23 Dante
Dante
“Dante, you sure she isn’t bullshitting you? You’ve spent all this time putting her in front of the Sins and she’s still pretending nothing’s happening.”
I grunted and looked around my palace. Hell would have disappointed most humans who expected lakes of fire and screaming bodies stacked to the ceiling.
It was scathingly hot in the deeper levels, but there wasn’t much actual fire.
The landscape was scarred instead, blackness swallowing most of the common areas while deep reds and blues shimmered through cracks in the ground and along the jagged stone walls.
Our demon skins were built for that kind of madness.
Human souls weren’t, especially before the cleansing settled them.
Nick enjoyed the uglier parts of Hell more than I did, and watching him finally embrace pieces of Wrath he had spent years fighting had been entertaining.
Luc needed more work, though. A lot more if I was being honest.
I had kept plenty from both of them, partly because some things were safer learned than explained and partly because I needed to see what they became without me steering every decision.
Pride and Wrath had both surprised me. Luc had built control around Pride instead of letting it become arrogance for arrogance’s sake, while Nick had spent years fighting Wrath until it leaked out of him sideways.
Ari was changing the equation, but not because I needed either of them to become crueler or louder.
Temptation exposed what was already there.
If putting her near them loosened anything, I needed to see what surfaced when Pride, Wrath, and Temptation stopped pretending they were simpler than they were.
And Ariuk was still feeding me lies so flimsy they were almost insulting.
Luc and Nick had affected her. Zel had affected her. I could hear it every time she dodged a question and pretended nothing had changed. The interesting part wasn’t whether the bonds were forming anymore. It was how far this could go before even Ari stopped pretending she didn’t see the pattern.
The angels had taught her enough old lore to make her dangerous with half-truths, but they had never understood what she was well enough to prepare her for what happened once all that suppression started cracking.
Ignoring my right-hand man, I slipped out of existence and appeared outside the gates of somewhere I was wholly unwelcome.
There were only a few seconds before three archangels appeared, all of them poised for a fight. I hadn’t come to start one. I had questions, and angels were still embarrassingly bad at technology.
“Dante, what reason has you gracing our steps today?” one of them asked. “More trickery, I assume?”
I ignored the jab and focused on the softer of the three, Haliel, the only one who might give me anything useful. “Care to fetch Ariuk’s handler?” I mused, though deep down I hated referring to Raphael as that.
There had been a time when we shared more than just the guardianship of angel.
Something much more dangerous. Jophiel finding my black feathers tangled in Raphael’s sheets had ended badly enough that neither of us ever tried again.
In heaven. Sometimes, though, I wished I’d had the balls to reach out afterward instead of letting centuries stack between us.
Haliel’s eyes grew wide. “I… but you’re the Devil. You can’t come in here!”
I snorted. “I’m not going to. I’ve had enough of Heaven for a lifetime. Tell Raphael I called. We need to speak about his little angel.” I turned on my heel and returned to Earth before it could become an argument.
My appearance would stir up enough unrest that Raphael would have to attend to the ‘matter’ at hand. I just had to wait patiently. At my cafe of choice. With my favorite coffee in hand.