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cymorilcinnamonroll · 1 month ago

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Holy Diver: A Gay Lucifer x Beelzebub Dark Fantasy Romance (Paradise Lost Fanfiction) PART 2

(Read Part 1 Here)

I was in the Far North of Svalbard, working with one of my soul-bonded humans, Dr. Olaf Henderson – a world-renowned botanist – to harvest seeds from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. In preparation for the eventual Apocalypse that would occur if Heaven and Hell could not change the course of a dead, rotting G-d that could no longer execute Divine Will, new humanity would need our seeds to plant afresh: new orchards, fields, and farms.

They would need a new universe, the current one wiped if Metatron’s had anything to say. Metatron and Belial – once my favorite foster child in Heaven turned rogue - were hellbent on the End Times, craving War.

Could anyone defy the bloated corpse of a Deist G-d, whose Intelligent Design had planned a grand, bloody End? Metatron executed His Will, after all.

Lucifer and Michael were collaborating on plans to save a select few humans who would propagate the bloodlines of all creeds and races – but the truth was, no other demon or angel’s hearts were behind the Apocalypse save Mega-dick-tron.

I combed over a seed tray with Olaf. “Dear friend, will these be enough for an orchard of apricots?”

Olaf adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses, his crop of icy, receding gray hair and tall, gaunt form dressed in a lab coat that matched mine, jackets warm and snug on both our shoulders. He looked the same age as I chose to present myself – mid-fifties.

Not all of us preferred ephebe-like youth like my vain husband!

Olaf smiled, then spoke: “My oldest lover and companion, Bee, yes – this is more than enough. Be sure to store them in a cold, dry place – I would think Sheol, as you tell me it is a moderate climate in the seed vaults there.”

I smiled, setting the tray down and hugging Olaf, who I had saved from drowning in a fjord when I was out fishing in Norway one day in the 70s when he was but a small boy and accidentally happened upon him struggling in the sloe black waters. Olaf was austere like me, kind, and soft-spoken, with a gaggle of children and now, grandchildren, with his headstrong, tender wife Toline. “Want to get some Indian food after this, Ole? I can take us to London if you’d like. I wouldn’t mind some tikka or daal, to be quite honest.”

Olaf bundled up the apricot seeds into my magickal biovault. I patted the firm noetic plastic to reassure myself with the textured clack, then hoisted it into the pocket dimension portal I carried with my always. My lab assistant Furiel, one of the Fury handmaidens of Hell alongside Juriel and Puriel, grabbed it gently but firmly and stowed it away.

“Bring me some naan, boss,” Furi called, winked, then closed the portal.

“Indian sounds lovely, Bee,” Olaf opined. “So convenient to have magical storage. Say, you think they have mango lassis?”

“I think that would hit the spot, Ole.”

I smiled as we went to the locker room and took off our containment suits and lab coats and changed into business casual.

When we went to Trafalgar Square and took in some of the sights and war statues – we liked to watch war movies on Sundays. Then, sharply dressed, Olaf and I went to an Indian brewpub, got some “nut brown ale reduxes,” fries, and reimagined modern Indian tapas.

We thought them rather atrocious, so ended up finishing up the ales: the only good part of the meal, and ambling over to our usual spot: Curious Krishna. A little statue of a hungry child Krishna in a bib eating fish and rice greeted us, and we rubbed the lucky spot at his forehead that was worn down for that very reason. Olaf and I devoured three plates of garlic naan, curry, and daal. I made sure to save some for Furi and Lu.

“So Bee, how is little Bailah?”

“She’s twelve now. A little miracle, Ole,” I smiled, taking my refurbished, classic Blackberry out of my pocket and flipping to my photo folder to show him Bailah, Elodie, Alicia, Lucifer and me at Bailey’s piano recital. Lucifer was teaching her how to stroke the ivories and serenade the crowd like a Mozart madrigal, and I?

I was teaching Bailah bushido, tea ceremonies, and jujitsu. Plus, how to wield a katana with pride – and we watched the best episodes of Sailor Moon each weekend after Lucifer made us miso soup, vegan sushi, and ramen (Elodie and Alicia went on much-deserved dates as we babysat our goddaughter.)

“Oh wow, she’s tall, skinny as a fork,” Olaf laughed. “Reminds me of my youngest granddaughter, Inge.” He pulled his Android out and flipped to a picture of a little towhead girl who was round, rambunctious and wild in her young, precocious beauty. There was a mud-brown frog in Inge’s hand in her grandmother Toline’s backyard, dirt and strawberry juice on Inge’s cheeks. Olaf’s bespectacled, camera-handling form shone in the flash reflection of his granddaughter’s glasses.

“Ole, Eve and I are running a garden in Heaven with some of the seeds from the bank, testing them out for new humanity… if Metatron has his way with G-d and, well, it comes to the Apocalypse.”

Olaf crossed himself: “Jesus forbid.”

“Yes, Christ, Mary, and Michael are working overtime to resurrect our Father and prevent it. But the arcane magick and sciences of Heaven can only go so far. And Lucifer’s experiments with the darkness of Erebus have yielded no exit strategy of salvatory mimetic either. So, I meet Metatron measure for measure, Eve keeps him on his toes, and we bide our time.”

“But there are those in Hell who crave war. Vengeance. Retribution – revenge. You speak often of Belial.”

“My favorite foster son… yes.” I shuddered, picturing Belial and Metatron together, war generals who had never laid down their weapons. Belial still led the daemons and dragons, Hell’s most powerful general whose only military rival was me.

Lucifer and Samael often led our war forces alongside Michael and Gabriel against our mortal enemies (it was then that even Metatron’s bloodthirsty broadsword was useful).

But, of course, it was my hellspawn – the Order of the Fly scions I created from my heart’s blood and my seed: my tender, unfaceable Brood – that carried out most of the militia action, spying, and dirty work – and lost most of their lives.

Veteran’s Park in Heaven was brimming with fresh dirt these days, and now that Lucifer had been let back to his Garden for over a decade, my husband insisted on burying each demon that fell to Belial’s sword. Lucifer was tenderest with my own Brood.

“Yes, Belial is murdering and poisoning the underbellies of Heaven and Hell as usual, Ole,” I sighed, massaging my pale scalp, my platinum, black-streaked hair sweaty in the humid London summer fog. We were outside on the patio of Curious Krishna, drinking beer and mango lassis. “It’s a mess, quite honestly, old friend.”

Olaf squeezed my hand, then gave me a gentle kiss – though we were both physically middle-aged, our old fire still burned bright - then my lover poured me another Kingfisher beer. “Maybe Bailah and Inge could help Lucifer garden and work with you and Eve in the seed orchard. Might get your mind off things. My girl Inge loves worms, digging for rocks, gardening, searching for bugs – and well, Bee, you’re a bug. Hah!”

“Eve does love you and Toline, dear Olaf, and my secretary brags about your seed stock to Adam, Samael and Lilith any chance she gets. I’m sure Eve would love to meet Inge, your scion,” I smiled. My mandible flexed under my glamour, and I let it, my antennae, and fly wings flash through my disguise for a second. Olaf laughed to high hell. “And Lucifer would use any excuse to spend more time with Bailah and another relative of my soul-bonds.”

“Heh, here’s her mother Gunhild’s number, Bee. I might as well come check out the heavenly farm. See if you’re using the proper nitrates, fertilizer and manure.”

“Lu will bitch at you for changing the manure.”

“Well, I’m the botanist here. The Devil is worth fighting, sometimes, Bee.”

“Bailey, block,” I encouraged firmly but kindly as my goddaughter was dressed in her jujitsu uniform, my dragonfly necklace on her shining collarbone. A sheen of sweat gleamed on Bailah’s forehead under her black braids, and her hazel eyes glowed in determination.

“Okay, Uncle Bee – Hii- YAH!” Bailah blocked my chop, then gave one of her own – straight to my shin. I smiled, reveling in the fight with my youngling, and we engaged in taps, kicks, punches, blocks, and rolls under my expert instruction. Bailah was feisty, darting to and fro on her tall, skinny limbs – she in seventh grade now at a ritzy, private STEM school in Brooklyn, just as Elodie had attended. But though Bailah loved math and science, her heart was in art.

“Can we paint now?” Bailah smiled, meeting me at the front of the dojo building of the Morningstar palace, having changed into a neon purple band tee, fingerless fishnet gloves, mall goth pants and makeup, and cherry red Chuck Taylors with fuzzy lilac socks. She bounced on the balls of her feet, and her fingers were stained in gold marker and white paint.

“I was thinking clay today. Teach you how to mold faces.”

“M-kay, Uncle Bee. God I love fighting. It makes my fingers tingle and makes me want to make something.”

I scooped her up in my arms and we flew to my art studio: “That’s generally what happens when I exert myself as well, Bailey. I want to stir some hocus pocus.”

We settled into the studio, I in gray and black athleisure and white Adidas, and I preheated the kiln, got out some oxides for glazes, and a big block of gray clay. We spent the next few hours of Friday afternoon sculpting as Elodie and Lucifer met to talk strategy. Elodie was 38 now, my highest general – as I taught all my human charges to fight, of course – and led human relations on Earth between Heaven and Hell, having found her purpose long ago. Her wife Alicia ran a cookbook business and was also a Penguin Random House editor who specialized in artisanal cheeses and deserts with quite the discerning list of clientele (she’s started as a Milwaukee cheese monger of high acclaim) – they had met in Parma on a cheese tour many moons ago.

Bailah looked just like her birth mother, Elodie, and I could feel Elodie’s ingenuity and spunk in her, but also, a more soulful streak in my Bailey – Bailah had that flash of artistry, the feel of my jazz guitar under my fingers, the best kind of brilliance and flamboyant. Bailah had the artist’s spark. Like her mother, she loved to scribble stories, mostly about a society of talking cats and horses that lived in harmony with wood elves, as Alicia and Lucifer and I had made sure to foster a love of Tolkien in her at a young age.

“What do you think, Uncle Bee? I can’t get it right, the flanks, I mean,” Bailah smiled dazzlingly, her white teeth shining, and held up an abstract horse and cowboy held together by a tree, sculpted and marked in the clay.

My jaw dropped: I looked at my sad, lackluster molding of a Harlequin – though I loved art, I never said I was any any good at it. “It’s exquisite, Bailey. How about adding some leaves to the forelock to help the movement of the wind you’ve captured so beautifully?”

“I wonder who my donor was – if, well, he was an artist. You know, Uncle?”

“I do wonder that,” I smiled. “Here, let’s take our delightful creations to the kiln after we add the finishing touches.”

After we had set them to bake, I ambled over to the kitchenette in the guest house where Lucifer, Samael, Lilith, and Elodie were making plans to raise the number of soul-bonds in order to foster more human innovation and a veritable Renaissance into the Martian age, as now, humanity had reached the stars. Space travel to the planets was occurring at a rapid rate, and the Martian colony was beginning to terraform the Red Planet.

I wondered, were there any aliens out there? I could wander the galaxies, it was true, and knew of other galactic pantheons, but they shielded their physical races and devotees from even prying immortal eyes. Thus, angels, demons, and pagan gods and spirits had to wander the Fairylands, Heaven, Hell, and Afterlife, with some able to haunt Earth. But we were barred from the multiverse – for now.

It was all quite a Brave New World Elodie was leading the charge of.

I was making some cheesy fettucine when Bailah tip-toed in with Harry Potter in her hands, her silver cat’s eye glasses piqued over dangling crystal earrings and her mall goth-meets-manic pixie emo outfit. Oh, to be a child, and an artist, at that!

“Beelzebub, what house are you?”

“Hufflepuff. Lucifer is Slytherin.”

“I’m Ravenclaw. Mama is Gryffindor and mom is a Slytherclaw,” she said – mama meaning Elodie, mom being Alicia. “Do you think the Houses can get along in real life? They don’t really in the books.”

Bailah stole some fresh, cheesy noodles onto a plate with silver chopsticks, plopped on too much grated parmesan, then gobbled them down.

“I don’t see why not, Bailah. Pantheons and countries and strangers in real life get along, not to mention Heaven and Hell… for the most part.”

“Do you think that will ever change?” Bailah wondered. “There are cliques at school, Uncle Buncle Bee,” Bailey said, referring to her beloved nickname for me. “Lucifer is scary, you know. So is Michael. And Lilith. And Eve…”

“Yes, but you and your mothers are the scariest of them all!” I tickled her, then sat down in a bean bag in the game room and turned on Mario Kart. We ate and played, and Bailah crushed me at Bowser’s Castle. “You’ll grow to terrify even the President, my Bai.”

“Heh. Yeah, I sure will.” She stole my last noodle and smiled, cheese on her chin. “Hey, can we watch that really ancient Mario movie?”

“Anything for you, my Princess Peach.”

I met Elodie at a Marrakesh market we frequented often for our romantic rendezvous. She was dressed in a modest, stylish black kaftan and beret over her plaited afro, her black locks free and fresh. Elodie laughed, waving me over to a tea shop as she browsed a book monger outside.

“Look Bee, occult texts on djinn,” she winked, her face one of my favorite sights.

I kissed her on the cheek. “Djinn might be even beyond your expertise, love.”

“I could ask Asmodeus, he’s a daeva.”

“And ill to serving others, even my beloved humans. He does not often answer mortal calls, too distracted by Eligos and Naamah.”

“Heh. Well, I’ll get it anyway – I’ve been doing Arabic on Duolingo.” Elodie bought the antique tome from the smiling, half-toothless but clean bookseller who obviously indulged in a hedonic, delightful life – judging by the size of his gait – and I helped her wrap it in the hawker’s offerings and tuck it into her book bag from ‘The Strand.’

“Tea?” I asked, holding her hand. I was dressed in a nice, casual outfit – Dior.

“Yes, and we need to discuss the invitation Belial gave us to negotiate. I have no idea what he wants.”

“Perhaps a reunion with his foster father.”

“Hmm... mayhaps Bee. That just may be so.”

We got some Moroccan mint tea and rose scones. Sipping it, we talked strategy for next month’s parlay with Belial in Gehenna.

“I’m taking half of the Star of the Fly Regis,” I said, referring to my and Lucifer’s personal bodyguards.

“And I’ve worked a Cabalistic trap tailored to the “Worthless One.” Based on Belial’s old incarnation – Ophion.”

“Smart!”

She drew out schematics of attack formations she could lead with my Brood of the Order of the Fly, her my Head Mage and War Strategist – Elodie was my star mortal, besides Olaf.

Bailah, however, was quickly catching up.

“Shall we go to the casbah I booked…” Elodie asked, sultry and sweet.

Lust rose in my wicked old belly. Devil that I am, I took her tender brown hands in mine and bit her finger with my fangs to draw some blood. With my pedipalp, I secreted some wicked aphrodisiac poison in her – something I saved only for Elodie and, of course, Lu – and shared my sinful desires with her.

“I think that’d be ideal, yes,” I purred, whisking us through an etheric portal into the blue-painted oasis of the casbah AirBNB she had booked – lush purple carpet, sand and plants and succulents, a blue pool, tile of camels and birds, high clay walls – and laid Elodie down in my arms on a large bed under the veranda, replete with red velvet blankets and gold silk pillows.

“Oh fuck Bee, it’s hot,” Elodie laughed, her brown hips rising under my hands. She fanned herself.

I let my wings do the fanning, laughed, then kissed her, tender and sweet. We danced together as old lovers, and I reached deep into her skirts, finding the gem between her thighs, the wet pearl of her sex – Holy of Holies – and made love with my palm and fingers.

She came as she nuzzled my neck, speaking Igbo, then said “Fuck!”

I lifted my hand, wet with her spendings, and licked it hungrily, eyes hazed and narrowed and boiling red as I gently undressed her. My hands were sharp, severe – I let my claws out, leaving red marks, then bit Elodie’s breast, pedipalp dancing.

We moaned, and my cock rose. She undressed me with mad passion, and we writhed in and out of each other, white polish nails and black claws, clothes strewn on the floor, and blood and sweat mixed like whiskey on the rocks.

“Me on top, this time,” she purred, toying with my thighs and dick. She mouthed it, then mounted me, her ripe brown breasts beautiful and sweet.

“I love you, Elle, hyup, fuck you’re tight, girl.”

“Heh – holy fuck, ugh.”

I moved slow into her core, my hips pistoning – and she met me bounce for thrust. We made slow, languorous, but intense work of our fucking – over the years since she had turned 21, we had become experts at each other’s kinks and tender spots, and when we came together, a light rain began to fall as my old glory as Baal, God of Thunder, let out illicit passion into her womb.

She collapsed against my pale white chest in passion, moaning, unable to talk, and I stroked her petite, round form, my hands moving like dancers along her curves. I laughed, nursing her back to health with my magick – to fuck a demon drained most mortals, but only a bit my Elle – and we had dinner.

“I love you, Bee.”

“Kiss kiss, Elle.”

Lucifer was in the belly of Tartarus, his human form discarded to deal with the harsh elements of an un-terraformed Hell. The Erebus flowed like black, blood-laden sludge and piping hot magma from the huge font in the center of the Cave of Lost Sighs, and Lucifer and I were forced to take our true forms from the Hell Warp.

I was all fly and spider, towering and gangly, four arms and four legs, slender thorax, stinger and spinneret, cockroach winged and serrated fly head. I was a creature of spite and blood. Lucifer was warped, cursed, sanguine skin of Hell, twisted and mutilated like Satan from Dante’s Inferno. His carcass was blue-black with a sheen of blood, old burnt flesh letting bone through. His face was old and austere, glowing yellow pus-filled eyes, horns, and teeth like a shark. We were dressed in black robes, our black crystal wands in hand. Lucifer let the fine sludge of the Erebus drip like snot from his hands, weaving it into pure spring water with his flaming heart’s core as he steamed it with Light – he the Lightbringer.

“You think this magick will work, the new Plasma I’m making?” Lucifer asked cautiously, his voice dry, loud, and hoarse, like a beast of Hell’s hack.

I buzzed: “YESSSSSSS DEAR. IT SHALL WORK SSSSSPLENDIDLY. SHALL WE WILL IT INTO EXISTENCE ON OUR BLOOD, SWEAT AND SPIT?”

“All to save humanity. Of course, my beautiful Baal.”

“MY SSSSSPELNDID ATTAR.”

Lucifer paused, readying the cauldron above our bed of furs and small fire on cedar and pine he had lit – it was always cold, in real Hell, and frost and maggots burrowed in the dirt. “Sometimes, I think, Baal – these forms, our true forms, are our loveliest.”

“SHHHHHHUT UPPP AND KISS ME, LU. YOU ARE SSSSTALLING.”

“Heh. Right.” His eyes pussed more than usual – a foul replacement for tears, but the only ones the Hell Warp left us, in all honesty – and he laid himself down as Offering to Erebus, withdrew his knife, then began to filet his flesh methodically, stripping the burnt flesh-leather and raising it to the boiling pot, burning the foul refuse of Erebus with his cleansing balm as Lord of Light into Plasma.

I cradled my poor husband’s hand with my thorax and pincers, stroking his hairless head. I nuzzled the bit of bone that poked from the left side of his skull with my pedipalp – I was thrice his size in our true forms – and held Lucifer’s blade as he wept, too weak to deflesh himself more as black blood pooled.

“I’LL DO THE REST, MY TREASURE.”

“You are – HACK – my first and last, Brilliant Baal.”

“AAAAND YOU ARE THE TREASURE OF MY HEART, BEAUTY.”

Lucifer sighed, content. Blood that replaced tears now flowed from his pussing, enflamed eyes. “Do you think it is true, Baal? What John of Patmos wrote? Will we rot here, cursed, for all eternity? All because our own people cast us out of our Temple and called us, once their gods – HACK – demons?”

I wept too, methodically slicing his last strips of flesh – always weeping at the true sacrifice of the Morningstar Husbands ruling Hell – and putting the last of the offerings into the bowl of the cauldron. “I don’t know, Attar, in all honesty. I miss – I miss the children’s songs,” I whispered, the only way I could make my hellish voice sound human. “Early, in the temple mornings, when my priests left out beer and bread for me, and the children played with their dolls at my statue’s foot.”

“I hate it. Christianity. Islam. Judaism. It can all rot for eternity.”

“AAAAND YET… IT SSSSHAPES OUR WORLD.”

“Yes. HACK. Well, fuck all that.” Flayed, my husband was a beauteous horror. His cock rose, and with lust he rose and kissed me with his fangs, tearing at my mandible, letting out all his torture and anger on my bruised, benign Fly body.

“I WILL TAKE YOUR PAIN, ATTAR. LOOSE IT ON ME,” I sang, allowing him to bite me, fuck me, dissect me, and we wove in and out of each other, his cock in my wounds.

“I – SOB – hate myself, Baal. Look at me. Look at us. What our humans made us.”

I wept too when he came in my mouth, and swallowed his seed, then wept more when I saw the Plasma form – brilliant silver like his human blood, he my Yeshua in the depths of Hell, comely and ill-anointed – Lucifer the lamb in sin.

“Maybe we do get a happy ending, Attar,” I whispered, carrying him and the Plasma cauldron in my oversized arms as he fainted from torture up the long stairs, out of his daily and nightly Harrowing of the Cave of Lost Souls, into our palace basement.

He formed human again, as did I, the moment our preferred forms took hold as the magick of Lucifer’s purification and Light that permeated all the rest of Hell outside that accursed place took hold, thanks to our diurnal Sacrifice.

Lucifer was young, peerless, blonde – beautiful, unmaimed. I steeled myself as he always did – he rarely fainted, but he typically hobbled up the stairs. Belial was more powerful a mage than Lucifer, so we needed a stronger Plasma for our enchantments and weapons.

I noetically magicked the Plasma into a cannister, pure blue silver, and put it in my lab… besides Olaf’s seeds. Call it wishing Hell into Heaven with precious apricots, or something silly. I sighed, then smiled as we entered the basement where our beautiful room was, and tucked Lucifer into our nuptials bed, wiping his sweat away,

Always

Keeping

Vigil.

The Star Watcher (Lucifer)

At first, I felt godly hands rubbing nard into my tender, sweating flesh, the stupor of the Harrowing heavy on my limbs and lids. I cried, the pain of flesh stripped from my body a strong imprint on me – hell on my body, hell on my mind. I curled into my husband’s lap as Beelzebub, tender, caressed my now-whole skin. Bee ran his slick, star-born fingers coated in spikenard and myrrh – How to Soothe a King, as David did Saul – up my breastbone, to my cheek. The cool lotion and herbs he administered to me served as a balm, and my husband’s thick, strong, naked thigh under my cheek felt like salvation.

His silver blue eyes, like a snowflake latticework of polished crystal, reflected eternity in their gaze.

“How long was I out, Butterfly?” I asked Bee, my pet name for him somnambulant in my murmuring, I the haze of the Dead.

His platinum shock of white hair with a streak of black cascaded past his face, onto my shoulders – I kept my hair to my shoulders, he to his mid-back. I twirled some of the beautiful, thick, luscious strands on my claws, and brought some of the shiny locks to my lips to inhale the scent of Bees shampoo. It smelled, as always, like lilac, hazelwood, and musk.

Even dearer to me, however, was the scent of his Old Spice and laundry detergent. He was only in a white muscle tee, and had dressed me in a black band tee. We were, as preferred, pantsless.

“Two hours, love,” Beelzebub softened his voice like butter. “You slept like an angel.”

I plotted at the base of his pelvis, pursing my lips, greedy: “I need you, Bee. Inside me, Butterfly. Like the Romans of old.”

He bit his lip, pensive. “I do not know if you can handle it, my Rose of Sharon.”

“I burn with need, I pray you will share your bliss with me,” I murmured, leaning over to kiss the sharp line of his waist jut above his chiseled hips. Pale white against my gold skin – Baal the moon to my sun.

“Just gently, Bee.”

“Alright, King. My Adonai.”

“Blasphemy, Bee.”

He smirked, then gently laid me down on the pillow, slipping the bit of my shirt up to lick my left nipple – my weak spot. I moaned: “FUCK,” as his mandible and tongue sucked, plucked, lapped. His fingers squeezed the right.

“I can worship you, Attar,” he laughed. “Shall I sing your praises? Oh Heylel Ben Shachar, more precious than jewels, more beautiful than a thief in the night, a roving marauder who has stolen my heart.”

“It has always belonged to you, Butterfly. Shit – uglgh.” He put his tender, winsome and frightful lips on my balls, stroked my cock with white chocolate hands, and precum wept from my tip. I bucked my hips, wanting to root into his balled fist as he worked my rod, and he administered to me like a nurse the wounded.

“Gentle, dear,” Beelzebub smirked, still careful, then eased my legs apart, dipped his hand in the coconut oil on our nightstand, readied his pulsing, veiny erection, and eased my ass apart.

“Fill me, fuck, Butterfly.”

He slid into me like he was salvation, and I was his sin. Perhaps I thought too much of Heaven and Hell. We melded our human forms, and I looked up into his bluest eyes with my emerald irises. He moved, ever so gently, inside me, like a lotus blossoming on the Nile after a noonborn delta flood.

“Ready, Attar? My King?” Beelzebub hissed, kissing my brow. I nodded as the pleasant ache and lustful delight of having my ass filled made my need for a dirtier fuck beckon.

“As I’ll ever be.”

Beelzebub knotted his hands in mine and slammed me down into the bed, fucking hard. I cried out as he groaned, and we cursed in the manner of drunk sailors.

Unable to hold our human forms, we reverted back to our true forms that came most naturally – sanguine flesh and fly carapace, and made love

Like demons

With three legs.

Afterwards, spent, and we came in white cream, we showered together in our human forms, whistling, then ate pineapple cake and played

Parcheesi.

“Nice morning, old Loverboy,” Lucifer smiled, pecking me on the cheek before he flew on his swan wings off to work.

I waved goodbye, then took my route upon insect wings to the basement of the Hellopolis. Chao greeted me, smiling.

“Look like you ate well, Bee,” she winked, dressed in a navy pantsuit. “I made char siu.”

“Fuck yes, Chao, you’re brilliant.”

“Anything for a hungry Fly.”

I settled into my office with Eve in my old, dilapidated leather chaise.

Eve was smacking on some gun, filing tax returns.

“Sigh… attaboy, Bee. Another day lost and stranded in the goddamn basement of Hell.” Eve munched on her own char siu, and then Chao came in, a plate of Eve’s lemon cake at hand.

“Bottoms up?” Chao asked. “It’s nine AM. Wine ‘o clock.”

“Ladies, I think you’ll like this – ice wine,” I smiled, pulling some chilled Canadian Riesling from my mini-fridge with magnets of Hua, Bailah, and Lu on it.

“Bottoms the fuck up, Bee,” Chao cheered as Eve got glasses.

And we had

A ball

Of a time.

Bailah ate some kettle corn on a bean bag beside me as we rewatched the ancient show House of the Dragon for the umpteenth time. She spat out a kernel wedged into her teeth into her empty soda cup – we only drank Pepsi products in my household.

“Uncle Buncle Bee, why are you dressed as Daemon? And is this really appropriate for twelve-year-olds… I love Alicent.”

“I’m LARPing with your Uncle Lu later.”

“What. Is. LARPing!!!”

“I’ll tell you when you’re older, Bailah. And you’re raised by demons. I think some dragon murder is fine.”

I dipped my hand in the popcorn bowl, plucked some, then threw it at her mouth. On reflex and due to my diligent Pavlovian child training, Bailey caught the kernel mid-air with expert martial precision, grinned like a wolf, then swallowed it whole. In the wild wrecks of Gehenna like her mother when Elodie now served in Hell’s armies, Bailah would need to stomach raw refuse and bitter herbs.

Or maybe I had just taken the popcorn out of the microwave too early.

There was a knock at the door: “Can I come in, funcle?”

“Sam, hell yes,” I called, adjusting my gauntlets.

Samael entered, dressed in Kylo Ren’s armor. “Ready for laser tag, Bailey?”

Bailah tugged on her Squirrel Girl cape and mask. “I still don’t see why I have to dress up, Uncle Sam.”

“It’s very important for weapons training. Here, Havashem, stop fidgeting,” Samael said, wrestling his eleven year old son with Eve from the shadows. Havashem looked up from his handheld game, dressed as Percy Jackson, and blushed:

“Hey Bailey. I missed you. Cool outfit.”

“Bro, I love Percy Jackson. I should have dressed as Annabeth!” Bailah zoomed from the couch and hug-attacked the demon child. Havashem, her best friend, was preternaturally tall, had blond hair, and black bat wings and ibex horns. They busied themselves in the other room playing air hockey: “Man, Shem, adults, even uncles, are mega-lame.”

Samael sniggered. “I guess we’ll always be old and out of date, eh, Bee?”

“I am beginning to feel my age. Brewski?”

“Rad, brother.” He pulled out an apple bong and we got high together, watching Metalocalypse.

The kids came in midway through Toki’s escapades with a magic spider pet.

“Where did you get that from, Shem?” Samael asked, voice raw with satvia.

“Ummmmmmmmm… Mama Lily.”

“Lilith wouldn’t give one of her poison plant pets to a child.”

“Uh…. Eve.”

“Fuck – excuse my language. You stole it from Eve? What if it bit Bailah? Humans can’t survive Shadow Spider poison.”

“I don’t mind! Bee’s a bug anyways,” Bailah sang, coaxing the spider onto her arms. It responded to my soul shard in her dragonfly necklace, and the tamed yet powerful Shadow Spider started to weave a web of lace in her hands. “Do we have to do laser tag. Shem and I are having so much fun in Uncle Lu’s garden.”

“Bailah, be careful with that.”

“M’kay, Bee-tlejuice.”

“Don’t call me that, little lady.”

“Spider spider, trapped in sand, weave the moonlight round your hand!-

“No rhyming either, Bailey.”

She stuck out her tongue, then winked. Havashem made a duck face at his father.

“Your face will be frozen that way, children.” Sam sighed, resigned, then toked the half-smoked apple bong. “Imbibe, Bee. Children are hell.”

They giggled – the wildfolk – then kicked us off the TV to play video games.

Samael slunk to the kitchen, a nose in one of my copies of Stephen King. I picked up some Anne Rice, and we read and made chili. Sam’s chili was second only to Raphael’s.

“They’re stealing my immortality, I swear to fucking Father,” Sam laughed, putting some dark chocolate in his chili concoction – Cincinatti style. He sampled it with the ladle. “Mmm, almost as good as stadium hot dogs at a Yankee game.”

“Why are you so morbidly obsessed with the Yankees and getting fat off baseball hot dogs, Sam?”

“The Big Apple is Ha Satan’s playground. I invented opposable thumbs for a reason.”

“I have spent too much time alone with my hands.”

We sniggered at our inside jokes.

Bailah’s hazel eyes peered with black puffs on her head like twin dandelions past the edge of the kitchen door: “Uhhhh gentlemen, is lunch ready yet? CHOP CHOPPITY CHOP! Shem needs to feed Lilac!”

“Manners, Bailah,” I remarked, wagging my index finger.

She sulked.

“Who is Lilac, girl?” I asked, hiding my amusement.

“The spider, Bee. My pet spider.”

I shared a knowing look with Sam. “And – hah – you uh, think Alicia will let you keep a spider in her mansion with fine wines and artisanal cheese? A demon spider?”

“It’s a Shadow Spider, Bee.”

“Yes, girlchild. I created them. I created all insects and worms and slugs, small creeping things are my domain.”

“I made maggots, though,” Sam interjected, balancing his scythe on his nose, much to Bailah and Havashem’s amusement, who were now dipping spoons in the chili.

“MMM! Dad, this is GREAT!” Shem said, bouncing up and down like a gangly Doberman, his demon tail wagging.

Lilac climbed atop Bailah’s head protectively, and sipped chili from her spoon: “See, Uncle Buncle Bee, Bee-ple Pee-ple, LILAC LIKES TO EAT TOO.”

“Alright, Bailah. I guess you can keep her if your mom and mama agree.”

“Wahoo, Shem! We won against the lame adults!”

“Language, Bailah.”

“The archdorks, I mean.”

Samael dolloped the chili with sour cream, chives, shredded onions, and crushed Fritos into cozy artisanal Moomin bowls: “Bottoms up, kids, it’s Sammy Chow Time.”

They scarfed it down as we watched the newest season of Pokémon.

Sam cheered on Blastoise. “God I wish I was a Blastoise.”

“I want to be a Seviper,” I remarked.

“But Lu is the snake,” Shem piped up.

“We always want what we can’t have,” remarked Bailah.

A truth had never been better

Spoken.

Wisdom from the mouth of a

Babe.

The time had finally come for Elodie, my, and the Star of the Fly Regis’ parlay in Belial’s wicked dragonic court in Gehenna. It took a fortnight to navigate the hellwinds in our flying enchanted marrowship, powered by the purified Plasma, and we traveled in a small company, in stealth – I at the helm, Elodie my general, a dozen dear sons of my Star of the Fly Regis commandeering the marrowship.

The black and red sand scoured the infernal ground, and only sharp cacti and fungus grew on the inhospitable desert ground. Hellbeasts roamed alongside animalistic dragons, and we traveled in stealth as I wove black sorcery to disguise us and steer the ship true. We passed over markets of whoredom and war, slavery and depravity, and just random fucking hicks. Out in the boonies of Gehenna, indeed. When I saw a yokel blood unicorn eating a puppy, I almost vomited, imagining Bailah’s reaction to such a wicked scene. This was the part of Hell I hated – disgusting rednecks. Elodie watched, smirking.

“They don’t expect us, Bee.”

My Brood – half-beast, half-man, no intelligence to speak of, but a soft animalistic kindness to my loved ones, and bloody benediction to our enemies, made out of blades and ant and wasp – manned the oars of wind as the marrowship loomed over the Pit of Apollyon, where a circular inner dent that spanned the mountain ranges of Gehennom in a labyrinth like a Jungi Ito horrorscape gaped open like a Sarlaac pit. The great dragon towers of Belial’s keeps pierced the rancid air like shining teeth. Elodie, the Star of the Fly Regis, and I were in cyberpunk suits with gas masks and capes, hellswords aflame with ionic lasers. I let our glamour down, our imperial Morningstar ship levitating threateningly above the watchtower of Belial’s castle.

The dragon demons sounded the alarm, and shot flaming arrows with cockatrice milk at us. I deflected them with my gauntlets I had enchanted to control the winds, letting my beastly Fly form unfurl as a great beckoning terror, and let my hiss of a laugh escape. Elodie, Head Mage, lit herself aflame with violet fire, letting it burn her to the bone as a Hell Harpy – to them went the powers of necromancy I taught my human charges so well, and if she had no flesh, she

Could not

Be injured.

“MAKE HASSSSTE, HARROWED BELIAL AND MY REBEL SSSSSCIONS. I GROW IMPPPPPATIENT.”

The Star of the Fly Regis flanked my sides four astride, and I held Elodie aloft on my central arms, close to my blazing infernal heart. Her bones fit into my pincers elegantly, like lucky dice on a gambler’s hand. We made an imposing, demonic force. I wanted to get this over with and get back to Chinese date night with Lucifer. It was navigating to Gehenna that was hard: Belial always magicked it so it evaded detection, but once I could noetically magick the Hell GPS in my own internal antennae sensors, I could magick my company and marrowship back to our palace dock, and get some fucking

Chow

Mein.

“This is annoying, he’s stalling,” Elodie sighed, clacking her skull, voice a hoarse lich. “Bailah has trigonometry homework. I need to get back soon. Alicia is on deadline with an Indonesian dessert book.”

Belial, finally, belatedly, debuted. He was dressed, as usual, like a fucking bloody pirate, his bald gray head and elven orc ears dotted with body glitter, in fucking pantaloons and what might as well be a Seinfeld puffy shirt, pirate cap, robotic three-headed parrot, and earrings on. He swilled wine with his hick dragon demons, naked hell prostitutes – also dressed as busty Caribbean tavern wenches, but closer to blood elves in actuality – dangling from his arms with their triple tits.

“Father. To what do I owe the pleasure?” Belial drawled, his voice silk and blood.

“I SSSSSEEEEE YOU ARE JACK SSSSSPARRRROW TODAY. IDIOT. I RAISSSSSED YOU TO LARP MORE CREATIVELY.”

He laughed, sucking on a “pirate” lass tit: “We all have our vices, Bee. Shall we have some wine?”

“I AM NOT HERE FOR PLEASSSANTRIES, CHILD. I NEED YOU TO STOP ATTACKING THE GATES TO JAHHNA. YOU ARE STOPPING THE FLOW OF INCAN UNDERWORLD GOLD TO HELL. MULCIBER NEEDS IT TO FORGE ADAMANT, ASSSS YOU FUCKING KNOWWWW, BELI!”

“And what if I want the gold for my cock rings?”

“You’re atrocious as always, Belial,” Elodie said, then sent a blast of purple lightning to scour Belial’s thigh.

“Oh, sweetheart, and you’re feisty as usual. I remember when you were a girl, attached to Bee’s hip. I suppose he always fucks his children.”

Hell froze over in my thorax. “FUCK YOU, BELIAL. SHUT YOUR WHORE MOUTH OR I’LL DESSICATE YOU INTO PERDITION AND TORTURE.”

“Oh, and what, you’ll seduce Elodie’s daughter, too?”

That was it. I lost it. I bit him in half. Swallowed him. My Star of the Fly Regis started taking on his dragons, Elodie went for the busty assassin wench prostitutes, and a melee worthy of Soulcalibur happened. Belial took his pirate sword and sawed open my belly, and we spent a few hours torturing, masticating each other, until we were all tired, healed ourselves, and did indulge in some shitty country wine.

“The grapes here are terrible, Beli,” I sighed, in my human form and Elric of Melnibone gear, cyberpunk attire over, Belial having acknowledged Elodie and my’s victory. “So you will stop interfering with the Jahnna trade route, and Incan afterlife gold?” I asked, weary.

Beli looked at me across from his hell table, astute. “That was a ruse, Father. I heard from a little bird… oh, shall we say, Metatron is experimenting on waking G-d up.”

I crushed my shitty wine glass to bloody shards in my hands.

Elodie cussed.

“What?” I demanded.

“Oh, my whisper network of Heaven and Hell… and I have friends in high places.”

“Like shit,” Elodie sighed.

“Well, I suppose I should thank you, son. It was a horrible time tonight, but you fought better than usual.”

Belial mockingly bowed, then fed his robotic triple-headed parrot a bloody Cheezit. “It was the least I could do, Baal.”

“Ophion, I do hope Eurynome reconciles with you after your mid-life crisis Boomer boat pirate phase drove her away.”

“The wide-encroaching Eve,” Belial hummed, then dabbed a stubborn tear from his eyes. “Yes, well, Baal, we cannot all have a perfect marriage like you and Lucifer. Some of us work, and fail, for our wedded bliss. Love, and all its trappings, is rare for true demons. For you are no demon Bee, but a fucking fallen angel.”

“Thank you, again, for the spar, negotiation, relinquishment of ruckus, and… tip, Beli.”

He smirked, resigned: “I’d do no less for my fucking

Father.”

Lucifer paced in his study, his elegant blue worship cloak from diplomacy with Michael and Gabriel to change the seasons on Earth drawing ire from him. He shucked his clothes off into the etheric laundry and magicked on war gear.

“I should have fucking known. It’s Belial and Metatron’s doing. I bet they are plotting together. Belial knows no master, but Metatron would wake the decrepit, headless corpse of Father up just to fuck with me!” Lucifer roared, lunging at his ink stand on his broad cherrywood desk and striking his papers and fountain pen and quills to the floor, them mashing them to pieces with the balls of his feet and black toe talons. “Asshole of the highest hell, dog beef bastard, cambion abortion SHIT STAIN-

“Lucifer, calm down.”

He looked at me with poison green irises: “Shut it, Prime Minister. Do not order your liege Satan. You are my subordinate, do not forget – how could I let this happen?” Lucifer sunk to his knees, wracked with sobs, let go of his human form, and beat the ground in grief. “I tried so hard. To stop Metatron from meddling. We are making so much progress – I dress up in piss-ass fashion in fucking robes and make nice with the archangels, when I know they despise me, despise our kind, gossip about us – ALL BECAUSE HUMAN BELIEF WRENCHED A KNIFE IN OUR PANTHEON. How we rotted, Bee. For eons. How my children fell, like eidolon cleft from my ribs. All because I wanted freedom, and El thought he was doing right. Doddering cunt.”

I clasped his broken, burnt body – seere majesty and wretchedness of Satan – my human form tender and small in comparison – and rocked him. He was thrice as tall of me, and picked up my human form in his lap, and held me hard me, nuzzling me with his teeth.

Lucifer kissed me raw with his Qlipha husk lips, and his tears matched mine.

“It’s okay, babe, it’s okay, Attar,” I sang, a lullaby that had no words, simply angelic, and he wept, rocking me like a

Broken

China

Doll.

I let myself down off his lap, and picked the ink, papers, and quills back up and set them lovingly on his desk, then magicked away the India Ink stains on the carpet.

“Let’s go watch Mystery Science Theater, babe. I’ll take care of this. It is not for the King to sully his hands with such trivial matters as Metatron. He is far beneath the sheer majesty of Hell’s regent. I am your left hand of darkness, Lucifer. Let me aid you, liege.”

Lucifer stood, towering over me, his bitter black armor on, with sheens of crackling red hellfire. He loomed like terror, homages to the underbelly of Gan Eden, and evil.

Le Genie

Mal.

“Mairon, you are perfect,” he sighed, stroking my platinum, icy hair. I kissed his leathery hand, then tenderly nuzzled his knee – the farthest I came up to.

“I do as you will, Melkor.”

With regret, Lucifer slipped out of his true form, into the ephebe that resembled Apollo on the lam. He massaged his brow, then smothered me in a hug, sagging against me.

Once again, I was taller, stronger, able to protect

My King.

“I’ll carry you to the couch, Lu. Remember, it’s Chinese night.”

“Yes. Chinese. I want… General Tso’s and dumplings.” He fell into my arms, a deflated swan, dressed in ivory robes and golden sandals, his six white swan wings limp.

I nuzzled his forehead with my mandible. “What else, Lucifer? Anything you want. Indulge tonight.”

I carried Lu up the stairs to the TV room. “Um… egg drop soup. And kung pao… and… Kirin.”

“Kirin it is.”

I ordered the Chinese on my Blackberry as Lucifer rested his head in my lap, looking like a starving, petty lion. He took his bruisy mouth and bit my thigh, letting flame leave his mouth and scorch my thigh.

“Fuck me, Baal. Now.”

“You are a brat, Lucifer.”

“Old man.”

“Bastard.”

“Fuckface.”

“Twink.”

“Asshat.”

“Daddy.”

We were undressed by now, wounding each other, razing flesh apart with our talons. I took my red, red mouth and drank his starry blood, my own blue spider ichor coating his hands like a second skin. He lapped at the bestial scourings on my breast, then forced my head down onto his turgid pink cock.

I smiled in amusement at his burning need, sucked it gently, then hard, biting the tip. He winced, grating into me, and I played with his balls and perineum, then ate his ass out – Osculum Infame – and jerked him off with my muscular guitarist hands.

He came like white lace and dessert wine, onto the couch. I shoved his face down in his spendings.

“Lick it clean, idiot.”

He purred, arcing his butt against me, and did.

I spread his ass apart, lubing myself with my venom, and tenderly kissed his backdoor rosebud, easing him gently open, then pierced him with my cock.

He groaned, and we made love raw and rough, assfucking. He turned around under me, my cock balls-deep in him, and bit my neck with his lion fangs, straight through to the jugular.

“Your blood tastes like ice cream, Baal.”

“You’re a – tight, FUCK, fool, Lu.”

“Call me Attar.”

“I’ll call you whatever you want, you fucking slut.”

“Talk me out of – FUCK – sending my Hell Harpies down on Metatron’s Throne Room and razing it – THERE, BAAL! FUUUUCK! – to bitter ribbons of raw flesh and gore.”

“That would be unwise, Attar. Brat. Prince.”

“I – hyuck – AM KING.”

“Lestat.”

“Louis.”

“Arioch.”

“Elric.”

“Rhaegar!”

“DAEMON – I’M COMING, YOU FUCKING WHORE BASTARD-“

“Ring Ring. Uh, hello… order for the Morningstars? From Golden Dragon?”

Lucifer shoved me off him. I was naked as G-d made me, and he magicked away our mess and basic clothes on, shoved the blankets over me, tried to hide his erection under his gray sweatpants, and grabbed the bag.

“THANKS, BYE.” Lucifer flew to the couch, shoved the Chinese away, and laid naked down under me.

“Where were we?”

We made sweet love after that, our stress at ruling Hell finally gone, showered together, then turned on a John Waters film.

“I prefer Kenneth Anger,” Lucifer said, his belly bloated from all the Pan Am Chinese.

I rubbed it as it rumbled. He hiccuped.

“The lunatic that made your eponymous movie with live crocodiles and a Manson prison score? But what about Devine???”

He kissed me, settled into my lap. I braided his hair with some roses from our garden.

“You and drag, Bee. You and fucking drag.”

The morning after a nightlong fuck, I hand fed Lucifer green grapes and brie. It was Saturday – the weekend – and he lounged like a cat in my arms, pensive.

“I don’t think the Chinese agreed with me. My nerves are a fucking wreck, Bee,” he said, morose. “I need bottomless mimosas. Waffles. Pancakes. Peanut soup.”

“Are you talking about the Colonial Williamsburg trip you chaperoned for Bailah, now that Elodie and Alicia relocated to D.C.?”

Lucifer’s stomach rumbled. “An old person pancake house. We can see the Williamsburg blacksmithery, Bee.”

“You just want to hear the pennywhistle. You’re fucking obsessed with flutes and strings. And fucking peanut soup.”

“I did make Heaven have fife and drum.”

“And the Order of the Fly. I do not fucking get your obsession with folk music. It’s lame, Lu.”

“True. Don’t you miss the days of horseback warfare? The Winged Hussars? Siege of Constantinople? Fall of Carthage? The Sea Peoples?”

“Let’s not reminisce for glories past, Lu. I’ll cry. I miss Hannibal.”

“And I miss Baldwin IV.”

“You’ve been watching too much Kingdom of Heaven, husband dear and doting.”

“Mankind is so lame now, Bee.”

I stroked his wrist, then kissed it. “You could also say that us demons have become softened, homely, and idle. Perhaps Eve tamed us, after all these years.”

“Heh. Women’s domesticating effects. I ache for my musket and flintlock. We can watch the drills at Yorktown’s museum, then get fish and chips.”

“And swim with the jellies? Bare your gold calves to salute the sun for a dip?”

“Why not, Bee? I am a demon of lustful pleasure.”

“And I love chocolate chips.”

Soon, we had platefuls of chocolate and blueberry pancakes stacked before us with whip cream, coffee, and chocolate milkshakes at our favorite Williamsburg pancake house. Old 50’s memorabilia littered the place, and retirees in walkers and wheelchairs met over old newspaper and backgammon.

“Delightful,” Lucifer said, chocolate on his blonde stubble. His silver glasses and choppy blond hair shined under the fluorescent light and rising sun.

I drank a mimosa I had just ordered. “What is on the itinerary, today.”

“I want to visit one of my human charges that goes to William and Mary, Bee. Will you accompany me?”

“Oh, Emilia? The ornithologist-in-training, considering she fainted during Pre-Med rounds at the sight of vomit and blood at the hospital? That charge? She’s a bit space cadet, Lu.”

“I know,” Lu said warmly. “Emmy is perfect.”

We ambled my 2017 scarlet Dodge Viper with fuzzy bananas and dice dangling from the mirror and a hula dancer on the dash over to Colonial Williamsburg.

“We need to see the sheep, Bee.”

“Bailah really does drag you here a lot, Lu.”

“Yes, she tips the sheep. And plays hoop.”

“Isn’t that illegal.”

“Heh.”

We went to the sheep field – for some reason, it had Wi-Fi – and worked on our interior décor blog on HellBook.

“What do you think about shiplap for the torture room?”

“Am I a Mormon mommy blogger in Utah with children on a tradwife farm, Bee?”

“Shiplap is nice, Lu.”

“Do we need a Live, Laugh, Love poster and matching Sunday dresses for our altar girl daughters?”

“We’re doing shiplap and baby blue, Lu.”

“Am I hallucinating. This is like when Eve made Samael watch all those Tradwife TikToks and LARP as domestic Republicans.”

“Their bread is so dry. Why did Eve do that.”

“To troll Bonebutt, of course.”

“He is fucking pussywhipped. Did you know I once accidentally heard him call Eve “pretty, pretty princess” while he was painting her toenails pink in the office? Why do I let them do that in my place of work… I’m crazy. It gets boring in the Hellopolis basement. He was chained to her desk and collared.”

“Fuck man, I’d rather die than be Eve’s sex slave and personal Grim Reaper vibrator.”

“She has a way of eunuching men.”

“Insatiable. Did you read her latest sex column?”

“I never should have let her watch Sex and the City. It gave her ideas. Adam said there’s more shoes than children at their farm.”

“Well, we all know how she treated Gilgamesh. Sent you down, Baal, to fight him… back when you used to be a bull and the Hell Warp didn’t make you a fucking insect.”

“At least I am not a corpse zombie living dead girl, Lu.”

“Touche, shit bro, give me more mimosa.”

Spring came, and Elodie was thirty-nine. She had her hair up in a loose chignon, dressed in a navy blue pantsuit, as we met near her condo on Capitol Hill at our favorite greasy diner and classic Washingtonian dive, the Tune Inn, that did breakfast all day.

“I remember the old vets that would take turns keeping the parking meter running and getting stoned in their car when I used to be a Democratic intern,” Elodie laughed. “Now, I’m the one in power, and they’re underground. I miss them, you know.”

“I wouldn’t be adverse to Lucifer’s lettuce,” I smiled, shitty, perfect vodka in my glass as we split a big, cheesy omelet with hash browns. We clinked our glasses. “Tell me, Elodie. How are you and Alicia? How is little Bailah?”

“Thirteen now, shit, Bee. We loved having you and Lu at the party. And she’s excited to meet Inge at Eve’s orchard. I’ve heard so much about her grandfather, Olaf. What is he like?”

My crystal blue, icy eyes hazed over, and I tucked some platinum white hair that had escaped my artsy manbun back behind my ear. “A legend in population dynamics and he singlehandedly reinvented the tragedy of the commons concept for the 21st century. Besides you, Olaf is my favorite mortal.”

We went outside to smoke, I in an off-gray Tom Ford suit and goldenrod pinstripe tie, bowler hat on. A slight rain fell on the March gray. Cars wheeled by and senators carried their clean clothes from the laundromat.

“Do you think it can stay like this forever, Bee?” Elodie asked me, squeezing my hand as she bummed a Tareyton off me.

I smiled, wrapping her back and curves and bum against my elegant, vicious front. I towered over her like a lantern of heaven. “Peaceful?”

“Yeah. With Metatron up to god knows what with your Father’s headless corpse, who knows? I mean, is Bailah safe to grow up in this world?” She dabbed at a tear, kissing my hand. I trailed my fingers down her plump, winsome brown skin.

“Every mother must render their child up to the altar of life. I think she’ll find a fountain of beauty, Elle.”

Elodie smiled, taking my hand and pulling me along to our favorite bookshop. We browed the sci fi and fantasy section. She pulled out a grimdark book, but I snatched it from her hands teasingly and bought it instead for myself.

“Bastard. Heh.”

“I’ll let you borrow it, Elle.”

“Okay, guess we should go to the Kennedy chapel to meet with Father Damascus.”

We went to the Kennedy Catholic church by the Capitol South metro and met with Elodie’s priest. He was an occult dealer and ran supernatural security for D.C.’s underbelly, safeguarding even Madam President.

“Elle! Bee, good fellow, hello!” Father Damascus said. He was a short, stolid Dominican man, Andres Damascus, with a chipper smile and sweaty, balding head. “Shall we light a candle, for old time’s sake? Yeshua sent the supplies, but why not pray for a bit?”

I smiled, an old wound in my heart that I silenced – that all too common pain. I remembered when the fathers worshipped me, but said nothing. We did the Lord’s Prayer, then went to the back room, where Father Damascus revealed olive wood stakes.

“For fighting any enemies, why, my G-d chose the best quality, carpentered by His hands!” Father Damascus put them in silk clothes and handed them to me, careful not to burn my white flesh with the blessed wood.

The wood was egregiously hot through the silk, counteracting the ‘evil’ of my soul, but I simply felt power when I held them: I’d always loved the Gospels, and Christ’s work.

Father Damascus looked pensive: “I do not know why you must go searching in such broken men for truths, Beelzebub – when you have the Light of the Lord right in front of you.”

I smiled softly: “You know, it is said, Father, that when my brother Samael accepts the Torah, there will be no more war. Perhaps… some things are never meant to heal.”

Elodie looked at me with tears in her eyes, hopeful. I ignored it, rot gut rising in me.

The arrogance

Of humans

Was frightening.

“Have faith, Bee,” she said as we left. “Maybe, you and Lucifer can be saved-

“Watch yourself, girl.” I magicked a portal to my basement armory, where we sorted the stakes.

“My apologies, dear. It’s just… sometimes, I wonder. If demons can be healed from the Hell Warp.”

Ire flashed in me, and I squeezed a stake in my hand so hard through the cloth it shattered, driving fiery splinters into my wicked flesh. Blue spider blood oozed, and Elodie cried out, magicking cool water over my hand, then gently picking the pieces out.

“Shit, what did I do to you. I’m so sorry, my angel,” she cried, bandaging my hand as I, still silent

Studied

Her.

“Will you say – hic – nothing, Bee?” She moved to hug me, but I withdrew.

“I think you should leave, Elodie Okowa. This is not the first time you have wounded me with a holy armament from the Vatican.”

She hung her head, nodded, gazed back at me with tearful eyes, then left

Through my own portal

Back to Earth.

I looked down at the blazing bandage. Went to shower. Drank too much that evening.

Passed out

Lucifer and I were watching Garden State for the bajillionth time after a long day of inaugurating a new side road on I-666. Lu munched popcorn, torso and head in my lap, as I played with his hair. The Shins came on the soundtrack.

“Fucking good band,” Lucifer opined, his hand slipping against my gauntlet. “Baal, how can you eat popcorn with armor on? You need to come out of your Sauron clothes, you’ve worn them all day – terrified Chao. You know she hates it when you LARP.” He chuckled, tracing my helm.

The armor felt cold, solid on me – against the storm inside me. All I could think of was the Lord’s Prayer coming shuddering and tremulous out of my whispers, Elodie’s acid. The pieces of holy olive burrowing into my skin like fanged serpents.

Holy, horror

Of hells.

“It makes me feel… protected.”

Lucifer turned off the TV, then gently removed my helm, cross-legged before me on the floor as I knelt over, letting my liege and king tend me. “There are tears in your eyes, oh darling Butterfly. Who hurt you? I’ll skin them alive and shit on their corpse.”

“With the shiplap in the torture chamber wounding them more than any of your instruments?”

“See, I agreed to put up the shiplap, now you hate it. It never gets the Damned’s blood out. But Baal, stop deflecting: who wounded my husband so?” He decorously, gently, languidly undid my breastplate, shin guards, and gauntlets, only for molten green fire to form in his eyes as he saw the olive wood scars – pustules of blue blood in the shape of crosses, as all holy wounds formed after puncture. “Shit. I’ll kill them. What whore bastard of Hell touched my Butterfly –

He threw the gauntlet to make a dent in the wall, shaking, then kissed my hand, walked irate to the Meyer lemon tree we kept inside, and grabbed a yellow fruit – crushing it to pulp. He threw the juicy corpse of the citrus to the floor, then stalked back to me, expectant and demanding, Lucifer’s nostrils flaring. I looked, glum, slumped over, at my hands:

“Do you think we can be redeemed, Lucifer?”

He froze like a lion caught mid-bite. “Who dared suggest we were fallen or imperfect to begin with? What pride of my sinful dominion inspired that witless remark?”

“Elodie… is not careful with her words.”

Lucifer winced: “Elodie said that?”

“She… she clings to her Catholic faith.”

“Pfft. And yet consorts with demons. You know Elodie is like my own daughter, and I adore her. And you know she… she probably only wishes you and I and the other demons were not… in painful conditions from the Hell Warp.” Lucifer sunk to the couch besides me, stroking his brow, then looped his muscled golden arm around me.

I sobbed.

“Bee, Bee, no, hush. You’re majestic. My consort. My husband. My life and heart and soul. Baal, you know how humans are… even Eve.”

I sighed, curling into Lu. “Yes, even Eve… pities me. Behind that respect, behind her being my best friend in the world… humans. Do not understand the Felix Culpa.”

“O fortunate fall. Can you… talk to Elodie?”

I spat venom from my pedipalp onto the pashmina blanket on the floor and kernels of popcorn that had escaped the bowl. My fly wings fluttered arrhythmically, and my antennae lurched. I looked like a caricature of Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.

“Of course. You’re still angry,” Lucifer apologized for his suggestion. “I only thought –

“No, you are right, Lu. Elodie is my dearest human, well, besides immortal Eve. My most favored mortal. Love is… hard, Attar.”

“But, it blazes the brightest in darkness.”

We both flinched, thinking of the Cave of Lost Sighs.

The clock struck midnight.

“Time for another pleasant Harrowing, eh?” Lucifer said weakly, helping me stand.

We assumed our monstrous forms, descended the basement staircase to the Heart Pit of Hell, and we

Tortured ourselves

To save

The world.

Eve poured me coffee as I stared at my computer, my eyes glazed over.

“Am I reading Wingdings?” I sighed, rubbing my brow. “Eve, is this even legible?”

Eve smiled tenderly, her pale pink lips quirked, red hair back in a bun. “Hmm, lemme see… Aym’s response to Executive Perdition… yes, it looks like he used Wingdings. It says: “Fuck you.””

I groaned. “Great, great, peachy. I’ve been litigating him in court for years. And incorrigible as our judicial system is under Samael and the stringency of law in the afterlife, I have gotten nowhere, and lost a best friend.”

Eve handed me the coffee. She noticed the bruises under my eyes: “Rough night, Bee? Shem kept me up with nightmares. He’s fourteen and still gets them, you know. Says he dreams about zombies. Maybe Samael should stop reanimating corpses and taking them to Sunday roasts.”

I laughed. “Yes, Eve, my week has been shit. Really, Shem is afraid of zombies?”

Eve laughed. “And ghosts, witches, vampires, aliens, and pirates.”

“Tell him to steer clear of my son Belial then.”

We clacked our coffees together in our ritual salute, then sat abreast of each other as we processed immigration paperwork: I initialed or didn’t off on profiles I approved to move from pagan, foreign, or Heavenly afterlives into the metropolis of Vegas met NYC of Hell. Afterwards, Eve stamped them with my Japanese seal of my demonic enn.

“Bee, why do you like Japan so much?”

“Nobility. Efficiency. Ingenuity. Honor. Creativity. Ningen Isu. Art.”

“I love New England. I get it. Oh, the fruits and gardens, Nantucket, Monhegan, seaside cottage, pines, Acadia… mmm.”

“Lobster?”

“Yes! Adam loves it.”

“Heh.”

“Say, what’s bothering you, honeybee?”

“Uh. Well. Eve… do you think I’m damned?”

“Blunt, Bee. Of course not. Everyone knows we lost much of ourselves during the Hell Warp. I, Astarte, became a human �� mother of humanity. Adam – Ninurta – became human. Nergal became Samael. Ereshkigal became Lilith. Do you know how odd it was? I had so many powers as Astarte – blessing unions, war and rain, fertility and artifice and disguise. At least you still have some semblance of your powers. Everything I can do, El makes me do with my hands.”

I smiled, touching her hand fondly. She squeezed it. “And your brilliant brain, Eve. So you do not think… my cursed state, is a reflection on the quality, and nature, of my soul?”

Eve let her human form slip, and turned into Venus aflame. She was a woman of brilliant, licking fire, blue ember eyes and proud red phoenix breast flashing in brilliant glory. I sunk to my knees in awe – divinity, so at odds with my wicked, cursed form – and could not shield myself from her truth – Astarte.

My fly form filled the room, knocking over furniture. I wept, my mandible buzzing.

“ASSSSTARTE, YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL. YOU REVEAL THE TRUTH OF ME. I HAD ALMOST FORGOTTEN YOUR MAJESSSSSSTY, MY CLOSEST FRIEND.”

Eve smiled, turning back to her petite human form. She wore a halter top of aquamarine and white capris, barefoot, then cradled my head – as little or as much of my giant insect form she could hold – in her arms, and let glowing golden light flow from her hands to me. My rotten heart, ancient wounds, and hellish body found succor in her motherly divinity.

“And you are beautiful, Lord of the Creeping Things,” she said tenderly, then kissed my right mandible. “You should go around in this form more often, Bee.”

“I DO NOT WANT THE MORRRRTAL RESIDENTS OF HELL AND HEAVEN… AND MY HUMAN CHARGES, TO KNOWWWWW MY TRUTH. MY SORROW. MY SHAMMMMME..”

Her tender warmth flooded my maligned body. It was too much. I assumed my human form, sobbing, in Eve’s arms.

She cradled me in her lap, the room’s items spilled from being cramped under an archdemon, and laughed tenderly. “Oh Bee. That form is your glory. Samael once said this, in his Grim Reaper form: ‘I am only horrific because I am the watchdog of Hell. I assume terrible beauty to scare off those who would harm the dead.’ Isn’t that you, Bee? Hell’s premier guardian, Prime Minister and leader of our military, father of your beautiful Flies… godfather of Bailah.”

I sobbed. “What Elodie and I have. There is always… pain. It is hard.”

Eve smiled, braiding my hair with some chicory blossoms she had conjured. “Yes, well, is it so different than what you and Lu have? That too is a marriage of pain and pleasure. The scope and level of duty is different, yes, but with my mortals I guide and love, I believe it is not so different, or less worthy, of a relationship than I have with my husbands Sam and Adam, and wife Lilith.”

I gazed up at the spackled ceiling, the Hellopolis brilliant yet outdated, gold columns mixed with Officespace, pensively. “I think you are right Eve. Why do we involve ourselves in the affairs of mortals, I wonder?”

Eve helped me up, then squeezed my hands. “I think us immortals can’t help it. We are beings of pure love, and are drawn to the unique mysteries, pleasures, and ardent joys of humanity.”

“You think me… a being… of love?” I wrapped my tall, narrow human form together with my long legs against my chest, brooding as I clutched my kneecaps to my breast with threaded arms.

“It is the Morningstars’ love that holds Hell together. One may even argue it holds Heaven together as well. The… sacrifice you and Lucifer make, at dawn and dusk. I do not believe even Samael or Michael could shoulder that.”

“I… see. Well, Eve, back to business. This talk… was good. It gives me much to think about.”

“As I always say, and you always ignore – you’re a good man, Baal.”

“And you’re a fine woman, my Eve. Fine

Indeed.”

Elodie had been texting me for a week. I had abandoned my vintage Blackberry on I and Lucifer’s nightstand, living like a Mennonite, technology-free.

“Bee, you have to accept her apology. She’s your dearest human,” Lucifer said one evening, Emilia the bird-brain human on his lap, feeding her dates and parmegiano Reggiano Alicia had mailed to us discretely, with a letter calling her wife an idiot and begging for our forgiveness.

I’d burned the letter with blue hellfire in my open palm, but the cheese was nice – nice before Lu stole it.

I peeled a pear with my katana in a spiral. Nibbled on it. Threw it in the trash. “I’m not in the mood for socializing, Lu. Sorry to discuss personal matters before you, dearest Emz.”

After our threesome with Emilia, Lucifer and I did laundry and vacuumed at our penthouse. We spent the wee hours of the morning scrapbooking in silence, putting memories and montages of our soul-bonded humans together with colorful borders and Polaroids.

“Why would she think I’m broken, Attar?” I finally sighed as we drank cappuccinos at 3:00 AM. A light blood rain fell, and children slept safely in their beds, knowing the Morningstars held vigil over Hell.

“I’ve noticed, when women become mothers, they think everything needs healing. She sees your pain, Baal. A pain I know all too deep. But G-d? He is as good as dead,” Lucifer muttered, macramé-ing. “We must take what little comfort we can in our duties, and hold each other fast against the rushing tides of eternal damnation.”

I clenched my cappuccino tight, knuckles whitening. “You always think we are Damned. That this is all your fault. I forgot you would side with Elodie. Can’t you see the beauty in us?”

Lucifer flashed tired eyes at me, setting down the macrame. “What beauty, Baal? All I see is tragedy. We are noble in our exile. I would never want you to feel shame. None of my residents are ‘fallen.’ But, the truth of the Hell Warp is horrid. What do you mean?”

“Our innate beauty is what I’m talking about. Perdition leading to salvation.” I crossed the table we sat at and touched his hands carefully. “A sacrifice much greater than Christ. Eve… she helped me see that. You and I often talk of what we lost. But… what about what we found?”

“Kingship? I damn it.”

“Love. Our marriage. Our friends. When we were gods… we had nothing to lose. We were cruel immortals that treated humans as playthings – Attar, your Assyrians were bloodthirsty madmen. We did not know love – just look at all the men Astarte devoured and opponents I massacred as Baal. Our own pain taught us empathy.”

“I suppose you may be right. We found humanity.” Lucifer caressed my back, leaning into my height. “And now, we gamble everything. It is time to pay the tithe.”

We walked down to the Cave of Lost Sighs, cradling each other.

Lucifer and I kissed, a corpse and fly, but when he went to pull the blade, I steadied his husks of Qlipha snake sheddings that formed an embryonic membrane across the Universe’s Sephirah shells.

“WAIT, ATTTTTAR. I THIIIIIIIINK THE EREBUS MAY FINNNNNALLY ACCEPTTTTTT A DUTIOUS SCAPEGOAT. LET ME BE THE LA-AZAZEL TO YOUR LAMB.”

Lucifer set down the blade carefully, pus-filled, rotting eyes penetrating my carapace like a cancer. “Be careful what you ideate, Baal.”

“DEEEEFLESH ME.”

“And if you die?”

“I AM SSSSICK OF YOUR PAIN, MY LOVE.”

“Who says I want to hurt you.”

“YOUR BURRRRDEN IS TOO MUCH. FOR ELODIE. LET ME PROOOOOOVEEEEE TO HER I AM MORE CHRISTIAN AND LOVINNNNNNGKIND THAN ANY YESSSSSSHUA. YOU HAVE PROVEN IT EVVVVVERY DAY AND NIGHT, FOR COUNTLESSSSSSS CENTURIESSSS.”

A grimy tear came to Lucifer’s eyes: “As you wish, husband mine.”

He laid me out on the butcher’s altar with careful, medical precision, then silently dissected me, offering the insectoid anatomy of my monstrosity to the Erebus hellfire.

Pain wracked me. I bled more than even the Fall, when the maggots had made me their dinner. But Lucifer?

He was whole. Burnt, broken, but not tortured.

When I was nothing but a puddle of organs, we fucked – what little slop could fit his manhood. He moved as gently as a wind in my intestines and muck. Only then, did he cry.

The fire blazed bright. When we kissed, his face tender on my flayed tongue, suddenly, the fire startled. A great quake shook the Cave of Lost Sighs.

“What is happening!” Lucifer shouted.

Suddenly, warmth overtook me. I let out a holy moan. What was this? Pleasure?

My bones mended back together. I felt a wretched part of myself exile itself beyond Creation. I was made whole in a flash – mandible, fly wings, and all arachnid or fly parts of me gone – and I was left with bull horns and my old Phoenician flail.

Attar looked back at me, made whole. His scars he as Lucifer had carried from Michael’s torments? Gone, like lace of white markings had yielded to the tan on his skin. Like me, we were in our old forms – burnt sienna skin, curled black hair, dark pearl eyes. It was a form we were always too traumatized to wear, but on him, it was beautiful. I touched Attar’s curls in wonder.

The Cave of Lost Sighs stopped quaking. Suddenly, the bloody font at its heart burbled with a sweet scent.

“The fuck has happened, Baal!” Lucifer looked at his immaculate flesh of Attar. “Why are we gods.”

I rose from the mount. “Fucking Hell, Lu?” Suddenly, a butterfly flew from my spilled blood, and gardenia bloomed where the sweet-smelling substance that was once blood now flowed from the Erebus. “Flowers? Wine? It’s wine…” I tasted it. Cabernet Sauvignon. “Uh. What.”

Lucifer laughed like a child, plucking a gardenia. “It seems the Erebus enjoyed your sacrifice.”

“This can’t be a fucking true love kiss, can it?”

“You know the Universe delights in its oddities…” Lucifer whispered, watching as the Cave of Lost Sighs bloomed like Purgatorio. “I suppose I do not have to carry this burden alone anymore. It worked.”

“But our daemonic forms?”

Lucifer looked at his de-stigmatized flesh. He tried, then summoned the scars. “Reach for memory, Baal. We must not let anyone know we are healed. Revolution. Redemption. Baal, Belial and Metatron are playing a treacherous game. Our daemonic dwells still in the shadow, though my Sacred Bull you may be. But, before you do… let me touch them.”

I lowered my head to his chest and let him stroke and caress my bull horns. Then, I changed into Baal in truth – a sunflower-crowned, light-soaked Bull of Heaven. He laughed gaily, caressing my blue-gray snout.

“You’re beautiful, my first and last. You look like fucking Ferdinand the Bull.”

I nuzzled him, then shifted back. I was man again, minus insect. “My shadow, you say?”

“Yes, dear. It is wretched, isn’t it. I’d rather bask in the glory of the Morning Star. Not the Midnight Sun.” He settled his features back into tan and blonde – what the fucking humans expected. It was still cute, though. He kept a black streak and his curl.

I did as he said, and my fly wings, mandible, and antennae returned. “I must admit, Attar. I more enjoy insect things now. Missing my antennae, mandible, and wings feels like a missing limb.”

“I am a vain creature, Baal. I do not like my disfigurements. And look at this place it’s spring.”

Jubilant, we drank deep of the wine, and deep of each other. But when we had finished delighting, we noticed something odd about the wine.

“It taste like iron… Baal, is that blood? Aaagh!” Lucifer shook in time with the Cave of Lost Sighs. The flowers grew in frenzy, replaced by poppies and asphodel. The Erebus wine bubbled, replaced by blood and what looked like dragon tears.

I looked at his crow wings: rot.

My head ached, and I summoned my horns: black grime, bugs in the keratin.

“Why – why are we rotting, Baal? I do not understand this damn magick that keeps us chained in perpetual torment. My wings…” Lucifer cursed, sobbing. “Your beautiful horns were like a gift returned, only for G-d in his dumb, blind Exile to snatch them away.”

I sighed, scratching my horns as I cradled him, stroking his back. “Fathers are only there to curse you.”

“I suppose the Erebus is punishing me for your Scapegoat performance. Let us hope the rot goes away quickly. It burns in my pinions.”

“My horns feel like a migraine. And my old temper of pagan times… I can feel my belly boil with blood.”

Attar winced, his fangs shining. “I want to sink my teeth in war.”

“And I want to eat Mot.”

“Azrael-called-Mot would not appreciate that.”

We cleaned ourselves up, looked at the odd, rebellious Cave of Lost Sighs, and magicked away the rot on us.

“This sucks.”

Elodie stirred her tea in her Woodley Park mansion’s drawing room. 13th century Persian rugs shone with dancing maidens and saqis, and Alicia popped her head in, a plate of cheese she was taste-testing at hand, the editor’s glasses askew.

“Are you two on talking terms yet?” Alicia said, stern. “Elodie, apologize. You were a bitch, my darling.”

Elodie’s lip quivered, and she sighed. “Bee, you have to forgive me.”

I narrowed my eyes, perched on the same pashmina throw she had had since high school. Now, it was old and threadbare, with dog tears from her geriatric Daschund, Harry Winston.

Harry Winston chewed on my Adidas. Alicia sauntered over, handing us each a piece of strange-looking cheese. “Try it, darlings. It’s dream cheese from England: Blue Stilton. Supposed to give you farts and weird dreams, according to my author. I’m unconvinced.”

It was delicious. I nibbled. “Thank you, Alicia. You are always a pleasure.”

“Bee, I’m so sorry.” Elodie ignored the cheese. “Alicia, piggie bear, could you excuse us?”

Alicia smiled demurely, her blonde hair in a pixie cut. “Of course. I’m looking forward to our time together later. I’ll get the oils ready.”

She sang to herself, discretely clearing our plates. Bailah’s guitar came from upstairs, alongside her screaming to Falling in Reverse.

“She still taking lessons?” I said off-handedly.

“Bael. I’m trying to apologize, oh please, Bee.” The lines on Elodie’s face deepened. Her crow’s feet were adorable.

I weakened at the tear in her eye.

“Know that I am whole as I planned. As G-d intended. Obviously, everything is as my bloody Father intended.”

“A Clockwork God.”

“More like a Demiurge. Tell me, Elodie, have you read about the Gnostics?”

“I know you are a Cathar. Well, sort of. Oh Bee, I know you are – were – a god. But… the God I know. He’s Love. Nature. He gave his Son for Heaven and Original Sin.”

“I am his son, too, Elodie.”

“I just don’t want to see you and Lucifer in any more pain!” she snapped, then sobbed, wracked with heaving. “I hate it. Your suffering! You are my knight, Bee. My way of understanding God. I think – sob – what I pray to in church, that my fucking Kennedy grandmother drilled into my head – Rockefeller, Igbo farmland billionaires, a Kennedy offshoot – it feels like love. And what you – do to me – it feels too much. Too pleasurable. I think, I’d give my soul to you to – to – to be your plaything. When – when, oh god, we kiss, that thing you do. And, what am I getting Bailah into? I’d die for your armies, Bee. What kind of mother am I?”

“A Madonna. My child. You are all my children. You think I wouldn’t bleed on the altar for my own daughters? Unlike G-d or Michael, I do not sacrifice my knights and Sons. Everything you have done for me you have chosen for your own power.When you first summoned me with the Lemegeton as a child, I have granted you every wish. Haven’t I faithfully served you? Given you no reason to doubt?”

“You’re not faultless, Bee. You covet souls.”

“I covet yours.”

We fell upon each other in violent kisses. She was crying, I drank her tears.

“More, cry for me, mortal idiot. Say I am whole, unbroken – this is not romantic.”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

I tasted like cheese. I hated her. Hated myself. Loved Elodie beyond all reason. Hated the dream cheese. Loved the Blue Stilton. I broke down crying.

Over the centuries, what had I become? So different than a bloodthirst god with crook and flail. What monster was I? After all this time, I still demanded sacrifice and toyed with mortal lives.

All us immortals did. Perhaps I most of all. Mayhaps that was why the Erebus punished me. Elodie held me. The Harrowing, though Lucifer and I were whole, still required defleshing. What we thought was our cure, was only a minor relief – we had our god forms, but they had begun to rot.

“Look, Elodie,” I sighed, and she stroked my hair. I showed her my maggot-infested, stinkng bull horns. “It hurts.”

“Bael, your horns? They’re back?”

“I was an idiot,” I whispered. “Gave myself to the Erebus. A cursed blessing. Lucifer and I have grown more powerful, gotten shards of our divinity back. But now, his form as Attar, and my form as Baal – they are dcaying. G-d must have tucked our holiness into his pocket then gave it to Tartarus just to curse us. If Metatron revives my Father, I – I do not know what will become of me.”

The truth boiled in me. I wanted to strangle her neck. Dissect her. Suffocate her with my kisses. Devour her.

“Bee, how can I help?”

“My… sadistic proclivities from when I was Baal are back. Human sacrifice. I was worse than Moloch, Elodie. It’s… awful. I want to hurt people. The demons and angels, we stopped warring ages ago. But to say we were sadistic, during Biblical times… it’s taken so much studying the sages and meditating to quell the pagan beast within me. We are the gods of the Assyrians and Sea Peoples. Conjurings of evolution, cancer, and brutality. The Mother that Eats Its Young. My humanity… Lucifer’s humanity… it’s dividing. Descending into Avernus. We… we… ugh.”

“Take it out on me,” Elodie said clearly. “Alicia, we’ll have to cancel tonight’s delights. I need to take care of him.”

“I’ll write up the Blue Stilton as mediocre. You lot take care of each other. Leave at least a kiss for me.

Elodie manipulated the Qlipha Nachash sheddings around the embryos of the Sephiroth so that we were transported into my dungeon. She was dressed in a black leather dress and latex knee-high stilettos. She held her favorite flaming whip.

“You can’t be serious, Elle? You’re a mortal… vulnerable. I’d never. Not since my pagan days.”

“I’ve read the stories, Baal. How hungry you and Anath-turned-Lilith were. How much you warred. I’ve read Paradise Lost. I am almost middle aged. I’m your top sorcerer. Take it out on me. I’ll bind you as you do me.”

The prospect fired lust and wicked sadism in me. “Our old safe word?”

“Lemongrass.”

“You’re sure?”

“Down to the bone. It’s all fine.”

And so, I broke her.

It was a pagan sacrifice of a maiden to Baal.

And even when we were done, I craved more

Nubile

Blood.

“I do not know what I am becoming, Elle,” I sobbed, after the aftercare, in her arms.

She soothed me, washing my horns. “Show me your godform, Bee, and perhaps I can tell with my magick.”

I turned into the Bull of Heaven. Putrid pennants of flesh hung from my oxen bones, and I smelled of rancid meat. Fiery embers burned in my eye sockets, and black blood dripped from my hooves.

Elodie wretched. “Oh Bee, it’s bad. You poor thing. Let me bathe you.” She summoned moisture from the air from her sylphs and conjured soap, a bucket, and sponge. “Like the Lindworm’s Bride.”

HAAAAH – OW, THAT HURTSSSSSSS.

She sang to me as she washed me, burning away the flesh until I was clean bone.

“I’ll do this every night, Bee. Does it feel better?”

YESSSSS.

“You know, Bee, all those years ago, when I was twenty-three?”

I transformed back into my human self, exhausted but clean, in Elodie’s arms.

“Yes, my love?”

She smiled, crow’s feet dancing. “I was going to kill myself that night. But you saved me. Maybe that’s what godhood is. Maybe it’s just loving small, mortal souls so much you give your immortality over to healing and cultivating humans like fragile, tender buds. That’s how I see you, Bee. You’re – you’re the closest to God I’ve ever known. I think you just…”

I flipped over, letting my hair dangle in her lap as I traced her lip idly.

“What is it, dear?”

“You and Lucifer have to forgive yourselves.”

Lucifer and I went to the Cave of Lost Sighs. The rot was all over our bodies now, plucking bone. We stank to high heaven, bull and beast, and smiled at each other in resignation.

“You think Elodie is right?” Lucifer asked in his hoarse voice. “Forgiving ourselves? As if that is easy.”

“When have we ever said it, Lu? And meant it?”

Lucifer clenched his fists, holding me close. “All that pain. All that regret. I wish I could just cast it into the Erebus. I wish… I wish I could love myself.”

“I do too, Lu. I do too. Let’s start trying now.”

Lucifer looked into his reflection in the burning, bloody pool. “I forgive myself. I – I love myself. The sacrifice we made, so that Hell and Heaven turn… our transformation. I think humanity has evolved past the need to worship, and gods.”

“I forgive you Lu. I forgive… myself. I love us enough for, well, both of us.”

We kissed, hungry, and suddenly, the rot just… slipped away. The magick of last night’s true love’s kiss, buoyed by my hope and tender care from Elodie and Lucifer, took true hold.

We were made whole. Lucifer smiled, then cried in joy.

“Elodie was right. We had to give a kiss that stuck.”

“We laid off Metatron,” Michael said at our annual Christmas retreat with Eve and Gabriel. Gabriel was smoking chestnuts in the fire with Bailah, and Alicia and Elodie were whipping up dessert with Lilith and Samael in the kitchen while Adam watched the rest of the children outside.

“About bloody time,” was all I could say. Though I would miss my sparring with him.

“You, my darling chestnuts, should have just told us he was trying to resurrect dear old dead Father. G-d needs to rest, on ice, permanently. We already have Christ and Mary, I can’t handle another parent!” Gabriel sang.

Eve and Chao hung up stockings as now-adult Hua gave Lucifer and I’s Doberman a check-up. She was a veterinarian now. “I didn’t know you two had a dog.”

(Reader, I think the author forgot too.)

“We should have told you,” Lucifer admitted. “It was just, Belial is not the most, shall we say, reliable source. He was rather… drunk, as Bee said.”

Michael came out of the basement, this year’s whiskey in tow. He beelined exclusively for me, wings petting the air, then kissed me in a brotherly fashion on the brow.

“This batch is dedicated to you, Bee. Felix Culpa.”

I drank deep of it, that night, and many nights to follow. The Cave of Lost Sighs was now a burgeoning paradise we planted rosebushes in.

Lucifer had two gardens, now.

(And I

always got

my whiskey.)

1 note · View note

hermitlibrarian · 6 years ago

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Babe’s got a viable side business working out of Busy Bean’s, the coffee shop in her hometown of Oar’s Rest, creating all sorts of tasty treats from sandwiches to baked goods for the people in her small beach town. Can sweets and savories heal hurt hearts, though, in a summer full of turmoil and new love? It’s hard to say, but in Lillie Vale’s debut novel readers will be treated to not only delicious dishes, but to a deliciously intricate story of friends and emotions, of the summer before the rest of their lives start, and a town that feels like home.

I want to thank Vicky from Vicky Who Reads for facilitating this partnership & Lillie for her guest post today on the tummy rumbling food in Small Town Hearts and much more!

From Lillie Vale

Hi Harker! Thanks for hosting me on your blog today! So excited to chat about my YA debut, Small Town Hearts, all the yummy food Babe conjures up in her kitchen, and, of course, the foods that mean the most to us! Everybody else: Hi! I’m Lillie Vale, the author of upper YA contemporary Small Town Hearts. It’s a messy BFF breakup + found family novel taking place in the summer after high school, the last summer 19yo bi baking barista Babe thinks she’ll have before her friends Penny and Chad start college in the fall. She has a somewhat co-dependent relationship with the people she loves, and change has never been a good thing, in her experience, so she’s trying to hold on tight during a time when she has to learn how to let go. Matters are further complicated when her ex-girlfriend Elodie returns to their sleepy Maine village of Oar’s Rest at the same time as a mysterious summer boy shows up to rent Babe’s mom’s cottage on the beach.

“It’s hard to figure out if you want something to be a career. Like when people find out I’m not going to college, they get all awkward. They think staying at Busy’s and being a barista is . . . a stepping-stone job. And for most people, it is.” I shrugged. “But I’ve never wanted to do anything else in my entire life. Making people happy with food is something special.”

– Small Town Hearts (pg. 124)

Food plays a huge role in Small Town Hearts. Babe loves taking care of her found family with sweet treats, steaming chowders, fresh-baked bread, and experiments with flavors like goat cheese that her author is way too chicken to try! Nope, nuh uh, sorry, I have an adventurous palate but it does not extend to goat byproducts! 🙈

I joke all the time that Small Town Hearts should come with the disclaimer that it will make you really hungry, and I hear this A LOT from readers that they were craving snacks (or actually went out to get some!) while reading! Which, to my foodie heart, is top-shelf praise.

“The sweetness of a slice of cake has the ability to turn a bad day around. There’s a lot of memories in food, you know.”

– Small Town Hearts (pg. 225)

So I thought I’d chat with Harker about comfort food, and why it means so much to us!

I live on a steady diet of Asian food: khow suey, chicken biryani, shrimp/egg curry, vegetable korma, pad thai, thai basil chicken, and so many more. This stuff takes FOREVER to prepare if you are a turtle at chopping vegetables like me, and in general there’s a lot of prep involved with Asian dishes, and sometimes a very specific order in which to add ingredients, so all in all it can be time consuming.

My mom makes the best chicken gravies/curries. It reminds me of my childhood whenever I smell frying onion. Her butter chicken and chicken tikka masala is *chefs kiss*. Rich, smooth tomato gravy with lots of onion and garlic, oh my gawdddd. Paired with white rice or naan? THE BEST. Also, Indian recipes that require only one clove of garlic? DO NOT TRUST. Who doesn’t love garlic? It’s doing double duty! Not only is it making your food delicious, it serves a very medicinal purpose of keeping you safe from vampires (;

Crisp vegetables, tender meat (or your choice of protein! I often substitute tofu!), the bite of ginger and the sweetness of onions, crunchy bean sprouts and sugar snap peas, chewy re-hydrated mushrooms (my favorite!!!), flavorsome lemongrass and curry leaves, garlicky noodles and sauces, fragrant coconut milk mixed in a delicious, savory broth…I could wax poetic about this all day! Eating any of this is like being enveloped in a warm hug. I know how much time goes into meals, so I appreciate it even more when it’s made for me. It soothes me to a degree I sometimes didn’t know I needed. Sometimes, food can be love.

As a diaspora Indian-American, food is the best way I know how to connect to my heritage. I associate my favorite Indian dishes with stories my mom tells me of her childhood in India, of a world and a time and a place I have never known, yet still feel wistful for.

And when I don’t have the time/energy to cook for myself or can’t beg/bribe my mom to make me something? Nothing beats packet ramen with a ton of veggies and a fried egg (gochujang and pickled radish and greens if you’re feeling fancy)! Wendy’s chicken nuggets, fries, and chili! You haven’t lived until you’ve dipped fries in their chili. So. Freaking. Good. And…corn flakes. I just really like corn flakes.

Harker, what are your favorite comfort foods, and why are they so evocative? Any special memories you associate with food? (Also, I am really hungry right now!!! Why did we think talking about food was a good idea!!! I have no idea what to make for lunch!!! I JUST WANT ALL THE THINGS!!!)

From Harker, the Hermit Librarian

Oh Lillie, I don’t know! Just reading your post made me hungry all over again. Each dish sounded better than the last. 😀

I feel very basic in saying that two of my comfort foods is mac n cheese or Chef Boyardee, both of which are super easy to make when I’m feeling low energy. However, I also enjoy Asian food quite a lot, especially from my local restaurants: brisket ramen, bool go gi, takoyaki, and butter chicken. I haven’t made many of these dishes myself at home because, as you mentioned, these and similar can take a long time to prepare and I often don’t have the energy or the strength (my hands cramp easily when chopping/mixing). I’ve tried some jarred butter chicken sauce which I know isn’t the same as homemade but it suffices and it still quite delicious.

Reading Small Town Hearts made me ache to try some of the dishes that Babe was making. Whether it was the sweets or one of the savory dishes, pretty much everything she made sounded delicious, even if it had an ingredient I’m not partial to (blue cheese is apparently to me what goat cheese is to you, Lillie! *lol*).

Babe’s fare was a bit easier to replicate at home.

(Left to Right – Babe’s “Grilled Cheese” Toastie, Ham & Cheese, Dark Chocolate Chip Pistachio Cookies)

There was one sandwich that jumped out first: a grilled cheese that Babe made with blue cheese, arugula, and apricot jam. I made my twist on this by switching out the blue cheese for gouda and using an arugula/spinach mix. Omg, this was SO good! I’d never thought of putting jam on sandwich before! What a joy! This was supposed to be a grilled cheese and I kind of failed on that in all the iterations I made, so it became more of a toastie, but even only semi-melted the smokiness of the gouda was a real nice counterpoint to the sweetness of the apricot jam.

Since I had the apricot jam and the arugula/spinach mix already and I wanted to make something that Babe would be proud of, I tried to think of a sandwich that would utilize many of the same ingredients. I paired the aforementioned items with some deli ham and sliced swiss cheese to make another sandwich. If you’ve got the energy you can toast it, but if you want something quick late at night, this Ham & Cheese can also be enjoyed cold.

And, of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t try and recreate Babe’s dark chocolate chip pistachio cookies. In Small Town Hearts, Babe includes sea salt in her recipe, which I nixed because I thought that the pistachios would be a bit too salty in the cookies. Next time, though, I would include it and also put more pistachios on top. All in all they were quite tasty! The recipe is the one on the back of the Nestle Tollhouse bag with the addition of the nuts if anyone would care to recreate them for yourself. 🙂

Food is only one part of Lillie’s book, of course. There’s so much more to it, from setting to the characters. Check out the synopsis, purchase links, and my review for more on this debut novel.

Once again, thank you, Lillie, for joining me for this wonderfully delicious guest post!

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository | Goodreads | Indiebound

Published: 19 March 2019

Publisher: Swoon Reads

Category: Contemporary/Young Adult/Romance/LGBT+

Rule #1 – Never fall for a summer boy.

Fresh out of high school, Babe Vogel should be thrilled to have the whole summer at her fingertips. She loves living in her lighthouse home in the sleepy Maine beach town of Oar’s Rest and being a barista at the Busy Bean, but she’s totally freaking out about how her life will change when her two best friends go to college in the fall. And when a reckless kiss causes all three of them to break up, she may lose them a lot sooner. On top of that, her ex-girlfriend is back in town, bringing with her a slew of memories, both good and bad.

And then there’s Levi Keller, the cute artist who’s spending all his free time at the coffee shop where she works. Levi’s from out of town, and even though Babe knows better than to fall for a tourist who will leave when summer ends, she can’t stop herself from wanting to know him. Can Babe keep her distance, or will she break the one rule she’s always had – to never fall for a summer boy?

Rating: 3 Stars

Rep: Bisexual MC, Black SC, biracial ex-LI, Chinese American SC

CW: manipulative friendship, mention of casual drug usage (weed, not shown on the page), alcohol consumption (on page), alcohol abuse (a character drinks and parties to the point of dehydration and sleep-deprivation; two characters get wasted and are too drunk to fully consent to sex with each other); in this edition use of a racist term (tr*be – “It always felt like once people had their tribe, they didn’t have a lot of time for new friends.”) during the included quote. Note: having spoken to the author, she’s accepted this note and while it’s too late to change the current edition, she mentioned correcting it in further print runs.

From the get go, Small Town Hearts had a great knack for setting. At the heart of it was The Busy Bean, the coffee shop where Babe sells her baked good and works as a manager. It has a certain eclectic charm that is illustrated well in the furniture from various patio sets and alternating lettering styles displaying the daily specials on a board.

Vale constructs a comforting setting. Oar’s Rest comes to the reader’s mind not only through visuals that she sets out for them, but through scents that are described and used to round out the image of the town. It almost makes it a 3D image and puts the reader that much more in the story than any other.

There were some characterization choices that I thought were interesting, such as when Babe & Penny compare Penny & Chad’s relationship to Rory and Logan of Gilmore Girls. Penny/Rory, in their respective works (book/show) don’t tend to notice what they’re asking of others, the demands that their actions place on others, and I found this a super apt comparison.

Penny did not end up being my favorite person. There’s some growth on her part, but it was difficult to read her interactions with Babe. There’s language she uses that’s subtly manipulative of Babe & Babe’s feelings as well as judgment toward Levi when “first meeting” him at a houseboat party and offering him weed/alcohol but also “water if you’re not into having fun”.

I wasn’t sure, at first, if the tension between Babe & Penny was casual friends depending upon one another or something else, but as one scene plays out (Penny asking Babe to, essentially, cement a breakup with Chad) it becomes clear that Penny knows what she’s doing. Events spiral from that one request, and from the past decisions that have happened between Babe, Penny, and even Chad, to create a whole mess that intertwines the entire narrative.

Babe & Levi had some sweet moments, despite the tension that was running between them for a variety of reasons. Their dates around town, their conversations, there were some truly lovely, intimate moments that bolstered the quickly formed relationship.

There is something I found slightly odd, maybe offputting, about the tone of the characters. Before their ages were explicitly stated, and perhaps even a bit after that, I would’ve said based on the way they acted, the situations they were in (living conditions, certain freedoms, etc.), that this was more a New Adult novel and that most of the main cast was in their early twenties rather than late teens. Like, there was a disproportionate amount of young people to older (late twenties and up) residents. These characters were all 17-19 and not quite acting like it. They had jobs, “houses”, and responsibilities that didn’t quite mesh with the personalities that had been presented on page.

There is a brief explanation given as to where Babe’s mother is (she works on a cruise ship most of the year) and why Babe is able to afford living in a lighthouse (given funds). It felt a rather convenient way, though, to avoid developing a familial relationship between Babe and her parents because both are essentially absentee what with her mother working on a cruise ship and her father being a relative unknown to the reader.

Overall, while the action seem choppy/repetitive at times, creating a sometimes rough reading experience, what was good was good and what wasn’t awful. I really could see Oar’s Rest in my head and sinking into a setting isn’t always easy. I wish that it was possible to visit such a place, get a picnic lunch at Lorcan’s seafood shack, and wander down to the beach. Small Town Hearts is a wonderfully atmospheric novel and getting to settle down with a snack and a good read is totally something to look forward to with this debut.

About the Author

Lillie Vale, upon discovering she could not be one of Santa’s elves or attend Hogwarts, decided to become a writer to create a little magic of her own. Enjoying the romantic and eerie in equal measure, she’s probably always writing a book where the main characters kiss or kill. Born in Mumbai, she has lived in many U.S. states, and now resides in an Indiana college town where the corn whispers and no one has a clue that she is actually the long-lost caps lock queen. She can be reached on Twitter @LillieLabyrinth and Instagram @labyrinthspine. Small Town Hearts is her debut novel.

I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review. Quotes included are from an advanced reader copy and may not reflect the finalized copy.

All media belongs to the respective owners and is used here solely for the purpose of review and commentary.

Yummy Read: A Guest Post with Lillie Vale, author of Small Town Hearts Babe's got a viable side business working out of Busy Bean's, the coffee shop in her hometown of Oar's Rest, creating all sorts of tasty treats from sandwiches to baked goods for the people in her small beach town. 2,668 more words

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