Chapter 1
Marcellious
What kind of man guts you with a blade so sharp you don’t feel it until the blood starts spilling?
A demon.
Not just any monster—he was the darkest of the dark, the kind of nightmare that even the supernatural feared. And right now, that nightmare was fetching something to tend to the wounds he had inflicted on me.
I lay on a filthy bedframe, staring at the gaping wound carved from my navel to my pelvis. My torso was bare, my deerskin breeches unfastened and spread apart, exposing my lower abdomen. My moccasins were gone—discarded like I was already a corpse.
A chill crept over me. Sweat slicked my skin. My stomach churned.
Holy fuck. Was I going to die?
I let my head fall back and closed my eyes.
Whack!
A stinging slap snapped my head to the side. My eyes flew open.
Balthazar.
A thousand flickering candles bathed his lair in eerie light. A short time ago, I’d been heading for the Catskills with my wife, Emily, and that insufferable bitch, Olivia. Now, I was here—wherever here was. The last thing I remembered was stepping into John James’ house and finding him decapitated. Then Balthazar appeared. Then, his blade.
And then—nothing.
How the hell had I ended up in this place? The question gnawed at my mind, but the pain was too much to dwell on for long.
Balthazar lifted an elegant glass vial, its delicate handle resting in a silver holder. His lips curved into something that might have been a smirk.
“Ready? This will make you feel so much better. It’s a healing tonic.”
I barely had the strength to nod. My body was failing, the agony unbearable. If this was a trick, I no longer cared.
Balthazar tipped the vial, and the healing tonic dripped into my wound.
I shrieked like a stuck pig.
The liquid sizzled and burned as it seeped into my wound, scorching my insides like molten iron.
“Stop acting like a little bitch,” Balthazar snarled, his long teeth sharp and unnaturally white despite centuries of existence. “I procured this substance from a necromancer in Italy in the late fifteenth century.”
Pain tore through me like bolts of lightning. The only response I managed was another scream.
“The necromancer said he got the recipe from a corpse. Or maybe from the corpse’s lingering spirit,” Balthazar mused, waving a hand dismissively. “It’s been so long. How can I remember such details?”
I had known pain before. In the eighteenth century, I had been pierced by arrows and tomahawks. As a gladiator in ancient Rome, I had been mauled by lions, harpooned by the three-prongedfascina, and skewered by the curved blades ofsiccae.
But nothing compared to the agony inflicted by a master of depravity.
No one could rival Balthazar in the art of pain. And no one delighted in suffering more than he did.
The grin on his face as he poured another stream of tonic into my wound was evidence enough.
I nearly blacked out.
Balthazar sneered and struck me across the face, the impact snapping me back to consciousness. He grabbed my shoulders and shook me hard.
