43. Topher
Dante and Isobel had been doing all their nefarious planning in Dante’s room.
I couldn’t get in to overhear what they were saying.
I knew what that meant, but I hadn’t said anything because everyone would freak out.
Orion, Azriel, and Misha didn’t use to care about that part of me, but they sure did now.
Harlowe didn’t need to know. She’d be on the first train home.
I knew they expected me to lurk, but I already knew what was going to go down. I went back to my room, threw on my crocodile onesie, grabbed a pint of Ben and Jerrys, and put the latest season of Bridgerton on the telly.
They’d be calling when they wanted me. It would probably be exactly at midnight because it was cliché as fuck. I set an alarm on my phone so I could pause the TV when it happened. It would be annoying as fuck if I had to deal with this and the episode kept going.
I plowed through the whole pint of Chunky Monkey when my alarm went off at eleven-fifty-eight on the dot. I could be wrong, but I usually wasn’t about this kind of thing.
At midnight on the dot, I got the call I was waiting on. It had been a while. I had to stop being Topher because Topher was too obvious and everyone knew him. Topher was still needed here.
I let the glamour drop. Honestly, how long had it been since I let my horns and tail out? Dante found the book in the library on how to summon a demon to make a deal. I was the resident demon at Blackvale Academy.
I was good looking in my true form. I was seven feet tall and purple with respectable horns and a glorious tail.
I got hit on way more than the other demons who responded to a summoning.
Some of them gave me a hard time about it because people weren’t screaming in terror when they saw me, but they were just jealous because they were ugly.
I let the summoning pull me through time and space to the protective circle in Dante’s bedroom. He must have taken down the warding that was keeping me out before. Isobel was sitting with him with huge eyes.
“Holy shit. It worked!” she said.
I gave them a deep bow.
“I am Mephistopheles. At your service.”
“Like the musical Cats?” Isobel said, opening her mouth like she was about to sing that infernal song.
First of all, our names were similar, but different. Secondly, that cat was named after me. This was why I started going by Topher. It was frowned upon to disembowel people who got my name wrong with a song I hated.
“If you sing that song, I will appear to you when you least expect it, and poop your pants. Visualize that however you need to.”
“You can’t hurt us, demon. The protective circle prevents that. You are trapped until you give us what we want,” Dante said.
What a demanding little nugget. He was also wrong.
The protective circle protected me. Once upon a time, when people believed and there were a lot more demon summonings, fucking Gadreel decided to whisper our weaknesses to the Church.
He told them to summon us and then kill us.
So, we devised the protective circle and didn’t say who it was actually protecting.
I could also come and go as I pleased. We didn’t grant every deal people wanted. Free will was the one thing the devil and his dad agreed on, but the devil was also into consent.
So, basically, I couldn’t make Isobel love Dante and I couldn’t make Leif love Isobel.
I could give Isobel the talent that she could compete with Harlowe and I could make her famous.
She just had to be really specific with her wording or I’d make her famous for being terrible because frankly, I didn’t like her.
I was rusty. I wasn’t a freelance demon anymore.
I didn’t respond to every summoning, just the ones here.
I was pretty sure the last time a student found the book and asked me for a deal, it was in the seventies and it was a creative writing student with writer’s block.
I didn’t take that deal. The only reason he couldn’t write was because he thought he needed ecstasy to be creative.
No point in taking his soul when he just needed to lay off the drugs.
He wasn’t vital in breaking the cage and freeing my master.
I had a feeling whatever these two were going to ask me, I either couldn’t do or I wouldn’t do. Orion, Azriel, and Misha asked me for talent, but they already had that. They didn’t need a magical intervention. They needed to be placed in front of the right people, which I did.
Except I couldn’t force anyone to do anything they didn’t want to.
Orion summoned me four hundred years ago when racism was a lot more blatant.
People wanted his music, but they didn’t want him.
It wasn’t what anyone intended, but the only way he could pay his bills was to pretend someone with no talent, but the acceptable skin color wrote it.
Azriel came a hundred years later. He had the talent, but he was also as brash and pansexual as he was three hundred years later.
He took the art world by storm, but the only way for a man not to end up arrested for liking the company of other men back then was if he was a king and the law couldn’t touch him.
Azriel took up with a closeted married man.
His wife walked in on them and Azriel paid the price. He was thrown in jail to rot.
Misha summoned me a little over a hundred years ago.
I couldn’t know everything about everyone, even though I could bend space and time and lurk in shadows.
I got him an audition with one of the best ballet companies in the world.
They were revolutionary and hired famous artists, composers, and made the careers of several choreographers and dancers.
Misha was blossoming there and becoming their star.
I had no idea what they were doing to him with wealthy patrons.
They wouldn’t let him say no. There was a cruel couple who liked to hurt him.
Misha snapped and so graphically murdered them, he got labeled schizophrenic and thrown into an asylum. He wasn’t. He was just traumatized.
I cared for all three of them. I loved them.
They knew what I was when they took me to their beds.
I promised them the world and they should have gotten it.
I was not human. I spent a lot of time around them and enjoyed their comforts, but I really didn’t understand things like racism, homophobia, or getting off on hurting innocents.
They blamed me and they hated me for it.
I couldn’t even explain myself because I’d made promises I couldn’t keep.
It took the whole joy out of making deals.
Lucifer was devastated too because he had a lot invested in those three.
It was why he got Azriel out of jail and Misha out of the asylum when his cage was weakened.
It was why he’d been loop holing the fuck out of them. They all should have been dead centuries ago, but Lucifer owned their souls. He just never had a reaper come collect them. Demons couldn’t bring someone back from the dead but if a reaper never collected a soul, they just didn’t die.
Lucifer had been letting them reinvent themselves and have fame for several centuries because of how their deals went down, but also because together, they tended to weaken the bars of his cage.
They blamed me because their chains got yanked, and they had to cancel the tour and come here because I was the one who had to deliver the message. I didn’t know why either, so I didn’t really have an explanation, but it had to be Harlowe.
Harlowe had to be protected and her foes were the ones who summoned me. I needed to lay out the law of the land and maybe redirect them.
“So, these are the rules, children. I can’t make anyone do anything they don’t want to do.
So, I can’t make someone love you. I can’t bring anyone back from the dead and I can’t send you back in time.
I’m not killing someone for you. You’re going to Hell whether you sell your soul and ask me to do it or just do it yourself.
I’m not staining my clothes and dealing with the screaming when you’ve got a same destination either way.
“You found the book and figured out how to summon a demon, but do you understand the terms, mortal? You are selling your soul to the devil. Whatever you ask for, you get to enjoy for twenty-four years. At the end of that twenty-four years, a reaper will come and drag your soul to Hell, where it will be generally unpleasant and full of fire and torture. Think hard before you make your request.”
Maybe I should be a little more obvious?
Dante wasn’t stupid, even if I was pretty sure he was about to sell his soul for this twat.
If he asked me to do anything to Harlowe, it was a one-time thing.
He wouldn’t enjoy fame or money for twenty-four years until he got dragged to Hell.
Isobel would probably forget about him after they graduated.
“I didn’t find all that on the dark web. I thought you had to give us whatever we wanted. Are you sure?” Dante asked.
The internet could be fun. There were cat memes and true crime podcasts.
It could also be stupid as fuck. If he’d actually cracked open the hundred’s year old tome in the library instead of getting the instructions online from some edgelord, he wouldn’t ask me if I knew the terms and conditions of the job I’d been doing since I was spawned.
“Are you mansplaining demonic contracts to a demon because you saw something online, mortal? Are you dumb enough to think everything online is true?”
“No? But I also thought summoning a demon was horseshit, but here you are.”
I’d always thought Dante was a weird little bird. He bought the candles, the salt, and left me an offering. The only smart thing he did was get me tacos as an offering to snack on while I deal with this shitshow. I tore the wrapper open and took a savage bite while I glared at him.
This taco was terrible. Where did he even buy this? This taco was made by someone who thought mayonnaise was too spicy. The meat had zero seasoning. I opened my mouth and let it tumble to the ground. This was the most offensive summoning I’d been to in a long time.
Why did he even go through the trouble if he didn’t think it was going to work? Wasn’t the whole point to impress the twat?
“Well, it’s real. So is Hell. You can’t run from a reaper. They will find you wherever you are. So, what do you want, cupcake? Make it something you want to enjoy for twenty-four years and not something brief and stupid because this isn’t free. You’re paying with your eternal soul.”
Dante looked like he was questioning all his life decisions.
He promised Isobel something to do with Harlowe.
He knew I couldn’t make her love him. I could give her actual talent so she wasn’t threatened by Harlowe.
He could ask me to make them famous as a pair, but that wasn’t what he promised.
He invited her to his summoning and now he was stuck.
He could break the circle and I could leave. I could leave anytime I wanted, anyway. But right now, Dante was keeping Isobel in line and if I could offer an alternative, I was going to.
He shot Isobel a look, and she gave him this expectant, prissy bitch, entitled look. She fully expected him to go with the original plan, even if it meant his soul.
The question was, was he dumb enough to do it for a girl who was just using him?
He squared his shoulders. Here we were. Don’t make my first summoning in several decades a complete disappointment. The tacos were bad enough.
“I want Harlowe Lopez to disappear.”
Fuck.