37. Max
Max
Asteroth led us deeper into the palace, and long before we reached the throne room, music hit us.
Heavy metal. I was almost sure that was the name for it.
I’d heard it exactly once before, pouring out of Caspian’s room at midnight in Aelindor’s residence, and I’d handled the situation with the gravity of high command. I’d sent Missy to knock on the shifter prince’s door.
“My sister said other people need to sleep,” Missy had shouted over the noise. “If anyone has panda eyes tomorrow, it’s on you!”
Ross had gone along as escort and growled at Caspian for good measure.
“All right, all right.” Caspian had surrendered.
The music had died mid-song.
“Me and Ross will be watching you, Prince Cas!” Missy had called, and trotted back into our suite with the cub.
Apparently, my father’s court and Caspian kept the same playlist. I filed that away as a thing I would never, ever tell him. You did not encourage the shifter prince.
At the double doors, the guards swung them open for us. They didn’t kneel. They didn’t so much as incline their horns. Asteroth’s soldiers had given me the realm’s courtesy; the throne room’s guards gave me nothing, and that was the message.
Whatever came next, I’d earn.
The hall beyond was a party.
Demons and worse packed it wall to wall under the black crystal vaults, stamping through some kind of dance, drinking from vessels that steamed, and in the alcoves and on the tables, fucking. The music was louder in here, drums and grinding strings loud enough to buzz in my teeth.
Down the center of all that riot ran a wide, clean berth of empty floor, a corridor of respect no reveler’s boot crossed, leading straight to a raised throne of black diamond and darker gems veined through with gold.
And to the man on it.
He looked middle-aged. Comfortable through the shoulders, silver threading his dark hair at the temples, laugh lines worn in at the corners of his eyes. No crown, no robes of state, just a long dark coat and a pair of powerful, elegant hands resting on the throne’s arms.
A father, sitting up late, waiting for his daughter to come home.
Something hit me under the sternum and kept hitting.
My eyes stung. I set my teeth and stared straight down that berth and refused to think further.
My hands had half-closed into fists somewhere without my permission, and I made them open.
My breath had gone shallow and high in my chest, so I pulled it deep on a four-count and held it there until it behaved.
Not here. Not in front of a hall full of demons, and not in front of the man on that throne.
Whatever wanted out of me could wait until there was a door between me and all of this.
Drakken shifted his weight beside me, lending me his support. You’re not doing this alone. I’m in it to the end.
The man sitting on the throne was the only humanoid figure in that seething hall besides Drakken and me, and his smile, when it found me, was warm and terrible at the same time.
It wasn’t his true form. He’d put this shape on for me, to make him seem fatherly. The eyes gave him away. In each dark pupil burned a single point of white light, steady as the morning star, and nothing behind those points was middle-aged at all.
Asteroth leaned down to my ear without breaking stride.
“He wants them to see you.”
He fell back into his ring of guards and halted, his platoon with him, and the two of us walked on alone.
Out of the crowd, into the berth, came a dozen giant demons. They spread shoulder to shoulder across the floor between the throne and us, and the dancing behind them did not stop so much as change its subject.
Then I understood.
Not one skirmish on the way here. Every knee bending the moment I arrived. His instruction, down to every detail, so that his daughter’s road home held nothing sharp.
Now he wanted his court to see what he’d sired, and in this place, there was only one language for that.
Violence, served generously.
He would never think like a human father. Not even wearing that kind, tired, waiting face. I made myself hold both truths at once, the warmth and the wrongness, and found they fit together.
Every demon in the hall had turned to look at us by now. Demonesses in gowns openly ogled Drakken’s naked body. A few of them licked their black lips with forked tongues.
“My, my, look at the cock on the meat.”
“I’d ride that until he tore, then eat what came out.”
“That one’s a dragon.”
“Better. A dragon shifter screams in two voices.”
Laughter went through them like something spilling, and it took everything in me not to open them from collarbone to hip and leave them steaming on the stone.
“Care to slaughter them, lioness?” Drakken invited.
“Thought you’d never ask.”
I let the savage out.
My Dark Grace rose as I called it, filling me limb by limb, power soaking into muscle like heat into cold iron. My Coldiron flowed off my forearm and split into two sanjieguns, six lengths of black metal snapping taut on their chain joints.
Drakken rolled his ebony broadsword once around his wrist and smiled. When a dragon smiled, it was bad news for his prey.
We charged the wall of demons and hit it side by side.
The mantis demon came first, a tall gray horror with scythes for forearms, and it was fast. Its first cut split the air where my head had been and took hair.
I gave ground, read the rhythm of the second scythe, and whipped my right sanjiegun around it at the joint, chain wrapping twice, and yanked the blade-arm wide.
The mantis’s whole side opened like a door.
Drakken came through the door. One horizontal stroke, and the top half of the mantis went one way while the bottom half figured out the news.
The hall roared. Somewhere in the crowd, wagers changed hands.
The bull demon came next, a tower of red muscle swinging a maul quarried from a single stone, and the floor jumped with every step it took.
No blocking that. We split around it without a word, exactly as Drakken had drilled into me at the academy until I dreamed the footwork, me low and left, him high and right.
The maul came down between us and cratered the stone.
I scythed my staves through the backs of its knees, hamstrings parting like cut cables, and as fifteen feet of demon knelt without meaning to, Drakken opened its throat on the way past and never broke stride.
“Rotate,” he said, calm, as if we were still in the training yard.
We rotated. My back found his, his found mine, and the jackal twins who’d been sliding around our flanks to peel us apart met a wall that turned.
Nothing burned.
His back was against mine, solid and hot through the sweat, no cloth between us on his side at all, and no geas fire came up through either of us.
That should have put us both on the floor.
There was no time to chase it. I filed it and kept swinging.
For a while it was all rhythm, block, give, turn, his shoulder blades brushing mine, each of us covering the other’s blind side by pure drilled instinct.
The heirs had trained me for this, and every merciless hour paid out now at once.
When the left twin overcommitted, I broke its wrist with the tip of one stave, spun the other under its jaw hard enough to lift it off the ground, and Drakken’s sword met it at the top of the arc.
The right twin looked at its other half falling in pieces and hesitated.
Hesitation, Drakken had taught me, was a wound you inflicted on yourself.
His broadsword finished the lesson.
The serpent demon almost had me. It came low through the carnage with a weighted chain-net spinning off its arm, and the net bloomed open in the air with my name on it.
I willed the Coldiron, and my right sanjiegun ran together into a single straight spear that went through the net’s gap, through the serpent’s open mouth, and out the back of its hood.
Let’s kill them in a horrible way! Yes, yes! my metal shrieked, gleeful, drunk on its home realm. So much fun!
The last real threat came from above, a carrion-winged thing that had climbed the vaults, folding into a dive with talons the length of my forearm.
The air changed before it reached me, and there was no time to point, so I didn’t.
I slammed a burst of Dark Grace upward, a fist of pure force, and the dive became a tumble, and the tumble delivered it, flailing, onto Drakken’s waiting point.
He didn’t even look up. He just held the sword there.
The rest was bookkeeping, and we did it together, back-to-back down the length of that berth, black ichor sheeting the floor, the crowd stamping and howling around us in a joy that smelled like blood and burnt wine. A demoness shrieked in ecstasy when the spray caught her gown.
And through it all, past the whirl of staves and steel, I caught the throne in slices. Lucifer leaning forward, chin lifting off his knuckles, the two white stars in his eyes burning brighter with every kill, pride blooming across that borrowed father-face like a fucking sunrise.
Then the last of the dozen folded to the floor, and there was nothing between the throne and us but littered demon corpses.
We walked the rest of the berth, not even blinking.
Drakken’s shoulder came against mine and stayed there, and still nothing burned.
Lucifer rose. The music stopped, all at once, as if the whole hall were an instrument he’d set down. Every eye in that vast room turned. Every demon and demoness in his court held their breath.
“Welcome, my Heir.”
His dark power rolled floor to vault, and the entire throne hall trembled, gems singing in their settings, ichor shivering into rings across the stone.
The demon nobles dropped as one, every knee striking the floor, fists to chests, horns bowed.
“Hail Heir Princess Morningstar,” the hall thundered back, hundreds of voices in one. “We’re honored to be your humble servants!”
Lucifer looked out over the whole kneeling court of Hell. His daughter’s welcome feast. His triumph, arranged over who knew how many years of waiting.
Then he waved a hand at all of it.
“Get the fuck out.”
Everyone fled.