CHAPTER TWO
500 years later
Greed hated this world—too much damned noise. Bright florescent lights turned the beauty of the night into a myriad of orange and white, reflected back upon the world by the clouds above. He lifted his eyes to the sky; no stars, there were never stars in this place. The city spread out as far as he could see, the New York skyline shimmering in the distance.
Pathetic mortals had no regard for the beauty surrounding them. They seemed content with the production and acquisition of more “things”—cars, TVs, game boxes. He didn’t understand the allure. Unlike his brother Satanus, on the other hand, who spent virtually all his spare time playing something called Halo. He would happily be “killing” aliens all night given half a chance, instead of being out on the streets doing his job.
Inhaling a deep breath of the putrid air, he looked down at the city below him. He leaned against the stone façade of the building’s rooftop, his body hidden in the darkness, his dead eyes watched those below him. The mortals looked like ants, as they rushed around their pathetic lives with no clue about the things lurking outside their perfect little bubbles. In the time he had been gone from the world, they had multiplied like a virus upon the earth. The call to hunt the souls of the corrupted ate away at him, but Greed didn’t see the point any longer. Humans had been doing fine without him for centuries; they had even invented new and darker sins, such was the depths of their depravity.
The piercing noise of police sirens assaulted his ears from the street below curling his lip in distain. Six months he had been free from the Pit, and his brothers had been spending time with him, helping him adjust to being “out”. But he was never out. It was fucked up but he missed the darkness; he missed the pain. Hell, after a hundred years, he had come to welcome it, he embraced it like a lover. Perhaps that was why his father saw fit to cut his sentence short, if a six-month early release could be called “short.” After five hundred years of being torn apart by the darkness, he had been reborn.
“You’ve been up here a while, Mammon. Lucifer sent me to fetch you.” The sound of Ze’s voice was like razor blades as it intruded on his thoughts.
The carefree Mammon, a demon who had once saved a mortal woman, who had tasted heaven in a kiss, no longer existed. He now lived only for his avarice, nothing but Greed drove him, pounding like a heartbeat in his blood. He would have it all—everything he craved—and no one, not even a god, would prevent him taking what he wanted.
“Not Mammon. That demon is gone. All that remains is Greed.” His tone devoid of emotion. He did not turn to look at his brother, simply watched the metropolis below him.
Greed listened to Ze sigh. He had seen it when they had retrieved him from the Pit. What they saw come out of that hell had not been the playful demon that went in. The demon that emerged was hard, cold, with no understanding of the world to which he’d been returned. The lightness to his green gaze was gone, replaced by disgust and condemnation.
His six brothers had five hundred years to grow in this new world. Greed had been left behind. As the power of the gods began to wane, his brothers had discovered their own powers growing, thanks mostly to the Christian belief in the Seven Deadly Sins. Yet Greed had been locked away from the light. As his brothers had grown in power and strength, he had embraced the darkness gathering in his soul. It had been the only way he could survive the abyss.
“Very well, Greed. Lucifer thinks it’s time you started pulling your weight. I disagree…”
“Like I give a fuck what you two think, Ze.” Greed turned around and stepped from the edge of the roof, his boots landed hard on the gravel. He walked past his brother and shoved his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket. If their leader said it was time he started harvesting souls again, so be it. It was better than sitting on his ass watching Tanus play war with humans.
“Greed!” Ze’s voice brought him to a standstill. He turned his head enough to see his form illuminated by the city lights. “We tried to find you. Lucifer, Tanus. We all searched for you.” Snorting, Greed rolled his shoulders and paused before he yanked the door open to the building.
“You should have left me there, Ze. This place, this world…I fucking hate it. I want the darkness back. You took me from silence and brought me to hell.”
Ze, the Sin of Envy, watched Mammon’s back as he took the stairs down into the building they owned. He turned and looked over the edge of the roof. It was a forty-story drop to the road. He glanced back to the door. He had stood there and watched his youngest brother stare at the ground the image gripped his heart like a fist; for just a moment he thought Mammon might jump. They had loyalty to one thing: their brotherhood. Each would defend the other till death, and now, with the gods’ power almost spent, it was more important than ever. His mind remained uneasy as he followed and descended to the top floor of the building.
The moment he entered the room he was assaulted by a loud cry of glee from the side of the room. Tanus, the Sin of Wrath, was playing that damned computer game of his again. One whole wall of the apartment was taken up by electronics of one kind or another. Tanus was sat on the couch, headset on, whooping and laughing maniacally every time he “killed” someone in his dumbass game.
Abbadon, the Sin of Sloth, was laid out on the couch, a NY baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. The only time he moved was to glare at the exuberance of Tanus as he bounced on the couch in his joyous destruction of pixelated people. Their leader, Lucifer, the Sin of Pride, was in his office, sorting through reports of heightened Sin activity that might indicate possible Blight creation. It would mean all hands on deck in an attempt to prevent the virus from spreading to innocent mortals before the Sin grew out of control.
Belor, the Sin of Gluttony, was in the kitchen cooking. Damned fool couldn’t eat a mouthful of the food he made, but he cooked enough food to feed an army of well, demons. He was one hell of a chef and owned a string of restaurants all over the country. Unfortunately for him, he could only feed on the souls of those who gave into his Sin’s namesake. It didn’t deliver him much of a meal choice.
Asmodeus, the Sin of Lust, currently in the form of a buxom blond with green eyes, walked past Belor. Reaching out he/she snagged some of the peppers from the cutting board and leaned against the counter popping them into his/her mouth. Ze had to give Asmodeus kudos, the demon had a wardrobe to rival any supermodel, male or female. It always depended on his current conquest; tomorrow he might look like Johnny Depp, or Kim Kardashian. It had been hilarious when he showed up looking like that messed-up mortal.
The door to Lucifer’s office opened and Mammon exited with their leader behind him. It looked like Lucifer was going through with his plan of getting Mammon out the house and back into the world.
“Ze, go with him. Make sure he stays focused.” Lucifer nodded, ignoring the snort of annoyance from Greed.
“I don’t need a fuckin’ babysitter, Lucifer.” A feral growl left his throat. Damn it was close to something Hades could produce. Ze grinned and clapped him on the back to break the tension, turning him so he would stop trying to pick a fight with Lucifer.
“Not a problem. Mammon, stop lusting after our illustrious leader and let’s get some work done.” The snarl that followed him as he walked from the room brought a smile to his face. Somewhere inside the broken shell of his brother, the old Mammon still lived, just in terrible pain. He would find a way to bring his little brother back, somehow.
“Greek mythology, Greek history, Greek Literature…My god, Isabelle, anyone would think you had a thing about Greece.” Natalie thumbed through one of Isabelle’s many Greek mythology books, which caused a stab of annoyance to shoot through her. One thing Isabelle disliked was people putting things out of order or messing with her papers. Her violet eyes narrowed on her roommate and she snagged the book back with a glare.
“Nat, seriously I am going to smack you with one of my books in a minute if you don’t stop. I have a paper due on Monday; you could at least leave me to study. Isn’t there a party or something you should be at? It is Friday night.” Isabelle put the book down beside her as her roommate returned her glare.
“Isabelle, you’re going to grow mushrooms if you remain in this room any longer. Your books and papers will still be here when you’re done having fun. You know, that thing normal students do on weekends, involving men and alcohol?”
The bright blue eyes of her young roommate only served to annoy her more. Hell, she was by no doubt the oldest student in the dorm apartments at thirty. Yet her twenty-two-year-old roommate positively radiated youth, while Isabelle pondered the finer points of her DVR recordings and whether her favorite would be kicked out of Hell’s Kitchen this week.
“Nat, really I am not up for this. You know if I don’t finish the paper, it will just eat at me all night. How can I have fun when it will be sitting here saying ‘I’m not finished; you’re going to fail!’ it will mock me.” With a groan, Isabelle leaned her head back against the chair.
She had depleted all her savings, put herself so far into debt she might never see retirement before eighty-five, just so she could follow her dream of studying Greece and its wonderful ancient history. An unexplainable drive in her blood, she had been obsessed since she turned five and her parents had taken her to the Natural History museum on a trip to New York. They had a display on the ancient gods of the world, and like a moth to a flame, she had been drawn in; they fascinated her. So here she was, thirty years old, attending Seton Hall University in New Jersey, a definite change from the small town of Warren, Maine.
Isabella opened her eyes as she realized her roommate Natalie had been talking and she hadn’t heard a single word. Her mousy brown hair was a fuzzy mess of waves and half curls. She patted it down like some angry beast as she frowned at her roommate, who huffed with one hand on her hip. Besides, the very idea of having to go outside, where people mingled, terrified her. She’d felt this way ever since her tenth birthday, when she woke up with a terrible migraine, and her parents were so worried she was carted off to hospital. The scans showed nothing, but she knew from that moment something had changed.
When she looked at her parents she could feel them, feel their emotions as if they were her own. The worry and the fear and something else, it took her a while, but she recognized it as guilt biting hard at her father. It slowly got worse, months of migraines and doctor’s visits and the slow growing black guilt she could feel around her father finally came to a head. He had been having an affair and the darkness little Isabelle had felt consumed him so deeply, he left his family behind to follow this new woman to Europe and never looked back.
Her mother had shattered that day, never quite coming back from the grief of being left a single mother of a problem child. From that moment, Isabelle Wells had lived in a world of sorrow, malice, and addiction and none of it hers. Her mother descended into alcohol abuse, spending eighty percent of the time drunk or waking up with a hangover. Isabelle had learned early to look after herself; no one else was going to do it. She had built walls around her young mind, learning to shield herself from the constant mental abuse from her mother and the emotional crippling waves that crashed against her soul.
She learned to hide her curse from the world, and that meant she struggled through school. Withdrawing from people as best she could, she would do anything to ease the constant pain no fourteen-year-old should have to cope with. Until one day, she was met by Child Protective Services and the Police. Her mother had been drunk, walking in the road, and was hit by a car. Her world had become a massacre of pain; so she had locked her mind away, retreating from everyone and everything. She began living on the fringes of society, becoming a shadow in the world, moving along in silence, hoping no one would notice her.
But it all changed with her senior year trip to the new Greek exhibit in the city, a painful trip for her battered mind. Yet with it came a sharp reminder of her love for Greek Mythology. She started hunting down the myriad of romance novels and movies that brought those gods and myths to life. Isabelle knew she would have to fight for her dream; but she would make it work, unless of course, that included having to go outside and having to see “people.” Isabelle was sure she couldn’t deal with the emotions and desires pounding around her it would break down her fragile walls of protection. The thought made her heart race and her skin turn clammy, being able to feel those around you as if their emotions were your own was a curse upon her soul.
Despite it all, she’d made it, she was here and every day was a battle but each step was one towards her dream. One good thing: Natalie was usually so tied up in her own world her emotions focused mostly on men and when she would be getting her nails done next. That kind of emotional interference Isabelle could live with. But outside, at a party? Hell, it was a marathon task just to go to class every day; keeping to herself at the back of the class was crucial.
“Listen Miss Workaholic, one night out is not going to kill you or your OCD. Now get up and come out for one hour. Then you can come back to your hobbit-hole and waste away under your books.”
“How do you even know what a hobbit-hole is?” Isabelle was clearly surprised, as her roommate didn’t even know what Lord of the Rings was, let alone a reference from the book.
“I live with you; I must know those damned movies inside out, you play them so much. Now in return for you poisoning me with nerd-itis, you’re going to come out for sixty minutes. You can even count them down if you like.” Nat turned on her heel and began to comb through her closet.
“Now to find you something that doesn’t scream ‘lonely mid-thirties virgin who has never ventured out into the world.’ This might be a challenge.”
“Hey now! I’m thirty, not thirty-five!” Isabelle pushed away from her desk. She needed to be involved in the clothing choice or she would end up looking like a hussy.
“You dress and act thirty-five. Tonight, you’re going to at least dress your age. I’m pretty sure hell might freeze if you broke a smile and had fun.”
Isabelle grumbled under her breath. She could do this, right? One hour around people; she would strengthen her mental barriers to Defcon three. Sixty little minutes, that was all, she thought. Her eyes turned longingly to her pile of papers and books. Soon, my pretties, I’ll be back!