Sinner’s End (Forgotten Shadow Lords #1)

Chapter Two

Welcome to Hell on Earth

Mana

Blood tinged with a hint of sin drips from the end of the needle jammed into my skin. Even with tape wrapped around the puncture mark, my darkness ekes out, staining my flesh with the taint of my kind. Demon kind, waltzing amongst humans like I’m the same and expect them not to notice the increasing differences between us.

“One of these things is not like the other things.” I hum the little ditty in my twisted way, watching my man potter about at my side in the unused asylum’s frigid, underground room. The perfect place to create a drug the previous inhabitants would have given a fragment of their souls to possess.

Alonzo sees the change in my demeanor as he drains me, I’m certain of it. But I pay him well enough, and that’s what keeps him in line. His loyalty remains with the highest bidder, and none other. No one else can give the twisted Chemist what I do.

A good thing my father allows me unlimited power over some aspects of my life. That boon creates a comfortable hiatus for my study of the overworld to better understand how to endlessly torment and torture their kind.

At least, that’s how I pitched my little holiday venture.

I’m so full of shit.

An hour in sunlight is worth an eternity in any dark realm, and I’ve bartered myself a full mortal life of the stuff. Shit, I nearly giggled hysterically as I backed away from his throne built of ash and souls.

For the next sixty or so years I’ll exist in a reduced, aging body until my bargain expires. I fully intend to enjoy every second of my rule over men before I return to my place at the hellkeeper’s side. Sunshine, hot pussy that’s not actually burning from the inside out when I pierce their flesh, and lollipops.

That last part might have been misconstrued. The gift I was given turned out to be a mortal curse that has left me, at the human age of thirty, a pincushion prisoner for a drug of my own making in an underground criminal empire on which I maintain a tenuous grip.

Sometimes, I wonder why I left hell at all.

“Another gallon to go, my lord .” Alonzo smirks, flicking the needle with a dirt-encrusted, ragged nail rather than the vein.

Pain ricochets along my arm, and I discover extra nerve endings I forgot I possessed in this form.

“I appreciate your candor.” I grit my teeth, watching the man’s scarred, pale fingers worm their way along my flesh. “One day, I’ll repay you in kind.”

And sear the flesh from your brittle bones, one layer at a time.

I believe humans have seven layers of skin. I’ll enjoy exposing every single nerve ending of his to my blackened flame while I fuck his ass with a cock that spews acid the color of my blood. A gift I could request and know the promise will be held for a not-too-soon future for both of us.

Cooking sinners from the inside out is fun. I get to experience all their suffering that way. Here, I am a lot more harmless. No acid in my veins, though my taint remains. Same for my cock. I haven’t cooked anyone for thirty years and … it’s nice. Relatively speaking.

Alonzo fusses with his vials, swirling their contents and studying the color. He checks a cheery little timer on the scarred wooden table at my side while he sucks on his teeth. A disgusting habit. I’ll enjoy removing his gums sometime.

“It’s paler today.”

I blink at him. “I beg your pardon?”

“The stain that ForgetMeKnot flourishes on. It’s … fading. Like you’re becoming more like the rest of us.” He speaks baldly in an honest exchange of information as we’ve always done, though omissions are permitted.

Human. Mortal.

I never said anything, and he hasn’t asked. But it’s hard to hide that my blood isn’t the claret hue of the rest of his race. Not that he’ll oust me. There’s no reason for him to screw his cash cow into the ground before I’ve run my course in benefiting him.

Plus, he won’t find a payday greater than my drug.

I sigh. “You want to test it again, don’t you?”

“I won’t fuck with our distribution.” He shrugs, rolling heavyset shoulders and cracks his neck. “Or I can take double.” Alonzo taps the little timer and twists the dial.

A groan rips from my throat and I manage to conceal the wince that follows. Fuck me, being human is more of a pain in the ass than advertised. Maybe sunlight isn’t worth it after all.

But it is .

I nod slowly, collecting my thoughts as my mortality drains from my veins. I’ve never stopped to see how much it takes for this body to bleed out, but I can’t die. I was aware enough to add that clause into my bargain. I might be a flaccid meat bag for a short period, but I can’t cross over until my penance is due. Which means that no matter what happens to me, I am stuck living in this realm for the next sixty years.

It seemed so simple a deal but the look in his eyes told me I should have been more cautious of signing away the only real life I would ever be likely to claim before I returned to my eternity of servitude. Freedom wasn’t real. Everything was a facade. Fake, fake, motherfucking fake.

“Fine. I suppose you have a subject in mind?”

Alonzo’s thin mouth covered in sparse, unmanicured hairs splits in a truly horrific grin, and that’s before he breathes. “I’ve got just the man. Actually, he reminds me of you.”

“There’s no one like me.” I inhale carefully as he backs up, fixing me with an unsettling stare.

“Well, not quite like you. More like what you’re not.” He laughs, the high-pitched sound unbecoming his endless girth in a duplicitous, psychotic sound that echoes around the cavernous room.

“I see.” I relax, but my heart, that traitorous organ I cannot control, thrashes wildly in my chest. Sweat gathers beneath my hairline and trickles along my spine in an itchy, unreachable path.

Who said being human was a joy? Lying fuckers.

Alonzo has guessed at more than I expected. I will have to be more careful. If he realizes he can overpower me, turn me into a pump for the forgetfulness drug, I’ll be more of a prisoner than I already am. That deal really sucks from this point of view. Then his words register.

“What do you mean, like me?”

Alonzo backs off, slipping a dirty knife from his belt and trailing it along the stone walls that remind me forcibly of home. “He’s like you, just … bats for the other team.”

The door to the old asylum’s shock room closes with me its only inhabitant, locked to a chair the twisted mind of a human designed for the devious pleasure of watching others suffer.

Beside me the little timer ticks the seconds of my mortality away and I count the pints of my sins collected in tiny vials.

****

My arm throbs beneath the little plaster decorated with tiny pink daisies. Alonzo swears it’s the only box he could find, and I plan some extra playtime for him in the afterlife. Not that he gives a shit, the man can’t think further than his next payday, and his expenses eat through his stipend well before the next rolls around.

I stride through the double doors toward my office, the only plushly appointed room in this godforsaken place where the sun rarely shines.

That’s the other part of my bargain. To live in a place not of my choosing. While I imagined a sandy paradise for my travels, what I earned myself was nine decades in a mostly sunless city. Portland, Oregon, was where I landed. It looked all right, hell, I can even see the water from the top of the abandoned building beneath the almost constant cloud cover.

I just can’t get to it.

My limits end at the edge of the asylum’s grounds and spread as far as that cloud cover allows on the other side of the city, terminating at a house that borders an old graveyard, its turrets overlooking the hallowed ground.

Sinner’s End.

It’s not even abandoned. A pair of not-so-innocent sisters lives there, and my drug has started to worm its way into their social lives. Ekeing away at their fears and replacing their petty concerns of social canceling into a recklessness that drives them directly into my path. One girl is just like the rest of her tribe—vapid, thoughtless, concerned only with herself. The other is … different. Not that I care for a child barely out of her swaddling rags, even when her moans roll through the quiet grounds while her dead rest in their earthen graves.

My father’s sense of humor carries into the overworld, and I don’t care for it a fucking inch.

And so, I turn my attention to the parts of my life I can control. I’m becoming more like them every day. Too damn much. Soon I’ll be chasing skirt and breeding a blonde human woman, for fuck’s sake.

“Who is our hamster today?” I flick the handles on the panneled, polished doors, soaking in the cold air let into the space by the open windows opposite my hardwood desk.

If I can’t have a sunny beach and fake tits in my face, I’ll damn well experience a cold, fresh breeze sharp enough to freeze the clit off a sorority slut. My brand of torture differs from my kind, as does my peculiar humor, or so I’ve been told.

“Reporting for hamster duty, sir.” A tall Arayan looking man towers over me. Crystal pale eyes the color of pristine snow stare at me from within a chiseled, tanned face. This asshole clearly gets plenty of sunlight, and I instantly hate the fucker.

“Jesus Christ.” I look up at him, unused to feeling short on this plane. At over six feet tall—not under—that doesn’t happen very often. “I thought hamsters were tiny.”

“Maybe you can dissect me for the purpose,” he suggests softly without a single frisson of fear.

I watch him with the sort of care one eyes prey they aren’t sure won’t turn about and latch onto them with rabies-infected fangs. “Perhaps we can. Seat.”

“I thought it was sit .” He arranges himself in a perfectly still “L” shape on the hard wooden chair designed to make the average person uncomfortable. He looks right at home.

“So they do.” I wait, expecting him to try to fill the silence, but he stays as still as before. It’s fucking unnerving, and I suspect the tanned asshole isn’t even trying. I sit opposite him in a leather gamer chair that fits my ass to perfection. “Do you have a name?”

He mumbles something under his breath, but before I can call him out on the shitty habit, he fixes his gaze over my shoulder. “Lethe.”

“Lethe.” I turn the name over in my head. “Got a first name, Mister Lethe?”

“No.”

“Last name?” I raise my eyebrows, my patience redlining.

“Just Lethe.” His gaze never wavers, and he never looks directly at me.

If this isn’t the strangest conversation I’ve had in this place, then I don’t know what is.

“All right, Just Lethe. Why do you want to try my drug? It’s powerful, and you won’t remember anything afterward. What is it you’re trying to forget?” I watch his eyes as they oh-so-fucking slowly slide to meet mine.

“I’ve already forgotten,” he says simply.

Pain is etched behind those crystaline, inhuman eyes that sees everything, a curse in itself, but he doesn’t know why.

I do, and Alonzo was right. Lethe is like me, and he does indeed bat for the other team. Well, he did.

Because fuck my life if I haven’t found myself a fallen angel who doesn’t even know he is one.