[ENG.] Azazel - Lucifer's Son

7. The exact spot

"Alright, everyone. This potion is completely harmless — or at least, that's what they say." Professor Hardin paused for effect, like an actress who knows her audience. "The great witches of the past used it on days when the earth was under Venus's favor, reciting a rather theatrical incantation: 'Gods and Nature, who heals me with their hands, grant me the power to shine with true light.' Go ahead, then. Repeat after me."

She said it with an almost grotesque enthusiasm — the kind that belongs to someone who knows perfectly well they're being ridiculous and decides to commit to it fully, on principle.

"Please tell me we haven't actually come to this," I whispered to Danielle, looking for solidarity.

She was already doubled over, one hand pressed to her mouth to hold back the laughter.

"Jolie, stop killing the magic of the moment. This is pure poetry!" she managed to say between hiccups, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye with the back of her wrist.

We all recited the incantation in unison. I felt ridiculous in the most profound and excruciating way possible. I exhaled internally — a long, resigned breath — while Danielle let out muffled noises in a desperate attempt not to completely lose it.

"Now I'd like you to prepare it and show me the results. The recipe is on the board: a simple herbal infusion that should make your hair... slightly less terrible." Hardin concluded, with a smile that was more unsettling than anything in the potion itself.

We spent the hour chopping, grinding, and mixing, until the room filled with a sharp, aggressive smell dominated entirely by bay leaf — a dictator presiding over a war council. In the end, everyone presented their concoction. Hardin examined each one with strange satisfaction, as if she were judging works of art, and assigned us the task of using it for a month, logging the results in a dedicated notebook. I had the distinct feeling there was nothing remotely scientific about any of this. Absolutely nothing.

Out in the crowded hallway, Danielle fixed her red bow in her pocket mirror with the satisfied expression of someone who already knows exactly how her day is going to go.

"Get ready, sweetheart. Your daily spoonful of honey is on his way."

I smiled, but something curled up inside me. If I really had to compare that man to something, it would have been the cold wind of early morning, the sea swelling before a storm, Sheffield's low, leaden sky during those weeks when the sun can't be bothered to show up. Nothing that bore even the faintest resemblance to honey.

"Honey? Dan, that man is poison dressed up as candy," I said, pulling my hair into a quick bun, almost as if bracing for something.

"Clearly you haven't tasted it yet," she replied, raising one eyebrow with a slow, calculated deliberateness.

"And you have?" I asked, pressing my lips into a smile that was trying to look innocent and not quite pulling it off.

She answered with a light nudge of her shoulder. But an eloquent one.

The arrival of Professor Stan cut our little performance short.

I stopped needling her and signaled toward the entrance with a subtle shift of my eyes. He crossed the threshold with that same deliberate, unhurried stride as the first time — the walk of someone who isn't in a rush because he already knows he's exactly where he's supposed to be. His eyes swept the room with the methodical precision of someone taking inventory, until they landed on me. As always, I looked down before my face could turn into a lit furnace.

Danielle, for her part, deployed the most artificially sweet smile in her repertoire. She kept it in reserve for special occasions. I wondered whether, if she held it for three hours straight, she'd need intensive care for a muscle spasm afterward.

"I won't waste time on pleasantries." Dimithryus set his hands on the desk, leaning slightly forward. "I have no interest in you, I don't like you, and I would rather have a conversation with a rock than teach any of you. If you were the only people left on earth to talk to, I'd rip out my own tongue."

He said it with a glacial calm that was almost more offensive than the content itself. As if he were simply reading a weather report.

Friday night came back to me. The bar, the lights, that voice sliding slow as honey. He hadn't seemed that hostile then. As if he had sensed my thought — or maybe it was just my paranoia reading into every move he made — he shot me a brief, cold glance before turning back to the board.

"Let's get started. Today we'll be classifying types of demons and evil spirits." His voice had the cadence of someone who has repeated the same material enough times to no longer need notes. "We have the Deceivers, who persuade men to commit abominable acts through flattery and subtle lies. The False Diviners, who pose as divine entities or spread terror as a weapon. And finally the Executioners — those who act on behalf of their lord, Mephistopheles, without will of their own and without mercy." He closed the book with a sharp, dismissive gesture, as if it didn't deserve to be on the desk. "Instruments. Not beings."

"Stop staring at him like that, Jolie. You're about to put a hole in his forehead," Danielle whispered, the smirk barely contained between her lips.

"And you stop fantasizing. Your thoughts are literally rattling around in my skull," I replied without looking up from my notebook.

"Oh really? And who was the one with the glazed-over look on her face a minute ago?" she shot back, snickering under her breath.

"Shut up, you goof."

"It is essential," Stan continued without raising his voice, in that tone that didn't need volume to fill a room, "to understand that these demons are divided into Incubi and Succubi. The former take on a masculine, seductive form. They lie with women, feeding on their vital energy. They leave them drained." A brief pause, almost surgical. "When they survive. Succubi do the same with men, feeding on their sin — which, as we know, is an inexhaustible resource."

I furrowed my brow, my pen still on the page.

"If their appearance completely masks what they are, how can a human being recognize their true nature in time? How do you defend yourself against something you can't identify?" I asked, with a concern that wasn't entirely academic.

Dimithryus turned toward me. There was something in the way he did it — slow, deliberate, as if the question had struck an interesting point — that made me hold my breath.

"There is no way to unmask them, Miss Vladă," he said, "other than experiencing their torment firsthand. Only then, I assure you, would their nature become crystal clear." He offered a smile — as subtle as it was unsettling — the smile of someone who already knows the answer to his own question and prefers not to say it out loud.

"They'd scare me regardless," Danielle said, with a disarming bluntness.

"They should," Stan replied, crossing his arms over his chest.

"Although, when you really think about it, they're just stories. Legends made up to put children to sleep," she added, twirling a strand of hair absently — the way she did when she was trying to seem lighter than she actually was.

"I disagree," said Dimithryus. His voice stayed flat, but something inside it had sharpened. "Every myth has an origin. Distorted by time, yes — but real." He paused, looking at her with an expression that wasn't exactly cold, but wasn't warm either. It was precise. "I'm surprised that you, of all people — with your well-known passion for the occult — would make such… juvenile assessments. Professor Rockchester spoke very highly of you." A pause. "Perhaps he was wrong."

The words dropped into the room like something heavy shattering on the floor. The silence that follows is never the same as the one that came before.

Danielle's mouth fell open, words evaporating before they could even form. I watched her swallow, her jaw tightening just slightly — the signal I knew well, the one that preceded either an explosion or a forced silence that cost more than the explosion itself. She bit down on her lower lip hard enough that it must have hurt.

Something rose slowly in me, from the bottom of my stomach upward. It wasn't just anger — it was that specific kind of anger that comes when someone hits a person who doesn't deserve to be hit, right in front of you, while you can't do a thing about it. The worst kind.

Danielle could be naive, over the top, loud. She could exaggerate and daydream and be wrong. But she was the most genuinely curious person I knew — the kind who sat in the front row not to make a good impression, but because things actually interested her. And he had used that as a weapon.

I gripped my pen tighter. I kept my eyes on my notebook. I waited.

But inside, I was already looking for the exact spot to strike.