I dropped what was in my hands again, trying to make my mouth work for a full minute, which chilled out a lot of people. “Okay, so who seriously is dead? Like… Where are we burying them?” Then I was scared again. “Did something happen at the safe houses? The snakes or someone made a move or…”
Everyone had winced and looked super guilty, which was why I’d trailed off.
So that was why they had acted like children. Great, so I was back to thinking this would be good.
“Just tell me,” I sighed.
Unfortunately, they tried to all tell me at once and defend their stupid. I glanced among the seven demons in the room and picked up this and that before I stuck my fingers in my mouth and let out an ear-shattering whistle.
I looked at Kyle and waved for him to go ahead.
“Always Mom’s favorite,” one grumbled.
“I will fucking shove my foot up your ass right now,” I warned them. “I just handled something huge on my shouldersandstressand wanted to get more done and walked into this fucking crazy. When I’m working to make our lives easier and—fuck you.”
“Yeah, fair,” he admitted. “Sorry. Just—you won’t get it like we do. We fucked up, but you won’t understand how badly we got screwed and it makes me pout.”
“I’ve been pretty damn understanding on more than one occasion,” I reminded him and, by extension, all of them. I crossed my arms over my chest and made it clear that it was time to spill what happened.
And makesensethis time.
“Okay, so here’s the deal,” Kyle sighed. “We all play WoW. You know this.”
I rolled my eyes but nodded. World of Warcraft was a game you basically needed a damn degree to know how to play, and I was someone who tore into computers, systems, and morefor fun.
But it was also incrediblytoxic. The online game lobbies were… Toxic wasn’t actually harsh enough. The public servers were just dumpster fires of angry people who spewed bile for fun and it gave me the ick that people played it.
And the fact that Kyle and his team liked that shit was only excusable to me because they were demons. They didn’t get like a feed through the internet—though that would be awesome—but they were desensitized to it basically since most of them fed on wrath.
Or were tight with people who did.
But my eye twitched learning it was about that stupid fucking game that I thought was a waste of time, energy, and internet.
“Yeah, I know,” Kyle sighed heavily. “But we weren’t playing on the public servers you hate and come on, we don’t like fuck with kids and—you know us. We also gotta blow off steam likeyou do, and there’s only so much beating each up or hitting the gym.”
Fair. I gave a quick nod.
I listened as he explained that a few years ago they had joined some private server for a challenge and the whole hook was they only had one life in the game. On the server. They died and that was it. Their everything was gone. It was like an elite server game… Thing.
Program? Modification?
I wasn’t into gaming, but I understood. It was the ultimate challenge for people who played the game and apparently were insane since everything was on the line.
Yeah, I couldn’t even judge since I went undercover without a safety net or a tiny one too many times and—we were adrenaline junkies. I got it.
I held up my hand when Kyle and a few others went on and on andonabout how much time they’d spent setting up everything again. “So what went wrong and got my house destroyed?”
Kyle covered the mistake well. “You take that title of Mom seriously to protect the company.”
I internally flinched but then played along. “No, I thought—right, this wasn’t one of mine. I get it all confused, and apparently I have way more than I—I gotta go over the list with Melissa again.”
Crisis averted when they all snorted or chuckled.
“We’re not exactly sure, but the reason we all blew up more than once is we avoid raids that are livestreamed for obvious reasons and someone lied about that too,” one of the guys explained. “Back up. So we’re our own guild, but there are also raids. And you need materials for those raids because if you win, you can get awesome gear and loot.”
I bobbed my head to more rambling and got the idea even if I didn’t care. “Okay, so what happened?”
“We were set up,” Kyle answered, cutting to the chase.
