by Jenny McKane
She’d seen him, yes, but she felt more of his absence in that moment than in the months she had slept in his bed and smelled him on his pillows.
For the moment, Gideon was well and truly lost to her and she had no choice but to pick up the pieces of her shattered heart and drive on.
Drive on, she told herself.
*****
The night passed slowly and once the shrieking of the night birds started, Sunny was at the table next to her window patiently watching, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever was making the noise.
“They’re called cloudbirds,” a small voice said from behind her and Sunny jumped. Spinning around she let out a cry as she saw Plaxo standing there. Her dream demon had returned.
She let out a cry and fell to her knees as the small demon ran to give her a rough hug with his little stone arms.
“I apologize for my delay, Lady Hunter,” he said, sweeping low once he was free of her arms. “I had a few issues keeping me from getting to you.”
He looked weary. More and more, each time she saw Plaxo, he looked tired and like he hadn’t slept in weeks. As a dream demon, he required less, but something was eating at the small demon’s vitality.
“I am so glad to see you,” Sunny said, standing. “Things here are crazy. Worse than I ever imagined. I’m not sure how long I can hold out here.”
Plaxo settled onto the floor at the foot of her bed and encouraged Sunny to tell him everything that had happened since she arrived in the demon realm, starting with an apology for not being at the portal when she arrived.
“My errand was not done yet, and I regret I wasn’t here to accompany you into this horrible place,” he said before Sunny caught him up on everything that had happened so far.
When she was done giving Plaxo every detail she could remember, he was silent as he absorbed it all. With a long sigh, he met her eyes. He looked like he had so much to tell her and didn’t know where to start.
“Your thoughts about the tree are correct,” he finally said. “It’s at the source of Azrael’s power and plans. Plaxo has felt it here, also. Lady Hunter must be careful with the tree.”
She nodded, agreeing.
“There are rumors in nearby villages that more people will be arriving soon,” Plaxo continued. “More parties. More revelers. More of everything.”
Sunny considered it. It made sense, actually. Azrael was building up to something and bringing more people to his chaos and his power was probably a move to feed it more.
“He looked ill, Plaxo,” Sunny blurted out, her mind back to Gideon. “He looked horrible.”
Plaxo was silent. His eyes searching her face, a knowing look in them.
“He’s not well, Lady Hunter,” he said with a bit of finality. Sunny had known the fact but hadn’t quite been ready to face it. “But Plaxo will see what is happening as best he can and we will find answers together somehow. Have faith, Lady Hunter.”
She promised that she would, but Sunny wasn’t quite certain where she was going to scrounge up enough faith to keep playing the charade without getting closer to rescuing Gideon. She wasn’t sure which way was up and she’d only been in Hell for three days now.
How was she going to hold up for another few weeks? Hell, how would she last another 24 hours?
Chapter Eighteen
Plaxo kept true to his word and used his ability to bend reality and perception to spy through Azrael’s keep. More than anything, she wanted Plaxo’s ability to disappear and observe. She felt so exposed and on display that her skin practically crawled each time she felt another set of demon eyes on her.
The demons were warped and twisted in the shadow realm--some beyond repair. While many of them would work themselves into a lather at a dinner party at night, they would seem somewhat reset and back to normal the next day as they mingled in the foyer around the monstrosity of the tree in the center of the building.
She watched firsthand as it happened at yet another dinner party. A group of tumblers took up the center of the room, as the tables had been arranged in a U shape that created a performance space in the middle of all the demons assembled.
The troupe was a collection of fire-bending imps, the likes of which Sunny had never seen before. They were agile, acrobatic, and daring. The tricks they performed captured the attention of all gathered, none of whom paid attention to just how much of the silver champagne they were drinking. Two courses of the over-ambitious dinner were down and by then, plenty of the demons were tipsy, loud, and getting obnoxious.
It was as though the imps sensed the timing was right, or perhaps they received some sort of signal from Azrael, and they began a bloody version of sparring.
Their moves were choreographed, but they used talons in their fighting and soon blood was spilling on the smooth marble floor. The blood was all it took for the crowd to amp up again and there were fights and shoving matches starting all around the dining room. It was a sort of demon-inspired cockfighting, with the crowd growing louder about which imp they wanted to win and which they wanted to see maimed.
For their parts, the imps seemed to be enjoying the chance to inflict pain on one another and their teeth gnashing and talon scratching grew more serious with each minute that passed.
As the violence grew, Sunny glanced over at Azrael’s table. His sons, two of them anyway, were locked deep in discussion while their father was watching the violence bubbling up among his guests with an air of grim satisfaction.
A few seats down from Sunny, a female demon with walrus-like tusks was embroiled in an argument with a gelatinous heap of a demon that looked like a pile of Jell-O. It made a glorping sort of sound as it (Sunny assumed) yelled at the female, and when a speck of its goo hit the female in the face, she attacked. Her tusks were embedded in the thing’s neck (-ish area? It was hard to distinguish a neck, after all) and she shook her head like a dog on a bone. It didn’t take long for the goo demon to disintegrate in a messy splatter all over its chair and the table it was sitting at.
Sunny could hardly believe her eyes, and when the tusk demon grabbed another flute of silver champagne and downed it, she remembered that she was being watched and pretended to take another sip of hers. Again, the liquid burned her lips and she quickly wiped away at the remnants with a napkin while she glanced over at Azrael to see if he’d seen one of his guests turned into a pile of gel on the floor.
Azrael wasn’t paying attention to the fight that had just transpired, but his son Vitaly was paying attention--to Sunny.
The second her eyes met his and lingered long enough to verify that he was actually looking at her, she realized her mistake. His eyebrow raised and his dark, depthless eyes narrowed in her direction, like a hunter zeroing in on its prey. Sunny felt the atmosphere around her shift and the room got too small and too hot very quickly.
She was panicking, looking for an out in any direction and finding none. The path to her right, the direction that Walrus Mouth had just killed Goo Man was rife with other groups fighting amongst themselves, despite the fact that the battered and bloodied troupe of imps had limped away from the stage now and there was no entertainment going on. The room didn’t need it any longer, as every other demon present was locked in some sort of violent frenzy being enacted against their neighbor. No, she couldn’t go that way. She was certain to get a chunk of her arm bitten off that way.
The only other way out was to walk behind Azrael’s table and without either Selah or an entire host of demons exiting the dining hall, there was no way that Sunny could pull it off without bringing attention to herself. She already felt plenty conspicuous being totally against the demon drink everybody was hopped up on.
Pushing back in her chair, she froze when her movement was halted by a heavy hand against the back. She pushed again in vain and was suddenly afraid of turning to see who was there. Somewhere deep within her, she knew. She knew it was Vitaly right behind her, could smell the scent of acrid smoke in the air, a smell that belonged solely to him.
S
unny had a role to play, she reminded herself as she closed her eyes for luck and forced herself to reach forward, grip the silver champagne and take another pretend sip, this time swallowing extra loud in hopes that Vitaly was buying it.
He seemed to be, because as she turned and looked at him over her left shoulder, she saw that his dark gaze wasn’t even near her mouth, it was riveted to her cleavage. Of course.
“Lady Layla of the North,” he practically purred in her ear.
Vitaly was a handsome demon, as far as spawn of archdemons go, but his tone wasn’t complimentary. It was awful date rape-y and made Sunny want to melt into her chair and disappear.
“Lord Vitaly,” she said, inclining her head, as the prince was practically on top of her and making it impossible for her to stand up just to bow down low again. She hated curtseying, anyway. She was garbage at it.
“Are you not enjoying the festivities?” He spread his hand out wide, indicating the nonsense unfolding.
She gave a casual shrug.
“The imps left five minutes ago,” she said, purposefully not looking at the fighting demons all around her. Her eyes fell on the empty floor space where the imps had earlier performed. “Are the festivities not over now?”
He shot her a quizzical look before speaking.
“What a very human thing for you to say,” he murmured and she felt the bottom of her stomach nearly drop to the floor.
Shit. She’d blown her cover, she knew it.
Her mouth opened and closed like some speechless, dying fish and just when she thought (no, wished) she would turn into a pile of dust on that very spot, Vitaly chuckled.
“You have spent far too long in the realm of those performing monkeys, my lady,” he said, his grin wide. He had pointed teeth, also. They were gruesome and terrifying and very well hidden in that handsome face because Sunny had not noticed them yet. She shuddered. “You’ve almost forgotten how to have a good time.”
A very demon thing of him to say to her and Sunny knew she needed to play the role well.
“Oh,” she practically purred, no matter how badly she wanted to retch on the carpet in front of her. “I haven’t forgotten how to have a good time, my lord.”
The demon prince’s eyes flashed with a hunger in them that didn’t bode well for Sunny.
“Prove it,” he whispered to her, his teeth gleaming in the candlelight.
Sunny was struggling for a response when Azrael, of all people, came to her rescue. He called to his son from where he sat.
“Vitaly, return to your seat,” his father commanded. “Your flirting will get our young guest killed at this rate. Your unhappy wives look ready to murder the poor girl on the spot.”
She glanced to the right of Azrael, at a table a few spaces away, and sure enough there sat three angry, deadly looking demon spouses who looked like they were mad enough at the situation of being jointly married to a prince--they sure as hell didn’t look open to watching him flirt with a newcomer.
Duly chastised, Vitaly straightened where he stood, but not before whispering in Sunny’s ear.
“We’ll continue this at a later time, Layla,” he said before disappearing. It was all she could do not to laugh in his face and utter a soft no freaking chance.
When he’d regained his own seat and shot her a conspiratorial wink, Sunny let out the breath she’d been holding and waited for the best possible moment to disappear from the hall and lock herself in her room. She carried her silver champagne with her as she stepped over a bloody paw, a ripped-off tail that was still twitching, and a pool of shimmering green blood that was pouring from the lifeless corpse of some amphibian-looking demon.
The fighting was dying down, but it wasn’t without a body count. In her trip from her chair to the exit, Sunny passed five dead demons alone, and there was an entire hall behind her. How many had fallen that night?
“Hell’s bells this place is going to kill me,” Sunny whispered as she moved around the tree toward the hallway that held the staircase that would lead her directly to the second-floor hallway that held her room. As she passed, she poured the contents against a patch of exposed root of the demon tree and watched in morbid satisfaction as the root actually flinched.
“Take that, beast,” she taunted the tree, not feeling the least bit foolish for talking trash to a rather large piece of vegetation.
The math was simple--if Azrael didn’t drink the silver stuff, if his family didn’t drink it, and if his house tree demon thing actually screamed in pain when it touched its root system, there was something seriously amiss with what the guests were drinking.
Dashing up the steps, she rushed to her room without checking if Selah was back yet. The door was still closed, but she hadn’t seen the princess at dinner. Or anywhere all day for that matter. It was odd.
When she pushed the latch on her door across so that the bolt slid home, she frowned at the door. What was the point of such a simple locking mechanism? A demon could splinter the wooden door in a half a second if it wanted to. Was it some sort of ‘let’s find the human decoy’ test? Just in case, she slid the bolt back to its original place and frowned.
When she turned, she saw that Plaxo was seated at the foot of her bed again. He didn’t look happy.
“It’s not good, Lady Hunter,” he said sadly. “Nothing here is good, but you’re really not going to like the news that Plaxo has.”
Sunny carefully got down into a kneeling position a few feet from Plaxo and took a long, slow breath.
“What is it?”
“Poison,” he said. “They are poisoning Half-Breed to see just what his limits are.”
She winced at the words, not meaning to.
“Plaxo also thinks they are doing experiments on him,” Plaxo continued.
Sunny stopped short. “For what?”
Plaxo looked at his feet and curled them under his body.
“Plaxo does not know, but it won’t be good,” he said. “Whatever it is.”
Chapter Nineteen
Sunny went another two days without seeing Selah. She passed her in the afternoon two days after her introduction to her brother Vitaly, but Selah was very closed lipped about what was happening.
“More meetings with my father,” the princess said vaguely.
“Of course,” Sunny replied blandly.
She knew something was going on, and she also knew that Selah would not tell her a thing if she did not have to. This was just the way things were, and it was part of the warning that Eli and Gabriel had given her. Sunny was suddenly incredibly grateful for Plaxo, as she would have been truly on her own in Hell without him. She warily eyed Selah as the princess pushed into her bedroom and slammed the door behind her. Nesta was in the sitting room pretending to clean, and hearing everything that transpired between the two. She also managed to throw in a dirty look at Sunny.
Feeling a little froggier than usual, Sunny shot her a similar look and even stuck her tongue out at the older demon. Nesta huffed and turned around pretending to dust around the window sill.
After eating lunch by herself, Sunny could not stand the four walls that she had been stuck inside any longer. Putting on sensible clothing that did not overly expose any of her body parts, now a fear after her run-in with Vitaly, Sunny set out to casually poke around Azrael’s keep.
She decided to start small, and not venture to a place that could get her beheaded immediately upon discovery--namely the top and bottom floors of this place. She figured the second floor was a good enough place to test out her ninja abilities and see how far she could venture without being discovered.
The second floor reminded her of an old, fancy hotel. Everything was jacquard and gold leaf--screaming expensive but not necessarily good taste. She wondered if the decor was Azrael’s doing or if he inherited the place looking like this.
The hallway that she and Selah were located in held six more doors that Sunny had not seen used in her week at the keep so far. Nobody was seen going in or out
of them, so she assumed that they were empty to afford the princess a little privacy.
There was a whole lot of nothing in their own hallway, so Sunny carefully picked her way around the open space in the center of the floor that allowed the terrifying tree to flow through. Despite the tree not having eyes, she swore it was watching her. Hell, the branches even seemed to stretch toward her as she stayed pressed close to the wall as she moved through the open breezeway toward another hallway opposite her own.
She couldn’t get away from the tree fast enough, and her imagination had Sunny wondering if the damn tree knew she was dumping her silver poison on its roots. It couldn’t possibly know, could it?
In the next hallway, Sunny slowed her jog to a more dignified walk and once again pretended she was right where she belonged, just in case any demon was to pop out of their rooms and wonder what the hell she was doing.
There were pictures along these walls and she guessed Azrael made this wing look a little more put together because guests were staying here. To be sure, the carpeting was newer, the lights were brighter, and everything about this hallway seemed just a step up from her own. Sunny marveled at what was going on behind the curtain here in Azrael-land. Guests were being poisoned and driven mad in tiny intervals, all the while force fed the illusion that this place was the height of sophistication and fashion. It was all a sham and they were all being played by Azrael.
But nobody seemed to care.
That was the crazy part. When the fog cleared, when the silver poison hangover settled in, the demons still looked at Azrael in awe, as though it was their great pleasure to be there.
It was sick.
But Sunny had already come to that conclusion and she needed to move on. Surely, she didn’t come to Hell thinking Azrael was going to run gardening meetings and serve his guests tea and crumpets at four in the afternoon. No, she expected a monster and that was exactly what she was dealing with.
The end of the second, fancier hallway held a set of stairs that went up or down. Sunny stopped a moment. She was feeling brave, that was true, but she wasn’t feeling crazy or desperate enough quite yet to push her luck and go up a floor to Azrael’s rooms. Nope. Not today.