FORBIDDEN: THE SOULKEEPERS

Chapter Three

                                                                   Chapter 3

                                                                       Dante

Hell smelled.

   If nobody ever told you evil had an odor, Dante Dannoso could. He had been in Hell for seven centuries and knew firsthand.

   Imagine sinners that reeked like roadkill mixed with an ample dose of demon blood smoked to perfection. That was Hell. And it smelled.

   Dante learned to ignore it, to distance himself from his surroundings because he didn’t really belong there. Okay, maybe he did now, but not in the beginning. Who knew dying for love sent you straight to Hell?

   It was complicated.

   Anyway, the stench was pretty faint in the upper catacombs where he lived and even lighter in the antechamber where he was standing now. Waiting.

   There was a lot of waiting in Hell. You waited to be punished, which came far too soon for most losers and involved an unusual number of fiery objects. You waited to get jumped by gang reapers who were easily bored and easily amused by inflicting their own brand of pain. If you were a nobody, some schmuck who had pissed away his soul for job or money or talent, you waited to get yours. And it was coming. Every reaper, soul seeker, or demon would pounce on you, repeatedly. For grins. And it hurt. Repeatedly.

   But if you were one of the Chosen, a demon with reaper capabilities, you usually didn’t have to wait for pain. They were called Demon Knights or Knights of the Unforgiven, post-humans who were cursed with a special demon living inside them. Demons like Persuasion, Affliction, and Impatience.

   They might sound mild but they were from Hell; mild didn’t exist.

   Demon Knights constantly endured some level of pain as they worked to control their demonic urges. The greater the urge, the greater the pain; thus, the essence of their curse. In return, they received assignments that sent them to the surface to torment humans. The kicker? They reaped their own victims, meaning they didn’t have to wait for official reapers to close the deal. A Demon Knight could snatch a tormented soul so fast that it would be halfway to Hell before a guardian received the call for help.

   Hell’s Army of One.

   It was a pretty sweet setup, unless you ran with Dante. He and his friends were Demon Knights, and they had issues. They kept losing souls. Well, Dante would lose his temper, and then they would lose souls to Heaven or limbo. A major faux pas down below. Because of this, Dante and his pack had been grounded, literally, for nearly four hundred years. They hadn’t been given a single soul assignment—hadn’t seen a death contract in ages. All that could change today.

   “Trust me,” Dante reassured his friends. “They will vote in our favor.”

   Two hours ago he had sent a petition to The Order of Reapers. They controlled everything: who competed in the Demonic Games, who was sent to wither away in Hell’s most subterranean level called the Nether Region, and who was allowed to resurface with a death contract. Dante wanted to be reinstated so he asked for a specific death contract.

   He wanted the soul of Pastor St. James. Well, technically, he wanted the soul of the pastor’s daughter, Sophia.

   Dante hadn’t wasted four hundred years sitting around laying bets on the Demonic Games. He had been tracking his lost lover’s soul and found it in Sophia.