HELLION: THE DEAD HEX: (Hellion, Book 2) Read online

  “I think the fact that I not only managed to survive Counterfeit City but did so with no help or information from you, shows that I’m already way ahead of the game. Like you said when we first met, I’m quite good at what I do. So why don’t you let me go do it?”

  My temper is in check, barely, and if Lucifer doesn’t show me how to get out of here I can’t promise I won’t lose it. Prior to my death, I’d had masterful control of my emotions. When your job is literally to kill or be killed, keeping a cool head can and does save your life.

  But pulling the sheet down from David’s beautiful face, seeing my fiancé cold and dead on a mortuary slab, has ripped away my equilibrium and I’ve been scrambling ever since. Here in Pandemonium with my captor is the first moment of something resembling quiet I’ve had since waking up in a body bag, and I realize now how raw I am.

  He must see something in my expression because instead of opening his mouth to toss out some smug comment, he opens the door that leads out of his chambers and gestures for me to pass through.

  “That might let me out of the room, but I don’t know how to get out of…” I gesture around me to Pandemonium in general, “here.”

  “Look again,” he purrs.

  The hallway beyond the door has disappeared, and a black void stretches out from the threshold of the door. “Goddammit,” I mutter.

  “Gods, Grey. Gods dammit. Plural. Again, you should know that by now. Denying the existence of everyone aside from…” he whistles as he points upward, “is just going to make you more enemies than you already have, and you have quite a few…”

  I don’t hear the rest of his lecture because I stride right by him and fling myself out into the darkness. Anything is better than one more word from that man, or demon, or god, or angel, or whatever Lucifer is. I twist as I fall and look up at him, silhouetted in the doorway in the middle of nothingness, and I swear he blows me a snarky kiss.

  The gesture I make in return is quite a bit more vulgar, and his laughter rings out into the emptiness as I plummet into the black.

  3

  GOBLIN IPA

  That bastard drops me into the center of the busiest street in midtown six feet from an oncoming taxi.

  As quick as I was in life, and even quicker now in death, there’s still no way I’m going to avoid being crushed underneath the wheels of the car. I tense and reflexively squeeze my eyes shut, only to feel my long hair fly around my face, caught up in the draft as the cab passes a fraction of an inch to my right.

  Cracking open my eyes, I watch in astonishment as the next car does the same. And the next. And the next. There is no squeal of brakes. No cacophony of horns. The drivers smile and speak to their passengers and don’t see me at all, but they skirt around me like water passes by a rock in a river. I reach out and trail my fingers along the side of a sedan as it drives past.

  Humans don’t register Counterfeits. Easy to remember when you’re walking past people on the street. Harder to remember when a vehicle is bearing down on you. A stunned and relieved giggle escapes my lips.

  I toss my head back and do something I’m certain I’m the first to do: take in the neon insanity of the city from smack in the middle of the road at rush hour.

  Billboards flash and traffic moves and tourists and city-dwellers alike crowd the sidewalks, and it is magic to behold from my tiny island on the asphalt.

  I should wait for a break in the traffic to get out of the street. A red stoplight or a crossing pedestrian to hold up the constant line of cars. But I’m also curious to know how far I can push this. Counterfeit City is still mostly a mystery to me. Why not do a little research?

  Taking a tentative step toward the sidewalk, I watch with glee as the cab barreling toward me veers a few inches to the left and misses me completely. Through the windshield, I could see the driver’s hand twitch on the wheel. Their face showed no recognition of the course correction or why it was happening, but they did it just the same.

  I step onto the curb and the spell is broken. Safely out of traffic, I’m just like anyone else in this city now, except for the whole demon-back-from-the-dead thing.

  Turning in the direction of the park, I make a mental note to ask Mina about all of this. Once you know the rules of your world and your situation, the better you know how to bend them to your advantage.

  ***

  I make it through the empty park in the middle of the city without having to dodge a single bullet or blow.

  In my old human life as an assassin, once you’d completed enough jobs you gained a reputation. Even better, make a splashy debut and you’d be a legend spoken about in hushed tones in the darkest corners by the worst people. Your name and what you could do would spread like wildfire. Maybe something like that happens here in Counterfeit City; a whisper network to let you know who the easy marks are, and who to stay away from if you value your afterlife. Perhaps the creatures that populate my new home, my temporary home, have wised up to the fact that they should be frightened of me.

  After taking out nearly all of Lilah’s demons, they should be.

  Nearly all.

  Not Ciaran. The man who carried me into Lilah’s service. Out of one fire, literally, and into another.

  There’s a large part of me that hopes that he’s human, but a tiny spark in me that desperately wants him to be a demon. I can’t recall there being anything out of the ordinary about him, but Nico’s words come back to me… people have an infinite capacity for lying to themselves. And Lilah, insinuating that I was part of the Counterfeit City long before it existed, a creature that belongs here… With her trapped in Pandemonium, there’s no chance of getting answers from her.

  The demons she sent to kill me, I trained with them for years thinking that they were human. Doesn’t that prove that I am, as well? Or have I been something other all this time, and kept that part of me boxed up and buried until I couldn’t anymore?

  Ciaran helped me survive Lilah’s, teaching me much of what’s kept me alive for years, and if anyone can help me figure out who and what I am, it’s him.

  As long as he doesn’t want to kill me like the rest of my former colleagues did.

  Ciaran is a wildcard to me.

  I step up to the massive oak a dozen feet off the main path. Split down the center, its gnarled halves stretch up toward the twilight sky. A metal door with an intricate, inlaid pattern gleams dully between the two trunks.

  The entrance to Mina’s still makes no sense to me. It will, though. Just as Nico transformed me into a walking arsenal for my last mission, by the time I’m eventually done with Mina I expect to be a walking encyclopedia of all things Counterfeit.

  Placing my palm in the small, smooth square of metal in the center of the door, I wait for the sting as whatever lives in or controls the door pierces my index finger to take my blood as payment for entry. It never comes. Instead, the door swings open silently, revealing not the forest behind the tree, which would make sense, but a staircase lit by bare bulbs that leads down into the earth.

  I descend toward the thumping bass beat that echoes up and off of the staircase’s brick walls, and the door shuts behind me of its own will.

  ***

  My first thought as I twist the crystal knob on the door and push into the club is that the place is dead, and I hate myself for the pun.

  The dance floor is empty, though the music plays on. The poles are sans dancers. The poker tables sit unoccupied aside from one, where two vampires with loosened ties and bleary eyes toss golden coins onto the green felt.

  I find Runner nursing a pint at the nearly-empty bar three stools down from the only other patron, an angry looking man swirling a lowball glass half-full with brown liquid. My silver-eyed friend glances over as I pull up a stool next to him and takes a long pull from his beer. “Want one?”

  He gestures to the bartender, who turns away from the shelves she was stocking to take his order. It’s the ethereal woman who tried to poison me on my last visit. Her long
black hair brushes her shoulders and sways up and away from her head, caught in some unseen tide. Her crimson lips twist into a smile. “Same as last time?”

  Hilarious. “Pass. I’ll have what he’s having,” I reply.

  She shrugs as if I’ve just taken all the fun out of everything.

  Runner has the Codex on the bar next to him, and I slide it toward me. “You see Mina yet?”

  “Nah, she’s in the back with someone and I figured I’d wait for you.”

  I nod toward the bartender and, careful to keep my voice lower than the music, I murmur to Runner, “What kind of Counterfeit is she?”

  A pint appears in front of me. “I’m a ghoul. A little like a spirit like him,” she flicks a glance at Runner, “but more fun.”

  “Ha. Ha,” Runner snorts. “She means more dangerous.”

  “Like I said. More fun,” she sniffs, and turns back to lining up crystalline decanters of booze on the shelves behind the bar.

  I take a sip of my pint and I’m surprised to find that it tastes like any old beer. Runner must see my nose scrunch up because he asks, “What, something wrong?”

  “Just beery,” I say. “Everything else in Counterfeit City has been a few inches away from normal. I guess I thought the drinks would be, too.”

  “They are,” he replies, taking another long drink. “That’s a GIPA. Goblin IPA. I’d suggest you start slow. A human gets two sips of that, they’ll be up there trying to swing from one of those poles.” He points to where a fairy has just started a lonely striptease for a single, leering serpent-type creature. “You’re a few weeks past dead,” Runner continues, “so I’d say finish maybe half and give me the rest.” He shoots me a grin and I can’t help but smile back.

  “You take a look at this?” I ask, flipping open the Codex Malum. The pages are yellowed with age, soft and worn, and a good portion of the text is faded. Diagrams and charts are interspersed between the paragraphs, and from what I can tell it’s written in a handful of languages, none of them English.

  “Nope,” Runner says adamantly. “Even if I could understand what’s written in there, I wouldn’t take the chance. That book can raise armies of the dead for starters. I don’t even want to know about the advanced stuff. I’ll just continue to play the part of chauffeur, thank you very much.”

  “Looks like she’s finished,” the ghoul behind the bar says and nods toward the back of the club.

  Runner and I turn on our stools to find the door to Mina’s office open. Someone is standing on the threshold with their back to us as they toss one final word back inside to Mina.

  Snatching the book up off of the bar, I slide off of the stool. “You coming?”

  “I think I’ll just keep an eye on this for you,” Runner says, picking up my pint glass. “Like I said, I’m happy just to drive.”

  “Then your next drink is water,” I say, and he nods good-naturedly.

  I’m halfway across the dance floor, colored lights sweeping and swirling across the pitch-black flooring to the beat of the bass, when I stop in my tracks.

  The person who’d just been speaking to Mina has turned to leave, and they’re frozen to the spot where they stand as well.

  Two dozen feet away, Ciaran has just stepped from Mina’s office, and he’s looking at me with murder in his eyes.

  4

  FRIEND OR FOE OR DEMON

  The music and the sudden roaring in my ears drown Ciaran out, but I watch his mouth form the word Gray and his brow furrow in confusion.

  I should race toward him. Take him off-guard and get the upper hand before he tries to kill me.

  I should back up, scramble toward the door and try to outrun him before I have to fight my closest friend to the death.

  I can’t move.

  So he does.

  He stutter-steps toward me as if in a dream, and all I can do is clutch the Codex Malum tightly to my chest and let him come. He is my friend. The only friend I made while working for Lilah. He would never hurt me…

  One of the swirling colored lights sweeps over his face, turning his shock of silver hair a brilliant crimson. He is only a handful of years older than me, but he’s aged since the last time I saw him, as if he’s been dragging around a terrible burden of heartache and worry. His cheekbones are sharper than I remember and he has dark smudges under his haunted eyes.

  His fathomless black eyes.

  The eyes of a demon.

  The revelation hits me like a nearly-physical blow, knocking me out of my haze and setting my blood on fire. I drop the book on the floor, the impact cracking like a gunshot, and ball my fists as I step back into a fighting stance.

  He stops immediately, throwing his hands up in surrender. “Gray…”

  “Your eyes,” I hiss.

  After a moment of confusion, understanding washes over him. “Now that you’re fully Counterfeit, you can finally see me for what I am.”

  Quick footsteps slap toward me, and Runner appears at my side. From the corner of my eye, I see him look from me to Ciaran and back, working hard to understand. “What? What’s happening? Who is this?”

  I never take my eyes from Ciaran. Betrayal and elation war within me. Betrayal that he didn’t tell me what he was, and elation that he’s supernatural like the rest of them, and that he might be able to help me figure out what I am. Lilah wasn’t my only hope.

  “He’s one of Lilah’s,” I manage to grit out. “A demon.”

  In the battles I’d fought since coming to Counterfeit City, Lilah’s demons had regarded me with hatred, fear, or cool indifference. Now, Ciaran looks at me with something like pity, and that is something I’m not prepared for.

  “So are you, Gray,” he says, and though he’s quiet, the words slice through the thumping music and plunge like a dagger into my heart.

  “Once I was murdered, yes. But before that…” I shake my head. “I saw demons. I wasn’t one of them…”

  “Why do you think you were in that asylum?”

  Runner spins to face me. “You were in an asylum?”

  “Before I worked for Lilah,” I say. “Ciaran saved my life the night it burned down. He brought me to her.”

  Ciaran takes a tentative step toward me. “And why do you think I was there that night?”

  “Stay there!” I bark, and again, he stops.

  The memories have been tugging at me since I was tossed into Counterfeit City, struggling to break the surface in the dark corners of my mind. I’ve been getting brief flashes, but never enough to tell me anything or give me a complete picture.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  Runner stoops to pick up the Codex Malum from the floor and clutches it to his chest like a child taking comfort in a stuffed animal. “Why were you in an asylum?”

  Finally, I drag my eyes from Ciaran and look at Runner. “Because I killed my parents when I was seventeen.”

  “And why did you kill them?” Ciaran prompts.

  I keep my eyes on Runner as I respond, “Because they were demons.”

  His jaw drops. “That doesn’t happen… humans seeing demons, or any Counterfeit, not unless they cross the veil and are revived, or… no,” he shakes his head, “it doesn’t happen.”

  “They twisted me around in there,” I say, and I hate the desperation in my voice. “I was certain I saw them, but then who says that unless they’re crazy, right? And…” A memory emerges, tearing itself from the fog and haze of my forgetting. “…They tested on us in there.”

  I turn to Ciaran in confusion. “Right? You saved me from the testing.”

  “I saved you from the humans,” he says, nodding. “They didn’t test on you to get to the bottom of some mental illness, Gray. They tested on you to figure out what made you Counterfeit.”

  “You were born a demon,” Runner says, and I can feel the truth of it in my bones. “That’s… rare.”

  “Lilah knew the whole time. All those years. And she didn’t tell me?” My gaze burns through Ciaran, and he sim
ply nods. “And neither did you.”

  “With what they injected into you over the weeks you were at the asylum, and that night especially, it erased you, Gray. You were incoherent when I dragged you from that place. Close to death. And when I brought you to Lilah…”

  “On her orders, because she knew and she wanted to use me,” I interrupt.

  “You were a natural-born demon. Do you remember getting headaches? That was the start of you becoming a full-blown Counterfeit. You just didn’t know it. And most traces of the asylum were wiped from your mind due to the drugs and the trauma.”

  The screams of the other inmates echo and bounce inside my skull, and I’m certain there is so much more that I need to know about that place and the people that were in there with me. It’s too much to process. It’s all too much.

  He gentles his voice as he says, “Why do you think you succeeded in so many missions that would’ve seriously injured or killed a normal human?”

  “I don’t know, the fact that I’m good at my job?” I scoff.

  “You’re weirdly good, though,” Runner says. “You fought your way through the last few days like someone who belonged here, someone who had been here for a lot longer than a week.”

  Ciaran points at Runner to emphasize the point. “That. Yes. You know how word travels, especially in what we do. What we did. You woke up after that last night at the asylum thinking you were human. The mind is powerful, and your reality is what you believe it to be. You believed yourself to be human, so that’s who you saw and who you interacted with. By keeping what you were hidden, Lilah kept you safe from Counterfeit assassins. She wanted to keep you her secret weapon.”