Chapter: 0
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The first thing I tasted was blood, and there was more of it than I thought I had. I doubled over and threw up onto the polished floor, and the coughs that followed came from somewhere deep enough to make my ribs ache. The room tilted. Something warm ran from my nose over my lip, and when I spat, the stone again in front of me turned from black to a wet red smear.
"Why," I said, to nobody. My left arm was burning. I looked down, and the white flame that used to belong to me crawled up the sleeve, bright and steady, ignoring me completely. Above it, a faint scarlet light hung under the ceiling like weather about to break. My hand shook against the floor. "Why." Another cough bent me in half, and the blood sprayed out in front of me. "Why the hell are you up there?"
I made myself look, and I wished I hadn't.
Gabriel Aster Cain was sitting on the throne. He sat with one leg crossed over the other, his head propped on his fist, as if the chair had been built for him and he had been waiting a while for the rest of us to arrive. His Overdrive hung around him in slow red threads that drifted like mist, and each time they moved, the whole throne room pulsed crimson. He looked bored, and that was the worst part of it.
He lifted one finger and looked at me. "Why are you still talking?" he asked quietly.
My left arm blew out in scarlet light. I got as far as "What—" before the floor came up to meet me. My face hit the stone hard enough that my horns scraped and caught, and I felt a tooth give while blood ran out around the rest. Something I couldn't see settled over my skull and pushed. I couldn't scream or pull in air or move a finger, and the pressure kept climbing until the edges of my vision went gray.
"That's fine," he said, in the same easy voice. "I'd like to see how long you can keep talking with your head pressed into the ground."
Along with me, dozens of high-ranking demons were scattered across the hall, every one of them on their knees or flat on their faces, some of them trembling, all held down by the same invisible weight. Gabriel glanced across them with something close to a smile.
"I appreciate all of you," he said, and the hall carried it to the walls. "Thank you for handing over your lives politely."
The insane bastard. I got my jaw open a crack, and the words came out wet. "What did you do to him?"
The pressure vanished. Before I could drag in a breath, something closed around my throat, lifted me off the floor, and hauled me across the room until my feet hung level with the base of the throne and his face was right in front of mine. His eyes were empty. He studied me the way you study something in a jar.
"What did you say?"
"What did you do to him?" I tried to snarl, and blood ran down my chin. "You bastard."
He let me go on for a while. He watched my mouth and waited, as if counting how many insults I had left, and when I ran short, he said, "Your lord is dead."
My mind stopped. It took a few seconds to understand that the sound I was making was a laugh, small and cracked, and Gabriel tilted his head at it.
"What's funny?"
"You think you've won." I laughed again, and it hurt in my ribs. Around the hall, I could feel the others watching me and the fear coming off them, and that only made it funnier. "Human, did you really believe you had a chance? Kill us. Kill every one of us if you can. There are demons above us who are leagues stronger, things you can't picture, and when they come for you..." I found I almost pitied him. "They'll make you wish you'd stayed a lamb."
"Huh," Gabriel said.
I waited for more. He looked at me like a man who had heard the same sentence from a thousand dying mouths and wasn't any more moved by this one. "That's unfortunate. Maybe you're right, and there are demons stronger than me. Maybe some of them are beyond what I can even understand." His eyes dropped a little. "Then I'll have to get stronger again. I don't need to, and I don't especially want to. I'm just the only one left who can."
His voice stayed low and tired. "You called me human. You're mistaken. I lost that long before I took my first step into Hell. I've been built up and broken and torn apart and put back together more times than you'd believe, and now I'm like the rest of you, a part in a machine. A tool." He stood, and the simple act of it made every instinct I had try to crawl out of my skin. "I'll keep grinding until the work is finished, until I take the last throne and watch every one of you drown beneath it, and until all the evil that ever existed has been ended by the one thing it produced."
He smiled when he said it. It was a calm smile, and I couldn't find the edge of it.
My laughter was gone by then. For the first time since I became a demon, I was afraid, truly afraid, because whatever stood in front of me belonged to none of the kinds I knew. The red light thickened around him, and his eyes went colder, and I understood, with a sick drop in my chest, that he was beginning to look more frightening than any of us, and that it felt like the end of everything.