“I didn’t, you winged jackass. They volunteered. Reseph likes a good fight, and Ares wants to help Lilliana. I’d have had all four Horsemen, but Limos and Thanatos are hunting the fallen angels who killed Wraith. Thanatos caught one, so he’s…busy, and Limos said she’d drop in and help fight if she didn’t bag a fallen angel of her own by the time the battle starts. So, yeah, you can help. How about you destroy Moloch and his armies and then grab Lilliana? That’d be great.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“I know you can go almost anywhere in Sheoul you want to go. Just as Revenant has access to Heaven.”
Reaver studied the armies surrounding the fortresses. “I’m not merely forbidden to enter any region held by Satan, I’m incapable of it. And since Moloch holds the lands for Satan, I don’t have access to his fortresses.”
“You can wipe out his armies beyond the regions he holds.”
“Not inside Sheoul. There are rules, Azagoth.” Reaver’s gaze held his, the Radiant’s look edged with a warning. “You’d do well to remember that.”
Azagoth laughed at Reaver’s arrogance. “Rules? You, the greatest rule breaker in all of history, are lecturing me about adhering to protocol?”
Reaver shrugged. “You’re catching on.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Azagoth growled. “I haven’t broken any rules.”
“No? Did you not give your griminions the power to kill?”
Azagoth’s jaw damned near hit his boots. Somehow, he managed to keep his composure, even as his mind raced to figure out who had betrayed him.
“It was a long-overdo upgrade,” he said. “Hardly anything to get worked up over. And I did have the demon lawyers at Dire and Dyre look over my contract. They think the section on griminions is vague enough to allow some play.” Heaven had fucked him over with the vague thing, and Azagoth figured it was his turn to twist a clause in his favor. “You should know, I’ll fight any attempts by Heaven to find me in violation of the contract.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Azagoth.” Reaver crossed his arms over his chest. “What you did was illegal, and you know it.”
Cipher had set up dozens of noncombatant figurines around the map, some chosen to represent specific people, some more generic, and Azagoth picked up one with wings as he paced slowly, opposite the table from Reaver.
“You said you were here about Flail.”
The smug jackass pulled out his cell phone, tapped angrily, and then shoved it back into his pocket. “I emailed the file.”
“Then you’ll be leaving, I assume.”
“Right after you assure me you aren’t going to release Satan from the prison I put him in.”
That Reaver was concerned was a no-brainer. He and his twin, Revenant, had pissed off the most powerful, infamous, grudge-holding fallen angel in existence. Of course, they wouldn’t want him walking out on parole nine hundred and some odd years early. Azagoth got that. He wasn’t Satan’s Facebook friend, either.
“I won’t release him from his prison,” Azagoth promised.
“And how can I trust that, given that you’ve already broken a contract signed in your own blood?”
Azagoth squeezed the figurine so hard, its wings pierced the skin of his thumb. “I told you, griminions are a gray area.”
“And what of Part III, Section II, Paragraph I, which specifically states that you cannot, using any means or method, release souls from Sheoul-gra unless they are to be reincarnated? Is that a gray area? I warned you, Azagoth. After you released souls to go after Bael, I warned you not to do it again. Specifically, not to go after his twin.”
Yeah, Reaver had warned him, all right.
If you kill him, all that you know, all that you are…will be destroyed.
Which was why Azagoth had given strict orders to capture Moloch, not kill him.
“You don’t need to worry about Moloch.”
Reaver swiped a hand over the map and grabbed a handful of silver game pieces. Azagoth’s army. “But I do need to worry about the hundred thousand souls you released.”
Son of a bitch.
There was no point in denying it. There was no point in anything except getting Lilliana back. “It’s not worth ruffling your feathers over. Most of them will die in battle and return to Sheoul-gra.”
“Don’t bullshit me!” Reaver repeated, his white and gold wings flaring, and his body glowing with power. “You broke at least three rules, and you did it on a huge scale. You released souls, you gave them the power to evict the souls of living demons, which ultimately gave you a hundred thousand more souls, and then they took over the physical bodies. What you’ve done is beyond forbidden.”
“And I’d do it again,” Azagoth yelled back, charging up his own power. Reaver could kick his ass, but Azagoth would fuck him up hard before it happened. “It’s my wife and child!”
“I can’t keep protecting you.” Reaver swept his arm across the map, wiping it clean. “Right now, this is contained. But it will come out, and I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“What is it you want me to do, Reaver?”
Reaver inhaled deeply, and his wings settled against his back. “I want you to win the battle, and I want you to get Lilliana back. She doesn’t deserve this. None of you do.”
Azagoth crushed a figurine from Moloch’s army under his boot. “Then maybe you could find your brother. He could end all of this.”
“Well, gee, I hadn’t thought of that,” Reaver said with a roll of his brilliant blue eyes. “I don’t suppose you know where he could be?”
As if Azagoth hadn’t given that very question a lot of thought. “Depends on if he gave up his reign willingly or not.”
“He didn’t. He’s imprisoned somewhere. I know he is.”
“Then that narrows down the places he could be.” Azagoth flicked his finger, and all of the figurines on the floor jumped back onto the map. “In order to trap someone as powerful as Revenant, you’d need a container as strong as the one you created for Satan.”
“There are few who can create one like that.”
Azagoth nodded. “I’m aware of that.” He willed the figurines to fight, playing out a battle on the table that he was guaranteed to win. “But one already exists. There’s just one catch.”
“What do you mean?”
The hellhound figures took down a skeleton army guarding Moloch’s north wall. “A few thousand years ago, some fallen angels who were pissed off at Satan built a prison hidden inside a temple, but there were a few snags.”
“Such as?”
“Well, Satan got wind of it, for one. But the real problem is that it’s a voluntary trap.” At Reaver’s raised eyebrows, he continued. “Its power comes from the victim’s desire to be inside it.”
“Who would want to be inside it?”
Azagoth used to wonder the same thing. Now, he knew. “Anyone whose mate was being used as the bait.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“Inside a temple in the Ca’askull region. Getting there is a journey many don’t survive, and only a handful know it was built to house the trap. The snare itself is like the Abyss in Heaven.” It had, in fact, been built using materials from Heaven, a dirty little secret Azagoth had learned when he questioned the original builders, one of whom still resided on the second ring of the Inner Sanctum. “You can only find it if the need is great enough.”