Still, Kalder didn’t believe him. How could he? “You’re dead.”
“So are you.”
“Aye, but I was damned and forgotten.”
Muerig wasn’t. Unlike him, his brother had always been a good and decent man. Honorable. Loved by everyone who’d had the pleasure of his kindness. He’d never whored. Never lied or cheated. Never gambled.
Or broken their mother’s heart.
While Kalder had schemed and drunk his way through life, Muerig had studied and labored hard. Ever sober and serious. Forever generous in all things, especially his heart and with his compliments.
Kalder had only been generous with his insults and scorn.
And Muerig had died because Kalder was a worthless piece of scytel.
Sadness turned his brother’s gaze stormy an instant before a twisted demon grabbed him and flew off.
“Nay!” Kalder jumped up, but was unable to reach them to stop it. Or reclaim his brother from the demon’s clutches.
Feminine laughter rang out around him. “So you do love something.…”
Horror filled him as he realized what he’d just done. He’d betrayed himself once more.
Worse, he’d betrayed his brother. Again. But that horror was quickly replaced by a resounding fury over the trick they’d played upon him.
“Damn you, Vine!”
When he spun to attack her, she tsked. “Strike me and your brother will bleed in ways you cannot imagine.”
She was wrong there. For he possessed quite the imagination when it came to ways to make others suffer. In that, he’d give even the great she-bitch herself a run for her money.
Aye, there were good and sound reasons he’d been damned.
He’d earned it, with both fists, brawling his way straight to the devil’s throne. Not a source of pride. Merely a statement of fact. One he was more than eager and willing to educate her on.
Yet her cautionary words stayed his hand better than any assault ever could. Because Muerig was one of the exceptionally few things in his life he’d ever cared about. One of the exceedingly rare things he’d ever been willing to protect and bleed for. “What do you mean?”
One moment he was in a searing, infernal pit, and in the next,they were both outside a smutched, bleeding, besmottered hole. The odor here was even worse than the Hadean pits where the demons had been chasing him. The walls around them appeared to breathe, and oozed with a viscid substance that could only be blood.
“Kal?”
He heard Muerig’s weak, tear-filled voice, and that tone iced his fury. While he’d been born an angry, intolerant brawler ready to die over any imagined slight, his brother had never been a fighter of any sort.
And in that heartbeat he was taken back to a time and place where everything was simply complicated. Back to the horrors of that haunting nightmare when he’d found Muerig’s battered, lifeless body and everything had coalesced into one single reverberating pain as all the sins of his life had viciously come home to drive a stake straight through that most vital organ that served only to pump venom through his hardened veins.
This…thiswas so much worse than seeing himself for what he really was.
For what they’d made him.
Held above Kalder’s head, just out of his reach, Muerig was fastened to a narrow ledge. His skin had peeled back from lack of water. Agony bled with every ragged breath he struggled to take. But worse than the torment in those eyes that were so similar to his own was the deep resignation that hovered there.
That unspoken wish for death to end his suffering.
It was a silent, echoing scream that Kalder knew intimately. One his own soul had been shouting since the hour of his unfortunate birth and the one that bitch Mercy had never seen the decency tooblige. Indeed, she took a sick perversion in allowing him to suffer more with every passing year.
With a furious war cry, Kalder tried to climb up the sheer volcanic rock to free his brother, but he slid down the slick, bloody surface that sliced open his hands and left them ravaged.
Muerig cried out.
