Two Kingdoms

by C. M. Owens

  Jude and Kai are lounging on my bed, both of them training those lethal eyes on me.

  “Before you say anything—”

  “You wanted us to care,” Kai says, interrupting me, slowly standing to his feet.

  “Of course I did. I still do, and—”

  “You fucking maddening, suicidal, infuriating hell spawn,” Jude growls, interrupting me again.

  “I realize I’m technically hell spawn, but I find name-calling to only be fun when I’m the one creating the names,” I say, trying to lighten their eerily similar, brooding mood.

  Doesn’t work.

  “Well, we care, and you go throw yourself at the motherfucking Devil!” Kai snaps. “And kick us out of hell when you know we can’t get back down there without an escort!”

  They don’t usually yell at me quite like this. This is more grievous fury than the typical irritable outbursts.

  “It was selfish, half-cocked, and completely unnecessarily stupid!” Gage’s voice booms from behind me, and I whirl around to find him and Ezekiel standing there, arms crossed over their chests, and heavy glares leveling me…predictably.

  “But it was fearless,” I remind them, grinning, even though it’s a little forced.

  They don’t grin.

  At all.

  “So here’s a riddle,” I say to lighten the very dark moods storming across their somewhat terrifying expressions. “Did the monsters move out of the way because they feared the creature running toward them with no visible sign of fear? Or did they scatter because they feared the Devil’s youngest and most destructive daughter?”

  I hold my hands up expectantly, waiting for an answer.

  Kai gives me an incredulous look.

  Jude looks like he’s just ready to throttle me, per the usual.

  Ezekiel and Gage just stare at me like half my head is full of gibberish and they’re waiting on the other half to start working.

  “What happened?” Ezekiel growls, biting the words out.

  Huffing, I roll my eyes. “Clearly I didn’t attempt to kill the Devil. I decided that may have been too ambitious when I’m so new to discovering who I am.”

  They all relax a little, and Ezekiel pinches the bridge of his nose.

  “Do you have any fucking idea how worried we’ve been? And we couldn’t do a damn thing about it,” Gage snaps.

  “I’m killing Lamar,” Jude growls.

  “Lamar really had no alternative. Apparently I can command him.”

  They just continue doing that death-stare thingy.

  “This is good news. Commanding Lamar could be a huge help,” I say happily, but clear my throat and mask my smile when that earns me even scarier expressions.

  I turn to face Ezekiel, the more reasonable one of the four, according to my journal…

  Shit. I forgot the journals in that room when I was concentrating on fighting the Devil. Not that I could have taken them, since I can’t zap around with such things.

  “A move had to be made. Lucifer thought I had my memories, and he was waiting—”

  “Thought you had your memories?” Gage cuts in, a fiercely unhappy look on his face. “As in now he knows the fucking truth?” he adds.

  “Someone please tell me what to say to make you see it my way,” I say as I turn back around.

  My breath leaves in a rush when I find Jude inches from me and towering over me as he grips one of my hips and pins me against the door. His gaze rakes over my face in equal parts hunger and fury, though the latter of the two is slightly dominant.

  “You don’t get to make those kinds of decisions on your own,” he grinds out.

  That…actually confuses me. “Why not? You four make decisions on your own quite often. I’m a real girl now. Surely you’re not actually clinging to some archaic sense of misogyny at a critical time like this.”

  Cursing, he turns and runs a hand through his hair before pointing at Kai. “You fucking deal with her,” he gripes.

  I giggle a little at Jude’s accidental joke.

  “Aaaaaand she’s laughing,” Gage says on a frustrated breath, also running a hand through his hair as he turns and walks away.

  “It was just the choice of words,” I try to explain. “Deal with her.”

  “What’s so funny about that?” Kai groans.

  “I guess it’s only funny since I’m the Devil’s daughter and you want to deal with me after I just made a deal with the Devil,” I say with a shrug before going phantom and zapping myself back to the kitchen.

  Five…

  Four…

  Three…

  Tw—

  One second earlier than I predicted, I hear something crash to the ground, something else shatter, and four angry Horsemen shouting very not nice words about me.

  “I’m going to fucking kill her myself, damn it!”

  “For fuck’s sake, she’s going to drive us all insane!”

  “When I get my hands on her…”

  “We need to find a way to chain her to the fucking house!”

  Sheesh. They act like they like me, but I think they’ve just missed threatening me.

  Idly, I realize the slice from the Devil’s blade on my hip is long healed. I’m not even sure how long the wound was there, which is far different than my last experience with a blade.

  “What the fucking hell?” Ezekiel roars, storming into the kitchen with the rest of the furious quad.

  “So you really did find the motherfucking Devil?” Jude snaps.

  “Of course I found him. He was actually waiting for me, because clearly that entire meeting was inevitable at some point,” I say, trying to sound as dispassionate as possible in hopes of staving off some of their nuclear anger.

  “I really didn’t expect so much hostility,” I lie, peering at them with wide, innocent doe eyes.

  Yeah, it totally doesn’t work.

  In romance books, the girl gets away with everything while the guys dote on her and affectionately stroke her hair. So not fair. Fiction is starting to annoy me with all its misleading inaccuracies.

  “What the hell happened? And start from the part where you had Lamar send us away while you decided—on your own—to go face the Devil without a plan, a weapon, or even a fucking clue,” Jude growls.

  “Apparently, I can move around whole and find my way around the illusions of the royal section, and—”

  “You went in whole?” Ezekiel asks me, staring at me like I’m an idiot, while also seeming to get randomly queasy as he pales slightly and sags to a chair.

  “It was the only way to get there,” I say on a sigh. “And Lucifer can’t hear me in my phantom form. Lamar seemed confident in the fact Daddy didn’t want me dead, so I concocted another plan,” I add, making it sound much more thought-out than it truly was.

  I’m not sure why I went in so damn determined I could handle that.

  “What the hell happened?” Jude insists, just as the timer goes off. “What did Lucifer say?”

  Putting as much gravel in my voice as possible, I answer, “He said, ‘Paca, I am your father.’”

  For a small moment, it’s like hearing crickets at the Apollo after an awesomely unappreciated joke.

  “I’m going to fucking kill her,” Jude says seriously to Gage, as Ezekiel groans and scrubs a hand over his face.

  Surely that deserves at least a little laugh.

  “What did he really say?” Kai insists, not sounding as annoyed with me as the others do.

  My outfit changes to the sexy devil costume, then I turn whole and pull the hot tray out of the oven with my bare hand. Turning back around, I give them a very grave look.

  “He said, ‘Welcome to the dark side, Paca. We have cookies.’” I’m nailing that gravelly tone thing today.

  I fight really hard to keep a straight face, as they all stare at me blankly.

  Jude finally pushes off, turns on his heel, and stalks out, yelling behind him, “I can’t handle her right now. Someone else make her stop being
ridiculous so I can effectively yell at her some more!”

  I just grin at them.

  “How the hell did you time that?” Kai asks me, gesturing to the cookies and barely resisting the clear urge he has to grin.

  “If I’d skipped the sadly underappreciated Darth Vader joke that no one with a sense of humor could have passed up, it might have had more impact, since that’s when the timer went off,” I point out as I put the cookies down and start eating them. “Aside from that misstep in timing and the confusing tones, this has been mostly predictable,” I go on around a chocolate-chip mouthful.

  Kai snags a cookie, regarding me with a humored gaze as he eats it.

  “Don’t encourage her, you dick,” Gage snaps at Kai, shoving at his shoulder.

  Now that their tempers have substantially cooled, I finally tell them the important parts. “You have access to the underworld and its power boosts or whatever. You’re also guaranteed safe passage while you’re down there. You have the right to come and go as you please, and you can take as many books as you need.”

  Gage snorts derisively.

  “What’d you give him in return?” Jude asks as he comes back in, apparently never fully leaving.

  “Nothing really,” I say with a shrug. “I just promised not to kill him while he abides by the rules.”

  Four suspicious eyes narrow on me. It’s like they genuinely question my badassness.

  “He really does know I have no memories,” I finally concede, knowing there’s a distinct lack of badassness compared to what I evidently used to be.

  As they erupt into more yelling and chastisement, I notice some more of my journals have magically appeared. I suppose Lamar is useful, if he’s the delivery boy.

  Taking the journals, I grab a cookie and start walking away, knowing they’ll follow, since they’re ready to throttle me again.

  “And he really went for this deal when he knew you couldn’t remember?” Ezekiel snaps.

  “Not until I bested him in a fencing match. I think I’ve now overcome my fear of swords,” I tell them absently as I sit down and open my journal.

  The journal’s words are still there, and they swirl around in their various languages. I flip idly through the pages, thankful for their moment of stunned silence when I find a passage that fluidly translates itself to English.

  You’ll need answers to the puzzle you’ve laid. To seek such, refer to all things from your favorite decade.

  Oh, great. I’m a rhyming riddler in here, it seems. Makes me wonder if Lucifer read me grimmer versions of Dr. Seuss when I was in my early years of becoming a manifested being.

  Just freaking fantastic.

  Sighing, I look up to find all of them staring at me like I’ve sprouted a second head.

  “You bested Lucifer in fencing?” Jude asks skeptically.

  “Considering how many times I’ve managed to save your lives based on sheer intuition alone, the surprise in your tone is actually a little insulting,” I point out.

  He looks amused and pissed at the same time—a look that only he can execute so flawlessly.

  With his outrage slightly subdued, I continue. “Supposedly, I was a master in a former life, and somehow I triggered an echo of muscle memory. For the record, he was quite annoyed I couldn’t remember.”

  They exchange a dubious look before facing me again.

  “Then it couldn’t have been him who killed you,” Kai says.

  “If Lucifer had killed you, you would have likely stayed dead,” Ezekiel goes on, like he’s trying to drill that thought into my head.

  “Precisely,” I say in agreement, already coming to that conclusion since the adrenaline has started to fade.

  “You’re agreeing?” Gage asks warily.

  “For now, it seems unlikely Lucifer’s hands caused my demise. Especially given our weird encounter. He wanted me to win that sword fight. Toyed with me until he triggered my buried instincts with the blade. Whoever killed us didn’t kill us very well, since we’re standing here. And I might have seen it coming,” I tell them, holding up the journal.

  Ezekiel takes it, his eyes skimming over it.

  “I only know some of these languages,” he tells me.

  “Better than me, since I only know one,” I grumble.

  Gage takes it, studying the pages. “How’d you get this out of hell when you can’t carry things in your siphon?” he asks distractedly as he reads.

  “Are we seriously fucking done with the topic of her going to make a deal with the Devil without our consent?” Jude snaps.

  “I don’t need your consent,” I remind him with my favorite fuck-you grin that earns me a scowl before I turn back to Gage. “I’m assuming Lamar sent the journals here.”

  “Or Lucifer,” Kai says quietly as he goes to read over Gage’s shoulder.

  “What does it say?” I ask them.

  “Roughly translated,” Gage says, his finger moving over the words as he traces them. “The final level always takes attempts in thrice. Move too fast or hesitate too long, and you always pay the boss man’s price.”

  “As ominous as that sounds, it makes zero sense,” I decide to point out. “Maybe I was mad as well,” I add on a groan.

  “This part is even weirder,” Gage goes on. “But it seems to have something to do with your current circumstance.”

  I lean up, ready to listen.

  “When lives are lost, you start from the beginning. You move through the obstacles with a sense of past failures instead of the feel of winning.”

  “Yeah, no, that doesn’t really make sense either,” I say on a breath.

  “The rest of this is in hieroglyphics on this page,” he says, flipping the pages.

  “Just translate what you can into English for me. I’m going to go read more of our past lives in the meantime.”

  “Why?” Kai calls out as I stand up.

  Going phantom, I change my outfit to a long T-shirt I know will be more comfortable to lounge in.

  “For one, you guys were way hotter back then,” I deadpan without turning around as I pick my cookie back up and head upstairs.

  A few snorts follow that.

  The truth is, I have questions about the past. Everyone looks equally innocent and guilty in our deaths. My questions stem from the fact no one is volunteering information about how we died. It’s irritating because I feel like I’m being coddled.

  It sounds ridiculous and insane, so I don’t share it aloud. They’d just stare at me like I’ve lost more of my mind.

  I still can’t shake the sinking feeling that things are about to get really complicated.

  Chapter 3

  “He gave us free access to the Hell’s Black Heart,” Kai states, parroting my words as he moves in closer to me on the bed, his lips brushing the column of my throat as I read about our lives as Vikings.

  They sent Kai up here to get more answers since he’s still my current favorite. Manipulative devils.

  “Yes,” I say absentmindedly, unable to stop reading about the scandal on the pages. “You know, we should paint my room purple, I think,” I add in a quiet murmur, still distracted as I make it sound like I’m attempting a conversation.

  They were rather ruthless and brutal in this life too. And very possessive of me. Stole me right from my family’s poor home as payment for my “father’s” debt.

  Then took out their payment on my body.

  Over.

  And over.

  And over.

  We’re simply a long collection of fucked up dark role players out in the real world.

  They’re only referred to as their Horsemen selves in this book, instead of their Viking names.

  Conquest loved sneaking in when the other three were off pillaging and plundering and doing whatever else needed to be done for them to be the proper villains.

  “I think Jude was my first,” I tell him.

  “No one is telling you who went first,” he’s quick to say.

  “
It’d make sense,” I proceed. “After all, he didn’t have any firsts yet, and there should be at least a little balance among you four.”

  “Your ass was a first too,” he crudely points out. “And there was also your first three-way. And the first time you’ve been on top. And the first—”

  “Never mind,” I grumble. “You’ve successfully stifled that entire argument.”

  I feel his grin grow as I continue reading.

  Conquest would take her, shoving her to her belly and holding her in place while he pushed into her body and subdued her fight. Her fingers clung to the bedding under her as she cried out in fear and guilty excitement.

  Guilt could only be felt in mortal form, and it was a rather consuming emotion.

  She felt guilty every time she enjoyed the wicked and terrible things they did to her.

  “You have to stop reading that, or I’m going to take another turn before anyone else gets caught up to me,” Kai says on a threatening breath so close to my ear as he pulls open one of my thighs.

  My breathing gets harder as I start reading aloud to him.

  “Conquest wanted her the most in the beginning. The others took a bit longer. But he wanted her every chance he got, and took more than his share.”

  He groans against my neck before moving between my legs, pushing the book out of my hands as his lips come down on mine, all of it happening in one swift motion.

  My hands go to his hair, fingers twisting in the soft strands as he works the T-shirt up over my hips. I start kissing him harder when he reaches between us to undo his jeans.

  In the very next instant, he’s ripped away from me, and my eyes blink open to see Ezekiel glaring at him as he shoves a laughing Kai against the wall.

  Kai runs his hand over his lips, his eyes intently focused on me as Ezekiel gripes at him.

  “Fucking really, Kai? We’re trying to get all the details of the deal she made. Not fuck her right now.”

  Kai shrugs unapologetically, and I arch an eyebrow at him, wondering if he’s going to let Ezekiel just win this.

  Kai smirks at me even as his eyes narrow. “The vixen is trying to tempt me.”

  I’m the one to shrug unapologetically this time.

  “You’re still my favorite,” I remind him. “No one else has done anything to earn the title, and only my current favorite gets to touch me…unless you all touch me at one time.”