Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
My knuckles were bloodless from centuries of gripping the throne, unmoving.
I would not participate. She was safer if she was no longer my human.
I wouldn’t let them turn her into a bargaining tool, a method for leverage, a pawn.
I had remained in Hell for hundreds of years before, and I’d do it again. I’d shove Love aside. Every excruciating minute of every day was spent in relentless rejection of the prophecy and its gods-dammed ramifications.
Superstitious deities had banded together to ruin my existence and the lives of my human? I wouldn’t let them play the role of puppeteer. Trafficking Love into unwilling cycles of whoring was fruitless if there was no demon to impregnate her.
The only thing more painful than staying away from her would be knowing I was responsible for her destruction. Without me, she was just another woman, free to live a normal, mundane life.
I would grind my teeth into a pulp.
I would clench my jaw so tightly that the knot never released.
I would clutch the arms of my royal seat until my fingers cracked the stone beneath them.
I would remain among thick velvet curtains and marble pillars and latticed windows of my tomb.
I would glower at feasts, each forced bite turning to ash in my mouth, as I paid no mind to the world of men.
I would hold audiences with ambassadors, carry out my duties, and not sully myself with the ways of mortals.
I. Would. Not. Let. This. Prophecy. Happen.
True to my word, I remained amidst the cities and incense and royal obligations of Hell.
I did not return to the surface for my human’s next life, nor for her death.
I’d hoped no one would identify her. That they wouldn’t know which soul had come and gone from the mortal plane.
I’d prayed my secret of the mortal with the mother-of-pearl aura would remain locked in the vaults of Athena and Nanook and Brigid.
I remained in the underworld, shoulders forward, face a mask of indifference when news came of her death.
It would have been a mistake for anyone or anything who crossed my path to report who she was, or how she’d died.
I would give them nothing to work with. My apathy was my gift to her.
The forced cold of an uncaring facade would give her a fighting chance at normalcy, untainted by gods and their folly.
Word came again.
A member of my legion—the fractal of my energy charged with my bidding—heard the word of Love and her passing disseminated among Hell’s citizens. Knowing word was on its way, they opted to tell me before someone of higher rank arrived to provoke me with the information.
Twenty-nine this time. A significant number to me alone. My lip twitched as I thought of the Celts, but I forced my expression to remain neutral as the trembling legion told me how she’d died. From the creature’s shiver, I knew it expected to die for what it said.
And it was right to be afraid.
The torture it described was unspeakable, quartered and drawn in the Carpathian Mountains. They spared no details when painting a picture of the throng that had surrounded her, nor of the terror she’d felt, the things they’d done that made her inhumane execution a comparative relief.
I would look bored. I would politely listen. I would dismiss the servants. I would not let them know how I seethed within.
And yet…
My covert visits to the mortal realm to end the lives of all involved in ways that would make Czars of Torture tremble. The general of the mutilation realm would have taken notes of the things I did, of the ways I made responsible parties suffer.
My retribution was in secret, as apathy was my outward expression.
The message to the Slavic deities who allowed her death on their soil was bloody.
But they weren’t meant to know it was me. It was war. It was an ambush. It was a usurper. It was someone else. Something else. Hundreds of witnesses could attest to how profoundly unbothered I’d been each time news came of her passing. Surely, I had nothing to do with the slaughter.
Until her third death.
She was only eight years old.
“Don’t shoot the messenger” is a trite platitude, relevant only to those who’ve never had to watch a messenger report atrocities about the one they loved.
A messenger was meant to be a neutral party.
There was nothing neutral about their words.
No unbiased third party could return to Hell’s palace and walk to my room and say the things they’d said and expect to live.
Killing the messenger, as it turned out, was a mistake on more accounts than one.
It hadn’t been difficult to guess that I’d been responsible for the entrails strewn about those responsible for the death of her previous cycle. Murdering the legion who’d reported on this death in front of infernal courtiers was the confirmation they needed: Hell’s Prince was not indifferent.
Hell had an established weakness, and no matter how I tried to hide it, its Prince was coming apart at the seams.
Whether Izi had legions of her own stationed outside my room or if she’d heard rumors of my mental state and responded, I had no idea.
She intercepted me as I burst from my bedchambers.
She shouldn’t have been in my palace at all.
She lived with her mother, Queen of Shadows, in the Nightmare Realm.
It was threatening in name only. The nightmare belonged to anyone who stood against them.
She, her mother, and the citizens of their court thrived within.
But as she looked at me with soot and coal in her black eyes, I positioned myself as an enemy welcoming nightmares.
“This is a mistake,” she said, jumping to her feet before I’d turned to address her.
I stormed past the couch on which she’d been lounging. I didn’t want to know how long she’d been there or what she’d heard. I needed to speak to the King.
“Don’t tell our father,” she urged as if she heard my thoughts.
As much as I hated it, her words gave me pause.
It was like a physical tripwire brought me to a halt.
I regarded my sister, pinch and curve and smoke and shadow, as the First Daughter of Succubi looked at me with true desperation in her eyes.
She looked at me with eyes that understood the mortal realm better than I could hope.
Despite my better judgment, I remained planted in the hall.
The wispy tendrils of her hair coiled and vanished as she stepped toward me.
She clasped her hands like a monk in prayer.
“You’re standing on the precipice of something terrible,” she said.
“If you involve him, you’ll throw Hell’s weight behind your cause and validate their efforts.
He will take your side if you stand with this human.
Do you see what that means for the realm?
We’ll be at war with too many battlefronts to count. We cannot win.”
I looked down the hall, thrusting my hand to its empty corridors as if her opal soul shimmered in its vacant space. “Because leaving her alone has served us?”
“It has,” Izi insisted.
My jaw dropped open.
“You are suffering because you still care,” she pressed. “You opened yourself to human emotion, and it can be glorious. I am not without sympathy, brother. I adore sipping from the human cup. But you cannot drink to the point of drunkenness. You’ve lost yourself.”
“But they—”
“They’re hurting her,” she insisted. “Not you. Stop tipping your hand. Every time you react, you give them power.”
“And who is them.”
She threw up her hands, gesturing to the palatial ceilings as if every pantheon rested atop the pillars. “Everyone! You’ve handed Hell’s power to every god, every immortal, even every man who dares push you in one fragile area. If you hadn’t slaughtered those men—”
“I didn’t—”
“Your lies insult me,” she bit. Her voice contained the snarl I’d heard in wolves and polar bears from my time in the Arctic.
She bared her teeth as she said, “You can’t hear of that mortal’s death without leaving a massacre in your wake.
The rumors might have been extinguished in a lifetime or two if you hadn’t reacted.
Three, perhaps, but no more than that. Each retaliation buys your precious mortal’s soul ten more murders, ten more lifetimes ending in torture, ten more—”
I broke her locked gaze, jerking my head to the side. “Stop it.”
“They’re drawing you out, and you’re falling for it in spectacular fashion.” She planted two small hands on my chest and pushed with the force of a queen. “You are the only one who can stop this. You’ve doomed our realm. Let her go, or—”
“Or what?”
Silence became its own shadow. It was a lingering darkness that puddled at our feet. After a quiet eternity, she said, “Or become what they hope, and give us a champion.”
The fight leached from me. My arms fell to my side as I looked at her with true disbelief.
“I don’t believe it either.” Her dismay was a breathy whisper.
“But they do. Every god, every fae, everyone who wants Hell to act and take down Christendom and its cockroach-like infestation. Those of us in the Cradle of Civilization were the first to fall. The Hellenic gods? Their Roman counterparts? All deities too powerful to believe something like this could happen to them. Rome’s only mission was to conquer, and for years they did it under Ares and his banner.
Now?” With a snap of her fingers, she gestured to the wide, dark nothing.
“Heaven and its armed militia marches on the regions Rome once claimed, destroying temples, pillaging holy sites, erasing every holy book and name and practice that doesn’t belong to Heaven.
Everywhere they go, the region’s mortals are forced to abandon their gods and convert against the tip of a blade. ”
I grinded my teeth so hard I nearly felt a crack.