Arrogant fool! If Wraith were here now, Than would beat some sense into him. He’d make the idiot understand how his loss would affect his family, his friends. Thanatos.
Grief squeezed his heart, crippling him for a moment as Limos grilled Curson. He didn’t care what she did to him. Limos had cared for Wraith, too.
“How did you kill him?” Punch. Grunt.
Grin. “A sword through the heart.”
Enraged by the flippant answer and the sickening glee in Curson’s smile, Thanatos shoved past Limos and slammed his fist into the bastard’s sternum, delivering a solid, bone-cracking blow to his black heart.
“How?” he demanded. “Wraith was immune to damage from fallen angels.”
It took Curson thirty seconds to stop wheezing. “Moloch assured us”—he gasped again—“that was no longer the case.”
“And how did Moloch know that?” Limos asked, and Curson clammed up, clenching his jaw and staring in defiance. “How?”
She jammed one cheery yellow fingernail under his chin, and a couple of heartbeats later, his muscles started to dissolve beneath his skin as his body digested itself. Curson’s deep, resonant scream came from his very soul.
“This is famine,” she growled. “Soon, you’ll be nothing but skin and bones and gnawing agony. Tell me how Moloch knew Wraith’s charm had been disabled, and I’ll stop.”
“He arranged it,” Curson blurted. “Stop! Please…stop.”
Pleased with herself, Limos stepped back and brushed off her hands as Curson went limp with exhaustion, his ribs showing where they hadn’t before.
“That’s not something he could just…arrange,” Thanatos said. “Not when a Radiant angel is the one who bestowed that immunity on him. So, who did Moloch get to remove the enchantment?”
Curson said nothing, trying to catch his breath, but when Limos took a step forward, he remarkably found his voice.
“One of the only people besides Reaver who could.” The fallen angel lifted his wobbly head to give Thanatos a weary smile of contempt, and Thanatos’s heart lurched. Don’t say it. Don’t say it… “His twin, your uncle. Revenant.”
Chapter 18
The shackles around Lilliana’s wrists chafed with every sharp tug made by the scrawny, twisted demon dragging her down the torch-lit hallway. Her bare feet kept tripping over the uneven flooring, and it was a miracle she hadn’t taken a tumble yet.
“Where are we going?” She yanked on the chains, earning another violent tug that sent her careening into the wet, slimy wall.
She didn’t know why she even tried. The twisty bastard hadn’t said a single word since fetching her from her cell.
But he really didn’t need to. She had a sick feeling that she was about to face the consequences of Azagoth’s failure to release Satan by Moloch’s deadline. Fear, so intense she could smell it coming out of her pores, made her even clumsier as Twisty hauled her into the great room she knew well by now.
When she wasn’t in a filthy cell, she was chained to the skull throne, forced to watch the depraved activities of Moloch’s guests and servants. That was when she was lucky. When she wasn’t…
She shuddered. She could take any amount of torture she was subjected to…she’d suffered at the hands of a monster before. What she couldn’t take was the thought of her baby suffering, and she wasn’t sure how much longer it could remain in the safety of her womb.
Not that there was a choice, obviously. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t keep repeating, over and over, “Stay inside, little one. Stay inside where it’s safe.”
Twisty wrenched the chain and swung her into the middle of the room…and into a crowd of demons and fallen angels, all of them sporting heinous, fresh injuries. Some snarled at her as if it were her fault that they were missing limbs, while others leered or wagged their forked tongues at her in obscene gestures.
God, she wished she was asleep. In sleep, she was happy. Safe. And Azagoth might be there. Or Maleficent.
At first, Lilliana had been startled to see Mal flickering on the periphery of her dreams. Then she remembered Cara mentioning that bonded hellhounds could communicate through dreams, and while Mal had never given Lilliana a hellhound’s kiss to create the bond, Lilliana still felt a connection with the beast.
Mystical bonds aside, Lilliana had tried to get close to Mal in her dreams, and Mal had clearly wanted to get to Lilliana, but it was as if there was a hundred-yard-thick force field between them. Maybe the lack of a true bond had kept them from being able to communicate in the dreams, or maybe Maleficent’s abilities weren’t powerful enough to reach Lilliana. It would make sense, given that her small size and lack of physical and supernatural strength had made her an outcast among her kind.
Cara had said that if not for her and the safety of Ares’ island, hellhounds would have ripped Mal to pieces long ago.
Twisty clamped his three-clawed paw down on the back of Lilliana’s neck and forced her to the ground, where he clipped her chain to a drain grate that was already gurgling with the blood of the injured demons.
Terror spiked as the crowd parted and scrambled backward, and she knew Moloch was coming.
“Your mate has been a bad boy.” The grotesquely distorted architecture of the room, reminiscent of a charred skeleton that had been stretched and warped, amplified Moloch’s voice into a terrifying entity of its own.
But that was nothing compared to the sight of the big male, his three-foot horns dripping gore onto his bald head. His armor, as grotesque and skeletal as the chamber’s architecture, glistened with blood splatter, and the cracks in his gauntlets were caked with bits of flesh and hair.
Stark fear clawed at Lilliana on a level so primal, she forgot how to breathe. Inhale. Inhale. Inhale, dammit!
Somehow, she didn’t pass out or piss herself. Somehow, she raised her head and met Moloch’s black gaze with defiance. “Not naughty enough. You’re still alive.”
She paid for that with a backhand that knocked her back so hard that her shoulders nearly dislocated when the chain jerked her body. Welcoming the pain throbbing in her wrists, shoulders, and jaw because it chased away the terror, she braced herself for the next blow.
“I fucking told him not to try anything stupid. So, what does he do? He tries something stupid.” Moloch bit out a handful of curses in Sheoulic. “He and his Horseman buddies slaughtered thousands of my men.”
Lilliana had a hard time feeling bad about that. Still, she offered her most insincere condolences. “I’m so very sorry.”
That earned her another backhand and a subsequent throbbing cheek to match the first one. “You will be sorry.” The crazy in his eyes dimmed a little, a sign, she’d learned, that meant the Moloc half of the soul had more influence than the Bael half. Both were dangerous in different ways, but she preferred to deal with the slightly more stable personality of Moloc. “Azagoth will be even sorrier. Heaven isn’t going to be happy about what he’s done.”
She snorted. “I don’t think Heaven will care that he snuffed some evil scum.”
Flail strutted up next to Moloch in thigh-high boots, her fine mesh catsuit revealing pretty much everything. “I think they’ll care that he re-souled tens of thousands of demons to do it.”