Chapter 6 Holly
HOLLY
That’s how I came to sit next to a demon on his sofa, his hellhound curled up beside me, looking at his pages of notes with growing confusion and a headache. I recognized a few symbols from a friend who refused to shut up about astrology and tarot readings.
But I refused to give up. So long as Abaddon tried to explain, I’d listen and take notes and do my best to follow. At least it wasn’t boring.
Confusing, aggravating, and frustrating, but not boring.
Especially with Belial forcing his way onto the sofa next to me, pushing me up against Abaddon. I tried to keep him off the furniture, but the hellhound was built like a small bear and refused to listen.
“Do not waste your energy,” Abaddon said after watching my futile attempts to resist. “Belial is in many ways an excellent companion, but when he gets it into his head to sit somewhere, there is no stopping him.”
I looked at him, raising an eyebrow. “I would have thought a demon lord would expect his pets to be obedient.”
To my surprise, he chuckled at that. “True, but Belial is more than a pet, and he is loyal. More important than obedience, and far rarer in Hell.”
Since there was no way I was going to move the big lump of terrifying monster-dog, I gave in with as much grace as I could muster. Scratching behind Belial’s ears, I turned my attention back to the notes and tried to keep it off the feel of Abaddon’s body heat and delicious scent.
“Wait, you’re powering the cabin with hellfire?
” I tapped the page as I spoke, pointing to a complicated array of arcane squiggles.
I didn’t understand the magic, but the other side of the equation was familiar.
Not that I understood electrical engineering any better, but at least I recognized the volts, amps, and watts as human measurements. “Isn’t that dangerous?”
“It’s better than having to go to town for gas,” he said. He almost cracked a smile. “I keep my shopping runs to a minimum for obvious reasons.”
Was that humor? Maybe. I doubted the folks in Springview would appreciate a demon popping by the general store, which raised more questions. “How do you get supplies then?”
His face turned serious again, the hint of a smile disappearing behind his stony expression. “I buy in bulk, collect once a month, and don’t speak to anyone if I can help it. It takes an effort, but I can transform myself to hide my nature.”
“Oh, that I have to see.”
He sighed and rolled his eyes. “You heard the part where I said it took effort, yes?”
I should have left it there. So of course I pushed on. “Please? Just for a second? I want to know what human-you looks like.”
After a second, he sighed again. “Fine. This is a foolish waste of energy, but fine.”
He stood in the center of the cabin, turning to face me. As I watched, he drew lines of sparks in the air with practiced motions.
Sudden bright light made me wince and blink, and in that moment Abaddon changed. I tried to focus on him through the afterimages of the flash.
Before I saw him clearly, there was a loud bang and the lights went out.
Then silence, the kind you only get when a noise you hadn’t noticed stops. The heating had failed too, and the temperature plummeted.
“What the fuck?”
“I don’t know,” Abaddon’s voice burned with confused rage. “Something happened to the generator. I have to fix it.”
My eyes adjusted to the firelight and I saw him, back in demon form, rushing for the door.
On instinct I followed him, though I don’t know how I planned to help.
I had just enough presence of mind to wrap my blanket around me before rushing outside into the snow, with a confused Belial watching me go.
The blanket barely kept the cold off me as we hurried through the storm. Snow fell thick enough that I could have lost sight of Abaddon at an arm’s length, except for the constant hiss and sizzle of snow evaporating on contact with his skin. The radiating warmth helped, too.
I didn’t see the door until he opened it. In fact, I’d lost track of the cabin in the blinding whiteness, and the dark opening almost surprised me. What waited inside did surprise me.
“What the fuck is that?” The tremor in my voice was from the cold, I swear. Not from the pentagram glowing with purple energy, surrounded by a circle of ominous sigils carved into the concrete floor.
“That is my power supply,” Abaddon said, sealing the door behind me and brushing the melting snow from his hair.
He should have looked bedraggled, but he only looked hotter, literally and figuratively.
Steam rose from his crimson skin, and in the purple light cast by the pentagram, he looked even more demonic than before.
To distract myself, I looked around the utility room, its strange mix of demonic and human fascinating me.
Strange runes covered most of the bare concrete floor, a weird contrast to the small washing machine and shelf of laundry supplies to my left.
Tools covered the opposite wall, along with a workbench.
And against the far wall stood a weird contraption, part human and part demon, connected to the central sigil by lines of purple energy flowing along carved channels.
Wires laid out in complex runes caught the energy and fed it under a battered metal cover, and heavier cabling vanished into the wall.
I didn’t need to be a witch or an engineer to spot where our problem lay.
“That’s not supposed to be smoking, is it?”
“No.” Abaddon ground out the word unwillingly, advancing on the hybrid device. The tension in his shoulders made me think he was about to pick a fight with it. “You have put your finger on the crux of the problem.”
I followed, careful not to step on any energy trails. Abaddon hadn’t paid them any attention, but I couldn’t forget the way he’d ignored being splashed with boiling oil. He might not think of warning me about something dangerous to mortals.
The battered, dented metal cover looked like it had been a car’s hood in a previous life. Abaddon lifted it and set it aside, revealing a mess. I looked at it with a mixture of horror and awe.
“This is what you’re using for power? And it hasn’t burned the cabin down?”
The demon lord turned his frown on me again.
I barely noticed, my attention on the jury-rigged generator.
Abaddon’s diagram was all clean lines and precise measurements, and that hadn’t prepared me for the reality.
My engineering skills didn’t extend past the basics of car repair my dad taught me, but that was more than enough to be horrified by the twisted pieces of metal grinding against each other, old oil burning where it still clung to an axle.
The wonder wasn’t that it had stopped working, it was that we still had air to breathe.
“There is a reason I keep this separate from the main cabin. My first few experiments disassembled themselves energetically; this one has been working well for years.”
“Okay, that addresses the bare minimum of safety concerns. What the fuck is this doing? You’re turning magic into electricity?”
While I spoke, I grabbed a pair of heavy gloves from the workbench. Far too big for me, they’d still protect my hands if I had to handle hot metal. The screech of grinding metal filled the air, and the acrid smell of smoke thickened.
“Yes. I need to power your mortal technology, and this was the solution I came up with.”
“You could have bought a fucking generator like a normal person,” I grumbled. “But no, you’ve got to use your special magic powers to get free energy.”
“Not free,” he snapped. “The sigils take effort and attention to fuel, but it’s cheaper than a regular supply of fuel would be. And easier than disguising myself to buy it. I have limited resources in this realm. Better to use my own power, especially since I needed the circle anyway.”
A grin spread across my face, and I carefully kept my back to Abaddon so he wouldn’t see. A little defensive there, are we? Maybe the big bad demon lord can’t do everything.
Instead of saying that, I looked for something to smother the fire with. No, of course the demon hadn’t thought of fire safety. No extinguisher, no fire blanket, nothing.
“Can you stop it turning? That’s going to make working on it hard.”
He drew a clawed fingertip through a line of purple flame, severing it, and the grinding screeched to a stop. Waving the smoke away, I looked at the mess the machine had made of itself. “So, how often did you grease this axle?”
He leaned in beside me, close enough that I felt the heat radiating from him. It was very distracting, and I tried to keep my focus on the problem in front of us.
“It shouldn’t have needed…” His voice trailed off. “Hm.”
I waited, but that was apparently all he had to say. “You’re not great at talking problems through, are you?”
“I am not used to having a collaborator. It has been a long time since anyone stood by my side.” The note of sadness was new, and I wondered what had happened to his last assistant.
He shook off the melancholy, and to my surprise, kept talking.
“The generator is supposed to self-regulate. Something went wrong there, and you can see the damage.”
He pointed to where the axle ground its way into its housing. I pointed out where flying metal had ricocheted inside the generator. Over the next half hour we made a list of the damage, and I gave up trying to figure out how the generator worked. I could figure out what it did, and that would do.
“Is it just going to tear itself apart again?” I asked as we started work on the repairs. “I don’t know how many times we can rebuild this.”
A part clattered as Abaddon discarded it, rooting through his pile of junk with the brittle silence of a man trying not to swear. I didn’t push, and after a long pause, I got my answer.
“It shouldn’t have burned itself out in the first place, so I have no idea if it will repeat the performance.
Ah!” This time he kept whatever component he’d found, bringing it to the workbench.
I kept on disassembling the broken machine while he found the parts—that was the only way we could divide our labor, since I wouldn’t know what to look for.
“I’ll put more effort into the limiters this time,” he said after a few more minutes of work. “Keep the top speed down, just in case. That’s the best I can do without knowing what I’m fighting.”
Pulling the generator apart and rebuilding it took us hours of work, but I found myself enjoying it. Not so much the work, which was hard, tiring, and dirty, but working so close to Abaddon. Together, we pulled his invention apart.
Then I put it back together, under his direction. He didn’t like the fact that I had nimbler fingers than he did, but his claws got in the way of holding a screwdriver, so it ended up being up to me to do the fiddly bits.
“Cheer up,” I said as I slid under the generator. Abaddon stood over me, pushing the drive shaft into place and holding it still. “You’re still helping. Without your brute strength, I’d never manage this.”
He growled, sending a shiver through me. I was almost sure that was his ‘teasing’ growl, but the hint of danger was still there, adding a little thrill.
“My strength, and my intellect to design this thing, and my power to make it run,” he said. “Your dexterous fingers are the least important part of our collaboration. I did, after all, manage without you when I built the first of these.”
“Yeah?” I grinned, tightening a bolt as far as I could. “Look how well that worked out. Okay, I’m set, time for your brawn again.”
The harrumph was definitely a humorous sound, and he reached under the machine, red hand groping blindly for the wrench. I took pity on him, gripping his wrist and guiding him with one hand, the other keeping the wrench steady. Once he had it, he gave it another twist, fixing it in place.
Feeling the muscles in his forearm work wasn’t the main reason I held his arm, but I’d be lying if I claimed it wasn’t part of why I kept my hand on him.
The otherworldly texture of his skin, the muscles like corded steel underneath it, the heat that felt like it should burn me but didn’t.
Steady, Holly. Don’t get any ideas. This is a demon lord, remember?
It wasn’t easy to keep that in mind, especially when he pulled me out from under the generator and lifted me to my feet. The gentle way he touched me, when his body was made for war, made me wonder how far his self-control extended.
I shook off the urge to test that control. “I guess this is the big moment.”
Abaddon nodded, turning to the circle of purple flames and scratching the palm of his left hand with a claw. A single drop of blood fell into the pentagram, and the flames roared, shooting up in a terrifying column.
I shrieked and leaped backward, tripping over the discarded, warped drive shaft.
Abaddon jumped back too, faster than I’d have thought possible, his tail catching me around the legs and his right hand holding my head.
He didn’t stop me from hitting the workbench, but he slowed and cushioned the impact.
Instead of braining myself, I got the air knocked out of me.
Probably for the best, because if I’d had the breath to scream, I would have. The hellfire column spread out where it hit the shed’s roof, and I felt an absolute certainty that we’d burn alive.
“Angelfeathers.” Abaddon’s curse was quiet, emphatic, and filled with such a deep anger that I wanted to run and hide. He wasn’t even angry at me, his focus was entirely on the pillar of hellfire.
I don’t know what I’d have done if he’d given me time to react.
Fear and shock kept me frozen as Abaddon turned and threw me, hard.
I sailed through the air, hitting the shed door with enough force to break it off its hinges.
A moment later, I hit the ground with a soft thump, the snow taking most of the impact.
Through the storm, I saw the hellish flames bursting out of the shed.
“Abaddon.” I tried to shout, but didn’t have breath to do more than gasp his name. He was still inside.