Grave Mistakes (Hellgate Guardians #1)(44)

I take in the sight of all three of them, and then I frown at Crux. Tanned skin, muscles, long blond hair and bright green eyes. He still looks like the ultimate hot surfer dude. “You...didn’t change,” I remark. “In fact, you look about as demon as I do.”

The other guys chuckle, and Crux narrows his eyes at them. “Oh, fuck off!”

“Crux is sensitive about how Diluted he looks,” Iceman says with a smirk.

Crux shoots him a look and a hand gesture that I’ve never seen, but seems definitively rude. Ignoring the heckling that ensues, I take a moment to look around, but it’s hard to see much of anything. It looks like we’re still in the same mausoleum as before, except it’s about a hundred times bigger. “Where are we?”

“We’re in Hell’s Embrace. You passed through,” Iceman declares excitedly, like I just accomplished something incredible. “Told you that you were a demon,” he adds eagerly, but my insides don’t match the elation I see in his blue eyes.

Holy fuck, I really am a demon.

Don’t puke, Delta.





11





I take a step back and try to swallow the acid I can suddenly taste crawling up the back of my throat. I know I agreed to this, but right now, as horror drops down on me like a weighted blanket, I realize that a large part of me expected them to be wrong.

I thought Hell would be like, Nice try, human peasant. Away with you, and that would be that. But as I look around at the gray stone and columns surrounding us, I can’t deny what just happened. This is definitely not a prank, because I can tell that I’m somewhere else. There’s something in the air here, some otherworldliness that I can’t quite explain.

I’m really not a human. I’m a fucking demon.

“See? You can be our fifth!” Crux exclaims, a massive smile on his face.

I cringe.

Iceman reads the panic clear on my face and offers me a reassuring grin. “This is good news. It means we can finally stabilize the Gate and maybe even close it,” he explains, like any of that matters to me.

Jerif nods. “Yeah, don’t worry. You belong down here, otherwise you would have disintegrated already,” he announces casually, and I can’t tell if he’s trying to push me over the edge or if he’s that bad at being nice.

I round on him. “What did you say?” I demand, closing the distance between us with furious strides.

If he weren’t so fucking gargantuan, I’d be giving him a very intimidating chest bump right now. But the fucker is massive, so it looks more like I’m trying to motorboat his pecs. That’s probably why I hear someone snort behind me.

Jerif looks pissed and confused at the same time. “I said don’t worry.”

“No, after that.”

His fire-kissed brow furrows. “You belong here?”

I do a finger circle in the air. “Keep going.”

“Um...the disintegration part?”

“Ding, ding, ding! What do we have for our winner, folks?” I announce in my best Price is Right announcer voice. The mausoleum supports my outrage by making my voice echo all around us.

“You’re saying I could’ve disintegrated when you brought me here, and no one thought that fine print should’ve been pointed out to me ahead of time?” My voice grows a little shriller with each syllable, and I have to keep from wincing at the sound. Maybe one of my parents banged a harpy or a banshee—are those demons?

Anguish hammers through me as I struggle not to drown in the overwhelming emotions. How can I actually be a demon? Did my mom cheat on my dad? That thought makes me feel sick. I know kids think their parents hang the moon, but I just can’t picture Tanya Gates looking at anyone the way she looked at my dad.

An ache starts in my chest.

“We, uh, didn’t want to worry you,” Crux declares, as if the statement should solve any issues I might have.

“The air is acidic down here. If you weren’t Hell-touched, you couldn’t breathe it without…” Jerif trails off as I cock a brow.

“Disintegrating,” I finish for him.

“Yes.”

My eye twitches slightly. Great. That word is probably going to be a lifelong trigger for me now.

I want to rage, and cry, and hit something, but I ball my fists and take deep breaths in an effort to get a hold of myself. These assholes don’t seem to be taking my life very seriously. There’s a very blasé attitude about things like disintegrating and suddenly being responsible for closing a Hellgate.

It’s all I can do not to claw at my throat. I’m breathing fucking acidic air? I force myself to look down at my perfectly normal looking arms and legs and rub them to reassure myself that they’re solid, but it doesn’t help.

My breaths quickly turn into gasps as I lose my fight with the dread coursing through me. I can’t tell if it’s me fracturing or everything else around me.

How the fuck is this happening? How could my parents not have had some sort of contingency in place to cover this in the event that they weren’t around to tell me? There should’ve been a we just thought you should know, you’re a demon plan firmly in place! I mean, when were they going to fucking tell me? I was nineteen when they died, they had plenty of time to drop this bomb.

I’m so pissed and hurt that I wish I could scream at them and demand they explain it all. But they’re not here, and that fact makes all of this even worse. Both of their images flicker back and forth in my mind as I try to figure out which of them is to blame for this. I quickly realize though that it doesn’t matter, they both fucked me over, and that hurts worst of all, because my parents are my fucking heroes. Or they were.