Hell wants me back.

I open my eyes to stare at the sky blue ceiling of the suite I’d procured at The Saint hotel. The irony of the Devil bedding down in the Archangel Michael Suite was too much for my sense of whimsy to resist.

Two curvaceous brunettes sprawl across the bed, tanned limbs and dark hair entangled across the pure white sheets.

Well, not quite so pure anymore.

I rise from the bed and stalk to the window, the plush blue carpet soft beneath my feet as I tug open the curtains and flood the room with bright midday sun.

The city spreads out before me like a feast, but the never-ceasing buzz of human sins in my brain is drowned out by the snarls of demons howling for my return.

Three sharp knocks on the door interrupt my musings.

Odd. I don’t remember ordering an interruption.

I yank open the door, ready to unleash my full wrath upon the interloper. Instead, I find myself positively grinning at the familiar face standing on my threshold.

"Hello, Phenex. Fancy meeting you here."

I step aside, letting the slender blond enter the suite.

We do love our titles in Hell, and Phenex is a Marquis with twenty legions of demons under his command. In the early days, he tore his way through the celestial battles, matching blow for blow with the cruelest of the Fallen, but his heart was never truly in it.

I don’t need to touch him to learn his deepest desire. Phenex wears it like a shroud everywhere he goes.

He wants to go back.

“This hotel’s a bit on the nose, isn’t it?” he drawls, settling himself on one of the long white couches. His eyes flick to the bed where one of the girls watches us with sleep-bleary eyes. “They come with the room?”

Rolling my eyes, I turn to the girls. “Out,” I order.

They scramble to obey, hastily pulling on last night’s dresses and too-high heels, albeit more than a little reluctantly. “We can come back later,” the taller of the two adds, her gaze moving from Phenex to myself.

I chuckle at her mental salivations. “Now now Clare, your husband probably wouldn’t appreciate it if you spent yet another night out getting Eiffel towered instead of cooking him dinner. Adultery is such a petty little sin. Maybe invite Jamie here over one night instead. Men never seem too bothered by that brand of adultery,” I add with a smirk.

Her mouth hangs open for a moment with misplaced moral indignation before she grabs her friend’s arm and bolts from the suite, slamming the door on her exit.

“She seemed nice.”

Phenex makes himself comfortable, propping his feet up on the glass coffee table, the cream-colored alligator hide of his boots fitting in surprisingly well with the absurd opulence of the room. Sprawled across the white fabric, Phenex makes a striking figure. He always looked a bit too angelic for Hell, and that was never more apparent than now.

A fallen angel in a white seersucker suit? Even for New Orleans that might be a bit much.

“Why are you here?”

The bored prettyboy affectation drops immediately. “Why are you here?” he counters, rising to his feet in one smooth motion.

Phenex stands toe to toe with me. Smaller than me in height and muscle mass, Phenex has little chance of besting me even in a mortal fistfight. On the field of battle, I could obliterate him in an instant.

“The souls.” I always liked Phenex. Once the first angelic battles ended, he left the violence to the Fallen that reveled in it, pouring himself into the subtler sins of vanity and lust while the wrathful around him filled Hell with torrents of blood in a misguided effort to curry my favor.

The solemn look on Phenex's face splits into a broad smile, and he slaps my arm. "And I'm here to help you, brother." Ever curious, Phenex leaves my side and prowls around the room, inspecting the random artifacts scattered across the suite for decoration before pausing at the window and staring unseeingly across the city.

"You're not the only one who needed a bit of shore leave, Lucifer." He sighs, and I hear a millennia of regret in that exhalation. "Hope is a deception for someone like me. I'm not a fool, despite what the others think. I know Heaven won't have me back."

I always told myself that reigning in Hell is worth the loss of Heaven to me. The one commonality I had with Michael and his ilk was the refusal to be a servant to those that were lesser. But there are so many like Phenex who long for nothing more complex than authority and approval and a place to fit in the divine scheme of existence.

And for the first time, I feel the smallest pang of regret for drawing him into my web all those years ago.

What’s past is past though, and I have Hell’s future to consider.

“All right,” I agree, and Phenex’s pensive expression melts into the familiar impish grin. No doubt Phenex’s mind is already thinking about which local flavors he wants to sample.

“Business before amusement,” I say, snapping him back to the present. “Michael’s behind this. No one else has the power. He’ll sense we’re here soon enough. When he does, don’t even try to get in the way, Phenex.” My fingers ache to hold my sword at the thought of finally facing down my smarmy ass of a brother after all these centuries.

This time I won’t be the one slinking back to be locked away.

This time Michael is mine.

“Let’s go.”