Page 54 of Anarchy
“Shall we go, my love? I’m more worried about you losing it than the Hellhounds.”
Thank you! Reyson and Lilith could doa lotmore damage than any of us Hellhounds could, and now they were besties. Lilith conjured a door, and we stepped through. There were rows of demons at tables just staring at us. Lilith strolled to a table at the front, so we all followed her. A pinched-faced woman at the front glared down at her.
“I’m sure you understand laws just can’t be passed in a day, Lilith.”
“I created demons, witches, and Hellhounds in a day. It took me five to create Hell. Every day, I created plants and animals so that you could survive here, and after four weeks, Hell was ready for you. Youcan. You just don’t want to. You can certainly pass other laws fast enough. Anyway, you don’t have to start over and write new laws from scratch. You just need to repeal the ones that turned Hellhounds into slaves and took away all their rights. Theyusedto sit among you writing laws. They were your spouses and family. All ofyoumight be too young to remember that, but I’m not.”
“No offense, but you are asking us to free vicious killers,” a man said.
“Bram, how many people have you killed?” Lilith asked me.
“None, until Talvath got kidnapped. I killed the shifter guarding the door to his prison so we could get him out. We were only at Akul’s to arrest him and Dorian, which we did. Akul’s wife showed up with her friends and was trying to hurt Lilith. We fought back in self-defense. It’s not something we enjoy.”
“May, how many people have you killed?”
“None, until the fight at Akul’s house.”
“Yes, and how many times were you raped and beaten while you belonged to Akul?”
“There was no point in keeping track. It happened all the time, to all of us.”
“I would hope all of you had a chance to read Akul’s manifesto and the sheer number of people he was planning on having killed. May’s story isn’t unusual. Neither are the injuries Reyson, and I healed from her. I have Hellhounds at my house from many different demon families. They all have scars and bruises where they’ve been beaten and whipped. You have a very different definition of vicious than mine because the way I see it, anyone who would beat one of my creations, force them to mate with a stranger, then rip their pup away from them for a profit is the very definition of cruel. I didn’t create any of you to lord over the Hellhounds. Honestly, if you look at the statistics in our jails, demons have killed more people than Hellhounds, but you treat prisoners more humanely than them.”
“You point out we are young and don’t remember everything about the past, but you were alive during the civil war that led to those laws. We passed them for good reason.”
“Yes, I was alive during the civil war and can tell you that half the history they taught you is false because the victors wrote it. It wasn’t Hellhounds versus demons, and the demons managed to beat them back. It was over a political issue. It’s not in your DNA to have specific political beliefs.
“There were Hellhoundsanddemons on both sides. When all was said and done, not only those involved in the fighting died but also many innocent civilians. People wanted someone to blame, so a group of politicians placed all the blame on the Hellhounds, even though they didn’t start the war and fought by their side to help end it.
“It horrified me when they were rounded up and subjugated. Their rights were stripped away. I should have stopped it then. The only reason I didn’t was that so many people had died, and I thought my creations were better than that. I thought you would see reason, and you wouldn’t come tothis.That was about the time I stopped being involved in your affairs, but I always intended to right this wrong. I was waiting for the opportunity to present itself that it could be done without another civil war.
“You know the truth. I’ve told you theactual historybehind the civil war and not what the victors taught you. You know how far Akul was willing to go with this. He has blackmail files on everyone here. If your name wasn’t on his hit list, you still weren’t safe. Trust me. If you voiced the opinion to do better by my creation, you would have been blackmailed into silence.
“Just to let you know, I’ve read what Akul has on all of you. Some of you haveno rightto make any assumptions about the morality and temperament of another one of my creations.”
The room got uncomfortably silent, and I could smell anxiety and the start of people sweating everywhere. That was the second time Lilith mentioned she had that. This time, she said she knew the contents. She also never said she deleted it. Damn. Lilith brought receipts. If Akul’s manifesto and plot, May and I’s testimony, and her retelling of the history of the civil war that not even Talvath knew weren’t enough, she was fully prepared to blackmail these fuckers to get the laws repealed.
“I fully support this,” a woman said. “I always have. I ran for office on that platform. There are plenty of demons out there that agree with it. Akul tried to ruin my campaign by leaking news of my husband’s affair, but we have an open relationship, and people got that when I said it when it made the news.
“He didn’t give up. He had nothing on me, and he knew it. As soon as I proposed my bill to change things, he manufactured something. The frame job was tight. Everything could be traced to me, and there was no way I could prove it was him and not me.
“I had a choice. If I left the bill as is, he would have revealed it, and I would have been arrested. I wouldn’t be here to argue when the time came. If I withdrew it, I could stay in office and work on this in the shadows. I’ve seen the same thing happen to literally everyone who proposed a bill to make things better for the Hellhounds. I just want to say to everyone that has doubts about this that there are plenty of us sitting among you who support it but have been blackmailed into silence, and there are plenty of demons we were elected to represent who want them free too.”
“What about the economy?” a toad-faced man said. “You’ll be taking income away from many demons. You’ll be taking away their household help. How are they to run their estates and make a living now? There are not enough jobs to go around for everyone. The Hellhounds will need food and shelter. How are they to do that with no jobs? They can’t even read or write!”
“Bram can,” Talvath said. “He was a fast learner as a child and a voracious reader now. Even if the sun wouldn’t be fixed, after what Akul did to me, I have no desire to return to Earth and collect souls. I intend to open a school. The Hellhounds can come and learn what they need to transition. They will be taught to read and write. They will learn the skills they need to get jobs. My estate is just as big as anyone else’s. I run it withpaiddemon servants. If your estate requires people to keep it up and running, you can pay them like a civilized person.”
“I also run my estate with paid servants,” Lilith said. “I’m a god. I created this entire realm. I have people on two realms that pray to me and leave offerings out. Not even I expect people to work for free, and I outrank all of you. As far as the money people are making at the breeding farms, it’s paid rape. There’s no gentle way to put that, but it is. We have strict penalties for rapists here in Hell, and prisons are full of them. So why should we allowanyoneto profit from it because their income is more important than a living being? And remember, I’ve seen Akul’s files. I know exactly who is okay with it and why.”
If a few men in the room could have begged the universe to open a crack in the floor to swallow them whole, they would have. The hair on the back of my neck was standing up from the level of anxiety that just got ramped up when Lilith just dropped that.
If some of these men were rapists, they needed to be in jail, not parliament. I had a lot of opinions on that subject. I drew attention to myself on Earth, getting into a few bar fights if I saw something getting slipped in drinks. I’d pretended to be a few women’s boyfriends to get some creeper to leave them alone, then walked them to their car.
I really hoped Lilith didn’t intend to sit on that information.
The woman who had initially spoken first was chewing her bottom lip and seemed to think this over. However, she was the speaker, and she would be the one to organize the vote.
“I do agree with you on several points. It’s beneath us to do these things to another living being, especially if everything they have taught us is lies. I do have concerns, though. Do you have plans for integrating them back into society to avoid another civil war? Won’t they want revenge? Some of the demons aren’t going to react well to this. Where will we put them while Talvath is setting up his school?”
