The Demon's Bride

Chapter 5 - The First Meeting

Az woke to the unnerving awareness that he wasn’t alone and as he examined the room he was in he instantly remembered why.

He had bound himself to a mortal; an extraordinary witch and rarer still a seer but a mortal all the same.

A small smile reluctantly appeared on his lips as he thought back to the first time he met her.

Az traipsed among the bodies looking for his pendant. The one his mother had given him when he became an adult.

This was why Asmodeus hated spending time with his brothers. He didn’t hate his brothers, but somehow whenever any of them got together, c*****e ensued.

For example, one moment he and his brother Beal, aka Beelzebub, are simply having a drink and the next moment the bar is trashed, and they’re dumping bodies in the Badlands.

Nothing like a demon prince to turn a simple missing-and-presumed-murdered-person gig into a snake-pit. Az picked his way past the corpses, shoes squelching weirdly in the inky muck on the tile. The pendant was not on any of the bodies. He tried the bartender, a leased-and-reassembled thing with arms like the roots of a tree. Still nothing—except, under the counter, an open bottle of absinthe with lipstick stains on the rim. He had the faintest sense the trinket was nearby, humming a minor chord of power too delicate for these brutes to register.

He sniffed the air—clove cigarettes, copper, with a top note of fear-sweat. And underneath, over near the back office, something faint and fresh: witch-magic, sharp as ozone. The hackles along his spine tingled. He followed the whiff into the corridor, past the shattered bathroom door (Beal’s style) and the heap of money on the sticky floor (definitely Beal’s style)—into the battered office. No sign of the pendant, but someone had laid a containment glyph across the rotting desk, and even without looking, Az felt it fizz under his skin.

He dropped into a crouch. A body slumped against the baseboard, smaller than the others, brown hair that glinted red sticking up in mats like someone had dragged her through a static storm. She was breathing, just pretending. He reached for the glyph, shrugged off the paltry hex, and the world tilted—witches always left a trapdoor.

“You can open your eyes,” he said, when she didn’t move.

The girl on the floor peeled one lid up, studied him.

“You’re Asmodeus,” she said.

Az c****d a brow. “And you’re a human in hell. A child no less. What are you doing down here?”

Her tiny fists clenched, and her face morphed into indignant outrage.

“I’m seventeen jackass. I just look like a child, besides it's not my first time down here, so don’t worry your pretty little head," she spat condescendingly.

Az reached out with his senses and realized she’d slowed her aging. Impressive. That magic was rare these days. Rarer still were witches with the power to enact it.

All of a sudden Az was plagued by a feeling of déjà vu. He knew he had never had an experience like this and yet something about this child felt so familiar.

He gestured for her to sit up. She ignored him. Instead, she retracted both hands and started to draw circles on her torn denim: glyphs, sigils, the usual half-assed protection runes witches thought would work in a pinch.

Her magic flexed and shimmered, oily-bright and imperfect, more like a cracked mirror than the straightforward lines he was used to. Adolescent. Haphazard. Az watched her with a kind of clinical awe, the way a lepidopterist might observe a moth with human teeth.

“Your pendant is in the dead man’s wine.”

Wait. What?

“How did you know that? Who are you?” Az asked carefully.

“I’m Cassie. I’m a seer. I know things.”

Cassandra Bright’s last words echoed in his head. Help Cassie. He saw it now in the shape of her face, those otherworldly hazel eyes with a gaze that saw more than mortals were supposed to, even the smell of her magic.

She was truly Cassandra’s legacy, and he would honor the promise he made her, so he crouched down to her level.

“Alright Cassie, descendant of Cassandra, seer of the witches; how can I help?”

“Don’t worry, you’ll help me soon enough.”

Az grew more curious by the moment. “How will I do that?”

“By marrying me.”

Az stood dumbfounded for a second—the kind of dumb that actually wasn’t dumb at all, more like someone seeing the punchline to a joke that had been running for centuries and only now realizing they were the setup. The neon behind him made a halo around his head, crooked, a vandal’s afterthought. He laughed, a sound all wrong for the space, too clean for the blood on the floor.

“Not my usual proposal,” he said, dry as a salted snail.

Cassie wondered how many times he’d used that laugh to grease a deal, thin the air before a kill. Probably a million. Didn’t matter. She wasn’t here to murder or be murdered. She was here because nothing else made sense. Not since her mother died. Not since the visions started sliding their filmy hands over her waking life, shoving her face into scenes she’d never lived but knew almost as well as the feel of her own skin.

Suddenly Cassie’s mind sharpened and she remembered why she was here. “Excuse me, but I need to extract that demon’s venom.”

Az felt like his mind was beginning to unravel. “Why?”

“For my business!”

Az just blinked at her for a second, then started laughing again, sharper this time, as if someone had pressed a knife to his funny bone and said, Go ahead, amuse me. “Your business is demon venom. That’s original.”

He said it like a joke, but Cassie reached for the dead demon’s arm, rolled back the shirtsleeve—she could barely get her fingers around the wrist, the flesh was already greying—and nicked the vein with a box cutter that was neither hers nor from this realm. She coaxed a purplish syrup into a little glass vial, hands steady, the world going out of focus around the edges. It stank of burned sage and something chemical, but she masked it by holding her breath and thinking about the ocean.

“My business is ingredients. Whatever is needed from everyday herbs to demon venom. From ingredients on earth to ingredients from other realms.”

Cassie’s vision flickered, a split-second reel of the world’s most unhelpful home video: the demon’s body, the wineglass, a glint at the bottom. She set the vial down, uncorked it, and inhaled, expecting a reek of death. Instead, the venom gave off a faint, nearly sweet scent, like coriander and burning sugar. She filled three vials. Two were hers to keep. She passed the third to Az, who took it with the wary amusement Cassie imagined he reserved for cursed objects and toddlers holding grenades.

He unscrewed the cap, sniffed, and made a face. “Practical.” He tucked the bottle into a pocket. “If you ever want to build a trade in this part of hell, I recommend a bodyguard. Or a better wardrobe.” He glanced at her t-shirt. It said EAT THE RICH but the ‘R’ was blocked out by a dried splash of blood.

“No I’m good. Trust me, I’m killing it in the human sector. Not literally of course, then again what my customers do with the ingredients I sell them has nothing to do with me.”

He was dreaming, he was sure of it now. Az was either in some elaborate dream or he was awake and being pranked by one of his brothers.

A voice in his head told him that if his brothers were in a playful mood they’d simply try to kill him but Az ignored the voice.

This couldn’t be real.

A knock at the door of his suite pulled Az out of the amusing memory. Opening the door he was handed two envelopes and smirked.

What would his little witch say waking up to this?