Page 10 of Crazy as Hell

“We can try,” Naomi said around a mouthful of food. “This is my first time living through this scenario, so I don’t know exactly what is going to happen. But if we fail, we can always try again after I die and reset the day.”

The four of them stared at her with different levels of horror and fascination.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Arson declared. “Now, tell us everything you know.”

Chapter Four

Viktor Ze was going to die.

He knew it.

Felt it in his very soul.

It wasn’t fear or panic that told him his end was near, but an instinct that was ingrained in his very being. It was a quiet, inescapable certainty that wrapped itself around him like a funeral shroud.

As a powerful dark angel, Viktor possessed the rare gift of premonition. He received flashes that warned him when danger crept toward others. The visions came without invitation or warning, offering fragmented glimpses of accidents, betrayals, and bloodshed before they unfolded. Over the centuries, he’d saved countless lives by trusting those instincts. It often allowed him to intervene before anyone else realized disaster was approaching.

But there was one fatal flaw to his gift.

It never worked for him.

No matter how many predictions he saw, no matter how skilled he became at interpreting the cryptic warnings woven through his visions, his own fate remained hidden behind an impenetrable veil. He could sense danger stalking strangers from miles away. Could recognize the subtle signs of disaster before anyone else realized a threat existed, and intervene before tragedy struck.

And yet, he was his own blind spot.

His was the one future he could never see.

Fate possessed a cruel, almost mocking sense of irony. It had granted him the power to save countless lives while denying him the ability to protect himself. Worse still, that meant those closest to him were in the greatest peril. The blank space surrounding his own destiny often spread to those around him, which meant the people he loved most inevitably became the ones he couldn’t save.

It was a lesson life had forced him to learn over and over again.

There had been three specific moments in particular when his premonition ability felt less like a blessing and more like a curse. The first was during the brutal civil war that had torn the Celestial Realm apart. Viktor had still been young, and his abilities had only started to manifest. When his parents were sent into battle, he had watched them leave with confident smiles and promises that they would return before long.

Sadly, they never did.

When news of their deaths reached him, his grief had nearly consumed him. For years afterward, he tortured himself with the same impossible questions. What if his powers had awakened just a little sooner? What if he’d been able to give them the slightest warning about what would happen? He would have done anything to keep them from walking into the battle that claimed their lives.

Instead, he had been left with nothing but guilt and regret.

The second time came centuries later during the disastrous war between the Celestial Realm and the Realm of Souls. By then, Viktor had become one of Lucifer’s trusted generals and an advisor whose premonitions had saved countless soldiers.

When the Emperor of the Gods had ordered Lucifer and his army to invade the Realm of Souls, Viktor had sensed that something wasn’t right. The campaign felt wrong from the very beginning. It was as though an invisible hand had tipped the scales against them before the first blade was drawn. The problem was that his gift had shown him nothing concrete.

No vision he could present as evidence.

No catastrophe he could describe.

Only an overwhelming feeling that they were heading toward their doom.

As a general, it wasn’t his place to question the Emperor’s commands. Loyalty demanded obedience. Even so, he often wondered if he should have spoken up anyway. He should have urged the other generals to voice their concerns to Lucifer. Encouraged them to delay the invasion until they better understood the enemy they were facing, or simply insisted that caution outweighed pride.

Perhaps nothing would have changed.

Or maybe a single conversation could have altered history.

It was a question that haunted Viktor far more than any battlefield ever had.

After the angels fell and they made their new home in the Realm of Souls, more commonly known as the Hell Realm, his friends and fellow warriors repeatedly assured him that the catastrophe hadn’t been his fault. None of them blamed him for failing to foresee what no one else could have predicted. They reminded him that every supernatural had limits no matter how powerful they were, and that destiny couldn’t always be rewritten.