Chapter 2
Lynx
Another sinner. Another soul that belongs in Hell.
The first strike of my whip still echoes in my ears, even after all these untracked centuries of monotonous agony.
I hated it at first. It was the sound of torture—the sound that signified someone was about to endure excruciating pain and bleed every drop of their blood onto the stones beneath them.
If the soul’s weakness was physical pain instead of mental anyway.
I would take being burned alive, skinned, beaten, and starved over any kind of mental torture. Being trapped in my head and replaying nightmare after nightmare, fear after fear, for what feels like an eternity, only to no longer know what’s real and what’s fake is the worst kind of pain.
I don’t mind the screams or the begging now, or even when they cry for forgiveness. I’m not allowed to feel remorse or empathy, given my position—it makes me weak, and I’ll do anything to make sure the roles are never reversed again.
But after being here for so long, I couldn’t feel anything toward them if I tried.
I was sent to this godless place because of one act of desperation and a curse from an asshole who should be suffering down here instead of me.
I raise my arm and bring the weapon down, deaf to the crack of thunder and the ensuing screams.
The human souls that meet my whip belong here. They’ve all done something in their life to deserve it. Murdered, maimed, raped, trafficked—heinous acts that deserve far worse than what I’m doing.
And yet the man who stabbed me in the chest over a single stolen object cast me into Hell to be tortured like one of the sinners. Because he didn’t just curse me to be stuck here for eternity; he turned me.
I went through years of torture—centuries.
I was forced to stand in the same position this sinner is in now and take every snap of leather against my skin.
It became a normal day. Pain. Screams that tore open my voice box.
Begging. Bleeding. Passing out over and over again.
Enduring the mental agony of watching my brother die in far too many ways.
All because that asshole turned me into a fucking demon.
It was unpleasant, to say the least.
Until I was taken down and led to the room I now share with a fellow human turned monster and told I was being trained for my new position as a torturer.
“Open your eyes,” I snap. “Look at me.”
The sinner does not.
He squeals when I grab his face with my large hand and sink my claws into his cheeks. His blue eyes ping open, and I grin through my torment. “There we go.”
That first day, I had the misfortune of thinking I was about to be forced to torture my little brother. Dylan’s eyes had stared back at me from someone else’s face, and before I struck, I’d asked my victim his name.
That was my first and last mistake.
He wasn’t Dylan. But my hesitation came with a price. Even though I’m the one who inflicts pain now, my worst curse is that I have to stare into perfect replicas of Dylan’s blue eyes—my baby brother’s eyes—every single time.
That’s when my real torture began. My new lifetime of suffering—torturing others who look like the little brother I left behind, with no one to look after him.
I pause when I realize I’ve lashed so hard I accidentally decapitated the asshole, then sigh and wipe the blood from my face, dropping the leather weapon on the ground.
He’ll wake up in his room at some point.
Hopefully soon. I want to make him suffer a little longer given he killed his own children and then his wife.
Useless, pathetic piece of shit.
Tony, one of the shifting hellhounds, comes to stand beside me, crossing his arms and inspecting my work.
His hair flops over his face—long, thick, golden strands he always brushes back with his overlarge hands.
He’s shorter than me, which has always pissed him off because I never stop reminding him.
“You aren’t focused today,” my annoying friend says as he looks at the puddle of guts and pulverized organs on the ground. “The big man is going to send you back to the dungeon, and I don’t think I can last that long without you again. Who’s going to hold my hair when I’ve had too much to drink?”
A few years in the dungeons sound delightful. I don’t mind when I’m sent there.
It beats having to cover my ears while Nala, Tony’s little fuck buddy, is in our room and all I can hear is the headboard slamming off the wall and the mixture of roars and cries and whatever other noises they make.
“You say that like we converse further than you talking about yourself or your hound-self ripping me to pieces.”
He chuckles and kicks aside the severed head. “What’s on your mind?”
Everything.
Escaping this place and finding my brother. Sleeping. Passing to somewhere less evil and more peaceful and ending this curse.
Hiding from the demoness I fucked, who’s decided that we should do more than just sleep together.
Revenge on the family who put me down here for eternity—revenge on their entire fucking bloodline.
“I’m fine.”
He hums as a soul screams in the background. “Sure. Since the fucker is in pieces and won’t regenerate for a couple of hours, can we do something?”
Tony acts like we’re on vacation sometimes and not surrounded by walls of fire; like the inferno that rips through the place occasionally, burning us to a crisp, is no big deal.
He walks beside me through the chambers of sinners being tortured, and we pause at the wall filled with different weapons. I set the whip in its place, inspect the blood staining the leather, and roll my eyes. I’ll need to clean that later.
“When do you finish your shift?”
“Stop calling it a shift,” I say.
My shoulder hits a fellow demon as he tries to pass.
Vadden, the same guy desperate to climb rank and become Satan’s little bitch.
He stops and glares, then pauses when he realizes it’s me he’s barged into.
The newer souls try to be too big for their boots when they first get here, so I usually need to take them down from their pedestal, which unfortunately has given me a reputation for getting into fights.
Ones I tend to not lose.
I grab the roster, checking what other souls have been assigned to me and scowl at a name that keeps popping up.
Oh, fuck my life. He’s a pisser. I’ve had to torture him far too many times.
None of the other demons have been willing to trade souls for him.
Tony snickers beside me. “Sucks to be you.”
He meets my glower with a shit-eating grin and follows me up the winding stone staircase like a lost dog.
Every so often, we get a peek of the tallest building in Hell—a circular castle that stretches up toward the red sky, breaking past the raging fire fueled by damned souls.
It’s where Satan stays, away from us all, looking down at us doing Its dirty work.
Most of the souls are terrified of It—but of course I’m an asshole who likes to push buttons, so I’m certain the ruler of Hell loathes me.
I should’ve really contemplated that when I tried to break into Its castle, demanding to know what happened to my brother on Earth.
I wanted to kill It, though I had no weapon but my weak demon power—the ability to pull up fire from the eternal river of lava and bodies that separates us from It.
I was thrown in the dungeons with a mental lock on my mind for what felt like centuries.
Now, for the rest of eternity, I’ll be torturing souls with no hope of freedom.
The hair all over my body rises at an unwelcoming feeling, a pull, causing me to glance out the window at the guarded gate that prevents anyone from leaving Hell. The urge to go over there vanishes within seconds. “What was that?” I ask Tony, who looks more confused than me.
“What was what?”
I continue to stare. My heartbeat accelerates, and the ringing in my ears nearly has me wincing.
Something is telling me to go… somewhere. I can’t control it even if I wanted to.
I stare at my friend, but before I can speak, my head spins, and everything goes dark.