1. Cato

“Okay, kings of the shit heap…” The creak of our cell door had to be intentional—nothing sounded that screechy and obnoxious in this day and age unless the fuckers left it unoiled on purpose. “On your feet.”

My eyes peeled open at the rustling around me, and I tipped my head back against the sandstone wall with a sigh, watching Aedan and Geralt shuffle to their feet. Naked and cuffed, same as me, they stretched their muscular limbs, their taut torsos and toned backs, twisting and arching and groaning—but they waited.

Neither made a move for the open door.

As alpha of the alphas, I dictated when we moved and where.

Centuries under our belts together, we might have been blood brothers, sons of the apocalypse and destiny, but the group hierarchy remained intact no matter what miserable realm we found ourselves in.

My gaze cut to the ten humans in black uniforms waiting for us on the other side of the salted iron bars. The shitstain with lifts in his boots—to put him on par with his six-foot-plus cohorts, of course, the sin of pride alive and well here—loitered in the doorway brandishing a cattle prod, demonic and Enochian sigils alike carved into the metal. Too young for his station, too weak to wield the unlimited power gifted by this prison, he tapped his prod at the metal frame with a sneer.

“You wanna fuck a magpie or not?”

My eyes narrowed, and I ground my teeth. We all thought Hell was degrading, but there was quite literally nothing worse than being controlled and corralled by fucking humans.

Ten days ago, the largest volcano on Ether Island erupted. Not catastrophic, mind you, but the rupture on this Pacific Ocean jewel cracked the hellmouth inside, opening an unsanctioned door between Hell and Earth, and from it spilled the dark legion. A trickle of the thousands upon thousands camped out at hellmouths across the pit clawed through magma and fire, eager to raid Earth, taint it, desperate to satisfy our Lord Lucifer’s distaste for humanity.

There were rules, of course, for demons who wished to walk among humans. Lucifer had signed treaties and all that nonsense.

But to the legion—

Human contracts, human laws, meant so little.

Drunk on imported fae wine and high on bloodlust, the boys and I joined the chaos division. We beat demons and other hellions aside to burst through—to taste the human world after a few decades in the pit.

Unfortunately, humanity had gotten its shit together since our last gruesome visit.

Somesupernatural species had revealed themselves to the world at large—fucking vampires, spoiling it for everyone—and allies were made.

In short, they were ready for us.

Not expecting us, sure, but Ether Island had been a hub for supernatural elite and human crime lords for centuries. Prisons occupied the southern tip of the forested island, while debauchery of the highest order reigned up north. A paradise on Earth for all manner of sinful pleasures.

And they didn’t need some marauding demonic legion spoiling that for them, apparently. Demons craved dominion. Hellions just wanted to feed on blood and screams and fear.

As sons of leviathans and aristocratic demonesses, we three fit somewhere in the murky middle. There hadn’t exactly been a plan. Drunk, high, bored, we saw an opening and took it, stabbing and shoving and fighting our way out.

We barely breached the shoreline with its crystalline blue waters before we were hit with human infantry and air strikes, spells to peel flesh from your bones and mages thirsty to prove themselves. Wolves the size of bears and dragons with eternity in their scales. Salt, holy water, and demon traps in the sand.

Fucking waste of time, this raid.

As our human escort glared on, I fiddled with the golden cuffs snapped around my wrists. Those captured alive had been collared, the insignia and magic in the metal binding our demonic sides—akin to declawing a lion, I suppose—and brought to Ether Island’s high-security male supernatural prison. Housed in the old holding cells underground, we waited, on their timeline now, as humans hauled dribs and drabs of the legion back to the volcano and forced them through the hellmouth.

Clawing through the lava had been… something.

Doing it sober would be such a headache.

Another thunderous clang of that silly little cattle prod to the bars of our cell, followed by a purposefully deepened: “Move!”

Tiny man with a tiny cock—had it not been for these cuffs, I’d gut him first.

Instead, I eased off the ground and stretched my stiff limbs, ass asleep, then took a few moments to crack my back and jaw while my blood brothers held their ground. Our human captors recognized us as a package deal from the start, like many in the legion. Sometimes the only way to survive the raw wilderness of Hell was to ally up—and blood bonds were a very permanent means to that end. Fortunately for us, we’d never fallen out.

Escaping a blood bond—nasty business.

While they realized that we needed to be housed together or no one would get any sleep, all eyes initially fell on Geralt to call the shots. I glanced his way as I strolled through the boxy prison cell with a hole in the corner and not much else. With long hair icy white as Lilith’s heart, skin black as a suffocating smoke, Geralt was built like a mountain, largest of the lot with his leviathan side’s lethal claws locked in place. Many failed to realize, both in the legion and beyond, that it wasn’t brawn that made a king.

No, to rule—that power ran so much deeper, and my brothers respected it, sensed it, from the moment we reconnected in Pandemonium’s gladiatorial fighting rings eons ago, no longer the wild brats of pampered demonesses, but warriorsof doom stuck counting down the days until the real apocalypse began.

Geralt towered over just about everyone at seven feet three inches, but his overt brutishness belied the heart inside, his softness our best-kept secret. Meanwhile, Aedan was the leanest among us, gifted with subtle strength and a sharp tongue. Ivory flesh and eyes like hellfire, his inky black waves were starting to look greasy. Lithe and lethal, he looked mostly human courtesy of the golden cuffs, but his leviathan horns, gnarled and twisted like demented buck antlers, gave him an extra two feet in a place where they all thought size mattered.

Shame, to look so like the guards glowering from the other side of the bars. Cuffed as we were, our demonic sides had been stifled for days, cowed by the runes and magic in the gold. Weakened, instruments of war blunted, some pureblood demons managed to keep their black eyes whenever gen pop was allowed to mingle and stretch our legs, but for the most part, we resembled men.

At a demon’s most basic form, after all, they were but men’s tormented souls made eternal in the pit. Twisted and ruined, molded into terrors, they could shift and change form on a whim.

No more.

Not until the volcano dissolved these fucking cuffs, anyway.

Some preferred the predatory advantage of beauty. Humans fell willingly into our arms when we were lovely, but where was the fun in that?

For the hybrids, prison guards kept a closer eye. While our demon side surrendered to the sigils, the leviathan in our blood fought the magic. Geralt’s claws, Aedan’s antlers—all paired with the grace and intrigue of sinfully handsome fallen angels, men who looked like gods. Flesh grey as old ash, straddling the middle ground between Geralt’s brawn and Aedan’s sleekness, even I kept a piece of my apocalypse self, a shadowy horned crown hovering around my skull that intake had tried to rip away, only to realize it was another part of me, a bone on the outside they couldn’t take.

The crown itself caused occasional uproar during gen pop outings, but it was nothing we couldn’t handle. Beating the absolute fuck out of each other had always been a way to pass the time, no matter how these guards despised the dark legion’s antics. Demons warred for rank, desperate for a crown, for a smattering of Lucifer’s attention and praise.

Dull, really.

Life had become so boring down there, and now, up here, it was more of the same.

I strode right up to the fellow in our cage door, his nose barely reaching my chin, and cocked my head, waiting until the height difference forced him to look up.

“You pull some shit, monster,” he sneered, blanching when I bared my sharp canines, “and I’ll shove this poker so far up your ass that we’ll watch the sparks fly at the back of your fucking throat while you scream.”

“Eloquent,” I mused. Aedan and Geralt fell into their usual positions, flanked on either side, Geralt expressionless, sick of incarceration’s tedium, and Aedan snorting—not because he found it funny, but because he loved to make the humans flinch and twitch for their weapons with the slightest sound.

I, meanwhile, kept my eyes on this little rat’s gaze, coppery brown, the amber flecks suggesting fae, maybe even elvish DNA, somewhere in his lineage. Pity their beauty and brains didn’t extend down the family tree. “You know, your soul might just claw out of the pits. Maybe.” I eased closer, forcing him to inch back so that nose didn’t kiss my chin. “And maybe, just maybe, they’ll let you torture once you’ve suffered enough—”

Lightning seared up my chest, the cattle prod jabbed between my pecks. A mercy—and a surprise—that he didn’t go straight for the appendage dangling down my thighs, but maybe he had a gentlemen’s code. While the sizzle stung, it paled compared to all I’d suffered before.

I held my ground.

Endured it.

Then grinned when he backed off, leaving a scorched black burn on my chest, and gestured for us to step out already. I glanced left to Aedan, right to Geralt, then sniffed and gave this lot a dismissive up-and-down sweep. Fine.

They swarmed us in the corridor, a pair of armed guards assigned to each, then a man between us as we marched by cells of hellions and demons. Some alone, the poor fuckers, others in pairs and groups. Some sleeping. Others howling. If only these bloody holding cells had been soundproofed however many centuries ago they were forged; what I wouldn’t do for just one night of silence, a quiet we could only dream about in Hell, the dark legion’s cacophony of unrelenting noise dragged topside.

“You boys ready to get some of that testosterone out?” one of Aedan’s guards asked. The figure to my left snorted while the one to my right rolled his eyes.

“Seriously, fucking animals,” he muttered. “Gotta breed ’em like stallions to get some peace in here.”

My smirk sharpened; if they thought allowing the biggest, baddest, meanest fighters in gen pop to fuck some poor magpie a few times a week would bring them peace, they were in for a rude awakening.

The prison—nay, the isle as a whole—operated under some deluded theory that if they took the most violent prisoners and allowed them conjugal visits, they might stop fighting. Little did they realize that swinging at other demons, chomping off fingers that would grow back in a day or two, slicing throats that would maybe heal before the fucker bled out—all fun and games. A way to pass the time. Sport. Alphas clashed, sure. Lords and minor princes from the upper echelon of Hell’s complex social strata had something to prove—win or lose your title—but it was nothing compared to the savagery we faced below.

Here, in the two hours of mingling outside our cells the warden allowed the legion, fights erupted constantly. The powers that be learned fast we might ride under the same dark banner, but we weren’t brothers in arms. We still had needs. We spilled blood to entertain ourselves. We cracked skulls for a laugh. But most of all, here, waiting to be shunted back to Hell, we were all just fucking bored.

And no one ever wanted a demon or hellion bored.

Kings of the Shit Heap: an affectionate title gifted upon me and the boys because we didn’t lose. Not one bout. Seldom did we go looking for fights, our leviathan heritage a completely unfair advantage against even purebred demons, but we sure as shit finished them. When we were through, there were always fewer inmates to escort back to the hellmouth. These fuckers ought to be kissing our feet in gratitude.

They led us up and out of the underground holding area, same as they did during rec time, and while our guards shot the shit, their drawling conversation instant white noise, I hunted for windows. Squaring my shoulders, I peered through the barred panes any chance I got, starved for the untapped coastline beyond the prison walls, the miles of greenery down to white sand and choppy waters. An endless black horizon greeted me tonight, potential in the thick salty air. Eager as we were to end it all, before the apocalypse bells tolled, Earth had a great many possibilities to explore.

We’d never admit it aloud, but Hell had gotten a bit… stale.

My brothers and I, we yearned for more these days. Eternity was just such a long time to suffer stale.

“You should see the bitch they pulled for these three.” Having passed the last of the windows in this sandstone corridor, I stared straight ahead, mapping the routes, the landmarks, the security measures.

“I hear she’s a volunteer,” one of Geralt’s guards at the back added, the declaration followed by waves of low, cruel laughter.

“Man, you know some of these magpies gotta be fucking crazy—like those dumb cunts who come here to marry their prison pen pal.”

My rightmost guard scoffed. “Bitch, he killed his last wife… What makes you so special?”

“For real, though. The delusions these females have.”

I gritted my teeth when the pair jostled me to a halt in front of an enormous metal door loaded with demonic containment sigils, tinted one-way windows on either side. As the fucker with the cattle prod and Napoleon complex sauntered forward to punch in the key code on the digital lock, I swept our newest cell, which, from this vantage point, looked like nothing more than a round empty stone room, perhaps at the base of a sentry tower.

Hardly a fitting place for a creature treated with the same reverence as the old Vestal Virgins.

Unfortunately, from what I’d gleaned over the centuries, information confirmed on this recent trip, Magpies rarely had the respect of ancient Rome’s virginal cult.

Proven now by the fact that they shoved me, Aedan, and Geralt into this pathetic, dusty round room with windows only they could look through, laughing and chatting once more about the failings of the female species. Bitch. Slut. Cunt. Whore. Hardly what a member of the sacred Magpie Order deserved, but here we were.

As soon as the door sealed shut behind us with a symphony of beeps and clicks, the first sign of modern tech this prison had to offer, we launched into inspection mode. I searched for physical weaknesses in the walls, the crevices. Geralt pounded his enormous black-clawed fists against the door, testing its strength. Aedan tapped along the faux stonework that hid the windows, staring, unblinking, so done with operating on the prison’s schedule. All this in silence punctuated only by muffled laughter and muted conversation, the windows also in need of a good soundproofing.

Something about putting caged monsters in a small room for them to fuck their aggression out on a magpie—hilarious, apparently. The only bit of fun these guards had, maybe, their lives just as regimented as that of their prisoners.

Jaw clenched, frustration mounting once again that an easy escape eluded me, I crouched and swept my fingers along the divot where the floor met the wall. Solid—and quite grating, actually. Sandstone swapped for coarse grey stone, the texture was likely to skin knees if you hit it just right. I sat back on my haunches, scowling. Not great for whoever was on the bottom.

My cock twitched at the thought of blood in the air.

How many Magpies had bled on this exact floor before today? How many had screamed and begged and bled before it was our turn?

A scowl darkened my features, Aedan and Geralt going quiet, the pair no doubt sensing the shift in my mood, the way the darkness danced around my horned shadow crown. While most demons had no qualms about raping anyone, either for pleasure or power, punishment and gain, we preferred a female who squealed and mewled and cried because we’d made her come so hard she couldn’t stand on her own for a week.

Anything else was just… dull. Disrespectful of the divine feminine. Expected.

Easy, especially when the prey was so very breakable. So human.

Island legend said magpies were game for anything, ready and eager at the drop of a hat. One look and they’d crash to their knees, mouths open and breasts bared—

Most legends were bullshit, frankly, and all the lore around this Magpie Order smelled especially foul. The organization dated back centuries, present during our past visits to the realm time and time again. Ether Island had a reputation in our world, which meant they had a place in the games we all played.

Women, supernatural and human, trafficked in. Stolen from their childhood homes and raised in the order. Inmates from the local female prison hoping for a reduced sentence. Volunteers, apparently, the thought laughable. All with a single purpose. All anointed and ritualized. All trained to service men.

Here to soothe the foulest beasts of the dark legion with their beauty.

Braced on the stone wall, I pushed back and stood, rolling my shoulders, gnashing my teeth. Ten days in here and I was desperate to fuck something, but not like this. Geralt preferred to woo and spoil. Aedan liked to tease and goad. I craved the hunt, stalking and running my lover down in the dead of night where no one could hear her squeal my name—

Beeps and clicks thundered behind me, and I turned, slow and cautious, as the door unbolted. Aedan and Geralt eased back, falling in line beside me, their arms crossed, the air electrified with our shared displeasure, thickened with skepticism—

Well then.

The door swung open.

And there she was.

Ourmagpie.

My brothers and I—we stiffened, still as panthers in the night, locked on target and waiting to pounce with big murderous claws. I breathed deep, the air suddenly tainted with elderflowers and innocence.

They sent their sacrifices in blindfolded.

Geralt snarled to my right, breaking rank first, stalking away and slamming his clawed fists to the walls, reeling around and snapping his teeth at her. Aedan frowned in the corner of my eye, tracking him, that violent response uncharacteristic of our strongest, steadfast, and usually most even-keeled brother.

Nostrils flared, Geralt pressed himself back to the wall, feet planted, long white mane bunched at his back, claws gritted into the stone—like he had to hold himself back or he’d attack. Teeth bared, cock hard, he stared our magpie down with a low rumble, and then it hit me.

Virgin.

Aedan inhaled sharply to my left, the realization shared.

A volunteer virgin dressed in white, wrapped in strips of cotton fabric that circled from the top of her head to the tip of her nose. Exposed were her ruby-red lips, smeared with ritualistic blood, a thin line dragged from the center of her plump lower lip down to her sharp chin. The fabric snaked around her neck, two strips crisscrossing down and around her breasts, wrapping, wrapping, bandaging her up—

Like a gift for monsters to tear into. The material clung to her curves, bandaged tight around her chest, the dip of her waist, the elegant swell of her hips. It then plunged to the floor in fluttering layers, exposing her legs at random. Milky-white skin like she had never tasted the sun. Bare shoulders and arms, strong, the muscle groups faintly defined all the way down to delicate wrists and regal fingers. Trimmed nails. Hairless—not a strand on her arms, pits, or even the glimpses of leg I devoured like I’d never seen a woman before.

And perhaps I hadn’t.

Never before had such a divine specimen landed in my lap, wrapped and presented so perfectly.

She cradled a ball of red yarn in both hands, a single strand of twine trailing behind her, and I eased back on my heels, snarling at the invisible window, at the hushed voices murmuring beyond the door.

Some Earthbound witches delved into Purgatory, occasionally even Hell, with an enchanted ball of red yarn just like that. If they lost their way home, they’d follow the string.

It seemed cruel to arm magpies with that here—because no matter what hell they found on the other side of that door, they couldn’t leave.

That silly bit of twine would never take her home.

But she didn’t seem to realize that.

No, with her next hesitant step, she unraveled more red cord, this little lamb toddling deeper into the wolf’s den—the monster’s lair. Lust cracked and scattered like a volatile lightning strike, illuminating my marrow and sparking wildfire in my soul. My brothers rumbled and growled, the fire spreading, possession rife in the air.

Need to claim her. Mate her. Mark her.

Now.

The sentiment snapped between us, evident in Aedan and Geralt’s prowling posture, their clenched fists, their eyes zeroed in on her.

She belonged to us, this magpie, and we didn’t even know her name.

Had yet to lose ourselves in her eyes.

Never stroked and fisted her hair—

But it didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered anymore but taking her.

For centuries, we’d had our fill of lovers, both together and apart, but the song had never struck before. Sweet soprano, divine chorus, a lure to the apocalyptic hymns in our hearts.

Leviathans craved strong females. Males had the physicality, the world-ending malice, but females, our mates—prophecies spoke only of them, of these vicious beauties who would tear humanity apart, and in the ashes of this scorched earth, they would birth a new generation of monsters.

The world belonged to them. Males, alphas—we hunted and fought, fucked and destroyed, but the divine feminine… She was the way.

And I—we—wanted this one.

I straightened, hackles up and teeth bared when a guard’s hand reached in behind her—but only to grab the door and drag it shut. Boom. It slammed and locked into place with an imposing sense of finality. Cock hard as the stone around us, firm and desperate to plunge into her, mouth swimming with saliva at the thought of biting her right where her neck and shoulder met, I pounced with a snarl that rattled the walls and splintered the one-way glass…

Then charged clear across the room for the mate we had spent centuries hunting for—and grabbed her before they could rip her away.