Page 3 of Hellbound

Marian didn’t want to bargain with a demon today. What she wanted was to go home to her crummy little North Hollywood apartment and sleep for weeks. But if she didn’t close this next deal, there wouldn’t be a crummy little North Hollywood apartment to return to, which meant Marian was going to have to die again. Maybe not today, tomorrow, or the next day, but soon—and she wasn’t ready. Not even close.

A surprise autumn downpour ensured Marian arrived at the transit center uncomfortably damp. As she disembarked from her final stop, a passing bus sped through a puddle the depth of a small lake, leaving her stinking of wet asphalt. Fortunately, the walk to the Presidium—the Tiernan Group’s Los Angeles headquarters—was a short one, but her jeans chafed the whole way.

Though she could care less what their demon CEO thought of her appearance—or stench—she would have preferred not to be shivering and nursing smarting thighs in the elevator up to his office on the 52nd floor.

She didn’t want to be there at all. But she needed the money more than ever after the call she’d received two nights ago from that son of a bitch, Greg Bjernsen, one of the many men who made her regret owning a phone.

“Elio Ramirez is dead.”

“What?” She rasped into the receiver, her throat like sandpaper after weeks of disuse. “Like … dead, dead?”

“Super fucking dead. What did you do?”

Every word in her ear made her sleep-deprived brain seize. She tripped over the potholes in her memory trying to catch up. She’d been holed up in her apartment for weeks, alternating between weeping and hallucinating, and suddenly she had to think—fast.

What had she done three weeks ago, before she’d hid from the world? She remembered dying, entering Hell, and being devoured by the Remnant—a monster that had spelled the end of so many divers before her. And yet she’d survived. Elio Ramirez brought her back to life—just like he’d done a dozen times before. Her return to Earth was a haze of screams and chlorine, but Elio had definitely been alive when she left his Norwalk compound, a little insane and bleeding, and without the artifact she’d been paid to retrieve beyond the veil. But the blood had been hers—not Elio’s.

“I don’t think I did anything.”

Greg didn’t so much as break for air, much less give her time to process any sorrow before he yammered on.

“I fuckin’ told you not to do the Butcher’s dive without me, you cheap-ass clown car. Now we’re down a spotter—a damn good one, too. Ramirez owed me eight grand, and now I hear no one wants anything to do with you.”

Not entirely true. The demon CEO of the Tiernan Group, Mr. Vale, was very eager to see her. He’d emailed her nonstop for weeks until she finally peeled herself off her mattress to respond to his request for a meeting. Now she wasn’t sure what could even come of it, given he likely wanted her to return to Hell to fetch another artifact, which she couldn’t do without a spotter.

Hell-diving was a grisly business, but spotters weren’t supposed to die. That was Marian’s job.

“I’m willing to overlook this … but here’s the deal,” Greg said, and Marian hadn’t the spoons to fight him when he demanded she take on Elio’s debt and get them both new work. She’d been preoccupied watching an inky shadow scuttle up the side of her fridge like a cockroach while she crammed a stale Pop-Tart in her mouth. When she blinked, the shadow vanished. Her new normal in the wake of her subsumption and expulsion from the Remnant.

She preferred the temporal pests to the other souvenir: the still-healing scar on her wrist itched incessantly underneath the worn cotton bracelet she’d fashioned out of an old cornflower blue T-shirt whenever she thought of dying again. Marian remembered with too-perfect clarity inflicting the mark on herself seconds after Elio saved her. She just had no idea why.

Now she owed Greg eight grand, somehow, on top of everything else that had come due. At least he believed her when she told him she’d survived the Remnant when no one else had. So she donned her finest dollar store trucker hat and set off across town that Friday to meet the demon who could fix this.

An alert chimed as the elevator doors opened on the 52nd floor. The lingering scent of espresso hit her immediately, and her veins screamed for it. Marian couldn’t brew anything decent in her apartment; the instant coffee she bought always tasted faintly of burned plastic. She squelched down the black and ivory marble hallway to the large double doors at the end.

Before those doors stood a wide, unoccupied stone desk. Marian assumed the demon had dismissed his papillon of an assistant for the night. It was well after six o’clock, and the hallway pulsed with a thick silence. She glanced at the slip of white paper taped to the left handle of the doors to Mr. Vale’s office. She walked over, peeled it off the metal, and unfolded it.

‘Meyer,

Assuming you bother to show up, you may enter at your leisure.

—V’

She crumpled up the note with a scowl and shoved it in her pocket, suddenly desperate for a human buffer between her and the demon. Even if that buffer was a bitchy assistant. But as far as she could tell, Marian was alone. She sucked in a deep breath, summoned her brittle courage, and pushed open the large double doors to Mr. Vale’s office.

His unnerving presence bowled over her so hard and fast, Marian couldn’t think through the sensation of free-falling through the earth. A being of smoke and shadow burned a hole in reality behind the mahogany desk across from her. She quickly looked away, grounding herself by inventorying the decor.

Plush black carpet, walls of windows affording a sprawling view of the city, wood and leather furnishings—fitting for the chief executive officer of a wealth management company that catered to the coastal elite. Modern cabinetry and floating shelves lined the walls to Marian’s left, which were sparsely decorated with leather-bound books and curios. Among them, she spotted a few she recognized. Warped links of chain, an assortment of black iron fragments, and a single cube of white stone. A benign display of eclectic trinkets to the uninitiated, but Marian knew exactly what they were and what they’d cost.

She’d plucked them out of Hell herself.

With a slow, measured breath, she forced herself to look at the demon who’d paid her handsomely for them. The moment she focused on that dark whorl, the shadows retracted to reveal a pair of eyes the color of glacial ice. Then came the rest of him—jet hair shaved close on the sides, a tall, lean frame, and a pallid face so achingly beautiful that Marian momentarily forgot how to breathe. All wrapped up in an expertly tailored three-piece suit of slate wool and a charcoal dress shirt.

When the butterflies in her stomach dispersed, she challenged the uncanny attraction to burn away the beguiling fog and reveal the truth.

The lines of his face were too sharp, his gaze hawkish. His aquiline nose and sharp cheekbones made him look perpetually severe. A damn good pantomime of a rather gaunt thirty-something human male. Marian bet he could curdle milk with a single glare.

The double doors clicked shut behind her, and the sound snapped Marian out of her own head. She had no idea how long she’d been staring at the demon in overwhelmed silence. Mr. Vale sat there motionless, staring intently back. Very intently.