Revenant(27)

Not for a lack of trying, though. He’d made a million attempts to escape the mines and the demons who wielded the whips, but he always got caught.

Only later did he learn that for every infraction he committed, every rule he broke, his mother paid the price.

“You grew up in a cell?” Reaver asked. “Like a prison cell?”

He laughed bitterly. “A prison cell would have been a luxury.” He tossed the cigar to the roof and ground it to dust with his boot. “You know, like food and water was for us.”

He’d always wondered why, sometimes when he was hungry or thirsty, he’d get anxious, as though if he didn’t get food and water right away, he’d go crazy. Now that he had his memory back, the anxiety made sense. He and his mother had starved for years. He remembered her begging for food, not for herself, but for him. And on several occasions, she’d gotten what they needed by making trades with the only thing she had to offer.

Her body.

And not just for sex. Some demons were all about torture and blood.

As a million horrible memories bubbled up, so did the contents of Revenant’s stomach. Rolling to his hands and knees, he retched. How could Heaven have left her to suffer that way? How could they have allowed one of their own to live like that? To be forced to give her body to demons in order to feed her child?

Anger struck hard and fast, scouring away the nausea and wretchedness with welcome, sterilizing flames.

Reaver watched him as he shoved to his feet. “You said you killed her.”

“Glad you aren’t deaf.” Revenant materialized himself a pack of gum.

Reaver ground his teeth so hard Revenant heard the scrape of enamel as he unwrapped a minty stick. “Why?”

“Why am I glad you aren’t deaf?” Rev asked, knowing damned well that wasn’t what Reaver was asking. “Well, it would make communication more difficult —”

Suddenly, Reaver’s hands fisted Rev’s jacket lapels and his angelic face was in his, teeth bared, eyes glowing with Heavenly fury. “Why did you kill our mother?”

“Heaven killed her,” Revenant spat. “When they left her to rot in hell, they signed her death warrant.”

Reaver shook him. Hard. “But it was your hand that did it. Tell me about it.”

“Fuck you.” Rev bared his teeth right back at his brother. “I laid all those memories to rest. No way in hell I’m popping the lids off those coffins.”

“I have the right to know.”

“Do you?” Revenant threw Reaver off of him like a sack of potatoes. His brother tumbled through the air, striking one of the cathedral’s famous stone gargoyles and breaking off one of its wings. “Because from where I’m standing, you don’t have the right to know jack shit about my life. You abandoned me.”

Reaver flashed himself in front of Revenant again. “I abandoned you? I was a newborn infant when I was taken to Heaven. How could I have done anything?”

“Not that,” Rev snapped. “When I came to you at Megiddo. When I told you who I was. Do you remember that?”

“No,” Reaver said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I have no recollection of you telling me I was your brother and that you’d murdered our mother.”

Rev hadn’t used the word murder, but hell, why not. Didn’t matter that she’d begged him to do it and that he’d done it out of mercy. The guilt ate at him like acid.

“You freaked the fuck out,” Rev yelled. “You didn’t wait for an explanation. You got your halo all bent out of shape, and you went on a damned rampage. And because of that, because you left me to go raze some goat-herder villages and shit, we lost our memories for thousands of years. That’s on you, you fucking asshole. You.”

Okay, sure, Rev wasn’t entirely blameless, given that he’d done his own share of demolition, but most of his wrath had been focused on Sheoul, not the human realm.

Shame flickered in Reaver’s sapphire eyes. “I was having a bad day —”

“Oh, right. You’d just found out that you’d sired the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and that your precious Verrine lied to you about it.” Revenant rolled his eyes. “Waa. I grew up in hell, tortured almost every day. I watched our mother suffer unspeakable horrors. Your spoiled ass got lied to.” He jabbed Reaver in the sternum. “Well, fuck you, brother. It’s a damned good thing Heaven took you instead of me, because your pansy ass would never have survived in Sheoul.”

Maybe that was why their mother gave up Reaver. Not because she loved him best, but because she thought he was too weak to survive life in Sheoul.