THE MEPHISTO COVENANT Read online

  “I don’t know. His face was blurry, and his voice was muffled. He was dressed all in black.”

  It was there, the memory of him that night, waiting to surge to the forefront of her mind. For whatever reason, maybe because she was Anabo, her memory couldn’t be erased like other humans’.

  He had no way of knowing when she’d remember, but until then, he’d stick to the plan of telling her everything in a week. He didn’t know if he could make her fall in love with him if he had a year, but all he had was one week. Unless she remembered sooner. Then all bets were off. Courting Sasha would be difficult, the hardest thing he’d ever done, but it’d be a million times harder if she knew what he wanted from her. “What else did Brett tell you about Eryx?”

  “He wants people to pledge their souls to him, because when he has the majority of humans following him, he can take over Hell. Ordinarily, I’d think Brett’s a lunatic, but after what happened in San Francisco, and now, meeting you … with your eyes …” She tilted her head and studied him, the wheels in her mind turning so fast he could almost see sparks.

  Before she could ask if he had been in that old warehouse, if he had saved her and healed her, he set down his fork and said, “Just for the sake of argument, suppose Eryx isn’t a nut job. The girl who took you to the meeting said people who join the Ravens give up God and pledge to follow Eryx. If he’s not about God, he’d see anything that is about God as a threat, and Anabo is as close to God as a human can be.”

  She looked across the table at him, curiosity all over her beautiful face. “You know the truth, don’t you, Jax?”

  He kicked himself again for taking off his shades before he kissed her. “I don’t know the truth about your cousin, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You know that’s not what I meant. Just tell me, is Eryx who Brett thinks he is? Is any of this real?”

  “What if it is? What would it change? If you find out Eryx really is an immortal who collects souls, if he already has your cousin’s and your aunt’s, what can you do to change it?”

  Her expression was stunned. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, “it is true.”

  “I didn’t say that. I said if it were true, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “I could keep other people from pledging. Mr. Bruno was nagging my other cousin, Chris, to go to the meeting last night.”

  “If you knew for sure, and told people, hoping to keep them from going through with taking the oath, they wouldn’t believe you. They’d think you were the nut job.”

  “Maybe you’re right, and maybe I can’t change anything at all, but if I knew the truth, I’d understand why the Ravens tried to kill me.”

  Sitting back in his chair, he glanced around the busy restaurant, watched waitresses scurry back and forth between the tables and the kitchen, saw a family laughing while they ate spaghetti, noticed a young couple holding hands across the table. Everything was all so normal. This was Sasha’s world, what she understood. It seemed the greatest sin to drag her into his world, to show her what existed on the other side.

  He turned his attention back to her, studied her lovely eyes, her anxious expression, the way she tugged at her bottom lip with her teeth. He wished he had what it took to get up and leave and never see her again, to let her live a normal life.

  But he didn’t have what it took to leave her alone. He couldn’t even stop staring at her. He wanted her, and the first step to having her was raising the curtain, bit by bit, giving her glimpses of the world she’d live in if she became Mephisto.

  With a deep, heavy sigh, he ripped away the first layer of her innocence. “Yes, Sasha, it’s all true.”

  Deep down, she’d known, but she wanted it to be a lie: the Ravens, a cult begun by a Satan worshipper with an ego as big as the universe; the Anabo, only the wayward imaginings of some crazy Italian guy, back in the day. “How do you know, Jax?”

  “I thought you were going to give me a week.”

  “You could tell me how you know without telling me who you are.”

  He tossed a few bills to the table and stood, holding out his hand for hers. “Let’s get on a lift.” They walked out into the cold and snow and put on their skis. There was a line at the lift, so they waited, and as they moved forward, he looked down at her. “What do you like to do?”

  “I love art. I like to go to museums. Sometimes I sketch what I see.”

  “Do you want to be an artist?”

  “I’m not good enough, and not really. I’d like to learn how to restore and clean paintings, maybe work in a museum.”

  “So you plan to go to college?”

  “Yes, but now, with Mom in Russia, I have no idea where I’ll go. Maybe I’ll look at schools in Europe.” She wished she were a better artist. She’d sketch him and maybe capture the perfection of his face. “What do you like to do?”

  “I read a lot of history books, biographies and stuff. I love to play basketball.” He smiled. “And ski.”

  Finally, they were up, and as soon as the chair took off, he leaned close and said, almost in a whisper, “Do you believe in God?”

  “Of course I do. Why would you—”

  “So you believe in Heaven.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then you must believe in Hell, and Lucifer.”

  She nodded.

  “It’s pretty simple, how it works. People are born, and their whole life, they try to do the right thing, to be good, to resist the temptation of evil. They’re angry and jealous and spiteful and vain and all those things, but they try hard not to be. When they die, they’re measured up and they either go to Heaven, or to Hell. Right?”

  “It’s what I was taught, what I believe, but no one can know for sure.”

  “Okay, well, what if the rules changed? What if people knew they were doomed to Hell, that the end of life would be the beginning of eternal misery? Without any chance of Heaven, who’d try? It’d be a free-for-all, and the world would be a dark and horrible place.”

  “That’d never happen. God wouldn’t let it.”

  “He said he’d never again interfere with the world, with mankind’s free will. Lucifer tempts humanity, but he also doesn’t get in the way of free will. It’s up to each person to make his or her choices and accept the consequences. Eryx wants to change all that. He wants to grow powerful enough to take out Lucifer so he can be in charge of Hell. If he ever succeeds, mankind won’t have a prayer.”

  “Brett said he wants to change Hell to be more like Heaven, so people won’t be afraid of dying and going to Hell. He says it will make the world a better place.”

  Jax frowned and shook his head. “It’s a lie they tell people they want to recruit. Eryx isn’t about changing things for the better. He’s worse than Lucifer, who began as an angel but whose pride got him kicked out of Heaven. He still has a slice of light in his soul, has some dim hope of redemption. Eryx has none. He’s without the smallest bit of compassion. God could get rid of him, because nothing and no one is more powerful than God, but he won’t interfere. The world is what it is, and Eryx’s existence is one part of it.”

  “Who is Eryx? Where did he come from?”

  He reached up to pull a strand of hair away from her mouth. “His father is the dark angel whose job is to take souls to Hell. A thousand years ago, Mephistopheles fell for an Anabo named Elektra, which was not cool because they’re like living angels, and he’s a guy who works for Lucifer. To keep God and Lucifer from knowing, Mephistopheles took Elektra to a small island in the north Atlantic, which he hid behind a fine blue mist. In Greek, the word for blue is kyanos, so that’s what he named the island: Kyanos. Elektra had seven sons, and the oldest was Eryx.”

  “Eryx has brothers?”

  Jax nodded, looking at her from behind those mirrored shades. She wished he’d take them off. Even though his eyes were strange, it bugged her not to see his expression.

  “As Eryx grew older, he became obsessed with jumping off the cliffs of Kyanos,
even though he knew it would kill him. Mephistopheles told his sons they were destined for immortality, and when they were grown, instinct would compel them to die.”

  “Why would it be anyone’s instinct to kill themselves?”

  “They had to die to become immortal. Since their Anabo mother was mortal, Eryx was afraid the part of her that was in them would die forever, and in immortality, they would be all darkness, with no light in their souls. He prayed for help, but God and Lucifer didn’t know they existed. He asked his father to come clean with Lucifer, but Mephistopheles told Eryx not to worry, that he would come back just the same. Eryx didn’t believe it.”

  As the lift took them higher up the mountain, it began to snow, and she watched each perfect flake that hit his shades, there for a nanosecond before it melted.

  “He became more certain as he grew older that he and his brothers would become immortal monsters, so the day he turned eighteen, when he couldn’t fight the instinct to die any longer, he killed Elektra. Her death was the only thing that would make God and Lucifer aware of his brothers, and he hoped sacrificing her would save them.”

  “He killed his own mother?”

  “Yes. Then he jumped, and just as he had feared, he came back as an immortal without compassion, with no conscience. His brothers hated him for what he’d done, even after he told them why, but he didn’t care. He left Kyanos and found other people. He was charismatic and discovered people would follow him, would do what he told them, hoping for his favor. They pledged their lives to him, and when he asked for their souls, they willingly said yes.”

  “What happened to his brothers?”

  “Just like Eryx, they were compelled to jump to their deaths, but because God was aware of them, he blessed each of the others before they died, so when they came back, they weren’t like Eryx.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “They were charged by Lucifer to fight Eryx, to keep him from becoming powerful enough to take over as the gatekeeper of Hell. If he did, he wouldn’t care about free will. He’d snatch every soul as it leaves its host.”

  Sasha looked down at the trees, dusted with snow, at boulders and crags and outcroppings where trees couldn’t grow. It was so quiet, noises muffled by the snow, the voices of skiers ahead and behind them muted and distant. All she could hear with any clarity was the constant hum of the lift cable. And Jax’s low, deep voice, telling her things she didn’t want to believe. “You realize this all sounds like BS?”

  “I wish it was.” He looked ahead. “But it’s all true, Sasha. Eryx exists. He tricks humans into pledging their souls to him, and when they die, he takes their spirit and absorbs it into his own, which makes him stronger.”

  “If he’s been doing this for a thousand years, he must have collected millions. How many is enough?”

  “When the scales tip in his favor, when more of humanity belongs to him than to God, he’ll be strong enough to take on Lucifer. But he doesn’t have millions. Nowhere close. He can’t take a soul if something blocks it, so Lucifer carved out a pit, deep underground, then surrounded it with the darkness of Hell. When one of Eryx’s lost souls is thrown into the pit, he dies, but his spirit can’t escape. So yes, Eryx has collected millions of followers in a thousand years, but a lot of those people are decaying inside the Earth, their spirits blocked.”

  This was like a show on the SciFi Channel. Or a horror movie. She thought of zombies and ghouls and ghosts. But she was a logical person, and the physical parameters didn’t make sense. “If the pit is deep underground, how do his followers get in there?”

  “The entrance is hidden on the other side of the world, in a place no one ever goes. Beneath a certain spot is a long chute that leads to the pit. It’s called Hell on Earth. It’s said no one ever lands and lives. The fall kills them.”

  “Who says that? Who takes them there?”

  With his face turned away from her, he looked down at the mountain as they moved above it.

  “Jax?”

  Slowly, almost hesitantly, he raised his head, turned toward her, and carefully slid the shades from his face. “I do.”

  Holy God. She almost couldn’t breathe, she was so stunned. “You’re one of his brothers?”

  Slowly, he nodded.

  Blinking back tears, she sat there in the lift chair and connected the dots. “It was you in that warehouse, wasn’t it? You came to take the Ravens to Hell on Earth, and there I was, half dead. Before you took them, you healed me. That’s why I had no wounds or bruises when I woke up. You stabbed Alex to keep him from taking me to Eryx. He wasn’t a jumper. You took him, didn’t you?”

  He didn’t nod, didn’t answer. Just stared at her with his weird eyes.

  “You work for Lucifer. You’re a dark angel.”

  Still, he didn’t say anything.

  “Did you come to the ski runs today to take Brett?”

  “I came to find you.”

  “Why?”

  “I went back to San Francisco to see you, to make sure you were all right. I found out you moved here.”

  She sucked in a deep breath and looked ahead again. The top was close. They’d be there within five minutes. “No wonder your eyes are different.”

  He said nothing. She had suspected he was different, but hearing it out loud wasn’t the same as wondering. Not only was she insanely attracted to him, she liked him … but knowing he was something from Hell, that he killed people, even if those people were lost and evil, made her skin crawl. Did he go home from a hard day’s work killing people and hang out in Hell?

  She moved a little, pressing closer to the edge of the chair. It wasn’t that she was afraid. She wasn’t. But he’d gone from being a guy she wanted to know a lot better to a stranger she’d like never to see again. “What happened with the Ravens? How did they wind up in San Francisco Bay, instead of Hell on Earth?”

  “The bodies in the bay were doppelgängers. Mephistopheles provides bodies that are exact copies of the people we take to Hell on Earth. If all those people disappeared without a trace, people would panic.”

  “Were your brothers with you that night?”

  He nodded while he pulled his gloves on and readied his poles for the ramp. “We planned that takedown for over a week. You being there wasn’t in the plan. I didn’t know what to do about you. I couldn’t take you with me, but I couldn’t leave you there to bleed to death. I healed you and put you to sleep, and we left.”

  “But not before you erased my memory of you.”

  “I had no choice. We’re not supposed to interact with humans unless it’s necessary to our job, and if we do, we’re supposed to erase their memory of us.”

  “Then why are we here, interacting? You know I’ll remember you.”

  A muscle worked in his jaw, so she knew he was clenching his teeth. Had she made him mad? “It’s not like you’ll tell anybody. No one would believe you.”

  “Why could you erase my memory of you then but not today?”

  “I don’t know. It’s never happened before with anyone else.”

  “Aren’t I the lucky one?”

  His sigh sounded sad. “Just forget it, Sasha. This is hopeless. I see that now.”

  “What’s hopeless?”

  “You and me. I thought … I wanted to … you’re beautiful, incredible, and you’re Anabo. Regular people are afraid of me, but you’re not like ordinary people. Your soul is pure, without original sin.”

  “I’m not without sin. I’m just like everyone else.”

  He shook his head. “There’s nothing about you that’s like others, Sasha. You don’t realize what lies within other people, so you can’t know how different they are.”

  “If I’m Anabo, does that mean my parents—”

  “No, it doesn’t work that way. What Aurora was can’t be quantified like DNA—something that determines if you have blue eyes or blond hair. It’s a spiritual thing, something unique to a person’s soul. The Anabo are rare, but all could be traced ba
ck to Aurora.”

  “How do you know I’m Anabo? Did you see my birthmark?”

  “I didn’t need to. It’s in your face, your eyes. To me, you have a certain glow, almost an aura, around you.”

  She remembered Mercy Jones said her aura was pure and beautiful, with the light of divinity—the most perfect she’d ever seen. Mercy said she was destined for an extraordinary life, one that would make a difference. Sasha had thought she was a wack job. Now, she wasn’t so sure. “Give me an example of how I’m any different from anyone else.”

  He was thoughtful for a minute, then said, “You’re not mad at your mother for not giving Alex’s boss what he wants.

  You’re bummed about it, sure, but not angry. You’re stuck living with strangers—a woman who hates you and a guy with no conscience—making you vulnerable to all kinds of bad consequences. Anyone else would be mad as hell, but all you think about is where your mother is, if she’s safe, if she’s going to be okay.”

  Slumping back in the chair, she stared down at her ski tips. “She said the information could cause problems bad enough to start a war.”

  “And you bought it without question. You trust her completely, because it’s not in you to distrust anyone you love. It never dawned on you that the information is worth a lot of money, that maybe she’d rather sell it than just hand it over.”

  “She’s never been the same since Dad was murdered. If I got mad at her, what purpose would it serve except to make her feel worse?”

  “Thanks for making my point. With you, it’s always about the other guy. You think everyone else is like that, Sasha, but they’re not. Trust me.”

  “There are millions of compassionate people in the world.”

  “Sure there are, but even the kindest people have a dark side, a part of their soul that tempts them toward evil. They have to make a choice to resist it. You don’t, because it’s just not there. It’s why you’re not afraid of me, because I’m no threat to your peace of mind. You have no idea how appealing that is.”

  “So you came to find me because I’m Anabo.”