Revenant

She was long dead, but his need to follow rules was not, and Satan knew that.

Rev locked gazes with the demon in front of him. Someday he’d get revenge for everything Satan had done to Revenant’s mother, but until then, he’d play Satan’s game. After all, he needed to be trusted – and alive – to make the demon pay for years of suffering.

“Why did you summon me… Father?” he ground out.

Satan patted him on the head like he might do to a child. “Very good. I brought you here for two reasons. First, Gethel needs medical attention. She’s growing weaker as Lucifer grows stronger. He seems to be pulling energy from not only Gethel, but from all of my children as well. It’s possible that, upon his birth, they will all die.”

That definitely explained why Harvester had looked like microwaved shit. “So?”

Revenant didn’t give a hellrat’s ass if Gethel died. He’d hated her when she’d been an angel, and now, as a fallen angel pregnant with Satan’s offspring, he hated her even more. She was a nasty piece of work who had broken a million rules while acting as the Four Horsemen’s Heavenly Watcher. As for Satan’s kiddos, Rev didn’t like any of them, either. Reaver probably wouldn’t be happy if Harvester died, though.

Satan pushed to his feet and returned to his monstrosity of a throne. “So… Gethel can’t go to Underworld General.”

No, probably not. The staff of UG was largely neutral to the goings-on between good and evil, but the people who ran the place, like that asshole Seminus demon, Eidolon, and his dickhead brothers and Sin, his half-breed abomination of a sister, had been personally affected by Gethel’s machinations. There was no way they’d help her. Hell, she wouldn’t make it out of the hospital alive.

“What do you want me to do about that?” Rev asked. “Unless I’m missing a memory of attending medical school, I’m useless.”

“You will take a doctor to Gethel.”

So basically, Rev would have to kidnap a doctor, because no one in their right mind would volunteer to treat a psychotic ex-angel who was carrying Satan’s son… a son who also happened to be the reincarnated soul of Lucifer, the second-most-powerful fallen angel to have ever existed.

Until Revenant.

Except that Revenant wasn’t truly fallen, so he supposed he didn’t count.

Wiping away blood on his mouth with the back of his hand, Rev stood. “Is that all?”

“No.” Satan steepled his hands in front of him and leaned forward. This wasn’t going to be good. “Given all your new knowledge and memories, I question your loyalty,” he said, and now the reason he’d been so insistent that Rev call him Father made sense. He was trying to reinforce ties… or force them, as it were.

“You have no reason to question my allegiance,” Revenant assured him, even as his mind swirled with confusion about his place in the world. “I was born here. Raised here. Heaven abandoned me eons ago.” He jabbed his finger into his sternum, directly over the still-raw wound from his cardiectomy. Or whatever the medical people called the violent removal of a heart from one’s chest. “I did your bidding for five thousand years. Whatever you wanted done, even when your other minions wouldn’t do it, I did it. So why in the realm of fuck would you doubt me, when you’re the one who kept me and sent Reaver to Heaven when we were newborns in the first place?”

Satan studied him the way an entomologist might study an insect. “You think I sent Reaver to Heaven?” He laughed. The fucker actually laughed, because yeah, this subject was hilarious.

Revenant growled. “You gonna let me in on the joke?”

The amusement abruptly drained from Satan’s expression, and Revenant suspected it was time to put his name on a heart transplant list.

“Heaven insisted on taking one twin, so I told your mother to choose,” Satan said, and Rev’s gut did a somersault. He didn’t want to know this. “She refused, of course. Even after torture and two nights in my bed.” He frowned. “I guess those two things are one and the same.”

Nausea and impotent rage bubbled up inside Revenant, but he tamped them down, knowing full well that attacking the demon son of a bitch would only end badly. For Revenant.

“Finally, I had to threaten to torture her precious babies,” Satan continued. “That’s when she gave in and chose to send Reaver to Heaven. She knew, as I did, that Reaver was the good twin. The one worth saving.”

A spear of pain punched through Revenant’s chest, which he’d long thought was bulletproof. “No,” he argued, forcing a steady, neutral tone, “she knew Reaver was the one who couldn’t hack it down here.”

Satan’s bark of laughter sent hellrats scurrying from their hiding places. “Heaven wouldn’t have taken you. Not with my blood in your veins. Why do you think no one came to rescue you? Your soul is corrupt, and it’s only grown more corrupt. Tell me, since you gained your memory back and were raised to the status of Shadow Angel, has an agent of Heaven contacted you to welcome you into their loving embrace? No?” He bared his teeth. “And they never will. Mark my words.”

Revenant had never known Satan to be able to read minds, but it was almost as if he’d looked into Rev’s and latched onto his deepest, most secret desires. How could Revenant not want to know the place where he and Reaver should have been raised together? How could he not want to be accepted by those who had treated Reaver like family?