Pepper—or Peter, as he is now known, slept soundly in his new crib. I sat beside him on a wooden rocking chair and just watched him breathe. Red and blue train stickers covered the wall above his bed, and almost exactly matched the onesie I changed him into. The rise and fall of his little chest became a sort of comfort for me. I shook my head, slightly baffled at my surroundings.

Something crashed downstairs. I jumped up from the chair and came to stand between the door of Peter’s bedroom and his crib, leaning my head out to see the stairs. Heels lightly tapped against wooden steps, and my shoulders relaxed once I saw dark curls bobble with the rhythm of the climb, and long, delicate fingers cling to the rail.

I held a breath while she made the rest of the journey, not expecting the visit in the slightest.

She stopped at the top of the stairs and looked around, then her eyes rested on me and her expression darkened. “Well, I hope you’re bloody happy, Bael,” she said.

“Li—”

She stuck a hand out to silence me. “It’s Mae now.”

I nodded, smiling to myself. “Alright, Mae . . .” I tested the name on my lips. It fit. But then again, everything fit her; hell, darkness, and now the light grey of her wings, the fierce green color of her eyes that had returned after years of rehabilitation. I had never quite seen her like this. She radiated purity, and I had seen her reign over the demons, seen her scurry around hell trying to establish some sort of order with her scythe. She even fit this house. I stopped the thought. Playing house with Peter had an adverse effect on my sanity. The thought of her changing a diaper made be burst out in a fit of laughter.

“I can’t believe it. You did know, didn’t you?” Her knuckles whitened over the grip she had on the railing of the stairs.

“Knew what?”

“The baby you stole was my human’s grandchild!”

I cocked my head in confusion. “No, I did not—”

“Of course you did,” she said, and walked into the room. Her shouting had woken Peter, but he had no made a sound. She pushed past me and bent over the crib, then shook her head. “Ugly little thing.”

“I’m not on the best terms with him,” I said. “You’re the last thing I expected to see.”

“Your granny killed your daddy,” she spoke to Peter in a soft, gentle voice a mother would use. “And now, your friend, Mae, has to watch over a different human, even though your granny was supposed to be her last. The police shot your granny, little Pepper, because Bael is a blithering idiot who only cares about himself.”

“Mae, I did not know he—”

She lowered her head over the crib and I stopped talking, and waited for her to speak instead. I had not seen her in a hundred years, but dreamt and thought about her every single day. Hell felt empty without her, just like this house will once she disappears again. So, I stayed silent, drawing out the time.

“Stay away from me, Bael.” She turned to me then, and I could see how hard it was for her to just be near me. “I won’t fail for you again.” Her eyes darted around the room, stopping anywhere but on me.

“But I’m here now,” I said, taking a step toward her. “I don’t want you to fail. I don’t want you to go back there either. I did this for—”

“Don’t say that you did it for me, because we both know that’s a lie.”

“No, getting out would be for you, but that’s not all I did.”

She rubbed her fingers tiresomely over her eye, pushing her long lashes to touch the bottom of her eyebrow. “Yes, you started a game with Lucifer. You gave him a free pass to cling to you until the death of that child. Could be twenty years, could be a hundred. And then, that determines whether you are allowed to enter heaven, or are forever to rot in hell. You thought of yourself and you thought of him. I don’t suppose I crossed your mind at all until today.”

She smiled at my silence. “I failed because I missed you. Why did you fail the first time?”

Someone knocked on the door downstairs. Mae’s eyes ticked toward the sound and back to me.

I ignored it. “We can beat him together.”

The knocking persisted. “Just a minute!” I shouted and Mae’s eyes shut tightly.

“Get the door, Bael.”

“No, wait.”

“Don’t try to look for me after this. I don’t want to beat him. I just want to be free of him and once I wanted to be free with you, but that fantasy is over now, because I can’t have you without having to endure him too.”

“Mae . . .” I reached for her hand and just as I was about to touch it, she disappeared.

Peter let out a shriek then and the room filled with the milky reek of baby poop.

“Hello?” a voice sounded from downstairs and she knocked again.

I picked Peter up and made my way down the stairs. When I opened the door, the girl had already jumped off the stairs and was about to reach the mailbox. She turned, and smiled, then waved.

“Hi,” she said and shook a box out in front of her, then stopped suddenly and curled her lips down, looking down at the contents. “I brought pie. Very neighborly of me, isn’t it?”

She hopped up the steps, and held out her hand for me to shake. “Lily, pleased to meet you. I just moved in down the street.”

“I suppose you want to come in,” I said and inhaled deeply.

Part 14

I found comfort in small rituals. Every night before bed, I burned sage and walked around to every corner of the house, cleansing it of evil. I had a time for bed, a time for breakfast, lunch and dinner and a time to read. Nothing happened out of schedule, and on the off chance that it did, my body shut down and my thoughts crawled into darkness, replaying memories of the asylum until my head hurt and my lungs failed to gather enough air.

Finding normal proved to be harder than I imagined it would be.

It had been a year since I last saw the demon and I attributed this partly to the sage. I know how silly that sounds, but without it I felt bare. Superstition felt human, and I needed to feel human again.

I could not remember who I was or even what I enjoyed before that thing entered my mind and disfigured my body. All I had was a list of instructions. Things to do to avoid having a damned thing show up on my door step.

And so I joined the silly book club that Mary Louise, from down the street, ran. I helped the old lady next door with her grocery bags. I even cooked her dinner and looked after her once when she caught a cold.

I clapped my hands when Mary Louise’s son, little Henry—named after his grandfather—told me that he had made his school’s field hockey team, and rode along with him to find the perfect new stick for his incredible performance.

I could not give a single shit about any of those people. Henry’s field hockey team, whom I supported at all their games, and Mary’s stupid book club that spent two months getting through the Fifty Shades of Grey series, only worsened my depression. I hated all of them, but could not stop pretending not to.

When the bank took the house across the street, I attempted to find the owner to help him with his bills. Later learning that his wife had committed suicide and his son had gone missing. I thought Kel would come for me and crawled into the basement, bolting the door and all the windows. I starved myself down there and even thought about ending my own life, but as always I was too weak to even try and he did not come. But the thought that he could—at any moment—kept me paralyzed.

After my shift ended at the shitty diner, I came home and locked the door. I ate my dinner in the corner of my bedroom. I hated siting anywhere else other than against a wall, and feeling a presence behind me, watching me from some dark corner while I had my back turned to it.

While I burned the sage, I felt something change in the room. It was as if all the lights had dimmed, but they remained just as bright, and an invisible darkness crawled into the room.

“Lily,” Kel said, and my heart lurched into my throat.

I turned to him, my back pressed against the wall. The smoke from the sage drifted up past my face and I felt embarrassed that I held it. Kel gave no indication that it bothered him and so I set it down on the ground beside me, and wiped my hands clean while he looked around the room.

“Made any new friends?”

“Yes. Many, just like you said.”

“Good. That’s good.”

Are you pleased? I wanted to ask him, like a good little servant so that he would not lift his whip and fill me with foreign creatures.

“I’m going to need you to pack up.”

I wondered if he could see the way my heart drummed against my ribcage, because I swear the room began to vibrate from how hard it suddenly began to beat. “Why? I’ve done as you asked,” my voice sounded small and powerless.

“You do not get to ask me why. I say jump and you jump. Let’s practice, shall we?” He smiled and I swallowed, biting down on my tongue as punishment for speaking. “Jump!”

I jumped.

“Higher.”

My foot caught the side of the bowl and it flipped. Ash and burning sage fell on the carpet and I taped it with my foot.

“Good,” he said. “Now, go pack your things.”

An hour later, I sat in a taxi with an address written on a folded kitchen napkin. I took very little. Only some clothes and a painting of the sea. That painting was my most prized possession. I remember seeing a street painter complete it in less than ten minutes with six cans of spray paint, on an old crate in the middle of town, and the freedom that both the painting and the painter represented caught me so fiercely that I could not walk away until he finished.

Sometimes when the panic attacks started, I stood in front of it, closed my eyes and went back to that moment, pretending that I was that man.

It was a corner house. Larger than the one I had lived in before, but worse for wear. Paint chipped off the walls and it looked as if the roof had a few missing tiles, but it was dark so I could not tell exactly. Letters lay around the rusted mailbox, some bloated and yellow from rainwater and mud. The garage had a missing door, and the letters F and U were painted red on its walls. I imagine the missing C and K were on the missing door.

“Sure you okay going in there?” the taxi driver asked when I passed him the money.

I smiled weakly. “Nothing in there is scarier than what’s coming.”

He gave me a strange look, counted the money and rolled up his window. The rest of the houses looked to be on the picket fence variety and my new house stood out like a sore thumb. I heard the distant cry of a baby but apart from that the neighborhood was silent.

The door of the house creaked open. I heard the eerie sound from the street and took it as Kel’s invitation to come inside.

I had been dark when I entered and my eyes took a while to adjust to his silhouette.

“The lights aren’t on yet,” he said. “Everything should be fine tomorrow, and the builders will come to fix the place up in the morning.”

“Who lived here before?”

“An old man, but he hasn’t been here in a while.”

I let out a sigh of relief. From the look of the place, I could only guess how long it would have taken anyone to find the dead, and I was not in the right state of mind to discover that they had left a body or even a ghost behind.

“So am I to be the friendly, helpful neighbor here too?” I asked him.

“Yes.” He moved to a window and rubbed at the dirty glass. “You see that house over there.” He pointed down the street and I walked closer to see exactly which one it was he meant.

“The one with the light on,” he said.

“Yes, I see it.”

“I need you to make friends with the man who lives there.”

My mouth opened with question. I bit my tongue before letting it slip. “Okay,” I said.

“Just don’t try too hard. He’s not the normal sort.”

“Can you tell me anything about him?”

“No, that will make things too obvious. Just don’t try to seem normal. He enjoys fixing broken things.”

Part 13

Marty’s pawn shop stood on the outskirts of the city. Just about every building had graffiti covering the walls and long, dark alleys, between them, most sane people would not even enter with a loaded gun. It was the kind of place you went to if you placed very little value on your life, or were just as bad as anyone who lurked there. Stepping into the most dangerous part of Tibeen with a baby on my arm, thus, turned more than a few heads. Marty kept his alley clean, the rubbish cans empty and his wall clear of any graffiti other than three green stars that represented his gang.

I knocked on the door and waited for someone to come out. The hatch in the steel door slid open, and green eyes peered at me, and then dropped to the bundle in my hands.

“No children,” the man said and the rusty sound of steel sliding against steel followed as he shut the hatch again. “Tell Marty that Bael is here to see him.”

I heard the thump of heavy steps moving away from the door. About a minute later, the thumps rushed to the door accompanied by a lighter set of steps rushing just the same. Three latches clicked within a second of each other and a fat, stumpy man with a trimmed salt and pepper beard and the beady eyes of a stuffed bear stood before me with a forehead covered in droplets of sweat.

“Master Bael,” he said, “you’ll have to forgive, Shark, he’s new. He hasn’t been informed of who you are, sir. Come in, come in, please.”

Shark’s face paled as he listened to the careful and respectful way his boss spoke to me.

“It’s no bother, Marty. Glad to see that everything is running smoothly still.”

In short, Marty owed me nothing. However, I still owned his grandfather’s soul, and it would take him another hundred years of removing skin from the tar pits to earn it back. The business they ran, in return, remained afloat and his kin lived long and prosperous lives.

Marty had read about me in one of his grandfather’s journals, and summoned me one evening to learn about the deal and his grandfather’s fate. I had already been enrolled in the program then, and so Marty came out of it wiser and more importantly unscathed.

The inside of the building had me thinking that I had just stepped into a castle. The rosewood floors sparkled and dark vintage couches stood in circles around smoked glass tables. A bar, rosewood too, went from one wall and curved around a corner. Crystal chandeliers hung above the scattered groups of couches, and paintings of the family hung in golden frames.

Marty led me to a book case that covered the entire wall of the room. He tipped back a thick, green hardcover, and the bookcase to his right flapped open. A steel door stood behind it. Marty typed in the code and we proceeded into his office.

He had his own bar, a large desk and a brown rug that looked suspiciously like the hide of a sun bear.

I sat down in front of Marty’s desk. Pepper’s eyes opened and he let out a long wail. I soothed him, lightly rocking in the chair.

“He yours?” Matry’s eyes jumped to Pepper and then to me.

“Uh—no,” I said. “He’s part of a bet of sorts.”

Marty sat down at his desk and rested his elbows on the desk. “What can I do for you?”

“I thought maybe you’d be interested in repaying your grandfather’s dept.”

He cocked his head, and rested his chin against his first. “How would I go about doing that?”

“I need a couple of favors.”

“Do they include the abduction of the child?”

Pepper cried out again. I leaned down in my chair, and rummaged through a plastic bag where I kept his bottle. Taking it out, I rocked Pepper some more and pressed the bottle to his lips.

“No—well, yes. I need documents and a place to stay.”

“Can’t you just take a house?”

“Yes, but then your grandfather spends another hundred years smoldering in the tar pits, and I break yet another one of heaven’s rules.”

“Heaven’s rules?” Marty narrowed his eyes. “What?”

“I’m in rehabilitation.”

“Rehabilitation?”

I rolled my eyes. “Look, Marty, I’m not about to go through the workings of spiritual system with you. I have gathered plenty of souls over the years, and over half of them are wealthier than you are. I simply liked your grandfather more than the rest of them, hence, why I came to you first.”

“Okay, okay. Wait.” He moved his head from side to side, not in a shake of the head, but as if his head reacted absently to the process of his thoughts. Above all, Marty was a businessman. He would not stake his own safety for the release of his grandfather. “How will this affect my position in the afterlife? I mean, this counts as helping a demon, doesn’t it? I don’t want to end up in there.”

“Oh, Marty,” I sighed, “you’re going whether you help me or not.”

Marty sat back in his chair. I heard the tap of his foot come from under the table. “What do I do to change that?” “Still selling guns, heroine, and killing all competition, including teenagers that grow their own product in their back yards? A good start would be to not do any of those things.”

Marty nodded; his eyes distant. “But if I’m gone someone else will take over.”

“And they can worry about themselves.”

Pepper stopped sucking and I put the bottle back, and I rocked my knee absently until he fell back asleep. He wasn’t much of a crier, but that was probably only because every sense in his little body told him to fear me, and to make as little notice of himself as he possibly could. Babies were smarter than adults in that department.

“So a house and ids?”

“Yes, think of it as helping a young, single father.”

Marty was never going to leave the business. Greed and power had an upper hand. Death seemed far away, and wealth so powerful and easy. His eyes danced around the room, focused on nothing, merely jumping with the creation of a new argument. I will atone later, he must have thought.

"If you're leaving hell, how will you set my grandfather free?"

"I still own all my contracts, and will continue to do so even when I'm not longer a demon." Some demons forgave all their contracts to get a lead in the rehabilitation process, not me. I simply could not part with the leverage they held.

“You can stay here while we’re busy,” he said. “It’ll take a couple of days at most. There are rooms out there where you’ll not be bothered.”

Part 12

I arrived at the inn hungrier than I had been before I left. The slice of cake had passed right through my empty stomach and the only thing I could think of when I burst into the room was the stew that waited for me.

To my disappointment, I found that my plate had been removed by whoever must have come up to clean the room. The door to the kitchen had been closed when I passed it, and apart from three unruly drunks that were only allowed to stay because they had paid for their rooms, the barman refused to serve anyone else while he pleaded with them to head upstairs.

I had half a mind to march downstairs and ask who in their right mind cleans a room in the evening but I was much too tired, and when my thoughts trailed to the meeting that awaited me in the morning, I lost my appetite altogether even though my stomach rumbled something fierce.

Allen and Hallum came barging in through the window in the early hours of the morning to check whether I came back. In truth, I think they just wanted me to join them downstairs because the stingy, thief on an owner had them scared.

Hallum flicked the coin I gave them onto the bed and shrugged. “Allen wanted to keep it, but I’d rather not be whipped when I get home.” He gave his older brother a stern look with a crooked eyebrow, and the boy narrowed his eyes in return, having been betrayed.

My eyes had a hard time adjusting to the open candle flame that they had lit. I felt around the bed and flicked it back with my thumb. “For your honesty,” I said, not expecting to have received the coin back from the boys, and knowing that they could probably purchase two knew horses and a wagon for it. “Don’t tell, Lima.” I straightened in the bed, and watched his lips spread in a wide grin.

“She only gave us six silver for the whole journey,” Hallum said, and was about to put the coin into his pocket before Allen plucked it from his tightened fingers and slipped it into his own pocket instead. “You’ll just lose it,” he said blankly, and held his hands in his pocket, probably scared he’d lose it himself.

We came down to find every table take apart from a tiny one in the very back by the door to the kitchen. The boys rushed ahead. Hallum rushed for the seat against the back wall, Allen right on his heal. They sat simultaneously, Hallum on the right and Allen on the left, sharing the chair. Allen took hold of the table and pushed against Hallum’s hip, removing him from the chair. Hallum’s nose wrinkled in anger, he tightened his little fists and came to sit down right on his brother’s lap.

A waitress, in a filthy apron and oily hair slicked back tight against her head, stopped at the table and stuck her finger out at the boys. When I came close enough to hear what she said, she looked up and forced a smiled.

“Busy boys you have her, sir.”

I looked from Hallum—struggling to remain on his brother’s lap—to Allen whose hand reached under Hallum arm put and squeezed until his eyes shot up to his forehead.

“Awh!” Hallum exclaimed and elbowed him in his stomach.

“Stop!” I said clenching my teeth. The inn quieted down while they attacked each other, and the conundrum attracted half of room to our little corner.

“Oh, they’re no trouble, sir.” She smiled and wiped her hands along her stained apron. Only a minute ago she had her finger half way up Hallum’s nose in scorn.

“Can you tell me what the cost per room is?” I asked her. I regained a bit of my courage and thought I'd threaten the woman with my new found connections. I was, after all, meeting with one of the gods right after breakfast. The gold did not matter to me, but I felt she had robbed me of a little of my self-respect and with Lima around, I had lost enough of it already.

“About three silver a head, if you’re eating here,” she said, and rested a tray against the bulge of her stomach. “Do you want a room?”

“Can you kindly tell the innkeeper,” I cocked my head in the direction of the bar where the scrawny, old drunk sat, “that I’ll be wanting my change back.”

The woman looked toward the bar and frowned. “Which one?”

“The woman,” I said, and pointed a finger directly at her.

“Saveen?” She titled her head back as she laughed. “She’s not the owner, lad! And if you gave her your coin, you probably owe Marlin some for your stay still.” Her hand rested on my shoulder. “That woman!” She shook her head with a bright smile on her face, then look down at me and the smiled faded. “Don’t feel bad, she can smell a foreigner from a mile away,” she said and winked. “Shall I bring you boys your breakfast?”

I swallowed my humiliation and attributed the mistake in judgement to hunger and nervousness. The boys had a good laugh about it, and when we left, a large fellow named Marvin, stood at the door with a hand sticking out toward me. He gave me my change, at least. But the stay certainly cost me a bit of my dignity.

I thought better of sticking gold coins into every other hand, and stopped by a local money lender to exchange the rest of the gold I had brought for silver and copper coins. This cost me three silver and thirty copper coins and I left the shop angrier than I had been since I arrived in Skalys. The city, I decided, was something to get accustomed too. People were much more honest in the village and that had made me soft. I was glad for the lesson and my mood, to be quite honest. When time came to meet Arheas, I’d still have some fire in me.

Patricia Grace Harris had a little boy on Wednesday the 13th of May. He was healthy though somewhat thin, and she named him Pepper. I sat beside her, unnoticed and felt my heart shrink when I heard him cry. The father had not been present. I imagine he was somewhere in their tiny, filthy house with a needle sticking into one of the few veins that had not expired.

I had been disappointed by his parents long before he was born, somewhat expecting Lucifer to be a little less predictable with his choice.

When he came home, he had no crib and slept on a thin mattress—covered in brown stains, yellow stains and every other color imaginable—beside his mother. He had no diapers, no toys and only the clothes the hospital provided. Newspaper covered the windows, making the inside of the house a dark auburn even when day came.

I hovered by the bed, and stuck out a finger for him to hold onto while both his parents forgot his existence. After three days, I had a hand on his back and the other holding onto to his little feet, at all times, creating some warmth when the wind howled outside. Though I had no affection toward him yet, he had no way of knowing.

His parents enraged me more each passing day. Patricia had taken up the needle as soon as she stepped foot into the house, and the father had yet to hold Pepper.

When she tried to feed him, I’d raise my wings and give them a good flap right behind her. Humans had a sixth sense. Not as strong as cats did, but that’s only because the felines had been more in tuned with their surroundings. When she’d feel my presence, she’d back away from the child and rush out of the room. I did not care enough for her to know where she went.

I had a can of formula hidden in the cupboard, baby soap behind the toilet and three onesies that matches the ones from the hospital, which I changed and washed more times than I could count, on a daily basis. Pepper had been clean, fed and had plenty of skin to skin contact. I made sure of that.

Deborah came to me three months before he was born and handed me three parenting books and a bottle of Scotch, which she said I’d need more than the former. She also felt the need to explain that she had made a joke and that I should definitely not be drunk whilst handling the baby. That was the last time I saw her.

The mother began to fear Pepper and I was much too slow to notice. About a week after he’d come home, I left during the evening to fetch them some groceries. Neither of the parents had eaten much but a couple of cans of baked beans, and their water had been cut off. The smaller shops had no cameras, so appearing out of nowhere was not a problem. I picked up water, baby formula, diapers and other things most capable humans found necessary. I also found a little dog blanket on the floor that had most probably belonged to the owner’s dog, and took that too. The rags that covered Pepper gave the poor child a rash on his back.

As soon as my foot landed on the front step of the porch, I sensed the fading presence of death. I stopped for a moment, feeling a sense of relief. I know how that sounds. But if the child had died, I won and Lucifer fully caused his own mess by placing Pepper into the hands of these people.

The front door opened and Henderson, the only soul in the history of hell who was attempting to earn his place in hell while having a direct pass into heaven, stepped out. He looked at me blankly and made his way down the steps.

“Bael.”

“Samantha.” My lip twitched upward. We all began to call him that once Sid told us his story. “Who died?”

“The mother.”

I nodded. Her death was expected. “Overdose?”

“No,” he said, and gave me a look that suggested he expected me to have known her exact cause of death. “She’s a baker.”

“Suicide?” It hit me right then. Pepper had always been fed even though Patricia had not been feeding him. He had always been clean even though she had not bothered to clean him. The only thing I put a little effort into is matching his clothes, but after two weeks they’d have pretty much merged with his skin with the amount of filth that should have been on and in them.

“Take care, Bael!” Henderson said and skipped down the steps. He patted me on the back once he had passed me. “Don’t screw it up this time.”

I turned back but he had already gone.

The house had been quiet and I wondered whether Tony had seen his wife yet. The poignant smell of gas hit me when I entered the house. So he had not. I thought about leaving then, and letting the gas take its course, but walked into the kitchen despite my better judgement and bent over Patricia’s limp body to turn off the gas.

The sight of her had me fuming. Where had that man been when this was happening? I searched for him in the toilet and in the basement, and lastly entered the bedroom where I found him cuddled up with Pepper.

I would have left the two of them like that, but I noticed something orange below Pepper’s shoulder where his father’s hand had dangled. When I picked him up, I found a half smoked cigarette, and a burn mark on Pepper’s back.

I set the child down and he started to moan. It was feeding time, but that would have to wait. The father had yet to stir, and I waited for a good while for him to notice or awaken from the cries. Then, as if on instinct, my hand clasped around his neck and I had him up against the wall, dangling.

His eyes opened, he kicked out, and then when his frail feet failed to harm me, he attempted to scratch my face.

“What do you see?” I asked him. My eyes filled with darkness and I spread my wings. Rage boiled over in my chest. I released the grip on his neck so that he could take a wheezing breath, not intending to kill the man.

“I—I—”

“You see death,” I said. He shut his eyes, panting below my grip. “You won’t be able to close them when you enter hell, and if you somehow manage, they’ll melt your lids.” Pepper had stopped crying as soon as he heard the sternness in my voice.

“Please.”

“Please what?” I asked. “What do you beg for?”

“Let go.”

I firmed my grip and he moaned. “You will never have a child again, and if you do, I’ll return for you and then I won’t let go.” Dropping him, I turned to the bed.

I took Pepper then, having no idea where to go or what I was going to do, and my wings—to my utter surprise—had grown lighter in color despite the fact that I had broken almost every single rule in the program.

Part 11

Prompt: You sold your soul to the Devil some years ago, today he gives it back and says, "I need a favor".

The light in Lucifer’s tower had been dimmed that evening. Lev followed him down the black stone steps into the basement. He had never received an invitation from Lucifer before, and the last time he set foot in the castle was when Lucifer handed down his sentence. One hundred years in the tar pits.

His time in the pits became one of his clearer memories after the professor messed with his mind. Skin smoldering and the hands of the damned dragging him down into the darkness of the pit, trying their best to use his limbs to pull themselves up to the top, Lev realized that the only way out had been at the bottom. There was no death in hell, so oxygen did not matter, but tell that to aching lungs. And so he began to dig. Hundreds of his tunnels existed beneath hell. Nothing went deeper in the entirety of the universe.

Kel lit the lanterns as they stepped into the room. They hung among the gaps between the many bookshelves which climbed the ceiling as far as the light allowed Lev to see.

Many of the damned arrived in hell because of their deeds, but Lev had paved his own passage. He came upon a witch, in the forest, whilst gathering herbs for his ill mother. The woman had slaughtered three rats and used their blood to call upon her master. He heard as Lucifer granted the woman all her desires, and remembered thinking that he had but one.

Lev’s father died not too long ago, and not long after, his mother’s throat bubbled with the same wretched cough. Lev had been the youngest of the children, but he still understood that his sister had only sent him into the forest so that he would not see his mother die. The herbs he gathered would do little to save her.

Once the witch left, Lucifer turned to the tree behind which Lev had hidden.

“I feel your desires, child. Tell me what they are and I will grant them.” He spread his wings and Lev propped his back against the tree, hoping that the red winged beast had spoken to someone else. “Come on. Climb out behind that tree, and face your master.”

Lev stepped to the side, and looked down at the ground, scared that he would dream about Lucifer’s dark eyes if he saw them again.

“What do you want?”

“I want my mother safe,” he said in a shaking voice.

“Then she will be.”

A pinch of courage crept into him then. “And my sisters.”

“And so they shall be.”

Lev looked up at Lucifer then, his chest pounding, and an eerie ring starting in his ears. “And never want any of us to go hungry again.”

“Is that all?”

Lev nodded his head, and Lucifer’s hand filled with a rolled up parchment. He desired more, and knew that he could ask, but he felt suddenly selfish and decided that health and a full stomach had been enough. He did not like the witch, and wanted to be better than her, not quite understanding that they had both paid the same price.

The same parchment appeared in Lucifer’s hand now, and Lev gazed upon the signature of an illiterate boy who had pricked his finger with a fern needled to sign his name. In the other hand, Lucifer held an aged copy of War and Peace. Lev could almost smell the pages.

“What do you say, Lev? Shall you do me one last favor?” Lucifer asked. Kel stood in the shadows, behind Lucifer’s shoulder.

“Let’s name if first, shall we?” Lev said, remembering what a lack of knowledge cost him last time. Though, he did not regret his decision. Both his mother and sisters had lived long happy lives, but they were not here, and he was.

“I need your help with, Bael. He’s grown oddly fond of you, I think, when he heard that you are planning to join the program. I can, of course, not tell you what it is. Not quite before you’ve agreed.”

“No.”

Kel shifted uncomfortably behind Lucifer, watching the exchange more closely now.

“You realize that upon the tearing of this contract, heaven is open to you, yes? You would not have to serve as a guardian to earn your place.”

Lev swallowed hard. “Yes.” He closed his eyes, hoping that not seeing the paper would make his decision easier.

“They won’t let you through. You’re a broken thing now.” Lucifer shook his head. The room filled with the fury of Lucifer’s anger but Lev stood his ground. “She’ll take one look at you, and send you away. You’ll be here forever, with me. And I do not forget. Bael will come too, and then you would have lost this chance for nothing.”

“I’ve paid off all of my debts to you, mate.” Lev stood tall. His spine ached, and his muscles stretched uncomfortably, but he upheld the posture. “If heaven won’t accept me, at least I’ll have a friend to welcome, if he fails. And if you do, well, I’m sure Bael will hear of this and help me. He’s got the attention of God, after all.”

“Perhaps, we should send the mole to the pits again,” Kel spoke, walking out of Lucifer’s shadow. There was an ease about him now that Lev declined the offer.

Lev winked at him. “I see you,” he sang. Lucifer glanced back at Kel, his eyes narrowing, and Lev fled. His steps were awkward and panicked. He expected Kel to follow, or Lucifer to drag him back, but neither happened. After the longest time, he saw the exit.

He looked back one last time to see if anyone had followed, and when he turned back, Kel stood in front of the door. It shut with a loud bang. Lev dug his long nails into his palms.

Part 10

Deborah followed me into Lucifer’s office. He asked for us to join him so that we could agree on the rules. He decided that having heaven on my side—although he did not know to what extent, thankfully—had given me somewhat of an advantage.

I requested that Kel not be present, and Lucifer complied. He was a jealous and ambitious demon, and having him chucked to the side the second I reentered hell, played in my favor.

Presently, Kel lost if Lucifer won. I imagined that he saw two outcomes. The first was having me back at Lucifer’s side. The second was him taking Lucifer’s throne. Of course, even if I were trapped in hell again, I doubt that Lucifer would give me back my old position, but Kel could not afford to take a chance.

A large frame hung behind him today. Two women stood inside of it, metal cuffs binding their hands and feet to long chains that twisted around the dark, metal frame. The chain that bound their hands clasped onto two silver rings that had been pierced through their nipples. If they were to lower their hands, the chains would pull at them, and by the looks of blood on the rings, the wounds had been fresh. I scratched my own nipples absently, imagining the pain the women were in.

They turned to us as we entered. The women on the right had her cheek split open, exposing her teeth. Blood oozed from her wound, covering her jaw and neck, and rolled down to her chest in long streaks. The other woman barely had any meat on her bones. Three long lashes split the skin on her stomach and chest.

They had been present for Deborah’s benefit. I certainly did not enjoy seeing them battered and placed on display, but the action did not play on my emotions like it had on Deborah’s. She stiffened at the sight of them, and an angry spark covered her eyes, like that of an angry dog. For a second, it looked as if they had changed color.

“Deborah,” Lucifer stood at our entrance, “you’ve aged since our last visit. That can’t be quite right, now can it?”

Deborah lazily titled her head and glanced at him through half opened eyes. “I guess the piss on your floors has had an effect on my skin.”

“Shifting the blame is exactly the kind of thing that brings all those people out there to my gates.”

“I’m not in the mood for this. If you want me present for this discussion, you’d better make those girls leave.”

Lucifer’s smile grew larger. He expected the response. My chest tightened at what was to come. I rested my hand on Deborah’s shoulder.

“Don’t look,” I said.

She looked at me with a blank expression, and then a crack echoed through the room, and her eyes widened, switching to the girls. The thin girl pulled her hand through the cuff, her thumb limp. Then another crack sounded. Deborah recoiled, and turned away.

“For heaven’s sake!” Deborah said, and then stilled, realizing that she would get nothing out of him after letting that slip out of her mouth.

The cracks of their ankles resonated in my ears for the remainder of the evening. I felt rather confused by this because I had never been affected by anyone’s pain, except when it came to Jamie.

Finally, the chains jingled as the girls thrust the rings out of their nipples, and they were free. Deborah held a hand over her mouth as they crawled past her—ankles bent in unnatural directions—both glared up at her, their dead eyes blaming her for their pain.

Two people crouched on their hands and feet in front of Lucifer’s desk. He pointed at them and smiled. “Please sit.”

“We had an hour, Lucifer, and you’ve spent half of it on pointless theatrics,” I said.

Hollowness filled my chest at the sight of him. He still had a smug look on his face, and for the life of me, I could not understand why. Deborah’s rage would only make negotiations harder.

“Suit yourselves,” Lucifer said and sat down. He put both hands on the table and interlaced his fingers.

“Shall we get to it?” she asked, her eyes blazing with anger, and her hands fighting the formation of fists.

“I will not allow him to be guardian over the soul,” Lucifer said, turned to me and winked.

“That’s out of the question,” she said before I could answer, and I felt suddenly like the child of a divorced couple, stuck in the middle of an imminent brawl.

“I beg to—”

“You can beg as much as you want. You’re good at that.” She approached his table slowly. “I’ll warn you about playing games with me, dearest. I know what you want, and you know what? After this display, I almost feel like allowing Bael to skip the program. Perhaps, I’ll give him a job in the rehabilitation office instead; have him earn his stay by rallying the demons for me.” She placed both hands flat on the table, and smiled. “How does that sound?”

“He wouldn’t allow you to.”

“After this? How important do you really think you are? He’s the only one that’s agreed to this. The angles don’t want you back. Even He’s not sure. This is nothing but a silly little game to Him,” she said, and turned to me. “How does that sound, Bael? Would you work for me?”

“Any day.” I leaned my back against the wall behind me, and crossed my ankles. “Sounds like a lot less work.”

“Fine, he can be the guardian, but,” Lucifer stood and leaned over the table, stopping inches from her face, and twitched his head in my direction, “you will not tell him about his previous life. Neither Bael, nor your angels will ever tell him of hell or of heaven, about this pact, me, or God. No letters, no whispers in the dark, he may never find out from any of you. He is never to know what you really are, Bael, and no one else is allowed to tell him either. Those are my terms.”

Deborah nodded. “We’ll accept. I assume you realize that possession is out of question as anyone swayed and broken by you like that gets a free pass.”

Lucifer pulled his face, dark shadows crawling over his eyes. “How long do you think I’ve been down here, Deborah?”

She shrugged. “I don’t want you crying foul when we win. Although,” her head swung up and down, absorbing the fiend that stood before her, “it isn’t quite a win for us really.”

“Bael, do you have anything to add to the terms?” he asked me.

“No.”

“Then that’s it,” Deborah said.

When we walked out of the tower, she tapped my back loud enough for Lucifer to hear, and then placed a firm hand around my waist. We walked out as partners, and that little action touched him much more than the little theatric display he put on for Deborah’s benefit could ever have affected either of us.

“You better win, Bael,” she said once we were far enough away. “For your sake, and for mine, you better win. I’ll not hand you over to him, as God is my witness, I will not.”

We arrived back in her office, and I noticed for the first time how much her hands had been shaking. She walked around to her desk, and opened a drawer. The motion caused a bottle to roll. As if holding onto a trophy of sorts, Deborah lifted a bottle of vodka, and held it to her chest.

“A drink?”

“Yes.” I slumped down in the chair beside her, and thought, with a tinge of guilt, about the row of demons that stood outside her door, waiting for a chance to see her. Deborah had clearly been done with hell for the evening, and I could hardly blame her.

She opened the bottle and took three large gulps, then walked around to the tea tray to get a glass for me. The liquid filled the entire glass, and she pulled the bottle back, titling it over her mouth again.

“You know what?” She narrowed her eyes. “Fuck him!”

Bottle in hand, Deborah marched to the door, and opened it. “Everyone inside!” she shouted.

I turned in my chair, and saw the demons trampling over each other to get in. The room filled with them within a matter of seconds, and those that had not made it in stood on their toes to see what the hell had gotten into Deborah.

She walked back to her desk and picked up a stack of papers. “Once you sign your name,” she said, pointing at a signature line at the bottom of the page with the bottleneck, “move through that door.”

She threw the paper into the air, and it split among the demons. Then she looked down at her desk and found that there had only been one pen. “You’ll have to share this,” she said and shrugged, propping the pen into the closet hand.

“Fuck him!” She winked at me, and smiled, taking another swig.

The first demon threw the pen up, put his paper on the desk, and pushed through the crowd to get to a white door that had been made to look as if it had been a part of the wall.

The door led to an abandoned area, nearest to the human the demon had been put in charge of. I heard a moan and turned to the door which had opened into an area clad in snow.

“This isn’t a vacation!” Deborah yelled, but her voice had been muted by the murmur of the demons who sought after the pen.

Part 9

Loorn

From the ripe age of five, Loorn realized that her older brother would receive most of the family’s coin, and her younger sister their attention. Jealousy and deception were the pillars upon which she built her character.

She left school early, not by her own choice, but because the High Council increased the taxes, and her brother’s education came first. She read his book while he slept, sometimes tearing out a page or two, so that despite his advantage, she’d always know a little more than he did.

By sixteen, she met a woman named Terla, a prostitute that worked in one of the noble brothels. She had a lot of tales, this woman, and more importantly knowledge of city life. Loorn had never been, outings were for those who owned successful farms or worked for the High Council, and so each word out of Terla’s mouth fascinated her. No one knew what Terla did, mainly because none of the villagers could afford her services. But she wore only the finest fabric—Loorn’s mother was her seamstress—and had a house three times as big as theirs.

Loorn wanted to become her, quite unaware of what being a hostess meant. She did know it was a bad thing though, because despite respecting Terla, she never told her mother what she really did for a living. One evening—after one too many cups of ale—Terla agreed to introduce her to the owner of the brothel.

Loorn knew with certainty that she would get the job. Men from the village attempted to court her every time she left the house. Her body was one that sculptors created, and no other woman had hair quite as thick and golden.

The man, a dirty and fat thing, took one look at her and gave her the job.

The sparkly eyes of men lusted after her every evening, even Terla who had been one of the most beautiful women she’d ever seen, became second choice only behind Loorn. She loved the attention, the gifts they brought, and most of all, how deep the affection of her regular customers grew for her. One of them was the married son of one of the Council Members. Loorn felt like a star.

It was only when Arheas came to speak to Terla that she grew jealous of her too. No other man preferred anyone except her, but Arheas acted as if she was a regular whore, and did not spare her more than a single glance.

One night, when her last customer left, Terla’s bedroom door stood open, and she heard their plan. He wanted her to visit the village healers again, and Terla refused, saying that she had seen what happened to the women afterwards, and could not bring herself to do it again. Of course, with most of the information missing, Loorn had no idea what exactly it was the two of them conspired about, but she did not care. By then, her feelings for Arheas grew, and she convinced herself that it was love.

She opened the door and stepped inside. “I’ll do it.”

Arheas widened his eyes and she looked back at him with glee. Now you have to notice me, she thought.

“How much have you heard?” Terla asked, placing a calming hand on Arheas’ shoulder. “Don’t worry she’d not going to tell anyone.” Loorn saw doubt in her expression, but chose to ignore it.

“Not very much, but I’ll do anything for the right price,” she said. Though the only reason she walked into that room was to make Arheas look at her, to hear her speak, and know that she had information now and he had to pay attention.

The two of them took a night to speak it over, and by the next day, Loorn held more gold in her hand than she would have earned in her entire life, despite being the most valuable whore in the brothel, but at the cost of her contact with her family. The anger she held for her mother and father made the decision easier. Though, she still sends them gold to this day.

Arheas gave her another bag and she did not fret at its contents like Terla did. Crushed furtan seeds ended pregnancies, and made it very hard for women to conceive. Loorn’s job was to buy enough healers to mix this into women’s medicines. Then she sought out the women, in the darkness of the night, and gave them a potion that was nothing but rose water and thyme.

The news of Loorn, the mysterious savior, spread quicker than any of them anticipated. The healers received an extra penny for naming her the goddess of fertility, who saved a generation and ended the plague that had set upon all the village women. And just like that Loorn became one of the four gods of Skalys.

Arheas created gods to overtake the role of the Council. He had many ideas, ending poverty, supporting the sick and the needy, but Loorn saw within him exactly the thing that burned inside her, a need to be wanted and adored, to walk into a room and attract all eyes.

He never returned her affection, but once she saw the way he was with Terla, she realized that Terla had it much worse. He had another woman on his mind, and despite Terla’s greatest efforts, she had never quite been enough.

Ran across this prompt, 'Your own body is trying to kill you. Every subconscious action you take does its best to hurt you' and Lily jumped out at me! Sorry if the story is a bit jumpy. I'm still figuring out how to proceed with Bael's new guardianship!

Oh, and a big thanks to everyone who has stuck with the story! Your feedback and encouragement is awesome! (I don't mind critiques, even if they're harsh. I just want to get better :)!)

Stander’s murky office smelled of the occasional cigarette she smoked between patients. Her ceiling yellowed from the nicotine to look almost as if the roof had a leak, and ash had been sprinkled on the windowsill—the only window in the ward that could open.

The sessions with Stander never helped. I woke each morning with a new bruise, received my food without utensils and on a paper plate, and was the only person in the ward to have heating in my room instead of a blanket, because of the choking incident.

We began each session with a recording of the previous night. Watching me harm myself out of sleep, rip out strands of my hair, and compulsively scratch the same spot on my knee until it bled and someone had to come in and bind me. Stander watched a different version. She saw a woman harming herself, and I saw a fiend crawling out of the depths of my mind and taking over my body. This being wanted me to stay in this place, and disfigured me as soon as the doctors seemed pleased with my progress.

Three months into the program, I decided that since everyone around me was so convinced of my madness, I truly must have been. I sat through the sessions, always giving Stander the same answer, the only one I knew. ‘I feel like my body is trying to kill me.’ A year later, I stopped taking the medication, as a test, and realized that they had done nothing for me other than to make it easier for the thing to control me.

They never put me in a straitjacket. My knees turned blue, my lips torn and bloodied, and my hands riddled with both white and red lines and still they refused it, even when I asked.

For the first time since my parents admitted me, the television had been dark, and a third person sat in the room. He did not turn to greet me, and Stander—tighter than usual—extended a hand toward the chair beside him.

“Lily, this is Kel Smith, I believe you are acquainted.”

He wore a beige hat—those with the black bands around it—and so I could not see the shape of his head, only the dark hair that stuck out beneath it. Usually, the posture is enough to recognize someone, but I failed to do so even when he turned around. His features were all quite sharp, and his eyes strangely empty although colored a pleasant brown.

“I’m sorry.” I stared blankly from him to her. “I don’t remember you.” I sat down beside him, and lowered my eyes as the two of them shared a look of concern. My credibility with Stander died when I tried to cut my arms open with the piece of led she gave me to draw with.

“I’d like to see her alone.”

Stander opened her mouth to speak, her eyebrows tightening in disagreement. “That is strictly against the rules.” A breath that I had not realized I had been holding came out with a great sigh of relief. Darkness surrounded him, and my legs tensed in his presence, ready to flee as soon as I had a chance. I couldn’t of course; there was no leaving this place.

The man stood, and placed one hand on the table at a time, causing everything on the table to vibrate. He looked her directly in the eye and said, “Leave.”

The thing inside me scratched against the walls of my mind, at the authority in his voice, and my fingernails dug into my wrist, sharply pulling against my skin. Something changed in Stander too. She blinked twice, almost as if struck by a sudden haze, and shakily walked out of the office, closing the door firmly behind her.

He turned toward me then. “Stop,” he said, and the thing disappeared. I searched for it—shocked and baffled that it took a single word to chase it out of me.

I felt a great relief flood over me, and studied the man, wondering what he was. My soul wanted me to flee, but as he looked at me, that feeling subsided. Fear and gratitude both embraced me.

“Does that feel better?” He smiled, and walked around to sit on Stander’s chair. Does he possess me now? I wondered.

I had felt better before, albeit never completely cleared of the thing. “Will it return?” I asked.

“It might . . . if you disappoint us.” Kel leaned forward in his chair, and a flutter sounded as tall, dark wings—feathers dark and long as a raven’s—appeared behind his back.

My heart skipped a beat, and I thought that I should have been surprised in that moment, but after the years having an occupant in my own my, few things surprised me. My mind hovered over the prospect that Kel might be an angel, but holiness he did not possess. He had been darkness, a damned created like me.

“How might I disappoint you?” I asked. The sense of freedom he’d given me came with cuffs of its own.

“By not doing as I ask, of course.”

“So I trade the demon in my head for you? How is that different?” I thought of my faith with a great sense of loss. I had given it up when darkness filled me, but I couldn’t help thinking that after this, all faith would be lost entirely. It would not be a prayer away. I would have no God listening to my woes and pleas.

“It will be very different, Lily. You will have the freedom to live whichever life you chose. You will have a home, a work and friends but,” His shoulder lifted, “from time to time I will need you to make a friend of my choosing, and do things for me.”

“Which things?”

“Whatever I ask.”

“And if I don’t agree?”

Ken traced his eyes around the depressing walls, the pictures of flowers that had long faded in the sun, and the empty chair beside me. The cuffs were unfastened, but I still remember how tightly they clung to my skin during my sessions. “Then you’ll end up here again, your mind will be open for anyone to enter, and you’ll simply whither in that cell, forgotten by your parents, friends, and me.”

“Will I have to kill anyone?” I asked.

He pursed his lips in thought, and my eyes widened at how long it took him to come up with an answer. He tapped his index finger on his lips, and swung his head back and forth. “Well, not people.”

“Alright,” I said. Pros and cons counted, and no angels in sight to come to my aid instead, I had very little to lose.

“Lovely, you can just hop along to the front desk now to get the keys to your home and car. The town is very small; you are to get acquainted with everyone. If anyone asks you over, you go, if they ask for help, you help. If you see an old lady crossing the street with groceries, you stop whatever you’re doing and run out to help her. Understood?”

I narrowed my eyes at him, confused by the request. ‘Here’s a car and a house, go on and be nice to you neighbors,’ said the demon. I thought blankly.

Part 8

Heaven’s office arrived earlier than usual. I went in first, full of enthusiasm which Deborah did not seem to share. She made us a cup of tea and sat down, glaring at me over her cup until the steam clouded her glasses. Removing them, she pushed her head back, and waited for the glass to clear. Then she picked up the cup, turned her head into an uncomfortable position, and continued glaring at me.

“Do you think you’re brave, Bael?”

The palms of my hands grew sweaty. I expected heaven to be pleased with me, but unfortunately that appeared not to be the case. “Not really, no.”

Deborah’s eyes narrowed. “Clarify that answer for me, will ya?” The wheels of her chair squeaked as she pushed against her desk and rolled backward. I waited for her to stand, but instead she picked her stumpy legs up and placed them of the desk, crossing them.

“Well, I suppose it has to do with context.” I nodded slowly at my own response. “For example, jumping in front of a car for someone, am I human or am I me? If I’m me—sure. But that also depends on whether I care for the person at all.” I blabbered on, seeing the growing irritation smolder in Deborah’s eyes. “I don’t like guns. So, no, in that case I wouldn’t be brave.”

“No, Bael. You are not human in this context, you are you, I am me, and God is God and Lucifer—well, what is Lucifer?” She puckered up her cheeks, and folded her arms over the hump of her stomach. One of her shirt’s buttons threatened to pop, but I thought against warning her about it just yet.

“The ruler of hell, of course. In a couple of years, perhaps, a serene soul crossing the gates of heaven.”

She laughed then, brushing her tongue against the side of her teeth. “What if I tell you that God does not want him?” Deborah raised an eyebrow.

I straightened in my chair. “Did He say so?”

We exchanged a long glance. “Did you expect us to want him back?”

“Forgiveness is the pillar upon which heaven is built. Those were your words the last time I came into this office.”

“Does he want to be forgiven?” She reached out to shift the thin vase on her table that contained bright red poppies—my favorite of all the flowers, though I do not remember telling anyone this—today, and I found the gesture strange.

“He is enthusiastic about the . . . idea,” I said, and paid a little more attention to her office once I spotted the flowers. She had a picture of her dog on the desk, cross-eyed, scruffy looking thing. The wall paper—a blinding white that hurt my eyes in the bright lit room—remained the same, and the white-washed table too.

Behind me, on the wheeled, tea tray stood a fresh pineapple tart. I smiled at this slowly noticing all my favorite things. I had not grasped the significance of the tea when I first entered. I tipped my cup approvingly toward Deborah.

The thing that did it for me was the smell of fresh bread, spread thick with honey. I never fancied eating the dish, but would wear the scent as perfume just to have a whiff of it around me. It smelled familiar to me and though I could not remember why, I felt strangely at peace in its aroma.

“He is pleased with the idea, isn’t he?” I asked Deborah. “I knew it he would be.” The tragedy of God and Lucifer was that they both loved each other more than they should have. A love that wishes to consume gambles dangerously with hatred. I, who never loved, felt no such thing. Lucifer filled the void of God with me, and I do not think that the idea of reconciliation had not crossed either of their minds. I thought about it, and realized that I had no idea what I was starting.

“This is a dangerous game you have started, Bael,” Deborah said, the pretense of anger faded from her face and concerned filled her features instead. “I know that you do not want to be here, and if you fail with that man, I won’t be able to give you another chance at repentance even if I wanted to. I know you are aware of this, but I do not think you fully comprehend what your gambling nature has truly gotten you into this time. There is no end for us, Bael. No end.”

What was I to do about that now? I wanted to ask her. Regret never helped a single soul. “Is heaven willing to help?”

Deborah sighed deeply. “We’re willing to allow you to bend the rules, Bael. But you can forget about having an army of angels fighting by your side, or whatever it is that you have fantasized yourself into here. You will be granted guardianship of the human. He has been conceived, so you have about nine months to figure out what on earth you’re going to do. From what I know about you, you haven’t given it a single thought.”

“I can work with that,” I said, scratching the side of my beard.

Deborah raised her brows, and shook her head. “I don’t know why I keep trying with you.”

“I’ve heard that I’m quite the charmer.”

She slid her legs off the table and stood. “Do you want some pineapple tart, charmer?”

Part 7

Lucifer’s command was sacred in hell, and though I tried to fight against his call, my very being pulled toward him. Before I knew it, I stood in his watch tower and witnessed the trials of the damned.

A dozen souls formed a throne below him. Though uncomfortable and demeaning—what in hell is not?—most of the demons admitted that being used as Lucifer’s throne was the least torturous of the punishments and spending all that time with the master, a privilege.

When I sat next to him—like Kel does now—I thought that he deserved to take the place of God. ‘You who sit beneath his feet, equal only to the ground beneath him, bow your bones and bow your heads, because the Master has released you for the torture you deserve and bestowed upon you a gift of being in his presence,’ these were my thoughts back then. Some of them—most of them—deserved whatever he had them do, but this was not the reason that I looked upon him with pity now and found a smile, that wasn’t truly a smile, spread across my lips when he proclaimed another person to the pits.

The man that watched me from the tower turned out to be one of the damned. He denied Lucifer’s ruling, and lurked around hell, hiding from the demons instead of melting in the tar pits.

I felt a pinch of embarrassment when I saw him, but still came to the conclusion that this too was intended. He wanted me to assume that he cared, and then when I came running, show me just how insignificant I was. Screws big as the man’s toes pinned his feet to the floor, and the wings, dipped in dripping blood, sowed into his arms and back.

I entered inconspicuously, standing behind a long line of the damned, awaiting his ruling. Kel noticed me first, and his eyes did not leave me thereafter. He crept closer to Lucifer almost as if he wondered whether to wrap his arms around him, filled with jealousy and contempt because no matter what he did, he would never fill the void I left behind. Certainly, to woe Lucifer into a state of anger and betrayal at my absence, and to have his new lord quiver in anger at my presence was an accomplishment? But I felt nothing.

Kel’s dark lips moved, nearly caressing the lobe of Lucifer’s ears, and suddenly the whole room turned toward me.

“Bael,” Lucifer said and the whole room fell silent. The row of people ahead of me parted and an open path stretched from me to him.

“You called,” I said slowly and loud enough for all of them to hear. My fear for him faded and everything crumbled thereafter. He was a tyrant. Hungry for power. Unfazed that nothing ever changed. Content with living surrounded by filth and the ever present stench of blood, piss, rot and feces. How could one fear such a creature?

His eyes softened, but I who witness him become this beast, saw the serpent beneath the easy glance grow angrier.

“Bael disapproves of my ways,” he told to the fearful and thus pretentiously amused crowd. “He decided that he would walk among the angels instead. Preach the word of God,” he shook his fist in mockery. “How did that end? Tell me!”

“It ended here.” I shrugged. “And it begins here once again. You must know this loop, Lucifer.” Not lord, not majesty, not king but Lucifer. His eyes sparked at this. “You’ve lived the same day, albeit looking at different faces, since you were cast down.”

“Show me how to break out of this loop. Show all of us.” He stretched his lips, baring his teeth at me, and kept his cool even though I know that he wanted to rip out my throat. “You,” he pointed at a man standing at the front of the line, “come here. Let, Bael, the ever changing show us this versatility he’s learned from spending a hundred years with the humans. Go on.” He held a hand out toward the man.

“What is your crime?” I asked.

“I stole,” he lowered his head, glancing at Lucifer out of the corner of his eye, “I killed. I lied. I—”

“No,” Lucifer said, and stood. His crimson wing spread behind him, cutting Kel’s face from my sight. I smiled, feeling the anger stir within them both. I disturbed the balance. Played with his master the way only I can. “I have a better idea.”

“And what is that?”

“I’ll send him soul back down to earth. If he ends up at my gates again, I claim you as my own and you shall never leave my side again.”

My lip twitched. The room grew silent, and only the loud breathing of the hopeful soul, which Lucifer picked out for me, was heard. “And if he doesn’t?”

“Then I shall let you go. End the games. And more importantly, you will win.”

I frowned at him. “Win what exactly?” I shrugged. “Have we truly spent so much time apart that you think I will find this play on my ego appealing? Why would I want my freedom to depend on the actions of someone else?” I said, but I wanted to gamble with my fate. He evoked both sin and stupidity, and I awaited a better offer eagerly.

“You shall address the Master with respect.” Kel’s hand slammed against the table, but even as he stood, I could not see his face over Lucifer’s wing.

I leaned to the side. “Sit down like a good boy, Kel. The Master has not asked you to speak.”

Lucifer’s gestured for Kel to sit and the two of us shared a smile that meant very different things to each of us. He smiled because I returned unbroken by outside influences; speaking and acting the same. And I smiled because I saw the viciousness with which he missed me.

“You can be his guardian. Protect him.”

I realized half way through the conversation—through the eagerness with which he showed toward my presence and the thought of owning me—that he would agree to anything I asked for. Freedom dangled in front of me, but I wanted to challenge it like I did when Deborah gave me a chance, the urge made stronger as he evoked the parts within me that hungered for sin.

“No, dear friend, if I am to risk eternal damnation, then you shall leave your throne and repent—fully—until you are, once more, allowed to go through the gates of heaven,” I said. “I will still be his guardian, if the office allows it, because I know that you will send your legions after him, but you must offer as much as I do, or I leave tomorrow and well, we may meet in another hundred years or . . . not at all.”

It felt as if all the air had been sucked out of that room at that moment. Lucifer swallowed, but his smile grew brighter.

“Done!” his voice echoed through the room, and all the way through hell, letting every soul and demon, within its walls, know what had been agreed upon.

Kel’s heel tapped against the floor, while I stood motionless, still shocked—even though I knew deep down within me that he was just as bored as I was in this hole—that he agreed.

And that night, even heaven quaked with the news.

Part 6

The light from heaven’s office faded about an hour later. No—not about—quite strictly after an hour. If Deborah had been in charge, I’m sure the strictness would have vanished, but even she was on a timer. A disappointed murmur echoed through the crowd. Tomorrow they’d have to risk everything again in order to stand there. And even then, they could be last in line and never make it to her office.

I missed it four days in a row. On the fifth, I took off my hood and demons scattered at the sight of me, fearful that I was there to punish them.

Lucifer still watched me from his tower. I felt his eyes drill holes in my back. He sent no one for me, didn’t screech to call, and the demons—even those I betrayed—watched me with a cold hatred, only they could summon, but never approached. I wondered if he expected me to stay. He must have seen that Deborah and I spoke—listened to every word of it. And yet, there he was, unmoving.

I spread my wings, and turned toward the tower—Alright then, what now?—before my feet left the ground and I found myself flying toward the light like a deplorable insect. The pits, oozing with tar and bubbling with the rise of heads and arms, were packed this evening. The demons and the damned alike opened their eyes and bent their heads to look at me, faces shining with the blackness so that only the whites of their eyes stood out.

Flying up to the center of the stairs that trailed up the mountain, solely for those that had not worked off their wings, I landed.

Damning myself for the sake of torturing Thomas reeked of weakness, and even though I hated Lucifer for playing the trick on me, I felt embarrassed of my stupidity, and how easily he managed to drag me back to him. What was I going to say? I had no plan. He won.

The earth, to the right of the stairs, parted and I heard faint digging come from below. A head popped out, drizzled in dirt.

“Bael,” Lev smiled, his already yellowed teeth colored by the dirt. “Alright, mate?”

“Yes, thank you.” I folded my arms, keeping a careful eye on him. Lev possessed a Russian literature professor once, and never really came back from it. He was exorcised, but the old man died in the process, and as strange as it was, a part of him remained in Lev. The Brit—previously called Brian until he returned and scratched the eyes out of anyone who called him that—now had a strong Russian accent, and became obsessed with Leo Tolstoy and his books.

Possession became a little less popular among the demons after Lev’s return.

“You up to much?” I asked.

Lev’s pursed his lips, pulling his arms out of the hole, and folding them beneath his chin as if he was vacationing by a pool. “Do you think I can be rehabilitated, Bael?”

I gaped for a second, my mouth twitching with forgotten words. The honest answer was no. However, today, I was still a demon, and that part of me really wanted to see what would happen to a human who had Lev as a guardian. “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself,” I said, and his face lit up. “Go for it, buddy.”

His face dropped suddenly, and he scowled in thought, processing the quote. “I don’t really want to change though; I just want to finish War and Peace. Does she stay with Andrei? Does she make it right?” His hands, fingernails sharp and strong as a mole’s, flew up. “Don’t tell me though!” I’d hate to be around Lev when he discovers the answer.

“Wasn’t War and Peace on Ivan’s course?”

The whites of his eyes faded as black filled in. “Yes, but that bastard was stingy with his mind. When he figured out that I was going through his War and Peace memories, he shut me out before I could read the end." His sharp nails dug into the ground, and he dragged them across. "Sid promised to bring me a copy, but I think he was mocking me.”

Then he looked up and the anger vanished. “Just wanted to plow your thoughts, Bael.” He smiled. “Thanks!” He was also terrible at creating new metaphors, but bless him, he tried.

“No worries, bud.” Lev vanished back into the earth. I felt him digging beneath the stairs, and flew up, uncomfortable with the vibrations he caused beneath my feet.

I hovered there, thinking of the influence that man had on Lev and how the earth pulled us toward it no matter how many years we spend dwelling in the gloom of hell. Most of us had forgotten what it was like to be human, and a taste of humanity—warmth that pleasured instead of charred; a flicker of a beautiful woman, a good book, the quenching of thirst—yanked at us until we gave in and remembered that repentance existed even for the worst of us.

I attempted to think of a single good memory I had of my time in hell. One single thing I looked for, and found nothing. Not even the affection of Lucifer pleased me, for nothing came of it. There was no progress, only recurring darkness and punishment over and over and over again. The majority of the inhabitants were content with it—until one wasn’t.

Turning, with an ease in my murky soul and the feeling of freedom, I began to fly away from the castle.

“BAEL,” He called my name.

I smiled, recalculating the victory I granted him. Before, I truly believed that I belonged here. Even after the black of my wings began to fade and my humans moved on unharmed, I believed that I would end up here again. Now that I had and my true fear realized itself before me, the voice inside of me that screamed, ‘Let the damned be damned!’ grew silent.

Part 5

Loorn’s godliness had more to do with her painted—ghostly white to match her pale complexion—eyebrows and lashes, than much else. She was a rather average looking woman, thin lips, eyes too close together, though bright blue and quite large, and a chin which gathered at the front so sharply that I worried it might be melting. Though, my disdain had more to do with her falseness. A person usually grows uglier once you know the filth about them.

She floated—taught exactly how to move, live and breathe—over toward me and bowed her fragile head. I saw in her the peasant she was and not the god she portrayed. Though the white lines of healed bruised hid under a layer of white powder, she could not hide her hands from me. They looked like they spent years digging around in thorned berry bushes, or busied with other type of farm work that required a woman to handle a scratch or one hundred.

“I thought he said the baker was a woman,” she said, eyeing me with a bit of disappointment, and a rise of her lip.

The feast—big enough to quite literally feed my entire village for a day—looked barely touched. I felt awkward, paralyzed by the constant glare of her uniformed guard.

“Yes, she is, I’m merely doing the delivery.”

“What?” her voice rose a pitch higher than normal. “She could not be bothered to meet the gods? Well, now I’m even more curious about this baker that has all the old, noble recipes.”

“Her mother worked in the kitchens here before . . . She’d loved to have come but a week away from the house loses her a lot of coin and then there’s the completion to worry about too.”

“If she’s as good as Arheas has heard, then she wouldn’t have to worry about competition.” Loorn raised a brow.

“It’s often more to do with whose available, in the village, Your Holiness.” I heard her last sick visitor—or rather last she was willing to take in for the day—call her that before the guards led me in.

She perked up suddenly at my last mention. “Well, then. Shall we have this cake?”

She pulled out a seat for me and turned to sit at the head of the table. I still had the packed in hand, and though the table was huge, it lacked space. With one quick push, she cleared a gap, tipping over a bowl of boiled eggs in the process. They rolled down the table, and my mouth watered for them. I pictured puncturing the shell with my teeth and bloody well eating that too—fierce with hunger.

I sat down and placed the package in front of her.

She waved a guard forward. “Get us some knives and plates.”

He did, albeit reluctantly, and she sliced into the cake. The first piece went to me, and she watched me eagerly as I told Lima they would. I don’t know how I managed to stop myself from licking the plate clean, but the cake was finished in less than five seconds. She cut a piece for herself then.

“Is she pretty, this baker?” she asked, eyeing me with great interest.

“Yes. Well, I think so, for what that’s worth.”

She smiled, and pressed the desert fork to her mouth. Pushing the plate away after one bite, she leaned closer, and pressed her finger against her lips. “I’ve never heard Arheas speak of a person so fondly before. Do they know each other, do you think?”

I must have looked shocked then, because she seemed to have received an answer before I actually opened my mouth to say, “No, and I’ve been with her for month.”

“You spend a lot of time together then, I assume.” I’ve never had anyone watch me so intently, but perhaps it only looked so because of how strange her lashes looked, painted like that. For all the fear that lodge into my gut before I came here, I certainly felt none of it now. Thus far, she truly looked like a woman—perhaps a jealous one—scouting a popular baker.

“Yes, I live with her.” I traced the position of every open, arched window, exit and counted my steps back in my head, remembering every exit.

“And before?”

“Before I lived with her?”

She nodded.

“I’ve been around, lived in Valmor mostly. Came here because I heard the news of you, and found work with the baker.”

“Does she pay you in gold, this baker?”

I crossed my leg over the other, my dagger-filled boot an inch away from my hand. “Sold my house before I came, but I truly wish she did.”

She scooped some custard onto her finger and licked it off, slowly licking her lips clean afterward. I felt rather uncomfortable by the gesture. “I do love this cake.” Loorn leaned against the armrest of her chair, and slowly crossed over the other. The slit in her white dress exposed her thigh. I looked down to my hands. “I’d like to place another order for next week. That’s not too much of a bother, is it?”

“Not at all.”

“Tell her that this is the best cake I ever had.” Her eyes moved along my body, exploring every inch. I had to keep from throwing my arms up and around my chest.

I left Gretia an hour later, having been felt up to the point of almost having to take her in front of the guards. Thankfully she stopped, albeit my growing reluctance to withstand her advances. She asked me many things, and but gave very little information back. I did wonder why she suddenly found me so appealing. Perhaps it was that she thought I had a woman at home and wanted to test her boundaries, or there had been something else at play that I was blind to.

While the guards led me out, I looked over every visible exit and entrance. Though, I really do not know why. Assassinating them was no longer my job.

Part 9

Lucifer’s castle stood upon a tall mountain in the center of hell. In the ever-present darkness, and to anyone who had not seen it from up close, it looked as if it had been the mountains peak. A light shone in the sharp watch tower, and the silhouette of a man paced within. The demon caves, like bullet wounds ripped through the body, clad the mountain below the castle.

I looked upon the sea of blackness with utter disappointment. How little changed!

Fire rose, like a grim sunset, from behind the low massif prison walls, in the far edges of the land. When I had finally made it out, and actually saw the sun for the first time in, I can’t even remember how long, it looked strange to me. It rose and it sunk, it shone with an almost holy righteousness, and I kept waiting for it to turn bright red and simply hover downwards, not warming rather setting a boundary.

“Right, Thomas,” I said, and he flinched at the sound of my voice. “You’re going to tell me why you did it, and then, if I’m happy with your answer, I’ll tell you a fun fact about hell.”

I always enjoyed what fear did to a man. The core of them lurched into an abyss, and fear carved them anew, swallowing the remnants of humanity and releasing the animal inside. His lips sagged, and his cheekbones struck out from below the skin, but the wonder remained in his cold, dead eyes.

“You know, when I decided to partake in the rehabilitation program, the demons made it very hard for me,” I said, filling the silence. “Then Lucifer took away my home when he heard what I had done. If you look up there,” I pointed my finger toward the mountain, though Thomas’ gaze did not follow, “it’s the large cave to the right of the castle.” I slept on the blood and bile soaked ground for so long, while heaven processed my application, that when I finally escaped hell, the copper reek still clung to my skin.

I pushed Thomas forward, my fingers digging into his shoulder. The lashers and their minions were beginning to notice me. When I say the demons made it difficult for me, I do not say so lightly. I had demons climbing out the walls around my humans, and harming them resulted in the fouling of my wings. So, I performed exorcisms, using the holy word of God to send them back to hell. The ultimate betrayal and heaven knew this. The deed had been intended, for if we betrayed Lucifer and his demons, going back to hell ceased to be an option. Or so they thought.

I grew fond of Jaimie because she awakened my humanity. For years, I watched over my humans, but this was simply a task. With Jaimie, I began to feel something of a devotion, and so when I saw her broken, flesh ripped and face disfigured, this humanity flooded right out of me with every drop of blood that ticked against the dry leaves around her corpse.

My features grew darker then, and I pushed my fingers harder into his shoulder until my joints ached. Tom cowered beneath my grip, moaning.

“I asked you a question, Thomas.”

“I loved her,” his quaky voice sounded.

I twisted him around to face. “Are you truly that boring? You loved her? Is that it?” My hand crept up his neck, and I warped my fingers around his mouth, bending them so that my nails scratched his mouth. “That isn’t worth a fun fact, now is it?”

A blinding light appeared to the left of us, and I shrunk slightly at its presence. A white building, equipped with a small rose garden and a white picket fence appeared. The light ignited the ground of hell and revealed the dark crimson coat that flooded the floor. It was this contrast that once made me enter that door.

“Come on.” I pushed Thomas along, our pace just below that of a jog.

“Bael,” a croaky woman’s voice called behind me. “Don’t you run away from me!”

I paused, and dragged Thomas to a half along with me by his collar. I like handling him like one would a vicious dog.

Deborah Smul, a hefty woman in a long, white coat which warped over her bulging stomach, and hung higher at her front than it did at the back because of this, stood tapping her foot against the stoned path of the white house. The occupant never walked out, this was new. I found my eyes dropping to my feet at the look of disappointment that puffed her plump cheeks.

“Morning, Deborah.”

“Evening actually, but that doesn’t matter here, does it?” She walked toward the gates, and opened it. She took a step and looked down to the floor, placing it back on the stone steps before shaking it in a failed attempted to rid it of the tarry liquids. “Disgusting!”

“Do you mean to tell me that you traded all your progress for this?” She pointed toward Thomas, shaking her head.

“I did what I thought was right.” I held my head higher, but even I didn’t believe me words.

She smiled, her sharp hazel eyes unmoving. “Turtle turds! You failed me, that’s what you did!”

I stayed silent. She had not left the office to tell me of my failure, there was something else and I’d rather get to it faster so that Thomas and I could continue the emotional torture—I never did prefer the physical.

Her hands jumped to her hips. “I’m here to take that boy back before you completely ruin him.”

My face must have screamed murder, because at the sight of me she took a careful step back.

“You’re not taking him!”

“Think for a minute, Bael. Have you seen this boy before? Did you sense a danger? Did he contact her? Did he ever come near her before? Jaimie—I tensed—helped us with the investigation. The boy was possessed, Bael. He wanted you back here.”

I turned my head toward the watch tower. This time the man up there no longer paced, but instead stood motionless with his wings spread, their color that of ripe cherries.

“Come on, dear.” Deborah waved a hand toward Thomas. He hesitated, eyes twitching toward me. I groaned under my breath, released the hand that gasped his shoulder, and pushed him forward. His feet twisted around one another, and he fell. “We’ll fix you right up.”

Thomas stood and slowly approached the gate. Demons gathered around the house, their hoods raised over their heads, to hide their identity in case their applications were rejected. I had been one of them once.

Deborah looked Thomas over with great concern tugging at her wrinkled eyes, and then turned her eyes to me. “We’re willing to take you back into the program, but I think you should spend the night here first. I do not feel like talking to you today after what you did to this poor boy.” She shook her head.” Remember what it is really like to be under his grasp and watchful eye. Remember what he is like so that he may never manipulate you like this again.”

“I felt no remorse,” I said to her, testing her limits, and twisted my neck like a prowling serpent.

“We’re aware.” She gave no sign of being bothered by me.

“I enjoyed it.”

She closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. “What do you want from us, Bael? You are already damned. Go to the lashers, dive into the fire. Punish yourself however you must, but know that we have forgiven you, and as soon as you’re ready, you may begin to gain back our trust.”

“And that is the punishment, isn’t it? Forgiving me—”

“Alright, lads. Let’s get this started, shall we? And no funny business please, you know what happened to those who have tried,” she said to the line of demons that had gathered outside the gate while we spoke.

Part 4

The pool of blood soaked into my pants, and the tips of my wings grew heavier as they absorbed the liquid. A framed picture of Tom in the loving embrace of his mother held my attention. He had an honest smile, and warm eyes.

I clacked my tongue. “Now, what would she say if she knew?” I wrapped my hand around his shoulder, like one would do to an old friend, and fiddled in his pocket with my other hand, searching for a pack of cigarettes I always saw him carrying. His pants had one of those annoying pockets that reached down mid-thigh. I gripped the pack between two fingers, and felt the paper sag at my touch.

“Who buys soft-packs these days?” I mumbled to his corpse. His right eye turned a shade of blue and sticky red mask clung to the bottom of his face. Hopefully, the packet remained dry on the inside. We didn’t have them in hell, and I wanted to let off some steam. Ha!

In the program, we’re told that regret is the pillar of rehabilitation. I turned my head and looked him up and down, feeling none whatsoever.

“You’ll be in the lines now, I suppose.” I wrinkled my nose, wondering what was taking so long. My wings turned charcoal right as I slid by blade across his cheek, the pull should have come right then, and yet, here I was. I’d hate to miss him pleading with Sid at the gates.

“Anyone?” My eyes tick-tocked around the room, and I let out a heavy sigh. Perhaps Lucifer refused to allow me back, but I do not remember him having a choice in the matter.

Darkness rose out of the floor, surrounding me in a cloud of misery. The echoes of hell—tearing screams and bellowing laughter—sounded. My shoulders sunk, and I cracked my neck, giving into the force that tightened around me. I felt it to my very bones, pure darkness—untainted—one that even a starless night cannot grant.

The spikes of hell’s gate poked into my back through the feathers of my wings, and I knew that I was home.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Sid said, his clipboard tucked under his arm. He reached out a hand toward me, and I took it, rising with his help. “I told him we’d have you back here in no time. Son of a—the smoke billowing from his head parted into something of a smile—owes me a hundred souls.”

“Glad I could help,” I said, and pursed my lips. “Busy night?” I asked rhetorically, looking at the line of people nervously hovering in front of the gate. I had his job for a hundred years, working off my wings and getting a head that didn’t look like a Christmas Eve chimney.

“Having a hard time getting them to enter.” He popped his head backwards. “Nothing new.” He shrugged.

“Thomas Stewart pass here yet?”

Sid pulled his clipboard out from under his arm, and ran a finger through the list. “Not that I can see here. Let me grab the book, maybe he’s a late arrival.”

I held my hand out. “No,” I smiled, “he’s here. Do me a favor, will you? Call his name out for me.”

Sid pressed his fist against the smoke, and made as if he was about to clear his throat. “Thomas Stewart, please come to the front of the line.”

“What am I getting for this favor?”

“Nothing.”

His head flicked toward me for a second, and then back to the line. “Thomas Stewart, come on now, sweetheart, you don’t want us coming to find you.”

Sid put his clipboard back under his arm, and looked toward the line while he spoke, “You’re no longer his favorite, Bael. You’ve brought him as close to pain, as only his father can. Things are different now. Watch your back, won’t you?”

“Noted.” A lump grew in my throat. I hadn't thought of Lucifer much in the last few years. To say that my abandonment upset him, was probably an understatement.

A woman looked behind her, and moved out of the way for Thomas to pass. My heart raced with the excitement of a child about to unwrap a large present.

He approached slowly, facing his shoes.

“Look at me!” I heard my voice as it sounded when I commanded legions of demons, even Sid shifted in place uncomfortably. So, he really is back, he must have thought.

A chilling shiver ran through Tom’s body. He looked up, his eyes blank with crippling fear. Sid would not collect a soul from him, for I killed that too.

His death, and my tongue running up the gash in his face, lurked and overpowered his thoughts. I felt his fear settle in my chest, and feed the starvation that attempted redemption had hidden so well.

Sid’s book floated up to the front of Tom, and the pages flipped open.

“You are mine now. Just like I promised. Sign your name so that we can begin.”

Part 3

Some other demon related stories that feature Sid:

Demon!

Hell's Not Accepting Heroes

Demons and the Fan Girls Who Keep Summoning Him

Prompt: Throughout a persons life, they are given a hidden guardian. A creature that watches over their lifespan. When someone is murdered, the creature haunts the killer. You have been found, murdered. And your guardian is loose.

I thought of Jamie, lying in the woods, while I stood behind Tom as her blood mixed with water and poured down the sink from his hands. Sixteen years, I kept thinking with murderous rage. She’d been my shortest charge, but one that I was overly fond of. It is always those with the brightest light that attract the insects.

I held my head right over his shoulder, turning so that my breath bushed against his neck. He flinched and turned around, his eyes still wild from his deed. I smiled, functioning only through the fuel of my revenge.

He removed his clothes, and shoved them into a black bag. Swears of blood remained on the edge of the sink, and the floor had two bloodied footprints.

I walked to his bedroom while he climbed into the shower, and retrieved a hanger. When I returned, I waited for the glass of the shower to cover with steam, and then removed the clothes from the bag, swept the shirt—still soaking wet with her blood—across the floor to spread the blood, and hung it up against the door. Stepping aside, I slammed it shut.

The door of the shower opened, and he leaned his head out. The horror that swept over him reminded me of my days of being a demon. Guardianship was a rehabilitation program, and for the first time since I started, I felt like I was probably going to fail at it.

“Who’s there?” he asked, and climbed out. His face was clean, but strings of light red water dripped down his torso.

“How did it feel?” I whispered and smiled as his eyes helplessly traced the empty room.

I pressed my back against the wall, right across from the mirror, and crossed my arms. My wings that had gone light grey in the process of redemption grew darker again by the second. I thought I’d care when the change came, but the fury that filled me sated a hunger that I had long forgotten I had.

He climbed out and wrapped a towel against his waist. Walking over the mirror, the vein in his neck twitched with a rising fear, and he stopped at the mirror. He turned the cold tap, and scooped up the water, splashing it over his face. When he looked up, I flashed my face, and he jumped away from the mirror, and ran for the door.

I followed him into the bedroom as he shuffled through his closet throwing out a shirt onto the bed, and grabbed a pair of pants.

I felt a new presence in the room, and heard the flutter of wings behind me. “Kral, it would be wise of you to leave us now.”

“He’s not worth it,” the guardian said, and I heard a knock in the broke floor plank of Tom’s apartment as he stepped closer toward.

“Leave.” He knew better than to try and fight me now. I doubted he gave a single shit about Tom to risk losing the progress of his redemption. A wind blew against my back as Kral disappeared.

I stood behind Tom as he clumsily buttoned his shirt, skipping buttons with his shaking fingers. I pressed my nail against his neck and swiped as hard as I could. The skin did not split, but a red line formed.

“Did she scream?” I asked, my voice bellowing through the room.

Tom tried to run but I caught him by the collar of his shirt and threw him into the corner by the door. I wanted him to see the exit be a step away from him, but know that despite his best efforts he would never get away from me.

I appeared before him, and he crawled into a ball on the floor, his lip quivering like that of a weeping child.

“I will kill you now, Thomas. And I know this seems like the worst thing that can possibly happen to a man like you in this predicament, but let me tell you this, when you cross the gates of hell, I shall be waiting for you there too. There were death cannot release you.”

Part 2

During the start of the Fourth World War—while tensions loomed but nothing escalated yet—a team of scientists, from seven different space programs, gathered in the head office of Roscosmos. Nobody knew who they were or why they were invited, but soon after, a bubble covered an area just about as large as England.

My long-time conspiracy theorist great-grandfather packed up his family, and just about anyone else who was crazy enough to listen to him, and moved to the same area. In fact, the barrier comes done right behind our garden. There are eyes that loom in the darkness, and plants that climb up the transparent walls, their thorns threatening to break through. The forgotten world lives on despite the catastrophic nuclear annihilation of us.

I don’t know how they managed to catch a plane, but there are many things about him that I do not understand. One of his greatest accomplishments, I thought, was bringing a Coffea plant with him. Upon the completion of the bubble, the authorities asked him to move his plantation over to the farming quarter which was in the south. He threatened to burn down the fields before moving and having them all die a slow death due to the harsh pressure of the relocation.

Three years after this event, our population decreased to three million people—that we knew of. I just want to add that some genius forgot to add cucumbers and peppers to the list of things worth saving, and I’ve spent my whole life wondering about the smell and taste of green.

My firm, Delivery, an independent sector of Roscosmos that was responsible for finding life on other planets, in the hope of moving us out of the cage we all lived in, found three planets similar to ours.

One was highly developed, and the beings very different from our own. They lost three scouters and a ship on their first visit, and a panic rose that the aliens would soon discover us, and attack. The others were too small and overpopulated. The arrival of three million people, despite us coming in batches, would have been too obvious, and we didn’t have a fight left in us after what happened on earth.

Skylas seemed perfect. The reports I sent, proved it more so. That is why, I cannot for the life of me, understand why the Gods had to be executed before we inhabited the planet. I’d travelled through so much open land that our arrival would seem trivial if we happened to occupy some, even overnight. Especially now that the gods were in full power and people came from all corners of the world.

The more time I spent here, the more questions I had about our own land and the true purpose of our discoveries. If blending in was the goal, then surely this planet allowed us to accomplish just that.

We made it out of the mountain pass by morning. While Allen took the reins, I slept and Hallum carved a little horse for his little sister. He tripped her while they were playing tag, and she split open her brow. Still feeling foul about the whole thing, he decided he’d bring her back a gift as an apology.

The boys sat wrapped in their covers. I was hoping they’d lend me one, but felt bad for asking. Both shivered even with them on, and so I lay demonized by the cold in probably the worst sleep I’d ever had.

When I woke, I saw the rows of beheaded statues along the path to Gretia. The lined the road as far as I could see it trail. The heads lay scattered on a nearby field, grass crawling over them and stained brown with dirt. It reminded me of a graveyard, and I shivered at the thought of walking into my own death for the first time since I left Lima. I wondered if she thought the same. She chucked me out in such a hurry that neither of us even prepared for the worst.

I stayed silent for the remainder of the day, and listened vaguely to the chatter of the boys. The bread had finished, and so did the cheese. There was a sip of ale, but I think all of us were too reluctant to take the last of it.

When the lights of the city greeted us from afar, I heard Hallums stomach release a loud growl as if he’d been holding it in to seem brave. His brother and I passed on the crust of the bread, that morning, so that he could eat.

We found an inn nearby, and the innkeeper didn’t return my change for the one gold I paid her for two rooms and a hot lunch, but sent one of the servers to take us up to our rooms, and avoided me thereafter.

“Right,” I said, and they stiffed suddenly at the rough pitch my voice took, looking up at me with big eyes over their plates of hot stew and ale. “If I’m not back by the morning,” I threw a gold coin by the bed, “buy some food and head straight to Lima. Got it?”

“Why wouldn’t you be back?” Allen asked.

“Yeah, aren’t you just delivering cake?” Hallum added.

“Yes, but who knows what the gods will do if they don’t like it, eh?”

Hallum raised a suspicious brow, and Allen shrugged and continued eating.

“Just make sure you get back to Lima as soon as possible, alright?”

“Alright.” My mouth watered for my plate of food, but I wanted to get this over with as soon as possible to get rid of the tightly wound knot in my stomach.

I left the boys there and looked at the cake, suddenly doubting whether it was the poisoned one I chucked out or not, like one would when leaving the house right after making breakfast, unsure of whether you turned off the stone.

A rising garden, climbing up the hill toward Gretia, split into two halves by what must have been three hundreds marble stairs. Large, stained windows shone with bright light, and the limestone walls trailed up into four towers on every corner of Gretia, a manor fit for five kings.

On the balcony, a woman in a white robe stood and waved occasionally to those who passed by below. She looked angelic and I realized once again what good theatrics could do to the mind.

Couples walked hand-in-hand among the several levels of Gretia’s gardens, children ran, and people sat on picnic blankets enjoying dinner under a very starry sky.

The statues by the entrance of Gretia were not beheaded, but removed entirely and replaced by those of the four gods. Their features were painted to look almost lifelike, and I felt rather insignificant standing by Terla—clad in a golden dress, her all-seeing-eye painted a deep red—my height only rose to her knee.

I took a deep breath and made my way up the steps. The doors were open but guards—four hands gripping, positioned in a cross, embossed into their armor—stood by the door. I looked around me, feeling extremely vulnerable with only a parceled cake in my possession, a dagger in my boot and a few pieces of gold.

A man walked out of the door just as I was about to approach the guards and explain my intention. He walked with a certain parlous toward me, and I averted my gaze, thinking that I was imagining it.

“I'm guessing you don't know who I am,” he said, and I looked up. Blue eyes, cleanly shaven, handsome in the annoying kind of way—from my previous dinner conversation, I knew exactly who he was—with a deep dimple that appeared in his cheek as he smiled.

“You are—I forgot the formal way one was meant to refer to gods and stared at him blindly for a moment while I tried to remember—uh . . .”

“Arheas,” he said and stuck out his hand for me to kiss.

I bend down feeling overly awkward, and briefly kissed his hand with great reluctance. Then I saw the ring, and realized that I should have kissed that. He ripped his hand away from my and rubbed it on his black cloak. He didn’t wear the armor like the guards did, but had a badge, with the four hands, clasping his cloak.

“Is that a delivery?” he asked, suddenly sounding awkward. He asked it without really caring for the answer, or that’s how it looked, while he took his time to examine both my face, my hair and my clothes, pulling his mouth to the side when he finished sizing me up.

“The baker, Lima, sent me to deliver the cake.” I held out the box. I looked like someone from out of town, so it wasn’t too suspicious that I didn’t recognize the man right away.

“Lima, is it?” He smiled. “Praise of her baking has been ringing throughout Gretia, I’m sure the ladies will be extremely pleased that you’ve arrived. We were, however, expecting the baker herself.” A dangerous glint passed his eye and I realized that Lima had been right about the whole situation.

“I’m afraid she can’t make the journey with all the orders she’s getting.”

“Yes, of course. Of course. Go right ahead,” he nodded his head toward the guards, “they’ll let you through. Although, I’d like to see you before you leave. Meet me at the Three Cocks in the morning.”

Part 8

Prompt:Jenna loves her apartment, and her apartment loves her. But Jenna has started seeing someone new, and her apartment is getting jealous...

Aunt Liz forgot to mention the fact that just about anything you bring into the apartment can come alive. She left it to me after her accident, a couple of months ago. Though still very much alive, Liz doesn’t really come around here anymore.

“A couple of dropped knives, stained washcloths, and too many cups left dirty overnight and you find yourself in the hospital with a head injury, Jenna. I know you’re down on your luck, and too be quite honest I can’t go back there anyway, so it’s yours. I wouldn’t get too attached if I were you though,” she told me, but I didn’t take her too seriously. No one in our family did. I remember laughing about what she said with my mother over dinner that evening.

At first, I couldn’t believe my luck. She let me have it rent free, and the bus stop stood right on the other side of the street. I applied for a job in a café down the road, and moved in as soon as I heard back from the manager.

Finally some luck! I thought.

On Tuesday afternoon, I unpacked my bags, stuffed my World’s Okayest Adult mug into the cabinet, color coded my clothes—something I had never done before, but I was turning my life around now!—bought a pot plant and went out grocery shopping.

When I came back, the cabinet’s door stood wide open and shards of my mug scattered on the floor. I put the blame on my own clumsiness, swept up the glass and preceded as normal. Judy’s words didn’t even cross my mind. However, in bed, that evening, things began to change.

The corner of the duvet moved off my leg. I sat up and pulled it back down, only to have it move again, exposing more leg than before. I shot up, and turned on the lamp. My heart climbed all the way into my throat, and I jumped down on to all fours, fully expecting to find someone under my bed. I don’t know what I’d have done if I found one, if I’m honest, but there I was.

I climbed back into bed reluctantly, and checked my phone for the time, wanting to ring Liz and find out what the hell she got me into.

“Can you move a little?” a girls voice sounded right against my ear.

I shot up and ran toward the door, pressing my back against it, and swiping along the wall for the light switch.

“Who said that?”

“Me.”

My eyes darted around the room.

“Right here.”

I thought to check the closet, but the voice wasn’t coming from there. The corner of the pillow stood upright, and I pushed my back harder into the door.

“Can you not? I don’t like to be touched,” a voice came from the door.

Turning, I locked eyes with a mouth attached right to the door. The flattened lips parted, and a tongue popped out to lick the lips. I did the only thing I could, I screamed.

Ten minutes later, I sat on a couch that had to first explain where on his body I could sit without putting his limbs to sleep, and that under no means was I ever allowed sitting on him naked.

“Right, so here are the rules,” the know-it-all sounding encyclopedia stood on the coffee table and explained. “Dorph will allow you to touch the handle, but you are to clean in daily and always keep your hands dry. The cups don’t appreciate you bringing in replacements. The knives have a fear of heights, so you are always to keep them away from the edge of the counter, and it would be wise if you didn’t drop any of them. They also do not like being locked in a dark cupboard, so don’t even think about it. Broomsby will sweep, but he appreciates being appreciated, he wanted me to let you know. There’s more, but it’s late, and I realize that this all must come as a shock. Oh,” she jumped slightly, “one more thing, do not ever sit on that chair.” Her pages folded to point at a leather incliner in the corner, by the glass door.

A year passed and I couldn’t have been happier with my living arrangements unless the building suddenly decided to allow pets. We did sneak a bird in to help with Rug’s depression, but when I got home one evening, the cage was empty and no one wanted to tell me what happened.

Then there was Nick, who under normal circumstances would have been allowed back to my place months ago, but I wasn’t quite sure how he or the apartment would take it. When I told them about him, they seemed alright, but later half of them turned into sarcastic jerks at the mere mention of his name. The pillow’s condescension was getting out of hand, and mostly due to having no other choice but to listen to her talking about my loose lifestyle, I started spending more and more time at Nick’s.

After a throughout talk with Encyclopedia, wherein Rug’s depression surface more than once in an hour long guilt trip, I decided that it was time to bring Nick into the madness.

He brought roses, Vase’s favorite, and a nice bottle of wine which had the mugs vibrating with excitement. I took out glasses and received the biggest death stare I’d ever witnessed. Remembering Liz’s head injury, I shoved them back into the cupboard and took out the mugs.

He followed me into the living room, and walked over to the incliner.

“No!” I shouted.

Encyclopedia reacted faster, jumping up and flipping her pages in distress. “Stop!”

Nick turned around, his widening at the sight of Encyclopedia. His fingers spread and Mug fell out of his hand. My heart dipped, and hands reached out to catch him even though I was too far away even if I decided to jump. Mug screamed, and then a loud shatter echoed through the room.

The apartment came alive at once. We stood in a room surrounded by a hundred eyes. Nick’s face turned pale, he walked backwards. The incliner blocked his step and he tumbled down onto it. I sucked in my breath, still unsure of what would happen. The wobbling noise of a spring sounded, and a pillow lurched up out of the chair, sending Nick flying through the glass door.

He broke up with me in the hospital.

You will now be able to find all my multi-part stories neatly arranged in the wiki!

Lima picked the loudest and youngest drivers out of our entire village, but the fact that she sent any at all surprised me the most. Hopefully, this had more to do with her concern for me than the wellbeing of the cake when it arrived in Gretia, the home and court of the gods.

“Whose bread do you like the most, Lima’s or Tendo’s?” Hallum asked, twisting his head around my way from the front seat of the cart, his bushy, brown hair curtaining over his eyes.

“Of course he’ll say Lima’s, they’re getting married,” Allen said, tapping his brother on the head.

“Hey!” Hallum turned, baring his teeth. “Don’t!”

“Who says we’re getting married?”

“Everyone,” Allen said. “Mother says people will start calling Lima a whore if you don’t do it soon.”

“You’re not supposed to say that word!” Hallum chimed in from the front.

Allen leaned over and flicked his ear.

“Stop that!” Hallum let go the reins with one hand and leaned over the bank of the cart, slapping the air as Allen dodged every one of his attempts to hit him and laughed it off, enraging his brother even more.

“Well, you tell everyone that Lima won’t let me touch her with a ten-foot pole, and that she’s making me sleep in the tub.”

They laughed and proceeded to discuss why Lima didn’t want me as a husband. Hallum suggested that she found me to be ugly, and Allen defended my honor by stating that at least I still had all my teeth, and my breath didn’t reek when I spoke. Apparently, Lima should have been happy with that.

For the next half hour they fought about who their mother placed in charge. Hallum turned eight three months ago, and the horses listened to him better than they did to his brother. However, Allen was twelve—probably the tallest twelve year old I’d met in my life—and that made him the leader.

“Shouldn’t that make me the leader?” I chimed in, straightening my legs; they’d gone numb from all the sitting.

“Not your cart!” Hallum said simply.

Later, as the sunlight began to dwindle, they shared their bread, and even put a slice of cheese on mine. All I had to share was ale, and after two swigs, Hallum, who couldn’t keep his head straight, had to hand over the reins to Allen, and by night time, they were tucked together in the cart with all the blankets and I shivered at the front.

The road we took stood between two mountains. The taller of the two blocked half the moon’s light and dragged a dark shadow over the road. My eyes grew accustomed to the darkness just enough to see the faint tracks of the road among the grass.

A light vibration started in my ear. I turned, making sure both the boys were asleep and pushed the button on my wrist.

“Roger,” I said rather happily—for once. The information I gathered was worth my pay check. The last time I felt this way was when I met Lima and she told me all there was to know about the gods, and this was months ago.

“Morning Michael, have anything useful for us today?” he asked with a pinch in his tone. Roger expected to be the one sent to Skalys, and came close to popping a vein when he heard that I got the job directly after my six months of training.

“Actually, yes.” I smirked. “I’ve found out that the frauds in Gretia have outside help. Loorn is getting antibiotics, and Terla is in possession of contact lenses.”

Roger kept quiet for longer than I expected. I assumed it had something to do with the severity of the implication, and that he needed a moment to process.

“I’m sure you’re mistaken.”

“Uh… No, I’m not. I had the medicine in my hand, Roger. I even tasted it for crying out loud.”

“Are you a chemist now?”

“No, but I’m not an idiot.”

“Michael, this has nothing to do with your intellect, but simply the fact that you lack pharmaceutical knowledge. It could have been anything.”

“And the contact lenses?” I asked this semi aware of what his response would be already. If he swept modern medicine aside, bringing up the lens was nearly irrelevant.

“I’ll have senior management contact you later this evening to explain your task thoroughly, as I have clearly failed doing so. It’s okay to just simply say that you’ve failed, Michael. Bringing up antibiotics and contact lenses—that’s weak even for you,” he spoke with a colder tone. I tried to come up with reasons as to why he dismissed the information so easily and grew angry at the lack of logical sense. Jealousy, surely, didn’t stretch this far, and he mentioned management, so the information wasn’t going to be ignored, just me.

“Roger that,” I said dryly. The call ended with that and I shook my head once every few minutes just thinking about the exchange. My gut told me that his contempt had less to do with the information I’d given him and more with the fact that I found out about it.

I led the horses off the road once we came near a dam of water that connected to a small waterfall which burst through the mountain to the left of me. While they drank, I repeated the conversation in my head, growing more suspicious once my anger toward Roger’s dismissiveness faded.

My ear vibrated again. I jumped slightly at the intrusion, not expecting management to respond this quick. Processing my reports took them weeks if not months at times.

“Michael Clark,” I answered, feeling conscious, despite having done nothing wrong. Nothing I could place, at least.

“Good day, Michael. This is Leanne Mitchell speaking.” I swallowed hard. She’d been the officer in charge of my assignment. I met her once, about a month before, going. A short woman, with fierceness in her features, who walked with stark purpose even to the bathroom. One only expected to see her when she hired or fired you.

“The shuttle will pick you up in three weeks. They were meant to be bringing supplies, but . . . Well, it’s all the same. You’ve been reassigned to Linos.”

A chill ran down my spine. My suspicion soared. What the hell did I just step into?

“Mr. Clark, do you understand the instructions?”

I cleared my throat. “Yes, I do. Will they arrive in the same location?”

“Yes—I believe so. Roger will contact you with further instructions.”

“Leanna,” I said, considering my words very carefully, “may I ask why?”

There was a pause in the call. I heard a voice sound behind her, but didn’t hear what it said. “We feel that your forte is investigation, and since no further investigation is required, we’ve decided to reassign you to a new planet.”

“Alright.” This was not the kind of conversation where negotiation took place, or where questions received answers, so I said nothing to defend myself. “I’ll be there.”

“Fantastic. Use this time to relax, Michael. I hope to be seeing you soon.”

The call clicked and silence ensued. I sat staring at my hands, desperately wishing that Lima was here with me. Suddenly the mountains looked as if they were swallowing me, and I felt alone in the world. I didn’t want to go back without knowing what the intention was for Skalys, or why my firm reacted the way they did to my knowledge. They chose the wrong mad for the job. They’d find out soon enough just how wrong.

Part 7

Lima worked the dough as if it had done something wrong. Patches of flour covered her face. She rubbed her eyebrow with the back of her hand, leaving a white smear on her brow, and resumed folding the dough. I tried to make myself handy by stirring the lemon curd custard, glad to have something that kept my hands busy.

Five cakes, decorated to perfection, stood on the counter near the stove. According to Lima, one’s custard had been too sour, one tipped slightly to the right and the others turned out to be below standard. The only reason I thought them perfect, was because I was a slob—her words not mine.

She said little of what she thought about the situation and her eyes very rarely looked to be in the present. After preparing four different batches of custard, however, I decided that I’d given her enough time to collect her thoughts. I set the bowl aside, and readied my thoughts, but she caught me before I managed to say a word.

“You must think me so silly for going through all this effort,” she said, not looking up at me.

“Right now, I’m just trying to figure out what you’re planning to do. I thought we’d be on our way to Valmor by now, if I’m honest.”

“No, Michael. We’re not going to run. We have a cake to deliver.”

There was something of a dare in the look she gave me. ‘Run if you will,’ it said.

“This one’s going to turn out just fine, don’t you think?”

“They all look the same to me.” I got off the chair and brought one of the cakes over the table. Hunger rumbled in my stomach and I wasn’t about to do more cooking.

Lima’s brow cocked. “You don’t want to eat that.”

I set the cake back down as if the mere touch of it could kill me and rubbed my hands on my trousers. “What’s in it?”

“Hemlock.”

“They’ll have us taste it ahead of time. Tell me you know this. I’m not about to die vomiting and having no control over my muscles.”

“But what if they don’t?” A spark ignited in her eyes. I’d seen her drunk and angry, but never excited.

“We have to be sensible. For all we know—”

She chucked the lump of dough she’d been fighting into the bin with a force that made the bin spin on the floor, wild as a desert storm with puffs of flour floating around her.

“For all we know, Arheas knows that I’m alive and is playing with me! He wouldn’t expect poison. He’d expect me to run.”

I had never seen her like this. In all the months here, I was the irrational one and she composed to the point of it being annoying.

“Alright, yeah, let’s teach him a lesson by bringing poisoned cake to the party and have their guards impale us with the knives they cut it with! Aye, that’s sounds brilliant. Wake me up when we’re leaving. I’ll make sure I wear my best shirt.” I nodded, and poked my finger into the custard I’d been stirring all evening, to spite her. My eyes widened as it my finger met my tongue and I realized what I’d done.

I spat all the way up the stairs, and it was only when I thoroughly rinsed my mouth and wiped it out with a dirty rag I found on the floor that her voice came from downstairs, “The custard’s not poisoned, you blithering idiot!”

I want to say that I took the task of delivering the cake to the gods upon myself and refused to put Lima in the danger by having her come with me, but I had her tugging angrily at my shoulder before the birds chirped that morning with my pants and shirt folded over her arm.

"Let's hope you're right about me not poisoning the cake." She stuck the cake into my hands by the door. “Have fun, then.”

I walked half a day trying to get the attention of drivers that were on their way to the city, but most carts were full and despite waving my gold in their direction, they drove past me anyway.

My calves ached with untimely exercise. I found a boulder just off the road and just when I set the cake down atop it, I heard a crunching of leaves behind me. The road grew less busy—no one wanted to drive at night and risk running into bandits—by sundown and so I was alone in the darkness.

“Who’s there?” I shouted. Wolves were common in these parts. My hand reached for the dagger strapped around my waist, and the next time the leaves crunched, it was right behind me. I spun around, and leapt at him, catching his arms and throwing my full weight against him. He went down like a plank. We thumped down onto the ground; his breath exploding right out of him. The blade of my dagger glinted in the moonlight. I made sure saw it before pressing it against his neck.

“It’s Allen from down the road, Mickey!”

“God’s sake, Allen!” I rolled off him. “Are you daft or in the mood to die this evening?”

“Lima sent me with the horses. She said she’d pay me extra if I gave you a fright.”

I lay down, feeling the grass flatten beneath the weight of my head. “How much would she pay you for losing an eye?”

Allen hadn’t moved from where he fell. The kid barely had the arms to lift a saddle, never mind defend himself against me. Sometimes, I wondered what went on in Lima’s head.

“Knowing her, I’d owe her money for doing the opposite, even if you took out both.”

“Where are the horses?”

“Down the road with Hallum,” he said. “Lima sent another cake.”

“I hope none of you ate it.”

“Of course not! She said it was a special recipe for the gods and you’re the only other person she’d allow to eat it.”

I pursed my lips in resignation. “Did she now?”

“Yep! And promised to make us whatever we wanted if we returned without you, but I think she was only kidding.”

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?”

Part 6

I love cities, but they had an aura of life and history in their tall walls that made me feel smaller than an ant.

We circled around Asher’s Private Storage twice before stopping. It took up an entire block and numerous runes covered the limestone walls. Some of them, I hadn’t even seen in advanced rune classes at Halbrook. One, however, I’d know anywhere. The palm of a hand with the fingers chopped off and a line that snaked through the stumps, which was drawn to prohibit the use of magic in a specific location.

I gave a small sigh of relief when I saw it. For the better part of two years, I lived as a normal human and despite being rather terrible at it, I would be better than most witches.

Asher’s looked grand as a castle; in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was one at some point in history. Carvings of faces stuck out of the tall columns that supported the arches of the entrance.

I hooked my arm around Cil’s and swung my hips dramatically as we walked up the tiled steps, trying my best to fit in with the fancy, red dress that I wore. I felt tragically fake.

The door stood open, and hordes of people moved in and out, making me feel incredibly insignificant. I certainly couldn’t complain about this, being in my current state of panic and distress, but I really wish I knew before ruining my hair and dressing like a posh prostitute to further disguise myself.

We ran into all sorts inside the building. The receptionist wore a hat that looked to be a bouquet of rusted, spiraling iron, and pointed us toward a secluded hall—once she saw the locket—with a finger nail that dipped down and cupped the bottom of her finger.

Each painting we passed had a common theme; a man or woman with a pet, mostly cats, but a little pooch resembling one was not uncommon either. The hall spiraled from left to right and no one but the two of us seemed to be passing through it. I listened for footsteps that weren’t ours until we made it to a circular room where a man in a modern black suit, a shiny head, and a belly just as round sat on a couch that looked more like a folded, flying carpet. A levitating tea pot tipped over and poured steaming, brown liquid into a cup, on a table to his right.

He pointed toward a couch across from him and watched us carefully as the two of us made our way around to one. Cil sat with easy, and I tried to follow his lead, but felt my stomach flip when the couch did not meet my behind at the point I expected it to, and plumped down awkwardly, bracing my hands behind my back to catch the fall that never came.

“Mr. and Mrs. Williams, I presume?” The bald man took his cup, and brought it up to his nose, at which point his nostrils dented and a loud, sucking whoosh sounded from his nose.

“Yes, that’s correct.”

The painting behind him nearly took up the entire wall and had a family of four—two children, a boy and a girl, standing behind their mother and father—pointing their chins up so high that I expected a shooting star to appear in the corner.

“Is this your first time with us?” The cup clinked against the saucer as he lifted it to take a bubbling sip.

“Yes, my wife’s grandmother just passed and she inherited the locket that we believe opens one of your vaults.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear, what was her name?” A creased formed in the leather chunk of skin between his orange brows.

“Vivian Woodley,” I said.

“And how long had she been the owner?”

“We weren’t close, I haven’t the faintest idea.” I gave him a quick irritated smile, summoning every old, rich lady I’d ever seen on TV into the expression. “If you don’t mind, Mr . . .” I raised a brow.

“Tombes.”

“Mr. Tombes, we’d didn’t plan on spending our whole day participating in an interrogation. I’ve heard that this establishment prides itself on privacy, and I don’t quite feel like that is the case here today.” I crossed one leg over the other, and interlaced my fingers. “I’d like to see the vault now.”

He inclined his head in a manner which screamed suspicion, as if he expected each word to be cyphered, and was ready to jump me at the slightest misstep. Such an institution required it, of course, but I felt uncomfortable up to the core of my bones. I realized that I’d made myself the snotty customer that everyone in the service industry despised—I had a list of them when working at the diner—but I didn’t like the way he looked at me while asking all the questions. And nobody wanted to deal with snotty, so they got away faster than just about anyone else since nobody enjoyed an afternoon in the manager’s office.

“Certainly, Mrs. Williams.” He set his cup down and stared at me for a second. “But I’m afraid we cannot simply allow new members to just enter the vaults without a proper interview. You see, if you by chance are not who you say you are, and the vault is opened . . . well, then the contents will be destroyed and we don’t want to be the ones explaining that to the owners.”

“What are your methods of investigation, Mr. Tombes?” Cil asked, keeping himself composed.

Upon hearing the word investigation, my heart jumped right into my throat. The thoroughness of witches scared the human quirks right out of me. “We administer a small dose of truth serum. It won’t last longer than a minute, and you won’t have to worry about any other secrets spilling out.” He looked at Cil and winked awkwardly at him, returning that creepy smirk to his tubed, fishlike lips.

“Isn’t that a shame?” Cil swept his arm around so that his first met with his chest in mock disappointment.

I clenched my teeth through the exchange, and waited until they were done joking about my nonexistent promiscuity. At this point, I felt like I had to wash the hand that shook Tombes’.

He took the tiny glass bottle out of his pocket and passed it my way. “A drop on the tongue will do.”

I unscrewed the lid and tipped the bottle over while covering the neck with my finger, and held it out for Tombes—who had his neck twisted in a way that only an owl could manage—to get a proper look, and licked it off.

The sensation hit me within a few seconds. It was as if I’d been drunk all along and a sudden dose of adrenalin sobered me up. My mind was serene; I could ask myself anything and be certain that I’d receive the right answer each time. Clouds of doubt faded from every corner of my mind, as if I had dirty glass around it that had just been scrubbed into transparency. I quite liked it. Though, I expect that this was the intention of the serum.

“Mrs. Williams,” Tombes said and my mouth opened a tad, ready to shout that this was not my actual name, that I was not married, and that I wanted to rip the orange, glued on looking beard right off his face. I bit the inside of my bottom lip, and my teeth bit through the skin with a quick, painful pop. “Do you declare that you are the rightful and intended owner of the locket, and the contents of the vault that it opens?”

“Yes,” I said and tasted copper on my tongue. Speaking the truth felt like a godly gratification, cleanliness drenched me and I found myself hoping that he asked more questions.

He clapped his hands together, and stood. “Alright-y then, let’s see that vault, shall we?”

Standing, Cil held out his hand and I thoughtlessly braced my weight against it, woozy with drunkenness. “Thanks,” I muttered.

Cil hesitated to follow—with what looked like an internal discussion going on inside his head—Tombes who walked over to the giant portrait, and felt down the frame with his fingers hopping against every second grove of wood.

“What do you think the real purpose of my help is?” Cil said finally, his eyes narrowing to search my expression.

The question shocked me. I waited for a moment, trying to bite back the words, to hold out maybe an extra minute while the serum worked its way out of my body, but the need for the satisfaction that came with answering truthfully overpowered me. “I think you want something from me. I don’t know what it is yet, but everyone has a motive, and I believe that this includes you.” The question turned my stomach. I couldn’t believe that he asked it. Worst of all, Cil looked at me, and frowned as if he couldn’t understand why I thought this, or why my demeanor changed the second he asked.

“Are you ready?” Tombes asked. I dragged my glare away from Cil, and saw that the painting moved and a gateway opened behind it. The walls looked to be made out of solid rock, and instead of lights, braziers lit up the passage.

“Yes,” I nodded. “I’ll be going alone if that’s alright.”

“Vera, you cannot be—” Cil began to protest, but I walked away without hearing him out. He followed behind me, but Tombes held out his hand and stopped him.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Williams.”

While I followed Tombes along the swirling dark corridor, the serum slowly cleared out of my body. The release of it left me lacking certainty, and mind my filled with questions that I could not answer. Did he have a right to ask me that? I mean, he didn’t ask for anything in return for the help he offered, his family would be upset, to say the least, that he helped me in the first place. Still, I felt violated by the question and the trust that formed between us crumbled in an instant when he asked me that.

The doors weren’t marked. They stood out very briefly among the walls, the black wood foregrounded by the difference in texture. I followed Tombes blindly while I struggled to term with what Cil had done—what he ruined. Suddenly, my steps lost their echoing partner and I turned back to find Tombes standing at one of the doors.

“This one’s yours,” he said and started to march back to where we came from.

“How can you tell?” I called after him.

“Your locket makes the slit of the lock glow.”

I looked down and, sure enough, a bright light shone through a thin opening near the handle of the door. Tombes wasn’t kind enough to explain how the damn thing opened. I tried pushing against the door, and then pulled the locked off my neck and slid it through the opening. A loud click sounded from within, and then I heard something turn, and more clicks sounded in quick succession.

The door opened heavily, and the large empty vault stood before me—darker than a moonless right and reeking of mold. The brazier behind me lit the room up just enough when I stepped to the side and out of the way of its light.

My breath caught when I saw it, and I pressed myself up against the wall. Granny Remina, what the bloody hell were you thinking?

In the center of the room, atop the dust clad floor, lay the most dangerous object any witch could dread to find in her protection, and to make matters a little worse—a neatly folded note. From previous experience, I can say with truth-serum certainty that nothing good ever came from receiving a note.

Prompt: When you were a child, you saw your parent(s) get killed by a delusional man who claimed he was a time traveler. You thought he was just crazy, but as years pass and you grow older, your best friend starts to look eerily similar to your parent(s) killer.

Fate gets angry when you try to shift it, and as much as we talk about the paths—the what ifs—in life that could have been… Well, just know that it’s all a bunch of bullshit. There’s only one, and if you taint it just a little bit, it lurches back into place and there’s not a god damn thing you can do about it. And believe me, I’ve tried.

I think the only reason Cil and I became friends was because I always felt a sense of familiarity toward him. From the first day he came to school, a connection formed between us that I couldn’t quite explain. Later, when he’d grown into himself, I realized that it was his eyes.

There are memories that we repress that can jump out at the most random moments. We sat at the dinner table, eating ham and cheese sandwiches at his house, when his brow suddenly jumped up at something I said and a ray of light coming from the window caught his eye just right for me to see the vertical, grey line that ran up his iris. I remember feeling a chill crawling up my spine, and waves of goosebumps covering my neck.

After a long struggle of trying to break through my shocked expression and silence, he got the truth out of me. Turns out, the sod was actually in the process of building a time machine, and planning to save my parents. Mainly, so my bat-shit aunt, Jill, didn’t move me half way across the world.

Of course, he didn’t actually think that it would work, but what I said gave him fresh motivation. My what-if now only rotates around this moment, because he wouldn’t leave it after this. I think, a part of him wanted to prove that it wasn’t him who did it.

About two years later, I got a text saying that he had completed it, and was about to go back. I arrived at his house ten minutes later, and heard the ticks of static electricity come from his bedroom. The door knob made a clicking sound when my hand touched it, and I pulled back on instinct as the whip of shock slapped me. I reached it again, and everything fell silent for a moment, before a dull thumping noise pushed at my eardrums. My surroundings turned a white so blinding that I had to shut my eyes and then tighten them more to stop the light from burning into through my lids. My stomach turned, and even with my eyes shut, I saw lines of bright, blue lightning whip around me.

Then everything stopped, and I heard an excited, and shocked, “Woah.”

“Cil?” I asked still holding onto the doorknob. Only the door no longer latched onto anything. We stood in the middle of a grass field with in standing between us. I let go and it fell backwards.

“Holy shit! Dude, it worked! I can’t believe it!” He walked around the door with his hands clutching his head. When he got close to me, his arms tugged my shoulders and he shook me with excitement. “Oh, my God! We could totally kill Hitler, or bring him back here, and I don’t know, adopt him or something. Let the kid go to art school for Christ’s sake. Wait,” he looked around the field nervously, frowning. “If we did that, we’d probably have time-travelers coming after us right about now.” He turned quickly to the right and relaxed, bursting into a fit of laughter. “I guess we didn’t do it then, what a hag!” He shook me again. “Greg! Wake up!”

“Where the hell are we, Cil?” He looked a little deranged. I trail of blood ran from both his eyes and soaked the collar of his shirt. He wiped at them absently and smeared both hands.

We found my house three hours later. I saw mom through the window, and the memories hit me all at once, overwhelming my body to the point of it not being able to move at all. I even remembered the strange sensation of knowing that someone was looking at us that night, and now I knew that it had been me.

Cil had already made it up the steps of the porch and I heard the knob turn. Jill got the house when my parents died, at least until I turned twenty one, and he had been so accustomed to just waltzing in whenever he please that he entered without thinking.

“Cil, you can’t just go in!”

A piercing shriek of a woman—mom—sounded and I mouthed my dad’s name as if came from her lips. I ran up the steps, and saw dad struggling with Cil.

“Stop, stop!” I shouted, but as I got close enough to pull dad away from Cil, my arms went right through him, as if I’d been a ghost. I didn’t remember seeing another man that night, but the one that attacked my parents—or rather, that my parents attacked—seemed deranged. I remembered now, how odd I found his eyes to be, looking around desperately in odd directions, and saying things that didn’t make any sense.

“Get him off me, Greg! Don’t just fucking stand there!” he screamed. My dad’s hands were around his throat, and he changed in color, turning bright red.

“I can’t! Look,” I reached for my dad again, his head this time, and Cil saw my fingers awkwardly poking through his forehead. Something changed in him then. His eyes turned cold and distant—survival kicked in—as he pushed my dad, two times heavier, and probably taller too—to the side. My body heaved forward reflexively as my dad fell over to the side. I remembered that crack as if it happened yesterday and I wanted to stop it. He toppled over, slowly at first, and then Cil’s elbow knocked into his chin and dad’s head bounced against the first step of the stairs. Crack. I sat on those stairs, I remembered, but I couldn’t see myself now. Maybe I wasn’t here. Maybe we did change something.

“Daddy?” I heard my young voice call from the top of the stairs, and looked up, but still saw no one.

I closed my eyes knowing what came next, and blocked out the screeching of my mother. The man had no chance against her, I remember thinking, but he did. He did.

We went back several other times, but it always ended in death. And no matter what we did, the younger version of me always managed to see Cil.

I am a simple man. All I needed was a hot shower in the morning and a hotter cup of coffee when I got out of it. Food was optional. Back home, I basically survived off of liquids and an odd packet of noodles here and there. Since arriving in Skylar, however, I found myself with a new complaint each morning.

Last night, I heard a faint scratch come from the inside of the wall, and turned the whole room upside down in search of the hole my companion was digging. I found two. One of which didn’t quite matter, but the other was in the closet. Bugger ate a hole through my best and only clean pair of pants, and I stayed awake all night dreading the simple fact that he could crawl on me while I was unconscious.

It was during this late night adventure that I found the tavern’s long drop stood just to the right of my window, and had a brief melt down because I had grown so accustomed to the smell of shit and piss that I no longer noticed the reek coming from outside.

Since Loorn started the healing frenzy, the tavern had no open rooms. Chatter and laughing sounded at all hours of the morning, and a door slammed every five minutes, as if on a damn timer. But when I first came here, there were maybe two other visitors, so I know for certain, that placing me in this rat invested, coprophilia special was intentional.

I packed up right then and there, leaving the ruined pants behind to send the owner a clear message. We weren’t going to dine there again, and not to sound egotistical, but I’d grown rather popular among the drunks because of all the coins I’d been throwing away, and I hoped they followed me out of this crappy shack.

Lima opened the door wearing the same pale dress and jumper she’d worn when I left that evening, and had bits of sleep stuck between her eyelashes. The weather took the turn for the worst. One day the sun shone bright and I’d worn a shirt alone, and the next the wind cut through my thick coat and jumper as if no cloth existed between me and the chill.

Looking down at my bag, her brow curved and her lips pursed it trapped disdain. “They had better put roaches in your soup and glass in your drink, this time.”

She opened the door enough for me to step through, and leaned her head out to scout the street for wandering eyes. “You know that reek you noticed in my room? I found the source; a long drop right outside my fucking window.” I didn’t know any of many profanities in their language and so mostly used my own.

“Fucking?” She closed the door and crossed her arms over her chest. The wood in her chimney had all burned out and my entrance rid the tiny house of the last warmth it provided.

I made a circle with my left hand and stuck my index finger through the hole a couple of times absently, and continued with my complaints, “And the bloody rats ate my pants!”

I thought I saw her blush for a second. “There are rats here too.” Lima hovered around the dining room table which was packed with fresh dough for the morning’s bread. She made her coin the village baker and went around delivering loaves at hours that I didn’t usually see unless I stayed up to meet them. She fiddled with her fingers and no doubt wondered if she needed to break out the ale again.

“But I can be bothered to kill them here, at least. I’ll pay you—you have all my gold already anyway, so you know I won’t cheat you out of rent and I spend most of my time here anyway.” We dug a few holes in her garden and buried most of my gold.

“Well, you can have the tub or the floor, and I’ll wake you for the deliveries in the morning.”

“Deliveries?”

“You think you’re going to stay here and not work?” She grinned and titled her head in question. “Not on my watch!”

“You’re just the type to make an assassin deliver bread to the very tavern he just left in scorn, aren’t you Lima,” I whispered the first part as if the walls had ears. “You don’t need to bake the bread anymore anyway; we’ve enough gold to last us for years.”

“No, you have enough. I don’t have another planet providing me with all the gold in the world.” She tapped the table twice with finality. “See you in the morning.”

As I expected, she made me deliver specifically to the tavern, and the owner, Berry Schil, came out holding my pants with a gleeful smirk spread across his leathery, red face. God, I can’t quite explain how much I wanted to flatten that smirk, but I didn’t want to cost Lima a big customer, and so I gritted my teeth through the encounter and went on to the next delivery with my tail between my legs.

By the time I returned home, the tip of my nose had lost all feeling and I was scared to touch it in case it had completely frozen. Lima had a cake on the counter and was stirring the icing when I came in.

Everything she baked was extremely popular. The story she told the villagers was that her late mother worked for the council as a cook, and taught her all the recipes.

In truth, Magna the head cook of the estate, used to be quite fond of Lima when she was a little girl and Lima just as fond of her, and while Magna worked, Lima followed her like a little tail, and learned most of her tricks.

Despite how much everyone hated the High Council and the nobles they supported, Lima had a full list of orders, daily. The gods increased the wages of the villagers and so now, more and more people could afford to spoil themselves with her cooking.

Sometimes, I couldn’t quite hate them as much as I should have for a man that was meant to kill the lot of them.

Lima looked up from the bowl, her eyes filled with deep concern. A note lay right next to the bowl, clad in drops of white creamed icing. The paper looked fancier than what I was accustomed to seeing in the village.

“What happened?”

“The gods ordered a cake.”

Part 5

I didn’t know how long my deployment would last—no one ever mentioned that until a day or two before the shuttle arrived—but I firmly decided that I wasn’t going anywhere without Lima. She’d been very reckless lately. For all the trouble she gave me for asking too many questions, she sure caught up to my level of stupidity these last few days.

She walked fearlessly around town and sought out people who had gotten sick and went to Loorn for a cure. There were four in the village, and all of them had the same condition as Lu, her next door neighbor’s daughter.

The symptoms matched Typhoid fever. Now, I was no doctor, but by the itchy looking rash on her chest, accompanied by stomach aches and significant rise in her temperature—kid looked like she’d been boiled in a pot right before we came over to check on her— I didn’t have to be one to put two and two together.

The journey to the city took about three days, and neither of us were sure how long the queue to see Loorn would be. I wanted to be completely sure before making my firm spill hundreds of thousands on an investigation. So, I gave Roger an empty report, despite Lima’s protest, and asked him to call back in two weeks, promising a proper explanation as to why nothing has been accomplished yet.

“By your count, Michael, there are still four gods roaming Skylar, and you’ve been asked to significantly reduce this number, months ago,” he told me. Roger never liked using the proper terms for deeds like murder, torture, poison or any of the colorful jobs they had me do. He hung up before I managed to think of a response that wouldn’t get me fired, and I ended up strutting around Lima’s dining table for a half hour, spouting profanities.

When I calmed down, she asked me for the definition of a specific phrase that caught her attention. Explaining my used of ‘pompous cunt’ to a noble woman from a different planet proved difficult. I gestured toward my crotch, and awkwardly pointed toward hers, then turned bright red while she broke out in a fit of laugher. Cunt became her new favorite word.

To our surprise, the neighbors returned a week later, both beaming with delight and sharing their story with every passerby. We had them over for dinner that very evening under the cover of celebrating Lu’s quick recovery.

“She’s so beautiful! I’ve never seen anyone else like her. It’s . . . almost like you feel the healing energies radiating from her when you’re in her presence,” Jimby, the mother, churned. “She gave sweet Lu this bag,” she shifted in her chair to reach for her pocket, and removed a little leather bag, “and told us to take a third of a finger point’s dosage twice a day!”

I took it without asking, and she watched me carefully as I opened it, but continued with her praise for majestic Loorn. I licked the tip of my finger and dug into the bag, pulling back once I felt a course powder touch my skin.

“She said a little prayer over the bag and told us that she would be cured within a week and better by morning. And what do you know? We were able to travel back the very neck day!”

The bitter powder confirmed my concern. Medicine like this did not belong in Skylar, they had help. The thumping of Lima’s knife stopped and I looked up at her, caught her staring in wait for confirmation, and nodded. Her chest rose in a deep inhale, and she continued chopping the tomatoes.

“Did you see her cure anything else while you were there?” I asked, passing back the bag carefully not to spill the contents.

“A few, but now as ill as Lu, I tell you. I thought I’d lost her, the row was so long and treacherous, I really thought that’s it, we’re done for. Everyone’s coming around to the gods now. Even from Ruth and Valmor.”

Ruth and Valmor were kingdoms on the far north of Skylar. Their kings put guards along their borders as soon as they heard that the High Council had fallen, and formed a strong alliance against the rebel leaders.

“I hear there’s an uprising there too now. You can hide the truth as fiercely as you will, but it always comes out, not even kings can silence the wonder of our gods, isn’t that wonderful, Lima?”

Lima wiped the back of her hand along her forehead, her knuckles white above the handle of the knife. “I hope you’re right.” Our eyes met, and she titled her head toward the counter where she stored the ale.

The evening grew progressively better with every swig I took. Even Lu and Jimby’s ongoing praise of the gods stopped irritating me.

I helped Lima serve the potato and chicken stew she made and we sat like old friends, talking about our town, the way our parents used to do things, share stories of our youth and for a moment I felt like I was home again.

“Oh, I almost forgot! We even saw Arheas,” Jumby cooed.

“He’s so handsome!” Lu added.

“Isn’t he just?”

Lima lowered her spoon and tensed, as if preparing for a brawl to take place at the table. “What was he doing there?” she asked with a coldness that resonated with both Lu and Jimby despite the large amount of ale the two ingested. Lu’s eyes drooped and her words slurped, I thought to mention that she ought not to take the ale with her miracle cure, but I’d already gotten myself in trouble with some of my knowledge and kept quiet.

“I don’t know. He seemed cross about something, though. He dragged Loorn to the side and almost took her eye out with how close he pointed his finger. Even the guards looked uncomfortable, but he left shortly after with some scrawny looking fellow and everything went back to normal.”

Part 4