Chapter 10
HELL’S BEL
DON’T EAT THAT,” BELIAL SAID, FOCUSING ON THE knife in his hand as he chopped onions.
Meph ignored his warning, snagging another pinch of the parmesan Bel had just finished grating while continuing his endless chatter. Bel’s brothers and their girlfriends had all decided to come over and keep him company because they were worried about him being alone in his big house.
They hadn’t actually said that outright, because Bel would have killed them. But he knew what they were thinking, and it pissed him off.
Mist and Lily had gone to Ireland a few weeks ago, so at least they weren’t around to add to the chaos.
Although Mist was one of a very short list of people Belial allowed to help in the kitchen—because he actually helped and didn’t just eat everything and make a mess—so maybe that wasn’t such a good thing after all.
The rest of their dysfunctional family was outside on the patio, laughing and talking and making a whole lot of obnoxious noise. But at least they knew when to take a hint and give him some space—the whole reason he was in the kitchen right now.
“I’m just saying,” Meph continued, “Iris’s lease is up, and we need a place to live, and you’ve got like five spare rooms and a suite. It’s a big fucking house, and you could use the company. I know I’d be bored shitless living here all alone. The silence would feel like it’s pressing on my ears.”
You wouldn’t know silence if it bit you in the ass, Bel thought, grinding his teeth so hard his jaw cracked. His brother excelled at filling every possible silence with noise. If silence was golden, then Meph was a pauper. And there was no way in hell he was moving in here.
“Did you at least install some good speakers? If you had music playing, it’d probably make it feel less depressing in here.
” Meph snagged another pinch of grated parmesan, tattooed fingers reaching into Bel’s workspace and disturbing his neat piles of precisely measured food prep.
“At least in Hell, your lairs were never empty like this.”
“Stop eating that,” Bel growled.
Meph’s fingers left a dent in the cheese gratings as he dropped the mouthful of parmesan in his mouth.
“Back then, you had me and Raum to fuck shit up and keep things exciting. And then Ash was always lurking around too, though he wasn’t much fun back then, always moping about his curse.
But you had all your groveling legions trying to go to war for you, and all the demon ladies showing up to join your harem. Man, those were the days, huh?”
“Stop eating that,” Bel warned yet again as Meph reached for more cheese.
“I mean, damn, you went from biggest badass in Hell to grumpy old chef in his lonely mansion. Kind of a demotion if you ask me. We need to get you a—”
“I said STOP EATING THAT!” Belial roared, and just like that, he snapped.
His knife slammed down onto Meph’s hand, and then he burst into flames. Hellfire, to be precise.
As his world transformed into a roaring inferno, he distantly heard Meph shout, “Motherfucker!”
There was blood. There was fire. And there was rage. So much rage.
He was going to use that rage to burn down the fucking world.
He was going to exterminate the stain that was humanity, end the pathetic race of struggling mortals.
He was going to kill his brother. He was going to kill everything until nothing remained but blood and bones.
And as every soul breathed their last breath, they would die knowing he had delivered their deaths.
They would bow before him in subservience and fear as they bled out from their throats and watched their own bodies burn into—
A splash of ice-cold water hit him in the face.
Bel blinked and found himself back in his kitchen, still clutching a knife in one hand. Raum stood in front of him with an empty mop bucket that had contained the water he’d just thrown. A mop bucket.
But that wasn’t the worst part. Oh no.
Meph was cursing him to Hell and back and cradling his hand to his chest, blood streaming all over his arm. Iris was beside him, screaming and swearing in tears and panic. Ash, Eva, and Sunshine hovered around.
It was a goddamn party.
And there were three tattooed fingers sitting in the middle of the parmesan cheese. Cheese that had turned red with Meph’s blood when Bel had, apparently, chopped his brother’s fingers clean off.
“Fuck,” he breathed, staring at Meph’s stumpy hand in horror.
“Yeah, fuck!” Meph shouted at him. “You cut my fucking fingers off, you fuck!”
“Oh my god, oh my god,” Iris was saying, gripping her hair and looking a little too pale.
“It’s gonna take me a week to regenerate, I have a fucking show in a month, and I need to work! I can’t fucking work without fingers, Bel!”
Meph was pissed. Meph was never pissed.
Bel didn’t think he’d ever seen Meph actually angry, in all the years they’d been brothers. Sure, he snapped occasionally, but he was always the first to bounce back.
“We need to stop the bleeding!” Iris shouted, gripping his shoulder. “We need to—”
“He’s fine,” Sunshine said, hurrying forward to take control. “Everything’s okay.”
“Those were my favorite finger tats!” Meph hollered, gesturing at the bloody mess on the counter.
Iris wailed, hands fluttering around Meph like she didn’t know what to do with herself.
“They’ll grow back,” Sunshine assured her with a hand on her shoulder. “He’s perfectly fine. Come, I’ll close the wounds and bandage him up, and you’ll see that everything’s okay.”
She gripped Meph’s non-bloody arm and Iris’s hand and practically dragged them from the room, leaving Bel and the others in a painful silence. A moment later, after giving Bel a long, penetrating look, Ash took the hint and led a shell-shocked Eva back outside, leaving Raum and Bel alone.
Bel stared down at the knife in his hand, still wet with his brother’s blood, and then he tossed it onto the counter like it burned him.
“Fuck,” he said again, and then he dragged a hand through his hair. He groaned when his fingers got stuck on the now-long strands.
His hair grew to chest length whenever he flew into a rage. He always kept it short because he hated being reminder of his anger when he looked in a mirror. But that meant he needed a haircut every time he lost control. He was so goddamn sick of getting haircuts.
“What happened?” Raum asked. He didn’t accuse Bel or jump to conclusions. He didn’t even look pissed on Meph’s behalf. He just calmly stowed the mop bucket back under the sink and then straightened, propping a hip against the counter and waiting for Bel to speak.
Bel almost wanted him to be mad. He felt like shit. He felt like he deserved it.
“I was chopping, and Meph was pissing me off. Eating the cheese when I told him not to. And he was going on about how shitty my life was, living here by myself when I used to have a lair full of horny women and legions dying to go to war for me. And then … I lost it.”
There was silence. Bel stared at the severed fingers among his ruined food. It was gross, but he’d seen worse. It was more the sight of his failure that he couldn’t stand.
To his vast surprise, Raum chuckled.
Bel’s gaze shot to him.
Raum chuckled some more and then caught his look and shrugged. “It’s kinda funny.”
“How is this funny,” Bel growled.
“He kinda had it coming. Meph excels at pissing you off. It’s his second favorite pastime after making freaky art. And you make it so easy for him. He can get under your skin like no one else.”
Bel ground his teeth. “I should know better than to let him get to me.”
Raum shrugged again, and that was all they said on the matter.
So much for his garlic-and-onion cream sauce. Now it was bloody severed-finger sauce.
He grabbed a mixing bowl from the cupboards and then dumped the whole mess into it.
“You haven’t lost it like that in a while,” Raum said.
Bel grunted in response, using a rag to swipe the last remnants of blood-soaked cheese into the bowl.
“I still think you should consider my theory.”
Another grunt. This one slightly more on edge than the last.
“You know, I think that crazy succubus was right.”
Bel stiffened at the mention of Naiamah. “What the fuck does she have to do with anything?”
The succubus Queen of Hell was his most well-connected contact in the underworld, and she’d long ago sworn to owe him a thousand favors—though he was down to less than a hundred now. But he despised her and would have released her from their arrangement centuries ago if she wasn’t so useful.
The hate was mutual. Yeah, he wasn’t proud of what he’d done to manipulate her into swearing those favors in the first place, but she’d done everything in her power to make his life hell for it ever since.
Every time he summoned her, she offered sex as payment so he could keep one of his precious few remaining favors.
And he agreed because he told himself it was smart not to waste them, when, in reality, it was mostly because he’d always been stupidly attracted to her and unable to resist the temptation.
The problem was, when they had sex, she used her succubus powers to drain him of as much of his life force as she could, leaving him feeling like shit for days afterward.
She’d enjoyed his misery and her power over him until recently, when he’d vowed to himself that he wouldn’t touch her for at least six months.
He’d gone way over that time limit now, but he still wasn’t sure if it had been a good idea or not. He felt more volatile than ever, and he’d underestimated how much sex had helped stabilize him. He fucking hated knowing that she had inadvertently been helping him control his rage.
“She said, ‘repression never works,’” Raum replied, “and I think she’s right.”
“She’s a bitch,” Bel snapped. Of course she would say that. When he’d sworn off sex with her, she’d lost her favorite energy source and way of tormenting him.
“And you’re an asshole,” Raum said with a shrug.
Bel pinned him with a warning glare.
“I’m just saying, now that we’re not in hiding anymore, I think you should consider paying a visit to Hell to … let off some steam.”
“I’m not going to Hell,” Bel growled, setting the bowl down and soaping up the rag to clean the blood off the countertop. “The rage is even worse there. It wouldn’t help.”
“Hm.”
“What?” Bel snapped.
“I just think you should give it a try.”
“And I think you should shut up. Are we done talking about this? I have to go dump our brother’s fucking finger stumps in the compost bin along with fifty dollars worth of expensive fucking cheese, so forgive me if I’m not in the mood to introspect.”
Raum held up his hands. Bel tossed the bloody rag in the sink, scooped up the bowl, and stormed out of the kitchen. Ash and Eva were suspiciously quiet as he passed them, and he pretended not to notice them.
He was so goddamn sick of everyone trying to fix him.
Sunshine was coming in with her counseling, trying to convince him to open a restaurant like he wouldn’t chop off the hand of the first human to piss him off—and they couldn’t regrow that in a week.
And everyone was dropping comments about how lonely he must be in his new house.
Well, fuck them. He’d chosen this house to get away from them. He was sick of their constant nagging. And they’d followed him here. None of them lived here, yet they always ended up in his kitchen anyway, giving him shit.
He didn’t need fucking fixing. He just needed to be left alone. He just needed peace and quiet and some room to fucking breathe.
Fuck Meph and his constant needling. Fuck Raum and his psychoanalysis. Fuck Naiamah and her stupid assumptions about what did or didn’t work for him. Fuck Sunshine and her perfect, charming temperament, pretending she gave a shit about him. And Iris for screaming like he’d killed a puppy.
By the time he made it to the compost bin, he’d worked himself halfway back into a rage. He lifted the lid and threw the contents of the bowl onto the pile so hard, it left an indent when it splattered onto the rotten food mush.
He dropped the lid and then tipped his face up to the sky, trying to slow his breathing. It was cloudy tonight. The air was warm, but it was humid, so it felt cooler than it was. Spring was well underway, but he didn’t believe in any of that new-life bullshit.
He had to admit Sunshine was right about one thing, however. He did feel like he was toeing a line, and if he didn’t do something soon, shit was going to change whether he liked it or not. And probably in a way he didn’t want it to.
The last time he’d felt this out of control and sick of himself, he’d met Eva’s human friend at a bar.
She’d told him she’d sworn off sex for six months to regain control of her impulses, and he’d decided to follow her example.
Well, he’d crossed that off his bucket list, and all it had gotten him was an even worse hair-trigger temper because of his constant state of horniness.
Eva’s friend was probably skipping off into the sunset with her newfound self-confidence, reforming her life, and achieving all her mortal goals in her eighty-year lifespan.
When was he going to learn that pretending to be human wasn’t the answer?
He wasn’t just a demon. He was a fallen angel who fell so hard he’d turned into a demon.
He was as old as the world. Literally older than dirt.
He was so old he didn’t even remember most of his life.
And for as far back as his memory went, he’d been ruled by something he couldn’t control.
That was all he’d ever wanted: to feel in control.
Ironic, considering who he was. He’d controlled a lot in his day—people, territory, wealth, power—but he’d never controlled himself. And wasn’t that a bitch.