Some of Sonja’s many other titles included the Mistress of Telekinesis, Queen of the Psychics, and the Dark Lady of War. She’d once held me prisoner for weeks. She’d tested me, tortured me, then tried to convert me to her side. She was divinely beautiful and evil incarnate. She was also my aunt.
Today Sonja was dressed exactly as I’d seen her last: in a black leather uniform accented with pieces of sparkling armor. Her armor jewelry matched perfectly with the diadem on her head. Her throne was a large leather lounge chair; her footrest was a dark angel on his hands and knees. That was Sonja’s way of showing her soldiers, even her own dark angels, that they were all beneath her. I knew Sonja, and her throne summed her up perfectly. She abused anyone and everyone, including her allies, to get what she needed. Honestly, I wasn’t sure the gods really wanted a deal with the demons if it meant Sonja was involved.
But it was my job to form an alliance with the demons. And despite my misgivings about such an arrangement, I was certain that if we didn’t stand together, we would all die.
“The Guardians will destroy you,” I told the demons, and Sonja hissed. “They will destroy the gods too. But if gods and demons unite, the Guardians won’t stand a chance. You can all fight it out later, after we’ve dealt with the Guardians.”
“The Guardians were able to kill the original Immortals,” said Valerian, the Dark Lord of Witchcraft and Bella’s grandfather. “They are a formidable threat, as you say.”
Valerian’s long hair was as black as midnight in the wilderness, his skin shimmered like pearls, and his eyes sparkled like amethysts. His throne was very robotic, very machine-like. Only the faint thumps of human heartbeats, nearly completely buried beneath all that armor and all those engines, told me there were people inside those mechanical suits.
“But what is your plan for defeating the Guardians?” demanded Ava, her bright blue eyes sparkling with cautious intelligence.
Ava, the Demon of Hell’s Army and the Dark Lady of Sirens, was my other aunt. I’d only met her briefly once before, but she seemed less psychotic than Sonja. Even her throne looked normal. It wasn’t made of people; it was made of some kind of shiny material. It didn’t look quite like metal.
“Skeletons,” Bella whispered to me, her eyes locked on Ava’s throne. “It’s made of skeletons.”
I blinked, and then I saw it too. The shine on Ava’s throne was a spell, a trick of the mind designed to make you not see all the bones that had been tied together to make a seat fit for a deity.
And the beautiful young men and women, glowing with ethereal light, who served Ava drinks and food… I blinked again and that illusion fell away too. They were dead too, reanimated and manipulated by Ava’s Siren’s Song. She’d painted her magic over the grotesque to make it appear beautiful.
But why?
Bella must have been wondering the same thing because she gasped, “I can’t trust her.”
“What do you mean?” I asked her.
But she only shook her head.
Bella has realized how duplicitous and manipulative Ava is, Harker spoke in my mind.
Aren’t they all? I replied.
Yes, Nero said. They are.
But Ava helped Bella find some answers about her past, said Harker.
She must have known the demon was only serving her own interests, Nero said.
We’ll discuss this later, I told them. My mind is not a conference room.
Since I was the only one of the three of us who wasn’t telepathic, they had to each project their thoughts into my mind so I could hear them.
She’s grown so serious and responsible, Harker commented to Nero.
I’m as surprised as you are, replied Nero.
You’re both hilarious, I told them.
At least they hadn’t looped Damiel into this conversation. Honestly, the former Master Interrogator gave me the heebie-jeebies, and that went double for the idea of having him in my head. But Damiel’s character flaws were mitigated somewhat by the fact that he made the world’s best pancakes.
“We are waiting, Leda Pandora,” Ava said, her voice silky. “But we will not wait for long. How do you plan to defeat the Guardians?”
I smiled back at her. “You can’t expect me to share all my secrets before you agree to the alliance. What if you tip off the enemy?”
Sonja laughed. “Spoken like Faris’s daughter. Nothing like a dash of sweet-talk and a heap of paranoia to cover up a total lack of content.”
“If my diplomacy offends you, I can substitute insults instead,” I replied with a tight smile, and Angel hissed to emphasize my point.
Alessandro peered down at my kitten from his throne. “What is that?”
“It’s a cat,” I told him. “Don’t tell me you don’t have cats in hell.”
“Our beasts behave,” he replied in a chilly tone.
The reason there were even monsters on Earth at all was the demons and gods had lost control over their ‘well-behaved’ beasts.
But I didn’t say that. All I said was, “Your beasts behave some of the time.”
They knew what I meant anyway.
“We’ll tolerate no snark from you in these halls, child.” Angry magic sizzled on Sonja’s fingertips. “Nor from your cat.”
“Would you strike down an emissary of peace?” I directed the question not to Sonja, but to all the demons. “I’ve heard such great and terrible things about this hall—and about the Seven who preside here.” I glanced briefly at Sonja. “But the truth is you throw tantrums when people say things you don’t like, and you’re too afraid to make the one alliance that will save you. Perhaps, I should seek out allies elsewhere. I hear your lower nobility is full of demons with enough sense to realize you need this alliance—and with enough ambition to ascend the ranks should an opportunity present itself.”
The demons’ angry roars nearly buried Damiel’s laughter.
“Leda, you’ve got nerve, that’s for sure,” he said.
I waited for the demons to stop raging, then I said, “Look, it’s like this. The gods have betrayed you, and you’ve betrayed them.”
“True,” Violet agreed.
“But it’s different this time,” I told them. “Because this time, I’m the one making the deal. I don’t break my word.” I narrowed my eyes. “And I don’t let anyone break theirs either.”
“Impudent child.” Alessandro scowled at my implicit threat.
Well, actually, I thought my threat was pretty damn explicit, but then again, deities and I often disagreed on things like subtlety, propriety, and the honest-to-goodness difference between right and wrong.
“We should send Faris’s mouthpiece back to him. In pieces.” Sonja’s voice was a scathing hiss.
“If you think Faris is speaking through me, then you really don’t know him at all,” I laughed. “He’d never say the things I do, and he loathes me almost as much as you do.”
Grace rose from her throne, marking the first time my mother had spoken since we’d arrived—and the first time I’d ever heard her speak to me at all. “Why did Faris make you the gods’ emissary?” she asked me.
I looked up at her. The Demon of Faith, the Lady of Dark Vampires, stood close beside her sister Ava. The pale-haired twin demons were barely distinguishable from each other, and I looked a lot more like them than I’d realized—or was comfortable with. According to Lady Saphira’s bodyguard Calix, my mother had spent the entirety of her pregnancy engaged in ancient rituals designed to saturate me in telepathic magic. She’d tried to make me into a weapon every bit as much as Faris had.