Chapter 13 #2
Her voice pitched, hands animated as her intensity swelled. “Deities need to hear from Hell. The gods have a vested interest in this prophesized antichrist. They see you and your human as the conduit for their grand hope. Their belief is more valuable than any truth.”
“…they…”
I hated it.
Whether I believed it or not was irrelevant. The world was acting upon it, each step manifesting the reality upon two unwilling participants.
“We’re talking about everything, Amagi. Not just the mortal world, but the countless realms while our sworn enemy usurps their power. Heaven’s reach continues to expand. Do you know what this means for us?”
I knew my sister well enough to understand that this was not a dialogue. I didn’t bother speaking, knowing she’d scramble over me with her next outburst and finish her thought.
She tensed, practically wiggling with excitement. “They’re all looking to Hell, brother! Every pantheon has turned its eye to us. They see our value. They need us. And what’s more: they see your human’s role in ending Heaven’s colonization of their land.”
My silencing hiss did nothing to stop her.
She leaned in. “They’re provoking you to return to her.”
“And if I do?” I bit off the question.
Her small shoulders lifted. She looked at me with too-large eyes as if all her fight had evaporated. “Don’t. Not unless you’re ready to commit and give them what they demand. Birth the child that will end the world.”
I shut my eyes.
After a long sigh, she said, “I know you’ve already decided.”
My brow furrowed. My eyes opened, locked onto hers as I said, “I won’t facilitate their superstitions. I won’t be a pawn in this lore.”
“If you return to her,” Izi said, “you won’t have a choice.”
And Izi won.
Her victory lasted six mortal years—a little more than a week in Hell.
This messenger expected to die, and I was almost sorry to kill him.
Almost, but not quite.
He had to receive the report about the things that had been done to a child, internalize them, walk to my room, and report them while expecting he had no culpability. It was ludicrous to see him as innocent.
It would have been unfair to kill the messenger alone, however.
I found the one who’d given the report and smiled while he’d backed into the nearest wall.
He’d lifted his hands in a placating gesture, doing his best to remain amicable until I punched through his chest cavity, puncturing his sternum, grabbing his spine, and ripping it from his body.
I’d hoped for a little more relief when his lifeless form slumped around my arm, but there was no satisfaction.
And then there was the moment that turned me into the true Prince of Hell.
I realized then, that my life was not a three-act play. There was, in fact, an encore. And the fourth act would be bloody.
I was the demon of lore, the thing of fangs and poison and horror. I was the bringer of torment, the final tribulation, the pain from which they’d never awaken.
She was four months old.
One hundred and twenty-one human days.
She’d been alive for fewer than three thousand hours.
They wanted to draw me out? They succeeded.
A mortal could die of exposure, of lack of nutrition, of disease, of failure to thrive.
These were tragic, and I would have mourned, and I probably would have killed her parents and the village doctor and anyone else who’d failed her, but they were not unspeakable horrors that deserved true wrath.
Some things are too heinous for repetition even in the mind’s eye. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t be bothered to monologue, to explain myself, to reiterate what or why or precisely how they’d earned my fury, but I made Hell’s stance for the kingdom.
Mortals were not alone to blame.
I razed their gods, their fae, their creatures of night as I raked them over the coals, declaring open season on anyone who touched my human from that moment forward. Pantheons held council to which we were not invited. I would give them a war on all fronts.
Summits were called. Gods and their beings gathered from all corners to hold counsel with my father, demanding accountability against his terrorist of a son. I’d committed unforgivable crimes to which retribution was demanded.
Hell’s courts united, begrudgingly as it were, as the realm prepared for battle.
Casualties were expected in war, however, and the enemy of one’s enemy is quite famously their friend.
Those I killed—human and immortal alike—were unfortunate, so word came down. Losses were tragic, but they were nothing compared to prospective victory. It was noise, an acceptable loss, if Heaven fell. If the Prince and his human facilitated the prophecy, all would be forgiven.
The disgusting summit of minds and powers made it sound so simple.
My punishment was worse than my head on a spike. I was free on one condition: I return to my human, and I play my part in this unholy legend.
The screaming matches within my father’s throne room were privy to none but Hell’s innermost sanctum. No fight had divided the realms like this, and the courts cracked at our disregard, our selfishness—my selfishness.
All was forgiven, so long as I brought about the end of the world.
Go back to the surface, he advised. Embrace the human, just as I desired. Find her. Woo her. Love her. Together, create a child of two realms; one who might take down the enemy that united us all.
They were wildly unsatisfying terms.
“Son,” my father had said beneath his breath. “You will never receive a proposition better than this. The rest is on you, and I will stand beside you. It’s this, or your head.”
“Death or torture?” I’d repeated, the hate of my words sticking to the back of my throat like tar. “That’s meant to satisfy me? This treaty is an insult. It’s a spit in the face. It’s—"
I could feel my sister’s wrath from across the room. She stood, and it was enough to make me bite off my tirade in a snarl.
The Queen of Nightmares, Mother of Succubi, must have had opinions of her own, but unless we learned she had not sent her daughter to speak on her behalf, I had to assume the worst. The Nightmare Court, as with the others that crafted Hell’s many factions, preferred the shadows, knowing they’d prevail from Hell’s victory one way or another.
The other pantheons saw their active role in conquest when it came to triumphing over a pantheon expanding with rapid colonization, appropriation, and erasure.
If I held the key to the global tyrant’s undoing, they’d work with me.
And that’s how I won the war of gods while feeling like I hadn’t won anything at all.