Chapter 30 #2
Damien smiled. The expression was beautiful and terrible at once, a glimpse of something vast and hungry wearing human features like a poorly fitted mask.
“Oh, but you will help me, chico valiente. Both of you will.” He leaned back, crossed one leg over the other.
“Because I am the only way you will ever find Edward Fitzgerald.”
The name slammed into me—a sledgehammer to the stomach.
Beside me, Violet went rigid. Her pulse spiked—I heard it, that sudden acceleration, the rabbit-quick panic of prey recognizing the carnivore’s scent, and I knew she was thinking exactly what I was.
How? How does he know that name? How could he possibly know about Edward? I’d been careful. Violet had been careful. We hadn’t spoken that name in public, hadn’t given anybody, either within Oubliette or outside of it, any reason to connect us to Edward.
What else does he know? That question ricocheted through my skull, spawned a dozen more. Did he know about Violet’s previous life? About her rebirth? Did he understand what she was, what we both were?
Then an even more important—far more terrifying—thought occurred. What impossible terms will Violet agree to if this High Demon can actually deliver Edward to her?
As Violet and I sat there considering how to reply to Damien’s question, the door to his study opened.
A seven-foot-tall boar-faced demon squeezed into the room carrying a silver tray with a pot and a cup of white porcelain.
Fifty years from my first life of seeing truly weird shit all over the Wastelands greatly helped me keep my composure in that moment.
Violet did not have that experience.
“Ohmyfuckinggodwhatthefuckisthat?” She scrambled out of her chair and away from the new demon.
There was a heartbeat where nobody moved or said anything before the boar-faced demon replied, “Coffee.”
“Ciriatto,” Damien addressed the boar-faced demon, “thank you. You can place it right here on the desk. And if you would be so kind as to take Jules’s body back to her room? I’ll see to her after I have finished with this meeting.”
Massive and silent, the demon’s pig-like face was as blank as fresh snow. He set the silver tray in front of Damien, then turned to Jules. He lifted her as if she weighed nothing.
No, as if she means nothing. As if her death means nothing.
She was nothing more than a broken thing to be disposed of. Her head lolled back, arms hanging loose, blood still dripping from the cavity in her chest. The demon’s expression never changed. He simply carried her towards the door, her body swaying with his measured steps.
My stomach twisted. Bile burned the back of my throat. I turned from the sight of Jules being carted away like a sack of meat and took several deep breaths. This is what gods and demons and all the rest of the supernaturals do. They take and take and take all that they can, just because they can.
The room pressed in around me. I focused my senses on my surroundings in an attempt to ground myself, to not let my fury and sorrow take control.
Shelves climbed towards the shadowed ceiling above, each packed with ancient tomes—their spines cracked and faded.
Many titles I recognized, even from this distance: The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, The Lesser Key of Solomon.
Forbidden texts I’d only heard whispered about in my previous life, now casually displayed like trophies.
The scattered paperwork on Damien’s desk was covered in sigils penned in ink that shimmered faintly in the firelight.
I recognized some of those as well: binding circles, warding marks, symbols from random grimoires.
Others were older, stranger, pulled from traditions I didn’t know.
The air smelled of coffee, cinders, and red wine, heavy enough to taste.
My hearing picked up the hiss and pop of the fireplace and, beneath that, the steady thrum of Damien’s two hearts.
One in his chest where it should be. One in his tongue where it shouldn’t.
He leaned forward, all dangerous elegance: skin the color of burnished earth catching firelight, hair swept back to reveal a face too perfect for mortality, eyes molten amber that seemed to peel me apart. The scent of him rolled over me—cardamom, sandalwood, something faintly carnal.
“Now, where were we?” Damien poured coffee into his delicate porcelain cup, the stream of dark liquid smooth and controlled. “I believe you two were processing your shock over how I knew you were hunting a man named Edward Fitzgerald, si?”
I felt Violet’s hand tighten in mine, heard her breathing change—faster, shallower. Her heart hammering in her chest sounded like it was trying to break free.
She wanted Edward dead. Needed it the way I’d once needed warmth in the tundra, needed it with a desperation that eclipsed reason and self-preservation. Vengeance was her north star, the fixed point around which everything else orbited.
If Damien was offering her a path to Edward’s throat—
Fuck.
She’d take it. Of course, she would. She’d make a deal with this demon wearing human skin, would bind herself to him with obligations and boons, and walk straight into whatever trap he’d carefully constructed.
Because revenge mattered more than safety.
Because some scales needed balancing, even if it cost everything.
I’d spent fifty years learning when to run, when to fight, when to make deals with devils.
And every instinct I possessed was screaming that this was the kind of bargain you didn’t walk away from.
The kind that followed you like a shadow, collected its due with interest, left you wondering when the other shoe would finally drop.
But Violet?
Violet was already leaning forward, her voice steady despite the chaos I could hear in her pulse. “You can deliver him to me?”
And there it was.
The moment she stopped asking if we should deal with this demon and started negotiating terms.
I watched Damien’s smile widen, watched those golden eyes gleam with satisfaction as he sipped his coffee.
“But of course I can, mi gatita. And I am confident that I already know the answer to this next question, but I do want to hear it directly from your lips.” He paused and sipped his coffee.
“Why does someone gifted by the God of Time want to find Edward Fitzgerald?”
God of Time?
Things were still hazy—my mind struggling to catch up with being resurrected, with the golden door I saw, with Death herself releasing me, with Jules’s sudden murder—and Violet answered before I could, her voice steady where my own was not.
“Vengeance,” was all she said.
The word thrummed through the room like a loosed arrow. It struck me in the chest as well—an echo, a kinship I couldn’t unfeel. Her heartbeat spiked. I heard it clearly, hammering against her ribs.
Damien clicked his tongue, amused. The sound was sharper than it should have been, almost metallic. “Mi gatita. . . how primitive.” His smile was too perfect for how dangerous he truly was. “You seek vengeance upon a man for pain he rendered upon you in a different life?”
He knows too much. How does he know about Violet’s rebirth?
I tensed, bare skin prickling with cold despite the heat from the fireplace.
My eyes moved to Violet, and I saw her hand clench—knuckles white, tendons standing out like bowstrings.
The fracture showed behind her resolve, hairline cracks in stone about to break.
She glanced at me quickly, searching for something, then turned back to him.
“Both lives are me,” she said, voice taut as wire. “The joy I’ve experienced in this life does not erase the pain he caused me in my previous life.”
My heart hammered against my sternum. “Violet, we can surely find another way to get to Edward.” The words were fire on my tongue, ash in my throat. “He killed Jules.”
Her breath hitched—I heard it catch, heard the wet sound of tears she was holding back.
“I know he did.” She turned to me, and her eyes held a haunted shadow I recognized.
This was a side of her I had barely glimpsed, seen glimmers of beyond the youth she portrayed.
She looked like someone who had seen death countless times.
Someone, I realized, like me. “But I have to hear him out, Rowan. If he can get me closer to Edward—”
“At what cost?” I asked.
“At any cost. Part of me feels as if,” she paused and struggled for the right words, “as if killing him is the reason I am here. The reason I was given this second chance.”
I squeezed her hand. “Violet, you do not know that.”
“And neither do you,” she snapped. “How could you? You know so much about this supernatural shit we’re in,” she said as she waved her hand around the room. “But you don’t know how or why I was reborn. It had to be for a reason. Just. . . forget it. You wouldn’t understand.”
Damien chuckled, the sound resonating in his chest in strange harmonics. His two hearts beat out of sync with each other, creating a rhythm that hurt my head if I focused on it too long. “I imagine he would understand better than most. He is, afterall, grappling with his own form of reincarnation.”
Violet’s eyes widened in disbelief, her expression pained. Her pulse jumped. “What?”
Shame poured from every pore—I could smell it on myself, sharp and acrid, mixing with the cinder-wine air. I looked away from her, focusing on Damien. “Demon,” I said with malice, “that was not your secret to share.”
He set his coffee cup down and placed his hand over his chest in mock surprise. “Oh? Did I thoughtlessly share a secret of yours aloud? Did I carelessly let slip something you would have much preferred to keep quiet? I cannot begin to fathom how that must feel.”
“It’s true?” Violet asked. The hurt in her voice matched the pain on her face.