Chapter 14: Ashtaroth

I push the heavy reinforced double doors to my throne room with both hands and with force, making each panel slam into the walls. I march inside, my steel-plated boots echoing with each step that pounds against the mosaic leading toward my throne. The depictions of human souls burning in the Pits of Hell flicker in the light cast by the standing black candelabra.

Sariel looks up at my noisy entrance and stops mid-sentence in his conversation with his friend Armaros. His black-feathered wings are out and they twitch as he meets me halfway, then follows me to my seat.

"How'd it go?" he asks.

Though his charming words have melted uncountable numbers of females and males into puddles of lust, the abbreviated manner in which he speaks vexes me even more than usual today.

"It is done," I clip, and sit back, my heavy armor now feeling like it's compressing my lungs.

"Then why're you ticked off?" my son asks, quirking a black eyebrow, confusion clear on his face.

"You know, brother," Armaros says, a depraved smile firmly in place, "he came home smelling of pussy the other day. Mostly human pussy," he finishes, his grin now looking unnaturally large on his narrow face. "Maybe he accidentally decapitated her before he got off."

Sariel uncharacteristically ignores the gruesome and lewd suggestion and turns his face back towards me, his charcoal black eyes wide in surprise.

"One of the soldiers?" he asks and then adds, as if this new information added up with today's events to draw a clear picture of the situation, "I see."

"Leave," I growl at them.

They turn at once. Not even Armaros is idiot enough to test me in this mood.

They're halfway down the aisle when I decide that their impertinence should not go unpunished.

I wave a hand and the mosaic they're walking on dissolves, square by square. A gratifying canon of surprised yelps soothes the inexplicable fire burning inside me as they fall into nothing, landing in the dungeons so conveniently placed under my throne room.

I pinch the bridge of my nose. She will get herself killed, and I have yet to have my fill.