Exodus (Imp Series Book 8)

by Debra Dunbar

  “It’s okay. We’ll eventually find some information on him.” Of that I was pretty sure. Although the information might be imparted right before one of those three Ancients took my head off.

  I knew the first theory wasn’t valid. If Samael had died in the war, then Gregory would have known it. He was positive his brother had been exiled with the rest of the Angels of Chaos—so positive that he’d pushed to have the gates created. Once this side of those gates, Samael’s life, or death, was anyone’s guess. Only the Ancients would have a clue, and even most of them might not know. It was a search for a needle in an Elven forest, but if I could find out what happened to Gregory’s brother, it would be worth the effort.

  And if I could reunite them… That was too much for even me to hope for. But still, I did have hope.

  “I worry about these three Ancients of Whistle’s, Mistress,” Snip confided.

  I did too. “It’s okay. I took down Haagenti. I killed Ahriman. I’ll talk with these Ancients and explain the mistake, that it was all a misunderstanding. And if they persist, well I’ll just have to kill them too.”

  Bold words, but I couldn’t have the little guy worrying about me. Of all my Lows, Snip was my favorite.

  We strode through the gates of Dis, crumbling stone buildings marking the edges of the city. These were the slums, the homes of those without households. They shared the hovels, sometimes over a hundred packed into the various rooms. Anything owned was quickly stolen. Any food needed to be consumed immediately or a demon risked being killed over a crust of bread. This was where most of my household had come from, and where they’d return to if something ever happened to me. I was the only one who took in Lows. Well, the only one who took them in and didn’t intend to kill them within a week or so. Still, these ruins teemed with demons small and large. I couldn’t save them all.

  Or could I? An idea bloomed in the back of my mind, but it would need to wait. Invading elves and a war in Aaru was pretty much the maximum of what I could handle at this moment.

  The crumbling buildings gave way to modest timber and mud homes, then to multi-story stone houses with gated perimeters. Right in the center of town, in the heart of Dis was where the Ancients lived. Their sprawling mansions were not just gated, but had demon guards milling about. The energy hung thick and menacing around the buildings, warning others away. Past those was the commerce area. Every shopper needed to run the gauntlet. Each time they passed, they were reminded of their past, of the angels we used to be so very long ago, and of the decay that occurred the longer we were out of Aaru.

  I hated Aaru, but maybe others would choose to make it their home given the opportunity. Gregory was right. There should be a way for demons to re-enter heaven. There should be a way for the Fallen—even those who fell nearly three million years ago, to reclaim their lost heritage.

  My Dis house wasn’t so different from the one in Patchine. It was in the row of Ancients, trademarked by Ahriman’s signature bone-and-skull decorating techniques. The gate of fire here was blue instead of red, and the pathway seemed to be made of teeth instead of bone but otherwise the gothic architectural style was remarkably the same. There was even a dungeon here just like the one in Patchine where I’d been held—connected to each other through a series of creepy tapestry-hidden tunnels that transformed a several hour walk into a few footsteps.

  In addition to my usual Lows, there were five warmongers, eating my food and making themselves at home in one of the parlors.

  “Imp, get us some rats,” one shouted when I entered the door.

  I revealed my wings. “Get your own fucking rats, shithead.”

  That got them scrambling to their feet, shoving each other in their haste to introduce themselves to me.

  “I’m Hammer,” the rat-desiring demon told me. He looked like a hammer—the functional kind as opposed to the M.C. Hammer kind. His body was straight and solid like a tree trunk, his broad head like a rectangle on top of a stout neck. Tiny ears decorated the sides of his gray, hairless skull. He narrowed tiny eyes at me and grunted. “Nice wings. You gonna fly us into Aaru or something?”

  I ignored his snarky comment. “Where are the greed demons? And the Lows?”

  Hammer laughed. “The greed demons are probably stealing your silver. We locked the Lows in the dungeon. Those guys are a pain in the ass.”

  They were, which is why I’d hoped they would be of use in this upcoming battle. I’d let Snip brief them, and I’d have to go find the greed demons later. Right now, these five were the most important part of my army.

  A lizard-shaped demon with stubby arms and legs shoved Hammer aside. “Scream.”

  I assumed that was his name and not a command for me to vocalize extreme fear.

  “That’s Storm, Thunder and Inferno.” Scream pointed to the other three who looked as if they’d been hatched from the same egg. All had jagged scales, crocodile jaws and huge leathery wings. They were bulky, like they’d just left the gym and downed a bottle of steroids. They’d make good fighters, all of them. I only wished there were more than five.

  “So you’re an imp.” Hammer eyed my wings. “And you’re the Iblis. And you’re some kind of angel-demon thingie. How the fuck does an imp get to be the Iblis, anyway? I could probably kill you with my bare fists.”

  On second thought, five of these were just fine, especially if they were all assholes like Hammer.

  “I’ve commissioned some dwarven weapons that will work in Aaru. The angels there will be incorporeal, but these weapons should still affect them, as well as any energy blasts that you use.”

  “Wait, incorporeal? Like the wispy ghost things on human television?” Scream asked.

  “No, like you can’t see them with your physical eyes. You can feel them though. You just have to close your eyes and go with it.”

  “You’re fucking joking me.” Hammer curled his lip in disgust. “Ghosty angels. Is it like a bunch of clouds up there? Foggy? I just shut my eyes and swing my sword like a crazy demon?”

  “Yeah, kind of. How many of you can fight with both hands—or all four hands? Because I have extra weapons and you may need them. There are forty or so of us, and probably twenty thousand angels.”

  The triplets paused. “I don’t like those odds,” Thunder commented.

  Hammer snorted. “What are you, a Low? An elf? I’m gonna fucking kick some angel ass. I’ll bet angels can’t even fight. I’ll kill thousands single-handedly.”

  “They can fight. They won the war two and a half million years ago,” I reminded him. “We’ll have angels on our side. Our goal is to create a disturbance, to kill as many of the rebel angels as we can, then get the heck out of there and let the other angels finish the battle.”

  “I ain’t fucking running.” Hammer beat on his chest with a meaty fist. “Hammer finishes what he starts. And I ain’t leaving Aaru until every last angel is dead.”

  Idiot. “You’ll leave Aaru when I say you will, or you won’t be going. I’m the only demon in Hel that can get you in there, and I can yank your sorry ass out just as fast. I’m the Iblis. I’m your commander. You fucking do as I tell you to do, or stay here and wait while your buddies go kill angels.”

  Hammer glared at me. He was reminding me of one of my foster-brothers who used to torment me when I was little. That demon died at the hands of an angel. I was beginning to think Hammer might meet a similar fate. I wouldn’t be shedding any tears over his corpse.

  “Okay. I’ll do as you say.” He spat the words out, as if each one was poison. “Anything for a chance to come back here one of the few demons alive who fought the angels in their homeland.”

  Street cred. Warmongers lived for that sort of thing. I hoped that in the next few days Snip could scrounge up a few more of them willing to follow me to Aaru. They might be arrogant, stupid jerks, but of all the demons in Hel, they were the ones who could truly fight.

  Chapter 22

  I returned to chaos. The elves in the field were trying to
set up a rudimentary defensive perimeter, no doubt in response to Lysile’s attack and the other elf’s death. There had been yet another vampire sneaking around. He’d almost grabbed one of the younger elves, but Little Red had intervened and ate him.

  I wondered if vampires were an acceptable food source for dragons? If so, there might be good reason to keep this one around for longer than six months.

  I had just gotten the elves settled down and headed back to my house when I saw that Nyalla was wrestling with something by the pool. It looked like she was dragging a heavy bag of sporting equipment across the concrete. I ran to catch up and help her. It was then I realized that the bag wasn’t full of sporting equipment, but an elf. An elf in a net.

  “Nyalla! What the fuck? These elves are under my protection. I know you’re scared and all that, but you can’t just go netting random elves in the field and dragging them around the house.”

  She stopped, dropping the top part of the bag onto the pavement. “You think I don’t know a Wythyn elf from a Cyelle? These guys are trespassers. Trespassers.”

  Guys? As in plural? I eyed Nyalla with concern. This was all too much for her—elves in the house, in the field. She’d snapped and was bagging and tagging them, sorting them by their former kingdom affiliation.

  “You have more than one elf in that bag?” It wasn’t a big net, and I suddenly worried that Nyalla was grabbing elven young and stuffing them in a sack as if she was an attractive, blond Krampus.

  “No, silly. There’s just one in this net. The others are over there.”

  She pointed and I stared in astonishment. They were stacked up, like bags of potatoes at the grocery store. Giant bags of potatoes that wiggled and said muffled curses in Elvish.

  “What the fuck?”

  “I had to do something with them.” Nyalla blinked innocent blue eyes at me. “They’re Wythyn elves. I caught them sneaking around and thought you wouldn’t appreciate the trespass. I think they may have been sent to assassinate you.”

  How the heck did she know that? Although it bothered me that elves beyond my forty-three were sneaking around my house, I didn’t expect my girl to take care of the situation quite in this way. “How did you get them into the nets?”

  “I put them around the pool area with plastic flowers like a decorative canopy. Then I put the blow-up doll in the pool and waited.”

  “Blow-up doll?” My mind spun, wondering where my innocent girl had gone.

  “Leethu left them in her bedroom,” she told me, her smile full of pride. “They’re not the cheap kind like you see at the sex shops either. These look like real people. I put it in your bikini and when they tried to attack the doll, I netted them. I’ve been at it all day long.”

  How did she know what sex shop blow-up dolls looked like? Or what a sex shop looked like?

  “Some don’t float,” she continued, “so I had to put them on the rafts with sunglasses and a beer so they looked realistic.”

  “And when the elves came to check out the half-naked woman in the pool, you dropped the net on them?”

  “Yes, but a few times they managed to get the blow-up Sam before I captured them,” she confessed.

  I looked down at the nets in amazement and counted. Ten. “Just how many blow-up dolls did Leethu have in her bedroom?”

  “Three. I got pretty good at covering up the arrow wounds, but the one that got fireballed was a gonner.” She laughed. “You should have seen the look on the elf’s face when it exploded like a popped balloon. Burning arms and legs flew everywhere. He screamed and started to run. I was lucky to catch him with the tail end of the net.”

  “And you managed to drag them from the pool patio to the other side of the barn?” Nyalla was stronger than she looked, and elves weren’t exactly heavyweights, but still…

  “Oh no. Diablo helped. I hooked the ends of the net to the saddle horn like they do in the Westerns. I was hoping he’d just teleport them over there, but he seemed to take great joy in dragging them across the ground.”

  He would. Diablo had spent a bit of time with the elves in Hel, and I knew that horse held a grudge.

  “Nice job,” I told Nyalla. It was. The elves were piled up away from the eyes of any pizza delivery men, visiting humans, or nosy angels. I wondered how long they’d survive without food or water, and if the afternoon sun hitting this side of the barn would prove too hot for their delicate skin.

  Oh well. Not my problem. Ten dead elves was ten less elves I had to deal with. And I really wasn’t fretting over how to humanely relocate these particular elves. I wasn’t about to send assassins back to Hel, or find an elf-secure island in the middle of the Pacific to dump them. They could rot beside my barn and wind up in the compost pile with the horse shit and moldy hay.

  Except I guess I needed to let one or two of them out of the nets so I could find out why the heck they were trying to kill me. Yes, I knew there was a price on my head among the elves, but that was in Hel, not here. I couldn’t imagine one of the High Lords sending assassins over to my house here to kill me. The elves I’d encountered so far had been so clueless about life among the humans they were lucky to have survived a few hours. Assassins—well, they would need to know about cars and roads, about human customs and their language, how to read a map or use a GPS.

  How long had these elves been sneaking over here? It seemed the one or two I’d found out about months ago hadn’t been the anomaly I’d thought. Had those little fuckers been sending scouts over for years, hiding among the humans and learning their ways? It’s possible they could have bribed a human from Hel, one who had come through the trap as an adult and desperately wanted to return home, to accompany them and teach them about the human world in return for money and other favors.

  But I’d deal with them later. There was one elf I wanted to talk to before I got down to interrogating my prisoners. “How is Lysile doing?”

  “She’s awake and moving around a bit,” Nyalla told me. “She can go back and forth to the bathroom, but she’s still too weak to manage the stairs. I took her up food and water while you were gone.”

  My girl had come a long way.

  “I left the tray outside the door, knocked and ran,” she confessed. “I just… I don’t want to see her unless you’re here. I even had Boomer with me when I left the food. He ate some of her sandwich the first time, but I got him to leave the rest of her dinner alone long enough for her to pull it inside the room.”

  Okay, maybe she hadn’t come a long way.

  “Let’s go see her. Me and you. Together.”

  She bit her lip. “And Boomer?”

  “And Boomer.”

  My hellhound greeted me as I came through the door, slobbering kisses all over my hands and jumping up with enthusiasm that nearly knocked me to the floor. He bounded up the stairs ahead of us. Sitting in front of my bedroom door and staring at the handle with unnerving intensity. If I’d been that elf woman, I wouldn’t have wanted to open it, let alone try to attack or steal the human woman bringing me my food. Heck, I probably would have left the food there and barricaded the door. Lysile must have been starving to face that intimidating look on a hundred and twenty pound hybrid hound.

  I knocked on the door, then went on in. It was my house and my bedroom, after all. The elf was propped up in bed, looking through one of the many magazines I’d stacked up on the shelf of my nightstand. She might not be able to read them, but at least she could gather information about the human world from the pictures. She’d recognize the hottest celebrities, and know fall fashion trends at the very least.

  “I think I’m ready to join my friends and son again,” she said, her smile shaky.

  Good because I wanted my bedroom back. But first I needed information.

  “Nyalla has managed to capture ten Wythyn elves who were trespassing here with the intention of killing me, know anything about that?”

  She looked past me to my girl, tilting her head in surprise. “I thought you looked familiar.
Nyalla. You were Aelswith’s changeling slave, weren’t you?”

  I heard Nyalla’s sharp intake of breath.

  “Was. Now she’s mine. I bought her, and I have the paperwork to prove it. Any of you tries to steal her or make her do your laundry and the vampires will be the least of your worries, got it?”

  Lysile nodded, wide eyed. “I would never… I don’t think you understand who we are. We’re not high elves. We’re the laborers, the basket weavers, the gardeners, the wheelwrights. None of us have the funds or clout to have ever owned a changeling slave. We were usually the ones working beside them. And if it helps any, I always thought Aelswith was a complete durft.”

  I couldn’t help but smile at the elven slur.

  “So all of you are the elven equivalent of Lows?”

  She winced. “Yes. Most of us have little to no magical skills. We have rudimentary healing abilities, maybe one or two defensive spells, and an affinity for our trade. That’s it.”

  I was confused. “Then why Nirvana for you? I thought that maybe the High Lords were sending out the disposable members of their society first to test the waters, but I’m beginning to believe that elves have been coming here for quite a while.”

  Lysile nodded. “For almost two years there have been scouts coming here. Even I knew that. The High Lords would never had put such an enormous migration plan into motion if they didn’t know exactly where and how to best settle our people.”

  It made no sense. “But why choose the places they did? Iceland—yes I can see the people there kind of like their elves—but France? The group there was imprisoned. And you lost four of your party before the angel and I found you injured and frightened in that forest.”

  “We were supposed to have a greeting party. When no elf came, we figured maybe the humans were aware of our pending arrival, so we approached the nearest one. It didn’t go well, as you saw.”

  None of them had an elven greeting party. All the three groups did was cause some chaos among the humans and run me halfway across the globe.