The Darkest Torment

by Gena Showalter

  “No way I’m punching you.” Strider grabbed a towel from the rack on the wall and wiped the back of his neck. “Ashlyn will punish me by replacing the oh-so-delicious Oreo filling with toothpaste. Again.”

  “Well, I’ll replace your teeth with my fist if you don’t.”

  “You’d do that either way.”

  He wasn’t wrong.

  “Besides,” Strider added. “Your wife is scarier than you.”

  Again, he wasn’t wrong. Ashlyn looked like an angel, but when it came to the protection of her loved ones, she had the temper of an entire demon horde.

  “I need a good fight.” The urge to hurt and be hurt had overwhelmed Maddox more and more lately, and he feared what he would do if ever he snapped. Anyone weaker than himself—meaning everyone—would be in danger.

  He carried the demon of Violence inside his body, and the fiend was hungrier than ever. Starved. Even buzzing with gleeful anticipation, as if it sensed something Maddox did not—impending danger.

  As the keeper of Defeat, Strider would ensure Maddox—and therefore Violence—experienced a total knockout. Because, if Strider lost, he would experience a total knockout. The worst of the worst for a guy like him. When he was unconscious, anyone could kick his ass, making his suffering a thousand times worse.

  I suck. Maddox shouldn’t have asked him to help.

  With a roar of frustration, Maddox strode to the defunct punching bag and kicked it...into Strider’s chest, knocking the guy to his ass. Oops. “My bad.”

  “Well, that’s something to cross off my bucket list,” Strider said drily. “Magic sandbag ride.”

  “Sorry.” Maddox hopped from one foot to the other, more amped by the second.

  Sabin, the keeper of Doubt, and Reyes, the keeper of Pain, stalked into the gym, stopping abruptly when they spotted Maddox practically foaming at the mouth and Strider, who’d pushed free of the bag and now stood in a growing pile of sand.

  Both Sabin and Reyes grinned with relish.

  “Came to work out, but my spidey senses tell me something better is afoot.” Sabin rubbed his hands together. “Does someone need an old-fashioned beating?”

  “Yes. Let’s start with you.” The guy was within reach. Maddox swung his arm with considerable force. Crack! His fist slammed into Sabin’s jaw, sending his friend staggering to the side. At the moment of impact, Maddox’s thin thread of control snapped. He—utterly—unleashed.

  He punched and kicked, and Sabin and Reyes punched and kicked in turn. He never ducked, but accepted every blow as his due. When furniture got in his way, he destroyed it.

  You can’t win. Stop. Stop now.

  Sabin’s demon whispered doubts through his mind. Maddox laughed and delivered a punch so powerful he broke Sabin’s neck.

  Oops again.

  This wasn’t the first time they’d fought to such an extreme, and it wouldn’t be the last. However, Sabin was usually the one who broke Maddox’s neck in order to end a rampage. Today, with darkness driving him, Maddox wasn’t sure he could be stopped.

  Besides, the guy would heal...in a few days.

  Reyes delivered a hard jab to Maddox’s throat. A dirty move. Also welcome. As Maddox gasped for breath, Strider jumped on his back and jackhammered a fist into his temple. As Maddox stumbled from the impact, Reyes sealed the deal by knocking his feet out from under him. By the time he hit the ground, two others had joined the fray. William the Ever Randy, and Cameo, the keeper of Misery.

  Well, well. A boot party.

  As different members of the group took turns kicking him, the demon hummed with happiness. This. This was what it had craved.

  Cameo pressed a booted foot into his throat. “Had enough?”

  “Not yet.” The words were slurred, his lips and tongue wonderfully swollen.

  “Let me help with that.” William straddled his waist and grinned down at him. “You want action, shithead? I’ll give you action. Too bad you’re not going to like it.” He punched, his fist somehow pushing past skin, muscle and bone and reaching Maddox’s spirit—reaching the demon.

  Maybe Maddox could be stopped. Shrieks of pain sounded in his head just before darkness swallowed him whole...

  What seemed a mere second or two later, voices woke him. Water sloshed around in his ears, so he couldn’t make out the actual words. He blinked open his eyes, shook his head—good, movement. As he rolled his shoulders and bent his legs to check that he still had use of them, the water—nope, blood, he realized—drained out of his ears.

  “...is going on with everyone?” demanded Paris, the keeper of Promiscuity. “We finally got Cameo and Baden home, and as of yesterday morning, Cameo has no memory of her time away from the fortress and Baden, the Gentleman of Olympus, has morphed into a cold-as-ice bastard. He’s plowing through women as if there’s a going-out-of-business sale and, dude, his temper grows worse by the day. He even puts Maddox to shame.”

  Something rained over Maddox and, judging by the smell, he guessed it was popcorn.

  He sat up, shaking off a round of dizziness. To his delight, Violence remained quiet.

  He looked around the gym. Every piece of equipment had been shattered, and there was a fresh crop of holes in every wall. He noticed most of his friends had congregated in the room. The wives and children were missing, though. Lucien, keeper of Death, had probably flashed them away from the fortress the moment the fight had broken out before returning alone to wait for everything to calm.

  Even Galen was here. Once the hated enemy, now the tolerated enemy, he stood off to the side, watching the others interact with something akin to envy in his eyes.

  Maddox ignored him. It was either that or kill him. Might have forgiven his crimes but haven’t forgotten the results. He focused on Cameo. “You lost your memory?” It wouldn’t be the first time. In fact, it happened whenever she experienced a moment of happiness.

  She grabbed a handful of popcorn from the bowl on Torin’s lap and said, “Yep.”

  One word, and still he cringed, all the world’s sorrows seeping from her voice. Whatever had overcome the demon’s sadness, even for a moment, well, it must have been a miracle.

  Maddox stood up and stepped over the still unconscious Sabin to grab a handful of popcorn for himself.

  Torin moved the bowl out of reach. “Dude! I’m done sharing with you guys. You’re ungrateful assholes. Which is my least favorite kind of asshole! Get your own buttery goodness.”

  “Fine. I will.” Maddox stepped on the guy’s nuts, using them as a ladder as he reached for all that “buttery goodness.” Rather than taking a scoop of kernels, he took the entire bowl. “Got my own.”

  Torin punched him in the thigh with a gloved fist. “Jackass.” As the keeper of Disease, he could start a worldwide plague just by touching another living being skin-to-skin. Thankfully, they’d discovered a cure a few weeks ago, which had given all of them a new sense of freedom.

  Maddox jumped back when Cameo reached for a second scoop, barking, “Mine!”

  She smiled without humor. “Want me to make you sob so hard you lose your appetite?”

  As he shuddered, he threw a handful at her. “Here. Eat and stop talking.”

  Baden strode into the room, every step measured and intent. He was one of the tallest and most stacked with muscle among them, with dark red hair and a face Cameo liked to call “Jamie Fraser beautiful.” He used to host the demon of Distrust and, despite that, he used to be nice. As Paris had said, the Gentleman of Olympus was now a bastard.

  Baden was rarely without a scowl that promised pain and bloodshed.

  Miserable SOB. He was giving Cameo a run for her money. Several thousand years ago, he’d been beheaded, and his spirit sent to a prison realm. The bands circling his arms somehow made him tangible to the living.

&nb
sp; His head tilted to the side. “I finally come back from the dead and you guys turn my home into a shithole?”

  Nearly everyone else in the room deadpanned, “You’re welcome.”

  Bastard or not, he was still a brother by circumstance, and they’d treat him as such.

  “Typical.” Baden tripped over a blow-up doll, cursed and lifted the plastic beauty for all to see. “Did Paris order a stripper?”

  “Lola!” Paris leaped toward the doll to draw her in for an exaggerated hug. “Where you been, girl? Why you been ducking my calls?”

  Aeron, the former keeper of Wrath, grabbed the doll and tossed her across the room like a beach ball. “Probably because your wife would stab your precious Lola with a butcher knife. Meanwhile, my wife would patch her up and I’d be stuck with another stray.”

  That, right there, was the difference between marrying the current keeper of Wrath—Paris’s wife—and an actual angel—Aeron’s wife.

  As everyone laughed, Maddox met Baden’s dark gaze. The guy motioned to the hallway with a slight tilt of his chin. Understanding, Maddox finished off the popcorn and tossed the empty bowl at Gideon, keeper of Lies.

  “Make more,” Maddox commanded.

  “Yeah.” Lucien kicked Gideon out of his chair.

  “Don’t worry.” The blue-haired punk flipped them both off simultaneously. “I won’t spit in the kernels.”

  Gideon couldn’t speak a word of truth without suffering agonizing pain, so Maddox heard the unspoken truth. There would be a special topping on the new kernels—exactly what he’d hoped to hear. Or not hear. Whatever!

  “Fine,” he said, being sure to grumble. “I’ll make more.” He strode toward the door, bumping shoulders with Baden along the way. His friend stiffened, even hissed upon contact, and Maddox frowned. “Why don’t you pretend to be useful and help me?”

  “Wow. It takes two guys to work a microwave?” Cameo asked.

  Moans and whimpers rang out. The girl could tell the funniest joke in the world, but everyone around her would only want to stab their ears with a pencil.

  Baden followed Maddox into the hall, maintaining distance between them to prevent any more contact.

  As soon as the others were out of hearing range, Maddox said, “What’s wrong?”

  “An easier question to answer is what isn’t wrong.”

  Been there. “Why don’t you start with the reason you cringe every time someone touches you.”

  Baden ran his hands over the serpentine wreaths now circling his biceps. They were a gift from Hades, the king of the underworld. “I spent multiple millennia without having contact with another person. Yes, Pandora was with me in the other realm, and, yes, we constantly fought, but we rarely touched. Now my skin feels as if my every nerve ending is exposed.”

  Okay. That made sense. “But you’ve slept your way through a baker’s dozen and—”

  “Only one part of my anatomy has to touch a woman,” Baden interjected, “and with a condom, we aren’t exactly skin-to-skin. Besides, the pleasure is worth the agony.”

  Maddox considered the things he would do to get inside Ashlyn. Actually, what wouldn’t he do? With her, any amount of pleasure would be worth any amount of agony.

  “What about your new temper?” he asked.

  Baden hung his head. “I’m not demon-possessed anymore, but I feel an evil presence inside me.”

  “Because of the wreaths?”

  “That, or something was done to me during my stint inside Lucifer’s prison. Like Cameo, my memory is fading.”

  Lucifer was the worst of the worst, evil in its purest form, and certainly capable of doing something horrible to Baden. “Take off the wreaths. Return to the spirit world. We can find another way to get you back.” Even as he spoke the words, denial screamed through his head. Just got my friend back. Can’t lose him.

  “I can’t. I’ve tried.”

  Relief poured through him, as did fear. Baden wanted to leave them? “Is the evil constant or can you pinpoint triggers?”

  “There are definitely triggers, and they start and end with my temper, which is getting worse by the day. That’s the main reason I wanted to talk with you. How do you control yours?”

  Maddox laughed without humor. “I don’t. Not anymore.” And now that he thought about it, whatever Baden was dealing with might be the root cause of his own problem. Evil fed off evil, after all. The more it consumed, the more it wanted.

  That impending sense of doom...

  If evil overtook Baden... Yeah, they’d all be in danger. In more ways than one.

  The guy would have to be locked away. For his own good, yeah, but also for the rest of the world. And if that didn’t work, he’d have to be killed. Again. Neither idea appealed to Maddox.

  Baden’s thoughts must have taken a similar journey. “I don’t know what I’ve brought into your house. Maybe I should leave the fortress. I could be putting you guys—your families—at risk.”

  “Not my house, our house. You’re staying.” The words blasted from Maddox with the force of a cannonball. “We finally got you back. We can’t lose you again. Whatever’s going on with you, we’ll figure it out. Together. We’ll fight it together.”

  Silence.

  He sighed. “In the meantime, have you tried deep breathing?”

  “No. Because I’m a moron,” Baden snapped. He paused to punch the wall, dust pluming the air as cracks formed in the stone. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Please. This little man fit was nothing. “Don’t worry about it.”

  They descended the stairs and veered right, soon entering the kitchen.

  “There is one thing that has always helped me, no matter how far gone I am,” Maddox said.

  Baden stepped in front of him, consuming his personal space. Desperation radiated from him as he said, “Tell me.”

  “I think of Ashlyn, Urban and Ever.” His wife and his twin babies, the top three reasons he breathed.

  Disappointed, Baden turned to brace against the marble countertop. “You love them. You know they’re fragile, that you could hurt them, but you don’t want to hurt them so you do whatever it takes to protect them. I can’t do the same because I love no one.”

  “You love me.” Maddox bumped his shoulder—screw lack of contact—before heading into the closest pantry to grab a package of popcorn. “You love my family. And don’t try to deny it. I’ve seen you with the twins.”

  Maddox’s heart had nearly burst out of his chest as the big, bad warrior had sat down to play beauty shop with Ever, allowing her to braid his hair, lacquer his face with makeup and paint his toenails princess pink. Afterward, he’d played chess with Urban. Game after game, teaching the boy strategy—the only thing Urban loved as much as his girls, as he called them. His mama and his sister.

  “Why don’t you start looking for companionship rather than sex, so you can fall in love with a female?” Maddox asked. “Let the girls put your profile up on E-ternity or something.”

  “The dating site for immortals?” Baden shuddered. “No.”

  “But—”

  “You want revenge against me, don’t you? That’s what this dating-site nonsense is about. I let myself be killed all those centuries ago, and now you want me to suffer your wrath.”

  Maddox hadn’t known Baden had let himself be killed all those centuries ago, but he’d suspected. They all had. Having that suspicion confirmed was worse than taking a blade to the heart. He should know!

  He took his own advice and did a little deep breathing before he placed the popcorn bag in the microwave and said, “Why did you do it?”

  The ensuing pause was so heavy they both struggled with their next breaths.

  Baden bowed his head. His voice soft, he said, “That’s not important. Not anymore.”


  “It is to me.”

  “Drop it, Maddox. Please. Our reunion is strained enough. We don’t need the past rising up to make things worse.”

  He didn’t point out the obvious. If the past wasn’t dealt with, it would rise up regardless. Instead, he gave a clipped nod. “Whatever you need.”

  “Thanks.”

  Beep. He grabbed the steaming bag from the microwave, burned his fingers and cursed as the bag slipped from his grip and hit the floor. “Two-second rule,” he said, and picked it up by pinching the corner between his fingers.

  After pouring the kernels into a bowl, he met Baden’s gaze. “If left unchecked, evil grows. You know that as well as I do. At this rate, things are only going to get worse for you. Be prepared.”

  Baden offered a clipped nod of his own, and for the first time, Maddox realized there was something missing from his friend. A gleam of hope in his eyes.

  The coming months were going to be tough for all of them.

  Better enjoy the calm while it lasts. Maddox patted the warrior on the shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go back to the gym and have ourselves a real party. You’ve missed out on a lot of shit since your death, and I’m making it my personal mission to ensure you do everything.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Starting with beer pong.”

  Before they’d taken a step, the sounds of stampeding buffalo echoed from the stairs. A few seconds later, the entire group entered the kitchen, bringing the party to them.

  “Did I hear someone say beer pong?” Paris asked. “Let’s make things interesting. Strip pong!”

  A chorus of “no” rang out.

  Baden even slugged Paris in the arm. “Keep your clothes on. Seeing your ass is on my Oh, No list, not my To Do list.”

  “Oh, look at that.” Paris shook his head, his expression all about pity. “The big man thinks he’s funny.”

  Reyes gave Paris’s arm a second punch and said, “He is. He’s also right. Your ass? No!”

  Paris wasn’t deterred. “Not seeing it pains you, don’t even try to deny it, and pain is your jam. That’s the only reason you can live without getting a peek at my goods and services.”