Unearthed (3 page)

Fucking place was like a maze or one of the pits in hell. Smelled revolting too. The only things that should be dirty were minds, and nothing was a bigger turnoff than the smell of disinfectant. Any situation in which someone could use the word “sterile” was something no man wanted part of. Even demons, and they didn’t reproduce.

Davyn went solid to get ready for the inevitable fight. Hopefully it wouldn’t happen in front of the group of people he sensed up ahead. Without stopping or even slowing down, he poked through their minds until he found something about Lamere.

Aaand
bingo. We have a winner
. He tapped into the mind of a woman with some very naughty thoughts about a tall, dark, and unholy stranger. “Holy fuck.” Those were some powerfully naughty thoughts. “You dirty, dirty girl.” A woman with a mind like that was worth getting to know.

A crowd of hospital staff stood in front of the elevators, all the women bowlegged from looking at Lamere. If they only knew. Davyn was secure enough to admit the vamp was attractive. They
all
were, but Lamere had that impossibly beautiful boy-next-door thing going.

Davyn didn’t have that. Davyn had that big-guy-no-one-could-ever-take-their-eyes-off thing. Men knew not to expose their backs to someone like him. Women were simpler. He was the whole bad boy fantasy. Thick, black hair, hard muscle everywhere, coloring humans referred to as ‘exotic”—whatever that meant—and just enough of his tribal markings showed to make them look like the tattoos that had suddenly become popular.

The group panicked when they saw Davyn come at them. It happened. He tried not to let it hurt his feelings. Everyone backed away, then split and ran. But Lamere kept his arm around the woman with the dirty mind who stared at him as if he were a god. Even if it hadn’t been wrong, it was just so extremely
wrong
.

Davyn wanted to puke when the vamp licked his fangs. “If you’re trying to turn me on, it’s not working. Those things are puny. I know people say size doesn’t matter, but let’s be honest here—a fun-sized anything isn’t nearly as fun as the king-sized version. Am I right?”

“Careful,” the vamp whispered, his accent making the word even more disturbing. “You don’t want to cause a scene, do you?” The bastard knew Davyn’s hands were somewhat tied.

“Need some help?” someone growled.

Davyn recognized the malice, the annoying bravado of one of his kind, totally different from Davyn’s own genuinely
likeable
bravado. Probably a newbie, first time topside would be Davyn’s bet. All fresh-faced and evil.

Eww.

Scratch the fresh-faced, because the fucker who came around the corner was unbelievably ugly. His long hook nose bent down, covering most of his dagger-like, yellowed teeth. He wasn’t Fosfer—that was for sure. Impressive, though—not many of the other breeds were strong enough or smart enough to make it all the way up to earth.

“Thanks, but I’m good,” Davyn said. “Cutting in on somebody’s job isn’t smart though.” In fact, it was about as suicidal as it got in the demon world. “Did you fall asleep during the ‘How to Play Nice Topside’ videos?”

“I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the vampire.”

“The vamp?” Well, that was definitely impossible to understand. Damn it, things just got a lot more serious—and a lot less fun. Davyn could take on the vamp or the demon one-handed. So two hands, two enemies, one stone was totally doable,
if
they weren’t in a public place. The amount of damage he would cause by taking on both of them simultaneously would have humans coming through doors faster than if he yelled, “Only one more pudding left! Who wants it?” at a retirement home.

He was going to have to figure something else out. “The Prime hired me to collect this idiot, and our boss okayed it. So if you want to stay topside, let’s pretend you didn’t say anything to either of us.”

The demon lumbered forward, his hooves unaccustomed to freshly waxed tile floor. Wait a minute. That meant he was corporeal, but not using his glamour to hide his true appearance.

“You’re not going to make it past your second week up here if you don’t cover that up. All of it.” Davyn motioned down the length of the demon’s body, and then kept his hand in front of his face to block the visual. “Seriously, man. ’Cause it’s making my eyes water. If somebody sees you, there’ll be lots of screaming.” Screaming was a lot tougher to cover up than a glimpse of a supernatural being, because
everyone
wanted to know what caused it.

“You’re soft.”

Davyn laughed. The newbie didn’t recognize him. Granted, there was no newspaper or internet in hell, but it chafed nonetheless. He’d gone through the gauntlet faster than any demon ever had. No losses, no draws, barely a scratch on him, physically. Emotionally, there was the same lasting damage all his kind experienced. Davyn just dealt with it differently. Not better, just differently.

“You should try moderation. Balance in all things, even us, my man.”

“I am far greater than a man.” Between his teeth and the depth of his voice, the words were near impossible to decipher. “But you, the longer you’re topside, the less evolved you become.” Yep, impossible, because no way was anyone stupid enough to say something like that to Davyn.

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that. Because after you worked so hard to get up here, I might feel bad about shortening your tour above the crust. Maybe.”

A flicker of a smile made the demon even uglier. And made Davyn a little paranoid.

“Your grin is burning my retinas. Do you mind?”

“I am Drinod. In three earth months, I have killed more humans than you probably ever have.”

“Are you feeling okay? I know the air takes a little getting used to, but—”

“Does that not make you feel weak when standing in my presence?”

“Nope. A little nauseous maybe, but I think that’s the way you smell, not—” As soon as the words hit the oh-shit part of his brain, Davyn’s abs tightened. “You killed humans?”

The only plausible scenario was based on how fucking stupid this ugly shithead was. Since making it through the trials on all nine levels of hell took at least a little intelligence, this guy must have been summoned from a lower level and then accidentally freed. Had to be accidentally, didn’t it?

Davyn hated how smug and confident Lamere looked. What the fuck was going on? There was no reason for a vamp to summon a demon unless it was for something highly illegal, something only a demon could do. Like find someone or burn them to ash without any drama at all.

“No way you’re the demon who got to the dat vitae and took out all those rebels, along with almost every human who lived on that block.” The demon who had disappeared after the slaughter, presumably because someone in the Rising had sent him back to hell.

“My predecessor went below before he could claim his reward.” The demon glanced at Lamere. “I won’t allow that to happen to me.”

Whatever was wrong with the world, or this situation, Davyn would live through it. But a few things sucked way more than death, and he sensed things were heading that way rapidly. So Lamere was hiring illegals. Illegals with no morality or reason to follow the laws.

“I can still smell the burning of their flesh. Still see the terror in their eyes when they look upon me, a being never seen outside their nightmares.”

“What?” Davyn asked, refocusing. “Yeah, great. Nice work, lots of killing. I’ll pack up a trophy and some pom-poms for you to take back to hell.”

“I’m not going back.”

“You’re killing humans and seers who aren’t connected to the Rising, and that, my idiot friend, is against the rules.” Davyn pointed towards the floor. “
His
rules.” Plus, the Heights’ council couldn’t let somebody go around setting people on fire haphazardly. It just wasn’t good for morale.

“Lamere is very powerful.”

“Uh…okay. I could try caring about your boy crush or if you guys are banging, but I’m never going to make it past the I-don’t-give-a-fuck stage.”

“He promised me freedom.”

“Yeah well, now I’m promising you a trip back to hell, and I have better follow through. You should know better than to trust a vamp. What are you, anyway? A Level Four, Five, maybe?” This thing would’ve had to work fucking hard to get up to those. Then work pretty hard to lose it all, if you considered how taxing all that murder must have been.

The demon shook his head, his lip pulling back to show more fang. “I will have complete freedom from below.”

Davyn laughed. When the demon just stared at him, Davyn realized the prick wasn’t smart enough to have meant that as a joke. “You serious? How is he going to do that?” Fear didn’t happen in Fosfer demons—call it a perk, a talent, a skill, but they didn’t feel it. They had great ability to see stupid, though. And Davyn was looking right at it.

“What’d he tell you? That he would hook you up with a pretty girl? A pay-for-services-rendered deal? Great, but her soul only gives you one human lifetime of freedom. Then you get to pay for those rendered services for the rest of eternity.”

“You do not understand,” Drinod said. “But if I tell you what Lamere promised me, you’ll want it too.”

“Nothing in hell, on earth, or anywhere else would make me want to do a deal with that vamp.”

“He has one hidden. From everyone. He said I could have all of it.”

“
Her
. You could have all of ‘her.’” Not that it mattered. If the demon took the woman’s soul, he’d be paying for it soon enough. Davyn sighed and decided to give it one more shot. He’d speak slower this time. “Okay, sure, let’s pretend for a minute that Lamere could actually hide her that well, and nobody but the three of us—and what was left of the woman—knew what happened. Half of her soul only gets you around fifty years up here, but you get to keep it forever when you go back to hell. And if you think having a soul down there might make it ache a little more than normal, try amping that up by a few tens of thousands. Then you’ll be closer.”

A human lifetime of total freedom—from hell, pain, the Devil himself. Shit yeah, it was a temptation, but there was a balance to be maintained. For every thing and every being—immortals were no exception.

“I will never return to hell.”

“Too bad, buddy—no returns, refunds, or exchanges allowed. You steal it, but you end up paying for it anyway. Eternally. On the bright side, you’d get to meet up with Lamere down in Nine. Because that’s where I’m sending him.” When he heard a bone snap, he glanced over to the asshole in question, just in time to see the vampire’s unlucky human shield slump to the ground with a broken neck. The guy had a huge set of balls, that’s for sure. “Oh no! Were you feeling ignored? I can’t believe your friend and I were so rude. Just talking about you as if you weren’t even here. Or important. Or not hell-bait.”

“Home is where the heart resides, demon.”

“You’re not going to have either for very much longer, vamp.”

The vampire’s grin grew at the sound of footsteps no human could’ve heard. Running. Someone who moved quietly and quickly. Someone who knew how to shield their mind.

Davyn silently thanked himself for not killing the hunter outright, because she was beautifully distracting—enough to make Lamere forget what demons were famous for. Never one to miss an opportunity to fuck around inside someone’s head, he pressed into the vamp’s mind. It was like a garbage heap, random crap all over the place but nothing useful or not covered in filth. Davyn grabbed what he could: images of an apartment somewhere snowy—figured, demons hate the snow—a set of stairs outside the building leading up to the second floor. Next, he saw a grotesquely suburban house and a wall with blood splatter on it. Then he ran into a different kind of wall. The mental kind—a block Davyn couldn’t get through.

What the fuck?
Out of countless minds of every kind of being, he’d never encountered anything like this before. No one could block off half their brain without a very specific, very rare type of magic.

Treaty magic.
I knew it.
That’s why the bastard had been so hard to find. That stupid Treaty wish the Champion won. Pride slightly mollified, Davyn shoved the wall, asking more of his power.
Come on, come on, come on
.

“Such a pretty little thing, isn’t she?” the vamp asked quietly.

Davyn glanced behind him and saw the hunter stumble as she took the corner too wide. Her upper arms practically doubled in size when the muscles engaged to straighten her little body out. She threw out her other hand to steady herself, obviously still feeling the effect of the wall Davyn had sent her into. She flicked her short hair off her face, but it dropped right back over one eye.

“Meh. I prefer my pets a little bigger actually, less breakable.” She was tougher than he’d given her credit for though. He’d expected that toss to knock her out for a few hours at least.

“She is far from breakable, demon.”

When your body temp can reach the boiling point, you’ve spent millennia fighting through nine layers of hell, and you’re immortal, not a lot surprises you. Surprisingly, Davyn felt a whole bunch of it at Lamere’s comment.

When the hunter saw them, her eyes widened slightly, but she didn’t slow down, even while heading directly towards a vamp and two demons. Yep, she was either much tougher or much stupider than he’d given her credit for.

She slid to a stop about twenty feet away, her gaze trailing from Drinod to the dead human on the floor to Davyn, and then stayed put. Even though Davyn had been following her for a week and a half, she’d never seen him before. Although with the hoofed, ugly-ass hell-spawn next to him and the pretty-boy vampire to his left, he wasn’t sure why she was staring at only him.

“Why are you looking at me like that? I meant to call,” he mocked. “I lost your number, swear.” He turned towards Lamere—not that vampires have a sense of humor—and saw nothing. Well, there was an empty space where a vampire used to be. “Motherfucker.” Boy did that time pass quickly. He sighed and ran a hand through his hair.

“Well, that’s a wrap, people,” he said to the remaining two. “We’ll pick this up tomorrow, right where we left off, except next time”—his voice raised in volume until he was shouting—“stay out of my fucking way!”