Darlings of New Midnight Read online

  And much like no one warded against harpies, no one warded against mummies—or the mummy cursed—either. Since he was also sand, he could travel through the Delacourt house a lot faster than Lynneia and Logan and never trigger a trap.

  “Hey, Ahmed, you wanna check out the upper floors?” Logan asked. “At the rate we’re going, we’ll get there by Tuesday.”

  He sighed, which was always a neat trick since he didn’t technically breathe, and said, “Fine. What am I looking for again?”

  “A nasty book that gives off mucho bad mojo,” Lyn said.

  “Should I destroy it?”

  “No, we might need it,” Logan admitted.

  He rolled his eyes. “Of course we do. We need all the bad-news stuff we can gather. Because if we’re going to allow an apocalypse, it’s going to be one we start.” Before either of them could reply, he became a dust devil and blew off into the next room. The hellhound watched, looking as puzzled as it could possibly be.

  “Would it be insensitive if I suggested he give Prozac a shot?” Lyn wondered.

  Logan shrugged. “You could, but you know what he’ll say.”

  Lyn scowled—because Ahmed didn’t have resting bitch face as much as he had resting disapproving face—and quoted, “I don’t eat or drink. I don’t need to sleep, but once I slept for four years because it was the Dark Ages and it was fucking dull. People are disgusting. How is the species not dead yet?”

  “I’m kind of surprised he doesn’t have a hit podcast,” Logan admitted.

  “I’m surprised he’s not the head of the Department of Health and Human Services,” Lyn replied.

  Yeah, that was a surprise now that he thought about it. Also, the current government was the best reason for an apocalypse because those toddler motherfuckers were bound and determined to blow the world up. Call Logan perverse, but he thought maybe humans should end humanity, not a bunch of bored angels and demons. Not that it would matter much since the outcome would be the same. It was the principle of the thing.

  The dining room had another hallucination sigil that neither the hellhound nor Lyn was subject to, and Logan stayed as far away from it as he could until Lyn destroyed it by putting her foot through the floorboards. But that revealed something unexpected, although in retrospect, not an unsurprising find.

  “Who put money on bodies under the floor?” Lyn asked as Logan sidled up for his own peek.

  Yep. That looked like a human skull and some random other bones. “Think that was part of the sacrifice to juice all these sigils?”

  “Either that or the guy who used to live here was a serial killer.”

  Logan shrugged. “Possibly both. Who else would leave behind such a fucked-up house?”

  “Well, a wannabe black-magician sadist who probably thought he was the coolest thing imaginable. So, yeah, serial killer.”

  Cujo/Ralph dipped his muzzle into the hole in the floor and pulled out a bone. Logan thought about telling him to put it down, but would he listen? Also, it was highly doubtful the deceased gave a fuck. That was a perk of being dead, not having to give a fuck about the material world anymore.

  The hellhound trotted on, gnawing on the tibia, or whatever bone it had snagged, and they were close to the stairs when they heard what sounded like the collapse of a partially full bookcase upstairs. Even the dog looked up.

  “You okay up there, Ahmed?” Logan shouted.

  After a moment, the dust devil returned to the top of the stairs and instantly re-formed into fashion-plate Ahmed again. “There was a stupid trap that apparently read me as a physical being it could crush. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.”

  Logan nodded, all the while thinking that maybe that guy who voiced Marvin the Paranoid Android in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie should have been replaced by Ahmed. When someone was really down on everything, it showed. Or could be heard, as the case may be. “Anything nasty waiting for us on the stairs?”

  Ahmed glanced down at the staircase like he hadn’t noticed it before. “Besides a half-century worth of dust and tetanus? Not really.” He paused. “There’s a banishing sigil about halfway up, but it might put you someplace better.”

  Logan looked toward the door, which was open and in view from where they stood. Ceri and Esme were still waiting patiently, like they didn’t have loved ones inside a death trap. “Anything you guys can do about that?”

  Ceri and Esme had a brief whispered conversation; then Esme cast a spell. She was both too far away and talking too fast for Logan to follow it, but the stairs began to change color. No—not just change color, change material. The wooden stairs were becoming… plastic? Something like that. But the material being transmogrified had zeroed out the sigil. It also cleared out the dust, which Logan thought would have impressed Ahmed, but he looked unmoved by this display, and once the spell was done, he said, “Oh goody, Lucite stairs. Are we making this a strip club?” Not waiting for a response, he turned back into a dust devil and blew off to another room upstairs.

  “He is such a ray of sunshine,” Lyn said, mounting the stairs. “It’s a good thing he’s immortal, ’cause otherwise he’d have been bludgeoned to death by now.”

  The funny thing? Most days, Ahmed would have liked that. Apparently immortality wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

  Logan wondered if Gill was going to learn that sooner or later. And what she would do once she did.

  2—Hell Is My Backup Plan

  IT WAS kind of funny to think how far he and Logan had come in a year and a half, earth time.

  Love at first sight was stupid. It was lust at first sight, conflated to love. And yet, Ceri would definitely say he fell in love with Logan at first sight.

  That story took a weird turn since the first time Ceri saw Logan was in his father’s dungeon set. Ceri called it a set because that’s basically what it was. His father was known as evil, sure, but most people overlooked how fucking theatrical he was. He really was a drama queen, and the secret of Hell was that people always made their own. Hell could throw up a backdrop of what was expected, but Hell wasn’t other people more than it was simply people. What did anyone expect? What did they do that had haunted them? Hell did nothing but help turn the mind against itself, which humans seemed to do all the time without any prompting.

  But Logan was an unusual case. Of course he had regrets. Of course he tortured himself, but he refused to play Lucifer’s game. Ceri’s father had taken him because he thought he could use him as a bargaining chip with the angels, speed up the timetable on the apocalypse. Why he wanted to speed it up, Ceri had no idea, as Dad felt Ceri didn’t really need to know the details. That was Ceri’s only hint that his father knew how much he didn’t want to do it.

  Ceri didn’t want the world to end. He had seen very little of it, but he wanted to see more. He wanted to see everything. But Father was big on how unsafe it was for him to venture out, when he knew better than anyone how hard Ceri was to seriously hurt or kill. Maybe he was worried the angels would take his son as a counter-bargaining chip, but Ceri honestly would have liked to see them try. He didn’t get the nickname “the Destroyer” by being fragile and easily bent.

  Logan refusing to play Ceri’s father’s game made his dad bring out the props. The dungeon set looked appropriately medieval, with rusty chains, stone walls, an iron maiden, and a constant, near-maddening sound of dripping water. Logan was shackled to the wall, hanging semiconscious from his bound wrists, when Ceri first got a look at him.

  Logan was a mess. His left eye was swollen, he had a gash on his right cheek that was still bleeding, and his lower lip was both swollen and split. Father didn’t expect Logan to give in to torture; he only did it for shits and giggles. If he wanted information from Logan, he could have riffled through his brain, because Lucifer was nothing if not very gifted at getting inside people’s heads. But Logan knew nothing Lucifer didn’t already know. Again, it was Dad having a bit of fun. Hurting people gave him so much pleasure, and th
at was probably doubly true if it was a human Heaven had already marked.

  Although Ceri knew Father had some demon guards assigned to keep an eye on him, everyone knew that if push came to shove, the guards couldn’t stop him. So no one tried to keep him from going into Logan’s cell for a closer look. Maybe they thought he was going to work him over a bit more.

  But he was curious and fascinated. Demons weren’t scared of any humans, but they did speak of Logan Fox in resentful, hushed whispers. He’d hurt demons; he was one of the few humans who ever had. He was considered a vicious animal, and yet, hanging there, bleeding and unconscious, he looked like nothing but a man. Ceri could tell, beneath the bruises and cuts and blood, he was a very handsome member of his species. Touching Logan’s dark brown hair, which hung down in a messy tangle over his bruised face, Ceri marveled at how soft it felt.

  Logan startled him by mumbling, but Ceri couldn’t make out what he said at first. “What?” he asked, pulling his hand away from Logan’s hair. That might seem kind of pervy, but that was not his intention.

  Logan’s one unswollen eye opened, revealing a dark green iris that immediately captivated Ceri. “What the hell are you supposed to be?” he mumbled. It sounded like he was speaking through a mouth full of rocks.

  Ceri looked at himself, if only to confirm his full human glamour was still in effect. It was. “I’m Cerberus Morningstar.”

  That one eye, struggling to stay open, didn’t seem impressed. “You don’t look like a dog.”

  Ceri rolled his eyes. “My father thought he was being funny naming me that.”

  Logan muttered something that Ceri realized in retrospect was him saying, “So you’re the Destroyer.”

  His teachers had told him that—according to prophecies and blah, blah, blah—but Ceri couldn’t believe it. It seemed more like propaganda his father was trying to shove into his head. He didn’t want to destroy anyone, and he certainly didn’t want to end the world. How would he do that, and more to the point, why would he? He had no reason to do so. “No, I’m not. How would you like it if I called you Angel Blood?”

  “I’d tell you to fuck off,” he mumbled before his head dipped back down to his chest and his one eye closed.

  For a brief second, Ceri was afraid he had died, but he knew that was wrong. Logan was a bargaining chip, and his father wouldn’t kill him until he had been played. But he would kill him, wouldn’t he? No one escaped from Hell unless his father allowed it, and Ceri didn’t see him allowing a mere mortal to do so.

  Ceri traced the uninjured half of his jaw with his fingers and wondered if Logan was being defiant because he knew it didn’t matter. No matter how he reacted, Lucifer would do whatever he wanted to do to him. Frankly, begging for mercy might make it worse.

  “Keep fighting,” Ceri whispered to him and left, deciding he couldn’t be here anymore. He wanted to help him, heal him, but Father would simply make the next injuries even worse.

  The rest of the day, Ceri couldn’t stop thinking about Logan. In a classic denial scenario, he did some research on him, thinking it would distract him from thinking about Logan. Logan Fox wasn’t anything special, as far as humans went, and yet, conversely, he was very special. He grew up working poor, with an alcoholic mother and a younger sister he ended up taking care of, unaware there was angel blood in their lineage. Logan was the only human known who could beat a demon in a straight fight. He had been trained to his eyeballs, thanks to his mother’s foresight. He was stubborn, resilient, and had a natural ability to figure out his best move in any scenario. He was, in a dichotomy for the ages, no one and also someone they should definitely keep an eye on.

  Later that night, Ceri could hear Logan’s screams through the walls, and it made him furious. This was pointless! His father was torturing him only because he was bored. There was no endgame to this, except eventually killing him when he had a new toy to break. Ceri considered busting in and telling his dad to knock it off, but in no way would that end well for Logan. So Ceri waited.

  It was maybe an hour, and yet it felt like a day. And despite all the time he had, Ceri didn’t plan anything, save for taking Godslayer. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to leave Hell. He hadn’t ever been on Earth. Thanks to scrying and his father’s various abilities, he knew what it was like. His father and his demon bodyguards were big on telling him it wasn’t safe yet for him to go there, but they called him the Destroyer, didn’t they? People should be afraid of him, not the other way around.

  He found Logan unconscious, bleeding more but still dangling from shackled wrists. Ceri grabbed the chains and shattered them—hey, he never said there wasn’t a good reason why he was called the Destroyer—draped Logan’s arm around his shoulder, and held him up with an arm around his waist. “Can you hear me? We’re getting out of here.”

  Ceri got no answer. Logan was really out of it and drooling blood like a hellhound. “C’mon, Logan, I need you to help me.” Actually, he didn’t. He just wanted to make sure Logan wasn’t dying. “You wanna get out of here or not?”

  Logan mumbled something. It wasn’t actually a word, but it was at least a syllable, so that was something. He wasn’t dead yet.

  His guards appeared in the hall, and Ceri gave them a choice. “I’m leaving, and I’m taking him with me. Step aside or die.”

  “You know we can’t—” the red demon began.

  He got no further. Ceri held out a hand and ended them. He was ridiculously powerful on Earth, but in Hell he was a god. He could wish someone dead, and that’s exactly what happened. The guards vaporized; not even their bodies were left behind. Ceri didn’t feel that guilty. He gave them a choice. They simply chose to believe that his father was scarier than him.

  Ceri did encounter a few more guards and had to destroy most of them. One had the good sense to walk away, but only one. Father did prize loyalty in his employees. You’d think death would have been a stopping point, but nope. But when the choice was die for him or die from him, there was little to be gained.

  Hell had an exit, but most people didn’t know what it was. It was seemingly a dead end, a round room with a stone floor and only candles for lighting. If a demon was summoned—and bothered to respond to it—this was the gateway out. An especially powerful demon could summon themself out.

  There was a ritual circle drawn on the floor, but thanks to the low light levels, it wasn’t obvious. However, as soon as Ceri stepped on the circle, it lit up, a classic inverted pentagram inside a circle, daubed with blood and wax. All he had to do was think of a place and go there.

  Technically, he and his father, and a couple of high demons he wasn’t sure were still alive, could fold space; therefore, they could be anywhere they wanted to be. But Hell had a natural barrier, surely put in by his dad, that prevented space-folding anywhere within Hell, except in this room. He controlled who came in and who came out. Imagine—Satan a control freak. Who knew?

  Doing his research on Logan, Ceri had discovered he was originally from Washington State. Tacoma, to be exact. So even though he didn’t know what it was like, Ceri wished them to Tacoma.

  Ceri’s first view of Earth was a closed-down former bar. It was dark and dusty and smelled of rat shit, so it was kind of hard to say he’d left Hell for a moment. But a car horn blasted outside and someone was yelling obscenities, so he knew he was on Earth.

  It was night, which worked out well since he was walking around with a bleeding, unconscious man. They weren’t far from a motel, a cheap-shit place, and Ceri had no money, but that was irrelevant. He had his father’s ability to impose his will on others, so he told the clerk he had paid for a week in cash when in fact he’d given him no money. But the guy believed he had, and that was all that mattered.

  Once he got Logan laid out on the bed in their room, he healed him. Lucifer had the power to heal anyone, and sometimes he did, in the course of a soul-selling bargain. But mostly he took things apart. Everyone seemed to forget the opposite of healing was ruinatio
n, and if Lucifer had the power to do one, he could do the other. The same was true of Ceri—he could destroy, and he could rebuild. Of course, he’d never healed a human before, so it was slow going. He didn’t want to heal Logan overzealously and accidentally give him traits he didn’t need or supercharge his immune system to the point that it would tear Logan apart from the inside out. In all honesty, he shouldn’t have done this for the first time on a severely wounded man. He could have made things worse; he could have killed him. But luckily, in his bumbling way, he made Logan stop bleeding, and his breathing went from wet and labored to clear and calm. It did occur to Ceri it would be better still if he could save him from the trauma of torture, and he could impose his will on Logan, make him believe that didn’t happen. But it finally occurred to him that would be wrong. Yes, it would spare Logan some trauma, but he needed to have some autonomy here. If he wanted it removed, he could request it. Otherwise, it wasn’t for Ceri to say. Morality was something he wrestled with, because it certainly wasn’t something his father—or the various teachers he’d had—ever bothered to teach him. But he wanted to learn.

  Ceri pricked his finger and drew sigils on the wall. One was to blind the sight of demons, the other to blind the sight of angels, and the last, most important one was to blind the sight of his father. It took Ceri ages to find that one, but it was vital. He knew if he ever wanted to get away from him, he had to have a way to escape his notice.

  Of course, it was a little weird when Logan regained consciousness. He opened his eyes and seemed to take a second to look at the ceiling before sitting up and backing against the head of the bed, messing up the pillows. It would be much later before Ceri knew Logan had unconsciously reached under his pillow for a weapon because he usually slept with one there. Logan and Gillian had lived like fugitives for years, hoping to stay ahead of demons and angels alike, and it had made deep inroads into their psyches. To be brutally truthful, if they weren’t as stubborn and resilient as they were, they’d probably be institutionalized for the rest of their lives, and Logan seemed to be aware that could still be his fate. It clearly frightened him deeply. “Who the fuck are you?”