Twenty-nine this time. A significant number to me alone. My lip twitched as I thought of the Celts, but I forced my expression to remain neutral as the trembling legion told me how she’d died. From the creature’s shiver, I knew it expected to die for what it said.
And it was right to be afraid.
The torture it described was unspeakable, quartered and drawn in the Carpathian Mountains. They spared no details when painting a picture of the throng that had surrounded her, nor of the terror she’d felt, the things they’d done that made her inhumane execution a comparative relief.
I would look bored. I would politely listen. I would dismiss the servants. I would not let them know how I seethed within.
And yet…
My covert visits to the mortal realm to end the lives of all involved in ways that would make Czars of Torture tremble. The general of the mutilation realm would have taken notes of the things I did, of the ways I made responsible parties suffer.
My retribution was in secret, as apathy was my outward expression.
The message to the Slavic deities who allowed her death on their soil was bloody.
But they weren’t meant to know it was me. It was war. It was an ambush. It was a usurper. It was someone else. Something else. Hundreds of witnesses could attest to how profoundly unbothered I’d been each time news came of her passing. Surely, I had nothing to do with the slaughter.
Until her third death.
She was only eight years old.
“Don’t shoot the messenger” is a trite platitude, relevant only to those who’ve never had to watch a messenger report atrocities about the one they loved. A messenger was meant to be a neutral party. There was nothing neutral about their words. No unbiased third party could return to Hell’s palace and walk to my room and say the things they’d said and expect to live.
Killing the messenger, as it turned out, was a mistake on more accounts than one.
It hadn’t been difficult to guess that I’d been responsible for the entrails strewn about those responsible for the death of her previous cycle. Murdering the legion who’d reported on this death in front of infernal courtiers was the confirmation they needed: Hell’s Prince was not indifferent.
Hell had an established weakness, and no matter how I tried to hide it, its Prince was coming apart at the seams.
Whether Izi had legions of her own stationed outside my room or if she’d heard rumors of my mental state and responded, I had no idea. She intercepted me as I burst from my bedchambers. She shouldn’t have been in my palace at all. She lived with her mother, Queen of Shadows, in the Nightmare Realm. It was threatening in name only. The nightmare belonged to anyone who stood against them. She, her mother, and the citizens of their court thrived within. But as she looked at me with soot and coal in her black eyes, I positioned myself as an enemy welcoming nightmares.
“This is a mistake,” she said, jumping to her feet before I’d turned to address her.
I stormed past the couch on which she’d been lounging. I didn’t want to know how long she’d been there or what she’d heard. I needed to speak to the King.
“Don’t tell our father,” she urged as if she heard my thoughts.
As much as I hated it, her words gave me pause. It was like a physical tripwire brought me to a halt. I regarded my sister, pinch and curve and smoke and shadow, as the First Daughter of Succubi looked at me with true desperation in her eyes. She looked at me with eyes that understood the mortal realm better than I could hope. Despite my better judgment, I remained planted in the hall. The wispy tendrils of her hair coiled and vanished as she stepped toward me.
She clasped her hands like a monk in prayer. “You’re standing on the precipice of something terrible,” she said. “If you involve him, you’ll throw Hell’s weight behind your cause and validate their efforts. He will take your side if you stand with this human. Do you see what that means for the realm? We’ll be at war with too many battlefronts to count. We cannot win.”
I looked down the hall, thrusting my hand to its empty corridors as if her opal soul shimmered in its vacant space. “Because leaving her alone has served us?”
“It has,” Izi insisted.
My jaw dropped open.
“You are suffering because you still care,” she pressed. “You opened yourself to human emotion, and it can be glorious. I am not without sympathy, brother. I adore sipping from the human cup. But you cannot drink to the point of drunkenness. You’ve lost yourself.”
“But they?—”
“They’re hurtingher,” she insisted. “Not you. Stop tipping your hand. Every time you react, you give them power.”
“And who isthem.”
She threw up her hands, gesturing to the palatial ceilings as if every pantheon rested atop the pillars. “Everyone! You’ve handed Hell’s power to every god, every immortal, even every man who dares push you in one fragile area. If you hadn’t slaughtered those men?—”
“I didn’t?—”
