Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
A SINGLE NIGHTMARE
Uncomfortable glue stuck my lashes together. My vision was foggy. I stirred as if from a drunken stupor.
I was Hell’s Prince, and as such, could come and go from any court or location of the realm as I pleased. I expected cobbled streets. Architecture, old and new. I expected my palace, my home, my bed.
My title, my power, my being was older than mortal years.
The gods, as it was, were eternal. Their ideologies, squabbles, and partitions existed long before atoms split, and the physical universe rolled into organic life. Humans were late toys in the game of gods. It would be inane to anticipate anything out of the ordinary when stepping into my realm.
But this wasn’t my court.
My vision, my sense of smell, my thrash of heightened awareness spiked at once.
Thick opium, silken drapes, lungs full of involuntary oxytocin, and the endless pitch of onyx where walls should have been alerted me that I was somewhere I’d heard of but gone out of my way to never visit.
I knew my sister was to blame before I could articulate her role in my arrival. As half siblings, she came to the Royal Court for a reason.
I drowned in an ocean of thick, inescapable tar.
The blue-gray crackle in a cloud illuminated a cluster of snakes off to the left. Another thunderstrike illuminated a horrifying silhouette, this time of someone bound by chains and thrust into a bottomless ocean.
I knew where I was, and it was the last place in the multitude of realms I wanted to be.
The Court of Nightmares was for succubi, incubi, and things that went bump in the night. This wasn’t for fallen angels. This was for blood suckers, parasites, and creatures beyond and before the veil that struck fear into the heart of the mortals on whom they preyed.
Fighting for sobriety in a land soaked with sex was like swimming up from the murky depths of the deepest lake. I blinked to clear my head as I looked for the culprit.
A deep, disembodied purr seeped through the haze. “This is your fight.”
It wasn’t my sister. I was quite certain I’d never heard the voice. Given its gravity, I had a singular guess. Izi’s mother, the First Succubus, Queen of Nightmares, had broken through the haze.
“She’s talking to me,” Izi sighed.
I felt her before I saw her. She yanked my hand, pulling me onto a silken cushion.
The jump caught me off guard, but the shock had passed. I shook off the cloud to glare at her clearly. I was on my feet before she had the time to prop an elbow against the pillows and pout into her hand.
“You have ten seconds to explain yourself.”
“Consider this your intervention, Amagi,” she pouted. “You’ve failed.”
We’d surpassed sibling rivalry. I’d sooner start a war with her court than let her taunt me when it came to my Love.
“Nine. Eight. Seven.”
Her lower lip protruded. “The prophecy really bummed you out. I get it. Then for Heaven to hear about your human? Uff. They really forced your hand, huh? But then…” She sat up, gesturing to the isolated blackness around her.
“You were handed an opportunity on a silver platter. Fulfill your duty a million miles away from Heaven’s touch.
A willing bride. A human with open eyes. No one to stop you.”
I hissed through gritted teeth. “Four. Three. Two.”
“You aren’t going to do it. You think you weren’t watched?
You think just because you were in the middle of the fucking ocean among gods that all eyes weren’t on you?
You didn’t question once—not once—why not a single Samoan god showed up to confront you.
When did you lose your curiosity? Fuck, love really does make you stupid, huh? ”
Her timer had run out, but a new rage tethered me to the ground.
“What did you do?” I spit the question through my teeth.
“Me?” She batted her lashes, feigning innocence. “What did I do that hundreds of deities didn’t do? We interceded. We asked for a reprieve. We made promises. We bartered on your behalf. We let you fuck around under the oath that you would get the job done.”
I stared at this creature—the only being I’d ever deigned to call sibling—as the inky tendrils of her hair floated around her. The sultry chaos she offered the world focused on me.
“Finish it,” she said.
I thought only humans could teach me new emotions.
Here, in the Court of Nightmares, a new insidious drip began within me.
I repeated my question, tendons flexed, jaw clenched. “What did you do.”
She rose to meet me. Within her own court, she could distort her shape and amplify her voice at will. She doubled her height, bending as she yelled, then tripled her size as she towered over me. Her voice boomed across the obsidian.
“You could have left her alone!” The shout was half accusation, half maddening cackle. “The day I wandered into that shitty, clay hut, I told you, brother. Play with the humans. Have your fun. But to focus on one? To protect her? To love her?”
An iridescent glow reflected off the draped silk, and I knew it was my rage personified. I vibrated with it as I waited for her next words.
She laughed, her towering form pacing the endless land of terrors. A crackle of thunder in one corner. A scurry of spiders in another. An ooze of blood, a fanged beast, the gleam of a weapon, all crackling in their respective nightmares.
She tilted her head back this time, opening her mouth, unhinging her jaw like a snake as a wicked, belly laugh reverberated through her court.
“But I didn’t,” I said.
“But you could have!” She snapped back to my size, my equal in all but rage.
“You could have stopped in the hundreds of years before the motherfucking prophecy! You knew better than every other deity? You were wiser than the beings who walked among the humans? You and your hubris, your attachment meant more?”
She was drunk on her own monologue. I let my fury grow, light banishing the shadows, forcing nearby residents to scurry to the comfort of known darkness.
“So then,” she drawled, “phase two. Heaven, spearheaded by a war god, found sheep’s clothing.
You can only conquer so many lands through weapons and body counts, right?
After all, every pantheon has a war deity, and they all use the same playbook.
It’s why they stick with their own people, give or take a neighboring kingdom or two. But this guy? Our nemesis? Holy shit.”
I’d cut off my nose to spite my face if I grabbed her by the throat now. She was on the verge of telling me something. Yet the brighter I grew, the smaller she was. This may be her court, but she was no god. She could control her shape, but whether my land or hers, she did not hold my title.
Izi flipped her hair over her shoulder and walked toward a blank, black wall. She thrust her hands toward the darkness and flung a map of the mortal world amongst its nightmares.
“He almost deserves his victory. The first war deity to realize there was a new frontier to conquer: consciousness. He fought with emotion. His weapon became hate in the shape of peace. His blood-soaked agenda wore a kindly teacher’s face. He claimed victory over minds! Cultures!”
The blue-black crowd spread to show the expanse between the Dead Sea and the Tigres and Euphrates, the birth of Heaven and Hell.
A blood-red ink blotched above and below neighboring seas, further west than Rome, all the way to Hispania, further north than Britannia thanks to the Plague of Justinian, further east than my sorrowful visit in Constantinople.
“Do you know what our soothsayers predict?”
The blue-gray expanded higher and wider than any nightmare I’d yet to witness.
The red spread to lands neither I nor my legion had visited.
I watched the fall of the Aztec Empire, understanding their presence in the summit, though I knew neither when nor how.
The crimson blotch smothered continents on all sides of the globe in shapes that had yet to be mapped by any earth-bound scholar.
“You could have stayed in Hell,” she sneered.
“You didn’t listen to my advice the first time around.
You didn’t listen to my advice after their motherfucking prophecy when I begged you to stay here, to wait until desperate pagans thrashing for relevance stopped pressuring you to sire their champion.
You could have waited, been silent, taken my advice, allowed the gods and their schemes to grow bored. ”
Her map vanished, but the full moon glow of my silver rage continued.
“You decided, brother. You chose. You’d fulfill their prophecy. So, where is it? Where is the evidence you’re holding up your end of the bargain? Show us the fruits of your labor, Treacherous Prince. I’d hate to believe this infertility is intentional.”
My lips pulled back from my teeth. “What was your role in this?”
She plopped onto the silks once more. “I was on your side, even when you weren’t, Amagi.”
I studied her silhouette and had an epiphany that winked my starlight into blackness.
“Izi,” I said, fists clenched.
“Amagi,” she replied automatically, taunting, bored, ever herself.
“I owe it to you to tell you: this is the last time I will see you as my sister. With the resources at my fingertips, it will be hours, nay, minutes, before I unravel the fateful threads you’ve knotted in my life.
You believe you’re wiser than me? You know better, you have Hell’s best interest, you’re worthy of puppeteering? ”
Her throat bobbed without swallowing.
“I have a single piece of advice for you.”
Her brows pinched. Her back straightened at the unforeseen turn.
“Don’t come back to the Royal Court. That said, I expect we’ll see each other, whether in the mortal realm, among the infernal, or in another pantheon. I want you to understand the grace I’m giving you with my warning.”
The clouds ceased. There was only black as Izi stared up at me.
“I don’t care if I’m visiting a pantheon in a royal capacity, if I’m undercover behind enemy lines, if I’m simply listening to a harpist with my father in the Royal Court…” A light chuckle. Her skin blanched as hate blackened my eyes.
“The next time you see me: run.”