Page 3

Chapter

Two

PRIDE

“ S ir. Sir.”

The voice was nothing more than an irritating fly. People down here didn’t talk to me. That’s why the Bluetooth chip hanging off my ear existed—so I could filter out the noise of the wailing souls waking up in my own personal hellscape.

That was a little joke of mine.

The Underworld used to be a gray void, back in the day.

Ideas from the human realm gave us a fully functional city in our own plane of existence.

My brothers had bitched about how dull it all was in the beginning, and they were right.

So I recreated a city I’d visited in the living realm down here—a recreation of…

Philadelphia, I think? There was even a park with trees.

Not that anyone here was able to enjoy it.

That part was for me.

Though I hadn’t yet managed to create light in this environment that mimicked the sun.

I’d tried my best, but fucked it up badly.

It had come through too artificially bright, like those human LEDs or whatever.

It was jarring and upsetting. To cover my error, I made it permanently night time down here.

After all, I could create all the actual ‘artificial’ lights I wanted.

And the nightlife vibe was my current mood.

Gluttony could help me fix it later. He was the only one I trusted to actually help, instead of berating and giving me shit the whole time.

Regardless of what any of my brothers thought, this entire plane was my domain, as much as it wasn’t a human city.

Except my city was filled with confused, wailing souls at all hours.

So pretty much the same as a human city.

A grin stretched itself across my face at my little quip.

“Sir. Pride. SIR!” Someone physically grabbed my arm, and I whirled around, taken aback. Nothing touched me in this realm! I relaxed as I recognized my assistant, Janine. Her blond hair was pulled back into an efficient bun, secured with her wand that I also knew doubled as a shank.

“The Bluetooths aren’t working!” she gushed out before I could scold her, her hands still raised protectively in front of her.

I paused. “That means?—”

“A large magickal disturbance from an incoming soul. You might want to get over there; she’s warping the fabric of reality slightly.”

Wonderful. Just how I wanted to start my Tuesday morning—with an enraged supernatural dead lady. And it needed to be handled, especially since Hades was away.

If anything went wrong, he had full rights to kill me where I stood: there was a natural order to things. The gods and goddesses were at the top, followed by deities, the minor other beings, then supernaturals, then the legends, and humans were at the bottom.

“Come.”

Janine trotted obediently behind me as I followed the source of the disruption; it wasn’t hard. Souls fled, screaming and wailing in pain and terror. The air vibrated around us the closer we got, until I saw her.

Holy hell.

That was the only way to describe her rage—an avenging, dark angel exploding with light.

Long, frizzy hair fanned out in all directions like a halo as she lay on the ground, her spine arched and head thrown back in agony.

Her eyes were pure white as chaotic white magick leaked from every pore in her body, too much even though she was far from a tiny sprig of a thing.

Thick thighs, big eyes as the humans would say.

Focus, Pride.

I put my hand out to siphon off the excess magick and keep our realm from collapsing. It had happened a rare few times before, and I didn’t feel like doing the paperwork today. Hades trusted me to handle things in his absence, after all.

FWOOM.

The backlash hit me hard, and I almost took a half-step back. Almost . I’d been doing this awhile; a few hundred years, at least. The tang of her magick hit me, pure and untouched.

Ah, that made more sense. She’d died a virgin. That would piss me off, as well.

But it wasn’t just that. There was something else about the magick and how it sang through my veins—how struck I was by her beauty and her pain, even though I saw thousands of humans in various states of agony and wrongful deaths by the minute.

Do your job.

I pushed at the magick, forcing it back toward its source. She screamed, the sound reverberating so badly that Janine squealed and put her hands over her ears.

Pixies had such sensitive hearing.

Images of the girl’s life flashed before my eyes.

“Are you taking notes?” I yelled back to Janine, making sure she was still with us. Raw, white magick sometimes did weird things to different supernaturals.

Janine squeaked, but I heard the scrabble of her pen and clipboard.

“Take notes. A virgin witch,” I dictated, reading her life story as it rushed at me through her magick.

“Tragic indeed. And...oh my. Murdered by her prospective mate. Now, that was truly a tragedy worth the rage of a woman scorned!” I laughed. “Werewolves are such brutes.”

“Marked as unfinished business?” Janine yelled back, pen hovering over the checklist.

It should have ended there. I would confirm the diagnosis, then send her back to the living plane as a ghost until all her extra magick dispersed into the real world, and she’d come back here. Or in her case, she had enough pent-up magick and purpose to do more.

Intriguing.

“Now, what to do with you?”

With a mighty tug I pulled the magick out and held it to my chest like a favored pet, stroking and soothing it as her body went limp.

Something cold went through me at seeing her lifeless and dark like that in my realm.

I couldn’t imagine her as anything but what she already was.

And how fun would it be to see if she finished her business up above?

That could be fun. And I had so few opportunities for entertainment.

“Reanimation,” I stated confidently, making a rash decision.

I felt rather than heard Janine’s pause behind me. Reanimation was rare, and strictly controlled. It would have to be reported on up above. My brothers would remark on it and possibly tease me.

Why this one? Why is she special?

Let them tease me. I couldn’t explain it, but I had to do it for the wrath inside this soul, for this bit of Witch Hazel in front of me.

I was full of jokes today. I made a mental note to tell a few to Lust. He usually appreciated them, though he preferred smutty quips. Sloth loved my jokes, though.

I needed to visit him.

“Cause of death?” Janine asked, clearing her throat and trying to proceed.

The magick around me was blinding, but I shoved it down inside of me temporarily to get a bigger look at our troublemaker.

I’d seen souls murdered in the most heartless, heinous of ways; enough to make hundreds of the ‘horror’ movies that were so popular up above.

It was my job to keep things in order and moving along down here, and that included seeing souls as they arrived—nearly decapitated, beaten into pulps, old and gray, and even innocent children with wide, terrified eyes.

None of it ever affected me. It couldn’t.

But something about seeing my little sprig of witch hazel lying there, her throat collapsed and mottled with black and blue, filled me with absolute rage.

“S-strangulation.” I had to clear my throat to get it out.

What was happening? This was one death in a multitude of deaths—one drop of water in the vast, unending sea. There have been millions before, and there would be millions after her.

Panic and adrenaline raced through my body, my hands shaking. My grip on the magick slipped and it coursed through me, caressing my own magick like a long-lost friend.

Or lover.

Or...something else.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I was Pride. I didn’t have emotions. I didn’t get tangled up in petty human drama. That was why I’d been given this task. Only I could handle it.

Pride would never stoop to love , my brothers had joked. He is perfect for the job that never stops.

But this Witch Hazel had stopped me; right in my tracks.

I sent the magick back into her in a whirlwind, uncaring how against the book this all was.

“R-reanimation. Did you get it?” I snapped at Janine, whirling around so I didn’t have to look at my Witch Hazel as her body writhed and twitched, accepting the magick back into her flesh.

“Y-yeah. Reanimation. When?”

The air around settled and went quiet, a few sacred seconds of complete silence before the souls began encroaching back toward us, sensing the danger was over.

I grit my teeth.

“Now.”

Janine sputtered, nearly dropping her clipboard.

“But we need?—”

“Now.”

I held out my hand and Witch Hazel’s magick eagerly leaped toward mine, embracing it. I used that against it, letting it mesh and build up with my own.

Then I pushed her back to her own world.

“Goodbye, Witch Hazel.”

She screamed and disappeared back to the land of the living.