Hades Read Free Page B

time came when, or if, they were born again. How he kept them was entirely up to him. He could leave them in peace, he could torture them, he could do whatever he wanted. Failure? That was ridiculous. There was nothing to fail at .
    Really, this place was boring as shit most of the time.
    Leaving the asshole behind, he threaded his way past the kind of horrors one would expect to find in a place where the evilest of evils lived, but the bodies, blood, and wrecked buildings didn’t even draw his eye. He’d seen it all in his thousands of years down here, and nothing could faze him.
    Not even the hellhound crouched in the shadows of the gnarled thorn tree gave him pause. The beasts could cross the barrier between Sheoul-gra and Sheoul, and for the most part, Hades let them. He kind of had to, since their king, Cerberus, had taken it upon himself to be the self-appointed guardian of the underworld––specifically, Sheoul-gra. For some reason, hellhounds hated the dead and were one of the few species that could see them outside of Sheoul-gra. Inside Sheoul-gra, they got their rocks off by ripping people apart. As long as they limited their activities to the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Rings, where the worst of the demons lived, he didn’t give a crap what the fleabag hounds did.
    Ahead, from inside the ruins of an ancient temple, came a chorus of chanting voices. Ich tun esay. Ich tun esay. Ich tun esay alet!
    He frowned, recognizing the language as Sheoulic, but the dialect was unfamiliar, leaving some of the words open to interpretation. Somehow, Hades doubted his interpretation was correct and that the chanters were talking about opening a dime store.
    He tracked the sound, and as he approached the reddish glow seeping through a doorway in the building ahead, the hair on the back of his neck stood up. What the hell? He hadn’t been creeped out or afraid of anything in centuries. Many centuries.
    Ich tun esay. Ich tun esay. Ich tun esay alet...blodflesh !
    What. The. Fuck.
    Something screamed, a soul-deep, tortured sound that made Hades’s flesh crawl. Something was very, very wrong.
    Kicking himself into high gear, Hades sprinted into the fire-lit, cavernous room...and then he skidded to a halt, his boots slipping in pools of blood on the stone floor. A hundred demons from dozens of species were gathered around a giant iron pot hanging over a fire. Inside the pot, a Neethul demon’s screams died as his body bubbled in some sort of acidic liquid.
    “ Stop! ” Hades didn’t give a shit about the demon. What he did give a shit about was the ritual. In Sheoul-gra, all rituals were forbidden and came with a penalty of having one’s soul disintegrated, so they didn’t happen often. Oh, Hades had come across one or two loners performing religious rituals now and then, but this kind of massive gathering and ceremony? This was a first.
    And, by Azagoth’s balls, it would be the last.
    The mass of chanting demons turned as a unit, their creepy smiles and empty eyes filling him with a sickening sense of doom. Alarm shot through him, and in an instant, he summoned his power and prepared to blast every one of these freaks into the Rot, the prison meant for the worst of the worst, where suffering was more than legend, and where the only release came when Azagoth destroyed your soul.
    With a word, he released his power. At the same moment, one of the demons overturned the pot of acid. The liquid, mixed with the goo of the dissolved Neethul, splashed on the floor in a whoosh of steam. Suddenly, as if Hades’s power had hit an invisible wall, it bounced back at him, wrapping him in a cocoon of blackness.
    As he was transported by his own spell to the prison all demons feared, he heard the chant again. Ich tun esay alet!
    Oh...shit. This time, he understood.
    The demons weren’t trying to open a dime store. Somehow they’d acquired a forbidden object or person of power and were attempting to open Sheoul-gra’s very walls, to allow