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PRELUDE
Veni, omnipotens aeterne diabolus.
What can I say that hasn’t been said a thousand times before?
By now, you should know my world isn’t for the faint hearted or weak willed. It’s a beautiful wasteland built upon pain, bloodshed, and violence.
There are only lions and sheep, predators and prey, those doomed to fall and those destined to rise.
I have been the sheep, the prey, and the fool who fell for the lies spun from a silver tongue. Now, I will become the lion, the predator, and flip the fucking script.
The ones responsible for the hurt will learn that their most fatal mistake was showing me a mercy I won’t reciprocate.
I’m a harbinger, a shepherd of souls, and I have a list of names that need to be sent to an early grave.
Like a reckoning, they won’t see me coming.
Just as I, never in a hundred years, would have expected him.
Maliki Erebus.
He stroked the deepest parts of my tar-black soul without having to touch me with his hands. He dared take residence inside my ghost town of a heart. What we had was at times unsteady, sick and twisted, but it was also addictively enthralling.
We were the ugly truth of the world we came from, born with tragedy coursing through our blood.
He was angry, a vicious sadist full of rage.
I was lost, a masochist trapped in a state of chaos.
We were hellions embarking on a path of carnage, feeding our demons and using one another.
We turned pain to power, and we thrived on our insatiable lust for darkness and death.
Together, we were two vicious, chaotic gods.
Unus
cruor
Facilis descensus averno
(the) descent to hell is easy.
Chapter One
Unus
I find it strange the way a heart breaks in silence, how a chest can split open without making a single sound. It’s as if the universe takes a moment to pay your devastation the same respect you’d garner from a funeral. I stood there with a heart once solid now made of fragmented glass.
Every inhalation brought with it the aseptic smell of medicine and an undertone of bleach.
The only sound punctuating the thick air was the steady beeping of the monitor Cam was hooked up to.
If there was ever a moment I wanted to scream, it would be this one.
Why?
Nothing—not anyone or anything—could make me understand.
Why him?
I couldn’t pretend he was sleeping when all I could see were the wires, tubes, and catheters attached to various parts of his gauze-wrapped body.
There hadn’t been a word about when they’d gradually begin waking him up. His CVC line just continued to be pumped with alternating drugs.
On some level, I understood the delay. I wanted my friend back, but I knew the
man who woke up would be a very different version of him.
We all knew.
None of us were ready to accept it.
If there were a god, I would have made a deal so that Cam and I could swap places. He had so much more to offer, to go on and thrive for than I did. It should have been me in this goddamned bed. But that wasn’t how things worked, and even thinking such thoughts betrayed the religion that, until now, had always kept me and my loved ones safe.
The only gods in the Badlands were the sick and twisted who wielded enough power to be worshipped as such. There was a devil who wore a crown of flesh and bone, and demons scattered in every direction. Some of them lurked in our heads; others slept in our beds. The rest walked amongst us hiding their true nature beneath impeccable facades.
My eyes swept over the room, taking in the bright green curtains and fresh flowers on an end table. It reminded me of spring, of happier times.
