Devil (The Halloween Boys, #4)

by Kat Blackthorne

“You speak abnormally for a simple woman,” James snarled, stepping forward. Wolfgang and Onyx intervened, putting hands on his shoulders. Marcelene crossed her arms and narrowed her brown eyes. “And you speak with a tongue of the devil. I’ll have no business with any of you.” She flicked judgmental stares over the men. “But please stop by the caldron outside my shop for some pumpkin-spiced brew.”

Ash Grove meant so much to me. And I found myself in that moment choosing sides. And the side I found myself favoring was not, in fact, the witch. Witches were no bother to me, typically. Their magic less grand than they boasted. Moonwaters and bundles of plants were no business of mine. But this woman had a little something superfluous, didn’t she? A little touch of darkness she denied and a bit of ill-intent so heavily guarded. Interesting. This place was so fascinating, and fuck if next to nothing intrigued me anymore.

Ghouls were hunting dogs, rabid beasts either searching for their next kill or doing some master’s bidding.

You’re angry that I didn’t intervene? Did you forget I am the devil? Massacres happened the same as wildfires destroying forests. It was the way of things, and it was a part of my duty to ensure that balance. Someone must. And as the screams persisted, the woman in purple ran into the center of town, holding the hands of her fellow witches, and they began to chant. “I knew she would be a problem,”

And then, suddenly, the sky flashed purple. Marcelene screamed and fell to the ground, and when I looked back to see fire igniting from Onyx’s hands, the purple light encompassed him and his friends, and they fell to the ground, flame dispersing around them as it caught on the dried grass and snaked up a tree. I walked closer, snarls from ghouls and shrieks from demons still chasing townspeople to every side of me. And when I looked down to survey the lifeless forms of James, Onyx, and Wolfgang, I sighed. They were dead.

“You’re an asshole for this bargain.” He slid the knife swiftly through the orange flesh of the pumpkin, making a triangle. “Some call me the devil, Judas, Hades, the evil one. But yes, I prefer asshole. Or sir. You ate the blackberries in my home. You eat, you stay. Never heard the stories before now?” “Those tales usually involve a pomegranate.” “Even authors get it wrong sometimes. Perhaps that’s intentional, perhaps a coincidence.”

Irritation and something else, that emotion I’d been pushing down, threatened to erupt as I gritted out, “You’re going to say that the only reason they love me is because I’m death—” “No,” he interrupted earnestly, making my lower belly warm. “Because you’re you. Because you are them, and they are you, and hell is your kingdom, and Ash Grove is hell shimmering on the earth side of the veil.”

“Wait!” Onyx called, and I only slightly paused as I stepped through the opening they held for me. He reached into his pocket, his other hand still blazing with spitting embers, and clicked something. “The acoustics in here are superb.” My eye roll should have joined the hurricane of souls because it could have gone on endlessly as AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” began playing through my musical idiot of a friend’s rattly cassette player. Of course he had brought it to hell with him. That thing was like a cockroach and would survive the apocalypse.

We were surrounded by hundreds of the devil then. “Weak,” Onyx said into the locker. “But we got this, right, boys?” I met the gaze of not just my boys, then, but two lords. The Wolf King and the Vampire King, and I smiled. “Yeah, we got this.” And so we fought.

“Whatever happens,” I said to my friends, my family, “I love you guys. And it’s been a pleasure fighting with you all these years.” “Don’t go sappy on me, Cove,” Wolfgang hissed. “We aren’t done for yet.”

Maybe hell was the only school from where I could learn. The only place more wicked than me.

We sat in the front row of Lamb’s Blood Church. And on the priest’s throne sat the devil. With Blythe on his lap.

The flash of sorrow across his gaze, marring his impossibly handsome features, sank into my heart, and I wanted to take it back immediately. The absence of him hitting me like a boulder in the gut. But it was too late. “As you wish,” he said lowly. “You will never see me again. Goodbye, Mortala. My reaper, my death.”

“Your mind will recover, I promise.” “The things I felt and did in hell… it all felt so real…” “Magic of the likes of the devil is the most powerful and potent in all the realms. It’s driven mad every being who’s been touched by it throughout time. Don’t be so hard on yourself.

“You’d think Ghost put another tracker on you.” “Another?” I raised an eyebrow at my broody skeleton companion as Wolfgang laughed heartily. Something else they weren’t telling me, obviously. Ames punched Onyx in the side and he yowled through a laugh as my skeleton man put his arm around my shoulder. “You’ll always be my little blue dot.” “Whatever that means,” I smiled and flicked Onyx a playful stare.

passed by a coven of vampires who, for some reason, bowed to Onyx as they passed. “What’s that about?” I asked. “I paid them twenty dollars to do that in front of you. You know, so I’d look cool,” he said, buying a caramel apple and passing it to me. “How’s she going to eat that with a sheet over her head?” Ames asked, amused, as I took it under my sheet with me to nibble. “I’ll always find a way for treats.”

“My skeleton man. Still possessively stalking me, I see,” I teased. “Always,”

The air smelled like clove and coffee.

So then why couldn’t I stop thinking about him? And his stupid smile, his garnet eyes, and those hidden wings. The way he looked at me so earnestly. Not like some captor whisking me away just to piss off the guys. No, there was something else. There was more beneath his riddles. There was a story woven through all of our interactions over this past year, a story I only had torn and random chapters of. Why was he always appearing, visiting me randomly, helping me, only to walk me through a fucking gorgeous side of the underworld—and then let me go. He let me leave.

Doors, oh, the doors. Would they always hold such possibility?

“Well, if it isn’t death on my very doorstep… again.” Startled, I met her brown eyes. “Marcelene? You’re…” “Alive? Oh, yes, dear child. The devil and I dance.” She spun in a circle, flailing out her long purple skirt and wiggled her hips. “Though not the same kind of dancing as the two of you. A tango, is it?” she winked.

“Well, I have some gossip for you, Blythe.” Cat arched her back in a stretch. “But I’ve figured out who you are. Well, Marcelene and I have. And I’m going to throw a live mouse at Raven for not telling me when I see him.” “Wait, what?” I asked, approaching the front table. Marcelene took my hands in hers. “I should have seen it the moment you entered my shop… But I suppose that is your gift, isn’t it? No one sees you coming.” Her glimmering brown eyes met mine. “Not even you.” “Should we tell her?” Cat asked. Marcelene scratched the feline’s ear. “I think Death already knows.”

They didn’t comprehend who or what she was or that she was mine before time even began.

took my time startling her, sipping whiskey to calm my nerves. To calm my nerves? I hadn’t been nervous since… since never. She noticed me and rose onto her knees, raising the skeptical brow I’d elicited hundreds of thousands of times. It wasn’t the alcohol warming me then. Hi, she said, I think. I could only offer her a nod and curated stone face. Do you see me? Remember me, Mortala. Say you remember.

Calling herself Death… she at least knew that much. At least that resonated. Perhaps Mortala wasn’t too far from this amnesia of the spirit. This was a game, a game I had to play. A farce I’d promised my bride I’d play with her. What is one game among millennia of devotion? She couldn’t see herself, and I couldn’t either, until she was revealed on Halloween night with the veil at its thinnest. Death, the master of the hidden. A long and drawn-out game of hide and seek.

Death couldn’t see itself coming, just as I couldn’t sense her. Revealing it all and not allowing it to unfurl in the manner the fates designed could have catastrophic consequences for us all. It could separate her from me again.

No, my meddling was what had gotten us into this mess, and I’d had hundreds of years to regret my arrogance that first Halloween night. The night I lost her. I wouldn’t dare repeat my sins. She would remember. Perhaps I couldn’t outright tell her, but I could lead her to me. A breadcrumb trail of her and me is what I’d leave her.

My Mortala loved her cat and mouse games. My bride loved making me chase her all around the world, throughout time. And I’d find her. I always found her. Today, a bar in the 1940s. Tomorrow, a colosseum in Rome. Time in the human realm was our playground. Our powers combined were unstoppable. We could destroy worlds if we wanted. But instead, we played games like this.

“You found me quickly this time.” “It helps that I never lose you.” “Don’t you?” “And I never will.” I took her lace-gloved hand into my leathered one and kissed her knuckles. Years later, as I searched for her, I’d whisper the words into a songwriter’s ear, hoping that wherever my bride was, she would hear it and she would remember. Perhaps I’d find an under-qualified and unassuming author to attempt to string together this story as well. The tale of Death and her monsters, Death and her Devil. “Leather and lace,” Mortala breathed. “Always.” “Always.”

Magical mountain this was, hell’s finest, and my heart tore and burned along with the fires in the distance coming closer, closer. The underworld was unbalanced without her, the same as I was. And the answer to imbalance was always destruction. There was no other way.

“You dare summon my bride here?” Marcelene shuddered, her magic failing as the purple sputtered out and she fell to her knees, gasping for breath. “I summon death. Yes, someone with some sense should come to these peoples’ aid or their downfall.”

My bride’s presence was cold at my side. A hood over her horns, her robe blackened and flowing out behind her. Every bit the reaper of nightmares and the most beautiful and haunting creature I’d ever beheld.

“There is too much death. So much drawn to hell. Hell has tampered with this mortal place heavily. It is far too connected through the veil. Something must be done.” “It is only a few dozen mortals,” I bargained. “Every life matters. Otherwise death wouldn’t matter, would

They will have parts of me, too, and I will find them again, find these pieces of me. Though the people here…” She looked around at the screams and fright. “The most I can offer is a swift death and lingering spirit.”

She smiled. “I wouldn’t mind claiming them. Though I will miss you, my dear sweet devil. I love this place. It is hell. It is Ash Grove, and it is a piece of me. So these boys are a piece of me. This game will be fun, won’t it? And they will join me. Join us at the end, I hope. Look after them, and say you’ll look for me?”

“I will search for you every moment of my existence, Mortala.”

“Yes, I believe I’m a fan of Halloween.”

I pointed to the witch and back to her shop. “You are bonded to hell, and your magic stays there.”

“Please,” Wolfgang begged. “Help my friends. I’ll do anything.”

“No one has lost more here today than me. And now, Marcelene, you are in my debt.” I leveled her with a rageful stare that she met head-on. “So be it,” she answered, and we turned to watch the carnage together. Moments later, Ghost would kill her, and she would forget. The first Halloween. The Halloween Boys.

Danu, the third goddess, never spoke. She only looked on with a long face. I envied her perpetual silence and wished I never had to utter words myself.

Then Danu spoke, and we all turned, shocked. Were these the first words she’d spoken in a millennium? Longer? “Death,” she said, looking down and swaying in all her gray hooded robes, “has chosen her four horsemen. It is as it should be.”

I asked, running my touch over his skeleton-bone hand. He only ever took his gloves off for me. I was the only one who knew his hands. I was the only one who could hold the long bones next to my flesh.

“The witches say that I appear wherever blackberries are. Books full of stories and lore about it.” He turned onto his elbow, running a bone finger through my hair, his crimson eyes impossibly gorgeous. “But much to what I assume would be their dismay, I have no malicious intent. I just like the fruit.”

“You’re here,” I marveled. “Where’s Judas?” “He is the mountain again,” Raven said, sad and plain. “I couldn’t stop him from his slumber.” “Then I’ll have to wake him up,” I said. “Take me to him?”

They were mine; they were me, and we were all made for each other.

This climb was mine; this mountain was mine. And maybe I was destined to be the luna that slept in his caverns forever in waiting… just like the tales of Fenrir said. The stories are all about you, he’d told me.

Blythe Pearl and Mortala. Death, a reaper, and just a normal girl with darkness surrounding her. Both women, both versions of me, were valid. Both were beautiful and deserving of adoration.

couldn’t help but notice the frightful creature I’d become. Long black horns twisted above my head, and my chestnut hair fell in waves down my shoulders. I was the woman from my vision on Halloween last year. The one on her throne, with Raven and her four men.

“You are my burning willow. You are my hell; my place of eternal torment and sorrow. I am your devil, your guardian. I should love nothing, but I love only you,” he rumbled, his declaration more powerful than any storm.