Sancha laughed. “Nay, love. The real and true Lucifer, who sits on a fiery throne in hell and rains down his wrath on those poor souls he’s taken in.”
Cameron glanced at each woman in the room. Belle, Valynda, Janice, and Sancha. “I’m not sure I follow.”
Belle answered in her own lyrical accent. “You know about me Valynda there, and how she died her death. Sancha and I lived less than auspicious lives. Unlike poor Valynda, we earned our damnation with both fists, brawling every step of the way to our deaths. As did the rest of the men on this ship. Hell-bound from crib to grave we all were.”
“But each of us committed at least one decent act that brought us to the attention of a…” Sancha screwed her face up as she reached for more rum. “How would you describe the beast?” she asked Belle.
“The devil is the beast,” Belle said blankly. “And the beast is the devil.”
Cameron cocked her head at the casual way Belle spoke, trying to make sense of it all. “Captain Bane or the other?”
Belle let out a low, evil laugh. “The other.” She reached for Sancha’s rum to drink it. “This one gives our fair dark captain a run for his money when it comes to his evil aura and badassery.”
“Thorn be this beastie’s name, though.” Valynda picked up the tale. “As Sancha noted, they say he’s the son of Satan himself. For true. As in Lucifer’s very spawn. And it’s a story I believe. He has the air of it. And the power to pull souls from hell itself—which would make sense if he is the son of Old Scratch. ’Tis how some of us have come to be here. The Deadman mark is what allows us to stay on this side of things and not be sucked back to whatever dark realm he pulled us from. It’s a binding spell that holds us on this side of the barrier.”
Sancha lifted her cup. “And to keep other creatures from returning us to whatever dimension we came out of until either Thorn wills it or we earn back our freedom.”
“Aye, and he has the power to remove the Deadman’s mark at will should we do something wrong and fall from his favor.” Belle took a swig from the bottle. “It’s the bargain Thorn made with the lot of us. We serve his needs. Police his demons back to their respective cages. And should we survive our trials and battle, we’ll earn our salvation and be returned to the land of the living as full mortal beings.”
Cameron suppressed the chill that ran down her spine at the very thought of what they described. “If you fail?”
A shadow darkened Sancha’s gaze. “We’re cast back to the demons that were torturing us when he saved us.”
“That hardly seems fair.”
Belle scoffed at Cameron’s puerility. “Fair’s got nothing to do with our sorry lot. Never did. Never will.”
Sancha nodded. “Truth be to that.” They clanked mugs.
Cameron paused to consider everything they’d told her. Which made her wonder one particular thing … “So how many demons does it take to redeem yourselves, anyway?”
“Depends on the severity of the deed what got us damned and our remorse for it. Each has his or her own path to follow.” Sancha pulled back her sleeve to show her emblem to Cameron. “The mark lightens as we get closer to earning our freedom. When it’s gone completely, so are we.”
“How do you mean?”
Sancha reached for her drink. “We’re set free and given a chance to screw up anew.”
“Even Valynda?”
Valynda nodded. “That’s what Thorn promised me. A brand-new body as a woman, once more. I pray he’s not lying. I would love to be human again.” She closed her eyes and smiled. “To have a real human body!”
“And Janice?” Cameron asked. “Did you earn your freedom already?” Unlike the others, she didn’t bear the Deadman’s mark on her wrist.
Janice shook her head as she gathered together her cards. “I be a little different from them, me lovey.” She pulled her shirt up to show a double bow mark on her hip. “I was not damned, per se. Me mistress be a Greek goddess, and me soul be held by her for all eternity, under an entirely different set of rules and conditions.”
What the blue devil? Cameron gaped at the last thing she’d expected to hear. Even among these preposterous tales. While her father, who had been enamored of the Classics, had taught her and Paden much about ancient Greeks and Romans and their beliefs, she’d never believed any of it to be real. “Come again?”
“I gave up me soul for vengeance over a wrong what was done to me and mine. Technically, I shouldn’t be here with the Deadmen, as it’s not really allowed for a Dark-Huntress to mingle with them.”
“Which tells you how dangerous our mission is that Acheron would allow her to live and work among our crew,” Valynda whispered. “Even the Dark-Hunters have a vested interest in our success.”
“The Dark-Hunters?”
“Be the term for what I am, Miss Jack. Acheron be me boss man.” Janice covered her mark. “Deadmen pursue demons who’ve escaped their prisons or who be preying on humanity and return them to their place of origin. Dark-Hunters are a band of warriors what hunt demons known as Daimons.”
“There’s a difference, then?”
“Oh, aye to that. Our demons be born of an ancient race, cursed by the Greek god Apollo.”
“Cursed why?”
“’Tis said their queen was once a beloved of Apollo’s and that she lost his favor, after her miscarriage of Apollo’s child, to a beautiful Greek princess who bore him a son. So jealous was she that the queen ordered her soldiers out to slaughter Apollo’s mistress and son, in the most brutal of ways. She wanted them ripped apart as if an animal had done it.”
Cameron cringed at the horror. No wonder the god had cursed them. She’d have wanted revenge herself had someone dared take the life of her child. But only on the ones who’d done it. She certainly wouldn’t have gone after other innocents over it.
As her mother had so often said, two wrongs never made a right. Especially in a tragedy of this magnitude.
Janice placed her cards aside. “To thwart his curse, some of them Apollites done learned to steal souls so that they could feed from them to elongate their own lives. But the problem is, when they do that, they destroy the soul forever. Our goal is to kill those Daimons and free the stolen souls so that they can restore themselves and go on to their eternal rest. If we fail, those souls vanish forever.”
Cameron crossed herself at what Janice described. “Was it Apollo who made the Dark-Hunters, too?”
Belle shook her head. “It was Apollo’s sister, Artemis, who used her own blood to create the first Dark-Hunter to hunt the Daimons and kill them. That original Dark-Hunter, Acheron, is now their leader, and he’s the one what trains them whenever Artemis makes a new Hunter.”
“That’s why Janny has fangs and we don’t … different Hunters, different abilities.” Sancha winked at Janice.
Cameron let out a nervous laugh, hoping that was a jest. Surely the woman didn’t really have fangs.
Did she?
“W-w-what?”
“’Tis true.” Janice opened her mouth to show off her unique dental features.