Don’t harm my human.
Don’t even touch her.
But just as I found loopholes, so did the gods.
Our treaty said nothing of nudges, of prompts, of whispers. I was helpless against their pushes, their encouragement, their malignant guidance as they lured her toward a title that would facilitate the prophecy in one lifetime after another. They beckoned her out of churches, goaded her out of her home, bribed her to step into brothels, to sit down next to Madams, tosidle up to a desperate man with a pocket full of gold, all without touching her.
I followed Love’s soul as humanity—too disorganized to be a colony of ants, too wicked to be a swarm of wasps, too complex and beautiful and nuanced to be the animals I was already bored of comparing them to, and too fleeting to worry about the lasting impact of their sins—filled every corner.
The mortal world was mapped, known, conquered.
Heaven had, as I’d said from the conclave, done exactly what I’d said it would do.
I, on the other hand, did not rise to the occasion.
I was not my father. I had not once served Heaven’s King, loved its ruler, or shared the blood of the covenant with angelic comrades. I had no bias as I watched a war deity be the very best of his kind. I had a raw appreciation for the black and white fulfillment of his purpose, but my heart turned cold against thoughts of the war, its strategies, its stakes.
My father fought with me once, and only once, on the topic.
Exasperated, he’d pleaded, “You are my son! You are Hell’s Prince! This is your birthright! You must?—”
“Have to disregard all Hell stands for, forgo my free will, fight blindly for a king whether or not I consent?”
He forewent swords and blood and kingdoms and borders while the other pantheons remained stuck in the past. An innovator, he began conquering culture, consciousness, minds, dreams, and every deviation of war long before the others knew they could expand their definitions.
He won.
Yet even his own book had an antagonist and thus continued my usefulness on the global stage.
No one had seen him in four thousand years. But if I got the chance…
I popped my knuckles at the thought.
Cryptids, fae, lesser entities, inter-realm parasites, discarded heralds, spirits, beings of battle, creatures of the garden, wights, omens, lurkers, dream-feeders, relics, saints, nameless miracle-workers, witches, warlocks, wraiths, beasts of elder names, unseen governors, the half-divine, stray seraphim, lesser angels, the vast majority of Hell’s citizens, royal or otherwise, and the a rambling litany of preternatural beings too long to bother spewing, none of which could land a killing blow, even if they had the gumption.
They’d already believed in the champion we might conceive before witnessing how I’d ended a sovereign member of the undying. Now, global eyes turned toward me, convinced their role was more important than ever, even at the risk of their immortality.
One piece of the prophecy remained. My caution, in theory, would have been unwarranted in her lives as a mother, a seamstress, a shaman, a basket weaver, a military wife, if she’d ever wanted to have children. We could have sired a cambion—powerful, magical, and utterly irrelevant to Heaven and its games.
Those days were long gone.
All eyes focused on the missing technicality: Love had to be a whore.
In the hundreds of years that followed, many lost their lives.
Humans to be sure.
Fae in the dozens.
A bold god or two.
But most were subtle with their coercion. Those who came with silk, coin, and a purr, were usually allowed to keep their lives, as long as she remained safe, comfortable, and happy.
Love found herself with Madams, sometimes in the plush of red-velvet brothels, then serving amidst the smoke of opium dens, after that, a Bavarian village making house calls until I ensured she was hired by a foreign dignitary as a live-in mistress on one’s dime.
American boots marched into Port-au-Prince in 1915, which took the pressure off local deities. Gods needn’t get their hands dirty when invading soldiers were so efficient at violating land and body alike.
My wrath earned its own ghost story as the streets ran red with vigilante justice for more than a decade. I was single-handedly responsible for more dead Americans in that cycle than the Haitian resistance.
