Page 17 of Better in Black
“Just now,” Lucie said. “I certainly didn’t write them. There was no drab publishing office inThe Beautiful Cordelia.People want to read about castles, notpublishing.”
“So Cordelia is somehow inside this book?” James said.
As they watched, more words slanted across the page, in a handwriting very unlike Lucie’s.
Suddenly a woman materialized on the road, swathed in luxurious white furs. Her skin shone radiantly with an ethereal pulchritude, and the Beautiful Cordelia suspected instantly she was not of this world. As usual, the Beautiful Cordelia’s instincts were as acute as her beauty. For this was no ordinary woman. This was the deadly demoness Ajatara.
“Is this…describing what’s happening to Cordelia?” James rubbed at his temples. “Our Cordelia? Not the fictional one. Is she somehow—inside the world of the book?”
“It’s awful,” Lucie wailed.
“It certainly is, if Cordelia is trapped in a book! How could such a thing possibly even happen?”
“I meant the prose,” Lucie said. “Pulchritude?Really?”
“Lucie.” James gave her the kind of look that only a big brother can, the kind that suggested that if he weren’t her very loving big brother he might at this moment be tempted to swat her like a fly. Lucie swallowed her indignation at the idea of a verbally clumsy demon appropriating her novel and focused on the crisis at hand. Cordelia.
“I’ve never heard of this sort of magic,” she said, as wordsunspooled on the page in bloodred ink. “How can Cordelia be trapped in a place that isn’t even real?”
By this point, more sentences had appeared.
“The Beautiful Cordelia, I presume,” Ajatara said, as she approached. “Though if you ask me, the name is a little much. I’m willing to grant ‘reasonably pretty,’ but ‘beautiful’?”
“How rude!” Lucie exclaimed. It was one thing to massacre her story, but no one was allowed to insult herparabatai.
“Halt, demon!” the Beautiful Cordelia called. And perhaps her instincts were not so acute after all, as she reached in vain for a weapon—and realized she had left all her weapons behind in that other world, along with her stele and the powers it granted. In this world, she was nothing but an unarmed maiden forced to survive on her beauty and her wits, to whatever degree she could muster either.
“I don’t think I will,” Ajatara said. “And I don’t think you’ll want me to, once you hear what I have to say.”
“I demand you set me free from your hellish demon realm,” the Beautiful Cordelia said.
“I’ll grant you that the color palette is a little…garish for my taste,” Ajatara said, “but hellish is a bit strong, no?”
“Enough banter,” Lucie grumbled. “Let’s get to the plot. What’shappening?”
“Perhaps you’re wondering how you’ve ended up here,” Ajatara said. She laid one of her furs along the side of the road, like apicnic blanket. “Come, sit. Listen. And I shall tell you quite a tale.”
The Beautiful Cordelia was not the type to simply do as she was told, especially not when told so by a demon. But she was weary and worried, a stranger in a strange land, and was in no position to turn her nose up at answers. She sat. She listened.
“You are familiar, of course, with the dashing and dastardly demon Belial,” Ajatara said haughtily.
“I never thought of him as dashing,” the Beautiful Cordelia replied cheekily, and also accurately. “But yes.”
“What shoddy magic is this?” Lucie complained. “I haven’t used this many adverbs since I was a child!”
James shushed her. They read on.
“I am referring not to the being who strides the dimensions now,” Ajatara continued, “but the original Belial, may he rest in eternal un-peace, devious Prince of Hell and grandfather to your beloved and his ridiculous sister.”
James glared at Lucie, stilling her tongue before she could object to the characterization.
“That Belial is dead,” the Beautiful Cordelia said, “and whatever quarrel you have with him has nothing to do with my family.”
“I beg to differ,” Ajatara said. “And to be clear,quarrelis not the word for what I had with Belial. Your puny mortal heart could never understand what we felt. First we wereenemies. Then we were lovers! And such lovers we were, possessed of a tormenting and conquering love that devoured entire worlds in its voracious destruction. It was an all-consuming fire of lust and longing.”
“Sounds very romantic,” the Beautiful Cordelia said. “Although rather dangerous for any wooden furniture.”
“Belial must have loved me very fiercely,” Ajatara said, “and the evidence is in how cruelly he punished me when he severed our relationship. I have, for all the eons since, been imprisoned by him in my own demon realm. I believe it is because he knew if he caught sight of me, he would not be able to resist temptation. A part of me felt great empathy for him and what was clearly his unquenchable desire.”
