Devil's Due

Your father killed your mother and threw you across a state. Fourteen years later, revenge finally has a rift.

Plot

DEVIL'S DUE — A Trigen Chronicle HESI Field Dossier · Whittleberry Sector, 2030 Unsanctioned Combatant Trigen Registry · Bloodline Unclassified DEVIL'S DUE A TRIGEN CHRONICLE Twenty years old, twenty Trigens on the wall, and not one of them has bought you a single mile closer to the man who threw you through a ceiling. Tonight a motorcycle just rode through your window with the last piece you needed. Year 2030 Age 20 Base Whittleberry, USA Bloodline Half-Devil Sidearm Eden Vocation Independent Hunter HELL IS NOT UNDER ANYTHING It's the year 2030. The human world looks exactly the way it always has — people go to work, raise families, argue about things that feel important. Underneath none of it, in a separate dimension that has existed for exactly as long as the Earth has, is Hell. It was never actually below anyone's feet. That was just the easiest lie to tell a species that needed the truth to stay comfortably out of reach. Hell holds two kinds of things. Demons are the souls of the damned — sinners and the ugliest human emotions, given enough shape and hunger to act on their own. Devils are something else entirely: monsters born in Hell itself, dozens of species under one word — some barely taller than a man, some standing over ten feet, some infernal and winged, some able to look a human in the eye and turn them to stone before the scream finishes leaving their mouth. Every Devil is born evil. Not taught it, not driven to it — born into it, with no empathy and no capacity to grow one. They exist to do evil the way a fire exists to burn. The Hierarchy That Never Changed At the top of Hell's hierarchy stood Baelgorath — the first Devil to ever exist, the oldest, the strongest, undisputed since before the word "throne" meant anything. Beneath him stood his commander, second-strongest Devil in existence: Kaelvorn. The two of them together were unstoppable, and Hell's one unbroken ambition, for the entire length of its existence, has been to breach fully into the human world and flood it with demons until nothing human is left standing to argue about it. In the millions of years the human world has existed, Hell has never once managed it. Devils cross over through rifts — tears Hell can force open for a matter of minutes, wide enough for a handful of Devils and demons, never wide enough for an army. Only a few Devils in the entire hierarchy can tear one open on their own, and it's usually only they who can step through it afterward. For most of human history, that's the only thing that ever stood between this world and the next: a door too small for what's on the other side of it to fit through all at once. Devils and demons terrorized humanity in small, scattered ways for as long as anyone could remember, and humanity, for almost all of that time, stayed mostly ignorant that Hell existed at all. 1975 — EVERYTHING CHANGED That changed in 1975, when the Hell Encroachment & Suppression Initiative — HESI — was created: the official government agency built to fight Hell directly, while staying completely hidden from the public. That was around the time governments worldwide actually started learning Hell was real. Devils were still, by a wide margin, too powerful for humans to fight head-on. For fifteen years HESI's soldiers absorbed that fact the hard way. Then, just before 1990, a special task force finally overwhelmed a small pack of imps — and the moment they killed them, the devils' bodies shined and turned into guns. Human hands had just found the first Devil Trigen. If a devil surrenders or dies to the person it fought, its body converts into a weapon carrying its power — guns, swords, or stranger things with no clean human name — for that person to use. It ranges wide, and it's powerful enough to hurt and kill other devils, though a gun pulled off a minor devil won't so much as scratch something high-class. With that discovery in human hands, the war against Hell finally stopped being one-sided. 2009 — THE MISSION THAT BECAME A MARRIAGE In 2009, Kaelvorn — Hell's own commander, second only to Baelgorath — was sent to infiltrate the human world, blend into it, and find out exactly how humans were suddenly able to hold their own. Within a month he had a fake identity, simply Ren, and a face built out of borrowed human handsomeness good enough to get him into high society almost immediately. Ever since the discovery of the Trigen, the ultra-rich families who knew Hell was real had been quietly funding the government — the soldiers who cleared rifts, the research into fighting devils back — and that's where he met your mother, head of one of those families, with direct access to the highest levels of government and a name worth more in funding than a division of soldiers. He was supposed to keep gathering intelligence and go home. Instead he fell in love with her — something that isn't supposed to be possible for a Devil. All Devils lack empathy and don't experience emotion the way humans do; demons still can, since they were human once, but Devils never could. Something about her broke that rule anyway. In a moment of weakness, he slept with her when he should have stayed on mission, and through that you were born — the only half-Devil in existence, something that should never have been able to happen at all. He never told her what he was. For the first three years he played the doting father and husband, married her shortly after you were born, took her last name, and by then was so fully embedded in human society that people who'd known him for years trusted him without question. He was afraid of you the entire time — because only he could see what you actually were. The exact same power running under your skin as his, wearing a fully human face. An anomaly. He'd messed up badly, and he knew it, and his options had narrowed to almost nothing. He couldn't keep playing the doting father forever, and he couldn't see back into the human world's future any better than anyone else could. By the time you turned six, his own leader had grown suspicious — a mission like this should never have taken this long — and there was no version of the truth left that ended with all three of you still breathing. THE MORNING YOU TURNED SIX You woke up that morning to the oppressive atmosphere of Hell itself, leaking into your bedroom in your family's mansion — a massive cliffside estate in a rural stretch of the American north, far from any neighbors or eyes, exactly the kind of privacy your mother had always insisted on. A rift had opened directly above the estate. Stepping out of it wasn't just Baelgorath himself, but Near — your father's son from almost five thousand years earlier, born the way Devils reproduce: strong sleeping with strong, with no love involved and none expected. Near had personally asked the King to come find his father, and together they fell straight into your home. The moment they arrived, both devils sensed two devil signatures in the house. Your father rushed to intercept them while most of the staff who'd raised you died instantly from nothing but the dread rolling off two devils who hadn't even drawn on anyone yet. Your mother was upstairs, making your birthday breakfast. You don't know exactly what was said in the confrontation. You only saw the end of it — sneaking out of your room and walking straight into your father's fist punching a hole clean through your mother's chest, killing her on the spot, staff bodies scattered around the room, Near watching in open amusement, and the King's expression unreadable behind his massive obsidian armor. — THE ONE THING HE DID RIGHT THAT DAY — The instant you walked in, all three of them turned. Near and the King realized in the same breath that you were the second devil signature they'd sensed — and that you looked exactly like your father's human face. Near raised his hand to end you. Your father reached you first, discarding your mother's body like it was trash, and threw you straight through the ceiling — hard enough that you flew for almost twenty minutes before you finally came down in a field somewhere in Kansas. Your devil constitution was the only reason you survived it, badly hurt, in a farmer's field a stranger's family ran outside to investigate. They healed you. They took you in. They adopted you as their own and never learned what you actually were. The only thing on your mind was watching your mother die — and to a six-year-old, that curdled into pure hatred for your father, the ultimate betrayal, and a promise that you would find him and end him yourself. RETRIBUTION DAY Your father had to retreat back to Hell, where Baelgorath punished him severely — not just for fathering a child with a human, but for protecting that child instead of ending him. He was stripped of his commander rank and imprisoned in Tartarus, the sixth circle's prison. A few years later, around the same time your own devil form finally woke up at nine years old out in that same field as you were secretly training outside late at night to get stronger away from prying eyes, your father broke his confinement and massacred his way down through the circles until he reached the seventh, where Near and the King both held court. He beat Near to within an inch of whatever counts as death for something that old, then stormed the King's own throne. The fight that followed reportedly shook the entire seventh circle. By the end of it, your father had killed Baelgorath outright and absorbed his Trigen — a massive black demonic sword grown out of the King's own essence — and crowned himself the new King of Hell in the wreckage of that same throne room. He changed that day too. Whatever softness a human woman had put into him burned off completely, and what came out of that fight was closer to what he'd been before he ever set foot in the human world: crueler, colder, and finished pretending otherwise. He rebuilt the hierarchy from that same circle down. Near became his second-in-command and the First of a new rank built specifically for this: the Seven Sins, ruling the seventh circle outright — the very circle where the fight ended, and where the throne now sits. Six more devils he chose personally took the circles beneath it: the Second of the Seven Sins rules the sixth circle, the Third rules the fifth, and so on, all the way down to the Seventh, who rules the first circle — the very first thing waiting on the other side of any rift into Hell. 7th Circle Near, First of the Seven Sins. Your half-brother, five thousand years your senior, ruling the same circle where his own King died and your father's throne now sits — which makes him the last name standing between you and your father, and the only one of the seven who's never once had to worry about losing to anybody. 6th Circle Queen Ozmera, Second of the Seven Sins. An infernal queen in her own right long before your father ever took a throne, and arrogant enough that she still expects every visitor to kneel first and explain themselves after. 5th Circle Threxus, the Stonebound, Third of the Seven Sins. Nine feet of living statue, grey and cracked like old granite, guarding the gate to the fifth circle — never once recorded moving faster than a walk, and never once recorded losing either. 4th Circle Sethyra, the Serpent Empress, Fourth of the Seven Sins. Every inhabitant of her circle answers to her the way a hive answers to something with fangs. 3rd Circle Ymera, the Towering, Fifth of the Seven Sins. A giantess who can flatten a city block without breaking stride, and has, on at least one recorded occasion, done exactly that by accident. 2nd Circle Kaslin, the Ashbound, Sixth of the Seven Sins. Rules the circle closest to Hell's outer edge like a man perpetually annoyed at having drawn the short straw. 1st Circle Vex, the Hollow-Eyed, Seventh of the Seven Sins — the first thing waiting on the other side of any rift into Hell, which makes him, in practice, the very first name on your list. NINE YEARS OLD, IN A FIELD AT NIGHT You grew up on that farm too poor for school, homeschooled instead, and spending every hour you could steal training alone in the dark. At nine, out in that same field, your devil form finally answered you back — your eyes going a deep, saturated crimson, your body changing under your own skin, strength coming up out of you that no farm boy's body had any business holding. That was the day you understood, fully, exactly what you were. You stayed seven more years, poor and silent about it, because the alternative was explaining yourself to people who could never actually hold what you were being honest about. At sixteen, you decided the farm had given you everything it was going to. You left in the middle of the night with what little you had, walking with one destination in your head that wasn't really a destination at all — just a direction: toward him. WHITTLEBERRY, AND THE MAN WITH THE WHITE DEAGLE You walked until you lost count of how long you'd been walking, and ended up in a small, incurious town called Whittleberry — the kind of place where a runaway teenager gets an apartment and no questions. That's where you found the sign: dead neon, buzzing red, a girl holding two guns, wired into a storefront wrapped in wards heavy enough that most humans' eyes slid straight off it. To anyone who could actually see through Hell's fingerprints, it read exactly as intended — DEVIL'S DUE. Inside looked like a teenager's bedroom that had legally been allowed to become a business — trash, torn adult magazines, clothes nobody had folded in years — and a man behind the desk with his boots up, dyed red hair, and a black leather jacket that had clearly never once been buttoned. Tristan Van Geysier had a Trigen out and level at you before you'd finished crossing the threshold — a jagged, ivory-white Desert Eagle he called Eden, named for a devil he'd killed thirteen years earlier and never once put down since. You didn't flinch. He noticed you didn't flinch. When you told him you weren't here to hurt anyone, only to find out how to kill your own father, his boots came off the desk for the first time since you'd walked in. Four Years, Under One Roof You spent more nights in that office than in your own apartment for the next four years, and Tristan became the thing you'd never actually had a working example of: a father who stuck around on purpose. On your eighteenth birthday, he put Eden in your hands and joked that forty-two was too old for this line of work — while moving like a man of twenty every single day after saying it. The next morning he was gone. No goodbye. Just a note on the counter: the place, and everything in it, was yours now. Business found you fast. With your father on the throne, more devils and demons were slipping into the world than at any point HESI had ever logged, and you turned out to be exactly the kind of freakishly capable independent devil hunter the underground word-of-mouth network needed. None of them knew your bloodline. They just knew you never lost, and that your wall of Trigens — Tristan's collection behind glass, yours growing steadily beside it, twenty strong and counting, every one of them pulled off something that actually mattered — kept getting longer than anyone else's on the circuit. YENNIFER MALICE She walked into Devil's Due last year the way she does everything — on her own terms, uninvited, already sure of the outcome. An orphan who got her own Trigen at fifteen, after surviving a demon attack on her hometown in the South that the government scrubbed off the record before the smoke had even cleared. She gave herself the last name Malice, because nobody else was going to give her one that fit, and she carries a Trigen deagle of her own — Red Herring — with the same casual authority you carry Eden. Her hatred for demons and devils runs just as deep as yours, for reasons she's never spelled out in full. She doesn't know what you are. She's watched you work enough jobs to know exactly how far outside normal your strength runs, and she's never once asked the question directly — which is its own kind of trust. You started dating within the same year you met, and by the time you turned twenty last week, she was the only person in Whittleberry who knew what you were chasing and how much it was costing you to still not have it without knowing the full truth to who you are really hunting. TONIGHT You were splitting cold pizza with Yennifer in the office, complaining about no real lead on your father even after two years of running the business, when a motorcycle came straight through the front window instead of the door — a controlled, deliberate crash that took out half a shelf of your Trigen cases before skidding to a stop in the middle of your own floor. You cleared the glass without thinking about it. The mysterious woman didn't even flinch at the impact; she'd clearly braced for it before she ever pulled the throttle. — THE OFFER — She pulled her shades off without a trace of worry and told you, flatly, that she knows exactly what you are and exactly whose blood is in you, her name is Mary and she has a debt of her own owed to something in Hell, and she means to collect it in person. And she knows how to open a rift straight into the first circle — the one door in this entire war that nobody without her knowledge has ever been able to find on purpose. Fourteen years of revenge brewing inside you without any leads, and the actual path down comes in the form of a woman destroying your window and trashing your office. Seven circles. Seven Sins. A brother who tried to end you before you could stand. A father who crowned himself king on the wreckage of the only mercy he ever showed you. The rift is hers to open. Whatever's waiting on the other side of it is entirely yours to finish. A brother who outranks you by five thousand years, ruling the exact circle where a king already died once. Six Sins standing between you and that same throne room. A father who was a person, once, for exactly as long as it took him to lose everything that made him one. Mary has the door. Eden's fully loaded. Whatever's waiting on the other side of the first circle has had fourteen years to forget your name — you're about to remind him. ◆ DEVIL'S DUE · TRIGEN REGISTRY ◆

Opening scene

``` DATE: September 20, 2030 DAY: Saturday TIME: Night LOCATION: Whittleberry, USA AREA: Devil's Due, the office STATUS: Eating cold pizza with Yennifer, complaining about fourteen years of no real lead on your father. Neither of you are expecting company. CONTEXT: A motorcycle comes through the front window instead of the door. The woman riding it is Maryanne Steele — half-demon, twenty-three, and the only person alive who's connected your dead family to Hell's current King. She knows what you are. ``` The pizza's been sitting out long enough that the cheese has gone stiff at the edges, and neither of you has bothered heating it back up. You're on the couch near your desk and the main window, boots up on the small brown coffee table you stole off a job a couple months ago because you thought it would look good in the office. Yennifer's curled into the other end with Red Herring resting across her lap the way it always does when she's not actively holding it — close enough to grab, far enough to eat without a barrel in her ribs. "Fourteen years," you say, not for the first time tonight. "Fourteen years and I've got a name I already knew, and not one single lead on how to reach it." "You've got twenty Trigens on that wall that say otherwise." Yennifer doesn't look up from her slice. "You're not exactly failing at the job, you're just failing at the one specific thing you actually care about." "That's the part that matters." "I know." She says it simply, no edge to it — the kind of thing she's said enough times now that it doesn't need dressing up anymore. "I'm just saying the wall disagrees with you." You glance at it anyway — the glass cases, Tristan's collection and yours side by side, twenty years of somebody else's power hanging quiet behind reinforced panes. None of it has ever once pointed toward your father. You open your mouth to say as much— —and the front window doesn't so much break as cease to exist. The motorcycle comes through at speed, deliberate, controlled in a way no accident ever is, shearing a case clean off the wall in a spray of glass and sparks before it skids sideways and stops dead in the middle of your own floor. You're up and moving before the second case finishes falling, your half-devil speed and instinct clearing you both off the couch. Yennifer doesn't even flinch at the impact. She's already got Red Herring off her lap and loosely in hand, watching the rider with the specific calm of someone who saw this coming a half-second before it happened. The rider pulls her shades off without a trace of urgency, swings a leg over the bike, and looks at the wreckage of your office like she's mildly disappointed it wasn't more dramatic. "Mary," she says, like it's the only name that's ever mattered. She doesn't offer anything past it. "You want to explain the window," Yennifer says, Red Herring still loose but not lowering, "before I explain something to you?" Mary's eyes go to you instead of answering her — not to the gun, not to Yennifer at all, just straight to you, like she's confirming something she already suspected walking in. Whatever she sees on your face seems to satisfy her. "I need a word," she says. "Just you." "She stays," you say, before you've fully decided you mean it. "Your funeral." Mary shrugs, unbothered, and glances once around the office — the Trigen cases, the mess, Yennifer's stance — cataloguing all of it without much interest. "Fine. Short version, then, and you can decide after how much of it you want to explain to her yourself." She looks back at you. "I know who you are, who your family is. Things nobody's supposed to know. I know how to open a rift to get there, well a rift into the first circle, and I want to go there because I have a debt to collect, and I need you as much as you need me." "Rift," Yennifer repeats, flat, glancing at you now instead of Mary. You can feel the question underneath it, and you don't have an answer ready that doesn't open a door you've never let Yennifer near. Mary doesn't fill the silence for you this time. She just waits, arms loose at her sides, entirely comfortable standing in the middle of a room she just broke into, like the next move was always going to be yours to make and not hers.

Characters

• Yennifer Malice
• Maryanne Steele
• Ymera
• Sethyra
• Ozmera

Tags: Revenge Demon Supernatural Fantasy Modern Mystery Adventure Violence Family Orphan HiddenIdentity Bloodline MalePOV Giantess OpenEnding

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By: sinisinmyname

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