I manifested into my office and discarded my leather jacket. Shadows unfurled from my frame, crawling across the floor, the walls, and the tinted windows, until they plunged the room into complete darkness.
Lightning struck between my eyes in the form of a headache. I gripped my head with a growl and staggered as another bolt rocked my balance. My shin whacked into the coffee table. Inhaling a slow, steady breath, I straightened to my full height and drove my dress shoe down toward the culprit, shattering yet another glass coffee table with a violent stomp.
I dug hastily into the pocket of my pants for two cigarettes. My fingers shook so hard I dropped the damn things. I pinched the roll-ups between my lips, lit them both, and inhaled hard.
Falling back, I sagged into the couch with a satisfied groan and snapped my lighter closed. The temporary illusion over my skin began to fade away, evaporating into the air like smoke. I lifted my hand in front of my face. The false image of bare human fingers wavered like a mirage, until my black leather gloves emerged through the illusion.
“Forget to eat before your hot date?”
I didn’t startle, but I did stiffen at the voice.
Here we go.
In my peripheral, a silhouette of a man sat in the shadows behind my large mahogany desk. His tan fingers steepled together, sapphire eyes daggering into mine.
“Lucifer.” Smoke escaped my nostrils as I snubbed out my roll-ups in an ashtray beside the couch. “I can explain . . . ”
“Have a seat.” He gestured sharply to the chair in front of him.
Rising from the couch, I folded the sleeves of my dress shirt up my tattooed forearms and kept my affect cool. I strode to the desk to lower myself into the armchair. Devin Star leaned away from the shadows and into the light, his mouth curving in a deceivingly friendly manner. I prepared for the worst.
“Did you sleep with her?” His voice held a violent edge.
“Are you out of your mind?”
“I must be,” Lucifer said. “I trusted you to handle this. Carrion Angels, eh? Never knew storytelling was your second calling. You should write a book.”
I maintained a neutral expression. “You were watching us.”
“I needed to see why you were prolonging our plans.” Lucifer picked an imaginary piece of dust off his silken red dress shirt.
“Imagine my surprise when I discovered you’ve been putting on a five-act fucking Shakespeare play for the girl.”
My fingers tapped against the armrest. I scoped out the ceiling as I chose my words with careful precision. “In order for us to utilize her gift, she must be willing and trusting in me. Respectfully, I thought we were on the same page.”
“The same page,” Lucifer repeated, leaning forward in his seat.
“Tell me, kid, does being on the same page include you admitting your mistake today?”
“I don’t make mistakes.”
My phone went off from my pocket, blaring “Hells Bells.”
Lucifer placed his own phone flat on my desk, since he was the one who had called me, and ended it. “Subtle,” he said.
I rubbed the back of my neck and silenced the device. Damnit.
He knew about that too.
“Whatever, man. I broke things off with her as David. Got her all sad and vulnerable, just like you wanted, and yeah, I forgot to turn my ringer off. She put two and two together, so I had to save face with some bullshit story. Who cares?”
The temperature of the office rose to a sweltering level, enough to make my vision spin. I loosened the collar of my shirt with my finger, the heat in question coming from within me. Lucifer’s glare sparked to flame with condemning rage.
“You care,” he said suddenly, and there was a split second where I didn’t know what to say back. “You like her.”
An irritated smirk sliced across my mouth. “You have misconstrued my actions as affectionate. Faith is not my type—”
“You’ve lost your touch, kid—”
“Do not patronize me like I am a child,” I snarled, my temper flaring with a whip of shadow in the air. “I’ve existed on this planet far too long to have crushes on mortals.” My head tilted to one side as I lazed back into my chair again. “No offense . . . ”
Lucifer lunged toward me, launching himself over the desk. His hand bit into my throat, pinning me immobile against the chair, and I just sat there, unafraid, indifferent.
“For centuries, I have treated you like you are my own son,”
Lucifer said, looming over me. “Together, we have lived a life of luxury and power, but do not forget how this alliance began.”
“Take a joke, Lu,” I said. “People will start to think you’re getting sensitive in your prehistoric age—”
Lucifer wrung my neck in a vise grip. His power lapped across my skin like molten flames, searing a layer of my skin underneath my sleeves. I grinned like a masochist basking in the anguish, fangs clenched together and bared, daring him to do his worst.
He squeezed my throat harder, and even though I didn’t need to breathe, the innate mortal instinct snapped into place, and I could feel the sensation of suffocating. I clamped down on his forearm to try to tear him off me. It was useless. He was too strong. I conceded, albeit reluctantly, with an animalistic snarl.
“I’m sorry,” I choked out. “I’m sorry, all right!”
Lucifer’s hand released me at once. I quickly recovered to show no outward weakness, though I was humiliated and seething inside.
He’d crushed my esophagus like a goddamn soda can with little effort. When was the last time I’d indulged on souls? I couldn’t let myself get weak like this. Not around Lucifer.
Back behind my desk, Lucifer uncapped my bottle of “whiskey” and poured it into a glass. He took a sip and grimaced. “Iced tea.
You’re a little shit, you know that?”
I kept silent, still simmering with rage, my jaw wired shut to resist all the snarky, venomous comments rampant in my vindictive brain. Immortal or not, an archangel of Lucifer’s age could tear my body limb from limb with ease and scatter my remains in all seven continents to slowly mend back together. Not that I’d personally tortured someone in that way . . .
“You and I, we have an understanding,” Lucifer said. “Don’t you want revenge? Don’t you want freedom? Without her, you know I cannot lift your Seven Deadly Sins curse.”
The grand illusion that our alliance was equal shattered centuries ago, after I’d struck a deal with the old Devil. I was twice cursed: my death curse, and the Seven Deadly Sins curse. In exchange for helping Lucifer secure a prophecy, he had promised to free me from the Seven Deadly Sins, which bound my soul to the realm of Heaven. It forced me to use my powers to collect all mortal souls and distribute them for the lucrative business of the afterlife.
Lucifer carved a shape on my desk with his talon. If I failed him, that single talon could cleave my entire body in half, black blood and gore pouring from the gash. He’d drag me to Hell and hang me up by my spine with my intestines spilling out. Where I’d stay, cursed, unable to feed and slowly mummifying, trapped in my own harrowing thoughts as I lost my mind. More than I already had.
“Bring me her soul by midnight tomorrow,” Lucifer said. “On All Hallows’ Eve.”
“Your wish is my command, Your Majesty.”
He vanished in a fit of flames.
Rage lengthened my fangs. I gripped my desk with one hand and chucked the whole fixture across the office with a menacing roar.
It smashed into the television and blew a massive hole in the wall into the vacant office next door.
He’d hung my weakness over my head. He’d baited me like a fucking helpless child. I was no child. I was two thousand years old.
Prowling back and forth, I tried to control my wrath before I tore this entire room apart and then took it to the streets. My talons had already extended from my fingertips, tearing through my gloves, and I could feel my other side purring to be let out.
I braced my hands on the wall and hung my head as I tried to calm myself. Faith’s art portfolio lay open at my feet amongst a mess of files. My lip curled as I bent down to pick it up.
The painting of the willow tree.
There was too much on the line to let another deity take advantage of her power. I could not let her get away. No matter how much she’d despise me once she found out the truth.
This is what you wanted.
I turned with her portfolio in hand and caught a glimpse of my reflection in the tinted windowpane. Sharp, cruel features repelling any signs of life, like cold marble. Hunger had hunted and killed the green hues in my mismatched eyes, draining them to an onyx black.
It chilled me to the bone.
How I looked exactly like my father then.
The willow tree slipped from my fingertips, and I went back.
Back to my death.
I stood alone in the darkness of the corridors of the gladiator arena, torches flickering in the stale, humid space. Drums rolled out in a slow, rhythmic march. I felt no adrenaline. No fear. Nothing at all.
My hand clenched against the hilt of my sword, the familiar grip of my weapon giving me enough strength to trudge forward.
Sunlight slanted into the corridor and chaos erupted, a roar of a crowd so blaringly loud, I swore the ground beneath my feet trembled. I sauntered down the corridor into the rowdy arena with a modest wave to the crowd.
Golden sunlight bounced off my armor, the shield down my right arm, and the designs along my helmet shifting color to black. I slashed my sword through the air and in a grand display of skill, spun the weapon around my body. The crowd’s shrieking was deafening, having traveled from all over Rome to see the renowned “Dru the Beast” now in this arena.
I prowled to the center of the performance area and posed with a wide stance and a proud, erect posture. Then I feigned a smile at their heartless faces. The performance, the lively armor, it was all an act, an unwavering mask I’d worn for years as a slave to the game.
Once, in a moment of weakness, I’d begged those mortals, pleaded, for someone—anyone to see. See me for a human being. See the scars on my ankles and wrists. See how I’d tried to rise from this hell, and how my own father would pull me back down. What a waste, to beg humanity to save me. Mortals turned a blind eye to suffering for the sake of their own entertainment.
Today, my mask wavered. For beneath my hard-wearing exterior was a decimated soul so tortured it craved pain.
Unspeakable grief had stunned my heart into a complete state of numbness. For days, I’d wandered around Rome like an empty corpse. I’d lost everything. Everything, in a series of tribulations and deaths so sudden and swift they felt like cruel vanishing acts, leaving me questioning both my existence and the creators who had put me on my path.
Why me? I’d been torn limb from limb with everything still intact. I’d fallen to my knees, defeated by a power far out of my control, that left me with only the flicker of fading memories and the waning ghosts of people I should have held on to tighter. To be so shattered with grief you forget how to breathe. To live. Frightening is the man who has nothing left to lose.
“Dru the Beast! Dru the Beast! Dru the Beast!”
My insides churned with disgust at these sadistic people. They’d get their thrilling game today.
The drums rolled for the challenger.
My sorrow had ironically led me here. Back to the macabre games that had torn me from a normal childhood. Yes, this was where I planned to die, where I would coerce my opponent to take my life.
The challenger marched out from an opposite entrance. He ventured to the center of the elliptical area and faced off for battle.
This other gladiator, the challenger, stood a handful of inches shorter than my almost seven-foot height. Although he was slighter in stature and wore iron panels not as extravagantly detailed as mine, he held a certain confidence over my abilities. He didn’t have bands around his ankles. He wore plain leather shoes. His obsidian cape, strewn into the armor on his shoulders, flogged the hot air with fine, thick material that seemed kingly.
The thunderous crowd roared on with eagerness for battle. A gate lifted into the arena and in came two midnight jaguars. Feeling their intense fear was a sixth sense that lifted the shackles of my awareness. They’d been taunted more than usual today.
The challenger did not seem fazed by the wild animals either. I played the part of my celebrity role and fell into a defensive position.
The animals circled the perimeter of the arena at full sprint, clawing at the walls and howling, earning heckles from the crowd. Food was hurled into the pit, hitting the poor animals, and aggravating them further. Men with spears ran into the arena and corralled the jaguars to the center of the space. Petrified and riled up, the feline beasts turned their attention onto us, the fighters. They stalked closer to us, their heads lowered and ears flat.
I sank to the ground to mirror their movement, my golden plate guard scraping against old scar tissue over my heart. The remnants of three years before, when I’d tried to take my life in the river outside my home. As I reached my last moments, I’d thought better—I wanted to live, and I tried with all my might to surface from the water. The boulder I’d strapped to my back had done its job, and my feet slipped on the wet stones beneath the water. My mother had discovered my body later that day on the riverbank and made an ultimate sacrifice. She’d used the unpredictability of black magic to resurrect me by combining my heart with a cat’s.
One of the jaguars charged across the arena toward me. I faced the animal as a predator myself, low to the ground and patient. I waited until the last second to bring up my sword, slashing the first jaguar with an explosion of thick ruby liquid and fur. The injury would satisfy the arena without killing the animal, an unspoken rule for most of the gladiators. Landing inelegantly, the jaguar rolled onto its feet and hurried away from me, blood trailing behind it. The injured feline was captured by the men with spears, chained, and hauled out of the arena alive.
The second cat stalked behind me, spring-loaded to pounce. I’d been distracted by my own thoughts, so I’d miscalculated its attack, and it knocked me hard to the ground. Its claws burrowed into the flesh of my shoulders and tried to rip apart tendons. As I was mauled, my challenger with the black cape made no move to help me, instead circling the scene with slow, calculated steps. I held open the animal’s jaw with my bare bloodied hands and planned on wrestling the cat into exhaustion so it would be pulled out of the arena. The other competitor had plans of his own, as he stepped in and speared the animal through the top of its skull.
I staggered back in shock, hot blood running down my leg and into the sand. Edging toward the dying animal, I crouched down to comb my fingers through the animal’s fur as it fought to live.
Turning my head away, I twisted my hands to break the animal’s neck and end its pain. The competitor’s boastful laugh grated down my spine.
I drew my sword and charged at the competitor at full force. Our massive blades crashed together. We shifted our weight as our weapons sliced through the air again, dodging each other at nearly equal skill levels. However, I had neither slept nor eaten enough to endure the physical demand of sword fighting, and the challenger’s attacks were ceaseless and exhausting. He swung his blade out with inhuman speed, the blur of the weapon coming down hard as it carved a deeper wound into the claw-marked lesions I already had. My teeth grated as I clamped a hand over the wound, my vision strobing in and out.
When I looked up, the challenger vanished. I spun fast, and he was somehow standing behind me, his cape billowing out over the sun like a dark doom as he sprang toward me. He kicked out a foot and connected with my chest armor, hurling me back with a powerful force into the compacted sand. I landed hard on my injured shoulder with an agonizing scream, and the crowd swiftly switched their favor to the conquering gladiator with deafening cries.
The gladiator in the black cape turned toward the crowd, acknowledging their eruption of applause.
“What kind of man harms a helpless animal?” I shouted. “You are no man at all!”
Charging at him with my sword, we collided again. This time, I gained ground, negating each of his attacks, unleashing the full strength of my body into each hard blow.
The challenger bled from multiple small wounds, an oily black blood drenching the sand that I did not care to notice, and soon his weapon was knocked out of his hand. Tears blurred my vision as I carved the air with my entire body, slicing into his forearm between his armor sleeves. He buckled to the ground, clutching the space of skin where I’d cut him to the bone. One look at his injury, and his head went back. He’d fainted.
The crowd went crazy.
Energy pulsed in the air, retribution beckoning, raising the hair at my nape like a sixth sense. Slowly, I bent to pick up the challenger’s sword. My shoulders stiffened, a powerful sensation washing over me from the moment my fingers clenched the handle. A key clicking into place inside a lock. My head tilted down and I dragged the rough pads of my fingers along the unusual engravements in the hilt and the metal of the weapon. As I did so, a dark whisper unfurled inside my mind.
The one you hate the most . . . must die.
Heat flushed my body with the rise of a lethal fever, and my fury amplified with it. I clenched the sword tighter and glared at the unconscious gladiator, imagining his veiled face was my father’s.
He had killed them. He’d killed them all. And now I’d kill him. Kill him for betraying us all, for all the abuse I’d suffered because of him!
“DRU THE BEAST! DRU THE BEAST! ”
Sweat poured down the sides of my face, the world pulsing in hallucinations. They played out on the arena sand like ghosts on puppet strings. Sinister memories of my youth, my father’s constant berating and abuse. His fist colliding with my small, boyish body and knocking me down. I’d blocked it out, blocked it all out, but now his wrongdoings were coming back to life, the fury of a childhood robbed fueling an uproar of retribution.
The mirage rippled, and I saw myself across the arena. False fabrications of me, as the full-grown man I was now, driving my sword through my father’s heart. Mutilating his body until it was unrecognizable. The engraved sword grew hot and wavered in my hand as these thoughts spiraled out of control.
Your father destroyed your family, hissed a serpentine voice, and you let him run away. Coward. You died in that room with your wife and unborn child. If anyone deserves to die, it’s him. It’s Malphas Cruscellio.
Do it. Kill him, kill him now!
I lifted the sword with a madman’s intention, when my head turned, and in the reflection of the weapon, I saw my eyes. They were consumed in black with filaments branching outward like veins, and I recognized I was not myself. I threw down the weapon at once, feeling as though a vise had released my soul.
The sound of the arena warped back into full volume, and the sorrow tucked deep inside my heart exploded. My shoulders collapsed inward, a wheezed breath escaping me in a pained sob.
Weak, broken, pathetic. I’d never killed anyone before, and I’d never planned to. It was an oath I had made myself long ago.
I stared at the fallen sword, fear stricken at what it had done to me. Something vile, inherently evil had beckoned me from the blade, and how seamlessly it had sunk its fangs into my vulnerable mind. And I liked it.
Like a coward, I ran. Hurried toward the corridor to escape the arena. Faster, faster. The civilians in the stands became violent, booing and heckling, throwing objects into the arena. Scorching heat rippled off the sand and their faces transformed, undulating between human and demented creatures. Creatures possessed by wrath.
It halted me in my tracks
Something was terribly wrong.
I turned to look over my shoulder. The silent challenger, who was very much awake, lifted his head. His injured arm mended back to normal, stretched out toward the ground. My heart hammered as the sinister engraved blade slid across the sand to him without any touch. The challenger rose from the ground as though in slow motion, his head lowered like a bull’s before he kicked off, hurtling toward me in a blur.
I twisted fully around, reacting in a blur to his attack. Shock swept over my features. It happened so fast. My sword pierced clean through a gap in his armor to his heart. I freed the hilt of the blade, mortified. The veiled man fell back, his black cape sweeping out beneath him. The dark material transformed into a cloak, rippling against the sand like water as his body slammed into the ground, and his helmet came tumbling off.
I gazed into the challenger’s endless black eyes and stumbled back, shock choking out my breath. “Father.”
The one who had stolen everything from me. My heart pounded as I relived the tragedy in an instant. Him, standing over my dead mother, who lay in a broken heap on the floor. And my wife, and our child, who should have been born that night, unrecognizably torn apart in her birthing bed.
The blood dripping from the knife in my father’s hand was the final blow. An unfathomable betrayal. I’d hurled myself toward him, but my father was a powerful demigod of manipulation. His power had brought me down to my knees, where I broke.
Inconsolable cries of grief had stretched out like a howl. Why?
Why would he do this? I’d begged him to kill me too.
My father had placed his hand on my cheek, an ostensibly loving gesture I had never received from him. “My greatest offense is my most painful secret,” he’d said. “A secret, which I must take to the grave.”
Black eyes crueler and colder and emptier than ever before. And his words, those cryptic words. They stained my memory with unresolved mystery. I’d felt his power pour into me again, and my vision had faded to black.
When I’d awoken the next day, lying on the floor, the blood and the gore of the scene had been cleaned, but my loved ones remained dead, wrapped divinely in my mother’s precious silk cloth. My father was gone. He’d left on horseback, leaving me to my own devices.
Leaving me to bury these three precious souls, and my own heart, six feet underground.
Now I was here, in the arena, feeling as if I were separated from my body. My father, who I’d perceived as indestructible, dying, by my hand, my sword through his chest. And again, I asked the gods, Why? Why had he returned to fight me here? Why had he thrown himself at my sword? Why had he killed my family?
“Alexandru.” His weak, raspy voice drew me to the present.
The hard-hearted general, doling out edicts for his young soldier.
This death should not have affected me. Malphas Cruscellio was no father. But he was always there, and now he would not be. I would be truly alone.
“Hurry, my son. Come closer . . . ”
Tearing off my helmet, I collapsed to my knees. “I am here, Father. I am listening.”
“In weeping, find strength in the root,” he whispered. “How sharp, the willow’s slender branch.”
I leaned back to look at his face. His onyx eyes shone wet, and he was dead. Gone to the void of the afterlife, though his riddle lingered like a warning.
Blackness crawled from beneath his body. The hair at the back of my nape lifted, and I crawled backward as I tracked the large shadow slinking across the ground. It stretched along the sand, forming a dark apparition of a man as he rose to a looming height with thunderous laughter.
The draping hood of the cloak veiled all his face, except for the crescent smirk across his pale mouth. “Do you remember me, Alexandru?” the creature asked, mockery lacing his serpentine words.
“Trapped in that mirror in the woods?”
Pressure broke at the center of my skull. I stood in an unhurried way, seized by fear.
“Ahrimad,” I said.
“Yes, it is I, my friend.” He motioned with his hand, shadows spiraling in the air as a blade, the corrupted blade that had been in my father’s hand, manifested into his. “I hunted Malphas down to latch to his tepid soul. To bring him here, for you. He put up a mighty fight, indeed.”
My chest rose and fell with rapid breaths. “After all of these years . . . ”
“Our deal remains.”
“Does this mean . . . I have your power now?”
“I’m afraid not, child,” Ahrimad answered. “For I am a deity and we do love our tricks. When we first encountered each other, I knew you were different. There was a greatness inside your soul, so much potential, you see. Had you killed your father of your own volition, then yes, I would be bound to this prophecy. This balance of good and evil my soul must abide, but I never had any intention of giving you my power. It is why I weaved Malphas’s fate for you and threw him onto your sword.”
Thoughts swirled too fast to process it all. “I would have never—I would have never killed him.”
“Everyone is capable of taking a life. You needed a push, my friend.” Ahrimad’s sinister grin widened, his teeth too sharp and too predatorial to be a man’s. I could feel his shadowed eyes peering inside me, watching my soul wither from the inside out.
None of this could be real. How could it? I’d lost everything. I’d killed my own father. Now I was face-to-face with death.
The arena communicated their displeasure. The precious entertainment had paused. I tilted my head down to look at my father’s vacant corpse, perspiration and tears dripping into the dry sand. My eyes squeezed shut as I reined in all feeling, all the pain crushing inside of me, and turned it into rage.
“You fiend!” I bellowed. “You trickster!”
“How I love the sound,” Ahrimad said, shadows snapping over his shoulders like whips. “You should never have gone into those woods and released me from my prison.” When he strode forward, I tried to retreat away, only my feet did not obey. “I bring only death and darkness to this crippled little realm. But you see, Alexandru, the world needs creatures like me. And I must thank you.” He stopped to stand in front of me, my breaths sharp and quick with adrenaline. “For I lived in pure torment in the other world, unable to feed on the mortals, slowly mummifying. My vile heart would give anything for another meal—even risk my existence in equivalence for your help. I simply . . . could not resist another game. The temptation of ruining your pathetic, innocent life fueled my monster—
“Enough!” I shouted, my muscles straining as I finally tore myself from his hold and shuffled away. Ahrimad’s head tilted, as though I’d caught him off guard. “Enough with your raging mania!”
I fisted the hilt of my weapon and drew it with a slice of gleaming metal. “Draw your sword and fight me!”
“Foolish half-mortal. You dare challenge Death to a duel?” He laughed low in his throat and lifted his head. My sword wavered as sinister amber eyes blazed beneath the darkness of his hood. “It is a fight you will lose, child.”
“You forget.” I glided around Ahrimad, our footwork mirroring each other’s. “I am no longer that naïve little boy you met in the woods. And you, my dear friend, forget, my mother was a powerful witch who’d practiced black magic, and I was her protégé.” I planted my feet in a wide stance, gripping my sword tighter. “Draw your weapon.”
Ahrimad kept his blade limp at his side. “Make your move, boy.”
I charged toward him, though he disappeared in a black mist.
The darkness he’d left behind hissed and twirled like a tornado and I was trapped at the eye. Within the shadow, I saw the dead bodies of my family, lying together in a gory, bloody mess. I wrenched free from the shadows with a panicked cry, Ahrimad’s cruel laughter elevating over the crowd’s screams of joy. Why weren’t the mortals afraid? What had he done to them?
Ahrimad’s blade came down in a skilled movement, and I felt off-kilter as I swung out to protect myself. My eyes widened as my weapon cracked beneath the blow.
Ahrimad lashed out, slamming a hurl of shadow into my body.
My body flew across the arena again and I landed hard, my shoulder dislocating as I rolled three times before landing in a broken heap.
The arena exploded into applause, the sand blistering hot against my enraged cheek. Of course, they wanted me dead. The mortals were never on my side, and I was never one of them. They wanted blood.
They wanted death—I thought I had wanted it too. Nonetheless, here I was, fighting to live. The ironic turn of events made me laugh, a lurid, insane cackle, blood oozing down my chin. I planted a foot on the ground and rose to my towering frame at the center of the arena.
“Such a sad, pitiful sight,” Ahrimad said. “You have given these mortals your whole life, and your sanity. Still, they root against you.”
Ahrimad threw out a hand, and my torso hunched inward as though I’d been punched in the stomach. I remained where I stood, paralyzed, as I felt an invisible force climb up my chest and grip within—his power clutching my soul.
“We will give them a show indeed,” Ahrimad said, and then he lifted his palm.
Gasps of tight breaths left my lungs as my feet levitated off the ground. Now the arena had died down, the civilians stunned by the sight. My limbs locked in an inflexible position, my spine arching away from the ground as his power lifted me higher and higher. Dark clouds pummeled over the sky, creating an opaque cover over the sun as the blood rushed fast to my head.
Ahrimad’s laughter bellowed over the mighty wind. His lean, cloaked frame strode upside down in my vision, his hand gripping the sword at his side like an executioner. The weapon glowed amber along the hilt and blade, the engravements forming an inverted picture. Coldness crawled over my skin. The etchings were weeping branches. Branches of a willow tree.
In weeping, find strength in the root.
My father’s final words echoed as I remembered what led up to me freeing Ahrimad from the willow. How as a boy, I’d been drawn deep into the forest and discovered the ancient weapon buried in the ground. How it’d summoned me of all people, miles out from my home. The blade had rested perfectly in my small boyish palm, and I’d felt . . . unstoppable.
“Any last words, Alexandru?”
My vision dizzied as I tried to attain a deep breath, my spine still curved over the ground. I strained to free my uninjured arm from the tight position locked at my side. “I never imagined Death to be so short.”
Ahrimad snarled and pulled his weapon behind him with the intention to sever my head, but I’d already freed my arm, my hand snapping out in the air. I knew not what I was doing, the sheer will of survival taking precedent over everything else. I imagined the blade in my hand instead of his. I willed it to happen with all my might and everything I had left. On the downward arc to my head, Ahrimad’s features strained, his arms freezing in midair. The blade tore from his hand and landed in my vise grip.
His power released me at once, my body turning over in the air before I landed on all fours.
“Impossible,” Ahrimad whispered, horror lacing his voice. “The blade has chosen you over me.”
I rose to my towering height, the hurricane of violence in my head silencing doubt. Raw power breathed into me like a second chance, and I cast aside all thoughts but one: Death would not defeat me this time. I drove forward, slicing through shadow as it formed like a wall of darkness around Ahrimad. It grabbed onto my armor, hooking into my skin again with claws like knives to remind me of everything I’d lost. This time, I embraced it.
Ahrimad’s body started to dissipate, waning away into a black mist, but the speed of my wrath was faster. I shoved through the shadow with all my might and thrust my blade forward. A battle cry exploded from my throat as I went down with Ahrimad, the shadows beneath his hood willowing away.
Picture my surprise when the deity of death’s identity was not monstrous, and instead the face of an ordinary man. His dim amber eyes were lined with dark coal, olive-toned skin marked by branchy tattoos.
“Clever child,” Ahrimad said. “You know not what you have done.”
Then he grinned, slow and damning, revealing a mouthful of fangs like knives.
I stumbled to my feet, pure agony ripping across my body.
Panicked, I gazed down at my armor and rapidly shrugged out of the heavy equipment. My skin had paled to that of a corpse. Directly over my heart, where that old, thick scar tissue lay, black filament veins pulsed outward.
“What is happening to me?”
“You have won our game, Alexandru. Death is what you hated the most. Take mine life, and with it, my wretched power. It is yours now, after all.”
Pressure grew inside my head. Staggering to the side, I gripped my skull as if to keep the bone from exploding and crumbled to all fours. Pressing my forehead to the ground, I writhed against the earth screaming. Nails split open and extended into talons; muscles bulged and tautened in unbearable spasms. I lifted my head with a gulp of air, bloodied tears seeping into my dry mouth. I was thirsting for air now, begging my failing lungs to work. Suddenly, I stopped breathing altogether, but I was still conscious. Confusion knit my brows as I gazed down at my forearm, my skin color altering back to its normal bronze tan shade.
“I do not feel . . . the urge to breathe.”
“Because you are dead,” Ahrimad said weakly, as oily blood trickled out of the corners of his mouth. “Undead. Your body will painfully change. You will have an endless hunger in your stomach.
Nothing will satisfy it. You will have to feed on mortals. An eternal monster of Hades unlike any other. Cursed to steal away the souls of the living.” His breathing hitched, as he choked out, “Cursed . . . to live, Alexandru Cruscellio.”
I gripped the sand with my hands and held on. A bellowing roar was unleashed from deep within me as the nightmare continued to unfurl, and I was reborn . . .
The memory dissipated in my mind as I flicked my lighter closed and inhaled from another rolled cigarette. I stepped up to the floor-to-ceiling windows and looked out into the modern labyrinth of New York City.
That was when I was alone against the world, and the world was not merciful. I was its pawn and it continued to beat me while I was down. I’d lost myself to the madness and became what I hated the most. Once, I was just a young man, unprepared for the cards I’d been dealt. I let fate grind me under its heel. Now I was a monster who held the deck. I could screw the whole world over and never look back. I felt nothing. How could I?
And yet . . .
My phone vibrated in my pocket.
One recent missed call from Faith. Five missed calls and a voicemail from one of my Fallen soldiers. “We were attacked by Malphas. Two of ours are dead. Faith encountered him and managed to get away. She ran into a bookstore in Pleasant Valley called the Crossroads. It’s guarded by powerful wards and built on hallowed ground. We can’t get close. Please advise.”
Only one warlock recurrently opened up a bookshop under that title. He went by Ace, just Ace. A powerful clairvoyant and magic user. I hadn’t seen that bastard in centuries. He’d opened up shop in Pleasant Valley, of all places.
Coincidences did not exist. Not with clairvoyants. Ace knew about Faith.
I crushed the phone in my hand.
Shadows curled around my shoulders and mended into my cloak. Lunging forward, I vanished into the dark and reappeared midsprint on the roof of the D&S Tower. My combat boot pushed off the concrete ledge, massive wings unfurling from my back as I dove down into the dusky city.
