Chapter 29
CHAD
Istare at the towering figure before me, my clawed hands flexing at my sides. My mind races, trying to process his words. My son? The claim should sound absurd, but something primal inside me recognizes the truth of it.
“Who are you?” I manage to growl, the words still feeling strange in my transformed mouth.
The demon's lips curve into what might be a smile. “I am Behemoth, Prince of the Seventh Circle of the Pit.” He gestures to the ravaged boar carcass between us. “I see you've inherited my appetite, among other things.”
The name vibrates in the marrow of my bones. Prince. Seventh Circle. My demonic side suddenly wants to kneel, recognizing its source, but the human part of me—the part that remembers the smell of rain on pavement and the soft, trembling voice of my mother—wants to rip his throat out.
“My mother,” I rasp. “She died alone. She was hounded, disowned by her family, kicked out of her coven like a diseased dog because she carried you in her bed. She raised me in the shadows for years while you were... doing what exactly? Ruling some demonic kingdom?”
Behemoth takes a step forward, the ground submitting beneath his feet.
“Your mother was a rare flame, Chad. But the laws of the Pit are not the laws of mortals. I was called back, entrenched in a succession war that spanned many years in your time, though less in mine. For a long while, I could not cross back.”
“And yet you suddenly can now?” I growl. I can feel the beast inside me lunging, but the shock of his presence is still acting like a tether, dragging my human mind back to the surface. “How did you even find me?”
“The seal I helped your mother place upon you, to hide your full nature, also prevented me from sensing you,” Behemoth says. “It was… part of her request. Evidently, that seal was broken.”
I go still, the growl dying in my throat as his words sink in. My mother requested the seal. She didn’t just want to hide me from the world, from the judgmental eyes of covens or the fearful whispers of the human neighborhood where we’d hunkered down. She wanted to hide me from him.
His words hit me hard. I’d always pictured her as the abandoned lover, a woman left to rot with a half-demon secret while her powerful consort left her behind.
But Behemoth’s words paint a different picture—one of mutual severance.
Did she want to leave him as much as he needed to go?
Was the distance between them a choice she made to save me, or her, or us both?
Either way, the bitter taste of resentment doesn’t leave me.
He should have done more to support her, to protect her.
“She was murdered,” I snarl. “A darkblood took her life when I was just a child. I watched her bleed out in her own home. And where was the so-called ‘Prince of the Seventh Circle’ then? I was alone until a clearblood chancellor found me. He took me in to take advantage of me, give me his own twisted purpose when none of my own kind wanted me.”
I always suspected my mother’s murder was some kind of honor killing, a member of her family wanting to erase the evidence of the shame she’d brought.
The Valgraves were fanatical about keeping pure bloodlines, traced back to their earliest ancestors.
Most of them treated her like some kind of direct insult they’d rather not see walk the earth anymore.
But I’ll probably never find out who killed her. Rothmere baited me, claiming that he knew, but he was full of shit. And now he’s gone too. At least, that much went my way.
Behemoth’s furnace-eyes flare, a deep, burning red.
“Murdered?”
The temperature of the clearing suddenly drops, the remaining warmth leeching away like it's being devoured by something far colder than night. Behemoth goes utterly still. Not calm. Contained.
“WHO?”
The single word cracks through the clearing. Birds explode from the trees.
“Give me the name of the darkblood that took her life!”
I stagger back from the sheer force of his rage. The air around him seems to warp, reality itself seeming to bend under the pressure of his wrath. His eyes now burn so bright they cast my shadow across the clearing.
“Give me the names,” he snarls, and this time the raw, jagged agony in his voice cuts through my own resentment. “Both of them, the murderer and the one who deceived my son. Give me the location of their coven. I will unmake them. Body. Name. Memory.”
I look at him, stunned by the raw emotion emanating from his massive frame. I’ve spent my life convinced my mother was just a fling and I a mistake he’d simply walked away from. But the creature in front of me looks anything but indifferent.
Behemoth takes another step, already half turning like he means to leave the clearing right now and start tearing through the world until he finds them.
“Well?” he demands, voice vibrating through the ground. “Where are they?”
“I already killed the clearblood,” I rasp. “And I… I don’t know who killed my mother.”
The words fall heavy between us. Behemoth stops. Slowly, he turns back toward me.
“You killed the clearblood… and you don’t know.”
“I was a kid. I barely saw his face. My mother tried to push me behind her. Then… blood.”
Behemoth’s jaw tightens. The infernal fire in his eyes flickers, the fury twisting into something darker.
A low, grinding sound rolls through his chest.
“She would have done that.”
The words are almost to himself.
For a moment he just stands there, massive shoulders rigid, like he’s forcing the rage back under control.
And I wonder, not for the first time, how it ever came to be that my mother fell for him.
How they met. How something like him could have found his way into her life.
How he fell for her. What he saw in her that made a prince of a hellish realm remember her like this.
What moments they shared that brought them close enough for something as impossible as me to exist between them.
He turns his head away from me, staring into the dark canopy of the trees, chest still heaving. The silence between us is heavy with more than two decades that should have been something… Something more than just silence.
I don’t know what to say in this moment. My head crowds with so many questions I don’t know which to ask first.
“I will find him, Chad,” he says quietly, his voice regaining a jagged, brittle edge. “The one who took her. Even if I have to sift through every soul on earth, I will bring him to you. And we will show him the price of what he took from us.”
“You know my name.” My mind catches on that thought. “You named me together?”
His lips lift at one corner in something like bittersweetness. “She named you and told me. Just before I left you, for what I thought would be forever.”
“And now you’re back… why exactly?”
He looks at me intently—deep, dark reddish eyes seeming to look right through my flesh and bone.
“Because your blood called to me… You’re a Malabranche, Chad. It seems you don’t fully realize what that means yet.”
“Of course not. My mother barely spoke a word about you, let alone about… this.”
“Then I’d say it’s time you learned.” His gaze pins me. “You’re still in an uncontrolled stage. And an uncontrolled demon is as dangerous to himself as he is to everyone around him.”
“Why would you even care about those around me?” I ask. “Don’t you belong in literal hell?”
Growing up, when trying to cope with my demon heritage, I read as many books about demonology as I could get my hands on, by both magical and non-magical authors.
Most of the texts were too vague on the details to be helpful for my specific situation, filled with superstition and half-translated warnings, or scribbled by monks who’d probably never seen a demon in their lives.
But some contained information interesting enough for me to remember over the years.
Books like the Codex Infernalis, The Quiet Work of Devils, and an old Latin volume Rothmere kept locked in his private study—De Natura Daemonum. That one was less dramatic and far more unsettling.
They all agreed on a few things.
True demons are destructive and chaotic by nature.
Violence feeds them—not just bloodshed, but cruelty, deception, the small and terrible acts that rot the world from the inside out.
According to the Codex Infernalis, when the end of days finally arrives, it won’t be caused by any beast other than demons.
Every murder, every lie whispered in the dark, every broken oath strengthens them in some small way.
And when they lock on to someone… they lock on.
That was one point of eerie consensus, although the books I read never quite agreed on what demons ultimately want.
Getting myself under control wouldn’t be a bad thing. I desperately need it, in fact. Even now, I feel like I’m holding back my demonic nature by a thread—the effect of those incubi’s help, even though they said they didn’t finish what they came for.
I can’t ever see Brynn again like this.
The thought kills something inside me—the part of me that irrationally locked onto her and turned into this monster in the first place.
I remember the way she looked at me in that corridor. The uncertainty. The fear.
And the other things my mind refuses to let go of.
The way her hair had fallen loose over one shoulder. The quick rise and fall of her breath. The way she said my name, sharp and desperate.
Gods.
Even now the thought of her does something ugly inside my chest. That instinct I remember reading about in a few of the darker demonology texts.
They had names for it. The imprint. The taking.
When a demon’s hunger stops being… general.
Stops circling. And fixes on one person.
Especially, apparently, when that person does something that, in twisted demonic body language, reads like a claim. Brynn, you magnificent idiot.
Standing in that corridor with her mere feet away, I felt it settle in my bones. That terrible, absolute certainty. I know exactly what that thing would do once it had her. If I ever lose control near her—
No. Better she never sees me.
I’m still volatile. Unstable, as my… father says.
My father. My mind keeps hanging on the words. It feels weird even putting them together.
Behemoth’s mouth tilts slightly. “I come from something like hell. And you’re right—I don’t care about those around you.
Don’t give a fuck, in fact. At least not in this neighborhood.
But I do care about you. You’re my son.” He pauses, eyes glinting in the dark.
“Believe it or not, something like a heart still beats beneath this thick, ridged skin of ours.”
He smirks slightly, but I get the feeling it’s only meant for me. The pain in his eyes is still jagged, raw.
I swallow back the lump in my throat. Somehow he made it work with my mother. At least… apparently.
I don’t know what their relationship was really like. Only what I see in him now—which could easily be a twisted reflection of whatever my mother endured. The fact that she wanted him banished from our lives isn’t exactly comforting.
Maybe I don’t want to dig too deeply into that subject.
Or maybe, just maybe, there’s still hope for me to be around others without it becoming… a problem.
“How exactly do you suggest helping me?” I ask, shifting on my feet.
“I’m glad you asked.” He glances around the trees before looking back at me, his eyes glinting with something that makes the still-human part of me tense. “I’ve waited a long time for this moment.”