The Vengeance Demons Series: Books 0-3 (The Vengeance Demons Series Boxset)

by Louisa Lo

  Gregory followed me out, winking at me. “A freebie off the books. I must be getting soft.”

  Chapter Two

  Scenic Painting

  GUESSING WHERE SERAFINA WAS located wasn’t hard at all. But the getting there part was a pain.

  Thanks to Grandma Aequitas, Serafina had failed her first year at Demon U—for her own good. Being kidnapped at birth by the changelings, she had barely returned to the vengeance plane before being enrolled in school by her powerful family. She had an entire new way of life to adjust to, and the result of rushing the process was disastrous. Her grades were terrible; she was constantly bullied by everyone. Anyone who thought bullying ended after high school had never experienced Demon U, with its small classroom size and deep-rooted elitist culture. Serafina and I were in the same year together, so I’d seen her hardship firsthand.

  Grandma eventually stepped in and put her on a one-year hiatus. From what I understood, her family backed off, too, allowing her some much needed time to immerse herself in the vengeance culture, however begrudgingly.

  Serafina’s family home was on the vengeance plane. Though vengeance demons were responsible for addressing the injustices for all the planes in the Cosmic Balance, the human one was considered a special case. That was due to the mortal’s lack of magic, and the fact that the vengeance and human planes were parallel universes.

  There were thousands of planes in the Cosmic Balance. Well, technically there was an infinite number of them out there, but those who had life intelligent enough to be active participants were in the thousands, with the ones holding the most powers in the double digits. Some planes were similar to one another, though not exactly identical, and some were drastically different. The difficulties in teleporting through the barriers between planes varied, and depended on the traveler’s skill level.

  The ease of cross-dimensional traveling and the low difficulty in handling the targets made the human plane the perfect practice grounds for vengeance trainees such as myself. That was why I was assigned to work on Ms. Hogan.

  Yet there was a different reason why human movies and smartphones made their way into many supernaturals’ households, and became a counter-culture of sorts throughout the Cosmic Balance. Granted, the wide availability of the mortals’ handiwork was a factor, but that was not all.

  Many, including myself, actually found the humans fascinating. In the relatively short time since progressing from near savages, humans had come up with quite a lot of technologies that were almost indistinguishable from magic. Of course, Hades forbid if the snobbish vengeance demons would ever openly consider the mortals their equals, let alone living among them. Nope, especially not Serafina’s family, with an ancestry illustrious enough to fill a medical textbook.

  Due to the supposed urgent nature of the visit, I didn’t bother to save magic by finding pre-existing portals to the vengeance plane. So it took me mere seconds to teleport to the outer boundary of Serafina’s home. Like all vengeance families, big or small, a protection spell was placed around the perimeter of the twenty-bedroom Advocatus family estate. The Bridle Path neighborhood of Toronto, with large mansions on two to four acre lots, was no less affluent than its counterpart on the human side. The teleporting part was easy, but the walk to get to the actual front door of the property took me almost twenty minutes.

  The contemptuous butler told me that Serafina was out back. He didn’t, however, offer to let me walk through the mansion, though it would’ve saved me much time and energy. Instead, he made it very clear my path was to go around it. Dear old Andre and I had interacted with each other whenever I was here to visit my friend, and the experience had not endeared us to each other. He could smell the trickster in me, and I could smell the classist asshole in him. Funny how some people could really get behind a system that would put them in a servant’s rank, if it meant there were others considered even lower ranking than them.

  I turned to start the long trek around the mansion when a disapproving voice boomed behind Andre, “What exactly are you doing here, Miss Megan Aequitas?”

  In the past months since I’d gotten closer to Serafina, I’d always been lucky enough to visit her when no one else in her family was home. But just the way my day was going, High Judge Edbert Llewellyn Advocatus was there. Serafina’s uncle played a pretty heavy hand in my suspension during the last work term, and he was also a powerful member of the Council. He wasn’t someone I could afford to offend.

  But that didn’t mean I was happy to see him.

  “High Judge Advocatus.” I bowed to him in accordance to vengeance etiquette. “I’m here to see Serafina.”

  “And what’s the purpose of this visit?”

  “With all due respect, that’s between Serafina and me.” Then I added, “Your Honor.”

  Buzz off, jerk. If Gregory is telling the truth, then I’m on a timeline here.

  “I fail to see the benefits of my niece hanging out with the likes of you.” The high judge huffed. “That defeats the entire purpose of the hiatus.”

  I guess when they gave their consent for Serafina to take the hiatus, they were hoping that she would use this free time to job shadow a few of her many accomplished relatives and in doing so, realize her incredible fortune in being born into such a privileged family. There was the high judge’s court she could sit in, and one of her twin aunts was the chief liaison with the four major witches’ unions, while the other was an arch vengeance demon just like my dad.

  To the family’s disappointment, Serafina simply chose to stay home. Reading, doing art, and contemplating the changes in her life.

  I thought it was the healthiest thing she could’ve done.

  With Serafina’s uncle looking at me like I was a bug and costing me precious time I didn’t have, I knew I had to get out of the high judge’s presence fast. Without looking like I was trying to.

  “Maybe seeing my difficulties being accepted into the vengeance society will, er, reiterate to her the importance of having a proper place in it?” I offered helpfully, my eyes 100 percent sarcasm-free.

  Take that, creepy dude.

  High Judge Advocatus studied me for a long moment but couldn’t call me out on my bullshit when it was done with just enough politeness and pretend sincerity. “Perhaps,” he murmured.

  That was all the cue I needed to take off.

  I found Serafina by a small clearing facing a frozen pond on the edge of the Advocatus family estate. The waning rays from twilight reflected on the iced-over body of water, dried twigs of pussy willows poked out from the snow covering the surrounding marsh. I pulled the sleeves of my jacket farther down. I had no idea why anybody would want to be outside when they didn’t have to.

  Serafina stood by a propped up canvas on the clearing with an easel and paintbrush in hand, her eyebrows knitted in concentration as she added a careful stroke on what looked to be a landscape painting, yet she wasn’t painting the wintery nature scene before her at all.

  Rectangular midnight blue strips, depicting skyscrapers, filled the background with tiny yellow dots over them representing fluorescent lights. A bird of prey, glowing as if on fire, swooped down from above, heading straight for the roof of a building on the foreground. There was a person standing on the roof, and with a splash of flesh-colored paint, Serafina was in the middle of adding details to her face. The character’s body was clad in black. Skin tight.

  Classic vengeance demon outfit.

  “Hey,” I called out.

  Serafina jumped and dropped the paintbrush. It disappeared in the snow surrounding her.

  “Sorry.” I hurried over. “I thought you already knew I was here and were playing the cool-artist-being-in-the-zone thing.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. In the past months we’d hung out a lot, and I knew her enough to know she wasn’t the pretentious type. I figured she was probably too distracted to notice me, but I felt like I had to talk about something, anything more trivial before broaching on the real reason I was
there. After all, how do you tell someone that a mercenary you’d met from an old crisis wanted to drag the both of you into a new one?

  Serafina turned those soulful brown eyes on me. “You’re here about something.” Dammit, she was so quiet most of the time I always forgot how perceptive she was. Well, better get on with the explanation then. I swallowed and told her about my encounter with Gregory.

  “You have no idea what he’s talking about, right?” I asked her anxiously. “I mean, the guy is a jerk. A total jerk. In fact, forget the whole thing. It’s probably some sort of false lead he cooked up anyway.”

  “I know exactly who he’s talking about. Though I never expected to hear that name ever again,” she whispered in a shaky voice, and the rest of her started trembling, too. She reached out to steady herself, suddenly gripping my arm like an anaconda. Ouch, I didn’t even know her grip could be that firm. “This Gregory, he said Eldon is in trouble?”

  “Yeah, that’s what he said.” I eyed her curiously, wondering at her referring to this Crown Prince Eldon on a first name basis. Just who the heck was he? And what was he to her? “What’s this all about?”

  I was already speaking to her back. She dragged me toward the Advocatus mansion. When I started following her lead, she broke into a dead run. It was a ten-minute trek crossing half the estate, but we did it in under two. Once inside, Serafina raced up the grand staircase, perfectly suited to Gone with the Wind, and took me to an enormous bedroom in a private wing. Before I could even admire the fine cream silk décor—or catch my breath, for that matter—she drew the heavy curtains, effectively cutting off the last ray of sunlight and plunging the entire room into darkness.

  “Whoa. These are some top quality black out curtains; I can’t even see my fingers. Can you wait until I get the light?”

  “Don’t.” There was urgency to her voice. “I can’t make this work if there are lights around.”

  “Alright.” I gingerly felt my way around, using the flash mental map of the room in my head, making sure I didn’t bump into any sharp objects. I sat down on what felt like a shaggy armchair. It could be the back of a very patient—or very pissed off—hellhound for all I knew. Big families like Serafina’s were known to keep these creatures of the underworld as pets. The little buggers were adept at blending in—how else were they supposed to collect souls if they made their presence known a mile away?

  On the high vaulted ceiling, dozens of maps made of neon green lights exploded into my vision, overlapping one another. They reminded me a bit of the laser shows humans liked to put on.

  “What is this?” I asked, already forming a theory in my head. I remembered how handy Serafina’s tracking ability was when Esme, my half-sister, was kidnapped. An ability Serafina picked up from her changeling captors, and the maps seemed to be a physical manifestation of it.

  “Bird’s eye view of all the known planes. Hopefully Eldon is on here somewhere,” Serafina replied.

  “Hey, don’t you need an anchor to do the locating spell?”

  Last time, Serafina required something of Esme’s to properly identify her location. Luckily, Esme had donated some of her life force to charge me up before the kidnapping, and we used that as the anchor to find her. I had no idea who this Prince Eldon was to Serafina—though there was no doubt she knew him from the way she spoke of him—much less what she might have of his that could serve as an anchor.

  “I already have a magical baseline to go by.” Her voice sounded incredibly sad.

  He’s in trouble and she’s the only one who can locate him.

  Huh. I’d been friends with Serafina for months now; she never even mentioned an Eldon, prince or no prince.

  By the eerie glow of the juxtaposition maps, I could see Serafina standing in the middle of the bedroom, her hands waving as if conducting an orchestra. With each movement there were fewer maps on the ceiling, until only one remained. With a last wave, she brought the map down from the ceiling onto the space just above our heads. She magnified it and made it three dimensional, with bright lines indicating the X, Y, and Z axis.

  Large clusters of tall buildings. Narrow streets. Moving rectangular boxes representing what must be cars. It could be either the vengeance plane or the human plane.

  “Human plane,” Serafina said, as if reading my mind.

  “How could you tell?”

  She magnified even farther and pointed at the scattered dots in the alleyways. They weren’t moving like the dots on the main streets. “The homeless.”

  “Okay, but there are homeless on both planes.”

  “It’s spring break for the University of Vampiric Studies.”

  “Oh.”

  The vampire plane was on a different time rotation than us, so our mid-winter was their spring break, and nobody on the vengeance plane—homeless or otherwise—would be dumb enough to be caught outside when the streets were flooded with waves of raucous, fanged frat boys. Humans, on the other hand, either denied the existence of the supernatural or believed they were tormented romantic heroes. Hence the lack of self-preservation.

  Drunken college kids from any planes could be trouble. Those with fangs, especially.

  “Alright, so this Prince Eldon is on the human plane. You have any idea which city he’s in?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I can take us there.” Serafina’s voice was firm, her hand reaching for mine and I grasped it. Then she froze, and she said with great hesitation, “Actually, I can go on from here. I don’t want to trouble you.”

  “Don’t you dare. You’re my friend and I’m going. Who knows what might be there?”

  I was the one who brought Prince Eldon—whoever the heck he was—back into her life. I did it because of Gregory, though I was still unsure of his motive. That made me responsible, and no way was I going to let her go in alone.

  Chapter Three

  A Place to Hide

  WE TELEPORTED INTO THE downtown core of whatever city we were at, right by a garbage bin behind a convenience store. Based on the sign saying “Private Parking” in English, we were in, well, some English-speaking country and city, anyway.

  Great help there, Megan.

  Shut up.

  I wished I could bring Esme with me. A full-blooded vengeance demon with the sweetest heart and the mightiest ass-kicking ability would be a great asset in the face of danger, but she wasn’t back from a vacation with her birth mother yet.

  Her birthmother—my dad’s ex-wife—was a vengeance demon who specialized in unfaithful men. Thank Hades he never cheated on her, or I would’ve never been born; her reputation for male organ mutilation was legendary. With so many cheaters finding partners-in-crime on the Internet in the modern age, Esme’s mom would disappear for weeks and even months on end, immersing herself in the cyber world. She kept busy with everything from ensuring flirtatious emails were “accidentally” forwarded to spouses, to encouraging asthma attacks during over-stimulated online naughty chats.

  Esme had been really looking forward to spending quality time with her mom, and she’d been saving up for this vacation by working part-time for some undersecretary at the Council. I wasn’t going to spoil that. Serafina and I were on our own.

  “This way.” Serafina gestured me to follow her to the main street. The lights were brighter there, with more foot traffic. “I think he’s in the next alley.”

  I was expecting, I don’t know, maybe a fair-haired prince with a unicorn by his side or something. I’d never met a prince. Vengeance demons had done away with their monarchy a long time ago. Many of the old families had some traces of royal blood in them in one form or another, but now people measured success based on their position in the Concord Council, the governing body for all things vengeance, not some illusion of power through the randomness of birth.

  So I was curious, to say the least. I should’ve known that a dirty alleyway was hardly a suitable place for unicorns and rainbows.

  What we found instead was a figure slumped over by a puddle
of rusty water, with his back to us. His outfit might’ve been white at some point, but now it was covered in grime. His body was tall and slender; I could tell that even with him lying on the ground. I wouldn’t call the weird angles the limbs stuck out graceful, though.

  With a gasp, Serafina ran to the figure that must be Prince Eldon. She kneeled over him, her hands turning him over and gently pushing his grimy hair off his forehead. He opened his eyes and tried to focus them on her.

  “Fi-Finny?” he croaked.

  “Eldon, what happened?”

  “Deirdre…she jumped me. Took most of my power away and exiled me from Dualsing.” Prince Eldon moaned and slipped back into a semi-conscious state.

  Serafina looked up at me. “We have to get him out of here.”

  I had tons of questions, including where the heck was Dualsing and why had I never heard of it before? But I held them back for later.

  “Let’s go to the University hospital.” The University of Demonic Studies had a teaching hospital for magical healing and it was nearby. “I’m sure they’ll be able to help even if he’s from a species they’re not familiar with.”

  “No!” Serafina said. “We can’t go there. Do you have somewhere private we can take him? Somewhere vengeance demons generally won’t go?”

  ***

  There was one place regular vengeance demons would never be caught dead in—my parents’ house.

  The home of my father, a high-ranking arch vengeance demon, should have been a place everybody wanted to visit. By all rights, he should have lived in an estate home befitting of his station, with his underlings coming over for dinner parties and trying to suck up to the boss. But my dad married a trickster, which was unheard of and socially frowned upon.

  With a tremendous wealth of love, my parents accepted the children from each other’s previous relationships, and formed a mine, yours, and ours kind of family. I was the ours part of the equation, their only biological child together. Between the boss’s wife being a trickster, a household full of rambunctious children, and the household itself being established in a common folks neighborhood, it was scandalous enough to scare off even the most career-minded underlings.