“Charming place,” he muttered as they moved past Neethul slave markets and arenas where demons fought to the death.
Harvester nodded enthusiastically, as if he’d been serious. “I know, right? There’s a pub a few blocks over that serves the best pomegranate wine in all of Sheoul. Costs a fortune, but it’s so smooth. You’d never know they use Soulshredder blood to make it.”
“Sounds lovely.”
“I hear sarcasm.” She tsked. “What is it humans say? That sarcasm is the lowest form of humor?”
He shrugged. “Only for people who don’t get it.”
She laughed, and he missed a step. He’d heard Harvester laugh before, but there had always been an evil undercurrent to it, a morbid amusement that came from things normal people wouldn’t find funny. But this was a pure, bubbly laugh of genuine delight, and it filled him with the strangest giddiness, like a feather was tickling his heart.
As if she felt it too, she slid him an almost shy glance, a lopsided smile curving her luscious mouth. He didn’t say anything, because by now he knew that calling attention to anything pleasant would turn her back into an acid-tongued fishwife. Idly, he wondered if Eidolon had anything for her particular brand of demonic bipolar disorder.
“We’re almost there,” she said, pulling him to the side of the road to avoid being trampled by an elephant-like creature being ridden by an Anubis.
Almost there. If everything went smoothly, then in a few more minutes the nightmare would be over. This part of the nightmare, anyway. They still had to face the archangels, and the things they could do to him made all the miseries of Sheoul seem like a day at an amusement park.
The Harrowgate hung between two gold columns at the top of hundreds of steps that led to a building Harvester said was Lucifer’s palace.
“Will we be able to walk right into it?”
“I doubt it,” she said. “Gethel will probably be heavily guarded.
At the top of the steps, demons milled about, but it was the armed Silas demons standing nearby that hot-loaded a massive dump of adrenaline into Reaver’s veins.
“Shit,” Harvester said, her voice so low he barely heard her. “Silas demons are coming up behind us.”
Reaver cast a covert glance back, and yep, they were being flanked. When he looked ahead, Silases were moving toward them, too.
They were blocked.
Instinctively, Reaver reached for his power, but there wasn’t so much as a spark. Harvester had been right. He couldn’t even kill a hellrat.
“I don’t suppose you have any tricks up your sleeve,” he asked.
“I have a lot. Unfortunately, they won’t work in this situation.” She shot a covert glance at the Harrowgate. “I say we forget Gethel for now and make a break for it.”
As much as he’d love to end Gethel and Lucifer right now, he had to admit that without their full range of powers, any attempt would be suicide. But that didn’t mean he was admitting defeat. No, right now the smart thing to do was to escape and live to fight another day.
“On three,” he said. “One.” The demons behind them began to jog. “Two.” The demons in front of them raised their swords. “Three.”
He and Harvester bolted toward the gate, scattering civilian demons like bowling pins. Harvester flung several bursts of lightning at the Silas warriors, turning them to ash. They were within five yards of the gate when a net fell on them, the threads shrink-wrapping them so tightly that their skin sliced open, their blood sizzling when it hit the mesh. Pain tore through Reaver as they crashed to the ground, kicking and fighting, but the netting only squeezed tighter, until they were back-to-back and unable to move more than fingers and toes.
A huge male Nightlash shoved through the throng of Silases, his clawed feet clacking on the stone. “Harvester and Reaver. Slag will be rewarded with such riches for this.” His sharp teeth dripped like someone had rung the dinner bell. “I am Slag.”
No shit. Demons were so damned stupid. Before he could say as much, a demon cut the net away. Reaver shoved to his feet and lunged for Slag, but his limbs where heavy, if he was trying to run through Jell-O.
“The net,” Harvester blurted as a Silas yanked her upright. “It’s like the whip that paralyzed you in the cavern.”
There weren’t enough curse words in enough languages for this situation, Reaver thought. But he made a noble attempt at saying them all when icy metal collars that matched the bracelets on Slag’s wrists were clamped around their necks. Tight.
“Obey, or…” The demon tapped one of the bracelets, and Harvester fell to the ground, screaming in raw, desperate anguish. Gasping for breath, she clawed frantically at the collar.
“Stop it,” he shouted. “Let her go!”
He dove at the Nightlash, but in half a heartbeat Reaver joined Harvester on the ground. Excruciating agony tore through him, as if the collar had sprung spikes that pierced so deeply he felt them in his gut.
It took forever for the pain to ease, and even then, he couldn’t function properly, his limbs flopping around and his head dangling on a neck that wouldn’t support it as they were dragged into the palace. Raised voices came from ahead… both familiar, and Reaver’s stomach bottomed out.
“This,” Harvester rasped, “is going to be bad.”
Reaver groaned. “You have a flair for understatement, you know that?”
Slag punched Reaver in the back of the head. “Shut up.”
Reaver and Harvester were jerked around and forced onto their knees as Gethel and Revenant approached. Gethel’s spun-gold hair fell in sparkly waves around her shoulders, but gone was the luminescence that used to surround her. Her eyes had turned as black as ink, and her once lush, shiny wings were shriveled, the feathers curled and frayed. Angels who stayed too long in Sheoul were prone to decay, and Gethel, carrying the spawn of evil, had gone rotten to the core.
Of course, her core had gone bad a long, long time ago.
Her one-shouldered emerald tunic clung tightly to her hugely rounded belly, where her hand rested protectively. Hard to believe someone with such a black heart could be protective of anything. And how had Lucifer grown so much, so fast? Maybe because he was to be born fully grown? If so, Gethel was going to be extremely miserable for another four months.
Good.
Fast as a snake and from out of nowhere, Gethel backhanded Harvester hard enough to knock her into Reaver.
“Bitch,” Reaver snarled. That earned him a blow from Revenant that made his ears ring.
“It’s good to see you both.” Gethel’s smile as she rubbed her belly made all the hairs on the back of Reaver’s neck stand up. “Extra special to have you here, Reaver.”
She grinned, flashing fangs, apparently a pregnant-with-the-spawn-of-Satan upgrade. Or downgrade, depending on how you looked at it.
“Special seeing you, too,” Reaver drawled. “I don’t think I had a chance to congratulate you the last time I saw you. I hope you suffer in agony for days before Lucifer bursts from your hideous body.”
Gethel blinked with exaggerated shock. “That’s a little harsh. As a father yourself, I’d think you’d be more sympathetic to the plight of a pregnant woman.”
Reaver shrugged. “A pregnant woman, yes. But a psychopathic pregnant troll… can’t get on board with that one.”
She went down on her haunches in front of him. “It doesn’t matter if you can get on board or not. It’s too late anyway.” She folded her hands over her huge, evil lump. “See, we’ve accelerated Lucifer’s growth. Instead of months, he’ll be born in weeks. Maybe days. The clock is ticking, Reaver, and you’re almost out of time.”
An icy blast of oh, shit blasted through him. “You crazy bitch.”
He got another whack upside the head. “Let me take them to the Dark Lord.” Revenant’s deep, eager voice resonated through the opulent marble auditorium.
“I’ve already sent word to him.” Gethel’s mouth turned up in a smile that sent a chill skittering up Reaver’s spine. “Satan will be here any minute.”
Twenty-Three
Her father was on his way.
Terror shrunk Harvester’s skin. They’d managed to stay one step ahead of Satan this entire time, and now, within sight of a Harrowgate, they were going to die.
And that was if they were lucky.
“Was it worth it?” Revenant seized Reaver by the throat and yanked him off the ground. “Was leaving your family vulnerable in order to rescue a traitorous female worth it?”
“She’s not a traitor to my side,” Reaver choked out. He sucked in a wheezing breath. “Wait… my family. Vulnerable?”
Harvester wondered the same thing. She’d call the Horsemen a lot of things, but vulnerable was not one of them.
Revenant, his annoyingly luxurious black mane obscuring his face, leaned in as if to tell Reaver a secret. “They’re recovering from an unfortunate accident. Very sad.” He didn’t sound very sad, but there was definitely an odd note in his voice. “It was so against the rules.”
“Accident?” Reaver sucked a gurgling breath. “Rules? What rules?”
“The ones you like to break.” Revenant heaved Reaver across the room.
Reaver hit a pillar and crumpled to the ground, bits of stone and dust showering him as he tried to push to his hands and knees. Revenant launched at him, and with a sick, twisted smile, Slag tapped his bracelet.
Reaver grunted, and for a brief moment, Harvester got off on his pain. Malevolence was a faint vibration shimmering along every nerve ending, feeding into her pleasure centers like an erotic drug. Daddy’s DNA was just the gift that kept on giving, wasn’t it?
You’re an angel. Your mother is an angel, and your father, bastard that he is now, was an angel when you were conceived. There’s more good in you than evil. Fight this, Harvester.
Reaver’s words in the cavern came back to her in a rush. Her mother… she’d died only three hundred years ago, an innocent casualty of a small uprising in Heaven, according to Raphael. She hadn’t known Harvester had fallen from grace on purpose, and it was one of Harvester’s greatest regrets that her mother hadn’t learned the truth before she died.
Fight this.
Reaver grunted again as Revenant pounded his fists into his face and body, and this time, Harvester took no pleasure in his suffering.
“Stop it!” she screamed. She scrambled across the floor toward them, her knees cracking painfully hard on the floor.
She dove for Revenant’s legs. She didn’t make it. An agonizing pain wrenched her neck as she was jerked to a sudden stop by her hair. Gethel, her fist wrapped around Harvester’s ponytail, hurled Harvester through the air.
She hit the wall in a crack of bones and stone, and everything went black.
When she came to, she and Reaver, his face badly bruised and bloodied, were propped against the pillar he’d crashed into, chains connecting their collars to hooks embedded in the stone. Both Gethel and Revenant were gone. The as**ole Nightlash, Slag, was sitting on a marble bench a few yards away, a satisfied smirk on his ugly face.
“Only reason you’re not both dead is that the Dark Lord wants you alive. You,” he said, jabbing his finger at Reaver, “are for his bed until you beg him for death.” His smile widened. “He shares with Slag.”
“Slag’s right,” Harvester agreed. “He does share. But I doubt he shares with demon morons who refer to themselves in the third person.” She shifted to cast a furtive look at the guard situation near the front entrance. There were three that she could see. “He also likes audiences.”
“That was very helpful,” Reaver said dryly.
She slid a glance at him, trying to get a bead on what he was thinking, but his expression was shuttered, his attention focused on their surroundings. The familiarity of his expression made her smile. She and Yenrieth—Reaver—had spent a lot of time hunting minor demons, and she knew the look he got when he had a plan.
A Khepri entered, its nasty insect head swiveling. It drew Slag aside, and the moment they were distracted, Harvester leaned closer to Reaver.
“So… what’s the plan? Tell me you have one.”
“I snagged a key to our collars off Revenant when he was tenderizing me,” he said, and she wanted to kiss him. “But lifting the key was too easy, which makes me think it’s a trap.”
Her heart sank. “It’s our only chance.”
“Agreed.” He rested his head against hers, and again the familiarity came roaring back. They’d propped each other up more times than she could count. “Let me know when Slag turns his back.”
“You got it.” She kept one eye on Slag and the other on the door her father would use when he arrived. The thought made her throat close. She’d do her best to kill both herself and Reaver if she had to. She couldn’t endure more torture, and she couldn’t bear the thought of Reaver going through it, either.
And wasn’t that a huge shift from just a day ago?
“He turned,” she murmured, and Reaver’s arm started moving, as if he was fidgeting. Or maybe digging a key out of his pocket as inconspicuously as possible. “Reaver? What do you think Revenant was talking about when he said the Horsemen met with an accident?”
Reaver went as stiff as the pillar they were bound to. “I don’t know, but if he was responsible, I’ll kill him.”
Harvester would help. “What are you going to tell them about me? Do you think they’ll get why I did some of the things I had to do?” Do you think they’ll forgive me?
Harvester nodded enthusiastically, as if he’d been serious. “I know, right? There’s a pub a few blocks over that serves the best pomegranate wine in all of Sheoul. Costs a fortune, but it’s so smooth. You’d never know they use Soulshredder blood to make it.”
“Sounds lovely.”
“I hear sarcasm.” She tsked. “What is it humans say? That sarcasm is the lowest form of humor?”
He shrugged. “Only for people who don’t get it.”
She laughed, and he missed a step. He’d heard Harvester laugh before, but there had always been an evil undercurrent to it, a morbid amusement that came from things normal people wouldn’t find funny. But this was a pure, bubbly laugh of genuine delight, and it filled him with the strangest giddiness, like a feather was tickling his heart.
As if she felt it too, she slid him an almost shy glance, a lopsided smile curving her luscious mouth. He didn’t say anything, because by now he knew that calling attention to anything pleasant would turn her back into an acid-tongued fishwife. Idly, he wondered if Eidolon had anything for her particular brand of demonic bipolar disorder.
“We’re almost there,” she said, pulling him to the side of the road to avoid being trampled by an elephant-like creature being ridden by an Anubis.
Almost there. If everything went smoothly, then in a few more minutes the nightmare would be over. This part of the nightmare, anyway. They still had to face the archangels, and the things they could do to him made all the miseries of Sheoul seem like a day at an amusement park.
The Harrowgate hung between two gold columns at the top of hundreds of steps that led to a building Harvester said was Lucifer’s palace.
“Will we be able to walk right into it?”
“I doubt it,” she said. “Gethel will probably be heavily guarded.
At the top of the steps, demons milled about, but it was the armed Silas demons standing nearby that hot-loaded a massive dump of adrenaline into Reaver’s veins.
“Shit,” Harvester said, her voice so low he barely heard her. “Silas demons are coming up behind us.”
Reaver cast a covert glance back, and yep, they were being flanked. When he looked ahead, Silases were moving toward them, too.
They were blocked.
Instinctively, Reaver reached for his power, but there wasn’t so much as a spark. Harvester had been right. He couldn’t even kill a hellrat.
“I don’t suppose you have any tricks up your sleeve,” he asked.
“I have a lot. Unfortunately, they won’t work in this situation.” She shot a covert glance at the Harrowgate. “I say we forget Gethel for now and make a break for it.”
As much as he’d love to end Gethel and Lucifer right now, he had to admit that without their full range of powers, any attempt would be suicide. But that didn’t mean he was admitting defeat. No, right now the smart thing to do was to escape and live to fight another day.
“On three,” he said. “One.” The demons behind them began to jog. “Two.” The demons in front of them raised their swords. “Three.”
He and Harvester bolted toward the gate, scattering civilian demons like bowling pins. Harvester flung several bursts of lightning at the Silas warriors, turning them to ash. They were within five yards of the gate when a net fell on them, the threads shrink-wrapping them so tightly that their skin sliced open, their blood sizzling when it hit the mesh. Pain tore through Reaver as they crashed to the ground, kicking and fighting, but the netting only squeezed tighter, until they were back-to-back and unable to move more than fingers and toes.
A huge male Nightlash shoved through the throng of Silases, his clawed feet clacking on the stone. “Harvester and Reaver. Slag will be rewarded with such riches for this.” His sharp teeth dripped like someone had rung the dinner bell. “I am Slag.”
No shit. Demons were so damned stupid. Before he could say as much, a demon cut the net away. Reaver shoved to his feet and lunged for Slag, but his limbs where heavy, if he was trying to run through Jell-O.
“The net,” Harvester blurted as a Silas yanked her upright. “It’s like the whip that paralyzed you in the cavern.”
There weren’t enough curse words in enough languages for this situation, Reaver thought. But he made a noble attempt at saying them all when icy metal collars that matched the bracelets on Slag’s wrists were clamped around their necks. Tight.
“Obey, or…” The demon tapped one of the bracelets, and Harvester fell to the ground, screaming in raw, desperate anguish. Gasping for breath, she clawed frantically at the collar.
“Stop it,” he shouted. “Let her go!”
He dove at the Nightlash, but in half a heartbeat Reaver joined Harvester on the ground. Excruciating agony tore through him, as if the collar had sprung spikes that pierced so deeply he felt them in his gut.
It took forever for the pain to ease, and even then, he couldn’t function properly, his limbs flopping around and his head dangling on a neck that wouldn’t support it as they were dragged into the palace. Raised voices came from ahead… both familiar, and Reaver’s stomach bottomed out.
“This,” Harvester rasped, “is going to be bad.”
Reaver groaned. “You have a flair for understatement, you know that?”
Slag punched Reaver in the back of the head. “Shut up.”
Reaver and Harvester were jerked around and forced onto their knees as Gethel and Revenant approached. Gethel’s spun-gold hair fell in sparkly waves around her shoulders, but gone was the luminescence that used to surround her. Her eyes had turned as black as ink, and her once lush, shiny wings were shriveled, the feathers curled and frayed. Angels who stayed too long in Sheoul were prone to decay, and Gethel, carrying the spawn of evil, had gone rotten to the core.
Of course, her core had gone bad a long, long time ago.
Her one-shouldered emerald tunic clung tightly to her hugely rounded belly, where her hand rested protectively. Hard to believe someone with such a black heart could be protective of anything. And how had Lucifer grown so much, so fast? Maybe because he was to be born fully grown? If so, Gethel was going to be extremely miserable for another four months.
Good.
Fast as a snake and from out of nowhere, Gethel backhanded Harvester hard enough to knock her into Reaver.
“Bitch,” Reaver snarled. That earned him a blow from Revenant that made his ears ring.
“It’s good to see you both.” Gethel’s smile as she rubbed her belly made all the hairs on the back of Reaver’s neck stand up. “Extra special to have you here, Reaver.”
She grinned, flashing fangs, apparently a pregnant-with-the-spawn-of-Satan upgrade. Or downgrade, depending on how you looked at it.
“Special seeing you, too,” Reaver drawled. “I don’t think I had a chance to congratulate you the last time I saw you. I hope you suffer in agony for days before Lucifer bursts from your hideous body.”
Gethel blinked with exaggerated shock. “That’s a little harsh. As a father yourself, I’d think you’d be more sympathetic to the plight of a pregnant woman.”
Reaver shrugged. “A pregnant woman, yes. But a psychopathic pregnant troll… can’t get on board with that one.”
She went down on her haunches in front of him. “It doesn’t matter if you can get on board or not. It’s too late anyway.” She folded her hands over her huge, evil lump. “See, we’ve accelerated Lucifer’s growth. Instead of months, he’ll be born in weeks. Maybe days. The clock is ticking, Reaver, and you’re almost out of time.”
An icy blast of oh, shit blasted through him. “You crazy bitch.”
He got another whack upside the head. “Let me take them to the Dark Lord.” Revenant’s deep, eager voice resonated through the opulent marble auditorium.
“I’ve already sent word to him.” Gethel’s mouth turned up in a smile that sent a chill skittering up Reaver’s spine. “Satan will be here any minute.”
Twenty-Three
Her father was on his way.
Terror shrunk Harvester’s skin. They’d managed to stay one step ahead of Satan this entire time, and now, within sight of a Harrowgate, they were going to die.
And that was if they were lucky.
“Was it worth it?” Revenant seized Reaver by the throat and yanked him off the ground. “Was leaving your family vulnerable in order to rescue a traitorous female worth it?”
“She’s not a traitor to my side,” Reaver choked out. He sucked in a wheezing breath. “Wait… my family. Vulnerable?”
Harvester wondered the same thing. She’d call the Horsemen a lot of things, but vulnerable was not one of them.
Revenant, his annoyingly luxurious black mane obscuring his face, leaned in as if to tell Reaver a secret. “They’re recovering from an unfortunate accident. Very sad.” He didn’t sound very sad, but there was definitely an odd note in his voice. “It was so against the rules.”
“Accident?” Reaver sucked a gurgling breath. “Rules? What rules?”
“The ones you like to break.” Revenant heaved Reaver across the room.
Reaver hit a pillar and crumpled to the ground, bits of stone and dust showering him as he tried to push to his hands and knees. Revenant launched at him, and with a sick, twisted smile, Slag tapped his bracelet.
Reaver grunted, and for a brief moment, Harvester got off on his pain. Malevolence was a faint vibration shimmering along every nerve ending, feeding into her pleasure centers like an erotic drug. Daddy’s DNA was just the gift that kept on giving, wasn’t it?
You’re an angel. Your mother is an angel, and your father, bastard that he is now, was an angel when you were conceived. There’s more good in you than evil. Fight this, Harvester.
Reaver’s words in the cavern came back to her in a rush. Her mother… she’d died only three hundred years ago, an innocent casualty of a small uprising in Heaven, according to Raphael. She hadn’t known Harvester had fallen from grace on purpose, and it was one of Harvester’s greatest regrets that her mother hadn’t learned the truth before she died.
Fight this.
Reaver grunted again as Revenant pounded his fists into his face and body, and this time, Harvester took no pleasure in his suffering.
“Stop it!” she screamed. She scrambled across the floor toward them, her knees cracking painfully hard on the floor.
She dove for Revenant’s legs. She didn’t make it. An agonizing pain wrenched her neck as she was jerked to a sudden stop by her hair. Gethel, her fist wrapped around Harvester’s ponytail, hurled Harvester through the air.
She hit the wall in a crack of bones and stone, and everything went black.
When she came to, she and Reaver, his face badly bruised and bloodied, were propped against the pillar he’d crashed into, chains connecting their collars to hooks embedded in the stone. Both Gethel and Revenant were gone. The as**ole Nightlash, Slag, was sitting on a marble bench a few yards away, a satisfied smirk on his ugly face.
“Only reason you’re not both dead is that the Dark Lord wants you alive. You,” he said, jabbing his finger at Reaver, “are for his bed until you beg him for death.” His smile widened. “He shares with Slag.”
“Slag’s right,” Harvester agreed. “He does share. But I doubt he shares with demon morons who refer to themselves in the third person.” She shifted to cast a furtive look at the guard situation near the front entrance. There were three that she could see. “He also likes audiences.”
“That was very helpful,” Reaver said dryly.
She slid a glance at him, trying to get a bead on what he was thinking, but his expression was shuttered, his attention focused on their surroundings. The familiarity of his expression made her smile. She and Yenrieth—Reaver—had spent a lot of time hunting minor demons, and she knew the look he got when he had a plan.
A Khepri entered, its nasty insect head swiveling. It drew Slag aside, and the moment they were distracted, Harvester leaned closer to Reaver.
“So… what’s the plan? Tell me you have one.”
“I snagged a key to our collars off Revenant when he was tenderizing me,” he said, and she wanted to kiss him. “But lifting the key was too easy, which makes me think it’s a trap.”
Her heart sank. “It’s our only chance.”
“Agreed.” He rested his head against hers, and again the familiarity came roaring back. They’d propped each other up more times than she could count. “Let me know when Slag turns his back.”
“You got it.” She kept one eye on Slag and the other on the door her father would use when he arrived. The thought made her throat close. She’d do her best to kill both herself and Reaver if she had to. She couldn’t endure more torture, and she couldn’t bear the thought of Reaver going through it, either.
And wasn’t that a huge shift from just a day ago?
“He turned,” she murmured, and Reaver’s arm started moving, as if he was fidgeting. Or maybe digging a key out of his pocket as inconspicuously as possible. “Reaver? What do you think Revenant was talking about when he said the Horsemen met with an accident?”
Reaver went as stiff as the pillar they were bound to. “I don’t know, but if he was responsible, I’ll kill him.”
Harvester would help. “What are you going to tell them about me? Do you think they’ll get why I did some of the things I had to do?” Do you think they’ll forgive me?
