Stalker (The Hunt Book 3) Read online

  Severus’s hand, which had been clutching possessively at Moira’s neck, suddenly slid down her back. Dead? They couldn’t be dead. In Severus’s mind, those two old fools would endure throughout the ages—crotchety, pathetic immortals until Hell finally splintered and withered away.

  “Dead?” Why did his throat feel so tight? And why was Moira suddenly clutching his hand, her wide grey eyes boring into him, pupilless and dripping with empathy? “What do you mean—dead? They can’t—”

  “Didn’t Cordie tell you?” Malachi shoved his hands into his pockets, unmoved by the announcement. Unmoved now, perhaps, but as Severus took him in, really studied him with his bewildered stare, he thought his brother appeared comfortably numb to it all instead. Malachi shifted his weight between his legs, then chuckled. “Doesn’t she visit you in that little pin-drop of a city?”

  “We…” Severus cleared his throat, finding it thick and constricted. “We never really talk family when she visits. Hers, sometimes, if she’s feeling chatty. Mostly she comes by to moon over Alaric.”

  “Ah, yes, Verrier’s boy, isn’t he? Poor soul. No one ever escapes our cousin’s whims, do they?”

  Severus nodded absently, his mind sluggish as it digested the news. Dead. His mother and father, bitter, surely, to the last breath—dead. He had wished for it his whole life. He had no qualms imagining their lifeless bodies, their pale useless corpses. He’d laughed about it as a boy, daydreamed about it as they mocked him from across the dinner table.

  He had thought he would be immune to feeling a single shred of anything save relief at the news of their death.

  Not so.

  Severus swallowed hard, suddenly aware that the conversation had stagnated, the air thick between the three of them. Malachi watching Moira. Moira watching him. Severus staring at the frayed edge of his brother’s right sleeve, the string a mere breath away from their father’s crested ring, which Malachi now wore on his middle finger.

  Moira gave his hand a gentle squeeze, willing him to look at her—but he couldn’t. On Earth, he enjoyed being coddled by her. After all, he was a different creature on Earth. In Hell, he was raw—his entire being an exposed nerve that felt so much more viscerally. In Hell, he did the protecting, the comforting, the coddling. Otherwise, what use was he?

  So he stood tall, wishing the news had just rolled off him like it was nothing—like he didn’t care. His silence suggested otherwise, and now he needed to recover.

  “Well, that’s that then,” he said, forcing out each word, loud enough to distract his brother from Moira. “We’ve had a long journey and could do with some rest.”

  “What? Not even going to tell me why you’re here?” Malachi barred the entryway with his enormous frame, countering Severus’s step to the side with one of his own. “Now that I know it’s not for a family visit…”

  “Later, brother,” he insisted, readjusting the luggage on his back—dead weight that he had nearly forgotten about. “Is my bedroom still intact, or…?”

  He arched an eyebrow. Or did they dismantle it the second I was out the door?

  “I told them to leave it,” Malachi admitted with a sigh. Right—his things were definitely destroyed. “It’s a guest room now. I take it you two will be sharing?”

  “Indeed,” Severus said gruffly, finally shouldering his way into the enormous foyer, keeping a firm grasp on Moira’s hand as she tried to keep up. While the white and gold colour scheme remained, the structure of his enormous childhood home untouched, the interior décor—his mother’s plants, her rugs, her paintings—had vanished.

  “I let the staff go a few decades back,” Malachi said, leaning on the doorframe. When Severus glanced at him, he shrugged and rolled his eyes. “They were stealing things…and they just got in the way. The thieves I impaled at the yearly Saevitia summer gathering. The rest serve the extended family these days.”

  “Then I believe we both have stories to tell,” Severus remarked before looking to Moira. While she was paler in Hell, she was paler still at the news of his brother’s extracurricular activities. Malachi was an excellent impaler. He’d won awards for it when they were children. However, he needn’t boast—especially when Severus knew he was doing so to test Moira. See how squeamish she was, how far he could push her. Needling—it was another one of his family’s specialties.

  Well, not with her.

  “I suppose we do,” Malachi said tightly. “Five centuries apart will do that.”

  “Two centuries by my count.” Severus raised his eyebrows, issuing a challenge as he never would have dared in the past, then pulled Moira deeper into the foyer, its ceiling stretching all the way up to the roof three stories above. “We’ll talk later.”

  “Come find me once you’ve tucked her in, brother,” Malachi called as Severus led a mystified Moira, her grey eyes wide and her pale pink lips parted, toward the enormous stairwell. It spanned the breadth of the foyer and was made entirely of alabaster and marble; Severus had fallen down it once and knocked out all his baby teeth, whether they were ready to go or not. Fallen. After Malachi had pushed him.

  His older brother finally slammed the front door, his voice cutting through the echo. “I’ll break out Father’s good scotch, and we’ll really get into it…”

  “If you were so fucking bored down here, why didn’t you just leave?”

  His brother let out an exhalation rife with annoyance, then took a sip of his drink. His silhouette in front of the towering hearth, flames snapping and hissing within its depths, was even more foreign to Severus than his new look. He was still broad, tall, imposing, yet his big brother had lost muscle mass—with no servants, he was likely eating less, and poorly at that. And that hair, that tangled mane, stuck out in all directions. Where had his pride gone?

  Dead. Dead like their parents.

  “You know the laws, brother,” Malachi growled. “If I left, our home could have been taken. It would have been abandoned. I needed two signatures to put it in the care of Aunt Circe. Mother and Father were dead and you had been gone for centuries. What else was I to do?”

  Severus swirled the contents of his drink, then gulped down the rest of the molasses-brown liquid. This was an entirely new experience—having a frank conversation with his brother. Before he had left, Malachi talked, Severus listened. Sometimes Severus would fight back, whine, but Malachi had never engaged with him in the past—not meaningfully, anyway. Most of their conversations had consisted of childish squabbles that evolved into full-blown brawls through the white and gold halls of their home, Severus forever the loser and Malachi the golden child who could do no wrong.

  This was uncharted territory. Murky waters. He couldn’t decide whether his brother spoke to him now with respect or not, but Malachi hadn’t sneered—much—or insulted him—much—since they had joined one another in the dimly lit third-floor lounge. In an age gone by, this was where the men of the family would retreat, cracking open expensive liquor and Earth-smuggled cigars, while the women chattered away on another floor entirely. Like much of the enormous estate, the décor had disappeared—no rippled silk curtains over the windows, no oil paintings of the gardens, no marble busts of their father. The furniture remained, dusty and unused, and Malachi had admitted to giving most of the decorative pieces away to family after their parents died.

  “It’s never been to my taste,” he’d sniffed, seated on the other end of the long, rock-hard couch that Severus had always hated as a boy—hated and wished he had been invited to sit on all the same, as Malachi had, for late-night chats with their cantankerous father. Naturally, he was never sullen with the golden child. The two would sit up here, before a fire much like this one, and talk well into the wee hours of the morning.

  “Your father is preparing Malachi to take over the family,” his mother had always insisted, her eyes sparkling at the thought of her favourite son. “It’s a monumental undertaking, running the Saevitia clan. Something you will never understand.”

  Much
to his surprise, Malachi hadn’t wanted to run the clan. Apparently, after their parents’ deaths, he’d signed away all legal responsibility to their father’s younger brother, Heuric. He ran the clan now with the same rigidity as their father had. All gatherings were held at his estate—which, coincidentally, had taken in most of their mother’s old décor.

  It was all such a mess down here. Severus couldn’t help but delight in it, if only a little.

  After he had settled Moira into what was once his childhood bedroom, in the far corner of the third floor, tucked away from all the other suites on the second, he had searched the entire property, top to bottom, to ensure that Malachi was truly the only one there. Sure enough, there wasn’t a servant in sight—and from the amount of dust that had settled over everything, there hadn’t been any in quite some time. With only Malachi for him to keep an eye on, he had felt confident that Moira could get a few hours of undisturbed shut-eye. Safe, wrapped in layers of blankets to brace her against the nighttime chill.

  She hadn’t said much since they’d arrived, her eyes heavy but curious as she’d watched him check the room for any bits of magical trickery that Malachi might have hidden for kicks.

  “Just talk to him,” she had urged softly. “He’s all you have left, Severus, but at least it’s someone.”

  He had almost reminded her that her father was all she had left, but she didn’t deserve that. So, he had tucked her in, checked the manor for other beings, then met his brother in the formal lounge for drinks and what he assumed would be a very forced conversation.

  His first question, of course, had been how his parents had died.

  “Father killed Mother’s lover,” Malachi had told him, sounding painfully bored with the whole thing as he poured their drinks, “and then Mother killed Father, and then our beloved uncles killed her. Quite grisly, but I’ve washed my hands of the whole affair.”

  It seemed Malachi had withdrawn from most familial events in the aftermath, and Severus couldn’t help but wonder if the solitude had changed him. After all, they were talking as equals now—perhaps almost like true brothers, even. As a creature built for chaos, Malachi seemed deflated. Lesser. Still the strutting male with his golden mane, but aged and wiser, his voice shaded by a heartache Severus had never heard before.

  The deaths of their parents affected him far more than he let on.

  But then again, the same could be said for Severus.

  They had moved away from the topic swiftly, with Severus giving a very brief rundown of recent events with Moira, then Malachi whining about how dull the last century had been, stuck here all by himself in this big, old house, unable to come and go from Hell as he pleased.

  “Yes, I know the law,” Severus muttered, then cleared his throat and shook his head at his brother’s back. “Malachi, the law doesn’t stop you from leaving the property, only leaving the realm. No one says you can’t go to the city, see the rest of the clan—”

  “And what? Fraternize with the bastards who butchered our mother?” His brother let out a hollow laugh before grabbing an iron poker and stabbing at the black, charred wood in the hearth. The fire hissed back at him, spitting sparks that burned more holes into his tattered suit; the demon carried on rearranging, unfazed. “Not likely. And Mother’s side of the family is all witchy and close-knit. Hardly space for another chaos demon in their midst. I was far more content with my own company, anyway…for a time.”

  To limit squabbling over land and property, and to cut down on outright thievery, one of the residential laws of Hell dictated that should you leave the realm, and by extension your home, without a member of the immediate family tending to it, the property would be considered abandoned. Given this was their father’s ancestral estate, it appeared Malachi wasn’t ready to give it up just for a bit of excitement on Earth.

  In order to keep a home in the family name, the deed needed to be signed over to another relative, who would claim temporary ownership in your absence. Unfortunately, such a contract required two blood signatures from the immediate family. Without Severus, Malachi had been stuck with the place.

  “I tried it once,” his brother continued, standing there, back to him, fire poker in hand. The sharp tip glowed a pulsing orange hue, and Severus could see the way his brother’s fist clamped down around the other end. Malachi exhaled sharply. “Fraternizing with them. Once and only once after her death—that was it. I’m afraid I don’t have the tact to associate with those cretins anymore.”

  Malachi—unable to swallow his pride and smile at those who had left such a gaping hole in his heart? Who would have thought. Severus had forced a smile at his tormentors for centuries.

  Still, he couldn’t help but grin.

  “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me,” Severus mused, tapping his finger against the rim of his crystal tumbler. “Your lack of tact.”

  His brother faced him with a scowl, one that weakened the longer Severus grinned. Slowly, his frown bloomed into a lopsided grin of his own, and Malachi set the fire poker back in its place with a sigh. Downing the rest of his drink, he started to pace, back and forth across the width of the stone hearth, a hand in his pocket.

  “So, Diriel.” He seemed to roll the name across his tongue, tasting it, trying it on for size. “Hurt your woman, did he?”

  “By order of her angel father, yes.”

  Malachi chuckled coolly. “Tricky business, those angels.”

  “They’re much more powerful on Earth than we are,” Severus told him. “Hardly seems fair.”

  Well, no. The sheer wanton destruction demons would unleash should they be allowed to operate at full power on Earth, unrestricted and unchecked, was too insane to fathom. As much as Severus loathed to admit it, his kind needed to be monitored by a more powerful species. Dripping with arrogance and an exceedingly high, usually undeserved, sense of self-importance, demons would burn the human world to the ground just because they could without the angels keeping them in check.

  Not that that logic made his situation with Moira any easier.

  “Perhaps I ought to lend a hand then. You know, make it a fairer fight,” Malachi said, finally stopping in front of Severus, that hulking frame looming over him, dominating his view.

  For once, Severus didn’t cower. Not even a hint of fear circulated his system. Severus was a different demon than the one Malachi had known—it was reassuring to feel it, to prove it now in this conversation. However, his brother’s offer to lend a hand did not compute in the slightest. Severus blinked rapidly and sat up straighter, an incredulous smile flashing across his face.

  “What?” He arched a skeptical brow at his brother. “Malachi, you’ve never lent me a hand in your entire life.”

  And if he had, it would have only been because he planned to screw Severus over in the end, preferably somewhere public, for maximum humiliation.

  “No, I haven’t,” Malachi said with a curt nod, “and I’ve had a lot of time, alone, to think on that. You are my brother, Severus, but I’ve never treated you as such. And why? Because of some antiquated stereotype?”

  Severus merely stared up at him, expression unchanged, unsure of where this could all be headed—unsure of what, exactly, he was ramping up to.

  “I let Father dictate my relationship with you when we were children,” Malachi continued, his words edged in a snarl. “I let a vicious old man, weak, with no extraordinary abilities, tell me how I should treat my own brother. A brother who never schemed against me, never plotted my downfall. A brother who never stole from me, and who never broke my heart.”

  The corners of Severus’s lips twitched, but he swallowed his smile, too busy trying to decipher the subtext of this rant to admit that he had, in fact, plotted and schemed against Malachi in the past. Hundreds of times. However, all those plots and schemes had lived squarely inside his miserable little head, for he’d known he hadn’t the strength to go through with them. Now, he saw no reason to scheme against his brother; circumstances had done enou
gh of that already.

  “And…” Malachi studied his hands, the empty scotch glass clutched within them. “And now you’re here, Severus. You’re home. I want things to be different between us. They need to be different between us. Please.”

  Jaw clenched, Severus put some distance between them, standing and strolling around to the other side of the couch. He stood before the smaller of the two liquor cabinets, setting his glass on the empty silver tray.

  “Malachi, you were the bane of my existence growing up,” he said stiffly. “You were one of the reasons I finally left. You cannot expect to say a few flowery speeches and I’ll embrace you as the brother I’ve always wanted—”

  “Let me prove it to you, then,” Malachi told him, his booming voice drowning out Severus in an instant. “I’ll have my contacts locate Diriel for you by tomorrow morning. There will be no need for you to remain in Hell longer than necessary. I’ll find him, and together we will draw the truth from him. All you need is a name, correct? The name of the angel he serves?”

  He spat the last bit, just as disgusted as Severus would have been had he still lived in Hell. The thought of a demon doing the bidding of an angel—it was sacrilege in the underworld. Corrupting an angel? Praiseworthy. Cowering before one, following orders? Pathetic.

  He nodded all the same. Acquiring the name of Moira’s father was the only thing barring him from returning to Earth. The sooner they found it, the better. Diriel would be a hard creature to press for the information, but Severus would find a way to make him squeal.

  He sighed, fiddling with the half-empty bottles along the top of the small cabinet, searching for something to replenish his tumbler with. “Looking as you do, brother, I have to wonder if you have any associates left.”

  “Gold speaks just as loudly here as it does on Earth,” Malachi countered tightly, “and in your absence, the entire family fortune went to me. I can assure you—buying Diriel’s hideout, down to the exact room we might find him in upon arrival, will be simple enough.”