“You were in there a long time. But, I thought demons didn’t really get hit with time like a human.” She paced in front of his giant feet, eyes down, thinking mode. “I guess I hadn’t really thought about it much past that. Even if you do deal with time better than humans do, over two hundred years of being…” Tortured, by someone Vin considered weak scum. Yeesh.
She paused and looked up at him. Christ, she was out of her depth. How the fuck did she even begin to understand how someone like Vin processed his situation and circumstance?
Did she want to?
Yes! Yes, she wanted to. Even if it was dumb. Even if it was really, really fucking dumb that she gave a shit about Vin and his feelings, she wanted to understand. He was feeling fucked up, by his wounds, his situation, the leash, a whole bunch of shit. Having the Damall see him so weak and vulnerable was probably pissing him off right down to his bones.
She missed her laptop. She’d have written all this down, and maybe shared it with her classmates. Demon psychology 202: how to understand the mind of a real predator.
Time for a topic change.
“Think Yosepha will come back?”
“She’ll have to.”
“What? Why?”
He snorted. “She underestimates Heaven’s abilities. The council probably knows what she’s doing.”
Oh fuck.
“B-But, she… she’s…” She got between Vin’s legs and waved her arms. “We have to warn her!”
He snorted again and shook his head.
“She’s gone.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you warn her before!?”
“Would she have believed me?”
“I… don’t know.” Groaning, Mia paced around and around and pulled on her hair. “How would the council know?”
“I have dealt with angels several times. Sometimes, they know things they shouldn’t, where things are happening.” He thumped his wounded tail on the floor softly. “The council can see Hell. I don’t know by how much, but they can.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~Day 41~~
Vin didn’t sleep as much as he should have. He didn’t feel comfortable with the Damall, and took turns watching the entrance of their alcove, even though she told him she wouldn’t be doing the same. Not that she trusted Romakus. She didn’t. But she trusted Yosepha, and much as Romakus liked pushing Yosepha, that seemed to be purely a sexual, maybe even romantic thing. When shit got real, Yosepha seemed perfectly capable of bossing Romakus around. He wouldn’t betray her, and as long as he wouldn’t, the other demons wouldn’t. They liked their boss.
She tried to not think about Vin’s words, but every so often, she glanced up at the ceiling, checking for hidden eyeballs. If the angel council really could see what they were up to, that’d make everything a million times harder. But if that was true, why weren’t angels coming down on them right now?
Okay, another thing onto the pile of mysteries to solve: how did the council’s ability to track things happening in Hell work?
Sighing, Mia rocked back and forth on the ground, and let a cascade of thoughts run her over like a train. She was simultaneously exhausted from trying to use batlam, bored from sitting around doing nothing else, and overwhelmed with thoughts and memories.
What would David do? He’d recap. Make a list. Understand it.
She had an aura, a weird aura, a very Hell-like and Heaven-like aura, an aura of… the world, an aura that couldn’t be resisted. She could use angel runes, or at least one of them. She gained memories whenever she ate a heart, nasty memories of bad things. She could read an ancient language likely spoken by the archangels. She literally absorbed an assortment of runes, maybe even some sort of obtuse language, when she touched a book written by Lucifer themself, maybe some sort of real… er version of the ancient language? A version that had power? It used different symbols, but they were similar, nonetheless.
Oh, and of course, if she got close to another unmarked, horrible shit went down. Hell-shattering, world-ending shit.
What about her new libido? Much as she wanted to blame that on her new body, her afterlife body, it was probably more like her new body simply didn’t have the limitations her surface body did. It certainly didn’t have the physical limitations. Adron and Kas had proved that. Vin’s tongue had proved that. And Julisa had said Mia’s body had adapted to the large thing penetrating her a lot faster than betrayers did.
Her new body was unusual in a whole bunch of ways, but her ridiculous libido was just her.
Christ, she needed something to do. Go on the internet. Doom-scroll on social media and lament the ruined future. Have an existential crisis. Destroy her attention span and ability to focus for any longer than thirty seconds at a time. All that good stuff. She was damn happy to have some time to recover, relax, and prepare for the inevitable, deadly journey across Hell, but as a great hobbit once said, waiting on the edge of a battle you can’t escape is even worse. She was going stir crazy.
Noise from the connecting tunnel drew her eyes. A devorjin brute walked past the alcove, with a bat girl on his back. Yulia, and she looked panicked.
Mia hopped up, wearing her potram rune, took a second to make sure it covered her bits — problematic with the absurdly sexy clothes — and chased after her. Vinicius didn’t follow. Probably for the best, until he healed.
“Yulia, you okay?” Mia asked.
Yulia looked back at her, chirped a couple times, and patted her nameless friend on his big bald head. He turned around, and his big, scary demon face lit up. Both spent a little longer than necessary eying her new clothes.
Brutes weren’t exactly attractive, but not exactly ugly either, and their big, muscly… brutish shapes and demony skull-ish faces were scary, but also kinda alluring in that big bad monster way. Mia had, on occasion, read silly little erotic fiction about monsters like that, taking a girl and–
She slapped herself, both cheeks, same time. Enough.
“Are you an angel?” Yulia asked. “‘Cause you can wear runes and have an aura and–“