Page 26 of Hell Gate

“You’re crazy. That wasn’t me.” I cross my arms. “I don’t have powers. It could’ve been the demons that attacked us.”

Matthias barks out a sharp laugh from the passenger seat. “They couldn’t take out a transformer without touching it.”

Alder shakes his head. “The warrior’s guild is powerful. Yes, those demons were high ranked, but no one in the guild is capable of producing that surge of energy without more demons to pool their powers together.”

“No way,” I insist hoarsely.

My breathing turns shallow and strained as flashes of memories assault me. The haunting pieces of my past I’ve run from and ignored.

Fires I’ve never been able to explain.

Flickering lights when I got yelled at. My palms prickling with sharp pains when my emotions were too much to cage inside me.

Even the time the whole street went dark, the street lights bursting on my way home after a teacher kept me late. The touchy feely old bastard thought that because I was a group girl no one would believe me. Except, when he went to grope me, I grabbed his wrist and burned the hair right off his arm. He took me to the principal and had me expelled.

“I believe this is why you’ve triggered these strange instincts in us.” Valerian says instincts like it’s a curse. He works his chiseled jaw. “Why you don’t smell like a human should. Instead it’s more like a scent escaping through the cracks, like something is masking what you really are.”

Not human. I feel human. How could I not be?

With a thick gulp, I tuck my hands between my thighs, as if hiding the worst of my scarred flesh makes it disappear. “It’s not like I hit puberty and sprouted horns I never knew about. My body is normal.”

“Your body is gorgeous,” Matthias chimes in. “One hundred out of ten would smash.”

Alder strokes his chin, studying me intently. “Still, what we felt… It was far more powerful. Something on the king’s level almost.”

I blanche. “The king—as in like, Lucifer? The Devil?”

“Smooth motherfucker himself. I’ve seen it firsthand. About a century ago, at an orgy at the palace.” Matthias bites his lip, his chuckle depraved. “I swear he was commending my form. Anyway, his power feels like that, like it could choke you and you’d thank him for it.”

I smother the angry pinch of jealousy in my stomach and skip right over the tossed outcenturycomment. “I don’t have powers.”

“Whatever you say, pretty girl.” Matthias winks over his shoulder, reaching back to squeeze my knee.

“We’ll discuss it later when we get somewhere safe,” Valerian mutters.

The sharp, bitter smell of smoke chokes the car. It’s coming from one of them. Their scents seem to shift with their emotions.

Plucking at the seatbelt, I slide my lips together. More questions burst free after a short silence. “What are the gates? Why do they exist if you’re not supposed to show yourselves to humans? You look human enough, until you go all Wolverine hands and Human Torch with the fists of fire.”

Valerian’s expression shutters and his grip tightens on the wheel. There’s a beat of tense silence before Matthias breaks it.

“They weren’t always a secret. Humans used to know about them.” He ignores the severe scowl Valerian shoots at him, acting like he’s setting the stage for an epic tale. “Not as urban legends, but as altars.”

“Altars?” My stomach clenches.

“For sacrifice.” Alder’s no-nonsense confirmation doesn’t make me feel any better. “The humans sacrificed an agreed upon number of souls willingly to feed the demons and keep the king of the underworld from razing the mortal territories to the ground when we all existed as one realm.”

“Oh god,” I whisper.

Valerian scoffs and catches my eye in the mirror. “God,” he mocks. “Humans have told themselves such twisted lies. What you understand of Hell and the underworld is mostly wrong. Your folklore is born out of an ancient war that split the realm between the demonic fae beings in the underworld and the humans.”

My fingers tighten on the seatbelt and my voice shakes. “I’m not a religious person, but I know the Bible doesn’t talk about anything like that. I don’t think any other religion does either.”

What he’s saying is nothing like the books I read on demon lore.

“Exactly,” he sneers. “The humans are left to have their own ideas. There is only a semblance of truth when in reality, our kind has existed far longer than yours, descended from the primordial gods of the heavens and the underworld. Humans wouldn’t be able to fathom the truth now.”

I wait, disbelief ricocheting around my head, but he doesn’t elaborate.“Okay, so why do you guard the gates if you’re just going to kill the people who find one?”

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