Chapter 15
Fifteen
Mercy
Walking into dark, ancient ruins with the Demon Prince of Lust and ex-Horseman of War isn’t exactly the smart thing to do. Dumb girls in horror flicks would do it.
Asmodeus tosses a forlorn glance at me over his shoulder, torchlight flickering on his face. “You know, they paint me as the villain now, but it wasn’t always like that.”
I think about Cisco still frozen back on the shore. “I find that hard to believe.”
He harrumphs. “Let me show you something.”
“Let” sounds as if I have a choice. I follow him deeper into the ruins where he shines his torch on a wall crumbling under the weight of time. The fresco is broken into three distinct scenes.
The first shows a couple in love, the middle is a battle, and the third is a banquet.
All figures are pagan gods and deities. I’m not as knowledgeable about cultures and eras as I am with languages, but I’m guessing these are the Roman gods and their pantheon.
Makes sense if we’re buried beneath the Vatican.
Asmodeus stops at the first scene and smiles. “Handsome devil, isn’t he?”
It’s just a man in armor. “The warrior?”
“Mars.” He smiles fondly. “The God of War.”
“And the woman?”
“Venus.” A feral grin. “Lust.”
“Ah-huh.” I try not to sound too unimpressed, but I’m curious where this is headed.
He moves to the middle panel and casts his torch over a battle, illuminating the grotesque violence and gore. Pride fills his eyes. “He gets better looking with age, doesn’t he?”
I snort at the warrior from the first panel painted here, battling up a hill of corpses. “Right. Is there a point to this?”
He flattens his lips and exhales hard through his nose as if I’m trying his patience. “The point is that, unlike most other cultures, the Romans didn’t fear war—they worshipped it.”
“Maybe that’s why their religion failed, buddy.”
His hand whips out lightning fast and grabs me by the scruff, twisting the robe and lifting me to his eye level. My toes scrape the floor. My muscles relax, playing dead.
It’s self-preservation. Maybe Leila got it wrong about him not being able to hurt others.
He moved so fast, so powerfully, with only one hand.
The torchlight didn’t even gutter at the speed.
Slowly, as if to prove his strength, he brings me closer so we’re eye to eye.
His once-brown eyes are now wholly black—like how Cisco’s look when his curse rides him.
“They failed because they stopped believing,” Asmodeus snarls in my face, forked tongue flashing. “They stopped fighting for it. All they had to do was pray to me, and I would have helped them!”
“Okay!” I force my voice not to tremble. “I get it.”
Fleeting anguish crosses his face, and then he drops me with a disgusted twist of his upper lip. He swings the torch to the wall, highlighting a section where Mars leads his soldiers up a mountain of dead foes, his flaming sword held high.
“They never tell the story properly,” Asmodeus mopes, the picture of misery again.
He slips a hand into his pocket. “First, I was Fury. That’s what they called me when men looked at the blood on their hands and needed somewhere else to put the blame.
” He pauses, jaw tense, breath sawing in and out of flared nostrils with conviction.
“But I was the shove before the spear. The heat in the skull. The moment obedience cracked.”
He moves the torchlight to the final panel, the banquet with twelve gods at a table overlooking two lovers caught in a net—Mars and Venus.
“Later,” he continues, “when they grew more frightened of what happened in the bedrooms than on battlefields, I became Lust.” He growls, low and bitter in his throat.
“Funny that. Men can watch a city burn and call it history, but let a bride tremble in fear on her wedding night, and suddenly I am the scandal of the age.”
My eyes narrow. “I’m assuming you’re talking about this woman, Sarah—the one whose father used Raphael’s staff to trap you in the stone.”
The CCTV footage of the dive bar he massacred revealed he was hunting down Sarah’s descendants to kill them in revenge.
He puffs out his chest, indignant. “Did I go too far? She will tell you that. So will her miserable husbands. So will every fool who mistakes obsession for love because I breathed on the fire and found it beautiful.”
I don’t even know what that means. “Pretty sure they can’t say anything. They’re dead.”
“I didn’t invent desire!” He gapes at me. “I merely refused to apologize for it.”
Goosebumps break out over my skin as his words strike a chord. My fingers twitch toward my thighs, to the cilice wounds I’ve not thought about all day.
“This is why you call me one of your own,” I whisper. “Because my lust goes too far.”
“Sweet, innocent child,” he croons at me. “Lust is the kindergarten version. Desire is bigger than flesh. I am the patron saint of everything people crave badly enough to lie about.”
“I suppose that makes sense.”
“Take Venus, for example.” He gestures at the lovers and then the battle. “She wanted Mars so badly that she risked being caught for adultery. Back then, it was a crime punishable by death.”
I note dryly, “I’d bet it wasn’t a crime at all if she’d been born male.”
He gives me a brief, sad smile, then returns to studying the fresco. “Venus was forced to return to a loveless marriage, so Mars had two choices—let the woman he loved and who loved him in return suffer for it . . . or . . . stop lying to himself and realize some things are worth fighting for.”
“But they won.” I point at the battle depicting his victory, then at the banquet and the net. “They kept fighting for it, and they were punished anyway.”
“Hope is disgusting, isn’t it?”
I cock my head and stare at him. “But didn’t you say earlier something about only failing if you stop believing?”
“Not quite, precious.” He gives my head a patronizing pat. “But close.”
We stand in silence for a moment. He’s lost in the past, and I’m trying to summon the courage to speak because it’s finally hit me—this being standing beside me is incredibly ancient and powerful.
If what he’s insinuating is true, that he was somehow instrumental in the events on this fresco, then he’s no simple Demon Prince of Hell.
“It’s all bullshit, anyway.” Asmodeus takes a swig of sacramental wine, which he must have manifested while I wasn’t looking. He spits smoking wine over the mural. “There. Put that on a fresco.”
He tosses the empty bottle, only to manifest another—lid already off. He guzzles deeply, looking at me from beneath his lashes, and swaying drunkenly on his feet. Smoke leaks from his nostrils. He drinks the entire bottle down in one go and then spits the last mouthful onto the wall.
“We should burn it,” he slurs and tosses the bottle over his shoulder. It smashes somewhere behind us.
“You’re the one with the torch, buddy.”
He blinks. Looks at the torch in his other hand.
“Oh yeah.” He swings it like a baseball bat until it hits the wet wall. But when the flame touches the wine, nothing happens.
“Oh, that’s right.” He laughs. “Bullshit doesn’t burn!”
“The wine can’t hear you. Also, spitting is gross.”
“You know what your problem is?” Asmodeus points his sputtering torch at me, squinting with one eye and swaying.
“I’m sure you’ll tell me anyway,” I drawl. “Men love doing that.”
“Your problem is that you need more of this.” He lifts another open bottle that’s appeared out of nowhere.
“Communion wine?”
He rolls his eyes and stares at the banquet again, this time with a touch of melancholy. “At least when I used to carouse with mortals, there was a payoff. They drank to become interesting. To loosen. To confess. To gamble away titles, marriages, and common sense. It was magnificent.”
I’m starting to think he’s just lonely. There’s no real point to this excursion.
“A little wine.” He waggles the bottle. “A little music.” He clicks his fingers, and choir music grows loud again.
“A little dancing.” He swings his hips jauntily.
“And suddenly every man in the room remembers the thing he actually wants.” He sighs wistfully.
“I loved them like that. Loose. Honest. Ruinously alive.”
“No offense, Asmodeus, but I really don’t know why you brought me here.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” He jerks the bottle toward the fresco. Wine sprays and lands like blood spatter.
“Um . . .” I blow air through my teeth and scrutinize the mural. “I guess . . .” I graze my fingers over Venus in the net. “If you’re going to have an affair, don’t get caught?”
He lifts his face Heavenward, closes his eyes, and smashes his lips together as if he’s about to explode. A few deep breaths later, he calms down and faces me with forced stoicism.
“Mercy. Darling.” He touches his heart. “As one of mine, your answer offends me.”
“You keep calling me that, but you don’t explain why!” Frustration wells within me. “Just admit it. I’m a slut. I like to fuck.”
“Yes!” he roars, grinning from ear to ear.
“Finally, some truth! We like to fuck, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but—” He swings his bottle at the banquet, to the carousing gods and revelers behind them, to the battle on the next panel, and then the lovers embracing beyond that.
“It’s not what fucking produces. It’s what wanting and liking produces.
You don’t see babies here, do you? No sniveling runts running around.
” He slams his palm on the banquette. “This is what your holy man gets wrong. This is the bedrock of lies on which his religion is built. Saints think they are good because they deny their nature. Sinners think they are damned because they have one. But we know better.” He waves between us, wild-eyed and manic.
“We know that hunger is not the disease. Shame is. Judgment is. The lie is that they think wanting makes a monster of you.”
Bedrock of lies?
Didn’t Mary’s gospel say something about that somewhere?