“Yes,” he gasped.

“Good. Because, hello, I’m a legend. I deserve a little reverence. Now, tell me where they’re keeping Arik.”

“I don’t know.”

“Tsk-tsk.” She squeezed her legs harder, enjoying the crackle of breaking bones as he shouted out in pain. “I know you’re one of his torturers. So let’s try this again, and you’ll answer, unless you’ve really had your heart set on getting a guide dog. Where is he?”

“As much as I fear your wrath, I fear your betrothed’s more. If I so much as whisper a word, I won’t make it more than a step beyond the hellmouth’s gate before I’m torn to pieces.”

“Take a look at the fingers on my floor. I’m already tearing you to pieces.” She pricked the skin beneath his good eye, and a drop of blood welled up. “Where. Is. Arik?”

The demon laughed, and a chill shot up her spine. “If the human only knew how desperate you are to find him, he might have taken me up on my offer.”

“And what offer was that?”

He sneered. “The human worm refused to make a trade. You for him. Even after I tenderized his lower body with a sledgehammer, he wouldn’t deal.”

Limos could hardly breathe through her rage. And her shock. Arik had been given an out, and he hadn’t takes aadn’tn it? He’d protected her, someone he wasn’t related to? Who would do that? And why?

“You couldn’t have taken me, let alone held me.”

“We’d have set a trap so the Dark Lord could have caught you, because yes, you’re right. We couldn’t have held you for torture. But the human didn’t know that, and he still didn’t deal. And that is why the human race will lose in the Apocalypse. They are sentimental. Weak. Pathetic.”

“Weak?” she spat. “He didn’t play ball with you after you smashed his legs, and you call him weak?” She slashed the blade across his cheek, opening it up to his teeth. “Where is he?”

Rhys hissed, spraying blood. “It matters not, Horseman. Truly.”

“And why is that?” she ground out.

“Because if he hasn’t broken by now, he won’t. The order has been handed down. He’ll be executed tomorrow. He’ll be dead in twenty-four hours.” He grinned. “The honor will be mine.”

“Wrong answer, a**hole.” Limos slammed the dagger through his good eye, gave it a twist, and sent the blade straight into his brain. The demon jerked, his body spasming wildly. “That was for Arik.”

She leaped to her feet, her mind working furiously.

Hellmouth’s gate. Her breath caught as Rhys’s casual mention pierced her fog of fury. Though very few humans knew about them, there were six hellmouths on Earth, passageways through which humans could enter Sheoul—usually dragged there by demons. Could Arik be near one of them?

God, she hoped so, because right now, it was all she had to go on. And she had to hurry, because if Rhys was right, Arik had only hours to live.

Three

Kynan Morgan freaking loved being immortal. Yeah, he bore a lot of weight on his shoulders because of it, weight in the form of the crystal pendant around his neck. But immortality was worth bearing that little piece of Heaven—literally, Heaven. Given the choice, he’d make the same decision to be charmed by angels in order to protect the pendant.

Today, as he surveyed the half-dozen injured demons lying on the floor of the underground Las Vegas pub where he and his new fellow Aegis Elder, Decker, had beaten them into submission, he was more grateful than ever for the charm. The gray-green reptilian bastards hadn’t been able to lay a finger on him, which was great, seeing how their fingers were coated in a sticky acidic substance that bonded them to you like Superglue while they dissolved your flesh.

Decker was currently peeling himself out of his black BDU pants, which were attached to one of the creature’s hands. Just the hand… since Decker had amputated it from the demon’s arm with his KA-BAR.

“Mother. Fuck.” Decker got h1emis pants caught on his combat boots and did some kind of crazy dance as he tried to extricate himself. “God… damn, these demons are nasty.” He tossed the pants away and made a sound of disgust. The vampire bartender, one of the few people who’d remained in the pub when the fighting started, laughed, but shut up when Decker flashed a wooden stake at him.

“I’m just happy you’re not a free-ball kind of guy.” Kynan winced at Decker’s Dale Earnhardt Jr. boxers. “Not that what you’re wearing is much better.”

Decker drew his Aegis sword from the sheath at his back, and hacked off one of the demons’ heads. “Some of us aren’t all charmed up the ying-yang.”

Ying-yang did not sound right with a Texas twang, but Ky kept his mouth shut as Decker separated demon heads from necks, stopping with his blade poised over the heart of the last surviving demon. When the thing reached for his leg, Kynan used his single-handed modified Aegis crossbow to nail the demon in each palm, pinning its hands to the blood-soaked wood floor.

“Thanks, buddy,” Decker said.

Decker had never called Kynan “buddy” before Arik went missing, and the reminder of why they were here pricked at Ky’s temper. With a growl, he kneeled at the demon’s side and held the tip of his double-ended, S-shaped stang to the creature’s throat.

“Where is the human being kept?” he asked.

The demon rolled his lizardlike eyes up to meet Ky’s gaze. “How… would I… know?”

“Because you and your scaly friends have been taking bets on how long it’ll take him to break.”

“Fuckers,” the demon hissed. “We are… what do you call them… bookies? We hear things.”

“You do more than hear things.” Kynan used the tip of his blade to impale a demon tick the size of a damned quarter that was burrowing beneath one of the lizardman’s scales. “You’ve also been taking human form and insinuating yourself into human gambling operations.”

The breakage of Pestilence’s Seal had thrown off the delicate balance between good and evil that had, for so long, kept the worst of the demons at bay. Now scum like these demons, who had once been relegated to the depths of hell, were breaking loose and finding their way into the human realm, where they were wreaking havoc, either directly, by killing and maiming, or passively, by radiating evil like a dirty bomb. Humans whose souls were truly good were only mildly influenced by the hell-bombs, but evil humans and those who were on the fence became drunk with violence and possessed by evil thoughts; chaos was beginning to reign on the streets.

These particular demons had spread the gambling bug like one of Pestilence’s viruses. Not only had organized crime tripled, but the stakes had increased. Nothing was off the table in the back rooms of even reputable establishments. Money, drugs, children, human organs… all becoming disturbingly common as currency.

The lizardman was unrepentant. “Humans are stupidly blind. We can’t be held responsible for their esses.”

Ky snarled. “Where. Is. Arik?”

The demon’s nose, two black holes in his face, twitched. “We don’t know where he’s being held.”

Kynan threw aside the stang and gripped the demon’s throat in his bare hands. “Listen to me, you f**king Sleestak creep. You spill, or I’m going to turn you into a pair of boots and a belt. And then I’m going to hunt down every one of your family members and do the same thing. Got it?”

Decker casually lit a match and touched it to the end of a tiny capsule, a nasty little R-XR weapon that could be dropped on a demon, where it would immediately burn its way into flesh. The thing caused excruciating agony as it passed through the victim’s body, its white-hot shell cauterizing as it traveled, preventing a total bleed out.

Fear flickered in the demon’s yellow eyes. “I don’t know,” he said quickly. “Is the truth, slayer.”

“Rumors, then. I know you’ve heard rumors.”

“The… Iblis’s torturing grounds are in the Doom region of Sheoul,” the Sleestak said, using one of the many names for the big bad demon Christians called Satan. “But the human is said to have been handed over to experts.”

Arik’s torture had been contracted out? F**kers. “And these experts are keeping the human where?”

“They have many chambers. All located near hell-mouths.”

“Which one should we focus on?”

The demon said nothing. Ky squeezed his throat, and Decker crouched on his heels, holding the capsule over the lizardman’s crotch. “Which. One.”

“Erta Ale,” it rasped. “The rumor is… Erta Ale.”

“Isn’t that an Ethiopian volcano?” Decker dropped the capsule on the floor and crushed it with his boot.

Ky nodded. “I’ll search it. I need you back at R-XR headquarters in D.C. You have to convince the R-XR to hurry up with the weapons they promised us.”

The R-XR and Aegis had been working on weapons that could deliver doses of hellhound saliva into the Horsemen—specifically, Pestilence. But Ky wouldn’t hesitate to use it on any Horseman who went bad.

“The R-XR is doing their best.” Defensiveness crept into Decker’s voice as he hacked off the lizardman’s head with a little more force than was required.

“The R-XR is doing what they do best, which is being overly cautious.” Kynan knew, because he’d been dragged into the secret Army unit, the Ranger-X Regiment, back when he was an Army medic who’d been attacked by a demon. The demon had nearly ripped out his throat, leaving him scarred and with a voice that made him sound like he was always chewing on gravel.

Decker’s mouth tightened into a grim line. “The R-XR is proceeding with necessar="2ith necy caution, and you know it. Someone has to balance out The Aegis’s tendency to act first and think later.”

Decker was right, but Kynan’s temper was on edge, just like the relationship between The Aegis and the R-XR. For years, they’d been allied, backing each other up in operations and sharing information, but when Pestilence’s Seal broke, the relationship went south. The military preached caution and was still trying to cover up the growing threat, while The Aegis went in weapons-hot and was of the belief that it was time humans were let in on the existence of demons and the coming Apocalypse. The difference in approaches had caused a rift between the two organizations, and as a member of both, Decker was straddling the gap.