Chapter 13
Lucifer seemed eager for whatever bounty Saer might have brought from his latest excursion to the surface. He knelt and explained that he’d searched for humans to harvest, but found none and returned as soon as possible to go elsewhere.
He lied.
But he didn’t flinch. Even when Lucifer scrutinized him for so long with a heated stare that his insides felt like they melted.
Which was why, when Hellsfire erupted behind him, Saer held his breath and bowed his head.
Relief and disappointment mixed to hear Errshek and Kalia bickering at his back—and not Neyu following him.
“—the Hells are we supposed to work as a team when you won’t do anything!
” Envy stomped out of the fireball. Saer tipped his head to witness as Errshek whirled on the littlest sister.
“Everyone else is bound to have brought back hundreds of souls by now, and you’re going to be the reason we get punished. ”
Kalia rolled her eyes. The sigh she released held enough weight that it pulled her to the ground in a lazy kneel.
Errshek rushed to follow suit, as if just remembering where they stood.
“Father,” Kalia said. “Errshek refuses to work with me.”
Envy gawped and snapped his focus to her. “Are you serious?”
“Deadly.” Sloth’s snide drawl carried the bitterness of dandelion greens.
“I never said that.” Turning back to their maker, Errshek’s whine grated through the chamber. “I never said that!”
“Lower your eyes, Errsheken.” Lucifer’s command rumbled through the chamber, and Errshek cowed, bowing his head until his forehead brushed the stone ground.
The exchange brought a derisive spasm to the corner of Saer’s lips.
“Saerkhanum.” Fatigue laced the fallen angel’s recitation of his name. “Choose one to go with you. The other will be sent to work next to my Neyuukhan.” Lucifer’s gaze sharpened. “Given your obedience in remaining apart, she deserves to have someone alongside her, wouldn’t you agree?”
Saer fought the quickening of his heart at the implications in Lucifer’s question, focusing instead on the first sentence to avoid giving anything away. “Master, I prefer to work alone.”
“I did not ask what you prefer, child.” The threat couldn’t be clearer. Saer bit back a growl and turned his head to look at the Sixth and Seventh Daemoenica.
Neyu’s kinder nature would blend with either of them, but Saer remembered seeing Errshek helping Neyu and made the split decision. “Kaliaspher will search for Neyu. Errsheken will come to the surface with me.”
Kalia shot a smug look at Errshek, whose expression of incredulity begged to voice injustice. In the end, he held his tongue.
Lucifer inclined Its head and waved a hand. “Go, then.”
Saer hesitated, wanting to pull Kalia aside but finding no good excuse to do so. He locked his gaze with hers, urgency in his.
Kalia raised a brow in a noncommittal fashion, then yawned and stretched as Hellsfire transported her.
Saer bit back a curse.
He accompanied Errshek to Earth.
“No one wants to talk to me.” “They won’t even look at me.” “How can I learn to do this when you take over everything?” “Do you have any concept of what it means to be subtle?”
Errshek complained without end.
Saer learned what it meant to have a constant headache.
The two did find humans, and Saer taught the youngest brother how to blend in with mankind. Envy lacked patience, though to the detriment of his goals, desiring to excel at everything without true dedication.
“Slow down!” Saer scolded him one evening after he succeeded in alienating an entire village with his whining. “You have to learn what they want before making grand promises.”
“I know exactly what they want, it’s what I’m good at!”
But he wasn’t. And Saer ended with his nose pinched between a thumb and forefinger again, and again.
The reasoning behind Errshek and Kalia’s mismatch became abundantly clear the more he scolded Envy—through gritted teeth—to think before acting.
He wondered if Neyu thought of their time together. Of him. If she indeed felt that hollowness within her chest in his absence. A mirroring cavern grew in his, like an answer to her call.
It didn’t matter.
Envy’s grousing fueled Pride’s annoyance to a whole new level.
If Neyu grounded and balanced him, Errshek threw Saer off kilter in equal but opposite measures.
By the time Errshek successfully harvested a soul and it attached to him, Saer found himself on the verge of shaking Envy enough to make his teeth rattle.
But harvest, he did.
Saer almost went back with Errshek to present the trophy to Lucifer, but stopped before taking his brother’s hands. If he went back, he might see Neyu.
The temptation pulled at him at every turn, and every time it did, he forced himself to remember the frigid terror of Lucifer’s hand around her throat, the way steam leaked from her pores when their maker threatened to unmake her moments after kissing her eyelids.
They had to remain apart. He couldn’t risk cluing Lucifer into their forbidden union, and he didn’t trust himself to be near her.
He would not risk her safety.
So, Saer sent the Sixth—and instructed him to direct one of the other siblings to him. Anyone but Neyu.
The Twins joined him. Then Runeak. Even Kalia, after she’d completed bringing a handful of souls with Neyu.
Then Errshek again. A rotation formed, one after the other, spreading tactics and information amongst Lucifer’s creations.
In between their comings and goings, Saer gathered souls and passed them to his kin to bring to the Hells.
He traversed between human settlements on foot, never returning home.
The other Daemoenica recounted their time with Neyu, and he listened with agonizing intent.
They never said enough, and he couldn’t ask for more.
The void in his chest grew, just as she’d described, and he replaced it with antipathy and duty.
He had a function to fulfill, a Master to obey, a vow to uphold.
So he told himself.
The size of the Daemoenica’s harvests expanded with time and experience. Pride found ways to manipulate his sin, mixing it with his kin when they accompanied him. It grated at him to discover that pride complimented envy particularly well, despite their opposing tendencies.
Dressed as a vagrant, he slunk into a new town lying on the outskirts of a larger capital.
Farmers tended robust fields of grain beyond the village proper.
A series of stone buildings with thatched roofs made up the majority of dwellings, dotted along the edges of crisscrossing dirt roads.
An irritating drizzle rained on Saer’s hood.
Bits of moisture touched his nose and evaporated immediately upon contacting his Hellsfire flesh.
Saer had dismissed Runeak weeks prior to take their latest bounty to Lucifer. Intermingling pride and wrath amongst humans always proved explosive and resulted in a body count in the double digits. Lucifer would be pleased.
One of his other kin would join him before too long.
Learn the culture. Gain trust. Pull sins.
Don’t develop attachment to the humans. Ruki taught him that. Even years later when the boy came to mind, Saer found something to distract himself from the alienating discomfort it brought.
End the ones who promised themselves to the Daemoenica. Steal their souls and hand them over to his kin so their maker could populate the Hells and consume the readied ones. Relocate.
Again, and again, and again.
Saer found a traveler’s inn with an empty room.
He paid the sum required—currency stolen or won from prior conquests—and retired to his modest lodgings, which consisted of a too-short bed, a desk and chair, and a drafty fireplace.
Dust tickled his nostrils, mixed with the scent of stale linen.
Every inch of the tiny room lay visible with one, quick glance.
He’d stayed in worse.
The door shut behind him as he entered and untied his cloak.
“Can you hear me?”
Saer wheeled around, dropping to a defensive stance, arms up to strike or block.
No one behind him. Just the closed door.
The voice had surely come from behind him.
Did he imagine it?
“That answers that question.” Somehow the voice sounded both tired and relieved.
Saer startled again, then snarled, eyes darting around the room. He shifted his feet in a cautious rotation.
Nothing.
He’d heard tales and witnessed a handful of humans seeing visions, hearing specters. Had he spent so long amongst humanity that his mind adopted some of their hallucinatory tendencies?
But as Saer fought to calm the uptick of his heart, he realized he knew that voice. The language, one of the first he’d ever learned.
It can’t be.
He shook his head and scanned the meager space once more. “Show yourself.”
“I’m not sure I know how, anymore.”
Attention darting towards the spot the voice came from, Saer approached it. “No more games, Little Ghost.”
The voice huffed. “Games.”
Saer extended a hand until his fingers contacted an essence, then gripped. The spirit yelped, but vacillated into view, blurry at first. Edges clarified the longer he held on—until the spirit of Ruki stood in front of him, held at arm’s length.
Suspecting the presence proved another thing entirely from actually seeing the soul. Saer froze, staring into the glimmering eyes of the young boy he’d betrayed years upon years prior. Another human lifetime passed since he’d set foot in Chief Asheda’s village. The memories punched him in the gut.
“How…” Saer blinked and shook his head. “How are you still here?”
Ruki’s soul deflated, something between shock and trepidation lining its expression. “No one else can hear me.”
“Why are you here, Little Ghost?”
“I don’t know!” The distraught wail made Saer flinch.
“How did you find me?”
“It’s a pull. I don’t know. It led me here.”
Saer didn’t know what to do with it. Old thoughts and feelings he’d buried tumbled around in his stomach and heart, emotions he’d ignored for decades. Human emotions he fought to unlearn.
Ruki’s spirit reached for him. “Please, you have to help me.” The soul’s hand passed straight through Saer’s arm, even as he stepped back.
It had to go away. He needed it to go away. “You’re dead. There’s nothing I can help you with.”
“Where do I go? What do I do?”
“That’s not my problem.” Saer resumed the unthreading of his cloak with shaking fingers, shrugging it off his shoulders.
The instant Saer turned his back on the soul, its tone shifted from pleading to incredulous. “You did this to me!”
The accusation sent another roiling through Saer’s insides, unpleasant and sickening all at once. He paused at the bed’s edge, staring at the threadbare quilt, and swallowed. “I did.”
A clamor and another riotous voice lifted outside the room. “What do you mean? I can sense the old bastard’s heat through here.” An insistent knock rang on Saer’s door, piercing the tense atmosphere of the room. “Hey, big guy! Lady Terror says it’s our turn to play.”
“Frenzied Hells.” Saer glanced at Ruki’s despairing spirit, then went to the door and jerked it open.
Gluttony himself—Alus—whooped and all but tackled Saer with a hug. “Record time in tracking you down. My better half owes me the fanciest dinner this place has.” He pulled back and beamed at him. “Ney also made us promise to send her regards.”
Ney—one of Alus’s nicknames for Neyu. She sent communications with the Twins more often than anyone else. Always vague, always lukewarm. Never enough.
Arek scoffed from the doorway as Saer pushed Alus off, ignoring the familiar pang her messages always brought. He never returned them. If he did, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from indulging in more.
He refused to put her at risk.
Ruki’s soul watched it all with dumbfounded eyes. “They’re your—?”
“Brothers,” Saer growled.
“That’s us.” Alus grinned and punched Saer’s shoulder, but paid no mind to Ruki’s spirit.
His usually gray eyes reflected the color of the pale-yellow tunic he wore with startling uncanniness in a trait specific to Gluttony.
No matter what color shirt he wore, his steely eyes absorbed and displayed the hue.
“One of these days, we’re going to drag you further south.
These northern climes you insist upon are too damned cold. ”
“Can they hear me?” Ruki’s soul asked.
Greed—Arek—stepped inside, shutting the door behind him. “Much easier to show warmer places to you if you came back with us.”
It wasn’t the first time any of his kin tried to get Saer to transport to the Hells so he could relocate to a different locale. He passed over it—just as he did all the other times—and instead answered Ruki’s question. “They can’t, no.”
Alus’s smile faltered. “We can’t?”
Saer waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “A soul. It speaks to me.”
Arek’s brows lifted with mild interest. “You’ve got one already? We can take it—”
“No.”
“Just hand it over to us, Boss,” Alus tried to elaborate. “Soon as you say the word, we’ll see it, snag it, and transport it back to Fath—”
“No.”
The vehemence with which Saer uttered the word earned Alus’s hands raising in mock surrender. “Are you taking it yourself then?”
Saer scowled and shook his head. “You two go eat. I’ll find you soon.”
Arek shot him a skeptical glance, but Alus shrugged. “As our captain commands, so shall it be. C’mon, Handsome.” Gluttony looped his arm through Greed’s, pivoting the two of them so they could disappear from sight.
Saer let out a long breath.
“They’re…something,” Ruki’s spirit remarked, dazed.
Saer made a noncommittal noise.
“Why won’t you give me to them?”
Why wouldn’t he? The answer to that question simmered dangerously on Saer’s lips, and he bit down on it. Shaking his head, Saer turned towards the soul. “Go. Disappear again. Wander as you will.”
“But I don’t—I can’t…? Saer, you’re my only—”
Saer’s short fuse ignited. “Begone!”
Ruki’s soul fell silent, its despondent gaze beaten. A breath of time passed, and it nodded at last, a stilted movement.
Seething, yet unsure why, Saer left his room. He slammed the door behind him, intent on finding the Twins so they could begin their work.
When he returned to his room in the late evening, Ruki’s essence was nowhere to be seen, relieving and saddening him all at once.