Chapter 30
HELL HATH NO FURY
WHAT’S HE PLAYING AT?” ASH SAID, DRAGGING HIS fingers through his shiny black hair.
“I have no idea,” Belial growled in response, but he was getting sick and goddamn tired of the Necromancer popping up all the time. “I think it’s time to kill him.”
Mist frowned. He and Lily had returned a day ago from Ireland to this mess. Bel figured they should’ve stayed away.
“I thought you formed an agreement that he wouldn’t bother you or anyone you cared about,” Mist said.
The demons were gathered in Bel’s living room to discuss what to do about their recurring necromancer problem. Iris had spent the previous day with her friend Suyin, only to tell Meph afterward that the witch had recently returned from Hell, having been captured by Murmur for some unknown purpose.
“I did,” Bel said. “But I didn’t think to specify every single one of Iris’s fucking friends, and that slimy fucker took advantage of that.
” He ground his teeth. He couldn’t believe he’d been outmaneuvered in a bargain by Murmur.
He was Belial. He was supposed to be the one outmaneuvering people. It was embarrassing.
“Do you think he was telling the truth about the Cambion shit?” Meph asked, crossing his tattooed arms. He and Raum sat on one sofa, Bel sat on the other, Mist lurked in the corner like a shadow, and Ash sat at the grand piano, elbow propped on its polished black top.
Sunlight streamed through the tall windows, casting golden rays across the hardwood.
“If he is, the implications are …” Ash trailed off.
Bel finished the sentence in his head. Enormous. Mind-boggling. Catastrophic. Demons who could reproduce? It was absurd. It went against everything he’d ever understood about the world.
But he couldn’t deny it made sense.
Sunshine’s mentor Adriel had already confirmed that they had evolved souls. And it was always understood that demons couldn’t procreate because they were soulless. The soul was responsible for the inherent gift of creation. A demon with a soul was already an anomaly. So why not demon offspring?
“I still think we should kill him,” Bel grumbled, stewing over how Murmur had played him. That kind of slight could not go unpunished.
“We need to find out what he’s up to first,” Ash said. “What did he want with Suyin? He made her swear a vow not to talk about it. That means it’s important.”
“Maybe he just wants to study her or some shit,” Meph offered. “I mean, even I’m pretty curious. Does she have a demon form? Or is she like Eva and she just kinda gets bigger and scarier? And on that note, does her blood have magical properties like Eva’s does?”
“Maybe that’s why he wanted her,” Mist said. “For her blood.”
“I think we should get Suyin over here and ask her ourselves,” Ash suggested.
“She’s not going to tell us any more than she told Iris,” Meph interjected, “and Iris already told me everything she said.”
“Yeah, but Iris was probably too busy panicking at the thought of having your deranged demon babies to pay attention,” Ash shot back.
Meph snorted. “I can’t blame her for that.”
“I can’t believe Gamigin was her father.” Raum shook his head. “I always thought he was a bit weird, but I never would have guessed that.”
“I gave that necromancer fuck two favors,” Bel growled. “Then we gave him Raphael as a peace offering, and he’s still fucking playing us. He needs to die.”
“Bel, you sound like a broken record,” Ash said. “We aren’t even talking about Murmur anymore. Were you even listening?”
“He’s got a one-track mind,” Meph said. “Kill, kill, kill.”
His brothers chuckled, looking at him with amusement. Bel’s fingers tightened around his coffee cup. “This isn’t a goddamn joke. Murmur is a problem, and we’ve let him go unchecked for too long.”
“That’s because he’s fucking powerful,” Ash said. “It’s not as simple as marching into his lair and tearing his head off. He’s got an army of souls at his command. How are you supposed to fight ghosts?”
“Can confirm it’s impossible,” Raum mumbled.
Bel stood suddenly. “I don’t give a flying fuck about his shitty ghosts. He hides behind his spells and magic because he’s weak. If I can get close to him, I’ll wring his neck till his head pops off and cremate him with hellfire.”
“And how are you planning to do that?”
“Yeah, you’ve never been big on stealth.”
“Stop telling me what I can’t do, you little shits.
” Bel jabbed a finger in each of his brothers’ directions.
“I would wipe the floor with all of you. And if one of you makes another comment about how I can’t kill a measly necromancer, I’ll rip your arms off and beat you unconscious with them to prove a point. ”
Meph held his hands up. “No one’s questioning your badassery. We’re just concerned for your safety.”
“Fuck safety! And fuck all of you. I don’t need your goddamn coddling. Why don’t you go open a fucking daycare if you want to baby someone.”
Ash barked a laugh. “Now there’s a good image.”
Meph chuckled. “Can you imagine it? Demon daycare. Moms dropping off their little kids with us delinquents.”
“Raum would be good at it. He’s already babysitting the puppy dogs.”
While his brothers continued with their ridiculous fantasy, Bel spun with a growl and stalked out of the room. Back in the kitchen, he tossed his coffee cup into the sink a little too forcefully, and it shattered. He didn’t stop to clean it up.
He needed space from his brothers until he got his temper back under control, so he strode down the hall to the office he never used. Locking the door behind him, he sank into the cushy leather office chair and stared out the window overlooking the backyard.
He was pissed his brothers weren’t taking him seriously, but he knew that was stupid. His brothers never took anything seriously. It had nothing to do with him.
But he wasn’t joking around about killing Murmur. He’d had enough of the damned Necromancer.
It was at that moment, in a cruel twist of fate, that the air on the other side of the desk suddenly burst into purple flame. There was a small explosion of light, and purple sparks showered down like fireworks. And then it was over, as quickly as it had begun.
In the aftermath, a summoning sigil appeared on the floor, having formed from the ashes of the explosion. In the center of it was a folded piece of paper, sealed with purple wax.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Bel said, staring at it. Because he already knew exactly who had sent him that letter.
“You’re dead, Necromancer. So fucking dead.”
He stood, pushing the chair back and walking around the desk. He approached the sigil warily, bending and picking up the letter. Slipping a finger under the wax seal, he popped it open and unfolded the paper in slow motion.
As he began to read, his suspicions were confirmed.
The Necromancer had called in his first favor.
Miracle of miracles, the hellgate worked.
The world turned on its axis and shook her around, and then Suyin stumbled out the other side, head pounding. As the room stopped spinning, she saw the familiar shapes of Murmur’s library and knew she’d made it. Murmur had actually left his gate open, a careless act that seemed totally unlike him.
But she didn’t have long to dwell on that.
She’d stepped out of the hellgate … into an apocalypse.
The room was full of a thick black smoke that she promptly started choking on.
It was so dark it was hard to see anything, save for an orange glow flickering through the window outside.
A glance through the glass showed fire burning all across the plains surrounding the castle.
There was a distant roaring and a low rumbling on the ground like thousands of pounding footsteps.
But she only spared a moment looking out the window, because what was in the room was far more shocking.
In the center of Murmur’s spell, surrounded by swirling gusts of black smoke and wind, was a vortex. Purple and black, it filled the entirety of the circle Murmur had drawn in blood around it. The presence of that portal meant only one thing:
The spell had succeeded.
But if it had succeeded, then where was Murmur? And how the hell was she alive?
Nape prickling, Suyin ventured farther into the room, squinting into the darkness to make out her surroundings. She was still in her altered form, and she flexed her claws in readiness for any surprise attacks.
If she could sneak up on Murmur and stab him before he ever noticed her, she would gladly do so. She’d rip his throat out with her claws first and then sink her blade into his chest. Anything to appease the hurt and rage burning in her chest.
Except … as she got closer to the sigil and spinning portal, she saw a dark shape sprawled at the far edge, next to the ritual table.
Heart in her throat, she tiptoed a little farther.
The gleam of white hair caught her eye, and she knew it was him.
Vengeance momentarily forgotten, she rushed forward, dropping to his side.
He lay on his side, half over the outside line of the sigil.
One arm was stretched out, and the other was trapped under him.
His silvery hair fell over his face, hiding his eyes, but it was immediately obvious that he was unconscious.
And he was surrounded by a huge pool of blood.
Suyin wasn’t squeamish, but the sight of this much blood made her stomach churn a little.
“What the hell?” she muttered. This wasn’t what she’d expected to find at all. His upper body was bare, his white-gray skin even more deathly pale than usual. No breath from his nose ruffled the hair over his face.
She ought to have been relieved. He couldn’t kill her if he was unconscious.
She’d made the right call, coming here without getting anyone else involved.
Now all she had to do was find where he’d carved the mark on himself and cut a slash through it to break the magic.
Then she’d keep watch and make sure he didn’t wake up and try to re-carve his mark before her own skin could heal.
She should have been rejoicing. She would live.
Instead, a cold sense of dread rose within her.
She gripped Murmur’s upper arm, his skin ice-cold under her palms, and then pushed as hard as she could, rolling him onto his back. He flopped over, arm draped across his middle now, hair still over his face.
She gasped when she saw the marks on his chest.
His entire torso had been carved up with some sort of sigil.
The dark red of his blood against his pale skin was grisly and made her cringe with unwilling sympathy.
She gently swept his hair off his face. His eyes were closed, features slack.
Those same black veins she’d seen before snaked out beneath his shadowed eyes.
“What did you do, Murmur?” she whispered.
He would regenerate. A demon couldn’t die from blood loss, even to this degree. He would wake up, and she needed to focus on doing what she’d come here to do.
The mark. She didn’t think the giant sigil on his chest was it. Moira had said it was simple, and that one was extremely complex. There was nothing on the stretched-out arm, so she lifted the one bent over his abdomen.
She gasped. There, in the highest part of his inner forearm, was a mark nearly identical to the one on her chest.
Except for the fact that there was a slash carved through it.
Her breath caught. He had interrupted the mark himself. He’d planned to kill her and then changed his mind. Setting his arm down, she stared at him, trying to understand, her mind reeling.
She’d been so ready to hate him, to despise him for eternity. She’d never felt an intensity of betrayal so deep as when she’d realized he planned to kill her. Her skin burned just thinking of it.
But here he lay in a pool of his own blood, having done some terrible unknown magic to himself. Having slashed over the sigil that would take her life.
She didn’t know how to feel. She couldn’t forgive him that easily. Regardless of whether he’d had a change of heart, he’d still come to her house and had sex with her in her bed, while planning to kill her. That was too fucked up. She couldn’t let that go.
But this … if this was what it seemed like to her … it meant something. It wasn’t enough, but it meant something.
Almost against her will, her hand stretched out, and she stroked the back of her claw along his cold cheekbone.
“Why did you do it?” she whispered. “Why do you make it impossible to be on your side?” She took a breath and then admitted what she never would have had he been awake to hear it.
“You had me. You won our game. I would have done anything for you. I would have given you whatever you wanted. But you had to go and ruin it, didn’t you?
” She shook her head. “It was probably for the best. I don’t think you’d even know what to do with emotions if you had them. ”
She pulled her hand back and then stood, wincing at the blood that had soaked into her pants and stained her boots. She looked at him sprawled out on the ground, cold and alone, and her heart ached.
Then she turned and walked away.
She went to his desk, sitting in his well-worn chair and sorting through the mess of papers.
If she wanted to figure out what had happened here, she needed to look for clues, and she had to do it fast. However he’d done it, Murmur’s spell had succeeded.
Which meant Belial was going to show up soon, use the portal and open the door, and shit was really going to hit the fan.
She needed to be long gone before that happened.
It only took a moment of searching for her to be sure there were no answers on Murmur’s desk. But they had to be somewhere. One thing she’d learned spending time with Murmur was that he wrote everything down. It helped him make sense of the chaos in his mind.
Blowing out a breath, she slumped back in the chair, staring at his still-unconscious form, sprawled in the middle of the sigil, surrounded by blood. Even as mad at him as she was, she hated seeing him like that.
She pushed back the chair, leaned forward, and buried her face in her hands, trying to make sense of the myriad of emotions in her head. Rage, confusion, fear, heartbreak, longing … She couldn’t even try to name them all.
And then she spotted it.
A tiny trail of blood drops.