Well, fuck them. He’d chosen this house to get away from them. He was sick of their constant nagging. And they’d followed him here. None of them lived here, yet they always ended up in his kitchen anyway, giving him shit.
He didn’t need fucking fixing. He just needed to be left alone. He just needed peace and quiet and some room to fucking breathe.
Fuck Meph and his constant needling. Fuck Raum and his psychoanalysis. Fuck Naiamah and her stupid assumptions about what did or didn’t work for him. Fuck Sunshine and her perfect, charming temperament, pretending she gave a shit about him. And Iris for screaming like he’d killed a puppy.
By the time he made it to the compost bin, he’d worked himself halfway back into a rage. He lifted the lid and threw the contents of the bowl onto the pile so hard, it left an indent when it splattered onto the rotten food mush.
He dropped the lid and then tipped his face up to the sky, trying to slow his breathing. It was cloudy tonight. The air was warm, but it was humid, so it felt cooler than it was. Spring was well underway, but he didn’t believe in any of that new-life bullshit.
He had to admit Sunshine was right about one thing, however. He did feel like he was toeing a line, and if he didn’t do something soon, shit was going to change whether he liked it or not. And probably in a way he didn’t want it to.
The last time he’d felt this out of control and sick of himself, he’d met Eva’s human friend at a bar. She’d told him she’d sworn off sex for six months to regain control of her impulses, and he’d decided to follow her example. Well, he’d crossed that off his bucket list, and all it had gotten him was an even worse hair-trigger temper because of his constant state of horniness. Eva’s friend was probably skipping off into the sunset with her newfound self-confidence, reforming her life, and achieving all her mortal goals in her eighty-year lifespan.
When was he going to learn that pretending to be human wasn’t the answer? He wasn’t just a demon. He was a fallen angel who fell so hard he’d turned into a demon. He was as old as the world. Literally older than dirt. He was so old hedidn’t even remember most of his life. And for as far back as his memory went, he’d been ruled by something he couldn’t control.
That was all he’d ever wanted: to feel in control.
Ironic, considering who he was. He’d controlled a lot in his day—people, territory, wealth, power—but he’d never controlled himself. And wasn’t that a bitch.
BATS IN THEBELFRY
MURMUR SNAPPED OUT HIS WINGS TO SLOW HIS FLIGHTand then landed lightly onto the courtyard outside his castle. The black stone gleamed with streaks of red. The sky was finally brightening, the long night coming to a close.
There wasn’t a single sign of life around him. Nothing so much as breathed. But it didn’t matter what his eyes saw. His nape prickled, and he checked over his shoulder. Twice.
Of course there was no one there. There never was. No one his eyes could see anyway. But he was starting to fear that what his eyes told him wasn’t proof enough.
Not believing your own eyes anymore? You’re truly losing it. It’s only a matter of time before you crack completely.
“That isn’t news,” he replied to himself, striding through the barren courtyard.
So he was paranoid and possibly insane. Could one blame him after being haunted by dreams of his own death every time he closed his eyes? After being regularly sideswiped by visions of the future for millennia? After listening to the screams ofhaunted souls in his mind at all hours, never having a moment’s peace?
He’d just been to check his territory wards. He had recently caught Raum sneaking around the perimeter after the demon had somehow gotten himself conscripted by Heaven into stealingThe Book of Gamigin.He’d failed, of course, but he had managed to escape Murmur’s dungeon with the help of an angel. Afterward, Raum had returned with an adequate peace offering—the dismembered body of the archangel Raphael—and a promise never to return, but the experience had left Murmur more trepidatious than ever.
His paranoia was not unjustified. He was secretly plotting the downfall of the High King of Hell. If Lucifer got so much as a whiff of what he was up to, he would storm Murmur’s gates with a fury beyond anything he could withstand. Even his army of souls couldn’t protect him.
The fact that Murmur had lasted as long as he had was a miracle in itself. Every time he attempted his spell, there was a disturbance in the High King’s magical defenses. He was sure the only reason Lucifer hadn’t figured out what was happening yet was because he’d grown complacent, drunk off power and the illusion of indestructibility.
Murmur had always been a recluse. Only the foolish dared disturb the Necromancer who lurked in his lonely lair, sealed behind powerful wards, decimating intruders with his ghostly army.
But everything had changed once he’d had the vision of the blood-born twins who would cause Paimon’s downfall. It was the Queen of Hell who’d jumpstarted Murmur’s slow slide into insanity, and he had sworn to take vengeance upon her ever since surviving her creative torture.
His mind may have been splintered, but he never forgot, and he never forgave.
He smiled to himself, picturing the look on Paimon’s faceif she could see him now, sitting at the top ofhertower, commandingherminions. Too bad she was currently somewhere deep underground, being digested by a gorath. And when the enormous centipede-like monster shit her out, she would regenerate in its feces, only for another to scent her flesh and eat her again.
She wasn’t dead. But some fates were worse than death.
But now, as time ran out like the final grains of sand in an hourglass, his smugness at Paimon’s fall was irrelevant. He had far bigger problems to think about.
Paimon had been Lucifer’s most powerful and loyal supporter, and though it was known that the Hunter was the one to defeat her, when Murmur had taken her lair, he’d lost the obscurity he’d maintained throughout the ages. He’d become a threat.
How long until Lucifer got suspicious about what Murmur was up to in his new lair? How long until he had the presence of mind to check his defenses and sensed traces of the Necromancer’s magic among them?
What if he already had? What if he was using his considerable power to spy on Murmur right now, plotting his attack at this very moment?
Murmur stopped and spun around, scowling at the dark courtyard around him. The dark,emptycourtyard. But in his mind, it was crawling with spies, creatures hidden in the shadows, watching him—
