Azagoth: A Demonica Novella (1001 Dark Nights) (3 page)

Too late Heaven realized they should have put Satan down when they had the chance, because centuries later, his demonic creations began to die, and with nowhere to go, their disembodied souls wreaked havoc on the Earth. Azagoth volunteered to create Sheoul-gra, a holding tank for the souls, but
why
he volunteered was the topic of hot debates and wild conspiracy theories.

The only thing anyone agreed on was that he’d been corrupted by evil and was one of the most dangerous and powerful beings outside of Heaven. Fortunately, he was contained inside his own realm...but his reach extended far beyond it, and that had always been a concern for The Powers That Be in Heaven.

Raphael let her stew in her thoughts for a moment before adding, “And full disclosure; you can never leave his realm once you get there.”

Her jaw dropped. Closed. Dropped again. Unable to leave Sheoul-gra? She’d be trapped. Imprisoned, just like she’d been when she was kidnapped by a crazy angel bent on getting revenge on an archangel, a situation that had gotten her into this mess in the first place.

Finally, she managed a squeaky, “Never?”

“Not...in the traditional sense.” Raphael produced a cup of nectar from out of thin air and held it out to her, but she refused. She doubted her stomach could hold anything down right now. Plus, refusing something offered by an archangel gave her a sinful feeling of satisfaction. “But according to my intel, he possesses a
chronoglass
.”

Surprise flew through her. “I thought we had the only two in existence.”

“Apparently not.”

“So he can time travel?”

Raphael shook his head. “He wasn’t born with the ability. We believe he uses it to view current events in the human and demon realms.”

What a waste. Angels with the ability to time travel could do so only under limited circumstances and with the assistance of a handful of very rare objects.
Chronoglasses
were the most versatile and powerful of all the time travel objects, and Azagoth’s would be invaluable to Heaven.

“Wait...you said he can view the events of the demon realm too? How?”

“His
chronoglass
, unlike ours, is double-sided. One side allows a view of the human realm, and the other shows the demon realm.” Raphael sipped the nectar she’d refused. “With his
chronoglass
, you can escape his realm once per day for an hour. But you will be restricted to the past, and as always, contact with anyone you know is not permitted, and so is any manipulation of events that could change history.” He angled his body closer, putting on the pressure without saying a word. “So. What say you?”

I say you’re insane.
“As, ah...generous...as this offer is, I’m going to have to refuse. I have a job here.”

He casually took a drink of the nectar, and she got the feeling that he was stringing a noose. “Do you.”

She swallowed. Which wasn’t easy, given the invisible rope tightening inexorably around her neck. “Excuse me?”

“Did you think we could let your recent transgressions slide?” He waved his hand, and one of the smoky walls became solid ivory.

Against the white backdrop, in perfect, high-def 3-D, a movie started up. A movie that showed her, three months ago, as she traveled through time to various locations to gather objects.

An angel named Reaver had asked for some special gifts for his five-thousand-year-old children, items from their childhoods. It was against the rules to bring objects back from the past, but he’d pulled her butt out of trouble once, and she’d owed him.

But holy crap, had she paid for what she’d done. Fifty years of time travel with supervision only, plus a hundred years of listening in on human prayers, sorting them, and presenting the most urgent ones to the Prayer Fulfillment Department.

So. Freaking. Boring. Humans could pray for really selfish, stupid stuff.

The movie jumped ahead, and she watched herself handing the items to Reaver. “I’ve already been punished for that.”

“And clearly, you didn’t learn your lesson,” he snapped, suddenly and inexplicably irritated. “Because not a month later, you broke one of the most important time travel laws and caused an imbalance in Heaven that we’re still trying to correct.”

“I had no choice! If you’d just listen—”

“Silence!” He hadn’t raised his voice, but the echo of his command circled the room a dozen times before fading away. “You say you had no choice, so now I’m giving you one. You can go through the dissection trials to have your ability removed. You will then be assigned to menial labor for the rest of your existence, or you can mate Azagoth and be able to time travel once a day. Which is it?”

She shook with a combination of rage that the circumstances of her crime were being disregarded, and terror that both punishments were not only horrible, but permanent. Losing her freedom was her greatest nightmare, and now she was facing it in a lose/lose situation.

“I need time to think about it.” Even her voice trembled.

“I’m not giving you time,” he said. “But I’m in a generous mood, so I’ll tell you what. Go now to Sheoul-gra, and you’ll have thirty Earth days to change your mind. At the end of the thirty days, the realm’s exit will be sealed to you, and you will never again be allowed to leave except for an hour a day when you use the
chronoglass
.”

Her belly twisted, and again, she was glad she’d refused the nectar. “Will I lose my wings?”

“No. You’ll be like Azagoth...a fallen angel, but...not. He is like his realm; unique.”

This could not be happening. She searched Raphael’s handsome face for any kind of sign that despite his claim of having no sense of humor this was just a big joke, but the archangel’s expression was all business.

“What about the Memitim? Will you still be sending angels to him to...breed with?”

She could hardly get the last part out. Azagoth was the father of all Memitim, and she seriously doubted Heaven would just let him stop producing little baby Reapers. Or maybe he wouldn’t want to stop. Maybe he was like her father, donating baby batter for the greater good and not giving a shit about his offspring.

“He won’t be creating any more Memitim. We’re reversing their sterility and changing Memitim from a class of angel to an ability any angel can be born with.”

How easy it all sounded. She wondered how the Memitim felt about the fact that their inability to reproduce was by design and could have been reversed at any time.

She closed her eyes and considered her options, crappy as they were.

The removal of an angel’s time travel ability was brutal. Agonizing. And in some instances, fatal. Even if one survived, the process and the loss were traumatic, and the angel was never the same. Lilliana had encountered two angels who had undergone the process, and their empty eyes haunted her to this day.

As if having her ability taken away wasn’t bad enough, she’d then be stuck doing menial tasks for the rest of her life...but on the bright side, maybe she’d be so lobotomized from the time-travelectomy that she wouldn’t care.

And didn’t that sound like a wonderful life?

Her other choice was to become the mate of a depraved angel, a male who was the keeper of demon souls. A male who had volunteered to be booted from Heaven...or, if the rumors were true, he’d not so much “volunteered” as
been
volunteered.

Sort of like what was happening to her right now.

Except that after she mated the Grim Freaking Reaper, she’d be stuck in his realm, which, by all accounts, was a shadowy, dreary place that resembled Athens—if Athens was drenched in darkness, overrun by creepy demon things, and had been decorated via an unholy alliance between Guillermo del Toro and Anne Rice.

Really, though, there was a clear winner here. Between the choices of suck and suckier, suck won out.

Opening her eyes, she gave in to the inevitable. “I’ll go to Sheoul-gra,” she muttered. At least she had thirty days to change her mind once she got there.

“I’m happy to hear that. You leave immediately.” Clapping his hand on her shoulder, he leaned in, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur. “Now, if one were to somehow get out of Azagoth’s realm with his
chronoglass
within that thirty days, one’s past transgressions might be forgiven. Especially if one were also to destroy the spying stone we believe he’s using to spy on us.”

She nearly tripped over her own feet. He was giving her a way out of this crappy deal?

Raphael stepped back and finished his nectar. “Oh,” he said, as he tossed the empty cup to the floor and strode toward the exit, “and good luck. Azagoth is an asshole.”

Chapter Three

Lilliana’s skin crawled as she took in the massive palace before her. True to her intel and research, the building, and all those surrounding it, were fashioned after ancient Greek structures. Great pillars rose up from the ground to support walls that went on forever. But unlike the bone-white framework that typified Greek construction, everything here was blackened, as if polluted by centuries of smoke buildup. She wondered what would happen if she scraped her fingernail down a wall.

Everything here felt...wrong. Even the air buzzed with a low-level sinister energy, as if she were standing next to a leaking, demonic nuclear power plant. Instinctively, she reached for her angelic power, but it was as if she struck a barrier. She could feel her power inside her, but it was trapped somehow, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t reach it.

Raphael had warned her that her powers would be all but useless here, but she’d hoped that somehow he was wrong.

Not so much.

Shuddering, she inhaled the air that stank of decay and filth, and climbed the seemingly endless steps to a landing that was as sprawling as a football field. The doors before her, large enough to allow a pair of elephants inside, opened up as if by magic.

No one was standing at the threshold to greet her. She hadn’t been sure what to expect, but silence and a warehouse-sized room filled with gruesome artwork and fountains that ran with blood wasn’t it.

Lilliana walked inside, her pristine white gown dragging on the polished obsidian floor. She hated the stupid dress, but it was what Raphael had insisted she wear, as if she were some sort of child bride being offered up to a sleazeball who’d paid for her.

Which probably wasn’t far from the truth.

At the far side of the room, a lone figure appeared through another set of double doors. Male. Tall. Blond. Handsome. Evil.

Fallen angel.

He gestured for her to approach, and although she’d been conditioned since birth to despise fallen angels, she obeyed. What choice did she have, after all?

“I am Zhubaal,” he said, when she was a few yards away.

Up close, he was obscenely good-looking in his black leather pants and wife-beater that revealed a massive, muscular upper body, but the malevolence in his gaze made her shiver. Relief that he wasn’t Azagoth was tempered with fear that her soon-to-be mate would be hideous...or that his eyes would be filled with something much worse than cruelty.

“I’m Lilliana,” she replied as steadily as she could, but she cursed the slight tremor in her voice.

“I know.” Zhubaal smiled, and if she’d thought his gaze was fiendish, his smile was a hundred times worse. This was not a male she’d want to piss off. “Tell me, do you feel like a sacrificial lamb?”

Fallen angels were assholes. “I was given more of a choice than any lamb.”

He snorted and started down a long, twisty hallway. “Keep telling yourself that.”

She amended her last thought. Fallen angels were
major
assholes.

They arrived at an arched doorway that seemed to be carved out of a solid piece of bone. A slab of thick wood studded with iron squeaked open at Zhubaal’s shove.

Warm orange light spilled from the opening, illuminating a room that was chilly despite flames that stretched a full six feet in height inside the fireplace on the far wall. In front of the fire, there was a claw-footed oak desk scattered with papers, pens, and tiny jade animals.

And standing next to the monstrosity was an impossibly beautiful dark-haired male with eyes the color of vibrant emeralds. His expression could have been carved from a solid block of ice, and the blade-sharp lines of his jaw and cheekbones only emphasized the hardness of his appearance. The fang tips glinting between his full lips were the icing on the
oh-shit-what-did-I-get-into
cake.

“Hello.” His deep voice turned her marrow to pudding even as a wave of heat licked her skin. “I’m Azagoth.”

Dear...God. He was both magnificent and frightening. “I’m Lilliana,” she said, somehow keeping her tone even, her words sure.

He strode toward her, his black slacks defining long legs, his European-style leather shoes tapping against the ebony floor, his rich gray dress shirt rolled at the sleeves to reveal powerfully muscled forearms. Lilliana resided in Heaven, where all male angels were perfect specimens of masculinity, but something about Azagoth made every last one of them seem average. Hell, even Raphael, with his jewels and furs, couldn’t touch Azagoth’s simple elegance and raw sexuality.

Or his deadliness.

He halted a couple of feet away. “Why are you here?”

She blinked, not understanding the question. Surely he understood the deal that had been struck between him and the archangels.

“Ah...I’m here for you.”

He looked at her as if she were completely daft. “I know. But why
you
?”

“I don’t know why,” she answered honestly. This was a punishment, yes, but the archangels could have chosen anyone to toss up as a sacrifice, so why her specifically? She’d wondered, but in the end it didn’t matter, she supposed.

Azagoth’s remarkable eyes narrowed. “Then why did you agree to mate me?”

She wasn’t sure she was ready to tell him. She could think of little more humiliating or insulting than trying to explain that being here was the least distasteful of two horrific options. “First, why don’t you tell me why you wanted this?”