by Lucy Auburn
But I wasn’t the person to comfort Leon. Whatever partnership we had, it was odd at best and strained at worst.
“I’ll find her,” he said absentmindedly, as the ambassador and his seer contact coalesced in front of us. “I’m not giving up, Naomi.”
That was what I was afraid of.
But what scared me worse was the fact that I hadn’t given up yet, either. Some part of me still believed she was out there, even as the rational, experienced part of my mind darkly whispered that she had to be dead.
Our urgent business interrupted my train of thought.
“Naomi, Leon,” Petyr said, ever the diplomat. “Meet Shuri. She’s here to tell us the future—or what she can see of it, at least.”
A few days later I stood outside the church and its graveyard, my sister and other dark hunters by my side. We’d narrowed this down as the epicenter of so much that was happening in Baton Rouge: the increase in demon possessions, wildlings walking the Earth, even dark fae slipping their bonds and making their way here.
“This is it, isn’t it?” Iva said, sliding her eyes over to me. “It’s a hell gate. They’re opening up again.”
“We don’t know anything, so don’t jump into any conclusions.”
My dark senses were tingling, but I didn’t tell Iva that. I knew my sister well; if she decided to become a hero dead before her time, it would be over something like this. We had to take the cautious approach.
The last time the hell gates opened, dark hunters had to sacrifice their lives to close them. I wouldn’t let something like that happen to my friends and family.
As we walked the consecrated grounds and looked for signs that might point towards what was happening, I heard the voice of the seer Shuri in my head.
The hell gates were closed,
And all was well,
Until the gods’ avarice began to swell.
Five by five and two by two
The gates will open wide,
The humans run and hide,
When the Key opens Hell
To make the Earth Her own.
Godspring approaches, and with it the veils fall,
Opening the Underworld, then releasing all.
I knew what the Godspring was: an event that occurred centuries apart, tearing down the veils between realms and making mischief happen. On Godspring, even humans would be able to see the paranormal as truth, including the Underworld.
But it wasn’t supposed to open up the hell gates, or release the denizens of the Underworld into the Earth. That had been taken care of during the last Godspring.
All it was supposed to do was make everything visible, but that was it—and most people didn’t even believe what they saw, because it always happened at night, sweeping across the globe under the cover of darkness. We expected the possibility of widespread panic this time, because of the prevalence of technology, but we had preparations in place. It could be handled.
Unless the Key was real.
And if it was, dark hunters like me were sworn to find it and destroy it—before it unleashed Hell on Earth.
Literally.
8
Selena
It was one of those things from the in-between place. Down on the ground on all fours, it looked like some kind of horrific creation. Its arms seemed to have extra joints, and its black skin dripped an oily grease onto the ground.
When it opened its mouth and hissed, a blood-red tongue flicked out towards me, split open at the end like something out of a horror movie.
“Get away from me,” I muttered, backing up towards the door out of the mausoleum. “I swear I’ll drain you until there’s nothing left.”
It made a clicking noise with its mouth, which was just… gross. Unbelievably gross. I tried to gather power in my palms, but I was all out; whatever luck had made my power-stealing skills stretch in the Underworld hadn’t carried me over here.
I wasn’t sure that my succubus powers would do anything to a creature this inhuman. And I definitely knew that I didn’t want to drain its powers with my hands or my mouth.
“Stay away.” I held my hands up, wishing dearly for one of Naomi’s knives, but Persephone had taken the one I stabbed her with. “I swear, I’ll throw a statue at you.”
It hissed, stalking towards me on four feet. As I waited and waited for it to pounce, I realized something: the oily stuff dripping out of it wasn’t just some weird evil-creature goo. It was blood. I’d wounded it while I was killing all the things in the in-between.
Apparently using my powers had done more than just drive them away. I’d actually hurt some of the things.
But somehow one of them had followed me through the door. Which meant, maybe, that other things were on their way too. I had to get the fuck out of here before they showed up.
Climbing the stairs backwards, I reached out to grab the doorknob to the door out. Finally, freedom.
Except when I tried to turn the knob it stuck.
It was locked.
Which meant I was locked in here with this... thing.
It chose that moment to pounce on me, its supernatural legs propelling it through the air impossibly fast.
Leon
“Do you smell that?” I asked Naomi. We walked through the rows of graves, the dark hunters around us fanning out to use their senses. “I smell something... different. Almost familiar.”
“You know my dark hunter sense of smell only finds danger.” Naomi gave me a look. “You’re the walker fae. Use your beast form to figure it out. There are only other fae here.”
I glanced around us, realizing she had a point. This particular graveyard was historic and very private—which meant that we had it all to ourselves, due to using fae influence to get in during off hours so we could investigate what was going on around here.
Reaching inside, I found the place where the beast lived in me, alongside my double Leo. Neither of them was me, not exactly, but paradoxically they both were me—and without them I wouldn’t be a fae at all.
The beast was easy to find and transform into. Unlike werewolves in B-rated movies, I wasn’t some grotesque creature turning into elbows and grey skin. My beast was an ancient wolf, larger and stronger than modern wolves, with my cunning brain and his own killer instincts.
In wolf form the smell sharpened and took on two distinct flavors. One was demonic in nature, but not in the way all these previous demon possessions had been demonic; this almost had a whiff of the Underworld. The other smell was... I moved around the tombstones with my nose to the ground, hardly believing what my brain told me.
It was impossible. It couldn’t be. After all this time, all the effort, I’d found the very distinct and unmistakable smell of a certain succubus fae.
Just when I was about to shift back and tell Naomi, the demons started to attack.
They appeared as if out of nowhere, coalescing from ashes and smoke. They were like nothing I’d ever seen before: barbaric and powerful, their abilities unhampered by being out of Hell and on Earth. They didn’t cower or shrink from the sunlight, fully physical and present.
It shouldn’t have been possible. But it was.
All around me the dark hunters got their weapons ready, pulling out knives and axes. There were four of us in total, the three dark hunters and me, plus three fae on the other side of the graveyard.
I didn’t wait to react. Snarling, I let the beast loose on the demon closest to me. It was winged with scales, its teeth sharp and its skin dry. I leapt on it and put my fangs into its neck, shaking back and forth as black blood spurted out onto me. It was a killing bite, brutal and effective.
The body sank to the ground and took me with it. I jumped back as I fell, shaking blood from my muzzle and looking left and right for more targets to take out.
“Get Elah!” Naomi said, shooting a knife from her hand at the closest demon. “Tell the others. And make sure nothing happens to Tae Min.”
The doctor. He was useful when it came to scien
ce, but not the best fighter. His fae-borrowed abilities made him capable of recovering quickly from wounds, but he’d never been much of a warrior.
Nodding my shaggy head to Naomi, I ran on four fleet legs to the other side of the graveyard, where the rest of our team was. Along the way, all I could think was: how had this happened? We came here to gather information on a potential hell gate, nothing more. The gates had been sealed for centuries—and they were supposed to stay that way. If something had changed, or if the Key had been discovered and used by our enemies, I didn’t want to know because it meant we were all doomed.
That wasn’t what plagued me the most, though. I’d smelled her scent. The woman whose disappearance had haunted me for three months, who I’d dreamed of and yearned for in a way so unlike me. She’d been right there next to me, questioning the dark fae, and then I sent her home.
And never saw her again.
It wasn’t until she was gone that I realized just how much she’d come to mean to me. Our morning meditations, the way she tried her best to fight her baser instincts, how I could smell her arousal when the succubus side of her took over. We’d shared a perfunctory kiss in the middle of a battle, but I hadn’t admitted to myself until later that I wasn’t just giving her my powers or my strength.
I was giving her a part of me I thought was long buried.
I’d thought we would have more time to discover each other, to spend training her self-control, and then later breaking it down and letting her go wild—another type of training altogether. I hadn’t realized the last time I saw her exactly what was happening, and I never got to say goodbye.
Since she was gone I’d looked for her everywhere, in every corner of the Realm of Light, and in the Shadow Realm. I’d even grown close to her intended blackfyre fae knight, developing our own kind of friendship. Seeing the warrior up ahead, I knew that he despaired at her loss just as much as I did.
But now I could smell her scent, alluring and rich, curling through the air. Though I looked for her as I ran across the graveyard to the rest of our allies, I didn’t see her dark brown hair or beautiful green eyes anywhere.
I wouldn’t give up hope, no matter what.
I had to find her.
And finally make her mine.
At least, a part of her—the rest of her, I knew I would have to share.
As I neared Elah and the others, I sensed something following on my heels. Turning with a snarl, I took out the wildling with a shake of my head. It was little more than a snack, a simple wild animal turned supernatural and hungry by spending too much time in a fae realm.
Once I was done with it I shifted back into human form, and approached them: Elah, Petyr, and Tae Min. The three men were staring at me, and I wiped the blood from my mouth, knowing I looked like a wild animal.
“Dozens of demons have somehow broken out of the Underworld in their bodily forms and are attacking us,” I said succinctly. Tae Min paled; Elah drew his sword and untied his mare, Fira, from a nearby tree; Petyr looked to me, his eyes keen.
“There’s something else,” the ambassador said, getting to the heart of things as always. “Leon, you look wild.”
I licked my lips, still able to taste her scent there—along with copious amounts of wildling blood. “It’s Selena,” I said. “I think... I think she’s here.”
That was when the earth began to tremble beneath our feet.
9
Selena
I screeched.
The thing was on me—glomping onto my face. I didn’t have any useful powers against it, so I wound up just... grabbing onto it and trying to pry it off as its terrible pincer things scratched and clawed.
With a heave of all my strength, I pulled it off me and threw it against the wall. It hit with a sickening crunch, leaving behind a smear of oily black blood and slumping onto the ground.
“Oh my god.” Disgusted, I shook its goo off my hands and tried to wipe my face clean. “Just great.”
The silk dress I’d been wearing in the Underworld was disgusting now, torn in places and stained beyond repair. That was the one thing I would miss about living with my crazy-ass mother: the nice clothes. Persephone was a madwoman, but she was a stylish one.
Getting up, I crept over to the demonic thing. It didn’t look like any demon I’d ever seen before, or even any wildling, but something about it pinged at my sense of familiarity. I felt like I should know what it was.
It seemed dead, but just in case I decided to make sure. Wandering around the mausoleum, I found a brick in one of the walls that was loose and pried it out. There was thick concrete behind it, of course; a single brick wouldn’t be my escape from my current predicament. But it was heavy in my hand as I carried it back to where the thing was and smashed it into pieces.
This time, I was sure it was dead.
That just left the mystery of what it was, whether or not it had friends waiting in the shadows to attack me, and how the hell I was going to get out of this place.
I decided to start with the obvious: the door in the back of the mausoleum. It brought me here, and while I wouldn’t use it to go back, maybe it no longer opened up into the Underworld. Cautiously, the brick in one hand, I walked over to it and opened it up just a crack.
Then wider, when I saw there was nothing on the other side.
It wasn’t a door—or at least, it wasn’t a door anymore, not really. Because it didn’t even lead anywhere. It was basically just a slab of wood on its hinges. The other side was nothing but a bricked-off wall.
Maybe it used to lead somewhere, but as they built this mausoleum and its surrounding buildings up that changed.
Which meant the only way out was the locked door.
If I had any borrowed strength I could use it to force the door open and break the lock. But I was just a succubus now, and I doubted I would be able to seduce the door. It would be up to my very normal strength to get out of here.
I was just about to look for some more bricks to pry out of the wall and throw at the doorknob when the ground beneath me trembled. An earthquake—and the ceiling above me was unstable. It shuddered and buckled as the ground shifted.
Startled, I grabbed onto a nearby statue for support, then quickly regretted it when the statue shook just as much as the ground. The stories I’d read told you to stand beneath a supportive door frame or structure, but when I glanced back at the door in the back of the mausoleum it was glowing.
Apparently it had decided to turn back into a door again.
And there could only be one thing on the other side: evil shit.
That, and possibly my mother.
“Shit,” I muttered. “Fuck.”
Grabbing my loose brick, I ignored the trembling of the ground and rushed to the locked door. The doorknob was still locked under my hand when I jiggled it. Frustrated, I took a step back and slammed against it shoulder first. It barely budged.
The door behind me started to hiss as whatever had followed me slithered out.
“Fuck.” Pain radiated from my shoulder, but I tried it again.
Slam. Nothing—no movement. Frustrated, I hit the doorknob with the brick, and cursed when a piece of my brick crumbled off.
Meanwhile, the things were multiplying, their arms and legs crawling out. Soon their bodies, mouths, fangs and claws would be in here, and I’d be all alone with the dead and the demons.
No, they weren’t demons, I realized with sudden clarity. I’d heard of them before, when I was in the Underworld. From time to time they broke out of the in-between and made a nuisance of themselves.
They were lost souls, stuck between Earth and the Underworld, turned into something different: soul eaters.
Spirits without a body or soul to speak of.
And they wanted mine.
I was outnumbered and powerless, which left only two options: run or hide. Since there was nowhere to run to, I had to hide somewhere.
Most of the coffins were in the walls of the mausoleum, with pla
cards at their feet. But there were six marble standing coffins, each with its own statue of the gods standing at its head. The heavy slabs on top looked strong enough to keep the soul eaters out—or at least slow them down.
“It would come to this. Of course.”
With a grimace, I walked over to one of the coffins, at the foot of a statue of Bacchus. Out of all the old gods, he seemed most likely to be my favorite; nothing like the original party animal to get things going.
Eyes on the door and the growing soul eaters making their way in, I reaching out and heaved the lid to the marble coffin off. There were bones inside, little more than dust at this point.
“Sorry, buddy,” I muttered, “but you’re dead, and I don’t want to be.”
Pushing down the disgust doing it gave me, I climbed into the coffin and settled onto the bones with a shudder. Then I pulled the heavy coffin lid over me—and just in time.
Before I was snug in my hiding place, I heard clicks and screeches, as the soul eaters made their way out of the cracks between the door and the frame. There were a few inches of dim light left between the lid and the edge of the coffin, just enough space for one of the things to get through.
“C’mon, c’mon.” They were coming for me. “Fuck, c’mon.”
The last of the light disappeared as I pulled the lid all the way shut, closing it on one of their creepy little bug-like arms. It scratched against the lid of the coffin as I pulled my pinched fingers inside, wincing.
All around me, darkness closed in.
Beneath me, bones sighed and crumbled back into dust.
Maybe I’d been better off in Hell.
Leon
The demonic beings fell to my fury.
There weren’t very many demons, I realized the more I fought beside Elah and his mare. Most of what had come out of the Underworld were wildlings and soul eaters, a kind of demonic devolved form of a human spirit. The dozen or so demons who had made it through fell easily to my sharp teeth and Elah’s sword, but the soul eaters just kept coming.