CHAPTER ONE
Blisteringly hot hellwinds scraped across Ian MacKenzie’s flesh as he hoisted the great stone block into place. His muscles burned as he shoved it into position, and the manacle affixed to his ankle cut into his flesh. Why they made them wear these things, he had no idea. It wasn’t like the prisoners were going to flee.
A desert wasteland stretched out as far as he could see, burning sands surrounding the cathedral they built in hell. Certain death awaited them in the desert, which was saying something for an immortal. It was nearly impossible to destroy the body of one of their kind, but the hellish afterworld called Moloch could do it.
“It’s wrong.” The voice of the overseer boomed from behind him.
Rage burned in Ian’s chest, searing his ribs and lungs like hell’s fire. It was always wrong. The great stone walls of the partially constructed cathedral soared above him. He called it a cathedral, but he had no idea what it truly was. No one ever told the prisoners what they were building. But the labyrinthine structure was never up to the standards of the designers.
“Do it again.”
Ian ground his teeth and picked up the sledgehammer that he used so often it was driving him mad. He swung it at the stone wall, pain singing up his arms when the hammer connected with the stone. Something in his soul tore away as he destroyed the wall over which he’d toiled.
He kept up the motion until the voice of an overseer echoed across the red sands.
“Enough!”
Thank gods. His muscles burned, his skin stung from the hellwinds, and his mind felt near-fractured from the constant repetitive toil of build, destroy, build, destroy. One of the three overseers unlocked the chain at his ankle and Ian followed the other prisoners, a dozen of them in total, to the departure area. It was nothing more than a patch of sand guarded by two of the overseers. He joined the rest of the men in line to be transported back to the prison.
When he reached the front of the line, the third overseer appeared out of the air. Ian didn’t bother to look at him as the cloaked man gripped his upper arm and aetherwalked him back to the Immortal University’s Prison for Magical Deviants in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Ian cursed the aether, that ephemeral substance that connected earth and the afterworlds, as the heavens and hells of all the true religions were called. Select Mytheans—supernatural individuals who lived secretly alongside humans—were able to travel through it. It allowed the overseers to transport him from the hellish prison to the even more hellish afterworld every day for his work shift.
As soon as he was shoved into his small stone cell back at the prison, his skin began to feel tight. The walls closed in on him immediately, as they always did.
Ever since he’d been thrown in here, life had alternated between the painful misery of toiling at the cathedral on Moloch and the claustrophobic hell of his cell. His mind felt like it was about to crack from the strain.
He scrubbed a hand over his face and grimaced at the grit. He felt like little more than an animal as he walked to the shower in the corner. It was no more than a hose over a drain, but it washed away the dirt carried by the hellwind.
He pulled on another pair of the ubiquitous black pants and sweater that he’d been wearing every day for nearly a century and settled onto his bunk to count the stones that made up the walls. And dream about the past.
Ian jerked when the door to his prison cell swung open. That was off-schedule. Nothing was ever off-schedule at the prison.
He surged to his feet and watched the burly prison warden escort a small figure into the cell.
His breath caught in his throat and his spine stiffened.
It was a woman.
Every muscle in his body tightened. He hadn’t seen a woman in nearly a hundred years. And this one was pretty.