by Larissa Ione
“There has to be a way.”
“There is.” Detharu sank back down as if his display of temper never happened. “Your head on a pike, displayed in the Guild hall.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t work for me.” Lore shoved his gloved hand through his hair, but that didn’t massage the tension out of his skull. “Cut me some slack, will ya? They were my brothers.”
Fortunately, Lore had failed to kill them. After the attempt and consequent revelations of blood ties, Lore had only stuck around his brothers long enough to get a little history of the Seminus breed and see what happened with Wraith’s female, and then he’d gotten out of the demon hospital as if it was burning down.
Hadn’t seen or spoken with his brothers since, though Eidolon’s constant text messages had been as irritating as claws on a chalkboard.
“Family?” Detharu leaned forward in his seat. “Then why did you agree to kill them?”
“I didn’t know they were my brothers at the time the job was offered.” No, that little secret had been as twisted as Roag.
The chair creaked as Detharu sat back and rubbed his pointed chin. “I have siblings. I killed two of them. Liked doing it.”
This wasn’t looking good. “No doubt they deserved it.” Yep, Lore could kiss ass with the best of them.
Detharu shrugged. For a long moment, the only sound in the room was the crackle of the fire and the occasional drip of Ramreel drool. Lore eyed the exit, hastily piecing together an escape plan. He could take out the demon closest to him, snag his machete, and then hope to God he could mow down the others before Detharu caught up to him. If he made it to the outer chamber, Detharu’s other slave-assassins would help him escape.
Not that he’d be free for long. The slave-bond, the hand imprint burned into the flesh above his heart, would eventually compel him to return here or face unimaginable suffering as the bond first seared his skin, and then worked its way to his muscles and organs. You either returned to the den, or you cooked to death. Slowly.
Finally, Detharu shook his head. “I won’t execute you for not killing your brothers.”
“Big of you,” Lore muttered.
A serrated growl rumbled in Deth’s skeletal chest. “What did you say?”
“I said thank you.” Lore scowled at the Ramreels. “You heard him. Beat it. No murder for you today.” The Ramreel minions acted more as guards than executioners, but they pretty much did whatever Deth wanted them to do, and the bloodier the task, the happier they were.
Detharu’s glowing orange eyes narrowed. “There is a price, of course.”
“Naturally.”
“I have a job for you.”
Which meant that despite the threats and posturing, Deth hadn’t intended to impale Lore’s head on a pointy stick at all. “What do I have to do?” Lore asked through gritted teeth. “Collect another debt? Deliver a bloody warning to someone? Want me to fetch a pizza? Because you know how I love playing delivery boy.”
He hated playing pizza minion.
“You can bring me an all-meat topped with a certain human’s head. I’m giving you your hundredth kill.”
Lore stopped breathing even as his pulse revved. He’d been waiting thirty years for this. After he completed his hundredth kill, Deth would no longer have any hold on him. He’d be a free man. But wait… something wasn’t right. Detharu had avoided giving him an assassin job for years, unwilling to hand out that last assignment that would free both Lore and his sister, Sin, forever.
Lore studied Deth’s impassive face, seeking, but not finding, any clues to what he was thinking. “What’s the catch?”
Deth’s bony fingers made irritating clicking noises as he tapped on the arm of his chair. “You violated the terms of our bargain by breaking the subcontract with Roag and not killing the Seminus brothers. I missed out on my share and look like a fool. Therefore, I’m amending our agreement.”
Fuck. He knew it. “And what are your new terms?” he ground out.
“In the past, you have been allowed to refuse assignments.”
“And I paid the price in blood.” A lot of blood.
“You will not refuse this one.”
Uh-oh. A chill skittered up Lore’s spine. Deth was expecting him to refuse, which meant the mark would be a child or pregnant woman or something. “And if I do?”
“If you refuse or don’t succeed, then I’ll have Sin’s head in place of yours for your failure to kill your brothers.”
A red curtain came down over his vision. Stay calm. Stay… calm. Didn’t work. The rage inside Lore screamed to the surface, completely missing the usual transition period, and he lunged at the demon. “You fuck!”
The sentries caught him, one on each arm. Instinct and anger merged, and without thinking, he charged up his gift. The Ramreel clutching Lore’s right biceps didn’t even have time to scream. He fell to the floor, eyes wider in death than they’d ever been in life.
Instantly, the other one wheeled away, drawing his machete, which he jabbed into Lore’s ribs.
Detharu came to his feet, and the next thing Lore knew, Deth’s steel-gauntleted fist was in his face. Lore’s head snapped back and pain exploded in his skull. Fury contorted Detharu’s expression, peeling his lips from his sharp, blackened teeth.
“That was stupid, Lore. Even after all this time, you have not learned to control your temper.”
It chafed to admit it, but Detharu was right on both counts. Lore’s rages had been a problem since he was twenty, when he’d gone through the weird transformation that had given him an arm covered with tattoos. But that was just for starters. He also gained the “gift” to kill everything he touched with the tattooed arm, the ability to resurrect the dead or “feel” how a person had died, and a rampant libido that had to be addressed several times daily lest he go into rages that didn’t end until he either killed or had sex—sex that ended in the death of his partner.
But being sexually sated wasn’t a guarantee against the rages. Pain and anger could still set him off no matter how many times or how recently he’d relieved himself.
Breathing deeply, he willed himself to come down before the rage took him to the point of no return or before he did something stupid again. The move he’d made against Detharu carried with it a penalty of death.
Thing was, Lore couldn’t have hurt Detharu anyway. The bond’s magic prevented violence against one’s master. Lore couldn’t so much as touch Detharu unless the demon wanted to be touched.
And thank God Deth had long ago decided Lore wasn’t allowed to touch. Few of Deth’s assassins were so lucky.
Lore clenched his teeth, determined to keep from smarting off, but refusing to apologize. Instead, he gritted out, “Who’s the target? Who is my hundredth kill?”
Lore had forgotten all about the male in the shadows, but now he shifted slightly, his black, waist-length hair seeming to absorb all the light in the room. It was as if the dude wore his shadow like a cloak. That was seriously fucked up.
A sinister smile split Deth’s face wide open. “The target,” he said, “is Kynan Morgan. The very human you brought back to life.”
The ground shifted beneath Lore’s feet. Oh, holy hell. Though Lore had saved Kynan’s life, he hated him and really wouldn’t mind putting him in the ground. But Jesus… if he killed the human, Lore would spend the rest of his sorry life looking over his shoulder. He’d have every Aegis Guardian on the planet aiming to gut him with a stang, which would be pleasant compared to what Gem and his brothers would do to him.
Deth leaned in close, so close Lore could feel the ugly demon’s heat on his face. “You have your assignment. You will kill Morgan—using your death touch—and retrieve his amulet within ninety-six hours. And if you refuse or fail, Sin will die.”
Sin, whose favorite saying was now becoming ironic reality.
No good deed shall go unpunished.
No fucking shit.
By sparing his brothers, Lore might have condemned his sister
to death.
* * *
Rariel couldn’t contain a smile as he watched Lore exit Detharu’s chamber. He’d waited so long to put his plan into motion, and now that the ball was rolling, nothing could stop it.
“Why did you specifically request Lore for this job?” Detharu stood at the hearth’s edge, his normally white skin taking on the orange of the flames like a chameleon’s. Unlike most, Rariel could see the Molegra demon’s true form, though he wished he couldn’t. The eyeless man-shaped creature was one of the most repulsive demons Rariel had ever come across.
“He has a reputation as being one of the best,” Rariel lied.
Lore did have a reputation for excellence at his job, but that wasn’t why Rariel had chosen him. Rariel had chosen him because by giving Kynan, a Marked Sentinel, life, Lore had become the only being other than an angel who could take it away.
Detharu nodded, still facing the fire. “I’ll be sorry to lose him. And Sin.”
Yes, Rariel had been curious about this Sin person Detharu had dangled over Lore’s head. “Is she his mate?”
“Sister.”
Rariel’s breath caught. Sister… “Is she an assassin?”
Detharu turned around, his sausage-body undulating grotesquely. “She is. Ruthless and cunning, like her brother.”
Oh, this was perfect. Poetic, even. “Then I want Sin for the other target.”
“Same time frame?” Deth asked.
“Yes.”
The assassin master shuffled to his throne. “The rush job will cost you quadruple, as it did with Lore.”
“I’m paying quadruple because my insistence on using Lore is depriving you of him as a slave.”
“Double then. Take it or leave it.”
Rariel could leave it and go with another assassin, but the brother-sister thing gave him shivers of pleasure. “Done.”
Detharu smiled, his pale, shapeless lips forming a deep fissure that revealed tiny, pointed teeth. “Tell me, why is this amulet of Morgan’s important to you?”
“It’s a bauble. Worthless except as a trophy.” The truth, that it was a priceless bargaining chip that would get Rariel everything he wanted, was not something he would share with anyone, let alone assassin scum.
The demon seemed to buy the lie. “Come then,” he said, gesturing toward the door. “We’ll feast on the sweet flesh of a newly hatched huldrefox while we draw up the contracts.”
Furry little huldrefox hatchlings weren’t cheap, and with what Rariel was paying, the bastard could afford to eat them—or the young of any species—every day if he wanted to. Still, Rariel couldn’t scrounge up much in the way of bitterness. Not when centuries of planning was about to yield results.
Oh, yes. He could almost hear Idess’s screams of misery already.
The icy whisper of a hand caressed his arm, reminding him of the debt Rariel had yet to pay. Because Rariel wasn’t the only being in the room who was after revenge.
And after what Roag’s brothers had done to him, Rariel couldn’t blame the demon at all.
Two
Idess was close to the end. She could feel it. Could practically taste it, and as she stood at the top of Mount Everest and gazed up at the heavens, she could picture it.
An icy gale whipped up the snow around her, but she didn’t notice despite the fact that she was wearing low-waisted, cropped cammy pants, a tummy-revealing tank top, and hiking boots. As a Memitim, the only class of angel that was born, not made by the direct hand of God, she was impervious to the elements. Was impervious to most things that could harm others. Soon, even those few things that could hurt or kill her would no longer be a threat. Soon, she would Ascend, would earn her wings and join her fully transitioned angel mother, brothers, and sisters in Heaven.
Not that she cared about seeing many of them. With the exception of her brother Rami, she knew few of her siblings very well, most not at all. But she couldn’t wait to see Rami, had spent the last five hundred years since he Ascended in solitude and loneliness.
The only contact she had with people was when she shopped, a favorite pastime, and when she fed, a necessary evil she despised. “Feeding is the curse of our father,” Rami had said. “It reminds us that no one is perfect, and that we must all resist temptations of the flesh, lest we allow corruption to blacken our souls.”
Rami had feared that she would enjoy the physical contact feeding on Primori required, and that she’d gradually succumb to sin.
He was right to worry. Drinking blood did more than deliver the brief infusion of power Memitim needed to maintain their ability to flash. It also temporarily connected them psychically to their host, forcing Memitim to, for hours, feel what the Primori felt, whether it be anger, sadness, lust…
Oh, Idess couldn’t wait until the day she Ascended and didn’t need to engage in such intimacies anymore. As it was, she despised feeding so much that she had a tendency to walk a fine line with it, holding off until the last possible moment.
“It’s almost over,” she shouted to the sky. The wind ate her words, but she knew she’d been heard. In Heaven, they heard everything.
The thought brought an instant twinge of fear to her gut, because in truth, she hoped that wasn’t the case. She hadn’t exactly been… an angel.
Still, she was close to being one. She now had only two Primori to watch over, and one of them was the jewel in her crown.
Kynan Morgan was a Marked Sentinel, a human who had been charmed by an angel. Sentinels couldn’t be hurt or killed except by a being of angelic origin, which usually meant that they didn’t rate Memitim watchers. But for some reason he did, and she had been chosen to protect him from the infinitesimal chance that someone could get past his charm. On the other hand, he was immortal, which meant that she could have to guard him for hundreds of years. Thousands, even.
But she didn’t think so. Her other Primori, a werewolf, was long-lived but not immortal, so once he died or had fulfilled whatever destiny made him critical to the fate of the world, she would be left with only Kynan… and everyone knew that Memitim never guarded only one Primori.
Surely the honor of keeping Kynan safe would fall to one of her brethren, and she’d earn her wings for a job well done.
She couldn’t wait.
Earth sucked, as humans these days liked to say.
Sighing, she visualized the living room of her Italian villa and flashed from the mountain to her house. She’d been born nearby, and even after thousands of years, she still felt the pull that brought her home every day.
The soles of her boots clacked on the beige and gold stone tiles as she moved toward the kitchen. Usually she’d turn on the stereo, get some Mozart going, but excitement still stirred her blood, and hunger rumbled her stomach.
She eyed the fruit bowl on her dining room table and the dish of fine Italian chocolate on her kitchen counter, waffled… and then reached for a pomegranate.
Fruit is nature’s blessing, Rami used to say. We shouldn’t defile the bodies God gave us with spirits and unhealthful sweets.
Sure, none of that could hurt her, but Rami had been devout and pure, even before he’d been plucked out of his human life at the customary age of nineteen to become a Memitim, and as her teacher in all things holy, he’d been a strict taskmaster. Which, she thought, as she palmed a candy, was all the more reason to indulge now and then. She actually looked forward to his giving her a stern lecture when she finally saw him again.
A faint twinge streaked across her right wrist. Odd. She twisted her arm to view the two quarter-sized Primori marks on the underside. Chase’s heraldi had been there for eight years, was the same color as her skin, the thin lines raised like a brand or the outline of a fresh tattoo. But Kynan’s was new, only three weeks old, and she still hadn’t gotten used to seeing it. Frowning, she looked closer. The edges were pink… swelling rapidly… it began to burn, glow, and she dropped the candy with a gasp.
Kynan, one of the few untouchable people on the planet, w
as in danger.
* * *
Lore stood at the entrance to an upstate New York mansion, fists clenched and watching Kynan search the huge-ass sitting room, S-shaped stang in one hand and holy water in the other. Apparently, Croucher demons had set up shop in the dwelling, and Kynan intended to take them out before the wealthy family who lived there got too talky about what was going on. And before someone got hurt.
The Aegis to the rescue.
Bunch of do-gooder, holier-than-thou hypocrites. Lore had never liked Guardians all that much, but the dislike had turned to downright hatred two decades ago, when one of his contracted hits had been a Guardian who’d pissed off the wrong demon. The Guardian had been good enough at his job that he’d nearly taken Lore out.
Almost getting whacked wasn’t what had annoyed Lore—he’d deserved it for letting his guard down. What had gotten Lore all worked up was the fact that the Guardian had used some seriously underhanded, sleazy methods for catching and killing demons, including keeping cages full of baby demons to torture until adults came to save the little ones.
Lore didn’t harbor a whole lot of love for demons, but there were some things you just didn’t do. Er… yeah. Lore’s hypocrite switch flipped at that, because some of those things you just didn’t do had been done by him during his hell years as an assassin. He shot Kynan a glance, and okay, Lore had no qualms about putting that guy down. They’d been enemies since they first identified each other as competition for the same woman. Back then, Lore had hoped for an opportunity to take the guy’s head off, which made the fact that Lore had brought Kynan back to life after he’d been bled out so ironic. Then again, he’d only resurrected Kynan because he’d hated seeing Gem in pain.
This time, he wouldn’t have to see it.
The slave-bond on Lore’s chest pulsed, marking time in the countdown to his deadline, and there was no sense in waiting. Lore strode inside, his boots striking the black-veined red marble and announcing his presence with no subtlety whatsoever. Lore never had been subtle.
Instantly, Kynan swung around. “What the hell are you doing here?” His voice was a knot of suspicion and snarl, and yeah, there was no love lost between them.