His fire-kissed brow furrows. “You belong here?”
I do a finger circle in the air. “Keep going.”
“Um...the disintegration part?”
“Ding, ding, ding! What do we have for our winner, folks?” I announce in my bestPrice is Rightannouncer voice. The mausoleum supports my outrage by making my voice echo all around us.
“You’re saying I could’vedisintegratedwhen you brought me here, and no one thought that fine print should’ve been pointed out to me ahead of time?” My voice grows a little shriller with each syllable, and I have to keep from wincing at the sound. Maybe one of my parents banged a harpy or a banshee—are those demons?
Anguish hammers through me as I struggle not to drown in the overwhelming emotions. How can I actually be a demon? Did my mom cheat on my dad? That thought makes me feel sick. I know kids think their parents hang the moon, but I just can’t picture Tanya Gates looking at anyone the way she looked at my dad.
An ache starts in my chest.
“We, uh, didn’t want to worry you,” Crux declares, as if the statement should solve any issues I might have.
“The air is acidic down here. If you weren’t Hell-touched, you couldn’t breathe it without…” Jerif trails off as I cock a brow.
“Disintegrating,” I finish for him.
“Yes.”
My eye twitches slightly. Great. That word is probably going to be a lifelong trigger for me now.
I want to rage, and cry, and hit something, but I ball my fists and take deep breaths in an effort to get a hold of myself. These assholes don’t seem to be taking my life very seriously. There’s a very blasé attitude about things like disintegrating and suddenly being responsible for closing a Hellgate.
It’s all I can do not to claw at my throat.I’m breathing fucking acidic air?I force myself to look down at my perfectly normal looking arms and legs and rub them to reassure myself that they’re solid, but it doesn’t help.
My breaths quickly turn into gasps as I lose my fight with the dread coursing through me. I can’t tell if it’s me fracturing or everything else around me.
How the fuck is this happening? How could my parents not have had some sort of contingency in place to cover this in the event that they weren’t around to tell me? There should’ve been awe just thought you should know, you’re a demonplan firmly in place! I mean, when were they going to fucking tell me? I was nineteen when they died, they had plenty of time to drop this bomb.
I’m so pissed and hurt that I wish I could scream at them and demand they explain it all. But they’re not here, and that fact makes all of this even worse. Both of their images flicker back and forth in my mind as I try to figure out which of them is to blame for this. I quickly realize though that it doesn’t matter, they both fucked me over, and that hurts worst of all, because my parents are my fucking heroes. Or they were.
I bend over, my hands on my knees, and try to pull enough oxygen into my lungs to chase away the black spots speckling my vision. Someone is rubbing my back, and I can hear other voices speaking to me, but I can’t focus on any of them right now.
I’m a demon having a panic attack in Hell.
I look up to find Crux looking at me, his green eyes filled with pity-laced concern.
“Get me out of here,” I huff between labored breaths.
“It’s okay, Delta, you’re safe here,” Iceman reassures me, but the dismissal of what I want pisses me off even more.
“Get me the fuck out of here!” I scream, my panic jumpstarting a rush of rage.
I have no idea how I even have enough air in my body to force that level of fury and terror out of me, but my voice slams against the stone walls around us and reverberates back to me.
I can hear myself breaking in my own voice over and over again, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Warm tears drip down my cheeks, and I feel like if they don’t get me out of Hell’s Embrace right this second, I’m going to die.
“What the fuck do we do?” someone growls.
“Take her out!”
“But—”
“Take her the fuck OUT!”
Suddenly, I feel a hook-like sensation in the middle of my stomach, and in the next hyperventilated breath, I’m yanked back. The world as I know it contracts and then explodes, and in a blink, I land hard on the cold stone floor of the mausoleum we started in—the non-Hell side.
