by Larissa Ione
There was no love lost between those two, but Cat had no idea why. She did, however, know why she thought Zhubaal was an ass. Not that she wanted to think about it, let alone talk about it. She just had to hope that no one else knew.
Because humiliating.
“Thank you, Cataclysm,” Azagoth said, dipping his dark head in acknowledgment. “I hear you’ve been helping out with the Unfallen, as well. Lilliana says you advised them to use their Heavenly names instead of their Fallen names. You know that’s forbidden, right?”
Anxiety flared, but she lifted her chin and boldly met his gaze. “Not in Sheoul-gra. The rules are different in your realm. I figured that if they use their Heavenly names here, it’ll remind them to stay on the right track if they want to earn their way back into Heaven.”
Hades’s gaze bored into her, the intelligence in his eyes sparking. No doubt he was wondering why she hadn’t taken her own advice, but thankfully he didn’t have a chance to ask.
“Very smart.” Azagoth’s approval gave her a secret thrill, and then it was back to minion-chores as usual when he said, “By the way, my office could use some attention. It’s a little...messy.”
Azagoth brushed past her, and was it her imagination or did Hades linger for just a moment? Every inch of skin exposed by her blue and black corset tingled, and she could have sworn his gaze swept over her, appreciative and hot. But then he was as cold as ever, walking next to Azagoth as if she didn’t exist and never had.
With a sigh, she dropped off the dishes in the kitchen and grabbed her bucket of cleaning supplies before heading to Azagoth’s office. Once inside...well, he wasn’t kidding when he said he’d left a mess.
She ran a cloth over the stone and wood walls, wiping down the blood mist from whatever demon Azagoth had vaporized. And it must have been a big demon.
Apparently, he didn’t obliterate demons often; there was a price to pay for destroying souls. But when he did, the mess was considerable.
She went through two bottles of cleaner and dozens of rags before the office no longer resembled a slaughterhouse, and man, she was going to need a long shower. Relieved to finally be done, she started to gather her supplies when a dark spot on the wall behind Azagoth’s desk caught her eye. Cursing, she swept her cloth over the stain, scrubbing to make sure she got every sticky bit of gore. But dammit, blood had gotten into a crack, and...she frowned.
Putting down the rag, she traced the crack with her finger, squinting at what appeared to be a round recess in the wall. What the heck was it? Driven by curiosity, she pushed slightly. There was a click, followed by a flood of light coming from behind her.
Oh...shit.
She turned slowly, and her gut plummeted to her feet.
A huge chunk of wall had disappeared, revealing a portal from the human and demon planes. A stream of griminions filed through, their short, stocky forms escorting the souls of demons and evil humans into the realm of Sheoul-gra. The creepy little griminions chittered from under their black, monk-like hooded robes as they marched the souls, whose bodies in Sheoul-gra were as corporeal as her own, through the cross-sectioned tunnel, only to disappear into another portal that would take the demons to their final destination—Hades’s Inner Sanctum.
“No!” she shouted. “Stop! Azagoth hasn’t approved the transfers!”
But they didn’t stop. They kept emerging from the right side of the tunnel and disappearing through the shimmering barrier of darkness to the left. Panicked, she pushed on the lever again, but the griminions kept marching. She wiggled it, pushed harder, punched it, and finally, with a whoosh, the portal closed, leaving only a solid wall in its place.
Cat swallowed dryly, her heart pounding, her pulse throbbing in her ears. Maybe she hadn’t screwed up badly enough for anyone to know. Maybe no one would notice the souls that got through to the Inner Sanctum without Azagoth’s approval.
And maybe she’d just earned herself a place in the Grim Reaper’s hall of horrors, the Hall of Souls at the mansion’s entrance, where statues made out of the bodies of his enemies were on display for the world to see.
What made it all worse was that the people encased in those statues weren’t dead.
On the verge of hyperventilating, she slumped against Azagoth’s behemoth of a desk and forced herself to breathe slowly. How did she keep screwing up? And not just screwing up, but royally screwing up. Just last week she’d broken one of Azagoth’s centuries-old Japanese swords. And a month before that, she’d spilled pineapple soda all over a priceless rug woven from demon sheep wool by Oni craftsmen.
“Did you know that, unlike pineapple soda, fallen angel blood doesn’t stain demon wool?” he’d asked in a dark, ominous voice as she’d scrubbed the rug. And no, as a matter of fact, she hadn’t known that.
When she’d said as much, he’d merely smiled, which was far, far worse than if he’d just come out and said that if she fucked up again, her blood would definitely not stain that damned carpet.
Soda, however, did stain, just like he’d said.
It seemed to take hours before she stopped trembling enough to gather her crap and flee the office, and thankfully she didn’t run into Azagoth on her way to her quarters. She did manage to catch another glimpse of Hades as he rounded a corner though, the hard globes of his ass flexing under the tight, midnight black pants.
Maybe she could try talking to him someday. Try saying something more coherent than, “Hi, Mr., um, Hades. Or do you prefer Jailor? Or Lord? Or...?”
He’d looked at her as if she’d crawled out of a viper pit. “Hades,” he rumbled. “Easy enough.”
And that had been the sum of their conversation. Their only conversation. Ever.
Did he think she had freaking halo pox or demonic measles? And why was she dwelling on this anyway? He was clearly not interested in her, and she had more important things to worry about.
Like whether or not Azagoth was going to not stain his carpet with her blood when he found out that she’d allowed unauthorized souls to enter the Inner Sanctum.
Chapter Two
Hades had a lot of names. Lord of the Dead. Keeper of Souls. Jailor of the Baddies. Asshole.
He owned them all. Ruled his piece of the underworld with an iron fist. Feared nothing.
Correction. He feared nothing except the Grim Reaper. Azagoth was the one person who had proven time and time again that he could turn Hades’s underworld upside down and shake it like a snow globe.
So Hades generally despised the monthly meetings between him and Azagoth, but thankfully, this latest one had been refreshingly brief and light on fault-finding. Which was good, because Hades’s brain had been occupied with images of Cat.
He remembered the first time he’d seen her when she came to work for Azagoth a few months ago, remembered how drawn he’d been to her energy. She was new to life on this side of the Pearly Gates, and while most newly fallen angels were either terrified or bitter, she was neither. According to Lilliana, Cat was curious. Eager to learn. Enthusiastic to experience new things.
Hades could teach her a new thing or two.
Except he couldn’t¸ could he? Nope, because the curvy redhead was off-limits to him, and panting after her like a hellhound on the trail of a hellbitch in heat would only end in pain.
Pain that would likely come at the end of Azagoth’s hand, and Hades had long ago learned that pissing off his boss was stupid beyond stupid...beyond stupid.
Still, it grated on him that he’d been read the riot act about Cat when he was about ninety-nine percent sure Zhubaal had bedded her. So what was up with that? Z was a cranky sonofabitch with a short fuse and a stick up his ass, but somehow that mongrel was good enough for Cat?
So fucked up.
Hades took one of three portals dedicated to travel between Azagoth’s realm and the Inner Sanctum back to his residence, and as he materialized inside his living space a tingle of mayhem skittered over his skin. How...odd. Sure, hell was all about mayhem, but this was dif
ferent, and it had been different for a few months now. Before, there had always been a balanced mix of order and chaos. Organized chaos. Chaotic organization.
Even here, in Sheoul-gra’s Inner Sanctum, where the souls of dead demons came to play until they were born again, there was order. Rarely, there was chaos.
At least, chaos used to be rare. But now that Satan had been imprisoned and Sheoul was no longer under his rule, all hell had broken loose––literally. Sheoul was now operating under a new regime, with a dark angel named Revenant as its overlord, and not everyone was happy about the new leadership situation. Just as with humans, demons didn’t accept change easily, and the tension surrounding Revenant’s takeover had bled over into Sheoul-gra.
Completely unacceptable.
The tingle began to sting, as if Hades was crawling with hornets. Resisting the urge to rip off his own skin, he stepped into his personal portal next to the fireplace. Like Harrowgates that transported demons around Sheoul and the human realm, some of the portals inside the Inner Sanctum had been built to travel only between two locations, while others could transport a person to one of multiple places by manipulation of the symbols inside the portal’s four walls. But Hades could also operate them with his mind, allowing any portal to take him anyplace within the Inner Sanctum he wished to be. Or, like now, to get where he needed to be, he merely had to concentrate on the sensation of mayhem wracking his body, and a moment later, the portal opened up.
He wasn’t at all surprised to find himself in a burned-out sector of the 5th Ring, a vast, dreary realm of fog, heat, and despair that contained the evilest of the evil. Before him, demons scattered into the mist the moment they recognized him.
Most demons, anyway. A few stood their ground, their defiance admirable, if not foolish.
A demon who had been a professional torturer before he was killed several years ago by Aegis demon slayers blocked his path. Here, demons could choose their appearance, and this bastard had chosen his former skeletal Soulshredder form, his grotesque, serrated claws extending from long fingers.
“Move.” Hades slowed, but he didn’t stop. He didn’t have time for this shit. His skin burned and his insides vibrated, alerting him to some sort of violent disturbance nearby. And it had to be a whopper for him to have felt it from inside his home on the other side of the Inner Sanctum...which was roughly the distance from one earthly pole to the other.
“Fuck you, Soul Keeper.”
Surprise jolted him; few were brave––or stupid––enough to challenge him. But Hades kept his expression carefully schooled. Tension was running high right now, and he couldn’t afford to let anyone think he was losing control of the Gra.
From two-dozen feet away and without breaking his stride, Hades flayed the demon with a mere thought. Stripped him of his skin like a banana. The demon screamed in agony, and Hades let him. That noise would carry for miles, warning everyone within earshot of the consequences of fucking with him. Sure, Hades could have “killed” him, but the demon’s soul would simply have fled the old, broken body and taken a new form. Handing down pain was much more satisfying.
Hades continued on his way, his boots crunching down on charred bone and wood, and as he strode by the Soulshredder, the demon stopped his annoying screaming long enough to croak, “You...will...fail.”
Hades ignored him. Because really? Fail at what? His job was pretty simple and straightforward. All he had to do was keep demon and evil human souls inside the Inner Sanctum until the time came when, or if, they were born again. How he kept them was entirely up to him. He could leave them in peace, he could torture them, he could do whatever he wanted. Failure? That was ridiculous. There was nothing to fail at.
Really, this place was boring as shit most of the time.
Leaving the asshole behind, he threaded his way past the kind of horrors one would expect to find in a place where the evilest of evils lived, but the bodies, blood, and wrecked buildings didn’t even draw his eye. He’d seen it all in his thousands of years down here, and nothing could faze him.
Not even the hellhound crouched in the shadows of the gnarled thorn tree gave him pause. The beasts could cross the barrier between Sheoul-gra and Sheoul, and for the most part, Hades let them. He kind of had to, since their king, Cerberus, had taken it upon himself to be the self-appointed guardian of the underworld––specifically, Sheoul-gra. For some reason, hellhounds hated the dead and were one of the few species that could see them outside of Sheoul-gra. Inside Sheoul-gra, they got their rocks off by ripping people apart. As long as they limited their activities to the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Rings, where the worst of the demons lived, he didn’t give a crap what the fleabag hounds did.
Ahead, from inside the ruins of an ancient temple, came a chorus of chanting voices. Ich tun esay. Ich tun esay. Ich tun esay alet!
He frowned, recognizing the language as Sheoulic, but the dialect was unfamiliar, leaving some of the words open to interpretation. Somehow, Hades doubted his interpretation was correct and that the chanters were talking about opening a dime store.
He tracked the sound, and as he approached the reddish glow seeping through a doorway in the building ahead, the hair on the back of his neck stood up. What the hell? He hadn’t been creeped out or afraid of anything in centuries. Many centuries.
Ich tun esay. Ich tun esay. Ich tun esay alet...blodflesh!
What. The. Fuck.
Something screamed, a soul-deep, tortured sound that made Hades’s flesh crawl. Something was very, very wrong.
Kicking himself into high gear, Hades sprinted into the fire-lit, cavernous room...and then he skidded to a halt, his boots slipping in pools of blood on the stone floor. A hundred demons from dozens of species were gathered around a giant iron pot hanging over a fire. Inside the pot, a Neethul demon’s screams died as his body bubbled in some sort of acidic liquid.
“Stop!” Hades didn’t give a shit about the demon. What he did give a shit about was the ritual. In Sheoul-gra, all rituals were forbidden and came with a penalty of having one’s soul disintegrated, so they didn’t happen often. Oh, Hades had come across one or two loners performing religious rituals now and then, but this kind of massive gathering and ceremony? This was a first.
And, by Azagoth’s balls, it would be the last.
The mass of chanting demons turned as a unit, their creepy smiles and empty eyes filling him with a sickening sense of doom. Alarm shot through him, and in an instant, he summoned his power and prepared to blast every one of these freaks into the Rot, the prison meant for the worst of the worst, where suffering was more than legend, and where the only release came when Azagoth destroyed your soul.
With a word, he released his power. At the same moment, one of the demons overturned the pot of acid. The liquid, mixed with the goo of the dissolved Neethul, splashed on the floor in a whoosh of steam. Suddenly, as if Hades’s power had hit an invisible wall, it bounced back at him, wrapping him in a cocoon of blackness.
As he was transported by his own spell to the prison all demons feared, he heard the chant again. Ich tun esay alet!
Oh...shit. This time, he understood.
The demons weren’t trying to open a dime store. Somehow they’d acquired a forbidden object or person of power and were attempting to open Sheoul-gra’s very walls, to allow millions of souls out into the human and demon realms.
They were looking to feast.
Chapter Three
Hades had no trouble freeing himself from the Rot, although he’d had a hell of a time trying to convince one of the guards, a fallen angel named Vype, that he wasn’t a demon in disguise.
Once he’d talked the guy down, Hades gathered a handful of his fallen angel staff and returned to the site of the demonic ritual. Within a few hours, they’d captured two of the demons who had been there. They’d changed their physical appearances, but Hades could see through their costumes to their souls. Idiots.
After delivering them to the Rot, he went immediately to Azagot
h, who was surveying his library’s vast shelves of books, some of which vibrated as his gaze landed on them. Hades hung back, a lesson learned after being bitten by one of Azagoth’s rabid tomes. Who knew books could bite? Vicious little bastards.
Hades cleared his throat to announce his presence. Azagoth didn’t even turn around, simply barked out a curt, “Sit.”
The Grim Reaper’s voice didn’t leave room for argument. But then, it rarely did. So Hades took a seat in the leather chair...leather made from the finest Molegra demon hides.
Azagoth took a seat on the plush sofa across from Hades and reached for a tattered book on the armrest. “So,” he said. “What’s going on in the 5th Ring?”
Hades didn’t bother asking how Azagoth knew. No doubt one or more of Hades’s wardens were agents for Azagoth. The guy’s spy network extended from the deepest pits of Sheoul to the highest reaches of Heaven.
“Hell if I know,” Hades said. “But whatever it is, it’s bad. I caught a bunch of assholes performing a forbidden ritual powerful enough to deflect my power and blast me to my own fucking prison.”
One of Azagoth’s dark eyebrows shot up. “I assume you took care of the situation.”
“Once I got myself out of my own jail, yeah. I only found two of the offenders, but I’ve got ’em strung up and awaiting your questioning. I believe they got their hands on something from outside. The power they wielded was like nothing else I’ve felt.”
“Dammit,” Azagoth breathed. “You’re losing control––”
“My ass,” Hades snapped. “The Gra is becoming overloaded with evil souls. You need to stop reincarnating only non-evil demons and start working on the baddies. Get them back to Sheoul where they belong. I’ve been spending way too much time moving Ufelskala Tier 4 and 5 demons to Rings less equipped to handle that kind of malevolence.”
The Ufelskala, a scale developed to categorize demons into five Tiers based on the intensity of evil inherent to their species, was also one of the tools Azagoth used to sort demons into the five Rings of the Inner Sanctum. Not that the guy couldn’t send anyone to any Ring he wanted, but in general, he followed the information laid out in the Ufelskala.
