by Cate Corvin
Several of his heads snaked around, all of them staring at us with slit, serpentine pupils, and the mouths opened wide to reveal needle-lined maws.
It exhaled, breathing the toxic green smoke over us in a wave.
I closed my eyes and crouched, clutching the baby close to my chest and hunching over it to keep it safe from the fumes, praying we’d sink into the mire before we died choking.
But the smoke never filled my lungs to poison me from the inside out. I touched solid ground, my wings no longer glued to the tar, and my arms felt oddly light.
I opened my eyes. The baby was gone as if it had never existed, and I was no longer in the ruins of Dis, but in my garden.
The vines were back, sprouting from the ground like snakes and climbing up the walls. Velvety black roses burst into bloom around me.
“It doesn’t have to be like this.”
A shiver ran down my spine. I knew that whispery voice, the shivering crackle of crawling insects in his tone.
I slowly straightened up and turned around, taking in the cloven goat hooves that left burned black prints in the grass. He was wearing his suit, beetles crawling in and out of sleeves and the legs of his pants.
Satan smiled, as pale as bleached bone under the moonlight, lips as red as blood.
I blinked, and he was in front of me, holding me in his arms. Revulsion rose in my throat at his touch on my skin.
“All of this could be yours,” he said, his horizontal pupils dilating. “Everything in Dis. My city. My palace.”
He spun me around, clutching my back to his chest, and I blinked. We were no longer in the garden.
Obsidian towers rose around us in spires, pointing to a sky flickering with pale blue fire. It hung above us like the auroras, casting a gentle light over the terrible palace.
“I don’t want anything of yours,” I said through numb lips, wishing I could crawl out of my own skin to get away from him. “I don’t want your palace.”
“You just want my city,” he hissed in my ear. A beetle plopped onto my shoulder and ran down my arm, raising goosebumps where it passed. “My Princes, my demons. You covet as much as I do.”
Satan turned me in place in a mockery of a dance, his hooves clattering on the stone floor. I thought I saw a pile of bones from the corner of my eye, but he whipped me around too fast to tell.
Something writhed on the wall… a person. Many people, arms and legs crawling over each other, faces distorted with screams even though the palace was filled with a silence that pressed in on my ears.
All I could hear was the sound of Satan’s tapping hooves, the hiss and slither of the insects in his clothes.
“This is the heart,” he said. A centipede ran out of his mouth and over his cheek. “The very depths of the city, the endless palace. You could be its queen.”
“Or would I end up like them?” I asked bitterly, nodding to the souls embedded in the walls. “There’s nothing special about me. Is this what you seduce people with? Bullshit about how they would be your queen, but they end up as wall decorations for you… or like them.”
I jerked out of Satan’s grip and pointed to the dusty, jagged white pile at the door to a tower. It was definitely bones, and the empty eye sockets of the skull glared at us accusingly. I was sure she’d been one of the Brides. “There’s nothing you could offer that would convince me to give myself up.”
Satan reached up and adjusted the brim of his stovepipe hat. There was something different about his face, like his skeletal structure was melting and changing under his skin. His jaw was a little longer now, his nose and mouth protruding into a snout-like shape.
“Don’t be so sure,” he whispered. “I could give a second chance to the ones you love. If you leave me hungry and wanting… there is no telling what I could do. What I might take.”
I automatically reached down for a sword, but in my dream I was weaponless. “You’re all talk. I don’t need your palace or your lies.”
His bone-white skin was reddish now, shiny with scales as he turned his head. One of his hooves had lengthened and split into claws. “I can offer a deal that you would never regret.”
“Oh, please. We all know what happens when you make deals with the devil.” I backed away, disliking the way his suit was straining at the seams, like there was too much mass inside it to contain him. “Now get the fuck out of my dream.”
Satan smiled. It was a horrible expression, his mouth splitting wide as his face lengthened. “Who said this was a dream?”
My heart pounded in my throat. The obsidian floor felt solid and cold beneath my feet. The air was rancid with rot.
I closed my eyes and opened them, but all I saw was the palace, the bones, the screaming souls.
“It is a dream,” I breathed, “And I’m going to wake up.”
Satan laughed, the sound bouncing off the walls over and over until it all blended into a hyena-like chorus.
My patience and fear wore my temper thin. It couldn’t be real. It wasn’t possible.
I summoned my magic. Dark fire raced through my veins, comforting in both warmth and the sharpness of the thorns. I melded the fire into a whip, gripping it so hard the magic pricked my hand.
Satan was still laughing when I drew the whip back and snapped it forward, the crack overshadowing the sound of his laughter.
It struck him full in the face, splitting his skin to reveal the bone beneath, and the illusion shattered.
The palace melted away, the pale fire of the auroras faded, and I was back on cool dirt again, the air of my garden fresh and clean, washing away the scent of decay.
He took a hesitant step backwards, still touching his face with a look of surprise in his goatish eyes.
I drew back the whip and hit him again and again, the thorns of my magic spiking outwards to rip through his suit, smashing the insects that made up his puppet-body into a pulp. Satan made indeterminate groaning noises, still trying to talk through his ruined mouth.
His hand, with its too-long fingers, tried to crawl for me, but I stomped on it hard, grinding it into the dirt until it fell apart.
Not a single insect escaped as I released the magic’s hold on its shape, molding it from whip into cleansing fire and eradicating every trace of him.
I hadn’t known I’d been shrieking in my dream until hands grabbed me, pulling me away from the charred and pulped mess on the ground.
“Wake up, Melisande!” Lucifer’s voice cut through my dream.
I blinked again.
I was awake. I’d walked outside in my sleep, and now the faintest tones of sunrise were painting the sky with pink. The roses had vanished.
Lucifer held me, gripping my hands and forcing the magic fire back inside me.
“You were dreaming,” he said, touching my face. He looked worried, but I just mutely pointed to the ground.
Cloven hoofprints still marked the dirt. The palace had been an illusion, but he’d really been here, walking through Dis in his puppet made of bones and insects, infiltrating my private sanctuary.
Lucifer’s face darkened when he saw the evidence my magic had failed to erase. “We need to get you somewhere safe. Anywhere but here.”
“Lucifer, he was in my home. In my dreams, inside my head.” I touched my stomach, once again seeing those aquamarine eyes in an innocent round face. “There is no such thing as safe anymore. There’s only war.”
24
Belial
I knelt down and touched the cloven tracks in the grass. Melisande had left nothing but a charred mass behind, and the acrid scent still filled the air.
The motherfucker had been here, right here, in the sanctuary of my mate’s home. Touching her with his hands.
Red washed over my vision. Touching my pregnant mate.
And not one of the guards had raised a hand or seen him.
“Are you incompetent?” The anger rising in me had gone far past boiling and seething into cataclysmic fury. I kept my voice calm, hoping to tame s
ome of the anger. I’d promised her I would at least try to contain my constant wrath.
But they’d let him put his hands on her, on my unborn child.
Two Chainlings and one of my Overseers stood silently before me, their hands clasped and looking at the ground. My fingers twitched and I molded my hand into a fist, letting my lengthening claws bite into my palm instead of their faces.
They were hers, all of them. She probably wouldn’t be happy if I shredded her loyal demons.
“Or… are you traitors? How could Satan possibly have made his way onto these grounds without your knowledge?”
The Overseer shuffled in place. “My Prince, none of us are traitors.”
I felt my teeth lengthening, my jaw aching as it changed shape, lengthening into a lion’s snout. “Incompetent, then. Were you asleep at your posts? Do you think we assigned this position to you for the fucking fun of it?”
I swallowed hard, trying to settle the volcanic rage inside me. My bones shifted back into place, and the lion inside me curled up, waiting for its opportunity to be let loose once I lost my grip again.
The Chainlings were bolder than my Overseer. One of them tilted their hooded head back, looking me straight in the eye. “Prince, there was no sign at all of his presence until after the Lady burned his vessel. Every guard patrolling the area saw and heard nothing until Lucifer arrived. Satan’s illusions were strong enough to completely deceive the senses.”
His raspy voice had a ring of truth to it. I doubled down on my efforts to remain calm despite the red lights pulsing behind my eyes.
Touching my pregnant mate, and no one saw a fucking thing.
I shouldn’t have stayed behind for the strategic planning. It was idiotic in the extreme to assume that she’d be safe for a single minute.
Blood dripped from my palm as my claws lengthened a little more. The Overseer let out a quiet breath of resignation, accepting his fate in silence.
“You’re terrorizing them, Belial.”
Her voice cut through the sirens blaring in my skull. I opened my eyes and saw her standing behind the Chainlings, arms crossed over her chest, looking somewhere between amused and reproachful.
“If they’d done their fucking jobs, they wouldn’t need to be terrorized.” I cast a baleful gaze across the sorry lot of them. They could spend the rest of the day thanking every lucky star they had that they weren’t in the ground under Satan’s ashes right now. “Get out, all of you. I don’t give a damn where you go, just don’t let me see your faces again today.”
The Chainlings swept away in silence, and the Overseer let out a whimper before bowing, his forehead nearly touching the ground, and backing away.
When we were alone, Melisande dropped her arms and sighed. “It wasn’t their fault.”
“It doesn’t matter. They were given one job and they failed.” I wrapped my arms around her, taking a deep breath of her vanilla-scented hair. “And ‘terrorizing’ is an exaggeration. That was lukewarm chastisement at best.”
“Right.” She looked up at me and planted her chin on my chest, pale gold eyes dancing. “So that’s why the poor Overseer was about to piss himself.”
“His continence has nothing to do with me.” I stroked her violet hair, wondering for the hundredth time what our child- our little wrath-baby- would look like. Would it have her gold eyes, her wings? Or would it take after me, with a lion’s fire in its veins?
Would it be male or female? Most of the Princes desired sons, but I liked the idea of my daughter being the one to kick all their asses, just like my mate.
“Satan worked an illusion on me, too,” she said, glancing down at the charred ground. “It felt as real as anything, nothing like a dream.”
“What did he show you?”
Melisande frowned, shadows in her eyes. “A palace in the Pit. There were towers, and bones… and people embedded in the walls.”
We’d all been there before, in the Brides’ cloisters long before Satan had ever claimed a Bride. That room had once been where the Princes met to discuss war against Heaven before we’d fractured into our separate ways.
Of all of us, Lucifer was the only one who still entered the Pit and saw the poor women who’d been taken down there to languish in the dark until they were consumed.
“You’ll never see it with your own eyes.” I squeezed her tighter, formless rage rising at the idea of Melisande imprisoned in those walls.
She was quiet for a minute, then looked up at me with those shadows still written on her face. “That’s where he takes them, isn’t it? That’s where the Brides go to die.”
I nodded. There was no point in hiding it from her.
One of the many things that I loved about her was that she didn’t get weepy or fall apart in the face of terrible things. She just became harder, more vicious.
It was easy to see it in her now, the way her shoulders straightened and the coldness in her eyes. “After he’s dead, the first order of business is to disinter everyone who died in the Pit and lay them to rest somewhere peaceful. Then I’m going to rip that place down stone by stone, and fill it in so no one ever steps foot there again.”
“I’ll be right there with you, angel,” I assured her.
She pulled me away from the scene of the intrusion and over to a marble bench under the willow tree. “Lucifer is all up in arms, too. I’m just as angry as anyone, but… can we just have five minutes where we don’t talk about this? I just want a second to breathe and remember that there’s more to life here than constantly being on guard.”
“Sure,” I said, humoring her and straddling the bench. “Whatever you want, Princess Wrath.”
Melisande rolled her eyes, but she smiled. “I feel like I’ve done nothing but cause trouble and collect nicknames since I fell.”
“True on both counts.” I pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. “But that isn’t a nickname, it’s a title. We’re mated now. You own just as much of the Seventh Circle as I do. What’s mine is yours.”
She stroked my hand, and I realized that from the moment she’d stepped into the garden, the anger that had been threatening to explode had settled to a slow simmer and vanished.
There was a time when I would’ve let it go unchecked and damned the consequences. Now it seemed like a distant memory, a part of myself tucked away in the back of my mind, but not the entirety of my life.
When we’d bonded, I’d formed a new life. She and our child were my family, a thousand times more important than the thought of the war I used to live and breathe.
She made a face and touched her stomach. “It’s doing the fish-thing again.”
“The fish-thing?” I asked, appalled. “That’s my wrath-baby you’re talking about.”
She gave me a look that clearly told me I had no idea what I was talking about. “It feels like a fish swimming around in there. Here, feel it.”
Melisande grabbed my hand and put it over her lower belly, spreading my fingers so my palm was flat across her abdomen.
For a moment all I felt was the smoothness of muscle under the silk shirt, the beat of her heart, the warmth of her skin through the fabric.
Then something flipped, a tiny bump against my fingertips.
It flickered again, a sensation so tiny and slight that I had to concentrate to feel it. An odd emotion rose in me, one so foreign it took me a minute to place it: wonder.
I’d never felt this before, pure amazement at something that might never have been, along with a protectiveness that sank into my bones.
That tiny bump against my hand was part of me, the blood of Wrath. My blood. My kin.
“I dreamed about the baby,” she said, smiling at the look on my face. “Well, it was more of a nightmare, but I saw its face. It had your eyes.”
“It could look like you.” I kept my hand there even after the baby stopped moving, still processing the enormity of it.
Me, a father. I’d never fathered a single child in all my eons of life, not wanting to br
ing a bastard child into the world. Few of the Princes cared about their offspring unless they were mated to the woman who bore the children, and since I’d never wanted a mate, it hadn’t been the life for me.
Incredible how that could all change when you met the right person.
Melisande shook her head. “No, I just have a feeling that in some ways, the dream was right.”
“I don’t care what she looks like. She’ll still be perfect.” I felt another bump against my palm.
“She? You sound sure. Could be a boy,” Melisande teased, and I stretched out across the bench, replacing my hand with my cheek across her stomach. “What are you doing?”
“I’m talking to my daughter, angel. She needs to know me.” I closed my eyes, focusing on nothing but the muffled, steady beating of Melisande’s heart, and found one other sound beneath it: a tiny hum, the beat of a heart so tiny it was no more than speck. “Hi, daughter of mine.”
The baby bumped my cheek.
“You’re going to be the tiniest terror in Dis,” I whispered. “You’re going to chop up all the boys with your swords. I’ll teach you. The minute you’re born, you get a dagger instead of a teddy bear.”
“Belial, seriously?” Melisande asked.
“Shhh,” I said to her, looking up. “This is important. Now listen, kid. You’re going to have your own pony before you can walk, because it’s very important that you know how to mow down demons when they look at you wrong. In fact, I’ll get you a unicorn. With a big, sharp horn. Deal?”
The fish-like flipping went crazy for about ten seconds.
“See? She’s into the idea. We didn’t even need Crisca to confirm that she’s mine.”
“You can’t promise her a unicorn before she’s born,” Melisande grumbled.
“I can promise her the entirety of Hell.” I wrapped my arms around my mate’s hips and just laid there, listening to my daughter’s heartbeat. Maybe it was just talking to the little thing, but I was absolutely sure now that the baby was a girl. “You’re going to be a Princess, understand? That means there’s certain things you need to know. Like how to be a total badass, just like your mother. So yes, no matter what she says, you get swords and unicorns and Daddy’s going to get you a big old hellhound for your very own. But before I give it to you, I’m going to make sure it knows how to hunt and kill anything you point at.”
