Chapter Text

II.

A street car raising its iron moan; stopping, belling and starting; stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed; still risen, faints; halts, the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter, fainting, lifting, lifts, faints forgone: forgotten.

Knoxville: Summer 1915—James Agee

Even after a hundred-some-odd years in Hell, Alastor hasn’t forgotten the colour of a living sunrise. He recreates it faithfully over his bayou every morning: the pale watery blue of predawn igniting into brilliant yellow-orange shot through with swollen red veins, the gritty haze of smog from the city settling over the horizon, the lambent orange glow of fading streetlights cutting through the edge of the trees and fuzzing them into warm verdant green.

"It doesn’t look like that anymore, you absolute geezer," Vox had scoffed once, the one and only time Alastor had let him into the bayou. "Vel’s shown me pictures: they have these LED streetlights now, very cool, very clean. Blue’s the future, baby!"

"Blue. Eugh," Alastor had replied with an exaggerated shudder. Vox had sniped back, Alastor had smoothly parried, and they’d slipped back into friendly bickering as they’d always done until the day it hadn’t been friendly anymore. Alastor still remembers the sizzle of electronics against the tendons in his wrists, the white-hot edge of Vox’s shattered screen as it sliced through his palms. He could have ended it that day if it weren’t for the stitches woven through the muscles in his arm, weakening his hand. For one brief moment they had finally understood each other perfectly, and he’d been forced to pull away.

That’s the second thing he’ll do once he’s free of his contract, Alastor decides with a slow sip of coffee. He’ll find Vox, he’ll knock him back onto his knees where he belongs, and he’ll finish what should have been over and done with seven years ago.

He’d selected a particularly ripe cut of meat for breakfast this morning, but his appetite has shrivelled against the heat beginning to prickle in his gut. When he’d changed the bandages earlier, the skin along the wound was red and angry, hot lines of inflammation beginning to radiate outwards from its swollen edges like a starburst. The stitches were already beginning to strain again, the deepest crevices pulsating with a low, red glow. Unpleasant, but the first touch of a new dawn always is.

Alastor swallows down what he can and watches the sunrise.

After breakfast he sets out once again in search of Lucifer, which is becoming a regrettably common occurrence he’d rather not make a habit of. Down the ostentatious hallway to the elevator, through the slow arduous crawl of a suspended metal box (don’t lean on the wall, don’t let any stitches pull, don’t think about the pain gnawing at his ribs like a starving rat), back along the mezzanine in his new daily circuit that holds the cadence of his old routine with none of the familiarity.

His shadow slinks along the floor in a sullen puddle at his feet, radiating his bad mood to anyone who might care to look. Alastor spares it a single exasperated glance. "Come now chum, you could at least make an effort. Bear it for a few days, just until…" He trails off, tilts his head, listening. From the other side of the mezzanine, faint strains of music are drifting from the library. Something orchestral; it’s not show tunes so it can’t be Charlie, and it’s not self-righteous proselytizing so it can’t be her fallen angel beau. Niffty would be humming, Husker would be grousing, Angel Dust would never be awake at this hour of the morning. There’s only one other person it could be.

Alastor tugs his lapels straight, kicks at his shadow until it pulls itself into some semblance of respectability, then heads briskly across the mezzanine. The Morningstar family portrait watches him as he goes, as condescending as ever even with its canvas torn in one corner.

The library is a new addition to the hotel since the rebuilding, one Alastor doesn’t entirely hate. There’s stained glass in the windows that softens Hell’s harsh red light into a gentle lavender, and the shelves are built from dark, heavy wood that holds the smell of paper and book glue tightly enough to almost drown out the brimstone. It’s a place with weight, a place that feels older than the fresh hotel it inhabits. Like his tower, like his bayou; the soft rugs spread across the wooden floor swallow up the sound of his footfalls just the same.

The King of Hell is set up in a plush armchair near the windows with a newspaper and a steaming cup of what smells like English Breakfast tea mixed with a frankly alarming amount of milk and sugar. He’s listening to music on a proper gramophone, which is very nearly a point in his favour. Unfortunately for his scoreboard, he’s using it to play over-orchestrated, disgustingly soggy romantic slop which immediately dissolves the single iota of good will Alastor had been preparing to extend him. Who ever decided a string section should sound so wet?

More than that, the sight of him simply makes Alastor spiteful, more than his usual baseline. How dare Lucifer lounge around in his shirtsleeves and still look effortlessly aristocratic? How dare his hair read as artfully tousled rather than unkempt, the way it curls a little on the ends an added charm rather than looming threat? He reminds him of…of…!

His stitches twinge. The thought dissolves. Alastor clenches his hands behind his back and steps forward.

"Good morning, Your Majesty," he calls, bright and clipped over the soggy wash of music. "Another lovely day down in this charming domicile of yours."

Lucifer shudders like a salamander’s been dropped down the back of his shirt, his face moving through the five stages of grief in rapid succession. Alastor preens silently at the reaction he can invoke on presence alone. "Ugh. It was a lovely day. What do you want?"

Alastor ambles closer and stops by the opposite armchair, emphasizing their height difference as much as he can without straining his throbbing ribs. The newspaper crinkles as Lucifer’s fingers tighten. "Is a loyal subject not allowed to humbly request counsel from his king?"

"Oh sure, sure!" Lucifer twists his face into a dramatic simper, saccharine sweet. It makes him look remarkably similar to Charlie, which only makes Alastor dislike him more. "If I happen to see anyone loyal and humble around, I will happily lend them my ear."

Alastor bares his teeth. "Haha! Very funny."

"Haha! I’m not joking. Get lost." Lucifer lifts the newspaper up in front of his face with a snap, as a jaunty little horn solo blares from the gramophone as punctuation. Alastor recognizes the piece now, regrettably. Till Eulenspiegel. The story of an irreverent trickster mocking his way through life until fate finally catches up with him. How gauche.

Still, information retrieval requires the occasional bout of diplomacy, even in the face of such daunting odds. Sighing theatrically, Alastor drops himself into the chair and crosses his legs, trying to appear politely resigned rather than craving violence. His wound protests loudly; he ignores it. "If I could! Alas, I believe you’re the only one in the vicinity with the knowledge I require."

A beat; a rustle of paper, a swell of extravagant music. Lucifer’s eyes reappear over the top of the newspaper, squinted suspiciously. "Knowledge about what?"

Ah, there’s the first sniff of interest. Lure him in slowly now: a dash of nonchalance, a pinch of scorn, just enough intrigue to add flavour. Alastor hums, sits back in the chair, glances boredly at his claws until he can feel Lucifer physically bristle opposite him.

"Why, holy energy of course!" he says at last. "I want to know how it affects soul contracts."

It hits as intended: Lucifer drops the newspaper entirely and stares, his ridiculous bug eyes wide and baffled. Alastor beams a hundred watt smile and waits patiently, even as his wound burns and the music swells into a sodden woodwind run that drips like condensation from a wet porch roof.

"…Holy energy?" the Devil finally asks, blinking dumbly.

Alastor sharpens his smile to a gleaming knife edge. "I do believe that’s what I said, yes!"

Lucifer just keeps staring, useless little buffoon that he is. "And how it affects…soul contracts?"

"Perhaps you should turn your crafting ambitions towards parrots rather than ducks. You do seem to have an affinity for them!"

"It—They…" Lucifer doesn’t even rise to the barb, still too busy sputtering helplessly. "Holy energy destroys demons."

Spirits above and below, at this rate he’ll have more luck breaking into Heaven and torturing the information out of a different seraph than getting anything useful out of this worthless popinjay. (And how well did that go last time, ol’ chum? a nasty little voice whispers in his head. Adam’s laughter. Blood between his teeth. Holy fire screaming in the soft spaces between his ribs.)

Static pops in Alastor’s ears. He very nearly avoids digging his claws into the upholstery by folding them tightly in his lap instead. "A ground-breaking revelation brought to us by the King of Hell himself!" His voice crackles on "King of Hell", rendering it distorted and jagged. If he could only do the same to its owner. "Obviously I mean in the absence of destruction."

Lucifer attempts to glower while still looking flabbergasted, a combination that makes him look like he’s suffering a bowel obstruction. "In the absence of…?! What in all the Rings are you on about, there is no—"

Alastor cuts him off, the last shreds of his patience thoroughly evaporated. "Let me lay it out for the more slow-witted among us."

"Listen, you—"

"No, you listen. You clearly need the remedial study." If only he had his staff, he’d jab Lucifer in the chest as punctuation, maybe poke out an eye for good measure. He settles for gesturing grandly instead, ignoring how the hot coals under his ribs pop at the motion. "Now. Imagine, if you can muster up the capacity, there’s a battle against Heaven. A demon with a soul contract goes up against something a little more sophisticated than an exorcist and gets a serving of holy energy for their trouble. It doesn’t kill them, at least not right away. What happens to their soul contract?"

Other than the pain, he doesn’t say. Other than the raw weeping wound that won’t stay closed and the gnawing certainty that he’s lost something, that if he just lets himself burn a bit deeper it’ll finally shake itself loose—

Lucifer snorts, dissolving the trickle of thought before it can spiral into a whirlpool. "Why would an angel waste holy energy when angelic steel will do the job twice as fast with half the trouble?"

Because they’re ugly, jingle-brained sadists with more power than brains or imagination? "Humour me, if you please," Alastor says.

"You’d have to actually be entertaining for that," Lucifer returns without missing a beat.

The music, having briefly gathered itself into something vaguely serious with an almost consistent tempo, immediately returns to floundering mockery. Alastor flattens his ears in irritation and opens his mouth, but Lucifer beats him to the punch again.

"But. Assuming this hypothetical demon who’s special enough to waste holy energy on doesn’t immediately go up in flames…" He hums, drumming his fingers in time with the music. Alastor thinks wistfully about biting them off. "Well, soul contracts are built of the same stuff as most of the horrible nonsense that goes on down here. They’re made of demonic energy."

Alastor holds his expression perilously still. "So hypothetically…"

"Hypothetically," Lucifer echoes sharply, "if a holy wound was left to fester long enough, it could conceivably burn away a contract. But there also wouldn’t be much demon left when it was done."

So it’s a gamble then, like anything else worthwhile. Can he burn away his contract without burning himself away in the process? Can he withstand the wound until the threads snap without incurring even more debt when it inevitably needs to be healed? Is it worth placing his afterlife in the Devil’s hands if it means snatching his soul and his memories back from hers?

(It’s not even a question. His mother’s missing smile aches worse than a chest full of fireflies ever could.)

The jaunty little horn line returns, played by an even more self-satisfied violin. Alastor barely resists the urge to smash the entire record to pieces. "Hmmm," he says instead, drawing the sound out in a way he knows is particularly grating. "Wouldn’t that depend on the demon?"

Lucifer’s eye twitches for his trouble. "Why are you suddenly so interested in this anyway? Got something you want to share with the class?"

Now that he has the information he needs, Alastor has no intention of sharing any details of his situation a second sooner than he needs to. He deflects instead, letting his voice lilt high and singsong. "Just protecting my investments, that’s all. Your pertinacious daughter seems intent on drawing Heaven’s ire. I’d hate for one of my associates to get accidentally swept away in the excitement."

"Associates?" Ah, that’s got Lucifer’s attention. Good, hopefully the stink of his own angelic self-righteousness will throw him off the scent of blood. "You mean the souls you enslave and force to do your evil bidding or whatever? I’m sure you would hate to lose those."

The music concurs with a self-satisfied fanfare from the brass, the winds tittering in the background. Despite his best efforts, angry static begins to crackle in Alastor’s sinuses, bleeding his eyes black. How like the King of Hell to disparage those trying to win the game he’d set into motion. How like someone with all their power handed to them, how like—like—!

The thought’s gone again. His wound swells with pain. His stitches prickle.

"I don’t expect someone of your pedigree to understand, but not all of us are built of expendable capital, Your Majesty," Alastor bites out, white noise sizzling under the vowels. "Some of us need to protect what we’ve worked for."

"Worked for?" Lucifer squawks. "Is that what you call all the torture and soul-stealing and—and eating people?"

"Well it certainly doesn’t happen on its own!"

"Agh, you—!" Lucifer growls and flaps his arms angrily, much like the ducks he’s so enamoured with. Alastor thinks dreamily about plucking his feathers and stuffing him in an oven to roast until his skin crackles and peels back. He’d be so much more tolerable as meat. "Ugh. Fine. Whatever. A solid dose of holy energy could conceivably break a contract and free one of your souls, assuming it doesn’t fry them to cinders in the process which is a ginormous ass. Is that it? Will you leave me alone now?"

Alastor could point out the humiliating word misuse, but that would require continuing this farce of a conversation and he’d already hit his limit around three refrains of the theme ago. Humming dismissively, he swings back to his feet (ignore the gasp that almost punches out, ignore the white spots behind his eyes, ignore the burning white jolt deep within the gordian knot of his guts.) "Gladly. I’ve had as much of you and Herr Eulenspiegel as I can take. Ta!"

He’s almost made it to the door when Lucifer speaks again. "I know what you’re doing, you know."

Alastor halts. "Hmm?" Behind him, the cheerful theme piping from the gramophone abruptly cuts off into a blaring funeral march. The trickster is being dragged to the scaffold, protesting feebly against the harsh chords of his final fate. Death comes for all, even the irreverent.

"I can smell that wound from here. What are you trying to burn away?" Lucifer’s voice is slow and measured over the music’s pronouncement of guilt. When Alastor twists his neck all the way around to glare, vertebrae popping loudly at the motion, the King of Hell’s face is uncharacteristically solemn.

His voice creaks out as a low static hiss, the overlapping frequency burble of a threat. "I don’t believe that’s any of your concern."

Lucifer just keeps looking at him, eerily still and calm. "You know it won’t heal on its own. Is your pride really worth the risk?"

A white phosphorus flare of rage, and for a moment Alastor isn’t in Hell anymore. He’s in a study with warm wooden floors and a fresh Louisiana breeze blowing in through the high windows and a short, blond man he hates so much it makes him dizzy with it standing across from him with a rueful smile.

"…had to be done, you know how much filth is down there," he’s saying, and Alastor’s fists are clenched and his heart is pounding and his shadow has thrust all its sharp angles out like a frightened cat and is teetering back on one foot, its features contorted with terror as it starts to fall—

—and then he’s back in Hell with a burning coal pit in his stomach and thread prickling at his face and an ugly little angel standing behind him, filling in for a hated face from long ago he’s only just beginning to remember the shape of. Why would she steal that? What else has she taken? He doesn’t know, and he needs to know. He needs to uncover it all even if it burns him away in the process.

"That’s always been your downfall, Majesty," he says. The words echo and fuzz like an out-of-range transmission, but his voice doesn’t shake. "You never see anything but pride."

Alastor sweeps out of the room just as the noose goes taut with a high clarinet wail. The low pizzicato of the merry trickster’s neck snapping drifts in his wake.

~🪡~

A week crawls by, hot and viscid. Alastor begins to gouge the beginnings of a new routine into the hotel’s pristine veneer, though not the kind he’d originally hoped for. He wakes in a humid swamp of his own making, he staggers to the bath and scrubs off the sweat and blood and less savoury emotions that have seeped from his pores overnight, he buries the oozing, peeling mess of his chest in bandages until he can no longer taste the too-sweet suppurating stink of it on the back of his throat. He doesn’t call Niffty for stitches, partly because the wound has blistered enough from the heat that it’s hardly bleeding anymore, and partly because her preoccupation with the glow in his chest has the potential to become more trouble than it’s worth.

I never like it when bugs get under my skin.

He dresses. He runs a hot comb through his hair as ghostly fingers brush his shoulder and his mother’s voice whispers in his ear, get it nice and smooth, baby, just like that. He tries and fails to eat something. He ignores how his shadow shivers and twitches and plucks plaintively at his jacket cuffs whenever the heat in the wound swells almost too hot to bear.

"A little longer," he tells it every time, voice faint and crackly in the privacy of his own room. "Just a little longer, and then we’ll be free. We’ll remember."

Every time, his shadow only seems more agitated. Every time, Alastor brushes it off and forces himself downstairs to begin another day.

He’s in the office reviewing paperwork with Charlie today, a mind-numbing task at the best of times. Today is not one of those times. His ribs feel like they’ve been dipped in kerosene and set ablaze; his smile is pulled rictus-tight. He’s been tapping 92 code into the chair arm over and over again to distract from the pain, a constant background patter of 25, 25, 25. Busy on another wire.

"Alastor?" Charlie is looking at him, a single sharp furrow between her brows marring her otherwise pretty face. Alastor reaches out a claw and lazily flicks it away; she wrinkles her nose but isn’t dissuaded. "You’ve been staring at the same page for a while. Everything okay?"

"Right as acid rain, darling," he says blithely, quickly scribbling something rude on one of her cheerful little sticky notes to drive the point home.

🌈✨Remember, redemption is always one good choice away~! ✨🌈
NEVER FORGET THIS YOUR FAULT!

Charlie smiles, but she keeps looking at him too. "Great! Can I run something by you? I’ve been…thinking."

Charlie Morningstar and thinking is often a risky prospect. Sometimes it results in the best entertainment he’s had in decades, and sometimes it results in an army of exorcists raining down on their heads. One can never be sure what they’ll get until the wheel’s already set in motion.

Still, any sort of distraction sounds welcome at this point. Alastor leans forward gingerly and pillows his chin on his hands. "Colour me intrigued."

Charlie immediately beams and oh no, he knows that smile. He knows that he absolutely doesn’t want it pointed at him on pain of double-death, but the horse is out of the race now and he’s hobbling too slowly to catch its reins, to move from direct collision with its galloping path.

"I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day," she says. "About your mom, and how she’s in Heaven and you haven’t been able to see her since you died. And I want to help!"

Oh no. No no no, absolutely not. Charlie wanting to help only happens to other people. Alastor dances in her peripheral like a proper showman, ducking numbly under the clumsy bludgeon of her altruism and guiding it towards whichever target will yield maximum entertainment. It doesn’t hit him, it never hits him. He’s ensured it!

(Just like the gunshot. Like the bite of needle and thread, like an angel’s searing gold blade—)

"Do you now," he manages somehow. He means for it to sound derisive but it comes out fuzzed and crackly instead, near breathy. His entire chest is throbbing in time with his heartbeat; he can’t seem to catch his breath.

Charlie takes his subdued response as tacit approval and immediately latches on like a lamprey. "Yes! Because I’ve been thinking about what you said, but also about my meeting with Heaven and how they’ve been —reluctant? Yeah, let’s go with reluctant— about redemption and letting souls from Hell move in. So then I thought, well, what about visitation?"

He should shut this down now. He should laugh in her face, he should slip away in a swirl of shadow and spectacle and leave the needle-sharp maw of her monstrous enthusiasm gnawing on empty air. "Visitation?" he says instead.

Charlie nods so vigorously she shakes the entire desk. "Yeah! It’s not just sinners who’ve been cut off from their loved ones, it’s the people in Heaven too. We could petition the seraphim to help us set up a meeting, maybe in the embassy, or—or…well, the where doesn’t matter. What matters is we could let people see their families again!" She clasps her hands under her chin, her eyes wide and damnably sincere. "I’m sure your mom misses you as much as you miss her."

Alastor stares unblinkingly at her, his smile pulled razor-thin. Even without looking, he can tell his shadow is quivering in a wretched huddle at his feet. He needs to stop this now. He needs to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, he needs to slap that nauseating sentiment off her face before it can soak in further and start sloughing his outer layers off like acid. He needs to vanish back into his tower and scream until the soundproofing on the walls shakes. He needs to leave.

"Hmmm," he says instead. "And what makes you think Heaven would agree?"

Charlie smiles and the expression is all Alastor, from the wry curl of her lip to the sharp gleam in her eyes. It makes something clench in his chest, a wet, pulsing knot softer and more sour than the holy wound festering just below. "Well, we did just kill a bunch of their Exorcists. They’re on the defensive right now. If we go to them and ask for something small and easy like one little meeting to reunite estranged mortal souls, it would be kinda silly for them to say no, wouldn’t it?"

He can taste her power on the air now: a resonant thrum of energy scented with sugar and metal, like razor blades dipped in vanilla frosting. Against his better instincts, Alastor trails his fingers through it until it oscillates into a sine wave, erupting into faint, crackling music. A shiver of strings, a whisper of melody. Have you ever wanted something that was so clear in your mind that you could taste it?

"And then?" His words fizz on the edges, juddering with static.

"And then we have a meeting." Charlie sits forward and folds her arms on the desk, every inch the sweet idealist who also took on an army of Exorcists and won."We let everyone who’s been ever been torn away from their loved ones reunite for a day, and then afterwards we let Heaven explain to them why they’re going to be separated again." She tilts her head and flutters her lashes, grinning conspiratorially. "A good friend once showed me that winning ordinary people over is far more effective than appealing to authorities who don’t care. Do you think Heaven has a Cannibal Town?"

For a moment, she’s not just Charlie anymore. She’s the Princess of Hell who has the potential to upend everything. The daughter of a fallen angel and the first sinner, an eternal optimist, an unbreakable force. A lonely little girl who believed so hard in something better that the rest of Creation is finally beginning to believe with her.

For one taut, aching moment, Alastor wants to believe her too.

"My mother was never one for authority either," he finds himself saying. "We couldn’t afford a house after my father left for the war, so we lived on a houseboat in the bayou. Completely illegal, though we were far from the only ones doing it. The head of the Bayou Commission used to come by every other week to throw a fit, but my mother would just smile and invite him in for dinner. That usually chased him off in a hurry."

Charlie giggles and she’s just herself again, a ridiculous girl looking at him with so much fondness it’s staggering. "The jambalaya was too spicy for him too, huh? I can relate. Did she ever manage to get rid of him?"

"Mmm, no." He doesn’t know why he’s telling her this. He shouldn’t be telling her this. "Money got tighter and she started taking cleaning jobs. He ended up hiring her, the insufferable wretch."

The memory sinks in all at once like the blade of a knife: the ripe, pungent smell of the water, the feel of the deck pitching gently beneath his feet, the way the sun glinted off the exasperated expression of the man pacing across from them on the shore.

"…rie, please, I’m only trying to help! Let me pay you a proper wage so you can move off this floating trash heap." A dramatic gesture; a gleam of perfectly coifed blond hair, a flashy white suit. Too beseeching, too familiar. After his father, he swore he’d never let another man look at his mother like that ever again.

The seething hatred pacing within the cage of Alastor’s ribs rears its savage head.

His mother only tuts, gesturing with a ladle held loosely in one hand. Even the silhouette of her against the red-orange glow of late afternoon sun is beautiful enough to make his breath stick in his throat. "Tell you what, Mr. Bordelon, I’ll come clean for you. And then you pay me what I’m owed and I’ll come home by my boat and my son and my community, how ‘bout that?"

Her face is out of focus, blurring and reshaping then fizzing back into static. The man on the shore’s face blurs too, their features glitching and crackling and reforming on top as each other even as his name thrums a drum beat against the inside of Alastor’s skull. Bordelon, Bordelon, Bordelon. Blue eyes to brown eyes to half-clouded smiles, gold and white and the glittering verdigris of the bayou set against his mother’s dark curls. How could he have forgotten Bordelon, the smarmy little cretin? How could his name come back before the memories of his mother? Why is it all smeared together in a fractalizing mess, why is his head pounding, why does it feel like an incendiary shell is about to explode in his chest—

And then his shadow throws itself back against the wall, thrashing and clawing at the baseboards, and he snaps back to his senses with a full-bodied shudder that threatens to shake him from his chair. The stitches in his cheeks are itching hard enough to burn; his wound feels like it’s on fire. Something fresh and raw has torn open in his head and Charlie is still looking at him, her face soft and unbearably open like letting him see the inner workings of her heart isn’t the terrible violation it is. That little furrow is back between her eyes, and for one breathless, gelid moment he thinks she’s going to ask if he’s okay, that he might answer her honestly if she does.

He’s exhausted. He wants his memories back. He wants to stop being dragged around by someone else’s reins. He wants this fucking horrible wound eating away at his insides to be gone because it hurts and it keeps getting worse and with it he’s at the mercy of her father but without it he’s at the mercy of her and he can’t—can’t—!

Maybe Charlie sees him teetering or maybe she’s finally learning the fine art of true compassion, because she doesn’t stab the trocar in and let the wet slurry of unwelcome emotion spill out like she so easily could. She smiles instead, small and a little rueful, and asks like a secret between them, "Will you introduce me to her one day?"

And Alastor smiles wider and forces a laugh, because being too hurt and exhausted to put on a show is a privilege reserved for people far more fortunate than he’ll ever be. "I’d like nothing better, my dear."

Somehow he manages to extricate himself from the office and stalk (ignore the stiff gait, ignore the wobble as he turns the corner, ignore how his head rushes at the top of the stairs and his whole spine seizes with pain and vertigo and ice-cold dread) his way down to the bar, where he sprawls as elegantly as he can manage onto the nearest stool and emits an increasingly high frequency whine until Husker slams his usual drink down in front of him with a snarl. Alastor downs it in one gulp.

Another grumble. Another clatter of bottles. Another drink slides across the bar at him. "Much obliged, my good fellow," Alastor hums, curling his fingers around the glass and letting his head dip forward just a little. The alcohol sits warm and pleasant in his belly, a soothing hearth beneath the raging inferno of the wound and the swirling mess in his head. The juxtaposition makes him a little nauseous, but it’s manageable. It’s worth it to stop thinking for a while.

Husker grunts, his usual blessedly taciturn method of acknowledgement, but then he has to go and ruin it by speaking too. "You gonna cut out whatever shit you’re playing at? Niff’s damn near taken the varnish off the bar with how hard she’s been scrubbing it. She says something’s wrong with you."

Ah, Niffty. Alastor swallows back the bubbling irritation with another mouthful of rye. Poor dear, she can’t help that someone hammered a hole in her head that lets secrets slosh out. Cutting off their little stitching ritual must have sent her into a tizzy. He contemplates his drink a moment to draw out the silence, swirling it idly against the sides of the tumbler and watching the warm amber catch the low light, before he throws the rest of it back and motions for another. His esteemed bartender acquiesces with a low growl. Good puss.

"Niffty’s a funny little thing. You know she gets confused," he says after another long moment, relishing the way his head’s starting to fuzz from the alcohol. It makes the raw edges of whatever tore open with Charlie a little easier to bear, a little easier to examine from a distance. Is this how Niffty feels whenever she breaches one of the cavities in her head? The next time he sees her, he should…

"Not about important shit she don’t," Husker persists, which is as admirable as it is irritating. Alastor props his heavy head up on one hand and considers him through half-lidded eyes. The bar in this new hotel is all crimsons and golds and meticulously polished wood, none of the rough-hewn edges or salt-stained planks of his previous addition. It makes Husker look a little softer around the edges, a lot more put together than the hooch-soaked wretch Alastor had dragged here all those months ago.

Remember, redemption is always one good choice away~! Charlie’s inane little post-it superimposes itself on the backs of his eyes, and he is absolutely not ossified enough to be getting maudlin about such ridiculous nonsense. Tipping back another swallow, he sharpens the corners of his smile and dredges up some venom.

"Why Husker! Are you saying I’m important? Be still my beating heart!" He lets his voice distort a little, flanging along the edges. Not an imminent threat yet, but a nonverbal warning. Drop it.

Husker doesn’t drop it. "To Niffty you are, you irritating fuck. She’s one of the only people who can stand to care about you, and you’re throwing that back in her face to, what? Make some kind of point? You’re a fucking moron, and an asshole to boot."

He’s stepping over a line and they both know it. Husker’s ears are pinned back, his arms crossed defensively across his chest, but he’s holding his ground. So steadfast, so stubborn, so reluctantly loyal. A soul any Overlord would be privileged to have in their care.

Alastor sways with a slow rush of what might be pride, or what might just be nausea. Maybe two drinks on an empty stomach with a gaping chest wound wasn’t his brightest idea; the bar is beginning to tilt a little, the low glow of the lights diffusing into lucent soap bubbles. A cloud of fireflies, a drifting houseboat. Bordelon’s hated drawl, his mother’s musical voice undercut with the crackle of a radio. Too soft now, far too fond.

(You get home safe now, Mr. Bordelon. I’ll pass by tomorrow the usual time.)

His whole torso burns, but his mother’s face is still clouded over. How can he meet her again with his memories so moth-eaten and hollow? Why can’t he stop recalling her worthless employer in her stead? Why is Husker looking at him with his brows drawn low, past the edge of irritation and nearing what could almost be called concern…?

"Perhaps," he says finally after another pause. Too long a pause; Husker’s brows scrunch down somehow, impossibly, further. "It’s a gamble, certainly. But some stakes are worth burning for, wouldn’t you agree?"

What lengths would Husker go to to tear the collar from his own throat? Would he affect that same determined stance and let an angel run him through? Would he grit his teeth and hold fast as the wound started to itch, to smoulder, to burn? Alastor can almost picture it: Husker’s lovely white fur charred and tacky with blood, his chest pulsing the same red-gold glow as the lights above his gleaming new bar. The ever-present scowl collapsing in on itself in cloying pain and desperation, how his ears would flatten and his tail would twitch as the wound seared its way through skin and muscle to places too deep to bear. Would Alastor feel it when he finally succumbed, like a lightbulb filament flaring flash-bang bright before it disintegrates to ash? Would he feel it if Husker succeeded, if the chain snapped and the contract burned and that magnificent battered soul crawled from the burning wreck of himself as master of his own destiny once more?

Oh, Alastor would be so proud.

"…serious, boss, what the everloving fuck are you on about—?" Husker is still growling at him, the words sloshing in and out of focus as the bar undulates around them. The walls are rippling, the counter threatening to pitch the precarious fulcrum of his elbow off-balance. Husker is poised at the epicentre: surly, reluctant, but still steady. Always so steady.

"I’d let you burn if you wanted to," Alastor tells him magnanimously, and on the last syllable his radio filter sloughs off and it almost sounds real. "Good day, Husker."

He stumbles on the way back to the elevator, and this time he can’t pretend to ignore anything because catching himself against the wall is the only thing that keeps him from going down, but it also sends a jolt through his ribs and the white-hot electric pulse of hurt is so visceral it nearly takes him down anyway. Pressed flat to the wall, sucking in shallow breaths through his teeth as his head swims and his stomach clenches and the chasm in his chest attempts to spontaneously combust, Alastor is seized with the sudden hysterical impulse to pray. When he’d caught measles as a child, his mother had held his hands in hers and ran the rosary through his trembling hands until the rash had receded and the fever had finally broken. Cool, calloused fingers, nails neat and short. The smooth slide of rosary beads, one after the other.

That’s it, boo, say it with me now. Hail Mary, full of grace…

His vision is swimming, the rich crimson and white marble emulsifying into a carrion splatter of smeared meat and bone. A flash of gold in the top half of his peripheral snaps it back into focus so swiftly his eye sockets ache. Lucifer is standing at the top of the grand staircase, polishing the top of his cane against the sleeve of his jacket as he observes silently. Alastor doesn’t mean to flinch, but his body doesn’t feel entirely his own anymore. His ears swivel forward, his claws curl dangerously close to nicking the wallpaper, his skeleton creaks as power swells in his joints and then shatters into a million quivering pieces as the wound screams—

Black spots prick his vision. Blood floods his mouth from where he bit his tongue. A rivulet of sweat trickles down the small of his back, sticking his shirt to his skin. Lucifer cocks his head to one side and wordlessly holds out a hand. Waiting for Alastor to ask, waiting for him to crawl on his hands and knees and beg. Oh please, Your Majesty, won’t you help this lowly sinner? Won’t you judge him on his own merits rather than the circumstances of his birth? Please Mr. Bordelon, won’t you let this poor man and his home be even if it sullies your view? Won’t you get your filthy hands off his mother and never show your face here again?

Alastor drags himself along the wall to the elevator and hammers the button until the doors open. He won’t beg. He won’t crumble. No one will take her from him ever again.

He staggers the rest of the way to his room, collapses to his knees on the edge of the bayou, and vomits up whisky until he can no longer tell where he ends and the water begins.

~🪡~

The next time the shadows in the bayou speak to him, Alastor is twenty-four and crouched in the trees holding a smoking gun. Not the same trees as last time; this is a larger, deeper bayou outside the city, a proper cypress swamp with drooping, moss-laden branches that trail along the water like lace and thick tangles of wilderness strangling themselves around the few gaps of sunlight that make it through the canopy. Up ahead, Milton Peters —current evening show host on the state’s only kilowatt station and set to move into management at the end of next month— lets out a gleeful shout from beyond the next line of trees.

"Good shot, Landry! Come quick; the bastard’s down."

Alastor props the rifle up against his shoulder and picks his way through the underbrush, grimacing as mud squelches under his boots and soaks into his pant cuffs. There’s a crack along the seam of his left sole that won’t seal no matter how much mink oil he slathers on it, and he can feel cool water seeping into his sock as he ducks under a low-hanging branch and steps up beside Milton. A buck lies crumpled at their feet, dropped from a clean shot through its shoulder. The smell of blood cuts through the cool wet scent of the bayou: soft decay overlaid with an edge of hot iron.

Beside him, Milton beams. He’s a tall, heavyset man, dressed in a fashionable corduroy hunting suit with his thinning salt and pepper hair tucked under a flat cap. Alastor feels terribly underdressed beside him in worn trousers and a hand-me-down buckskein shirt that’s far too wide in the shoulders, but he swallows back the sour feeling and holds his smile poised and polite. After this tiresome little outing, he’ll have his future secured and will never have to feel shabby again.

"Glad to see you shoot as well as you brew coffee," Milton is saying, taking the rifle from Alastor and handing him a hunting knife in its place. "Go on, do the honours!"

"Thank you, sir," Alastor replies in his crispest, brightest transatlantic. "I’ll have you know that my radio host skills leave both in the dust, haha!" He circles the deer, tugging at its legs until it’s facing away from the water, then crouches down beside it in the driest patch of grass he can find. It’s not particularly dry; more water squelches into his boot.

"So I’ve heard, my boy!" Milton kneels down beside him and starts to empty out the rifle, glancing up once in approval as Alastor pinches the skin of the deer’s belly between thumb and forefinger and starts slicing up the midline. "You’ve been a boon to the station since its inauguration. A member of the radio club since you were, what, ten years old?"

"Nine," Alastor says distantly, focused on his cut. The soft fur and skin part neatly around the edge of his knife, exposing the shine of slick red muscle and marbled white fat beneath. He finishes the cut, makes a second incision through the abdominal wall, and shoves two fingers inside. The deer’s entrails press back tenderly, a hot, wet kiss.

"That’s right. An enthusiast after my own heart!" The rifle clatters as Milton removes the magazine and clears the chamber. "And my own job too, I know. I’m no fool, Landry, I see what you’re doing here. God knows you’ve got the voice for it, the smarts too. But tell me, do you have the guts?"

Alastor slots the knife neatly between his fingers and opens the deer up in one smooth, decisive slice, offal steaming as it’s exposed to the late November air. Blood dribbles through russet fur, soaking into sedge and dark mud. "Yes, sir. Plenty of guts! I daresay I have the most guts of the both of us right now."

Milton guffaws and slaps Alastor soundly on the shoulder, nearly jostling the knife through a coil of intestine. Alastor manages to steady it before it ruins the meat. "Right you are! I like you, my boy. Radio needs more boldness in its ranks, more bloodthirst. We can’t just stop at a kilowatt. Did you hear the Jesuits are plotting to upgrade to five come March? Five, Landry! We’ve got to think bigger. We’ve got to be bigger."

Alastor hums and nods in the appropriate places, only half-listening to the monologue as he works the deer’s innards loose. He’s spent the last six years hopping between fledgling stations, playing dutiful gofer to this tiresome blowhard and all the others just like him: brewing coffee, untangling wires and adjusting dials, slowly weaving himself into the station’s inner workings until its heart won’t beat without his fingers wrapped around its chambers. And now that heart is leaving, and all Alastor has left to do is convince it to let him take its place.

For one moment, he lets himself imagine it. A hosting job during prime time, the pulse of the entire city thrumming under the thrall of his voice. He’ll be known, he’ll be adored, and no one will be able to tell through the airwaves if his hair curls at the ends when the air is damp or if his complexion looks a little too dark in the wrong light. He’ll buy his mother a new dress, he’ll take her to the opera every weekend and maybe even dancing at one of the more reputable new clubs popping up around town. He’ll make enough to support the both of them, and together they can finally tell Jules Bordelon and his pity money to beat it.

The gris-gris bag he’d sewn into his waistband presses tight against his hip as he works: grave dirt and black cat fur, a rosary bead and High John the Conquerer root wrapped in copper wire. He’s put in the work and every bit of luck is on his side; all he has left to do is seal the deal.

"…obvious choice, of course." Milton is still talking, the insufferable mustard plaster. "People loved you when you covered the morning show last month, the rest of management’s all but written you into my contract. All they need is my sign-off. Which is why you’re out here squatting in the mud with me, isn’t that right?"

"Astute as ever, sir." Alastor’s smile is painfully tight. He yanks out the deer’s intestines with slightly more force than necessary, wet coils spilling down towards the water in long rubbery spools, then bends back over with the knife to start working the sternum open.

Milton kneels down beside him. "That’s the beauty of new industry, isn’t it? No preconceived rules, no limitations. Anyone can be a star when the sky’s uncharted! Shame we’ve run aground much faster than anticipated. This nasty business with the press in court…We need an influx of money, and fast."

Alastor glances up, halfway through prying the deer’s breastbone open. "Do we? I was under the impression we were doing quite well for ourselves."

"Maybe compared to drifting through sludge on the Saint John," Milton says flippantly. Alastor bites back an acerbic rejoinder and forces himself to focus on his task. "We’re sustaining ourselves, certainly. But we need to think bigger. We need to be able to continue to grow! That’s why I’m giving the host job to Ernest Randolph."

The knife slips, sinking deep into the deer’s heart and spilling tacky blood all over Alastor’s hands. He barely feels it— he’s gone numb all over, a high-pitched dial-tone ringing somewhere behind his eardrums. "Randolph? He—You—!" His polite mask, stretched to its breaking point, finally cracks and splinters. A torrent of biting insults promptly spills out. "That bluenose? He’s as bland as an underripe alligator pear with half the personality. He couldn’t talk his way out of a wet paper bag if his life depended on it. He’s never even expressed any interest in hosting, why would you even consider him?"

"He’s never expressed interest, but his family has," Milton says easily, like he’s not sending Alastor’s life tumbling down around him so an uninspiring nobody can play dress-up. "They want their boy to be a star, and they’re willing to provide the financial support to make it happen. Sure, the ratings will suffer a bit, but what really matters in the long run? The station needs stability, Landry, not a hotsy-totsy billboard with nothing but an illegally docked houseboat and a single suit to your name. You’re a liability, no matter how good your coffee is."

The incandescent flash of rage is so bright, it makes Alastor’s vision go black at the corners. "A liability? I researched networks for weeks so we could secure the affiliation with CBS. I climbed up onto the roof during a hurricane to make sure the antenna wasn’t damaged. I’m the only one who can restart the transmitter when the signal jams, I can type Morse faster than the rest of you with only one finger, and you call me a liability?"

He’s snarling without meaning to, the low sputtering hiss of a receiver grasping at dead air. His hand’s locked so tightly around the knife the tips of his fingers are going numb, even with the deer’s hot insides pressed close around him. Was the air always so warm and humid, the water always so dark? Something ripples beneath the surface, sending bubbles scattering in its wake.

And Milton laughs, like this is just another radio play and Alastor’s the poor witless chump who’s the butt of the joke this week. That’s all for now, folks! Tune in next time when we ruin some other poor sucker’s dreams. "That’s life, boy. It’s not about what you do, it’s about who you know. I thought your mother would have taught you that; hasn’t she been shacking up with some big timer at his waterfront estate? Now there’s a way to get off a houseboat."

Alastor grits his teeth so hard they squeak. "She is employed by him. Proper honest work, the kind you’re apparently not acquainted with!"

Because he doesn’t have to be, he acknowledges with a flash of furious, embittered hatred that rolls through his nerves like sheet lightning. Men like Milton Peters don’t have to contend with all their accomplishments being attached to someone more palatable standing in the limelight. Milton Peters and his assistant. Jules Bordelon and his maid. Easy to ignore. Easy to replace.

(Because you let him ignore you, something soft and vicious whispers from a dark crevice at the back of his skull. It’s been squirming around in there since Louis drowned in the mud all those years ago, growing steadily louder as the weight of the world’s indignities grows steadily heavier. Because you’re letting him replace you. The water steams and gurgles, murky and dark and alluringly deep. Alastor’s fingers curl tighter around the knife.)

Milton is leering now, too assured in his victory to keep pretending to be gracious about it. "Oh, I’m plenty acquainted with that sort of honest work. Not that I blame the man; your mother’s a choice bit of calico." He leans in close like he’s sharing a secret, eyes glittering with vindictive mirth. "So long as she isn’t a flat tire you’ll both be set for life, no hosting job required! Nothing shameful in a bit of good old-fashioned plaçage—"

Ah. So that’s it then. So long as Milton Peters is around, appointing job placements and running his big mouth, Alastor has no chance of landing a host job at all.

It’s a split-second decision, an easy one. Alastor smiles politely, cocks his head to the side, then neatly shoves the hunting knife through Milton’s throat.

The other man stares dumbly at him, eyes bulging as his voice cuts off with a wet gurgle. His mouth gapes open, his hands fly up to paw feebly at the blade imbedded just below his Adam’s apple. He looks a bit like a bullfrog. A blessedly silent one.

"What’s shameful, sir, is that you seem to have lost your voice," Alastor singsongs, yanking the knife out with a flourish and sucking pop. Hot red arterial blood sprays out in its wake; Milton claws at his neck with both hands as he keels over backward and begins to choke. "In fact, I think you might have to resign from your post early. Such a pity! Good thing management has the contract ready to go with my name on them, hmmm? Dear old Ernest will have no idea what he missed out on."

A burbling gulp, a rattling wheeze. Alastor sits back on his heels and watches the blood froth in the open red gash of Milton’s throat, as he slides further down the tree to lie in a weakly twitching heap beside the eviscerated deer carcass. All that big talk, and in the end he’s still nothing but meat.

That’s life, sir! Alastor sits back on his heels and hums St. James Infirmary until Milton’s eyes fog over and the last sputtering hiss of bubbles finally tapers off.

"Looks like you’re not up to your sign-off tonight, sir," he says jovially, setting the knife aside and wiping his bloody hands off on Milton’s expensive corduroy pants. "Shall I do the honours? Milton Peters, signing off on his final broadcast. And good fucking riddance to him too."

And then he laughs, but something else laughs with him. A resonant, multi-voiced laugh, dark and wet and impossibly hot, slithering through his eardrums and between the notches of his spine and deep beneath the shivering surface of the bayou as something stirs in the turbid depths…

"Oh, pet. You always do know how to put on a show!" The voice is as horrible as he remembered, and also ten times worse because hearing it again means it was real. Not a childhood fantasy, not a way to explain away why Louis’s body was never found. Just a monster who told him it would be back, and kept its promise.

"You." His voice creaks out from somewhere beneath his breastbone, breathy and halting. Hardly appropriate for any self-respecting radio host; he swallows hard and squares his shoulders, staring defiantly at the water even as dread prickles at his neck and that horribly familiar rotten smell hits his nose.

"Me. Did you miss me, sweetness?" A tendril of shadow slithers out from the depths, twining itself lovingly through the glistening pile of discarded deer entrails. "I’ve been waiting for you to find your way back to me, to give into that delicious hunger again. Didn’t it feel good?" The shadow tugs, and the whole mass of intestines slides down into the water like thick, segmented worms. Whatever is lurking beneath the surface gobbles them down hungrily, bubbles swirling in their wake.

Alastor fights back the urge to reach for the knife. What good will that do? He rocks to his feet instead and forces his face into a calm mask, his voice into a bored drawl. A good entertainer never lets on when he’s shaken. "What do you want from me?"

"Want from you?" More shadows crawl from the water, this time seeking out Milton’s sprawled body. Tiny black tendrils pick at his nails, pushing under the beds and separating them in a chorus of tiny cracks. Thicker strands press into his vacant eyes, his mouth, the gaping slit where Alastor had slotted the knife. The dead man’s skin starts to writhe. "Darling, I want you to embrace your potential! You know you’re better than this. This game has been rigged against you from the start. Stop playing by their rules!"

Skin separates from flesh with a long, wet schlick as the whole loose sheet of it is pulled aloft and tossed over a low hanging tree branch. "You could be so magnificent if you let yourself, sweetness. If you let me help you," the voice implores, not quite loud enough to drown out the sound of snapping bone. The shadows are stripping skeins of muscle from glistening white fragments, systematically dissolving the man who’d held Alastor’s fate in his hands into nothing at all. "Don’t you want to be a star?"

Alastor can’t make himself look away from the costume that used to be Milton Peters, billowing like a crimson-lined overcoat in the hot, fetid air. Something is twisting low in his gut like a gnarled mass of wire, too hot to be fear and too settled to be nausea. His palms are sweating, his glasses are beginning to fog. The gris-gris bag burns against his hip like a brand.

"And what do you get in return?" he asks. Spirits seldom offer their aid for free. Especially hungry ones.

There’s a brief flash of colour, a sudden swell of light; for one sliver of a moment the bayou gleams dark vermillion like there’s a fire lit in its depths. Alastor sucks in a breath, then nearly chokes as thick wet air sticks to the inside of his lungs in a sour coppery film. Blood, he realizes numbly. A whole frothing swamp of it, spilled from a thousand deserving throats.

"Think of me as your patron." The shadows withdraw from the few scraps remaining of Milton and converge on the deer‘s body next. Darkness pools in the hollow of its abdominal cavity; with a slow sucking sound and a rush of bubbles, the deer’s perforated heart bobs to the surface. "You represent me: your triumphs are my triumphs. Your failures…"  Bands of black wrap around the heart and begin to constrict, squeezing until the dark red meat begins to express thick, clotted blood. "Well, I’m sure we won’t have to worry about that, will we, pet?" One of the heart’s chambers bursts under the pressure, striated muscle unfurling like a black-veined flower. The shadows pull it back inside them; when it reemerges, it’s whole once more. "Entrust yourself to me, and I’ll make sure no one ever stands in your way again."

Saliva is pooling in Alastor’s mouth. His gut clenches again and this time he recognizes the feeling: it’s want, it’s hunger, the kind that presses out hot and insistent, scraping at the inside of his abdomen like knives. He doesn’t want a patron. He wants to bury his hands in Milton’s tattered guts like he had with the deer. Cooling meat between his fingers, the remnants of a life clutched in his palms. He wants to be the one to peel him into his consummate parts, not this thing crawling in from under the bayou that’s trying to relegate him back to the sidelines. This mesmerizing voice, this creeping shadow that keeps trying to lure him in one step closer, one inch deeper, one turn further from the path like it’s a…

The deer heart is glowing now, the pale green phosphorescence of a firefly. Answering lights begin to wink on across the bayou, dancing globes of green and yellow and flickering white-blue that cast glittering sparks across the rippling water. Fifolets, his neighbour Tante Eva calls them.

Don’t you go following no fifolets, ti-tataille, she likes to tell him, slouched over her boat’s railing with a cigarette in one hand and a cat draped around her shoulders. They’re swamp spirits. Bad omens. Some folks think they guard treasure but me, I won’t trust no tricky ghosts, no! Nothing but death where they lead. Bad bad news.

Alastor had never bothered much with her warnings. Fifolets are for those blinded by greed or suffocating in desperation, and Alastor is neither.

"I can take out filth just fine on my own, thank you very much," he says. Coolly, like his heart isn’t hammering against his ribs, like his whole body isn’t pulled taut as a piano wire. "I don’t need your help."

The voice hums, and the entire bayou resonates with it. It’s like hearing a gunshot from underwater, like pressing his face to his bedsprings and hearing the radio singing in their coils. Alastor barely resists the urge to cover his ears as his teeth begin to buzz. "Mmmm, maybe not yet. But you’ve been chosen for a perilous road, sweetness. How long until you stumble? Wouldn’t you like someone there to break your fall?"

All at once, the slick churning want in his guts ignites into anger. It’s a relief— anger is familiar. Alastor knows how to use anger. "I haven’t been chosen for anything," he snaps, sharp and clear against the shadows’ pressing fog. "I chose for myself. I worked to get what I wanted. I don’t need anyone else steering my fate."

That’s all he’s ever wanted. No Milton Peters hanging invisible weights on his feet, keeping him from ever breaching the surface. No Jules Bordelon, threatening his home in one breath and trying to sweet-talk his mother in the next. No whispering voices under the bayou swallowing up all his hard work and trying to coax him into being the thing he already is.

Alastor lifts his chin and forces himself to stare into the pulsing apex of the shadows, where the faint outline of a figure bends and weaves and reaches for him with covetous fingers. Red spots pop in his vision, haloed by brilliant green and white. Fifolets dance at the figure’s feet.

"Go find someone else to haunt and leave me alone," he says and bares his teeth in a smile sharp as a hunting knife.

The shadows laugh. Louder and louder, raucous and cackling until the water is sloshing in its banks and the ground is quivering beneath his feet. Alastor has to clap his hands over his ears. It feels like the sound is burrowing through his brain, chewing him apart like Milton and leaving nothing but tattered meat and a hollow cavity in its wake.

I’m going to die, he thinks, caught between hysteria and exasperated rage. It’s going to peel me apart and hang me in the trees like Milton and when the fuzz finally find us they’ll say, "leave the dirty one, it’s a liability—"

"Still so stubborn!" The voice isn’t angry and about to tear him to pieces. The voice sounds delighted, which is somehow even worse. "Very well. Play your little games. Forge your own shining path! And I’ll leave you until you’re alone. Until you’re UTTERLY alone. We’ll see how you feel then. Best of luck, sweetness. I’ll see you again soon."

The figure fades, the shadows recede. All that’s left in its wake is Milton’s skin, still fluttering feebly in the rapidly cooling air, and the deer heart where it’s rolled free from the body that once housed it. As Alastor stares at it, he realizes the side the shadows crushed and reformed isn’t whole again after all. Thick black stitches criss-cross the raw meat, pulsing a low, sickly green where they pull the split flesh back together.

Alastor hisses out a snarl and kicks it into the bayou. No fifolet can tempt him when he already has everything he needs.

There’s almost nothing left of Milton’s insides but Alastor looks anyway, crouching back down in the mud and rifling through the gummy, red-stained grass. A long, slimy strip of what might be liver, a fragment of bone, a chipped back molar with a glittering silver filling.

Alastor scoops up the tooth and tucks it into his gris gris bag, then grabs the deer by the antlers and starts hauling it back through the trees. He has a hosting job to claim, a new dress to buy, a celebratory meal to cook.

No sense in wasting good meat.

~🪡~

The first thing he registers is the mud. Soaking into the knees of his pants, squelching between his fingers. He’s huddled in a wretched heap on the bank of the bayou, spit still trickling down his chin from his last bout of sickness. Heat pounds in his temples. Liquid flame oozes from his chest.

Somehow Alastor sits up, even as the world tilts and whirls like he’s fresh off a ride on the flying horses in City Park. His mouth floods with saliva, but he manages not to retch. Slowly, painstakingly, he reaches through the heat to his magic, hissing and choking through the pain until the little wooden box has been summoned to his hands.

Behind the trees, the sky over the bayou is beginning to saturate with the first brushes of sunset. Magenta and soft violet, his mother’s favourite.

The box’s contents rattle as he empties it into his lap: an assortment of teeth and small bones, metacarpals and metatarsals with some cervical vertebrae mixed in. (And a glint of silver against the dusky white, but no, no. When he looks again it’s gone. Milton Peters is long gone.) He counts out the vertebrae with shaking fingers —seven, not enough for even a full decade but it’s all he has— then plucks a reed from the muddy ground and starts clumsily threading them on.

Out on the bayou, the shadows are beginning to gather. Alastor keeps his head tucked down low and focuses on fumbling through his knots. The vertebrae rattle as he twists them into a loop, mud caked in their notches, but it will work. It has to work.

Squeezing his eyes shut, he curls his fingers around the first vertebrae and tries to remember how the prayer goes. His mother talked to all the saints and spirits, but the Virgin was always her favourite. If anyone could reach her from all the way down here, if anyone could convince her that the Princess of Hell is speaking the truth when she extends her olive branch…

His head is stuffed with steel wool. Every breath he pulls in stokes the pain into a flaring roar, every breath out sends it skittering out over his ribs and through his guts and into the hollows of his hips. The air is going hot and humid and foul as a figure pulls itself from the roiling cloud of shadow on the water but he ignores it all, teeth gritted and sweat gathering on his forehead as a boiling white abscess begins to swell open behind his eyes.

(Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is…)

"You’re making a terrible mistake, pet. Have you forgotten how much you owe me?"

Alastor doesn’t open his eyes. He knows he’ll see her face, not just the shadowy simulacrum she’d worn in the Living World, and the thought is almost too much to bear. He focuses on his makeshift rosary instead, clutching the vertebrae so hard the points dig into his palm. Trying to drown out the dread, the miasma of pain, the caustic little voice in the back of his mind whispering, she’s right you don’t remember you don’t know what you owe her because she’s taken that too.

(The Lord is with thee)

"I’ve served you faithfully since I first entered Hell and you’ve done nothing but diminish me. I owe you nothing," he says, trying to sound like he believes it. At least his voice is still steady, no matter how his hands shake and his head throbs like his skull’s splitting apart. She can take his voice as she pleases, but she’s never been able to break it.

The heat presses closer, wet and suffocating. "You believing that only confirms your debt."

"Quiet. I’ll be free of you soon enough." The click clack of bones. Mud under his knees. The stitches in his face begin to prickle and itch, but he tips his head back and smiles wide before she can make him. He just has to remember. Just has to hold out a little longer until the threads burn away and the Devil extinguishes the fire under his ribs and he can chase her horrible voice back into the darkest, filthiest shadows where it belongs.

"Free? Oh darling." She’s coming closer. He can feel it even with his eyes squeezed shut: the way his ears pop like he’s been shoved underwater, the full gasping weight of her horrible aura pressed against his throat. Sulphur, rotten blood, the sickly sweetness of fermented fruit. The air is so hot it sears his face. "When I’m gone you’ll be BEGGING for me to come back. You’ll never be free, not of me. Not of yourself."

And then her fingers are on his cheek and he flinches back reflexively, a flanging, static-soaked shriek catching in his throat. Every stitch through his skin is alive and burning acid-bright, a thousand tiny leeches with sharp, sucking mouths burrowing hungrily through flesh and hooking into bone. His body is no longer his own. The strings jerk hard and his arm jerks with them, pulling the hand clutching his makeshift rosary back to pitch it out into the dark water where no spirit or saint could ever hear his call—

—before the wound flares-sears-singes-immolates and the shadows rear back like they’ve been electrocuted, like Alastor’s a live wire with electricity crackling through his pores instead of a piece of carrion being eaten through by fireflies that glow so bright they dwarf the light of the setting sun.

There won’t be much demon left when it’s done, the Devil’s voice mocks him. Till Eulenspiegel’s garish funeral dirge thrums in his temples, as somewhere far beyond the agony his mother is singing and dogs are barking and someone is screaming over the high-pitched clarinet wail of a snapping neck. His fingers tighten on the rosary. He yanks his hand back down and tucks it tight against his chest. He licks away the blood dribbling from his nose, and then he opens his eyes and laughs until it feels like his ribs will shatter.

"We’ll see about that, won’t we?" he says when he can breathe again.

His patron stares at him, shadows and stolen memories twined through her hair and the hollows of her face. More beautiful than he ever remembers, more horrible than he can ever forget. She hums, his cells vibrating sickeningly in tandem, and then she laughs too, cold and sharp.

"We certainly will. Ta, sweetness."

The smell of her lingers long after the shadows dissipate.

His shadow is cowering again, ears laid flat and hands covering its face. Its shoulders quake like it’s crying. Alastor ignores it and resumes the rosary. It’s working, it’s working. Just a little longer, a little more heat, a little more suffering, and then the strings will be gone and his head will be clear again and when Charlie hosts her little reunion he’ll be able to gaze out over the sea of souls and know the face he’s looking for and…

(Blessed art thou amongst women)

That’s the first thing he’ll do once he’s free of his contract. He’ll march into Charlie’s meeting and commit every minuscule detail of his mother’s face to memory so he can never forget any of it ever again.

Alastor curls in tight around the parts of him that are fizzling away and watches the sunset.