Demigod Captive Read online

  "You would know, Damien," the woman says, voice teasing. "You're the one with the poison skin."

  His jaw jumps, a nervous habit no doubt. I shudder as another pulse of the lightning's aftereffects goes through me. Turning my head, I let my eyes focus on the other god hunter, looking away as Damien wraps my wrists, then arms, then torso, tight with chains that cut me off from my godhood.

  The second god hunter is a slim, relatively short woman with toned biceps and a scar across her forehead. Her pale skin is dotted with freckles, the red of her hair cut in a fashion-forward bob that skims the back of her bare neck. Unlike the man, her uniform doesn't seem to include gloves, and she looks at me with wry curiosity instead of violence or dispassion.

  Another tremble of the lightning goes through me, making me clench my teeth so hard I swear one of them almost cracks. I need a distraction. So I decide to chat with the woman while I'm getting arrested.

  "Your hair is orange," I tell her inanely. "They call it red, but it's not. They should call it orange. That's the color it really is."

  "Wow." She raises a thin, pale brow. "They really make 'em different up there in Heaven? Huh?"

  I snort. "Has no one told you, god hunter? There is no Heaven. There is no Hell. Only Earth and the Celestial Realm."

  "That's not true." The male god hunter speaks up, his voice a low burr. Moving down to my legs, he lets a length of the chain trail loose, then expertly wraps it around my ankles, sealing the last of my godblood's hot-burning power away. "There is a Hell. I've been there."

  "Oh? Tell me, mortal." Raising my head, I stare down at him with my lips twisted in a smile. "How is it that you've seen this Hell, when a demigod over three centuries old hasn't?"

  "You're about to find out." He meets my gaze head-on, nothing amused or passionate in his icy blue eyes. "They call it Demigod Prison, and it's where you'll live out the rest of your very mortal life."

  Tugging on the chain, he jumps off the dumpster and yanks me with him. I roll forward and stumble, yelping as my feet come in contact with the sidewalk, cutting my eyes at him. He just walks towards the street, ignoring the drizzle of rain overhead, and jerks me after him without even checking to see if I catch up.

  The other god hunter follows on his heels, not even looking back at me, their prize.

  Frowning, I watch their backs, the thought occurring to me that I really might not get out of this particular jam.

  But no—that's not possible. I'm the daughter of Death, after all. Her one and only child, half-mortal or otherwise.

  I'll get out of this.

  As soon as I please.

  Because while it's no fun to imagine aging and dying, and I'm not a big fan of the lightning still crackling across my skin, there's one big benefit to this so-called Hell the mortal seems to think I should fear.

  The instant the golden chains touched my skin, my hunger for death disappeared completely for the first time in years, and the painful burn of my godblood sizzled into nothing. Taking away my powers didn't just steal the immortality from me. It took the torture of having deity running through my half-mortal body, too.

  Mortality won't be so bad, even if it comes with a side of prison bars and godmarked assholes. I've been through worse—seen worse, whether it was the Rwandan Genocide or the Spanish Flu, the Holocaust or the destruction of indigenous people in, well, every continent.

  Godblood Prison won't take me down, and it won't hold me. A single press of my fingers against the chains reveals that they have death waiting inside them, like all magical things. It would take months, but I can free myself. If I want to. But I let the mortal think he's the one calling the shots as he pulls me after him.

  At least in "Hell," there won't be Death waiting for me in the darkness.

  Chapter Three

  For soldiers of the God of War, these godmarked assholes sure do have boring ass regulation gear. Other than the magicked god chains they've put me in, everything about them screams low budget secret soldiers: black utilitarian outfits, a boring regulation black van, even leather briefcases and simple glocks.

  The fidgety guy connects my chains to a large metal ring on one side of their van and sits me down on a metal bench, taking a spot next to me, while the woman takes a spot opposite him on the other metal bench, grabbing a bag and rustling through it. Then the man leans over, slaps his palm on the front wall of the van, and the engine turns over. Just like that we're off—taking the most stereotypical ride imaginable, complete with the stale smell of sweat in the back of this van, which looks like it's someone's messy bedroom half the time.

  I can just imagine how the humans do their stakeouts back here. They probably sit around and waste hours trying to track down their targets: rogue demigods like me. If my mom hadn't led them right to me, they never would've been able to find me. Combat skills or not, even with their marks they're still mortals.

  Watching the redheaded god hunter shove half of a sub sandwich in her mouth all at once, I wrinkle my nose disdainfully. Mortals can be so perplexing sometimes—they have such short lives, and so little to live for, yet instead of making each moment count they live small and mediocre lives full of boring, trivial, and even terrible things.

  Take her sandwich, for instance. The bread is stale; that much was clear when she fished it out of the bottom of a utility bag and unwrapped the fast food wrapper. It has white, beige pale bread, without a hint of aioli or hot sauce. A few thin layers of salted meat, dyed yellow-orange cheese, uninspired mayonnaise and iceberg lettuce are all that she bothered to order between the two slices of uninspired bread.

  She gets so few meals in her life, this mortal woman. Even the Godmark won't save her from her own inevitable death. Yet here she is, wasting a lunch by eating in the back of a van, curled over the very definition of mediocrity, not even a red onion or banana pepper to be found.

  "You hungry?" Foolishly mistaking my disdain for envy, she waves her sad excuse for a meal in my direction with a smirk. "I'd offer you some, but it's probably not to your taste. You eat rotten meat and long-dead corpses, after all."

  "Kayla." I don't know why the other god hunter, Damien, bothers to chide his fellow soldier. "She eats death, not actual dead people."

  "Yeah? We so sure about that?"

  "The archivists have done their research."

  "Well, maybe they're wrong. From what I hear, Death or whomever isn't exactly well-known." She jerks her chin in my direction. "And this one is her only child. There's no way to know what traits she passed on. For all we know they dig up graves and shit."

  Amused, I peel my lips back from my teeth and snap them mockingly in their direction. "She's right," I coo at the man, enjoying the way his jaw clenches in disgust, how he forms nervous fists through his black leather gloves. "You should be careful around me, darling. I might bite your dick off and suck the marrow from your bones... or other things."

  It's always fun to get inappropriately sexual with mortals. They never know what to make of it. Especially the men—for all that they might moan and complain that they want their women to be more open about sex, the truth is that they don't know what to do when they get what they want. And this one is tighter wound than most.

  If he weren't one of Ares' soldiers, I'd enjoy peeling him layer by layer, taking off not just his clothes but his mental and emotional armor, until he laid bare naked beneath me and gave me his little death. Unfortunately for us both he has that damn mark on his forehead that makes us enemies. So I'll settle with a little light mental torture and enjoy the way he squirms so pleasingly the instant I mention sucking his dick.

  While Kayla gapes and sets her sandwich down, Damien just frowns in my direction. "You have Ares' chains on. I'm not afraid."

  "Too bad. I would love to find out what you taste like." Raising my brows, I lean into my new role as the boogie-woman. "I bet you make the most delightful sound as you... die."

  He darts his eyes in my direction, frowning. The van goes over a bump, and th
e metal bench we're both sitting on slides him towards me, making him push his heels against the floor to get away from me. I smirk at him and tilt my head to one side, letting my thick dark hair roll over my shoulder. His weak, mortal gaze is drawn to the tanned flesh of my neck, and he shifts uncomfortably, looking over at the third metal bench, the one neither I nor his coworker—and all her stuff—are occupying.

  I can tell he wants to move. To sit further away from me. He's regretting taking the spot on the metal bench next to me. If he moves now he looks like he's rattled, though, so he just crosses his arms and leans back against the side of the van, his eyes closing even as we jerk over bumpy roads and unfinished asphalt.

  Running my fingertips across a length of Ares' chain, I try to look disinterested in it, choosing to stare at the redhead's sandwich some more. Inwardly, I turn my attention towards each god-forged link of the gold, feeling their magic and assessing its weaknesses. I'm less confident now that I can remove the chains, but I do feel a little whisper of death within them.

  All magic is made from pain and suffering, you see. And while death can't be drained from objects of power as easily as it can be drained from mortal bodies, it's still possible. Slow and difficult, but possible.

  And they have no idea.

  One thing the redhead Kayla said is true: they really don't know much about the daughter of Death, even in the archives. My mother may dine, party, and screw around with her fellow gods, but her business has always set her apart from them. They view her dependence on mortals—her need to feast on their deaths—as a weakness, and prefer that she mainly rub shoulders with filthy humans on Earth.

  Sure, the other gods may come down to places like Yemen and the Poconos to feast and be merry among mortals, joyous and suffering alike. They fuck and leave their demigod children behind. But they don't need humanity like my mother does—so they've never bothered to study her, even Ares, whose trade of war goes hand-in-hand with the purpose she serves. He views her like the carrion who come after the slaughter to feast on the dead, and not as a sister in both of their aims here in the mortal realm.

  She's always wanted to gain his approval. I wonder if that's one of the reasons why she set his god hunters on me. Maybe she believes that if he sees her as a loyalist, he'll change his tune.

  Even gods are foolish and desperate at times.

  The god hunters are ignoring me now. As the woman, Kayla, finished up her sad excuse for a sandwich, she doesn't even look at me. Neither does the tightly-wound Damien, even when I make kissy sounds in his direction.

  Into the tense, empty silence, the two actually start up a conversation about some streaming show.

  Digital entertainment. Humans seem to take it for granted, but if only they knew how different their world has gotten in a few short decades. I remember when they feared the dark and writhed in pain from communicable diseases. Hell, they still do—in countries mortals don't bother paying attention to, and even right here in one of their grandest cities, within the neighborhoods they turn from. Pain and suffering has been much of human life for so long.

  Then came antibiotics. Vaccines. Hygiene. Plastic. They put sound on airwaves and information on chips. Now they sit at home in comfort with the world at their fingertips, and bemoan it when the wifi is slow.

  Maybe my mother is right.

  They do deserve slow, painful deaths.

  But I find that I can't wish that on them. Once you know a mortal, have met them face-to-face and learned of their desires, dreams, and fears, it's harder to see their life end. Simpler almost to wish it wasn't so.

  Tonight was the first time I gave in to that desire, though.

  I didn't even know I could do it until it worked.

  I brought a man back to life.

  I may pay with my own.

  At least now I know what it's like to fear your own mortality.

  * * *

  It feels like hours that we spend in the back of the van. During that time, Fidgety tugs on his gloves and stares at the wall; Sandwich Lady somehow manages to sleep sitting up, her eyes half-closed, snores pouring out of her nose.

  I run my godblood fingers across Ares' chains and consider what I might do, what I might want, who I could one day be.

  Maybe this is a blessing. Living as a mortal. No more burning in my veins. No more hunger for death. It's what I've wanted for nearly a century. It's the reason why I turned from my mother's dark path. Why I foolishly put the life back into Omar and resurrected him from the dead.

  Godbloods aren't meant to meddle in mortal lives or mortal affairs.

  But as the prison becomes closer and my predicament more clear, I come up against an obvious problem: while I could slowly drain the death from the chains and free myself, the instant I do my starvation will come back. The only way to free myself from prison—a choice I know I'll wind up making—will be to gather enough death inside me to survive my godblood rushing back.

  Divinity wasn't meant to survive in a mortal form. It clings to those of us who are half-mortal or more, but it makes our blood hot, our skin prickle. Many demigods have short tempers; others are weak, easily sickened by things even mortals shake off. Some are mad with rage and violence. Others are sociopaths verging on psychopathy. But most of us are simply cursed to walk this world with a constant, uncomfortable duality shivering beneath us.

  The chains make that go away. They calm the beast inside. Without my mother's blood making me a godblood, I'm merely a mortal, just as my father was all those centuries ago when he somehow made the mistake of bedding Death herself.

  To destroy them, and free myself, I'll need strength. Power. Until I see the inside of the prison, I won't know how to get it.

  There are three main ways I feed. The best way is off a mortal's recent death. After that comes draining magic from objects of power, though it takes more time, and only very large objects have much in the way of death built into them.

  The third way will be the easiest and yet the hardest.

  My powers let me drain a mortal's little death, as I like to call it. Their orgasm. La petite mort in French. At the apex of their pleasure, mortals come a little closer to the Great Beyond—and I can take that moment from them.

  I'm the inspiration for many of the legends about succubi.

  It used to be my favorite way to feed.

  But even carnal pleasures grow boring over the centuries. There's no man I haven't bedded, or woman, or any gender in between. I've indulged in orgies, tantric sex, and even slow, passionate lovemaking, though it's hard to remember what that last one felt like. All meals grow stale over time.

  And little deaths are, well, little. It would take dozens to fill my well enough that I can remove the chains without being weakened by my starved state.

  Who in the world will I fuck to climax inside Godblood Prison?

  As the thought comes to me, the van goes over a bump and comes to a stop. Beside me, Damien startles, waking from what was apparently a very brief nap. He glances over to check that I'm still safely secured, and I raise a dark brow in his direction, rattling my chains.

  "Care for a romp in the hay? Your partner is asleep. She might not hear it if I ride your dick."

  He blanches, which is so fun. We both know he won't do it, though. Especially when I've just been so crude. His gloved hands and fidgety nature make it clear he's the uptight kind of guy—probably the kind who needs a woman to whisper his dick hard.

  Too bad. He's attractive, for one of Ares' foot soldiers. I bet I could bring him to the edge of orgasm and give him a little death big enough to rival the real kind of death.

  "We're here." Frowning in his partner's direction, he raises his voice. "Kayla! Time to wake up."

  "Huh? What?" She blinks back into the conscious realm, pushing her red hair back from her head and wiping her cheeks. "Guess I dozed off."

  Studying the redhead for a long moment, I try to figure out if she might be bisexual, or at least bicurious. But based on the way she
keeps staring at her partner and completely ignoring me, it seems unlikely. Too bad—it's so much easier to feed off women. Multiple orgasms and all that.

  "Try not to fall asleep next time," Damien says, sounding annoyed. "Grab our kit. I'll get the prisoner."

  "Prisoner." I give him my best seductress look, more for the fun of watching his frown deepen than anything. "I like the way it sounds when you say that. What's next, will you call me a naughty girl?"

  The redhead coughs into her hand, covering a laugh. So maybe she does have a sense of humor. Her partner doesn't, though. His mouth thins into a tight line, and he merely responds, "You won't find all of it so funny once you've been escorted to your cell."

  You never know. My mother is Death. I can find humor in the bleakest of places. This isn't my first rodeo—I'm willing to bet that Godblood Prison has nothing on the Spanish Flu or World War II. I was there with Death for both, and let me tell you, it's been a long time since she's gotten to feed so thoroughly.

  While Damien checks my chains, his gloved hands running smoothly over them, he refuses to look up into my eyes. I can sense tension coming from him. There's even a flush at the nape of his neck, barely visible between his dark hair and high, stiff black collar. It's hard to tell if he's aroused or angry, but I'd bet on a combination of the two.

  Once he's satisfied himself that I'm secure, he locks the ends of the chains to a clamp he holds in his hands. Kayla opens up the back of the van, and bright white light floods in, overhead and artificial. I get the scent of motor oil and dampness before Damien jumps to his feet and jerks me off the bench.

  "In front of me," he says, pushing me off the van with a gloved hand, his voice gruff and short. "Don't try anything."

  I laugh.

  Like I have the energy to try anything.

  As I step out onto the concrete beneath us, I feel like I've been kicked in the head by a horse. Sitting still in the back of the van covered up how wrung out I am. But even without my godblood powers running through my veins, I'm weakened and starved. My head is pounding. There's a pinching feeling between my eyes. And every step feels like I'm walking underwater.