Every ‘jin’ demon, the male demons, had penises. That was unusual. A glance at Vin proved that the male demons didn’t go walking around with their dicks out. They had them stored inside their body. Testicles, too. Not the statues. All the male statues looked ready to fight and fuck, or just fuck, and more than a few of them were sitting in very ‘hop on my dick’ positions.
Some of the lady statues had dicks, too. That was unusual.
Much as tetrad demons were all unusually hot, in that big scary monster kinda way, the giant cavern killed any sexiness. There were bones everywhere, human bones, demon bones, all shapes and sizes, and they were scattered. Thousands of skeletons, maybe more, the remains of their bodies piled into mounds, or left to collect dust — no dust in Hell — by the torture machines.
Torture machines? She gulped and came closer. Yeap, those were torture machines. Platforms made of black metal, tables and chairs and stuff, many covered in the sort of chains Vinicius had once been bound in. Some of them had holes, and judging from the metal sticks with sharp edges lying nearby, the holes provided easy stabbing of sensitive places. Some machines had corner hooks for holding limbs, and chains meant for pulling on them. Draw and quarter. A lot of the tables and chairs still had skeletons on or in them, and their bones carried hundreds of scars.
“The fuck is this place?”
“One of Valzanal’s torture rooms.” Vinicius shrugged and marched through the giant cavern toward the tunnel on the other side. He didn’t give a shit about the room. Bones crunched and snapped under his talons, and the sound echoed in the giant cave.
Vinicius stopped, looked to one of the tetrad statues, a fujara, and marched over to her. Valzanal, no doubt. A deep rumble vibrated through his chest, and he gestured up at the symbols written over the statue’s head. Not the ancient language, just the usual language Mia’s brain read as English, despite how it obviously wasn’t.
‘Valzanal. Let Suffering and Pain Become You.’ It could have been ‘thee’ instead of ‘you’, but either way, the text wasn’t talking about Valzanal, but about what she’d do to you.
Vinicius did not like that. He didn’t move, didn’t breathe, nothing. Everything shut off and went quiet.
“She really pissed you off?”
“She did.” His voice was an earthquake in his throat.
“Her and Zel? Because they ruled Death’s Grip? Because–”
Vinicius’s whole body flexed. Slowly, he aimed his gaze toward her, and Mia froze.
Oh shit.
Would the leash work? Would it work? Oh god, she prayed it’d work if she needed to use it. But the look Vinicius gave her put a doubt in her mind, a big one. Angry. He was angry. Not angry at her, just angry, and it poured out of him even without using a sin aura. He tightened the muscles in his hands without making fists; probably so he didn’t puncture his palms. But that didn’t stop him from digging his talons into the ground, and with how heavy he was, they cut through the rock.
The dozens of huge black spikes coming out of his back, his head, and his elbows and knees, glowed.
“It was mine,” he said, and he aimed his mouth at the statue. “It was mine.”
She opened her mouth, and closed it.
“It… was… mine,” he said again. No temper tantrum. No screaming or yelling. Children threw temper tantrums and screamed and yelled. This was something else. Something deeper. Something worse.
She’d read about this in her psych books, the sort of people who didn’t just get angry and throw things, or hit things, or hit people, but absorbed and embodied their hate and rage until it multiplied inside them. Their brains grabbed onto negative thoughts and spiraled them down, and down, and down, until they went fission bomb, a chain reaction that destroyed anything and everything nearby. For humans, that often meant grabbing a gun and killing a lot of people.
For a demon as strong as Vinicius, someone who probably enjoyed violence and carnage for its own sake, it meant something entirely different.
She took a step back, and another, and another. Slowly, she slipped her fingers around the necklace, and squeezed it until her fingers shook. She didn’t activate it. She didn’t know if it’d work. It’d hurt him, but right now, she didn’t know if that’d be enough to stop him.
His spikes grew brighter. He rumbled in his chest again, and this time, the walls shook.
“It should be mine. It should have been mine.”
He held out his four arms, looked down at his claws, and leaned forward, just like he’d done that time he’d incinerated the entire dungeon in the spire. The amber glow on his spikes pulsed, and a subtle humming sound filled the air. His fingers flexed tighter, and he glared at them as fire leaked out from between his crocodile teeth.
He was going to explode, and she was in the blast radius.
“She’s dead!” someone yelled. They sounded an awful lot like Mia. “She’s dead, and Zel’s dead! I killed her! You helped me kill her!”
His growling, deep enough she felt it more than heard it, continued on, but at least it didn’t get any louder.
“Val and Zel are both dead, and you can come rule Death’s Grip or whatever when I’m done saving the world. You heard her, that woman in the aera armor, and you believed her. And we’ve been stuck together for a bit now. Do you think I’d lie?” She could lie better than her brother, but a virgin nun could lie circles around him. Mia wasn’t much better.