Hell Sucks: A Reverse Harem Urban Fantasy (Selena Pierce Book 2) Read online

  Hell Sucks

  Selena Pierce Book Two

  Lucy Auburn

  Contents

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  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  1. Selena

  2. Selena

  3. Selena

  4. Selena

  5. Selena

  6. Selena

  7. Selena

  8. Selena

  9. Selena

  10. Elah

  11. Naomi

  12. Petyr

  13. Elah

  14. Selena

  15. Naomi

  16. Selena

  17. Selena

  18. Selena

  19. Selena

  20. Tae Min

  21. Selena

  22. Selena

  23. Selena

  24. Naomi

  25. Selena

  26. Selena

  27. Selena

  28. Selena

  29. Naomi

  30. Selena

  31. Selena

  32. Selena

  33. Selena

  34. Petyr

  35. Selena

  36. Selena

  37. Selena

  38. Selena

  39. Selena

  40. Selena

  41. Selena

  42. Naomi

  Epilogue

  Also by Lucy Auburn

  About the Author

  Copyright 2018 Lucy Auburn.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Cover art and design by Hanna James, www.heyhannajames.com.

  First edition.

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  Thank you to all my lovely readers.

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  www.lucyauburn.com

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  Author’s Note

  Hell Sucks is the second book in the Selena Pierce series, about a succubus struggling to find herself in a new world. It’s a sequel to Fae Like Me and won’t make as much sense if you haven’t read the first book.

  Hell Sucks contains a reverse harem plot and romance between two women. I hope you enjoy!

  Prologue

  Leon

  I walked through absolute darkness, searching for her. In my beast form, I was able to use my superior senses to catch even the faintest whiff of a scent trail. I didn’t need something of hers to inhale in order to look for her; the smell of Selena’s shampoo, the scent of her skin, was like a song on repeat in my head. I would never forget her.

  I also couldn’t forget that kiss we shared on the last day that I saw her, before she disappeared. I’d meant for it to be a perfunctory kiss; back then, I was still telling myself that any attraction I felt for her was short-lived and would die with time. But the kiss we shared was anything but passionless. It had awakened a part of myself I thought long dead. She was my first apprentice in a long time, someone I’d come to root for and cheer, who I’d hoped to see grow into a powerful woman.

  And now she was gone.

  But I would find her. Brushing my nose against the black amorphous ground of the Shadow Realm, I got a whiff of her scent—old, from her previous time here. I’d been hoping for a fresh trail. A path began to grow beneath my paws, lit by the strange magic of this unfinished prison. I walked down it, staring into the darkness with my beast’s clever eyes.

  Before long a figure rose from the darkness ahead of me, lit by dozens of floating lanterns that disappeared above his head into the darkness, only to reappear moments later near his feet. Vincent Vikander, a powerful and ancient fae, had made the Shadow Realm his home. While others viewed it as a prison—one without any human lives to feed on—he seemed to have turned his corner of it into his own private kingdom. My lips reflexively twitched back from my teeth at the thought of him lording over others, using his power to shape the Shadow Realm to his whim; if he had Selena, I would tear his throat open with my teeth.

  As I neared him I saw that he was talking to someone, and my hackles went up. Dark fae in the Shadow Realm were supposed to be isolated from each other, as punishment for their crimes of organized rebellion, but many of them found ways around the realm’s borders. The person he was speaking to smelled of fae, but before I could get close enough to catch a better look at him he disappeared, using the ring on his finger to transport out of the Shadow Realm.

  The ring the fae used was strictly in the possession of light fae; we made sure of that. So Vincent had light fae friends who visited him from either Earth or the Realm of Light. I filed this information away in my head, deciding that I would look into it if need be, though my caseload was currently quite full. I’d always known that he had dark fae informants, but this was the first time I’d seen someone reach across political lines for him. I didn’t know what to think of it.

  The dark fae turned as I approached him, staring down at me with that ancient, heavy gaze. “Hello doggy. You interrupted my discussion with my friend.”

  I shifted into my human form as I approached him, wishing I had an easy quip set aside to cut him down—but of course I didn’t. All I had was this new hole in my heart that demanded to be filled.

  So I cut right to the quick of things. “Where is Selena? Do you know?”

  Vincent blinked at me, seemingly startled out of his witticisms for a moment. “You’ve lost the Lightblood? Interesting.”

  I frowned at him. “Who told you about her heritage?”

  He merely smiled, benevolent and clever. “No one had to tell me, detective. Some things are just obvious.”

  “Sure.” I didn’t believe him, but this wasn’t the heart of my mission. Advancing on him, I got close enough to smell his scent—and was disappointed when it didn’t contain any traces of Selena’s signature smell. But there was still a chance he knew something. “You have an entire network of people who trade you for information.”

  “Do I?” He raised a dark brow. “Such things are against the laws of this place, so I’m sure you’re mistaken.”

  Grinding my teeth, I barely resisted the urge to grab him by his steam-pressed shirt and throw him around a little. “Allegedly, shall we say, you have a network of eyes and ears who keep you informed about what’s happening outside this realm. Most of them dark fae who have eluded capture—though apparently not all of them are dark side.”

  “I’ve heard rumors of this so-called network,” Vincent said, his brief smile flashing the white of his canine teeth. “You give me too much credit, detective. Surely if I had such a network I’d simply use it to escape this dreadful place.”

  “Yes, I can’t imagine why you’d want to stay,” I deadpanned. “I don’t care about your informants—at least not right now. I have bigger fish to fry than one dark fae who knows too much. What I want to know is if you’ve heard rumors about Selena Pierce’s whereabouts.”

  “Did you lose her? Tsk tsk.” He shook his head at me. “What a terrible teacher you are.”

  His words were the last straw. Every inch of me was exhausted, frustrate
d, and worried sick for Selena. Exploding forward, I grabbed onto his shirt with one hand and wrapped the other hand around his throat, feeling his sluggish pulse against my palm. Even with me this close, breathing into his face and staring him down, he just looked back at me patiently like he was dealing with a tantrum-throwing toddler.

  It was enough to piss me off even further.

  “Tell me what you know,” I said, growls inching out of my throat with every word. “She’s disappeared. We don’t know where to—we don’t even know what realm she might be in. She left no trail behind, and didn’t take anything with her. I swear to all the gods that if you know something and you’re keeping it from me, I will ruin you.” The tips of my claws began to shift as my anger leaked out of me, thick dark blood spilling from his skin as I opened it. “I’m out of patience, Vikander. Speak.”

  He looked at me with something like frustration. “If I knew, detective, I would go to her myself.” An expression crossed his face, gone as soon as it came, but for a moment I almost thought he cared about Selena. “She’s one of a kind. The key to everything. But I don’t know where she is—no one does. Not a single soul. And trust me, I’ve been asking around.”

  “So you knew she was missing,” I growled at him. “You’ve just been playing dumb.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” he countered. “You and I aren’t exactly friends, detective, as this proves.”

  He meant the blood trickling down his neck to his shirt. It was a shallow flesh wound; a fae like Vincent would be hard to kill with even a deep gash across the neck. Forcing myself to relax, I pulled my hand off his neck and watched as the wound sealed back up the instant my claws retracted, his skin unblemished once more, the slight bloodstain the only sign of my temporary loss of control.

  Vincent asked, “So does this mean that I can continue to use my network of informants? Assuming that you want the information I might find.”

  I breathed in and out, as deep as I could, centering my mind to control my powers—just as I’d taught Selena to do, what felt like so long ago. “Do what you want, Vikander. I’ll be back.”

  I turned to leave, and heard his voice as I walked away. “Do tell me if you find her, detective. It’s rare that I have something to look forward to, and I did so look forward to her coming to visit me.”

  There was a tone in his voice that I didn’t like, but I forced myself not to rise to the bait. “I’ll tell you nothing. And you’ll never see Selena again if I have my way.”

  Reaching over to my left hand, I touched the ring that brought me here and used it to go back to the Collective, straight to the middle of my office. Once there, I pulled my jacket off and threw it onto an empty chair, then prowled towards the board I had hanging behind my desk, where every possible lead to Selena’s disappearance was.

  Staring at the board, I jotted down a few notes and tried to make sense of it. She wasn’t in the Realm of Light—that much I was sure of. And Naomi and I had searched every inch of Baton Rouge that we could, looking for her. The Shadow Realm was a possibility, but I had no idea what corner of it she would wind up in.

  The best guess we had was that she’d accidentally used her realm walking powers to take herself somewhere, but we didn’t know why she’d done it, or where she’d ended up. The only clue we had was from the last person who saw her: Maggie. Apparently Selena was upset right before she disappeared; Maggie claimed she wanted to know about her birth parents.

  I worried that I’d sent her into the field too soon, or pushed her too hard. We’d only gotten through a dozen or so rounds of meditation and concentration practice before I had her interrogate Percy. I’d thought it would be fine because he was fae, so there was no chance of her hurting him on accident, but it hadn’t occurred to me that she could be the one hurt. Maybe she’d seen or felt too much while pushing him for answers.

  It had occurred to me more than once since she disappeared that maybe she didn’t want to be found.

  I was stuck in these thoughts, mind circling around and around, when there was a knock at my door. I answered it without even bothering to cover up the board behind my desk; I knew the place looked like something out of A Beautiful Mind, and I didn’t care.

  Petyr was standing on the other side of the door, and behind him was a dark haired man I didn’t recognize. “Ambassador.” I blinked at him, startled that he’d come to me. “Did we have a meeting? If so it slipped my mind. I could’ve gone to your office—I’m not up to anything.”

  “No, no meeting. And we came to you.” He walked into the room, leading forward the man behind him. “Leon, meet Elah. Elah, this is the detective.”

  The name sounded familiar. I shook the man’s hand, trying to put pieces together. “Havaala—the blackfyre knight, correct?”

  “One and the same,” he said, his vowels soft with an accent particular to the Realm of Light.

  I stared at Petyr. “What’s this about?”

  “Things have gotten rather chaotic here, to say the least,” Petyr said, grabbing my jacket and moving it to my desk so he could sit on the chair beneath it. “The number of demon possessions has gone up considerably. Baton Rouge is experiencing much more than to be expected for a city of its size. So we’re bringing in reinforcements.”

  “Okay.” I looked over at Elah. “That’s good.”

  “From now on, Elah will be your partner,” he said, “while Naomi will be working mostly with another dark hunter named Crane. Together, I want the four of you to take care of everything going on in the city.” He looked over at my board, a thoughtful expression on his face. “And if you wind up looking into another case on the side, I won’t stop you—you know that.”

  That was when it clicked for me. I looked the blackfyre knight up and down, sizing him up as possible competition. “You were her fiancé.”

  “Selena,” he said, the name weighted on his tongue. “I’m worried deeply about her. The ambassador says you care for her too.”

  I swallowed a lump in my throat, not wanting to acknowledge how much I cared for her—or how suddenly those emotions came upon me the moments she was gone. “I’ve been looking for Selena ever since she disappeared.”

  “We’ll find her together,” Elah said, striding forward to put a hand on my shoulder. His gaze was fierce. “I won’t give up until she’s safe in my arms.”

  Staring at him, I found it impossible not to like him—and so I clapped him on the shoulder. “Together,” I vowed.

  No matter what, I wouldn’t give up on her—even if it took months to find her, I would. Because now that I felt this emotion inside me, it demanded an outlet, and I knew that I had to tell her how I felt.

  I just hoped she was still alive to hear it.

  1

  Selena

  Everywhere I looked, there she was. The woman with the face that haunted me.

  The face that I saw looking back at me every day in the mirror.

  Persephone—the woman who held me in my prison—had long dark hair and pale skin, no doubt in part because there was no sunlight in the Underworld. She wore draped clothes made out of silk, wraps with embroidery and patterns that she often folded together in something like a sari or a toga. Though she’d shown me a hundred times how to do the same thing, I almost always wound up sticking a bunch of pins in my own silk wraps to get them to stay on. My existing clothes had been discarded somewhere shortly after I arrived here, though she let me keep my amulets.

  I didn’t think of her as my mother very often.

  It didn’t seem like the kind of role that fit the Queen of the Underworld.

  Queen or captive, depending on how you looked at it. From where I was often standing, though, she took to the role like a woman born to it. This was no meek Persephone from the Greek legends, tricked into eating a pomegranate, missing her mother on Earth. She was cruelty and caprice, whimsy and torture, all wrapped into someone who I’d known, the moment I saw her, gave birth to me.

  I wasn’t even really sure that
Persephone was her real name. It was the name she gave me, though—and the only name. If her husband gave her a surname, she’d never told me.

  Peeking from around the carved column I hid behind, I watched as she interrogated a guard about my whereabouts. She started all honey and seduction, her fingernail trailing along his cheek as she pressed her body towards him and widened her eyes just a little. The guard—a minor demigod who she’d put on my rooms after she realized the demons couldn’t hold me—looked almost like he bought it for a moment. I would’ve felt sympathy for him if he weren’t one of the reasons why I was being held here against my will, unable to escape.

  My mother’s seductive whimsy only lasted so long, though. When it became clear that the guard didn’t know where I had gone and was useless to her, she snarled at him, making a sound like a child denied their favorite treat. The fingernail on his cheek turned into claws digging into his flesh, and he swallowed.

  “Where is she!?”

  I chewed my lower lip at the sound of the ire in her voice; in this state, she was liable to do anything. The demigod’s face started to shrivel under her grasp as her hand turned molten and she began to sear his flesh with her fingers. I knew that he had powers of his own, but using them on Hades’ wife would be tantamount to treason.