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“Move back!” Chains shouted. My brothers jumped back, and Chains fired a second dart. The pressure on my throat eased, and I fell backward. Angel jumped in and helped me speed up my healing. I gasped and wheezed on the sudden influx of oxygen.
Ghost hooked Angel under his arms and dragged his sagging body out of reach of the cacodaemon so he could recuperate. Thankfully, my injuries were relatively mild, and he didn’t have to exert himself as much to heal me, since we were both contributing. He shouldn’t be down too long.
Finally, after what seemed like forever, the last lock clicked shut, and we moved back as the being jerked again.
“It’s Buffy,” Blade choked out.
“No, it isn’t—Buffy’s dead,” Voodoo soberly announced, and I knew he spoke the truth. Because we sure as shit hadn’t summoned Buffy.
“How long do you think it’s been…wearingher?” Ghost asked with a curl of his lip.
“Fuck, who knows,” I muttered.
The chains rattled and clanked as it suddenly fought and arched off the ground. That thing on the floor might look like Buffy, but no way was it her. Those chains were the heaviest I’d ever handled, yet it shook them as if they were shoelaces.
Then it lifted its head from the floor, stared me square in the eye, and sneered.
“Yousummoned me?” it screeched, then laughed darkly. “A eudaemon castoff and his whore?”
My eyes gave away my shock.
“Oh yes. Don’t think I don’t know she’s there,” the demon shrieked before it smiled evilly. “You can’t hide from me. I can smell you, my little pretty whore.”
I wasn’t sure which was more shocking, the things it was saying or the insanity that showed in the eyes of someone I’d foolishly once slept with.
“You didn’t know? That’s probably more rewarding than all the times I fucked your wife and she loved it. Do you think she remembers that? Oh, of course she doesn’t because I stole her memories the way you stole her virginity from me!”
I lunged at the repulsive creature staked spread eagle on the slaughterhouse floor, and the cacodaemon cackled as it thrashed against the bindings.
Voodoo held out his arm over my heaving chest. His ice-blue eyes stared eerily at me from the macabre skeletal makeup he had painted on his face. In that moment, I understood how powerful he really was, and I was grateful we were on the same side. That alone calmed me.
“You can’t hold me here! I’m going to get loose, and then I’m going to slit your throat. I’ll fuck her while you watch as you bleed out. Then when you come back, I’ll do it all over again!” Saliva sprayed from its mouth as it threw out degrading and vile things while continuing to fight the restraints. Despite its inhuman strength, the enchanted chains held. I sent a word of thanks to Phoenix and his ol’ lady.
“It’s only trying to get to you. Do not give it what it wants. Let’s finish this instead.” Voodoo’s soft-spoken words of caution stilled my rage. “Youwillget your revenge.”
I nodded. Then I approached the screeching thing that occupied the body of the woman it had killed. It was difficult to separate what I was seeing from reality. I repeatedly told myself it wasn’t a woman I was hurting. That reticence had to be something it was well aware of when it chose her.
“Your father promised me a virgin daughter! He was too proud to admit he hadn’t a penny to his name. So we made a deal, but because of him”—it practically stared daggers at me as it screamed in Soleil’s direction—“it was useless! What he did was not only against the rules of his kind, but hestolefrom me! With a whisper in Aphrodite’s ear, I made sure his transgressions were discovered. The look on his face when he realized his fate had me celebrating. Then seeing his precious wings being ripped from his worthless body was orgasmic.”
Disbelief warred with rage, but I called on every bit of self-restraint I had and stepped forward. I reached out, and Voodoo handed me the weapon he’d prepared. With calculated precision, I did what I’d been instructed to do.
I had to remind myself it wasn’t Buffy in front of me as I knelt next to it. Though I’d never had feelings for her, I never would’ve wished this on her. Slowly I sliced the thin T-shirt open.
“That’s right, take it all off. You like my tits, don’t you? You seemed to love them when you fucked my tight cunt!” it shouted.
I again told myself a cacodaemon knew the details of its victims’ lives as it absorbed their memories when it slaughtered them. This was not Buffy. Still, I hated that Soleil was being subjected to this. I never would’ve thrown my past women in her face like that.
Facet had discovered that as an invincible demigod of sorts, I was the only one of us who was able to retrieve a cacodaemon’s soul from the body it occupied. But first I had to kill it while it was in the stolen skin.
When I slit the cacodaemon’s throat and stabbed the jewel-handled silver dagger through its cold heart, Soleil dropped to her knees, holding her head and groaning. My stomach clenched because I wasn’t able to go to her yet.
As Voodoo chanted his incantations, I carved the symbols he’d ensured I memorized. It was all part of the ritual. The one that would make certain the soul was sent back to Hades where it would spend eternity.
At his cue, I plunged my hand through the flesh on its chest and clutched the writhing, slimy, corded center that was its soul. Then I ripped it out, clutched tight in my fist. Voodoo’s chanting grew louder, and the black snakelike thing rippled and sizzled. It fought me, and my lip curled at the stench that was growing from the now rotting flesh it had worn.
“From Hades you came, to Hades you return,” I said before burying the blade in the center of the thing in my hand. Then I dropped it on the skin with the dagger still embedded.
Letting Voodoo step in to finish the last of the banishment ritual, I got to my feet and rushed over to Soleil. Hands still splattered in the black blood of the cacodaemon, I held her face and searched her pained gaze.
