Chapter 2
A s they reached the old mahogany door that hid the Earthly portal behind it, Balthazar sucked in a deep breath. It’s now or never, he thought to himself. Do or die.
“You’re being very mysterious about the destination this year, Balti,” Azazel said, grabbing the black wrought iron door handle and shoving the heavy old door open.
As the silence around them filled with the creaking of the ornate iron hinges, Balthazar took the couple of seconds to choose his words carefully.
“It’s a surprise.”
Azazel quirked a sandy coloured eyebrow up, his jade green eyes filling with mischief. “I remember the last time you said that we ended up in Thailand. What an adventure that was.”
Balthazar allowed himself a small smile. “This will definitely beat that,” he said. “Don’t you worry.”
Azazel stole a quick look at his brother, scanning his coffee-coloured eyes for any kind of a hint as to where they were going. In his mind’s eye, he reached out with a long tendril of pulsating green energy, gently pushing at his brother’s mind, trying to break inside and peek at what was going on in there. All he met was a fortified wall of steel.
“Keeping your secrets close to your chest, hey? I like the mystery of it. Very good.”
They stepped through the doorway, scanning the long, narrow room for any potential intruders. Around ten feet wide and sixty feet long, the room itself was nothing but chunky grey stone bricks all around. At the very end sat the portal itself – a ball of rainbow coloured energy pulsating as if it had its own heartbeat.
“I don’t see why we have to use this still. It’s ridiculous. It’s been over a thousand years already,” Azazel said, rolling his eyes. “We’re more than capable of going straight to Earth without having to use this thing.”
Balthazar shot his brother a sideways glance as he ran a hand through his dark hair, trying his best to hide the fact his hands were shaking. “One breach of the threshold was one too many, Azazel,” Balthazar replied. “You only have yourself to blame for this.”
Azazel pressed his lips together and frowned. “It was one momentary lapse of concentration, that’s all. Now I know humans can follow us through our own portals, it won’t happen again.” He shrugged his shoulders like an innocent boy. “Scouts honour.”
“Azazel, you allowed an entire tribe of Amazonian warriors to follow us here...whilst you were... copulating ...with their queen through the portal itself. I really don’t think your ‘scouts honour’ carries much weight in that respect.”
Azazel closed his eyes and let out a groan of satisfaction. “Oh, Acantha...my, I’ve not thought about her in a long time. She was as sweet as honey. Tasted like morning dew on fresh grass.”
“And worth you complaining about this every year?” Balthazar asked, pointing at the portal.
Flashing his brother a mischievous grin, Azazel replied, “If you knew the things that woman could do with her tongue, you wouldn’t have even asked that.”
Balthazar sighed and marched forwards to the portal. “It would be nice if you could have just one thought, one sentence, without it involving your dick or some woman.”
“But where’s the fun in that?”
Balthazar didn’t dignify his brother with an answer. Instead, he placed his hands either side of the portal, feeling its energy latch onto his, surrounding him in what felt like a magnetic field. As it spread over him like water seeking an edge, it made a small ‘pop’ as it engulfed him completely. Then, an instant later, Balthazar disappeared from Azazel’s sight.
The three seconds spent inside the portal were the most peaceful three seconds of Balthazar’s year. All that surrounded him was beautiful silence encompassed by a myriad of colourful geometric shapes. As the portal pushed him through its tubular length at five times the speed of light, Balthazar kept his eyes wide open to soak in as much detail as possible. It was nothing short of a celestial wonder.
Azazel, left on his own in the room, took a deep breath, muttered a few curse words, and then followed his brother, his mind only remembering what he and the Amazonian queen had been doing all those hundreds of years ago.
In the icy waters of the North Sea, a lone fishing boat bobbed along the gentle waves, the captain and his men paying little attention to their vessel as they stared above them in awe at the spectacular light show of the aurora borealis. They were seeing for free what would cost anyone else thousands of pounds.
Completely entranced by the glimmering radiance, like moths bewitched by a flame, they noticed nothing of the shadowed island they floated past. The tiny piece of land last encountered humans in Norse times. On the eastern side of the Shetland isles, the mere eighty hectares of Balta provided no use for anything except a lighthouse.
And a pair of demons.
If the fishermen had not been so captivated by the rainbow-coloured lights reaching down to earth, they would have seen two figures shimmer into existence. But as soon as the hypnotic polar lights touched the ground, they recoiled as if in pain, leaving their hitchhikers alone in the darkened landscape.
Azazel sucked in a deep breath, closed his eyes, and let his breath out with an appreciative groan. “Can you smell it, Balti? Can you smell the sweet scent of all those mortal females?”
A muscle in Balthazar’s cheek twitched as he narrowed his eyes at his brother. “Don’t call me that.” Choking almost to death on a spicy Indian dish over thirty years ago had been nothing but humiliating for Balthazar and only pure entertainment for Azazel ever since. “The joke’s getting a little old now, Azazel. Grow up. A bit of maturity once in a while wouldn’t hurt, you know. Zay Zay.”
Azazel curled his top lip back at hearing the stupid nickname given to him by the Lamia, the lethal female temptresses of Lucifer’s lair. He closed the gap between them in the blink of an eye, staring his brother down with narrowed eyes. “Me grow up?” Azazel snorted. “That’s rich coming from you. Every year do you, without fail, fall in love with some poor girl, wrap her up in a whirlwind romance for three months and then disappear. If you’re such the romantic, as you claim to be, where’s the romance in breaking a different woman’s heart every year?”
Balthazar folded his arms over his broad chest and squared his shoulders. “Has your pea sized brain got the capacity to think that maybe I want these twelve weeks of freedom to give me a glimpse of something I’ve yearned for for centuries? That it allows me to temporarily live a life I never had, and probably never will have. As for the woman, she remembers nothing of it. My last kiss goodbye wipes their memory of me.”
A twinge of empathy coursed through Azazel before burying itself back in the darkness. “Why would you torture yourself every year like that? Reality check, brother. We’re not going to be human again. Ever. So, in between now and eternity, loosen up and enjoy what you can.”
The two glared at each other, neither one wanting to back down. A strained silence fell between them, the atmosphere thickening with emotion, secrets of old tales threatening to re-surface.
“Need I remind you,” Balthazar said, stabbing his index finger into his brother’s solid chest. “That we are stuck like this because of you . You’re a damn curse—always have been. If you want to cause misery to everything and everyone you come into contact with for all eternity, go ahead and be my guest, but don’t drag me down with you. Asshole.”
Azazel quirked up a sandy coloured eyebrow, delight filtering through his eyes at the taste of a challenge. “You’re kidding me, right? You think we’re stuck like this because of me? ” He poked Balthazar in the chest with two fingers, causing his brother to stumble back a step. “You might want to re-think that little statement, Octavio. ”
Balthazar’s brown eyes swirled with flecks of blackness, the hint of his demonic form scratching just beneath the surface, ready to unleash at any moment. “That. Is. Not. My. Name.”
“No?” Azazel asked, giving his younger sibling a smug smile. “Let’s follow your little ideals for a moment, shall we? Let’s say you find that person, that special one, your demi- soul. You know what you need to do to have that love confirmed. And it involves everything you were as Octavio. Everything. ”
Balthazar tilted his chin up with a defiant flick. “I’m fully aware of the rules. There’s someone for everyone, Azazel. Every year we come here is my chance to find her. The right one will love me despite my past. I know that. It matters what I am here and now, not what I was or have been.”
Azazel chuckled. “You’re nothing but a soppy hearted idiot with idealistic views of love. I would have thought after two millennia, you might have learned something.”
“I have learned something, you infantile moron. I know I don’t want to continue much longer without feeling love. Unlike some.”
Tipping his head back, Azazel laughed so loud it echoed through the dark skies. “But that’s where you’re wrong. I do feel love—” Azazel grabbed his groin in a crude gesture, looked back at his brother and grinned “—I feel it right here.”
“And what would Cassia think of you if she could see you right now, hmmm?”
In the blink of an eye, fuelled by fury, chiselled cheek bones became lost under a sea of dark purple veins as Azazel’s demonic form came to the surface. Jade green eyes gave way to obsidian depths, the gleam in them nothing but dangerous. “Don’t you dare speak her name, you vile piece of—”
Blessed with feline reflexes, Balthazar hurled a clenched fist at his brother’s face. The crunch of bone splintering bone thundered through the sky. Turning away from his uncouth brother, a whispered curse left Balthazar as he walked across the frosted grass, chastising himself for being drawn into another physical fight. He drew a deep breath and re-focused his mind on this year’s destination.
Azazel shook his head, his demonic features evaporating as quickly as they’d appeared. He shouted a stream of curse words as his broken nose realigned itself, each shattered piece of bone clicking back into place.
“Why can’t you just accept that we’re different?” Balthazar asked, glancing briefly at his brother over his shoulder. “Why do my ideals of love bother you so much?”
Azazel paused for a moment, thinking over his brother’s question. “Because we have immense power and magick, more knowledge than any amount of books could ever contain, and an eternity to enjoy it all with. Why would you want to give that up just to live eighty years with some human whose looks will fade after twenty years anyway?”
“But that’s my choice. Not yours.”
“I want what’s best for you,” Azazel said, the feeble tone to his voice not quite passing off his sincerity.
Balthazar chuckled. “No, you don’t. You just can’t stand the thought of me finding happiness before you.”
Azazel pressed his lips together and stared at the grass beneath his feet. His brother had hit the nail on the head.
Seeing Azazel lost in his thoughts, Balthazar took his opportunity and lifted his hands, tracing his fingers through the crisp night sky. He drew a large triangle, his fingers leaving behind a shimmering glow of silver and purple specks hovering in the air, like a plane leaving vapour trails.
“Transporto,” he said, giving his brother a quick sideways glance before he said the next two words. The stillness around them began to change, a slight breeze strengthening into a powerful vortex. Spinning in all directions, the turbulent energy ripped a hole in time and space. A sharp crack, as if the sound barrier had been broken, signified the completion of the closet-sized magickal doorway being opened.
Sucking in a deep breath, Balthazar spoke his final words as fast as possible. “Amor aeternus.”
Azazel snapped his head up, his face contorting into a picture of horror as he glared at his brother. “What the fuck did you just do?” He launched himself at Balthazar, rugby tackling him to the ground. “You fucking bastard!”