Chapter 16
“ C AN I ASK you a question?” Sam slid over, making room for Daphne to crawl under the covers next to her. “It’s kind of a weird one.”
Daphne snuggled up behind her and tucked the blankets around them, cocooning them in the warm bedding, which smelled like fabric softener.
Her palm pressed against Sam’s belly, dragging her back, even closer, her knees tucked behind Sam’s, breasts smashed against her back, their legs tangled, not even a scant inch of space between their bodies.
Looking at them, it probably would’ve been hard to know where one of them started and the other ended.
“Demon,” Daphne murmured, pressing slow, open-mouthed kisses to her neck. “ Weird is sort of in the job description.”
“Mm, and debauchery?” she asked, tipping her head to the side, giving Daphne more room. “What about that? Is that in the job description, too?”
“No.” Daphne smiled against her throat. “That’s all me.”
Sam huffed a quiet laugh and laid her hand atop Daphne’s, threading their fingers together. “Coincidentally, that brings me back to my point.”
Daphne hummed.
“What happens when … when, you know, you get your soul back?”
Daphne paused for the briefest of seconds, her softer-than-silk lips parted, fixed on Sam’s pulse point. “I don’t know.”
She shrugged and went back to laying kisses against Sam’s skin.
Sam frowned. “What do you mean you don’t know?”
Daphne sighed and her grip loosened, her mouth leaving Sam’s neck. Sam twisted around, no small feat in a twinsize bed.
“There’s no precedent for this, Sam,” she said softly. “ I am the precedent. Or I will be.”
Sam sat up and leaned her weight on her elbow. “You’re telling me nobody’s gotten their soul back? Not ever?”
A frown creased Daphne’s face, barely visible in the dark. “Not any demon whose path I’ve ever crossed. I’ve never even met a demon with a deal like mine.”
“Then how do you know if—” Sam pressed her lips together, cutting off the rest of her sentence.
“How do I know if it will even work?” Daphne surmised.
Sam winced. “Sorry. That was—”
“You think I haven’t wondered the same?” Daphne folded her hands atop her chest and stared up at the ceiling.
“Of course I have. Who takes the devil at his word?” A quiet huff of laughter escaped her lips, more breath than noise.
“Fool me once.” She paused, the crease between her brows deepening.
“You know, you don’t become a demon by simply forfeiting your soul. ”
Sam rested her chin on her hand. “How’s it work, then?”
“Demons are born only on deathbeds. You have to be dying to become one. Lucifer—and Lucifer only—offers you your life in exchange for an oath of servitude. You still forfeit your soul, but you get to skip the eternity of torment that awaits everyone else down in the pit. It’s really only an incentive to those who don’t wish to die in the first place.
” Her lips flattened into a grim line. “I’ve never heard of another demon with an escape clause.
Though it’s not like we can compare the language—all of Lucifer’s contracts are strictly verbal.
But I haven’t forgotten exactly what he said.
His exact words are burned into my brain.
I’ve played them over and over and I can’t imagine how he could possibly finagle a way out of returning my soul short of breaching our contact. ”
“He’s the devil,” Sam said. “You’re telling me he can’t do that? I’d assume he does it all the time with a smile on his face and a song in his heart.”
Daphne shook her head. “The deals we make are cosmic contracts and not even the devil can cheat the universe. That chess game I talked about? Less of a joke than it sounds. While demons are making deals, angels are also out there answering prayers.”
Sam narrowed her eyes. “You’re pulling my leg.”
Daphne held up three fingers, Scout’s honor. “ I’ve never crossed paths with one, but I’ve heard of demons much older than me who have.”
“So that means …” Her eyes flitted to the ceiling.
“Beyond the existence of a god, maybe gods, I know nothing about them.” Daphne screwed up her face. “As much as Lucifer loves to hear himself speak, he’s far from forthcoming with the facts. So I don’t know what’s going to happen, Sam.”
“You’ve been waiting two thousand years. You must have thought about what might happen or—or hoped , at least.”
Daphne stretched out and stole Sam’s pillow, hugging it to her chest. “Of course I’ve thought about it.”
“And?”
She chewed on her lip, staring off into space. “The likeliest scenario I can come up with is that when I die one day, I’ll become a ghost, a shade, maybe, trapped somewhere in between. Or I could wind up in Purgatory, whatever that looks like. The Asphodel Fields, maybe, if I’m lucky.”
Sam swallowed down her discomfort at the thought of Daphne as a ghost, imprisoned in the liminal space she already, in a sense, haunted. Never truly able to move on. “Asphodel Fields?”
A smile ghosted over her face. “When I was young, my mother told me stories of what happened when you died. She taught me of the Elysian Fields, a place where the righteous, the heroic, and those chosen by the gods went to live a blessed and happy afterlife. Of the Asphodel Meadows, a land inhabited by those who were neither good nor evil in life, a place where they would be treated thus after death. And Tartarus, a gloomy abyss where the Titans were imprisoned and vicious souls were punished.” She lowered her eyes.
“A soul like mine … neither righteous nor heroic, certainly not chosen by the gods … Paradise, whatever form it takes, does not await me.”
“You can’t know that for sure,” Sam argued. “There’s no precedent, you said as much your—”
“ Shh. ” Daphne’s mouth found hers in the dark, silencing her with a kiss. “Not knowing what’s going to happen to me is not the same as knowing what won’t.”
Sam reared back. “But you don’t even know what you don’t know. It’s like that Diane Kruger effect and you are standing at the peak of Mount Stupid!”
Daphne pressed the back of her hand against Sam’s forehead.
“What are you doing?” Sam asked.
“A high fever can cause delirium; you’re speaking in tongues.”
Sam glowered. “I don’t know the name of it, okay? Something Kruger. And, yes, I see the irony in what I’m saying, but you know just enough to think you know more than you do.” She poked Daphne in the cheek. “ Mount. Stupid. ”
Daphne turned her head and nipped at Sam’s fingers. “My sins are many, but hubris isn’t one of them. At least not of late.”
Sam’s jaw ticked. “That’s stupid.”
“What is?”
“All of it.” Sam rubbed the heel of her hand against her chest where it felt like there was a weight sitting, squeezing. “What gave anyone the right to be judge, jury, and executioner of somebody’s fate?”
A noise came from the back of Daphne’s throat like the sound of a creaking door. “ That’s blasphemous, but all right.”
Sam snorted. Whoever was keeping score could add that to her tally. “I know you probably think I’m crazy for getting all incensed about this.”
“No.” Daphne’s brows furrowed slightly. “But why are you? Incensed by any of it? I’m not and it’s my fate we’re talking about.”
“You mean other than me not loving the idea of you spending an eternity as a ghost?” Sam was offended that needed to be said.
“Yes.”
Sam sighed. Here went nothing. “Okay, look, I … I stopped going to church when I was twelve, not because I didn’t believe in …
some higher power, but because I couldn’t stomach the thought of spending another Sunday being told I was going to burn in hell because I had a crush on my best friend.
That I was twisted, a perversion, wrong and brimming with sin because I didn’t want to marry a boy one day.
That I needed to repent, that my sin was just as great and terrible as that of someone who committed true acts of atrocity. ”
Even in the dark, she could see Daphne’s face fall. “Sam—”
“I’m not saying your hands are clean. But whose are? You said it, no one’s ever wished for world peace . You weren’t a snake whispering in somebody’s ear, Daphne. I doubt you damned anybody who wouldn’t have damned themselves in one way or another.”
“Yes, well, this gun is guilty, Sam,” Daphne said, rubbing her eyes.
“And your church? The one you grew up going to? Is small-minded and regressive and just plain wrong. Trust me, we’d be dealing with an overcrowding problem if being queer got you a ticket to Hell.
Now, those who preach hate, on the other hand, there’s a special place reserved in the eighth circle for sowers of religious schism and discord. ”
Sam harrumphed. “Small favors.”
Daphne reached out, grabbing her hand. “My fate is what it is, Sam. There’s nothing either of us can do about it. Therefore, what’s the use discussing it? There are so many better things we could be talking about right now. So many better things we could be doing …”
Her thumb brushed across the middle of Sam’s palm, tickling a little.
Sam’s brain was stuck on the logistics. “Then what’s the plan? You’ve got to go find someone, right? Someone desperate, and make them an offer they won’t want to refuse?”
Until she did that and got her soul back, everything else was moot.
Daphne sighed and rolled onto her back, stared up at the ceiling. “That is how it works.”
“So? When are you going to start … sniffing?”
“I’m not a bloodhound.” Daphne heaved another, heavier sigh and opened her mouth like she was going to say something. She paused, pressed her lips together briefly, and tried again. “Can we just enjoy the next few days without talking about any of this? Please?”
Maybe it was the plaintive way Daphne had said please , the fact that she’d said it at all, but Sam’s stomach twisted with that sixth sense that something was off.
“Is there a reason you don’t want to talk about it?”
“It’s not exactly ideal pillow talk, for one.”
She didn’t even look at Sam when she said it, and more warning bells went off inside her brain.