Page 8 of Bond of Passion

“I remember,” Tavin said. “Sort of. I was kind of out of my mind during those days.”

Lore shot him a look of sympathy. “What Deth did to you was…” He shuddered, his gaze scanning the sun-dappled sea. As a fellow Seminus demon, Lore had needs that, if not fulfilled, meant agony, insanity, and death, just like Tavin. Tavin wondered if Lore’s human half tempered the demon half. Maybe he’d ask someday.

“Do you ever…?” Tavin trailed off, not sure he wanted to know the answer to the question lodged in his throat.

“Do I ever think about all the people I killed?” Lore shrugged. “Nope. They were mostly scum. And there’s nothing I can do about it now.”

That hadn’t been what Tavin had been about to ask, but close. “Do you ever worry that some of them will come back to take revenge?”

Lore inhaled deeply, and his hand trembled a little as he raised the beer bottle to his lips and took another swig. “Revenant and Reaver estimate that half of the Resurrected from Sheoul-gra were killed in Azagoth’s war. The rest…” He smiled at his son, who was hightailing it toward the waves, Idess in close pursuit. That kid was like Forrest Gump. Always running. “Most of them are likely enjoying their second chance at life and aren’t focused on revenge.”

Revenant probably knew what he was talking about when it came to the numbers of Resurrected destroyed in Hell, given he was the king of the place. King until Satan was released from his prison, anyway.

But if Revenant or Lore really thought that demons who’d died horribly and then rotted in Sheoul-gra would forget their deaths and hellish afterlife, they were delusional.

That said, Tavin wouldn’t mind being in that same delusional boat. Instead, he found himself half-hoping and half-dreading the possibility that one particular formerly deceased female would come for him.

After learning that all souls in Sheoul-gra were re-embodied when it was destroyed, he’d searched for her himself, but so far, he’d come up empty-handed. He’d called in a couple of favors too, past associates who could get into Neethul society and dig around a little. But no one had found evidence that Gristlen was alive, let alone back with her psycho family.

Not that he’d expected anything different. She’d feared and despised her family, and there was no way she’d want to be part of it again. If she’d survived the big battle Azagoth had sent her into, she’d likely be laying low. She’d have spent the last couple of years doing everything she could to stay away from other Neethuls. Her kind and gentle nature was everything the species hated, and she’d been miserable with them.

Would she want revenge for what Tavin did to her? Was she even capable of it?

Of course, there was also a chance that she had been reincarnated into another species of demon before the day Azagoth went mad and released all demon souls into the bodies they’d died in. If that were the case, Gristlen was a young demon somewhere with no memories of her past lives. She could be any species, but probably, hopefully, one that matched her soul’s moral alignment.

He’d been convinced almost from the moment he’d met her that she’d been a good soul wrongly placed in the body of an extremely evil species, and he hoped she was finally in the right body and at peace.

He hoped that was the case because he was sure that peace wasn’t something he would ever find.

He didn’t deserve it.