Eternal Rider (42 page)

“Ares, no!” Limos leaped in front of him at the same time Harvester flashed in, her shit-eating grin rocketing Ares right into orbit again.

“Evil is winning,” she said, in a taunting, sing-song voice.

Reaver, a category five heavenly storm, shifted his focus from Ares to Harvester. She snarled, and they came together in a sonic fucking boom. Light flashed, and they were gone.

This couldn’t be happening. Couldn’t be happening. Couldn’t
fucking
be happening! Ares wiped a stream of
blood off his temple and cursed in a dozen different languages, but that didn’t change the fact that they were so fucked his ass hurt. Though he guessed that could be the result of having a pillar shoved up it.

He shook stone dust out of his hair and rounded on Limos. “Contact Kynan. We need that damned dagger. It’s Cara’s only hope now. And I want the island’s Harrowgate shut down. Pestilence isn’t leading any more demons through it.”

Limos whistled. “Won’t be easy.”

“I don’t care,” he snapped. “I’ll pay whatever price I have to—”

“My lord! Ares!” Vulgrim ran toward them, gesturing back at the house. “The hellhound—”

Ares didn’t wait for him to finish. Armoring up, he tore off across the garden, darted through the house, and found Cara on the bedroom patio. She had one hand on the scruff of Chaos’s neck, the other scratching under his chin, and the only way this could be happening was if Cara had invited the hound in, which bypassed the ward. Limos came in behind Ares, her own armor creaking as she drew her weapons.

The hellhound swung his great head around, and Ares swore the beast was grinning. Ares could read it as clearly as he could a billboard.
Your female likes me
.

“Ares,” Cara said quickly, “before you say anything—”

“Get away from him.”

She ignored him. “Listen to me. For just a minute.”

He was so not in the mood for this. “I want that monster dead.”

Chaos snarled, and bullets of drool dropped from his mouth to splatter on the pavers.

“You need to call a truce,” Cara said, and Limos made a strangled noise.

“You can’t be serious,” Ares rasped. “Never. Now get away from him before he hurts you.”

Unbelievably, Cara wrapped her arm around the hellhound’s neck, and through the red haze of hatred, he realized that she was wobbly and needed support. “He can’t hurt me or he’ll hurt his son. He needs my help to find Hal, Ares, and we need him.”

“We don’t need him.
I will never need him
.” He stepped forward, and the hound matched the move, putting one giant paw in front of Cara, holding her in place. If Ares didn’t know better, he’d think Chaos was trying to protect her.

Which was ridiculous.

“I told you what he did to me, Cara. I can’t forget that. I
won’t
forget that.”

Pain flashed in Cara’s eyes. “Ares, if you kill him, you’ll be fighting Hal for the rest of his life.”

The cold, stark reality brought his temper back down to manageable levels. Fighting Hal very likely wouldn’t be an issue. Hal would be dead soon, if Ares couldn’t bury Deliverance in Pestilence’s heart. And if he did, by some miracle, destroy his brother, how could Cara live with Hal and Ares wanting each other dead?

And damn… how could he let go of over forty-five hundred years of hatred?

But how could he not give Cara this, after all he’d put her through, and after what she’d sacrificed for him?

It was the hardest thing he’d ever done, but he lowered his sword, never taking his eyes off the evil son of a bitch.

Closing her eyes, Cara let out a relieved breath. “He says that as long as Hal lives, he’ll honor the truce.”

Honor. Not a word he’d associate with hellhounds. “Just one thing,” Ares said thickly. “I need to know why he killed my brother and sons like that.” There had been genuine hatred in Chaos’s actions that went well beyond a normal kill.

Cara smoothed her hands along both sides of the beast’s face. After a minute, maybe two, or ten… it was hard to say… Cara hung her head. “So much pain between you two.” She lifted her gaze. “I can see his thoughts. Do you remember a battle in some mountains? There’s a siege engine of some sort, ugly, with a boar head carved into it and”—she shuddered—“human skulls nailed all over the beams.”

“Yeah. I remember.” He, his sons, brother, and Ares’s army had chased demon hordes all the way into the Ahaggar Mountains after his wife was killed, and once the demons were boxed in, the slaughter had begun.

“Chaos wasn’t part of the demon-human war. He and his mate brought his pups out of Sheoul to teach them to hunt rats among the carnage. He was young, and it was his first litter. You killed them.”

Ares swallowed. He’d done so much killing in his life, so much of it running together like thousands of rivers of blood into one massive sea. But he remembered his first hellhounds. He’d been so full of hatred after the death of his wife that he’d taken pleasure in slaughtering the female and her young. In Ares’s eyes, they’d been nothing but evil beasts feeding on the corpses of his soldiers.

The ground shifted beneath him. They’d been hunting rats, not eating his men. Not fighting humans.

It was only days later that he’d come back to the command tent to find a giant hellhound standing over the remains of his sons and brother.

Oh, Jesus. Chaos hadn’t started the feud between the two of them.
Ares had
. For so long, he’d believed Ekkad and his sons had died simply because he’d loved them, that they’d been targets for demons who were striking at Ares. But no, they’d died because Ares had destroyed a family.

“All this time I wanted revenge against him, and he wanted the same against me.” He scrubbed his hand over his face. He still hated the damned thing, but Ares understood him now. “I’ll honor the truce.”

Chaos met his gaze, a mutual understanding passing between them. Neither wanted to cuddle or anything, but they’d give each other a wide berth and pass without swinging.

The hound dematerialized, and without the support, Cara hit the floor.

“Cara!” Ares dropped to his knees beside her and gathered her in his arms. She was unconscious.

Limos kneeled beside him. “Is she—”

“No,” he croaked. “Her pulse is weak, though.” He stood, keeping her close to his chest, and threw open a gate. “I’m taking her to Underworld General.”

The hum of a tattoo gun was the sexiest sound Thanatos had ever heard. Well, not counting the sounds of actual sex, which he avoided like one of Pestilence’s plagues. He loved the buzzing sensation and the bite of pain that vibrated deep into his muscles as the needle moved over
the small of his back, and he forced himself not to shift so his aching erection could get a little comfort. That bastard deserved to hurt.

“Almost done.” Orelia, a pale, eyeless Silas demon, wiped his sensitized skin with a cloth and went back to work.

She hadn’t used a template and transfer for the design. She never did. The demon worked off images from her customers’ minds, turning thoughts to art, and in Than’s case, taking scenes of death out of his head and relocating them onto his skin, where they could no longer affect him so strongly. He remembered all the death and destruction he’d seen—and participated in—but once they’d been inked onto the canvas of his body, they no longer haunted.

As a bonus, he got off on the process, the pain, the pleasure. Tattoos and piercings were one of the few ecstasies he allowed himself.

“You’re running out of room,” Orelia said, as if he wasn’t aware of that. Fortunately, her unique talent went beyond bringing thoughts to life. She could layer the images and somehow keep them from obliterating each other. The scenes bled together in harmony, each distinct, yet blended.

“Just finish.”

Her long, bony fingers feathered over the design taken from his recent visit to the dying grounds of Pestilence’s Slovenian epidemic. “This one was particularly bad. Your brother has been busy.”

“What have you heard?” Questioning Orelia was his main reason for coming today. He could have held off getting the tat, but he needed intel, and this female, who
got into the heads of her customers, had her finger on the underworld’s pulse.

“You know I can’t discuss things I shouldn’t know.”

Standard answer, standard bullshit, and Than didn’t have time for it. “My brother is amassing an army. I want to know where.”

“How would I know?”

Than whipped his arm around behind him and grabbed her thin wrist, wrenching the tattoo gun away from his skin. In one quick move, he flipped over on the table and dragged Orelia close. Like most Silas demons, her skin was so white the veins beneath were visible, her mouth was a mere slash that revealed black, pointed teeth, and her nose was little more than a bump that framed two gaping holes. Unlike most Silas demons, she had tattooed eyes onto her face.

He allowed his fangs to slice down—since she could snag images out of his mind, she was one of the few people who knew what he was and who he hadn’t killed because of it. Not even his brothers and sister knew. This was a secret he’d kept well.

“I don’t have to tell you what I’m capable of,” he said. “You’ve tattooed it on my body for centuries.”

“If I tell you what I know, my life will be in great danger.”

“I guarantee that I’m more dangerous than any of your other customers.”

The muscles in her throat bounced as she swallowed a few times. “But I don’t want to stop the Apocalypse. I want out of Sheoul. The scenes I can draw on humans…” A gruesome smile split her oval face. She’d once said that on humans, her talent was prophetic. She had special,
extra-painful tools for them, and once she tattooed their skin with a scene involving them, it came to pass. And Orelia was
very
creative. And cruel.

“Do you know what it’s like to die at my hands? After the pain ends, your soul becomes part of me. You’ll be trapped in the darkness of my armor with other souls, tormented with their pain and misery. If the Apocalypse happens, you’re the first person I’m coming for, so you won’t have a chance to play with the humans anyway.” He tightened his grip until she whimpered. “So tell me what I want to know.”

“Rumor has it that my people are flocking to the Horun region. But some of my clients have heard tales of growing excitement in Sithbludd.”

“What else?”

“Pestilence has put out a call to all demons… anyone who brings him the head of an Aegi is promised a place at his side after the Apocalypse, and he’s also started quietly paying a bounty for hellhound ears. That’s all I know. I swear it.”

Than released her and flipped over again. “Good. Now finish.” He had some recon to do.

Ares stepped out of the Harrowgate into the emergency department at Underworld General Hospital, a facility run by demons to care for underworld creatures. Ares used to think it was crazy, but now he was pretty damned glad it existed.

His boots cracked on the obsidian floor as he crossed to the triage desk, where a sleek, catlike Trillah demon was shuffling papers. She sniffed the air and frowned as he approached. “Human?”

“Yes. She needs help. I want Eidolon.”

“He’s busy—”

“Get me the doctor, because if this human dies, I’m going to turn into your worst nightmare.”