Page 2 of Midnight with the Devil

He wished hell could run itself, and it did…mostly. The damned didn’t need him there to continue their suffering at all times, which was a relief. He despised hell. But he couldn’t avoid his job completely. He had to watch out for stray demons that wandered into the paths of mortals, then catch and destroy them. That didn’t give him joy either.

He preferred the mortal plane, watching humans make decisions that put them on the path to sin. He loved the secret language of hidden smiles, seductive glances, exploring hands as they gave themselves over to their darker desires. He craved corruption, not evil.

“Lucien.” The smooth, dark voice caught Lucien’s attention. He still stood at the edge of the balcony on the top floor of his club that led to his private office. From the relatively secluded spot, he could see the club patrons below him dancing wildly.

“Yes?” He turned away from the smoky haze of the strobe that lit the club below and faced Andras, one of his fellow fallen angels. The blond-haired man had the palest blue eyes, like frozen glaciers. They had once been brothers in the glittering city of clouds, but now they were brothers bound in darkness.

“You asked me to bring you a list of the deals made on crossroads this month.” Andras walked over to Lucien and held out his palm as though to shake his hand.

Lucien put his hand into Andras’s, and his head suddenly filled with a flood of images. A hundred souls, a hundred deals made. Deals made out of anger, greed, and lust.

How utterly dull and predictable.

Lucien released Andras’s hand and sighed as he turned back to face the crowd below. Andras joined him at the railing and remained quiet for a moment. Lucien again fixated on the feeling that had increasingly haunted him the last few years. He wasn’t content. There was a cloying emptiness that seemed ready to strangle him, and he couldn’t shake it. He was no stranger to that hollow feeling, but it seemed worse of late.

“Sir, you seem…unsatisfied.”

Lucien nearly denied it, but heneverlied. The devil only ever spoke the truth. Everyone painted him a liar, but it wasn’t true. They lied to themselves and each other in his name.

“I am unsatisfied,” he finally admitted. From the moment he’d been cast out of heaven, he had been restless and full of rage. The rage had faded over the many years he’d been in hell. Corrupting souls was too easy. A hint here, a little nudge there, and these mortals fell into sin so easily. He craved a challenge. The gates of hell required pure souls to be corrupted in order to stay strong. The more souls he took below, the stronger the powers keeping demons in hell were. In a strange way, corruption of a few protected millions. And it had been a long time since he’d focused on pure souls as targets. The gates were starting to crumble.

Nothing like a challenge when hell itself needed saving.

“Are there not any good, incorruptible souls still out there? The gates are weak. I can feel it,” he muttered. It was a rhetorical question, but Andras straightened.

“There must be. Shall I find one for you? I too have been worried about the gates. It’s been a long time since we’ve gone in search of pure souls to power the portal.”

Lucien crossed his arms over his chest, frowning at the crowd below him. He hadn’t expected Andras to offer to find one. He’d been thinking aloud more than anything, but Andras was a loyal soldier and clever. If anyone could find what he needed to protect the gates, it was Andras.

Do I want that? Would the challenge sate my emptiness? Or should I leave it up to Andras to secure the safety of hell?

No, he had to be the one to do it. When he corrupted the soul and secured it in hell, it kept the gates strong and the demons where they should be—locked away in crushing darkness.

If there was even the smallest chance of relieving himself of that awful ache, he had to try.

“Find me a pure soul. One that will be a true challenge. The gates need one that will truly test me if we are to secure the portal.”

“Understood.” Andras vanished, and the flutter of his invisible shadow wings was the only proof of his ever having been there. When Andras fell, he too had lost his snowy white wings. In their place, the scars had formed what were called shadow wings, and those were all that remained.

Lucien turned his back on the club and returned to his office. He closed the glass doors to his balcony and sat in his black leather desk chair. Taking a cigar from the cherrywood box, he removed his silver cigar cutter and cut the tip. Then he snapped his fingers, and a flame blossomed from his fingertips to light the cigar. He drew in a slow breath, relishing the rich, sweet aroma of the smoke, and blew the air back out. The smoke escaped his lips in tendrils that coiled into the air to form a slithering snake.

Andras would find him a soul, a perfect one to corrupt, and it would restore Lucien’s purpose and keep the gates of hell intact.

It’s time the devil got back in the game.

Life isn’t fair.

Diana Kingston knew that was the truth, but it didn’t stop her from hoping for fairness every day. She sat by her father’s hospital bed, helplessly watching him fight for life. He’d slipped into a coma early that morning as the final stages of cancer took hold. Her mother, Janet, held his hand and was talking softly to him about her day, hoping he could hear her. It had been a part of their normal routine before he’d slipped into the coma. When Diana got home from her college classes, she and her mother drove to the hospital to keep her father company while he went underwent radiation and chemotherapy for colon cancer. She couldn’t get past the pain of watching her mother lose half of herself with the impending death of the man she had deeply loved for more than thirty years.

Most days Diana kept herself together, but today was possibly the end. The doctor had called her mother early this morning to say that her father, Hal, had slipped into a coma. Only yesterday, her father had been glassy-eyed and exhausted from fighting the inevitable but still awake and talking. The machines beeping beside his bed showed his life ticking away, slowly fading bit by bit. Her heart was breaking, fracturing like a mirror into a thousand shards. She could see herself in her father’s face, reflected a thousand times over as he gave in to death inch by inch. Would her mother look at Diana and see that reflection of her father? Would it cause her mother even more pain? Diana bit her lip hard enough that the metallic taste of blood surprised her. She licked her lip and rose from the stiff wooden hospital chair.

She was a coward, she was weak—she could not sit there and watch him die. It hurt too much.

“Mom, I’m going to get some air, okay?” She hugged her mother’s shoulders and kissed her cheek before she headed to the door.

“Okay, hon,” her mother murmured absently.

Diana paused at the door to her father’s room, drinking in the sight of her parents. Hal was a handsome man with soft gray eyes, eyes that would likely never open again, and brown hair feathered with gray. Her mother, Janet, had been a real beauty in her youth and was still stunning with gray-blue eyes and raven hair. But her father’s illness had aged them both over the last two year, stealing time like fall leaves scattered upon the wind.

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