Lucifer Reborn by Dante King (ebook reader play store .txt) 📕

so-called ‘magic’, what they’re really doing is communing with the spirit world. They might touch a creature like that one,” here she gestured at the transforming demon, “and it would need to take many forms in order to convince her of its honesty.”

“All while ensnaring them in your traps,” I said, thinking of the mind-fuck the fake Christina had tried to lay on me. “No offense, but this is definitely not my thing, Xora. I’m more of a direct guy.”

“I had figured,” Xora said with a smile. “Should you remain with Mareth for a long while, she can assist you in that area.”

I looked over the now-blushing succubus, who’d been fidgeting with her schoolgirl uniform while Xora spoke. “So that’s your thing, then, Mareth?”

“Something like that,” Mareth trilled, clearly embarrassed. “I’d be happy to show you a few illusion tricks later, if you’d like? I can make myself look like just about anybody…”

About a dozen different erotic possibilities filled my head at the words. “I’d love that. First, though, maybe we should get somewhere where I don’t feel like I’m in a goddamn funhouse?”

Xora led us through the hall of mirrors, pausing here and there to reorient herself. toward the end of the hallway the room stretched like one of those optical illusions, and what had appeared to be a tiny door halfway up the wall became a full-sized one down on the floor.

“Gluttony, Wrath, Envy,” I told Christina as we reached the door, counting the words on my fingers. “I’m starting to sense a pattern here.”

“I was wondering when you’d figure it out,” Christina giggled, flashing her demonic smile. “What do you think the next one will be? Lust?”

“Kinda hope they’ll save that one for last,” I said with a smirk. “Maybe Sloth, though. I could use a break…”

Chapter 15

As we passed into the next hall, the carnival attraction air of Envy’s hall of mirrors gave way to the sedate gray walls of a bank. We walked across marble floors, patterned in overlapping scales of green and silver. The green was the same shade as money, the silver the gleaming surface of a coin. Everything in here gave an appearance of age and security, the stability of a great monument or building to weather the years and remain standing tall. This wasn’t your local bank stuck in the corner of a strip mall or suburb—this was more like Fort Knox.

Christina’s heels clicked across the floor as she followed Xora through the lobby. Across the way I could see the entrance to a massive vault, a grate made of heavy iron bars half-retracted into the ceiling and ready to snap shut at the slightest security threat. Imps and other demons came in and out of it, their arms laden with sacks of coins, jewels, and heavy gold bars.

“So this has got to be Greed,” I said, matching my step between Christina and Mareth. It felt good to have them on either side of me—we felt like more of a team that way, like they were my entourage and I was some kind of Infernal Academy VIP. I felt like that more and more all the time. The fight with the demons who had wanted Maddie had already faded into the back of my consciousness. Nothing I’d seen since then raised the hairs on the back of my neck, made me feel like taking this place over would be too much of a challenge.

I had a fighter in Christina and a potential illusionist in Mareth. What else would I need to rise to the top of the ranks?

“Very clever,” Xora said, her words dripping with good-natured sarcasm. She gestured just past the vault, where a small glass window stood out in the marble wall. “Was it the dragon that tipped you off?”

I hadn’t seen anything like that. “Bullshit,” I said, craning my neck to see. “There’s no dragon! Dragons aren’t demons.”

“Of course they are,” Xora said with a laugh. “Someone’s not familiar with the Book of Revelation, I see.”

“You will be,” Mareth said, blowing a lock of dark hair out of her eyes. It flapped over her horns, giving her a cute, rumpled appearance before she smoothed it down. “Course prerequisites. You have to be able to give chapter and verse before they’ll let you handle advanced grimoires…”

I discarded that worry for the moment. The dragon was more interesting. “Let me see…”

The window looked out onto a vast, cylindrical chamber. There was no other way to put it—it looked like Scrooge McDuck’s money pit, with the thick carpet of gold coins to match. Diamonds, rubies, and other precious jewels studded the hoard like piercings on an alt-model, gleaming and glittering with an eerie light. I gasped at the sight. There was enough money in there to buy most of Earth’s nations outright—if not permanently tank their economy, at least.

The pile bulged in the center, rising as high as a hill, and sitting on the top was a red-scaled dragon. Xora had been right, this was no fairy-tale beast. Malice glittered in its dark, ancient eyes, its body sinuous like a giant snake rather than the more dinosaur-like creatures I’d grown up seeing in fantasy movies and TV shows.

The dragon’s gaze met mine, a puff of smoke escaping its nostrils. Don’t even think about it, that puff seemed to be saying. I could sympathize. With so much wealth on display, every new student to see this horde must have been green with envy.

Ah. So that was why the two were set up this way. Envy did lead to greed, after all.

“I’m almost frightened to ask what you all do with all this money,” I said, glancing at Xora and Mareth over my shoulder. Christina stood next to me, tapping a heel against the floor as she waited for her turn to see. “It’s enough