by Dante King
Lucifer grinned from ear to ear. “That’s what I was hoping you’d say,” he said.
The Prince of Darkness snapped his fingers, and a door appeared in the center of the clearing. Beyond it, Poppy and Godfrey moved in extreme slow motion, barely enough to be noticeable.
“I thought I was going back to the Castle,” I said, staring at the simple wooden door. “What’s this?”
“By now you’ve probably realized who built the Castle of Days,” Lucifer said with an impish chuckle. “Queen Titania moved in with all her toys, but that’s only because the toymaker allows it. That door will allow you to skip all her games and go directly to what I want you to see. Once you’re done, you’ll be in the cells. Take Oni and go—an identical door will take you back to this clearing, and you’ll never need to set foot in my Castle again.”
I froze in my tracks.
“It’s your castle,” I said, the realization flooding me.
“Of course it is,” Lucifer snapped. “All forms of pain and pleasure belong to the Beast. And personally, I’d rather not see your demon experience any more of it than absolutely necessary. He is on a mission for me, after all.”
A mission from Lucifer!?
Before I could ask for more information, Lucifer disappeared in a puff of smoke.
“I hate it when he does that,” I muttered, staring at the spot where the Prince of Darkness had stood only moments before. In the background, Poppy and Godfrey continued their slow motion dance, moving a fraction of an inch every thirty seconds or so of my time. Whatever magic Lucifer had used to slow down this decision wasn’t going to let up until I made up my mind and stepped through the door.
I couldn’t believe the Lord of Hell really thought I might back down. After everything I’d seen, after everything I’d done, the idea of discarding all my powers and going back to an ordinary human life felt like poison in my veins. I never wanted an ordinary life.
I was going to be the next Lucifer. On the other side of that door lay my destiny.
Chapter 15
After the pantomime of my journey to the Infernal Academy, I wasn’t sure what to expect was waiting for me on the other side of the door. It felt like a boss fight, for sure—something big and bad, that would test me to my absolute limits. Anything else felt like it would’ve been outside of Lucifer’s style.
Which was why it was such a shock to step through and find myself back in Christina’s living room.
The house of Christina Hebert looked exactly as I remembered it. To be fair, I’d only been inside the one time, but the particulars of that encounter had been seared so firmly onto my memory that I’d never forget it. The high-ceilinged vestibule—too high, now that I had time to think about it clearly—stretched above my head, a roaring fire in Christina’s fireplace. The same framed photographs of her out and about hung on the walls, with the same sinister undertone of something lurking just beneath their picture-perfect surface. The occult trinkets, the books in Latin… all of it was just as I remembered.
God, how did I not peg Christina for a Satanist immediately? I thought, looking over the collection of items on display. I knew how, of course: that night, I’d been trying to get laid. Finding a way into my college crush’s panties had been first on the agenda, with fixing her computer a problem a distant but necessary second. Discovering the secrets of her flirtation with the forces of Satan hadn’t even registered.
A set of footsteps echoed on the stairs. I caught a flash of a familiar figure making their way to the second floor, carrying a pair of wine glasses and a freshly uncorked bottle. It had been so long since I’d seen Christina Hebert in her non-demonic, totally human form that I almost didn’t recognize her. Her robe swished around mid-thigh as she sashayed up the stairs, humming to herself like a hunter about to make a conquest.
Is that what she looked like that night? I thought, grinning to myself. God, she really did want to go to bed with me, didn’t she?
Why not? I’d been quite the surprise to my former college crush—I cleaned up nice, I was in shape, and I owned my own business. She’d called me to fix her computer problems, never knowing that I was the same Luke Bell she’d known in college half a decade ago and had never given her number to. It was an opportunity to reconnect with her past, to feel the glory days of college hookups with the experience that multiple relationships gave.
But it was still an ego boost to see that Christina had so plainly planned to fuck me.
Christina reached the top of the stairs and turned, disappearing with a giggle. Only now did a strange possibility occur to me: was this real? I’d ventured through the Castle of Days’s many theatres, but none of them had felt quite so detailed or so true to life as this one. Was this… time travel?
If it was, then the dimensions of Christina’s house suddenly made a strange kind of sense. No wonder her McMansion was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside—it overlapped Lucifer’s own interdimensional palace, bordering it in time and space. Which raised an even stranger question—had the Prince of Darkness always known Christina and I were going to be so central to his plans?
I heard the sounds of murmured conversation upstairs. Christina’s smooth contralto mixed with a rougher, more strained voice that I knew had to be mine. She’d brought the wine upstairs and poured us both a glass while I messed with her router, trying to fix her computer problems—
That was it! The words the phantasms inside the Castle of Days spoke. I’d seen them while I was diagnosing Christina Hebert’s router. I had no idea what it meant, if it meant anything at all, but I’d finally remembered the answer. Pleasure filled my chest, the way it does when you find the name of a song you’ve been humming a fragment of melody from all day, trying to remember when you’d last heard it.
I reached the bottom of the stairs, then hesitated. If this really was some kind of time warp, could I fuck up the future by interfering with Christina and I? Any minute now, I’d have logged into her router. Once I activated the Morningstar Program, the two of us would be whisked away to Lucifer’s den, I’d learn Christina had secretly been a Satanic worshipper all along, and the two of us would gain entrance to the Infernal Academy. Our lives would be changed forever.
Maybe this is what Lucifer meant when he said I’d have the ability to choose, I thought, taking the steps as stealthily as I could. I could stop what’s about to happen. Scare the shit out of myself, so that I never select the Angel of Darkness or the Angel of Light. Go to bed with Christina, fuck the shit out of my college crush and start a relationship with her. An ordinary, human relationship.
If that’s what Lucifer was offering me, then forget it. That life no longer held any appeal.
But I still needed to see it for myself.
I crept down the hallway, glancing at each of Christina’s portraits as I went. With the gift of experience I could see what my eyes had missed the first time—the sacrifice in a cocoon around the campfire with her ‘besties’, the spots of blood on the dance floor at her old sorority sister’s bachelorette party. If this had been a horror movie, this would be the moment of realization where the audience saw the ‘twist’ revealed for the very first time. But I’d already fucked Christina, I’d added her to my harem and made her one of my future Queens of Hell. Her rituals held no terror for me—just amusement that I hadn’t realized the truth about her the moment I saw her.
Finally I reached the bedroom where it had all happened. By now, I knew the real Luke wouldn’t see me—at the time, I’d been trying my damndest not to look too much like I was staring at Christina’s bodacious cleavage. She’d definitely been tempting me to the hilt that night. I could smell the faint, acrid tinge of red wine as I leaned across the door frame, feeling strangely like a voyeur. Despite the fact that I’d lived these moments already, had been present at the time.
Christina leaned over the past Luke, nibbling her bottom lip as she read the screen of the laptop I’d brought to the bedroom with me. “Angel of Darkness? Ang
el of Light?” She took a sip of her wine, licking her lips. “It sounds like a video game.”
“I always did like being the bad guy in those,” I heard the past Luke say. The cursor highlighted ANGEL OF DARKNESS, then I heard the mouse click.
In an instant, everything surrounding the past Luke and Christina began to dissolve. The two of them disappeared, pulled into the gravity well of the router as a portal opened straight to the chamber where Lucifer waited. It was a strange thing to both remember my look of shock and to see it as a third-party, even as the past Luke faded away with the router still in his hands. Christina looked surprised as well, but also more sanguine—as if part of her already knew where this was heading.
A burst of air shook the room as the pair of figures disappeared. The router in the past Luke’s hands landed on the carpet, along with my old IT laptop. Both were utterly forgotten—once we met Lucifer, I never thought of them again.
Until now.
I crept forward, a little hesitant. After all, might the portal open up and snatch me in it, too? If it hadn’t completely dissolved, it was a possibility. And what would I say to Lucifer then?
But by the time I got to the router, whatever danger there was seemed to have passed. It sat on the carpet like a rock, a thin wire connecting it to my laptop. Fortunately, all my equipment was rugged, and a little shock to the system wasn’t enough to break the device. Nothing seemed damaged, though the little flashing lights on the side of the router were no longer blinking.
I took Christina’s router in my hands and examined it. It looked perfectly ordinary, an old Belkin with two antennae sticking from either end like the head of a giant insect. There was nothing to imply that a program capable of transforming an ordinary human into a future Archlord of Hell lay within.
Turning my attention from the router to the laptop, I found the real prize. Opening the portal to Lucifer’s domain hadn’t stopped the Morningstar Program from running—in fact, a command prompt sat at the top of the otherwise blank screen, blinking every few seconds as it waited for human input. A line adorned the top, one that I had to read two or three times before the real message sank in:
CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE SELECTED THE ANGEL OF DARKNESS.
BECAUSE OF USER (“LUKE BELL”) SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS, ADDITIONAL ANGEL MAY BE SELECTED. ACTIVATE ANGEL OF LIGHT AS WELL? (Y/N)
“What!?” I gasped, staring at the screen. “What kind of special characteristics?”
Lucifer had said that an Archlord candidate who’d accepted the Angel of Light would have been incredibly powerful. Just in a different way from the path of Darkness. And I’d had the opportunity to grab both, all along?
I’d missed it. And Lucifer himself was the reason.
No wonder he considered this my final test.
The past Christina and the past Luke were gone. The present Luke sat on the floor of Christina’s bedroom, contemplating the possibilities of this new information. And the future?
The future remained to be seen.
I pushed the ‘Y’ key on the keyboard and hit enter. For a long time nothing happened, until I was sure that the screen had frozen while waiting for input. That or the laptop had crashed.
Then the world around me dissolved.
I found myself standing in a narrow hallway, with great glass walls on both sides. The router and the laptop were gone—the moment I’d made a choice, both had disappeared as if they’d never truly been there. Which, probably, they hadn’t.
All that was left to me was to walk forward. As I did, I saw things. Visions of the past, the present, and the future. I heard myself through open doors in the midst of sex, fighting for my life, and hearing my own name chanted by armies. Scene after scene resolved as my steps forward turned into a run, as if I were trying to escape the weight of fate itself.
“Luke Bell!” the chanting rose to a crescendo. “Luke Bell! The new Satan! The new Lord of Hell! Hail Luke! Hail Luke!”
It mixed with the sounds of orgasmic bliss, with the groans of defeated foes. I swore I could pick out individual voices in that storm of names—one cry of climax held the whimper I knew so well from Maddie, while the grunt of a throat being slashed came with the deep baritone tenor I associated with the angel Gordon. What were these visions trying to tell me? Was it the past, or the future the Castle of Days wanted to show me? Had I already started the Day of Judgement, and didn’t yet realize it?
I won’t let anyone hurt my friends, I resolved. A door loomed at the end of the path—something told me this was the final one. And let any man who lays a finger on one of my women be damned to the lake of fire for all eternity…
As my hand gripped the door handle, the voices fell silent. From the other side, I heard the shuffling of chains, then a gruff, plaintive voice.
“Hello? Is someone there?”
I recognized that voice. Oni!
I threw the door open and stepped through. What greeted me was almost depressingly banal: a block of cells that could have been the interior of any prison in the world. The floor was bare concrete, the bars of each cell were covered in spots of rust but otherwise looked unbreakable. Cells stretched down both sides of the hallway, forming two dozen in all—the four I could see from where I stood lay empty. The voice I’d heard had come from farther away, somewhere near the back.
“Oni? Oni, is that you!?”
A cry. “Master!” Yep, that was Oni alright. “You came for me! Lucifer told me you would, but I’d begun to believe I’d be trapped in here forever…”
There was that mention of Lucifer again. All of us had wondered why Oni would risk his life in the Fae Realm, and now I knew: the Devil made him do it. But why?
In the next cell, Oni sat on a long concrete bench with a threadbare mattress on the top. His thick legs hung over the side like tree trunks, his boots tapping gently against the cold stone floor. At the sight of me he sat up straighter, the single horn growing from the center of his forehead nearly touching the ceiling of his cell.
A sack sat between his feet, black velvet tied with a little ribbon. That had to be the item he’d brought with him into the Fae. The reason Titania never wanted him to see the light of day—and why Siobhan wanted me to free the big guy so bad.
The temptation to reach into the cell and grab it was fierce, but I held back. “Oni, man, it’s good to see you!” I said, tearing the lock off the cell door with my tendrils. After such a tough trek through the Castle of Days, breaking open Oni’s cell felt almost simple. “What the hell have you been doing out here, dude?”
Before Oni could answer, however, I heard another voice. This one chilled me to the bone.
“Thank God,” it said, groaning with relief. “Come quickly and free me, Luke. We have to get out of here!”
Slowly, with my heart sinking into my stomach, I leaned over to peer into the next cell. In a million years, I never could have guessed who my big red demon’s cellmate ended up being.
Sitting in the cell right next to Oni’s was Judyth Dominia, the Headmistress of the Celestial Academy.
Chapter 16
“You,” I growled, peering through the bars at Judyth’s prone form. “What the hell are you doing in the Castle of Days?”
Even behind lock and key, Judyth Dominia was one intimidating angel.
“It wasn’t by choice, I assure you,” the Headmistress of the Celestial Academy assured me, brushing her long blonde hair backward. She definitely had the air of someone who’d let their looks go over the last couple of days and was trying to make up for it now that she had a man to show off for. Judyth didn’t look pleased at all to have been found looking the way she did. “Get me out of here, Luke. We need to leave as soon as possible!”
I could smell the trap in her words.
The sight of Judyth Dominia filled my veins with the confusing mix of emotions I could never truly shake.
There was anger, of course, as the sight of the Angel of Vengeance being left behind in the Fae Realm flickered beh
ind my eyes.
There was the frustration that this woman held Maddie’s future in the Celestial Academy in her hands, and could destroy my girlfriend’s academic career with a word. Not to mention have her expelled from Heaven forever.
And beneath all that was lust.
Pure, primal, caveman lust—because Judyth was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen.
Technically, I was her spy. I’d agreed to help the Headmistress of the Celestial Academy in exchange for Maddie’s safety at her school.
But things had changed rapidly since then.
The veil between Realms felt thinner than ever before—and no matter what happened with Queen Titania and the Fae, it was unlikely that either I or Maddie would be completing our courses of study at our chosen Academies. So I didn’t feel much like obeying Judyth.
Adding her to my harem, though? That was another matter entirely.
After claiming Eiko as one of my future Queens, the sky was literally the limit on who I could bind to me.
For the moment, I decided to ignore Judyth entirely.
Oni sprang off the bench as his cell door opened, then the big demon pulled me into an even bigger bear hug. He smelled like he hadn’t gotten a proper bath in a few weeks, but other than that, it felt good to have him back. Really good.
“I’m so happy to see you again,” I told the hulking demon. “Why the hell did you run off into the Fae Realm, anyway? What could Lucifer have possibly told you to get you out of the Infernal Academy?”
Oni lowered his head as if chastened. “I am sorry, Master,” the big demon rumbled, looking ashamed of himself. “Father Lucifer commanded me to take this—” here he lifted the item in its black velvet sack off the floor, “—item into the Fae Realm and present myself to Queen Titania.”