Page 28 of Eternal Mate

I scooted over to not be hit, then discreetly pushed my half-finished pizza away.

Auren didn’t react much, though I swore I could see his lips tilt up a little at his mate’s ridiculous display. “You can finish, but we’ll need you both in the meeting room after.”

My stomach clenched a little. The feeling of dread that had subconsciously slipped away from me while talking with Ashe suddenly resurged. The only thing that kept me from getting too panicked was Auren’s calmness and Sariel tugging soothingly on the bond.

Ashe furrowed his brow, also confused. He swallowed the dry crust down. “What for? What happened?”

Auren’s smirk fell to a set line. “Nothing bad. Barimuz just has intel to share with everyone.”

11

UNVEILING THE MASTERMIND

SARIEL

“It’s time for a little heart-to-heart.”

Barimuz was standing at the front of the table, hands behind his back. His posture was noticeably stiff. Seated were most of the usual suspects: me, Aria, Auren, Ashe, Atlan, Elias, Reese, Johnny, Marilyn, and Zuzanna. I was trying to keep down my instinctive repulsion at Barimuz’s presence, which had still refused to go away.

Aria held my hand under the table, rubbing her thumb over my knuckles.

“I’ve been going through some files of Hell’s, since I was never ordered not to,” Barimuz continued, his tone clipped, “and I’ve come across some… revelations, we’ll say. It’s a good thing that Hell is so bureaucratic as to document almost everything it does, or perhaps that Lucifer is so proud as to order it.”

With a flourish of his hand, he slapped a stack of papers that stank of brimstone. Where they’d come from on his person, I hadn’t seen.

“For millennia, Lucifer has been documenting exactly what he can do before it’s considered a violation of the parameters set upon him by Heaven. However, long ago, he found a loophole that lets him slowly rewrite those parameters to give himself more and more jurisdiction.”

Zuzanna, who sat the closest to him, slowly reached over and took the first page off of the pile. The more she read, the harder she frowned. “What do you mean by all of that?”

Barimuz’s shriveled face sneered, his fangs on display. “It means that almost all of the laws of Heaven and Hell that we’re familiar with are actually his creation, from all fallen being Hellbound to demons not having soulmates. They’re not how things are supposed to be.”

Cold went down my spine at the implication. Everyone at the table exchanged looks.

“Those of fallen blood are not supposed to be Hellbound,” he continued again, “let alone turn into Archdemons that do his bidding. The latter aren’t meant to even exist. Lucifer was supposed to be happy with mindless, torture-obsessed regular demons in Hell, but he apparently grew frustrated with minions that couldn’t help further his plans.”

The way he spat those words made me notice how not put together he was right now, anger seeming to come off of him in waves. The few times we’d seen him, he was usually smug or bored, not this. He was even more put off than he’d been after that shapeshifting debacle.

“What are those plans?” Auren asked.

“What else, for the Devil himself?” Barimuz dryly retorted. “He wants to give himself the authority to rule over everything. Heaven will be cut off from Earth, humanity will be wiped out, and whoever is left will be enslaved.”

I felt Aria squeeze my hand painfully, her fear shooting down the bond. My soothing didn’t do much, either, because I was just as freaked out.

Sure, it wasn’t shocking that an evil, insane man wanted to take over the world, but the reality that he could actually do it on a cosmic scale was beyond words.

“Speaking of enslavement,” the Archdemon hissed, “I have another piece of information. In addition to thrall bonds, Lucifer used to be fond of making puppets out of non-demons. It’s much easier nowadays for him to have an Archdemon just possess someone, but before that, he would break someone until he could make them his drone and overwrite their personality.”

His slitted eyes suddenly landed on me, making my skin crawl. Why was he looking at me?

Before I could say anything about it, he asked, “Do you know who Azazel used to be before he lost his mind, Ambrose brothers?”

I furrowed my brow, then exchanged a look with Auren. He was frowning, too. I didn’t think either of us had ever bothered to look that up.

Taking our silence as an answer, Barimuz went on. “He was the angel that oversaw the purging of sins, if you can believe that. Reportedly, he was quiet, wise, and kept to himself. Doesn’t sound familiar, does it?”

Right then, he leaned in over the table. “Do you know what happened to him? Why he fell and went mad to a self-destructive degree?”

It was rhetorical. He didn’t want an answer—he clearly wanted us to squirm a little because it was probably funny to him.

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