Chapter 10
10
W hen I exited the double doors of the abbey, I walked right back into Dantalion’s realm. The hellish bibliotheca, with its amber scent and dust mites and distant smog of sulphur, greeted me with a warmth that felt like a homecoming.
The demon sat in its wingback chair in the corner; its hands steepled over its knees. The bloody remains of the sigil lay at its feet. I had materialised before it and looked up at Dantalion, who stared at me with great interest.
“Well,” it said, voice a low purr.
I swallowed, flushing. “Did that please you?”
“It most certainly pleased you .”
I couldn’t help but smile at that. I had wanted Oliviero for so long. To have given him pleasure, to have helped him on his own path, was a great thing for me to have done. And so, too, was the taking of my own pleasure. I had known what I wanted, and I had done it. I had told him I loved him. Love and pleasure and rough sex and blasphemy—all of it could co-exist.
Dantalion rose, its tall form towering in the corner of its library. Carefully, it crossed around its sigil to me, arms outstretched. I did not know what to do with this sudden display of almost-affection. I let it lay its clawed hands upon my shoulders.
“Look up at me,” it demanded, and so I looked.
Its many shifting faces oscillated between human and demon, male, female, other, until suddenly I was staring at the visage of Asmodeus itself, in the form of the first demon I had summoned all that time ago.
My entire heart seized.
The voice that came no longer belonged to Dantalion. It was the voice I had been hearing for my entire journey through Hell. I had crossed a lake of sin to reach this moment.
“You have done it,” Asmodeus said. Gone was the violent, rough tinge to its voice, the anger at my insolence.
“You have been such a good little lamb for me, haven’t you, Alessandro? My once-priest. My eternal whore.”
I looked up into its eyes. “Dantalion. . .is pleased?”
“It called for my attention the moment you pushed that little priest down onto his own altar. The pair of us watched you defile his innocence in a house of God. We watched you love him, and he love you. How could we not be pleased?”
I flushed with pride and embarrassment and lust so deep it pulled at my very essence.
I wanted—I wanted Asmodeus. I wanted everything that came with servicing a demon. I wanted the immortality of my pleasure, to shuck my human past entirely. To forsake God most ardently, and for always.
To be Asmodeus’—forever.
“Come to me. Come to me now,” Asmodeus cooed. Books flew from their place on the shelf, hurtling out to carve an arched doorway in the recess. Then a doorknob appeared, a snarled, angry silver thing, and the door was fully realised. A soft glow emanated from the cracks where it met the stone.
I felt a tug in my gut as if the anchor of my soul was caught on the sea floor. I knew that through those doors, Asmodeus waited.
It took its curled fingers and ghosted them over my cheeks. It leaned down and kissed me. Everything in me opened, a sluice gate of emotion and hope and desire. A certainty settled in me.
This was it.
And Asmodeus said, “Come and take your place as my immortal toy.”
I walked to the door and opened it, and before me wound a staircase, up and up into red and black clouds.
A throbbing in my temples, in my heart, in my flesh. An incessant drumbeat urging me forward. It was the end of one journey, and the beginning of another.
Alessandro, transformed.
END