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Her shoulders tensed. “Slaughter?”
He pointed to a cluster of carvings depicting yet another battle. Only it hadn’t truly been a war, it had been an onslaught. “As I said, the lesser deities neglected their duties. The guardians took advantage of that and attacked the gatekeepers with the intention of wiping them out. Mostly, though, the guardians wanted rid of me, because I shouldn’t exist.”
Her brows snapped together. “And what right did they have to decide that?” she asked, anger dripping from every word.
“None. But guardians are all about power and perfection. In their opinion, the gatekeepers were the opposite of perfect and possessed too much power. The guardians felt that the world would be a better place without my kind in it; felt that there should only be light, not dark; only good, not bad. Stupid, really, because something cannot be good if it has no opposite—it would simply be.”
“It sounds more to me like they feared your kind and so wanted you all gone.”
“That was no doubt a driving factor behind it all. As for the attack . . . they were well prepared. The population of gatekeepers was only a quarter of what theirs was, so it wasn’t difficult for them to overwhelm us. Anyway, a small number of us were permitted to live after the battle and were subsequently dumped here, but it wasn’t out of mercy, as you already know.”
Her gaze cut to the carvings and then bounced back to him.
Seeing the question in her eyes, he said, “Ask me.” It came out sounding more like a dare than an invitation.
She swallowed. “What are you?”
“Hmm. You heard of behemoths. Or of a behemoth. There was another race of monsters—one much worse, much darker, much more deadly. You’ll know of it as a single creature.”
“Leviathan,” she said, her voice strained.
He slowly nodded. “Leviathan. Mythology has all sorts of theories about the legendary Leviathan, doesn’t it? Some think it to be a primal sea monster. Some believe it’s a Prince of Hell. Others think it is something much more malignant.” And he saw that knowledge right there in her gaze. “The truth is . . . there’s a very good reason why the guardians fear us. We are soul eaters. Gateways to hell, because anyone we kill—good, bad, holy, unholy, mortal, immortal—will be doomed to spend an eternity in hell itself. We do the same when we die.”
Her lips parted. “And the souls you buy . . . that’s where they go when their bodies fail them?”
He nodded again. “We can choose to instead free those souls so that they may be reborn, but we generally don’t.”
She frowned. “Wait, Seth’s parents are Adam and Eve, so he should be a guardian.”
“He is. In theory. He sold his soul to me to receive the powers of a leviathan.”
Her mouth opened in an “O” shape. “To be like all of you.”
“Yes. He didn’t want to be part of a species that would massacre another—women, men, children—the way the guardians did mine with no justification.”
She swiped her tongue over her lower lip. “You really don’t identify with your mother’s kind at all, do you?”
“I’m not like them. I’m stronger than other leviathans, I have powers they don’t possess, but I am still a leviathan. Which implies that my father’s genes were simply far more dominant than that of the guardians—they didn’t like that.”
“Still, it shouldn’t have been such a big deal that you were born. I don’t understand why God would insist that the two species didn’t procreate with one another.”
“You think it should be a good thing that I have both celestial and leviathan blood,” he sensed. “Perhaps it should. After all, I have both supreme light and supreme dark in me—you’d think it would create a balance. But some things aren’t supposed to mix, Wynter. Throwing two such total opposites together can sometimes create something even darker.”
Folding her arms, she bit down on her lip. “What do you mean?”
“Let me tell you a little about my father. He cared for Eve, in his way. He was the leading Monarch of all the leviathans. Exceedingly powerful, hence why he’s been doing so well down in hell since his death.” Cain paused. “His name . . . is Satan.”
Wynter went so utterly still that she didn’t breathe for a good few seconds. Finally, a breath stuttered out of her. “One of the theories about the Leviathan monster was that it was the devil in serpent form.”
“‘Devil’ isn’t the correct word in this context. Satan certainly seduced Eve. He was indeed a serpentine creature. But he never appointed himself the ruler of hell; never referred to himself as the devil. Lucifer calls himself that—the two men aren’t one and the same. Lucifer’s nothing like he’s depicted to be by humans. He’s simply a fallen angel who brought some order to hell and made it clear that anyone was welcome.”
Pausing, Cain stepped into Wynter’s personal space. “The reality is that there are much more malicious beings in hell than Lucifer—things that would give anyone nightmares. Satan, created to be the ultimate antithesis of God, is one of them. He is a thousand times darker than Lucifer. Crueler. Utterly insidious. Depraved in a lot of ways. And I’m his son.
“Yes, the antichrist has been present on Earth since almost the beginning of time. It’s true that I shouldn’t have been born. I am in fact one of the biggest monsters that will ever live. That, baby, is the Curse of Cain. And you, pretty witch . . . you now share in that curse, because I’ve claimed you as mine. And I’ll never fucking let you go.”
Slipping on her poker face without thought, Wynter didn’t say a word. Not a single one came to mind. She could only stare at Cain, her dry lips parted.
Well, he certainly knew how to tip a girl’s world on its axis.
