Azagoth: A Demonica Novella (1001 Dark Nights) (2 page)

“My lord,” Zhubaal said cautiously, “your deal with Heaven—”

“Deal?” Azagoth snorted as he reached across his desk for the expensive-ass bottle of Black Tot rum that Limos, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, had brought him earlier. “It wasn’t a
deal
. I volunteered to fall from grace to run this horror show of a demon graveyard.
They
changed the rules.
After
I gave up my life.”

Yep, just a few decades after he’d been expelled from Heaven in order to create Sheoul-gra, a unique realm designed specifically as a holding tank for demon souls, Heaven changed the game. The archangels suddenly decided they needed a special class of angel to watch over anyone living in the human realm who was important to the fate of the world, and they insisted that Azagoth should father those angels.

And he had. For thousands of years he’d taken the angels they sent into his bed and created lots and lots of earthbound, hybrid angel children known as Memitim. But now he was done. Aside from Satan’s threat hanging over his head, Azagoth was tired of screwing females who looked down their noses at him or who just laid there like sacrifices until he was done.

Oh, sure, there were the curious ones who at least made an attempt to participate, and there were the lusty few who figured they’d enjoy doing a bad boy. But for the most part, he might as well have been banging blow-up dolls.

Yeah, it was awesome.

Archangels were asshats.

“But sir, you need to do something. You’re...testy.”

Testy? Zhubaal hadn’t seen testy yet.
Testy
had gotten Azagoth’s last assistant disintegrated.

“Send the female back, and have her tell her superiors that...no, wait. Send her in.” Kicking his booted feet up on the desk, he broke the seal on the alcohol bottle with a vicious twist. “I’ll give her my message personally.”

“As you wish.”

Zhubaal gave a deep bow and left, returning within seconds with a tall, stately brunette in white and ruby robes, and Azagoth groaned. This wasn’t an angel who had come for a roll in the hay. Mariella was a Heavenly messenger who swept in the way she always did, as if she owned the place, her head held high, her long strides sure and brisk.

“Azagoth,” she said, all snooty and shit, “it’s time to stop whatever game you’re playing and get back to work.”

He raked his gaze over her in a blatant show of sizing her up for sex. She wouldn’t lower herself to screw him, but he got a measure of amusement out of screwing with
her
.

“So you’re volunteering to spread your legs for me?”

She cringed at his crudeness as he knew she would. Most angels were
so
uptight. “I’m a liaison, not a bedmate. I’m here to convince you to stop being a fool.”

“Ah.” Keeping his gaze on the angel, he put the bottle to his lips and took a deep, long pull, savoring the sweet burn of the liquid pouring down his throat. He drank until Mariella’s pinched, judgmental expression threatened to make her skin crack, and with exaggerated relish, he smacked his lips and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Well, here’s the deal. I’m not doing your bidding anymore.”

“Yes, you are.”

Carefully placing the bottle on a pad of paper, he pushed to his feet and moved around to the front of the desk, noting how she managed to keep that pinchy expression even as her copper eyes assessed him from head to toe. She liked his black slacks and turtleneck...and the way she went taut said she despised the fact that she liked anything about him. Man, he loved messing with angels’ heads.

“Or?”

“Or,” she said, her tone pitching low with gloom and doom, “we replace you.”

He barked out a laugh. “Good. Replace me. I’ve been stuck in this realm for thousands of years, dealing with nothing but demons, evil humans, and the angels Heaven sends for me to service. Someone else can have this shitty job.”

“I don’t think you understand,” she said silkily. “
Replace
is a nice word for destroy.”

Azagoth’s pulse kicked up a notch. It was fun when someone threatened him.
Game on.
“And I don’t think
you
understand. You can’t destroy me. I’ve put safeguards in place.”

Her eyes narrowed into slits. “What kinds of safeguards?”

He gave a dramatic pause, partly to irritate the angel, and partly because he totally got off on dragging out the win. Finally, he steepled his fingers together like a cheesy cartoon villain and said, “The kind that will release all demon souls from Sheoul-gra upon my death.”

She gasped in outrage. Because sure, it was okay for her to threaten him, but turnabout was clearly
not
fair play. “And Hades allowed this?”

Hades, who ran Sheoul-gra’s Inner Sanctum where demon souls were kept, had little say in what Azagoth did, but they’d long ago hammered out a working relationship that gave the fallen angel independent authority over the Inner Sanctum. Azagoth could overrule him if needed, but in general, he left Hades alone.

“Actually,” Azagoth said as he casually propped his hip on the desk, “it was Hades who suggested it.”

“That blue-haired bastard.”

He’d give her that one. Hades was a world-class dick. Azagoth liked that in a fallen angel. “Now,” he said, “you get to listen to my demands.”

“Which are?” she said through gritted teeth.

“I want a female.”

She shot him an exasperated look. “What do you think we’ve been sending you? You keep turning them down.”

“I don’t want a female to fuck,” he said, still being as raunchy as possible. It drove angels nuts, and sure enough, her lips puckered as if she’d sucked a lemon. “I want one to keep.”

Outrage mottled her perfect, ivory skin. “You want an angel to
keep
? As what? A pet?”

“As a mate.”

“Oh, that’s precious.” She laughed, and the blood that usually ran cold in his veins started to steam. “You want a mate?
You?
Why?”

Because I’m lonely.
That was only part of it, but it was a big part. He could have simply told Heaven to stop sending him females because Satan had threatened to start killing Memitim if even one more was born, but he didn’t want to spend the rest of eternity alone. He’d seen one of his daughters, Idess, willingly sacrifice so much for the male she loved, and she’d risked her life on more than one occasion to make sure other couples were happy. The depths to which people felt love had stunned him, and deep inside, it had sparked a desire to have that for himself.

That was assuming he
could
love. He hadn’t felt anything but anger and amusement in thousands of years, and even those emotions rarely reached a level beyond what he’d consider mild.

“My reasons are my own,” he said. “Send me a female to keep.”

“I’m sure this female you want will be so happy to be constantly pregnant,” she drawled.

“Oh, did I give you the impression that I’d keep making Memitim angels for you?” He pushed off the desk and moved toward her, enjoying the way her eyes sparked with anger and superiority even as she inched backward. “Well, newsflash, you Heavenly puke; no children that come of the union with my mate will ever be handed over to you.”

She flared her cinnamon wings in annoyance, but he kept his own wings tucked away. When he took his out, it usually meant he was on the verge of killing.

He wasn’t there yet, but he had no doubt this angel could push him to it.

Not that it took much.

“I’ll inform my bosses, but don’t expect an answer you’ll like.”

Even now, after he’d made clear that he held all the cards—or the souls, as it were—she continued to think she had the better hand. Amusing.
Mildly
amusing, of course.

“You’re still not getting it, are you? I’ll get what I want. There’s no other choice.” He halted in front of her, so close she was forced to look up at him. “And tell them that the next angel they send better be prepared to stay, because I’m keeping her.”

“How nice,” she said snottily. “Are you going to keep her in chains? Rape her if she refuses to bed you?”

Suddenly, his hand was clamped around her throat, almost of its own volition. Angels did that to him, made his body parts act independently of his brain. He felt her reach for her angelic ability to strike at him, but this was his realm, and here
he
controlled the use of power.

“Send someone willing.” He bared his fangs, giving the angel an up-close-and-personal look at one of the things that made them so very different despite their angelic origins. “I’m warning you. Because the next angel who steps through that doorway won’t be leaving. Ever.”

Chapter Two

Lilliana scurried through the pristine white halls of the massive Archangel Complex, her heart beating like a hummingbird’s. She’d only been here once, several hundred years ago, and it had merely been to deliver a message from her superiors in the Time Travel Operations Department.

This time, she was here because she’d been summoned, and that could only be bad news. Her direct supervisor, an angel humans would describe as nerdy and shy, had warned her that after her latest screw-up, she might earn more than just a suspension from TTO.

She broke out in a sweat at the thought. Her work was her life. The only connection she had with her dead mother. If the archangels took that away from her...she shuddered. Sure, she’d committed a grievous offense, but there had been extenuating circumstances. She’d been kidnapped, held captive, and forced to do things she hadn’t wanted to do. Her nerdy supervisor understood...but he didn’t think the head honchos would. Besides, rules were rules, and Heaven’s tolerance for rule breakers was notoriously nonexistent.

Stomach churning, she entered the garishly maroon and gold offices of Raphael.
The
Raphael. She might vomit on his robes.

A petite, flaxen-haired female looked up from her crystal tablet, a device that was the human equivalent of an electronic tablet device...if human tablets had advanced by about ten billion years. She gave Lilliana a bored once-over, pausing to wrinkle her nose at Lilliana’s unfashionably loose brown hair. Lilliana could change it with a mere thought, maybe piling it on top of her head like a giant ostrich egg the way the other female wore it, but she’d never cared about current fashion. She did, however, care about looking stupid.

“To your left.” Egghead went back to tapping on her tablet.

Lilliana turned down the hall, which ended inside a room with walls that seemed to be made of white smoke. A marble fountain, an extinct palm tree, bronze statues...the room was filled with the most eclectic mix of objects from different time periods.

An angel appeared before her from out of nowhere, and although she’d never seen Raphael before, she knew him instantly. He stood a full foot above her five foot eleven inches, and his golden hair fell in a shiny curtain around broad shoulders draped by a lush, purple velvet mantle. Jewel-encrusted rings circled every finger, and a gold sun-shaped pendant hung halfway down his chest, standing out starkly against his snowy white suit.

If she had to describe the style of his outfit, she’d go with royal-retro-pimp.

“You’re late.” His deep, dark voice rumbled through her, jangling her already unsteady nerves. “Late to a meeting with an archangel.”

She was most certainly
not
late, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to argue. “Ah...I got lost—”

He cut her off with a savage sweep of his bejeweled hand. “Your excuses don’t interest me. I have a proposition for you.”

Wow. What everyone said about archangels was true.

They were giant douchebags. With terrible fashion sense and taste in decor.

“What kind of proposition?”

“I understand that you’re curious about the underworld.”

Her pulse picked up a notch. Most angels nursed a deep hatred for anything related to demons and their realm, Sheoul, and one never knew how much trouble you could get into by being too inquisitive. Plus, too much curiosity threw up a red flag for those who watched for signs of potential defection to Satan’s camp.

“I wouldn’t say I’m overly curious,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “but I do find it interesting that many ancient human structures are replicated in Sheoul and vice versa, and I’d love to study the links between them.”

“What if I said I could give you that opportunity?”

She cocked an eyebrow. “I’d say...what’s the catch?”

“The catch is a big one.” He gave an ominous pause she suspected was calculated to make her lungs seize. It worked. “You’ll have to take a mate.”

What little air she had in her lungs whooshed out in a rush. “A mate?” she choked out. “Why?”

“Because this particular male wants a mate, and we need him, so he gets what he wants.”

In other words, this particular male, clearly a standup guy, was using blackmail to get what he wanted. She licked her dry lips, buying herself time to speak without sounding as if she’d run a marathon. “And what about what I want?”

The archangel regarded her with disdain, as if what she wanted was of no consequence. “How about we go over all of the terms of this deal before you decide what you want.”

“Of course,” she said tightly. She had a feeling the terms were going to be pretty one-sided, and that side wouldn’t be hers. “Who is he?”

“Azagoth, collector of souls.”

Her heart stopped. Just quit beating. “The Forgotten One? The Grim Reaper?” Holy shit. He had to be kidding. “Is this some kind of joke?”

“I have no sense of humor.”

She’d heard that about Raphael. About most of the archangels, actually. “But you want me to
mate
Azagoth?”

Raphael inclined his head in an impatient, curt nod, as if this wasn’t something to get all worked up about. How could he be so calm?

Because it’s not
his
head on the chopping block, that’s how.

The ex-angel, sometimes known by those in Heaven as The Forgotten One, was occasionally spoken about with respect, but most often, contempt. He’d been a hero in Heaven, the person who first identified Satan as a rotten apple who was planning a coup against his angelic brethren. Because of Azagoth, Satan had been stripped of his wings and cast out of Heaven to create his own realm known as Sheoul, where he’d set up shop breeding evil minions.