Cipher (Demonica Underworld #8) - Larissa Ione Page 0,38
turned Azagoth’s blood to acid. Everything inside him burned as he rounded on Hawkyn.
“Still think this is a coincidence?” His voice was warped, spoken through clenched teeth. “Find Cipher. Find him now.”
“But Father—”
Azagoth’s inner demon clawed at his control, and he wasn’t in the frame of mind to restrain it. The monster was about to be loosed.
“I offer this one mercy, my son,” he growled. “Find Cipher. Find him and kill him. Because if you don’t, I will.” His sons just stood there. “Go!”
They scrambled out of the office, and Azagoth let his beast loose. He was going to break some rules and people were going to pay for killing his children. Eyes for eyes.
He started with the Croucher’s.
Chapter Fourteen
In the hour it took for Lyre and Cipher to get from her place to his computer, Cipher’s fury had dulled enough that he could temporarily relegate his part in Azagoth’s child’s death to the background.
Revenge, though, was very much in the foreground.
He fired up his laptop with the single-minded focus of a vampire on the trail of a bleeding human.
“Do you think you can do it?” Lyre asked as she locked the door behind them.
“What, write a virus? Sure.”
“The kind of viruses Bael wants?”
Cipher let out a bitter laugh. “No. People have been trying since the internet began.”
“But there are stories about people being possessed or cursed after opening emails or files.”
He nodded, familiar with those. He’d written code for dozens of types of viruses like that, but as a powerless Unfallen he’d lacked the ability to execute them. Now, maybe he could. They’d be perfect to kill individuals like the enemies Bael wanted dead.
“Those are useful for individuals, but they’re limited in scope and expire quickly. Not to mention that the spells can be broken by deleting the emails or closing out the app or whatever. But Bael also wants me to create an enchanted computer virus that can spread from the computer to the human world, and then keep on spreading. It can’t be done.”
At least, he hoped not.
“Then what are you doing? You said you were going to make a plague.”
He’d said that, but really, he was going to cause a plague. Because once Azagoth knew Bael was behind his children’s deaths, Azagoth was going to become an epidemic. All Cipher needed to do was hide a message inside one of the viruses meant for Bael’s enemies. When the virus activated, a subprogram would deliver a warning to Azagoth via the demonweb. Bael would never know.
“Cipher?”
Oh, right. He was supposed to answer her. Probably shouldn’t tell her his real plans. He opened his mouth to spew some bullshit he hoped she’d buy. But before he could say anything, his wings sprouted from his back, wrenching and twisting with so much force that he grunted in pain.
“What is it?” Lyre rushed toward him. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” he gritted out. “They popped out on their own and—”
He broke off as an electric tingle sizzled across the surface of his skin and pinprick points of light filled his vision.
“What the hell..?” Transparent cyan glyphs appeared before his eyes. Random numbers, letters, and symbols took shape in the air, some skimming the floor and hugging the ceiling. Holy shit.
“It’s code,” he whispered.
“Code? Ciph? Are you okay?”
Ciph. She’d called him by his nickname. Felt intimate. Felt...right.
And that was so not what he should be concentrating on right now. No, the programming language floating around was way more significant.
Because weird.
He blinked. Maybe he was hallucinating. What had Lyre said was in the sandwiches? Demon beef and hellrats? Maybe they’d gone bad.
“Hey, Lyre...how old were those sandwiches?”
“I bought them yesterday.” She frowned. “Why?”
Closing his eyes, he shook his head. Maybe he could reset his operating system. But nope, when he opened his eyes again, the atmospheric graffiti was still there.
“Can you see this?” he asked.
Lyre glanced around. “See what?”
“The symbols.” He pointed at a group of them. “The greenish-blue symbols.”
She looked right through them and then turned to him like he’d lost his mind. “I don’t see anything. What’s going on? You’re weirding me out.”
“I don’t know. It’s language of some sort.”
“Language? Like a demon language?”
“Like programming language.” As he watched, character sets and entities rearranged themselves. A Greek omega symbol spun into a tilde operator squiggly mark and caused a cascade of code into lined formation. “Holy shit,” he breathed, as what he was witnessing started to make sense. “It’s a spell. Fuck me, I’m seeing a spell!”
“How can you see