“My name is Hasstor. I bear word from Lucifer.”

It took a second for the words to sink in, rattled as I was from being dragged from Earth and dumped into some backwater, cross-dimensional cesspool. Just a few minutes before, I’d been spending what I thought was my last minutes alive with Karra and mourning the loss of Abe, when the demon Xyx and his flunkies, black and White, showed up. Now, here I was, standing before their master. I don’t know what I was expecting from this forced meeting, but it certainly wasn’t a message from my not-so-dearly-departed uncle.

There was fog in the air and it made my eyes water. Xyx, Black, and White had all faded into it after dropping me off. They were pretty much out of sight, out of mind because all I could do was stare at Hasstor. There was no mistaking the guy was a demon, of some kind, but I felt a strange reverberation against my senses. It was something I couldn’t put my finger on. His power was subdued, held in check by sheer will and the smoke that clung to everything like a bad credit score, but it was clear he had plenty of it. As it had when I first encountered Xyx, the wash of Hasstor’s magic rolled over me and made my stomach twist. Whoever he was and wherever he came from, he sat at the top of the food chain.

His cold, lidless gray eyes didn’t waver as he stared back, waiting for me to respond. Unlike Xyx, Hasstor didn’t hide behind a cloak and mask. In fact, he left nothing to the imagination. Naked as the day he was hatched, Hasstor stood before me like he was posing for the cover of Demonic Playgirl. His skin was an abyssal obsidian, so black it shimmered with a radiant blue in the dim light. Possessed of four powerfully built arms he stood with two of them upon his hips, drawing awkward attention to the monster between his legs; and I really mean monster.