I wasn’t a complete moron. Puzzling all the pieces together didn’t take a whole lot of extra thought. It was convincing myself I wasn’t a complete lunatic that took me several seconds of head-pounding, heart-stopping, agony.
Satanic sigils. Horned monsters. A missing person…
“Oh my god. Oh my god!” I screamed at top volume, even Damiens's neighbors several miles away could probably hear. “Sky…Sky was actually dragged into hell. Wasn’t she? Wasn’t she?”
Damien’s teeth ground harder while his hands fixed to a praying position up to his face. What he was praying for, I could only imagine.
Ansel, cool as a devilish cucumber, touched a gentle hand to his own shoulder and said with his still perfectly posh accent, “We really prefer not to use terms that link us to any specific religion. It gets messy and people get angry. It’s bad for business. We call it: the Void.”
“What?” I hadn’t hit such a high note while speaking since before I hit puberty. The worst part about Ansel’s answer wasn't that this thing was worried about its PR standing, but that the answer hadn’t been an immediate and firm, “No.”
“Ansel shut the fuck up.” Damien finally popped and jerked his arms towards Ansel like he was ready to grab the giant monster and ring his neck. “I told you to look human!”
Ansel’s one hand flourished over his shoulder like the fanciest way to perform a shrug. “Too late now, the human’s already here.”
They were not having a conversation about me like I was not in the room. I leaned onto one of those fancy tiny tables by rich people’s doors with nothing but a flower, a vase, and a doily on it as I grew more and more light-headed. “Damien, you better explain to me right the fuck now why there is some kind of demon…devil…thing standing in your hallway.”
“There you go with the religious terminology again. Devil is so…red…and fiery.” Literal flames coated Ansel’s hands as he said it before he snapped them away. “Though, probably a closer comparison than a demon. That’s just wholly inaccurate.”
“Then what are you?” It was a question I knew I didn’t want the answer to, but it slipped right out of my mouth.
Ansel threw his arms straight out to his side with all the performance of the kid who took the high school dance choreography a bit too seriously.
His blue skin darkened back to his normal tan, his wings crumpled, creaked, and bent into his back, and his horns shortened and shortened until he looked the same as he had last night. “Sir Ansel, Lord of a House of the Afterlife.”
Oh. Okay. Well, then that explains everything doesn't it?
“Yeah…that’s great.” I breathed each shaky, high-pitched word with as much sarcasm as my brain could muster while slowly being melted into goo. I’d heard just about as much as I could handle at this point. A lord of the what?
Nope. Hell no. I’m out.
With a flick of my hand as a half-assed wave, I said only, “Goodbye Damien,” and headed the fuck out that door.
“Mikkie, stop! Let me explain!” Damien ran after me, grabbing a hold of my shoulder just before I reached the stairs of his absurdly rich-ass porch which I’d never questioned once growing up even though all his mother ever did was watch soap opera and drink bad wine.
“Don’t touch me!” I shoved his hand from my shoulder and threw both my arms up in defense.
When I took a second to think about it, I wasn’t sure what part of the equation I was more pissed off about learning that people can talk to damn near literal devils, and apparently, my niece participated in something like that, or the fact that I had to learn my ex-boyfriend and best friend for years was involved only because my niece participated.
I threw a finger right in Damien’s face like my mother always did to me. “We’ve been friends for thirteen years and you never found the time to tell me your father was a...whatever the hell he is?” I pointed at Ansel, leaning in the doorway, enjoying the show.
He touched his chest with his fingertips. “Me? His father? Is that what you told them?” He bent over in boisterous laughter while Damien and I both stayed poker-faced. When he calmed, he wiped away an actual tear. Could Devils cry or was that for show? “Oh, do I ever wish…well, not now obviously.”
“Well, good,” I said, now with my sarcasm able to come out as intended and not as high-pitched squeaks. “At least I didn’t date some kind of devil spawn, then. It’s the little things.”
Ansel stepped forward and leaned his arm right on Damien’s shoulder with a wicked smile. “Oh, no you definitely did. He’s just not mine. I am not so thick as to fall in love and breed with a human woman. Could you imagine?”
The last words were lost in more inappropriate laughter. What a weirdo.
“ANSEL!” Damien shoved Ansel off of him. “You’re making it worse.”
“You want to explain it to them? Go right ahead. You’ve had plenty of years to practice your speech. I’m dying to hear it.” Ansel performed another theatrical move, pretending to faint, but catching himself before he hit the brick of the porch.
If "Lording" the afterlife ever stopped paying off for this guy, he certainly had a career in stage plays.
But he had a point. I wanted to hear the explanation from the horse’s mouth. Damien was the one who’d kept some huge ass secrets from me—to put it lightly—and it was about time I knew the truth about the guy I’d spent over half my life thinking about.
I turned to Damien and said a calm, for the first time all conversation, “Same here.”
Damien sighed. He was trapped in a corner and he knew it. It was his own damn fault. If he didn’t want me to find out, he should have locked the front door.
“Can we at least go inside? You’re freezing,” Damien asked and motioned towards the house. I would have been freezing if I wasn’t boiling with anger and confusion. But, if that’s how he preferred, then so be it.
If he or Ansel were going to hurt me, they would have. I needed to understand whatever alternate reality I’d fallen into, for Sky. If that meant facing the fact that some version of devils and hell existed, then I guess I’d have to dust off my old church clothes or something, because getting Sky back was most important.
We clamored into Damien’s living room, full of all the same, stuffy furniture that had been there when we were kids. I sat on the couch which was as stiff and firm as it’d always been like no one ever used it. Every second only made me more curious where all this shit had come from. Damien’s secret undead father? How did that work?
Ansel lay down full across the loveseat, feet propped up on the armrest for extra comfort as Damien handed me a warm cup of tea. He sat in the poofy armchair across the way-too-large room, forcing me to practically yell to the other side. “Okay, I’m listening. Make this make sense.”
“It’s not going to make sense.”
“Try me. Start small. If he’s not your dad, who is he?” I nodded at Ansel who only shimmied himself deeper into the couch, getting more and more comfy. He was enjoying this way too much.
“He’s my…” Damien bit his tongue, and I glared harder. What was the bigass deal?
Ansel put his hands up behind his head. “Go on, say it.”
“He’s…my master,” Damien grumbled the last word so low I almost didn’t hear it…but I did. Oh, I definitely did.
I had to place my tea down on the table next to me and fold my arms in my lap to hold my composure as I asked, “I’m sorry, you what? Is that a sex thing?”
“Only if you want it to be, dearest.” Ansel rolled over and winked at me. I have to say, I was a little less attracted to him after I’d seen the horns growing out of his head. But only a little…and that disappointed me.
But not even he could get away with winking at me and calling me pet names. “Don’t call me dearest.”
“It’s not a—” Damien cut in, but paused again. It was like every word out of his mouth pained him to say. He clapped his hands together and then let them fall into his lap. With a long, drawn-out exhale, he finally spilled the story he should have told me seven years ago. “I swear to you, didn’t know what I was until my actual father died just before I turned eighteen…” I recalled his eighteenth birthday, only weeks before the accident. That was a good day. “…I thought my mom was crazy. A box of wine a day can only do so much damage before you get delusional. And then…the accident happened…” My heartbeat quickened to the gallop of a horse. I tried not to let the flood of memories leak in. The bright white light. The ear-shattering crunch of metal. Broken glass. Pain. Darkness. “I’d never been more scared. The blood. The—”
He stopped again, pain percolating from every muscle on his face. I knew that pain all too well.
It's funny, in the least funny way possible. I’d always considered Damien the lucky one, who made it through without a scratch. But I couldn’t imagine having memories of the scene haunting me.
My brother and his wife, dead. Me, broken.
That was how he saw me last, before last night at the bar: bleeding and close to death. I blacked out and woke up in a hospital. If there was anything I was thankful for that day, it was that. Suddenly, some of the ways he looked at me made a lot more sense.
Damien found the will to finish his story and said something I'd never known: “I was going to die, Mikkie," he said, and my heart sank to the floor. "It was then that Ansel found me. He made me an offer to sell my soul to change things—"
“And from then on he was bound to work for me,” Ansel clapped his hands like the crack of lightning against the dim, dreary silence Damien created. I leaped out of my skin as Ansel sat up and continued with a tone the exact opposite of the room. “The best deal I ever made, to be quite frank. The spawn of another Lord of Houses. I do believe that makes me the envy of all the others.”
The air around me felt thick. It didn’t fill my lungs properly. Blood didn’t flow to my head. The whole room was spinning and darkening. Everything I’d understood about everything was wrong.
Damian nearly died that day like the rest of us?
“Y-you sold your soul to save your own ass?” I squeaked out while holding my head. If I’d let go, I think it would have rolled off. “My brother and sister-in-law died, and you sold your soul to walk away?” That wasn't how I was wording it all in my head, but that's what came out.
“Half a soul…really. His father had no soul, after all.” Ansel said, “But, for what it’s worth to you, raising people from the dead is the single most taboo act a Lord can perform, for that would be taking souls from another Lord’s house. Isn’t that right?”
The way Ansel watched Damien for an answer, with accusation plastered in his eyes, implied he’d given Damien this lesson before. Part of me wondered... had he actually tried to save my brother. How wrong about him had I been all these years?
Damien only nodded in response.
The puzzle pieces clicked into place, and despite the whole “my entire understanding of the world has been turned upside down, oh, and also there is an afterlife with flamboyant overlords, and your ex-boyfriend is the child of one of them” my head cooled, the air thinned, and my body relaxed.
I breathed the answer I’d been needing for seven years, “And that’s why you left.”
“To serve me,” Ansel said with a grin. If his grin hadn’t been so damn perfect and charming, I’d have punched it off his face. Attractive people—or, devilish hell lords or whatever—got away with everything.
I tapped my fingers on my knee to make any small pitter of sound in the quiet until I knew what I needed to say. Having all this information was mind-blowing, and somehow relieving, but it didn’t answer the reason we got here in the first place. “Fine, let’s say I believe you, and I don’t walk away thinking you slipped some wild hallucinogen into my coffee this morning, what does this have to do with Sky?”
Ansel stood from the couch and walked around the room, tapping the stubble of his chin.
“That’s the thing; it should have everything to do with me, and yet it doesn’t. That’s the baffling part.” He stopped walking to fall into extreme gestures as he spoke, mimicking each step like the world's weirdest mime. “I may’ve slipped that book into the library a few years ago hoping someone would find it, and I could have a little fun. Soul-selling hasn’t been the most popular thing in the past few centuries, and as fun as shepherding the souls of the dead is, when you live for eternity, you want to add some flavor here and there. You get it right?”
No. I absolutely did not get it. I couldn’t live for eternity. Though, when you’re living a life of failure in a city that chews and spits out people like you, every day feels like an eternity.
But I would never take advantage of someone suffering for my gain and entertainment…unless you count the dozens of one-night stands I’d had with—more often than I’m proud of—other sad, lonely people looking for an escape from their own eternity.
As I pondered that, Damien chimed in with the most disappointed-father-voice I’d heard from him. “I cannot believe you left a book on how to sell your soul at a library where children could find it. Of all the—”
“It wasn’t supposed to get into the hands of children,” Ansel intruded matter-of-factly. "That Dainty Snotters girl was clearly not looking at books at her level.” Ansel flopped back onto the couch with a puff of pillows and a sigh. “It’s a long, agonizing process to contact one of us out of the blue, but once the blood sacrifices started pouring in, and we realized it was a pre-mature sapling, lover-boy here was supposed to find the book and bring it back…but that didn’t quite happen, did it?”
That explains what the hell he was doing at Sky’s school. Substitute teacher my ass. Damien had been playing me the whole time.
I’d deal with that later. “So they summoned you to sell their souls? Where is Sky?”
“Unfortunately, I don’t know. They did not summon me, which is preposterous. There were explicit, step-by-step instructions. If they’d called me, you better believe I would have turned the sprouts away, but not all of us are as much of a stickler for the rules as me.”
Ansel’s constant movement and wordy explanations were getting exhausting. Could this guy not ever give a straight answer to anything? I rubbed at my temples, leaning on my knees with my elbows for support. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” Ansel perked back up. I swear he was going to give us all whiplash, “the brats messed it up and summoned a different—as you put it—devil and I haven’t the slightest idea who.”
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