I mind. Paul’s father is the bank manager. I deal with him for my account and investments. And John’s mother works at the library. She knows who I am.”
“Does she now?”
I groaned. Ryder had been a good friend for most of my life, but sometimes he liked to annoy me. “You know what I mean. They think they know me.”
I had been relocated to this fucking town about two years ago, and I didn’t think any of the twenty-three hundred residents really knew much about me. But I knew all about them. I knew all of their names, ages, occupations, affiliations. If they hadn’t been born here, I knew why they had come to this sleepy town. I also knew their medical and criminal history. Some really fucked up people lived here.
And I was the worst of them all.
To the townsfolk, I was a twenty-one-year-old rich orphan with a penchant for solitude. In reality, their quiet neighbor had been alive for more than five hundred years—if I could count the three hundred and some years I spent in hell.
Time didn't exist in hell. No day, no light. Only pain. Suffering. Misery.
All because of a failed mission I didn’t remember.
“I know, I know,” Ryder said.
I let out a sigh. “All right, you’re here for your fucking report, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, but—”
“There’s nothing new to report,” I snapped. “Nothing has changed. I haven’t seen anything, felt anything, found out anything. This shitty little town is boring and not even on a map or GPS. Not even lesser demons come here. To be honest, being here feels like another punishment from the gods.”
“You know it’s not like that. If they wanted you to suffer, they would have let you rot in hell.”
I winced. We both knew warriors didn’t rot, which meant I could have spent eternity suffering in hell if the gods wanted me to. “But pulling me out of the underworld nineteen years ago and abandoning me in this place without as much as an instruction of what I should be doing is much better.”
“At least you’re not being tortur—” Ryder’s words died when I shot him a glare. “Besides, they did give you instructions. Fix what went wrong and don’t fail this time.”
The problem was: What had gone wrong? How had I failed? What mission was it? The not-so-merciful gods erased all my memories related to that failed mission when they pulled me out of hell. I didn’t remember a single moment, a single action. I barely knew when it had been and where.
Not that it helped knowing when and where. It wasn’t as if a warrior’s mission history was available in a book or on a computer.
But the warrior standing in front of me knew. He knew all about that fucking mission, but he couldn’t tell me. The gods forbade the other warriors from helping me.
“That’s my report,” I said, my tone harsh. “Come back in five years. I’m sure nothing will have changed by then.”
I spun around and marched away.
“Devon, don’t be like that.”
I had every intention of ignoring Ryder, but when a chill brushed against my skin, sending a disturbance through the air, I halted and glanced over my shoulder. “Did you feel that?”
Ryder drew out his sword. “I did.”
The chill spread, bringing heavy, oily tendrils of darkness.
“Demons,” I whispered.
In the blink of an eye, my normal human clothes—dark jeans and polo shirt—were gone, replaced by the warrior’s thick dark leather armor, and my sword strapped to my back.
With cautious steps, Ryder and I stalked back to the main square. The darkness was thick and coming toward us.
Ryder twirled his sword in his hand. “Be ready.”
I unsheathed my sword.
Half a second later, the little fuckers jumped from the shadows, right at us. Dozens of lesser demons in the form of black shadow snakes. Some were as small as my forearm; some were as long six feet.
I swung my sword in a wide arc, hitting most of them in a single blow. The snakes exploded in puffs of dark smoke that dissolved in the night sky. A few more slithered from the shadows, coming at us from the ground. They hissed their forked tongues, as if teasing us.
All I wanted to do was stomp on them and be done with it. Killing them with swords while they slithered along the ground wasn’t the most practical fight. “I hate these things.”
“Me too,” Ryder said, and he drove his sword to the ground, piercing through the head of a snake. “But at