Page 4 of My Demon Hunter (Hell Bent #2)

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A MARKED MA N

T he brand on his neck started to burn the next morning.

Mist sat up in his soft bed and touched the mark gingerly. He’d known this was a temporary reprieve. He’d known he would eventually be summoned and have to return to his duties. He’d just been hoping he would have longer.

Evidently, he’d been a fool.

Rolling out of bed, he dragged his claws through his tangled hair. Strands hung in his face and stuck up every which way, but it didn’t bother him. He’d never cared much for his appearance the way other demons did. He spent a great deal of time invisibly stalking prey or moving as particles of vapor. It didn’t matter what he looked like.

Yet, for reasons unknown, this morning he found himself stopping in front of the mirror on his way past and regarding his reflection. Familiar yellow eyes stared back at him, but it felt like he was looking at a stranger. The neck brand blended against his dark gray skin, though by the way it burned, he half expected it to be red and swollen.

He shifted into human form. As he stared at this weaker, more vulnerable version of himself, for the first time, he felt something other than mild revulsion.

He looked like someone else. Someone who wasn’t the Hunter. Someone whose existence wasn’t controlled by another and who had a choice in their future.

This was why he had begun this experience living on Earth. He had sought an escape, however temporary, because he wanted a break from being what he was.

But, judging by that brand on his neck, that respite was at its end. Not for the first time, he wondered if death was preferable to an eternity of servitude. And not for the first time, he couldn’t decide.

Belial’s booming voice thundered from the kitchen. “Come eat breakfast while it’s hot or I’ll bash your skulls in with this frying pan!”

Mist snapped to attention, shifting back to demon form as soon as his focus lapsed. One did not disobey a command from Belial. Especially when that command contained the promise of his cooking.

Stalking into the kitchen, he perched on one of the barstools at the island where they gathered for meals.

“You’re the first one here,” Belial said, “so you get a reward.” A steaming espresso shot was deposited in front of him. “First coffee of the day. And”—he piled the contents of the frying pan onto Mist’s plate—“extra food.”

Mist stared at the coffee and food and felt a warm sensation he couldn’t name. He glanced at Belial, who met his gaze briefly before turning back to the stove.

Meph and Raum breezed into the kitchen a moment later. “Ooh, coffee.” Meph stretched out a tattooed hand to steal his espresso shot.

Mist didn’t have a lot of things that belonged to him, so when he acquired something, he became extremely possessive of it. He snatched the shot away and hissed in Meph’s face with bared teeth.

Meph just laughed. “Come on, be a nice demon and share.”

“Touch his coffee, I’ll rip your fingers off,” Belial snapped. “Sit your ass down and eat.”

It was hardly a difficult command to obey. The four of them dug into their meals with gusto.

When they finished, Mist stayed to help clean up after Meph and Raum disappeared. He enjoyed having something to do with his hands that didn’t result in violence, even indirectly. Washing dishes was about as harmless a task as there was, and he found it soothing.

He was just hanging the dish towel off the stove handle when Belial spoke.

“Were you planning to say anything about that brand on your neck?”

Mist’s head swung around. Belial was leaning against the island counter with arms crossed. Even in human form, he was enormous, as tall as Mist’s demon form, with shoulders twice the width of a normal man’s.

“She’s summoning you, isn’t she?”

Mist glanced away. “How did you know?”

“I just know.”

Mist supposed there wasn’t a lot Belial didn’t know, considering he was a fallen angel and one of the greatest powers in Hell.

“So?”

Mist glanced back at him in question.

“Are you going back?”

“I have to.”

“What happens if you ignore the brand?”

He plucked at the fraying edge of the dish towel with his foreclaw. Everything in him rebelled at responding—his brands were his greatest weakness, and a smart demon knew never to reveal such information. But there was no denying Belial when he wanted something, and Mist didn’t view him as an enemy anyway.

Which was yet another thing wrong with him. A proper demon viewed everyone as an enemy.

“It acts as a compulsion. The urge to return will get stronger every day, and the burning will increase.”

“And if you don’t go?”

“You would have to restrain me. It becomes overwhelming.”

“Okay, say I trap you in prison wards. Then what?”

“The burning eventually becomes hellfire. It will first burn through my neck and will not stop until my remains are incinerated.” Decapitation followed by a total incineration of the remains by hellfire—the only way to kill a demon without an angel’s consecrated blade. He would be dead. Permanently, irrevocably eliminated.

Not necessarily the worst option.

Bel breathed a low curse. “And what happens if we kill Paimon?”

“The brand would activate, and I would die too. My life force is tied to hers.”

“Of course it couldn’t be that easy.”

He frowned. “Why would you want to help me? When I am gone, you will no longer have to worry about my presence endangering your secrecy, and—”

“Shut up.” Belial waved a hand. “You sound like a martyr, and I’ve always thought martyrs were fucking idiots. Answer me this: Do you want to belong to Paimon forever?”

Mist slowly shook his head. He couldn’t even speak aloud how much he despised belonging to Paimon, lest he lose his mind in his hatred of her.

“That’s what I thought.”

He stared into those piercing blue eyes, waiting for Belial to speak.

“Look.” The former King of Hell dragged a hand through his pale blond hair. It was short and had been for a while. His hair instantaneously grew every time he flew into one of his infamous rages, but he hadn’t had one in nearly a month, something that was apparently unprecedented.

That wasn’t saying he seemed calm and relaxed, however. Rather, it was the opposite, as if holding back his rage was taking its toll. Shadows lurked under his eyes, and his hands were clenched into fists more often than not.

“I’m going to say some shit to you, and I’m only going to say it once, so pay attention. And if you ever repeat it, I’ll kill you, and all the work we’re doing to help you will go to waste. Got it?”

Mist nodded.

“Okay.” He seemed to be building himself up. “The truth is... I like having you around. You appreciate my food, and you help me clean up, unlike my idiot brothers. You’re Eva’s friend and you make her happy, which in turn makes Ash happy. Which makes me happy. So we’re all happy motherfuckers, thanks to your creepy gray ass.

“So... you want to stay here, you’re welcome as long as you want. You want my help getting free from Paimon, you got it. So don’t give me shit about how I’ll be glad to see you go because I don’t want to hear it. Have I made myself clear?”

Mist nodded again. While he almost couldn’t believe what Belial was saying, he did know he valued it in a way he didn’t quite understand.

“Now that I’ve said my piece, you’re not going to question me or make stupid martyr comments anymore, right?”

“Okay.”

“Good. The first thing I have to do is some research. I’ve seen those brands before, but it was a long time ago, and I don’t know if I remember where. You tell me everything you know, and then I’ll do some digging. I’ll probably have to consult fucking Dan.” His lip curled.

Eva’s father was one of the Grigori, warrior angels that had fallen from Heaven long ago to mate with humans. Belial and his brothers had formed an uneasy truce with him due to Ash’s relationship with Eva.

Though Dan hadn’t been happy about that, he’d accepted the logic of having a Prince of Hell guarding his Nephilim daughter and knew Eva would be angry if he killed her boyfriend. And Ash had accepted that Eva wouldn’t appreciate it if he killed her father.

Thus, an alliance was born.

“In the meantime...” Belial tilted his head and stared at him.

Mist stared back. The silence stretched on.

“Go out with my brothers. Get drunk, get laid, party—whatever you want to do. You came here for a vacation, isn’t that what you said? So go out for once and stop lurking around the apartment.”

Mist had been trying to get rid of his brands without success for a very long time. Certainly, he’d never had Belial’s help before, but he wasn’t without his own resources. His hopes weren’t high, and he knew from experience he had less than two weeks before he couldn’t fight the compulsion to return to Paimon any longer.

Maybe it was time to push himself out of his comfort zone. The first time he had, he’d met Lily. Maybe he’d lost his chance to see her again, but perhaps there were other human females as enticing as her, and he could find another.

The following Thursday, He Who Does Not Shut Up, aka Mephistopheles, aka Meph, sprawled in the bench seat beside his brother and partner in crime, Raum. At the back of the club beneath colorful lights, Ash and Eva were onstage. There were other musicians too, but the two of them stole the show.

Since the first night Eva had talked Ash into going up to jam, he’d been hooked like a regular heroin junkie. Now, broody, sullen Asmodeus was smiling up at his woman like the sun shone out of her ass as she flew over a crazy solo on her flute. He filled the spaces between her notes with fancy shit on the piano, the music flowing effortlessly from his fingertips like it was second nature. He wasn’t even looking at his hands, yet every note he played sounded like perfection.

Meph didn’t know anything about music, but he still understood that what he was witnessing was epic. Ash was in his element, and so was Eva, and the two of them combined were like a force of nature. The entire club was transfixed.

In that moment, Meph hated himself a little bit. He wanted to enjoy it like everyone else. He wanted to be happy for his brother. But instead, he was feeling sorry for himself.

And then disgusted at himself for feeling sorry for himself.

And then more sorry for himself for feeling disgusted at himself for feeling sorry for himself.

And so on and so forth.

He knew he was a train wreck. He was a demon with a serious dark side—and he didn’t mean “dark side” like a human with a weird kink or something. His dark side was a psychopathic, sociopathic alter ego that was not something he could ever let out of its cage unless he wanted people to die horribly. His attempts at being good—whatever that even meant—were a recent endeavor that in no way made up for the centuries he’d spent as an evil, nefarious bastard.

Selfishness was second nature. Hell, it was his only nature. He was self-destructive and impulsive. He broke everything he touched, and he loved touching things. He was constantly getting into trouble and seemed to be incapable of getting out of it. How his brothers put up with him would forever remain a mystery, because he couldn’t even put up with himself most of the time. And that wasn’t even starting on—

“Meph, snap out of it.”

He blinked and found Raum watching him with those too-perceptive gold eyes. They peered at him from a perma--scowling, dark-skinned face, mostly hidden beneath the hood of a baggy sweatshirt.

“Wherever you were in your head isn’t a place you wanna be.”

Fucking Raum. He was always at it with this wise-guy shit when, really, he was just as screwed up as the rest of them and spent just as much time falling into dark places in his head.

Raum was a kleptomaniac with a three-hundred-year gap in his memory, and he had no clue what depravity he’d committed to earn that heavenly punishment. And he always had to hover around Meph like he needed babysitting—

Which he kinda did. But damn it, he didn’t want to need it.

“Just concentrate on keeping an eye on Mist,” Raum grunted. His face was fixed in its usual scowl—the only expression it ever seemed to make—as his striking golden eyes scanned the packed bar.

Since the day they’d met, Meph and Raum had been inseparable. It didn’t make sense, really. Raum never smiled; Meph had a perpetual shit-eating grin plastered across his face. Raum was quiet and stoic, and when he spoke, he generally had something meaningful to say; Meph couldn’t be serious to save his life, and any opportunity to make a sex joke was seized with gusto. They were different in every way, but maybe that was precisely why their dynamic worked.

Following his brother’s request, Meph scanned the club for their other companion. Mist wasn’t hard to spot. He was big even in human form, and since Belial had stayed home tonight, there was no one else around close to his size.

“He really is clueless about humans,” Meph said, watching Mist stoop to sniff the hair of a woman in front of him. He recoiled, scrunching his nose like her scent offended him, and moved on to the next. “What’s he doing in such a rush anyway? He looks like he’s on a hunting mission.”

“I dunno,” Raum said idly.

But something about his tone had Meph glancing back at him with narrowed eyes. Raum could lie with the best of them, but not to him. They knew each other too well.

“What is it? You know something.”

Raum downed the second half of his beer. “Nope.”

“Don’t give me that ‘protect baby Meph from the truth that will hurt him’ shit. I’m sick of everyone tiptoeing around me like I’m a fucking infant. Tell me what or I’ll make a scene right here, right now.”

Raum lifted a dark eyebrow. “And that would be acting like an infant.”

“Tell me, damn it.”

“Fine. You know how Bel let it slip that his tattoos are brands?”

Meph clenched his hands into fists. He wasn’t about to forget that any time soon. “Yeah.”

“You know he’s bound to Paimon, and she can control him through the brands. Well, apparently, she’s summoning him now, and he has to go back.”

Meph’s eyes widened, and he felt vaguely nauseous. He knew well how it felt to be controlled and used by a powerful demon. It was a pretty sensitive topic that his brothers were generally careful to steer clear of, and he understood why Raum had tried to avoid talking about this, even if it pissed him off.

He swallowed, trying to keep his cool. “How long does he have?”

“Not long, I don’t think. The summoning started last week, but I only just found out today.”

“How?”

“Overheard Bel talking to him about it. They’re planning to meet with Dan and see if they can figure out how to get rid of them.”

“Fucking fuck the motherfucker.”

The whole fist-clenching thing wasn’t working, so Meph planted his elbows on the table and dragged his fingers through his hair a few times. Then, he sat up abruptly and stared at Raum. “We have to do something. He’s fucking branded!”

“Keep your voice down, idiot. Bel’s looking into it with Dan, like I said. There’s nothing else we can do, so chill.”

“I can’t be chill about this.”

“Which is why I didn’t want to tell you.”

Because this shit hit a little too close to home for anyone’s liking.

Meph sought out the broad figure of Mist in the club. He was still sniffing random women and appearing repulsed by them. He didn’t look remotely human. His head was cocking this way and that, his hair wild, his eyes too bright, and though he was missing the sharp teeth and gray skin, he still managed to just look creepy .

“We should help him get a woman.” If Meph couldn’t help with the brands, he could at least make sure Mist enjoyed whatever time he had left on Earth. “That’s what he’s on a mission to find right now, right? A human pet ?”

They both snickered.

“It’ll be a challenge if he keeps acting like that,” Raum said.

“Eva told me about that chick he met last week. He must have some game. And there are plenty more women around.”

“I don’t think he likes anyone here.”

They watched Mist recoil from another female and then growl at a human who accidentally bumped into him. The guy backed away with palms up.

Meph flicked his tongue piercing against his teeth. “I have an idea.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Shut up.” He slid around the table and stood up. “I’m gonna see if he wants to leave.”

He wound his way through the crowd of bodies, ignoring the cautious glances of the dudes and covetous looks of the chicks.

Yep, he ignored the chicks.

He had never ignored chicks. He loved female attention. He loved sex. He loved lots of it with lots of different women, separately or together, consecutively or simultaneously, he wasn’t fussed.

Except... ever since Eva’s dad had tossed that consecrated blade into his chest, he hadn’t felt like himself. He wondered if the Empyrean magic had crossed some wires in his brain because lately, he wasn’t in the mood.

It wasn’t that he’d lost his sex drive; he just didn’t want anyone touching him. He felt nauseated by physical contact, like every touch was dragging something ugly to the surface where he would have no choice but to—

A pair of amber eyes blinked, snapping him out of it.

Oh, look, he’d crossed the bar and was standing right in front of Mist. He’d gone to that dark place in his head Raum had told him to avoid again.

“You wanna get out of here?”

“Yes. Humans keep touching me, and I want to bite them. And I scented all the females, and none are appealing.”

Meph signaled to Raum over the heads of the crowd, and the three of them made their way toward the exit. “But I heard you already found one you liked.”

“Yes, but she isn’t here.”

They stepped onto the street, leaving Eva and Ash behind, lost in their bubble of musical bliss onstage. The pair probably wouldn’t notice they were gone for another hour, but Meph shot a quick text to Ash anyway, just in case. His stick-in-the-mud brother was likely to worry if they didn’t let him know where they were.

Damn, when had they become so bloody domesticated?

“Shall we return to the lair?” Mist asked. “I’m weary of my human form. My shoulders ache without my wings. I don’t know how you maintain it constantly.”

Meph wasn’t about to explain why he never shifted. He also wondered how Mist was going to find himself a woman if he couldn’t handle ditching the wings for more than an hour. Guess it would have to be a casual relationship.

Meh. Those are the best kind anyway.

“I’ve got a better idea. Tell me where your human lives, and let’s go there.”

Mist shot him a narrow-eyed look. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I will not reveal her location. She’s mine.”

“She’s not yours if you didn’t even get her number.”

The Hunter growled.

Meph held his hands up. “Not trying to steal your girl, dude. Only trying to help you out. Here’s my plan. You write her a note with your new number on it and put it in her mailbox. When she checks the mail, she’ll find it, and if she wants to see you again, she’ll call. Easy as pie.”

“That’s actually not a bad idea.” Raum sounded surprised, the jackass.

“It’s a fucking fantastic idea.”

Mist scrutinized him for so long, a lesser demon might have lost his nerve. But Meph lacked the ability to feel insecure, so he just stared back at him, customary grin plastered across his face.

He knew he looked like an idiot most of the time, smiling like that, but he didn’t care. Raum wore a scowl like a mask, and Meph did the same with a smile. His grin was his armor.

Finally, the Hunter nodded. “I agree to this plan. But she is mine.” The word “mine” came out like a growl. “We’ll go now.” He strode off into the darkness, newfound purpose in his step.