Completely unacceptable.
The tingle began to sting, as if Hades was crawling with hornets. Resisting the urge to rip off his own skin, he stepped into his personal portal next to the fireplace. Like Harrowgates that transported demons around Sheoul and the human realm, some of the portals inside the Inner Sanctum had been built to travel only between two locations, while others could transport a person to one of multiple places by manipulation of the symbols inside the portal’s four walls. But Hades could also operate them with his mind, allowing any portal to take him anyplace within the Inner Sanctum he wished to be. Or, like now, to get where he needed to be, he merely had to concentrate on the sensation of mayhem wracking his body, and a moment later, the portal opened up.
He wasn’t at all surprised to find himself in a burned-out sector of the 5th Ring, a vast, dreary realm of fog, heat, and despair that contained the evilest of the evil. Before him, demons scattered into the mist the moment they recognized him.
Most demons, anyway. A few stood their ground, their defiance admirable, if not foolish.
A demon who had been a professional torturer before he was killed several years ago by Aegis demon slayers blocked his path. Here, demons could choose their appearance, and this bastard had chosen his former skeletal Soulshredder form, his grotesque, serrated claws extending from long fingers.
“Move.” Hades slowed, but he didn’t stop. He didn’t have time for this shit. His skin burned and his insides vibrated, alerting him to some sort of violent disturbance nearby. And it had to be a whopper for him to have felt it from inside his home on the other side of the Inner Sanctum...which was roughly the distance from one earthly pole to the other.
“Fuck you, Soul Keeper.”
Surprise jolted him; few were brave––or stupid––enough to challenge him. But Hades kept his expression carefully schooled. Tension was running high right now, and he couldn’t afford to let anyone think he was losing control of the Gra.
From two-dozen feet away and without breaking his stride, Hades flayed the demon with a mere thought. Stripped him of his skin like a banana. The demon screamed in agony, and Hades let him. That noise would carry for miles, warning everyone within earshot of the consequences of fucking with him. Sure, Hades could have “killed” him, but the demon’s soul would simply have fled the old, broken body and taken a new form. Handing down pain was much more satisfying.
Hades continued on his way, his boots crunching down on charred bone and wood, and as he strode by the Soulshredder, the demon stopped his annoying screaming long enough to croak, “You...will...fail.”
Hades ignored him. Because really? Fail at what? His job was pretty simple and straightforward. All he had to do was keep demon and evil human souls inside the Inner Sanctum until the time came when, or if, they were born again. How he kept them was entirely up to him. He could leave them in peace, he could torture them, he could do whatever he wanted. Failure? That was ridiculous. There was nothing to fail at.
Really, this place was boring as shit most of the time.
Leaving the asshole behind, he threaded his way past the kind of horrors one would expect to find in a place where the evilest of evils lived, but the bodies, blood, and wrecked buildings didn’t even draw his eye. He’d seen it all in his thousands of years down here, and nothing could faze him.
Not even the hellhound crouched in the shadows of the gnarled thorn tree gave him pause. The beasts could cross the barrier between Sheoul-gra and Sheoul, and for the most part, Hades let them. He kind of had to, since their king, Cerberus, had taken it upon himself to be the self-appointed guardian of the underworld––specifically, Sheoul-gra. For some reason, hellhounds hated the dead and were one of the few species that could see them outside of Sheoul-gra. Inside Sheoul-gra, they got their rocks off by ripping people apart. As long as they limited their activities to the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Rings, where the worst of the demons lived, he didn’t give a crap what the fleabag hounds did.
Ahead, from inside the ruins of an ancient temple, came a chorus of chanting voices. Ich tun esay. Ich tun esay. Ich tun esay alet!
He frowned, recognizing the language as Sheoulic, but the dialect was unfamiliar, leaving some of the words open to interpretation. Somehow, Hades doubted his interpretation was correct and that the chanters were talking about opening a dime store.
He tracked the sound, and as he approached the reddish glow seeping through a doorway in the building ahead, the hair on the back of his neck stood up. What the hell? He hadn’t been creeped out or afraid of anything in centuries. Many centuries.
Ich tun esay. Ich tun esay. Ich tun esay alet...blodflesh!
What. The. Fuck.