Page 16 of Demon Demands

We’d all been watching the way she interacted with Dolyn, but I didn’t think it was out of jealousy.

At least, I didn’t feel jealous at all.

It was just fucking weird to see anyone talk to her that way and not end up dead after pissing her off.

They were clearly more than casual acquaintances. I was struggling to define their friendship, though. They weren’t close like Barbie and Jack, or even her and Grim, but yet, Dolyn knew exactly what to say to get a rise out of Sloane.

By the way Dolyn had cooled off instantly, I could only assume that he needed to hear the conviction in her voice when she told him that she was no damsel in distress. And she wasn’t.

I was not keen on being the one who needed protecting. But I knew that if the situation ever arose, I’d want Sloane at my side.

Though Dolyn seemed like he was an honest and trustworthy type of guy, you couldn’t miss the odd familiarity between them. It was really bugging me. I wanted to be able to slap a clear label on their relationship.

They had a past; it was plain to see, but how deep it went, I didn’t know. I had a feeling that it was just as twisted as the rest of her history. For all the spoiling her parents had done, the rest of her life had made her callous and cold.

“What was that about?” I questioned Grim, wondering how long Barbie had been waiting to call out Dolyn for trying to coddle her. Grim seemed to be the only person in the building that would be willing to talk about what we’d just witnessed.

“Shit she doesn’t want to talk about in front of her parents and grandparents,” the reaper whispered, just loud enough for the guys and me to hear.

Sam ushered his parents and Charlie out of the warehouse, telling Lilith that she wasn’t going with Sloane. Bickering followed in their wake, Lilith bitching them all out until the trio of males groaned in unison.

“She's the most secretive person I’ve ever met,” I grumbled under my breath. I wanted to know what made her so reserved when it came to talking about her past and letting us learn about who she was.

“If you want to know something about her, all you have to do is ask,” York informed us. “She’ll answer your questions, but you may not like what she says.”

“And that means what exactly?” Vaughn inquired, his fae accent sounding like a poor imitation of an English accent.

Stone sighed before answering, once again proving he knew more about the half truths and rumors surrounding our mate. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but she’s a serial killer. An assassin for hire. She lives a busy, mundane sort of life on Earth. Here in the Underworld, though? She leaves victims everywhere she goes. Don’t get me wrong, they’re not innocent by any means.”

“You aren’t being clear enough,” Grim told Stone, leveling all six of us with a pensive look. “Dolyn runs a criminal organization. Think of them as something along the lines of vigilante demons. The Underworld, and Hell by extension, is a dangerous place, and they work tirelessly to take out the worst kinds of demons. I’m not talking about petty drug runners or thieves. I’m talking about rapists, demons who murder entire villages, that lot of criminals.

“The Underworld has a warped justice system, and the Kings have been fighting it for longer than any of us have been alive. Jack, Sloane, and Dolyn agreed that they would take things into their own hands a decade ago. And they’ve been cleaning up the streets ever since. It was some kind of pact they made together after Sloane killed Dolyn’s mother.”

Grim took a deep breath before continuing. “Dolyn calls Lo in when they have issues with their targets. But he stopped calling her three months ago because she was injured while trying to save Hyland. They weren’t particularly bad injuries, Sloane gets hurt on a regular basis.

“The issue came with her demon seeking vengeance for what happened to Hyde. She painted the walls red. All the walls. She tracked down every face she could skim from Hyde’s mind, and she killed half of the horde before word spread. She plowed through their numbers on her own, leaving the leader for last. The gorgon fled, and she hasn’t been able to find him.”

I sighed, scrubbing my hand through my beard. “But what does all of that have to do with Sloane and Dolyn arguing and her not wanting to talk about it in front of her family?”

“Dolyn was trying to talk her into wearing more protection than she usually would. Word has apparently gotten back to him that the gorgon is looking for Lo, and Dolyn is worried. As we all should be,” Grim warned.

“The gorgon…” Stone was thoughtful, staring into space, his mind searching old memories that I knew he’d rather forget. He whipped his head around to Grim so quickly that it made me flinch. “The gorgon from Oren? That horde leader?”

Grim nodded solemnly. “That would be the one.”

“Oh, fuck,” Stone muttered, his monotone voice not telling us if that was bad or worse than bad news. The blank-faced asshole.

“What?” Novak asked. “Who the fuck is that? What do you mean by ‘oh, fuck’?”

“I’m from Oren,” Stone admitted softly. “Compare him to a Korean mafia boss. We called him Blue. No one could remember if that was his real name or not. He’d been terrorizing Oren since the village was founded.”

Grim grunted. “She left Blue calling cards to recover instead of the bodies of his underlings.”

I groaned. “Why would she leave cards?”

“It wasn’t a physical card that she left. It was a message in the blood. Or, well, the only part of the walls, where she killed them, that was left spotless was where she left her message. The walls were bloody, the words were… whatever color the original wall was.” Grim waved his hand, dismissing what he’d just told us.

“What’d the messages say?” Palmer inquired, mentally logging every ounce of information we’d learned about our mate. If anyone could piece together all the bits and details to find the bigger picture, it was the mage.