Flytrap

by Stephanie Ahn

  “But I know you eavesdrop on them. Was how you found me, right?”

  She’s quiet. Chews on a piece of ginger.

  “…I don’t eavesdrop on them exactly. I kind of… tap into the network at a random spot. I can’t really choose what I hear.”

  “Like a hive mind?”

  She smacks my knee with her empty plastic container, and the rest of the ginger goes flying. “No, you dumbass. It’s… it’s…” She pushes her lips out to one side. “…Roots. The roots of Hell are bones, and they whisper.”

  I tilt my head. In all my years as a witch, I’ve never heard that—but it sounds incredibly, incredibly significant. “Tell me more. Please?”

  “I’ll tell you what they told me—paraphrased, roughly.” She folds her legs, grabbing her ankles and scooting them closer to herself, like she’s settling on a rug for storytime.

  “Once upon a time, there was a beast. A great, beautiful, magnificent beast. Not just a devourer of worlds, but a birther of them. There was a Beast, and humans killed it for its power—and with its blood they wrote the laws, and from its ribs they fashioned a cage. And into this cage they drew and bound—all those they feared. The tricksters, the heart-eaters, the blameless beasts, magic-wielders who had reached beyond their station… even gods.

  “The prisoners could leave this cage, but it had changed them, warped them. On Earth, they had no magic save the magic of contract. In Hell, they had nothing to eat, so they ate each other. When they died, they only came back to the same—there was no escape, not truly.

  “So the starving ones crawled to Earth and sold the last thing they had: knowledge. Knowledge, for which they were paid in souls. Souls, which granted them magic, which granted them power; enough to form territories, to earn new names. New names, new titles, new lords, new kings. They built over the barren carcass of the Beast with souls. They forgot they were prisoners at all—they didn’t have to be, not as long as the souls kept coming. And coming, and coming, and coming.

  “But the buried bones remember. They remember, and they whisper. They whisper, and whisper… and all they wish, in return, is to be heard.”

  Lilith ends the story with her head bowed, her eyes shadowed and her hair swaying. I sit back, stunned. For minutes, I can’t speak. When I do, all I can manage is a “Woah.”

  Lilith lifts her eyes. “I know, right? Wild. I didn’t even mean to hear it. I’d just been using the roots like a wiretap, listening in on parts of Hell without risking a surface trip. For a while, I didn’t even know the roots were bones. I thought they were trees—really weird, moldy trees in an underground forest.”

  I realize I’ve completely forgotten about my sushi. I offer it to Lilith; she takes it and my chopsticks, eagerly. “Who else knows what you know?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe the imprisoned demons, buried alive. But they don’t comprehend much anymore.” She pops a tamago egg into her cheek. “Even when I talk to Buer, it’s more of a one-sided convo. Me and some mutters coming up through some hundred thousand feet of stone, pretending that’s any kind of meaningful interaction. But, hey, my dad lets me stay out as long as I want, and he’ll never threaten a date with a baseball bat. Depressing, but worth the trade-off.”

  She says it casually, but when she’s finished, she avoids my eyes and busily eats her food. I can tell it’s a big deal, her telling me about her “dad”—before, she’d struggled to even tell me she’d carried a gunshot victim to a hospital.

  Maybe she’s been needing to get all this stuff off her chest. The things she’s lived and learned—they exist on a scale I can’t even comprehend, can’t even picture in my head. Looking at her face, her cheeks moving like a chipmunk’s, I’m hit with a childish burst of honesty.

  “You’re cool,” I blurt out. “You’re really, really cool.”

  She preens a little, fluffing her hair. “Yes, well, I already knew that. But thank you.” She stops, her chopsticks halted in their downward dive for more ginger. “…Hey. Uh… what was that you said earlier? About Beelzebub, and—eating people?”

  “Oh, that.” My skin crawls, unpleasantly, as I remember the whole reason I’m here. “Uh… I think he was dead for a while, like you said. But he did a hard manual reset. Got his lackeys to pull him out of Limbo, into a fetus carried by a teenage girl. And when he was born… it was terrifying. The baby became this—this mutant monster, and it killed and ate every doctor and nurse in the room.”

  Lilith looks shaken. “That… doesn’t sound like anything an Earthborn vessel should be able to do.”

  My head bobs, even as a lump forms in my throat. “Right, which is why I came to you for help. He’s not bound by the consent laws, you’re not bound by the consent laws. I thought, if anyone would know how that was possible…”

  She presses the points of her chopsticks into the plastic of her plate. It looks like she’s lost her appetite. “I… Harry, I’m sorry, but I don’t know what the fuck that could be. What I am, how I do it, it’s—it’s not like that. It’s not like that at all.”

  I quirk up a corner of my mouth. “Still not willing to tell me, huh?”

  She puffs, a little indignant. “A girl’s gotta keep some secrets. But…” Her eyes wander off, back to the view of the city. And then they go sharp—like she’s caught onto an equation, and is calculating. “But the demon consent laws aren’t natural laws, like gravity or entropy. They’re artificial, like the bones said. And that means they’re not foolproof. Stuff slips through the cracks.”

  “Is that what you did, slip through a crack? —Ow!”

  I shake the back of my hand out, hissing, where Lilith’s rapped on it with her chopsticks. She looks smug about it.

  “I told you, I don’t want to say. But—maybe I’m not the only one who heard about how Hell was made. Maybe Beelzebub learned too, somehow, while he was dead. And… maybe he’s found a loophole.”

  My stomach churns so violently that I almost throw up my sushi. “Fuck,” I say. “Fuck. That’s terrifying.”

  She shudders too. “See, now, this is why I’m not rearranging my whole schedule to look out for you anymore. The shit you get into, Harry—it is way over my head. Being a part of it, for just a little bit, was exciting. But you’re all accelerator, no brakes. I got scared. I bailed. And it’s looking more and more like that was the right decision.”

  “I’m sorry I scared you,” I murmur, holding my stinging hand. “I didn’t mean to.”

  She shrugs, a little sheepishly. “You know it wasn’t really you. It was this whole thing you’ve got going on, the life, the punch-your-problems existence. And you’ve got the scars to show for it, too.” She lifts and inspects the palm of her hand, where the skin is mottled with scar tissue. I hear the sense-memory of sizzling, cooking flesh—the injury she got from a spell I designed, and that Samael put into action against her. While I can’t see the slash between her collarbones right now, I know she’s thinking of that too. “This is enough scars for me. At least… enough scars taken for someone else.”

  I nod. “Super fair. And smart. But… what about the underground? They’re still inviting you to join them. Are you going to?”

  “I…” She hesitates. “…I’m not sure. I don’t even know what to expect, what the result of that could be.”

  “Really, how you play it is up to you. But you could be… I don’t know. Known. Is that something you want?”

  She stares down, fidgeting with her fingernails.

  “…Maybe.”

  She looks shy all of a sudden, and I feel bad for knocking her off balance like that. I peel open a straw wrapper and stick the straw in one of our untouched drinks, handing the cup to her.

  “Well, if you do choose to introduce yourself, you should make a better first impression than you did with me. You’re lucky I’m weird, or I wouldn’t have been okay with you trashing my apartment.”

  She rol
ls her eyes as she reaches to take the drink. “If you must know, it started as an accident.”

  “Huh?” I yank the cup away, making her lips purse in irritation. “Elaborate.”

  She grabs the cup out of my hand anyway, then turns away from me as she puts the straw between her lips. “I… was just there to snoop and stuff. Read your diaries, whatever.”

  “That’s not great either!”

  “Yeah, well, sue me, I’m a demon. But I, um…” She stalls, aggressively sipping her drink. “…I took a bottle of soda from your fridge. And I kind of… knocked it off your desk. By accident.”

  “Wha—” I wave my arms, scandalized. “Then why didn’t you clean it up?”

  “I couldn’t!” she yells back, equally as passionate. “I mean, I wasn’t going to let you come in and see me scrubbing your damn floor!”

  “What, so you just—started throwing shit on the floor?”

  She turns away again, holding her drink like she’s shielding it from me, glancing nervously from the corner of her eye. “And what if I did?”

  I start laughing, helplessly.

  “No! Stop laughing!”

  I just laugh harder, so hard I tip over onto my side. Lilith pelts me with empty food containers, shouting; I laugh until I’m crying, sitting up with an arm over my face, saying, “Okay, okay, I’ll stop! I’m stopping, I’m st—no, wait, just a little giggle coming back up—”

  “Asshole!”

  “Just let me have this, alright? I might be dead by tomorrow!”

  I meant to say it jokingly, but Lilith freezes where she’s winding back with a soup container in her hand. She puts the soup cup down. “You really could be, couldn’t you?” Her voice is quiet. “I forgot for a second.”

  The laughter in my throat dies. “…Yeah. Yeah, I forgot too.”

  I feel nauseous again. I turn and put a straw in my own drink, then hold it just to have a distraction.

  “…Are you really going to do it?” Lilith asks. “Go up against the Lord of the Flies?”

  Of course not, I want to say. What kind of idiot would? But what comes out is, “I don’t think I have a choice. If I don’t find him, he’s going to find me. So I think… I think I’m going to try to kill something that can’t be killed.”

  We drink our drinks, both orange Fantas. My nose, ears, and fingers have gone from warm, to cold, to so cold they feel like they’re on fire.

  “…Well,” Lilith says, like she’s announcing the end of a long deliberation process, “just because I don’t want to get involved, doesn’t mean I can’t give some advice. Do you want to know how they got Buer?”

  I sit up straight, just to let her know I’m listening. “How?”

  “He showed weakness, and everyone he owned knew it. It only took a spark to light the flame. Once his reputation was gone, everything else went up in smoke.”

  I squint. “So, what, I’m supposed to go on a smear campaign against a demon?”

  “Thats the thing. I think… you already did.”

  I feel my whole face wrinkle as I struggle to understand what she’s saying. “Pardon?”

  Lilith sets her drink down and starts gesturing with her hands like she’s laying a set of illustrative blocks on the ground. “I’ve been thinking about it, on and off. You used his blood in a necromancy spell, right? And you survived. People don’t usually survive.”

  “They don’t, no.”

  “What do you think that says about Beelzebub? About how powerful he is, and how much currency his name is really worth?”

  I finally get it—and then I feel proud of myself for getting it, because usually I’m pretty bad at this stuff. “Woah. Is that why he died? Why he got usurped, you think?”

  She claps her hands together, her excitement coming back. “You probably know more about it than I do, but yeah, I’d bet a twenty. Maybe, if you fuck him up badly enough, just one more time—then maybe, just maybe, the others will finish the job.” I open my mouth to speak, but she cuts me off. “—Don’t take this as me encouraging false hope. It’s just, if he was able to be killed before, and he’s only just come back… you might be able to take him on, even as a human.”

  She told me not to have false hope, but I can already feel the gears turning in my head. “So… what would you do, do you think?”

  “I’d arm myself.”

  I guffaw. She looks at me weird.

  “Oh, that… wasn’t a pun? You know, because,” I gesture to my ribs, then to hers. “Because you actually have four arms? No?”

  She looks at me like I’ve grown a third nipple on my forehead.

  “…Right. Sorry.”

  “Harry. If you ever insist on a pun that stupid again, I will smack you with all four of my hands.”

  I stick my tongue out at her. “Big deal, you already have. Well, I mean, you spitroasted me on them.”

  She snorts. “Oh yeah, I did. That was fun, I still masturbate to that.”

  “Sweeet.” A beat. “Hey, wait—so if you don’t have to ask permission to hurt humans…”

  Lilith blinks innocently, smiling. “Yes?”

  “You didn’t have to… you know… ask before you did all that stuff to me. You know, the first time we fucked.” I can tell I’m blushing just thinking about it. Lilith is doing a good job holding a poker face, but her smile is getting ever so slightly wider. “You know, you were all, ‘Beg me to spank you, slut, I don’t have all day.’ ”

  She clicks her tongue, feigning disapproval. “I never called you a slut, I called you a ‘slutty little witch bitch.’ ” She catches the straw of her drink between her teeth, and flashes her fangs. “And really, I just liked hearing you beg.”

  I flush from my forehead to my chest, no longer feeling the cold.

  She turns her face up to the sky, at the clouds and the grayness of it all. “Wonder if it’ll snow again,” she murmurs, dreamily. “It’s only snowed once since the winter started. And it’s already December.”

  I try to remember her like that. Try to keep the image in my mind, a snapshot of simple goodness, one of those pure moments that really makes me feel like this whole bum existence is worth it.

  I hope that, if my life flashes before my eyes, I get to see this again.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Arms Race

  I’m in a public bathroom stall, sniffing up a wet nose and standing with my back against a wall. I had to spend six bucks on coffee just to use the place—goddamn Manhattan. I sip my rainbow-sprinkled holiday latte as the phone rings.

  “Harry!” says the smooth voice that picks up. It’s mellifluous, business-like, but not lacking in warmth.

  “Hi, Miri! Are you busy?”

  “Lucky you, not at the moment.” She sounds like she’s walking; I think I can hear the distant clicking of her heels. “I’m glad you called, I’ve been swamped all day. I could use a coffee date—”

  I glance down at the latte in my hand. “Oh, um… I’m sorry, Miri. I’m calling about business.”

  The clicking stops. I hear a dramatic sigh. “I’ll allow it. But now you really owe me a coffee date.”

  I smile tentatively, even though she can’t see it. My standing with Miriam is… complicated. We’re friends, more so than ever since that whole disaster with a traitor in her family’s midst—but I get the feeling she keeps tabs on me the way one keeps tabs on a dormant landmine.

  “I just need an address or a phone number. You know the Typhon Group, right?”

  “Oh, Harry. Are you in trouble?”

  “Yes, obviously. But when am I not?”

  She laughs, softly. Even though she sounds happy, I feel guilty. “I’m sorry, Miri. This isn’t what I wanted our friendship to be when we met up again.”

  “No, I understand. It’s just life.”

  “You’ve done business with the Group, right? Are they scary?”

 
She hums, thinking. “I’ll put it this way: if the Council doesn’t like you, they might try to execute you. If the Group doesn’t like you, you’re already too dead to find out about it.”

  I make a face. “Oh. Yikes.”

  “It’s nothing personal, just power.”

  I picture Miriam in the halls of her family’s mansion, giving orders in her cobalt blue skirt suit, putting out fires left and right. She makes it seem easy, even though I know it’s not.

  “Hey, Miri?” I ask. “Do you trust your goddess?”

  “Dalia? In what way?”

  “Does your faith in her… make you believe that everything is going to be alright?”

  She laughs out loud, startling me. “Of course not! Why do you think I bust my ass the way I do? I just trust that she loves me, and I love her, and if shit doesn’t work out we still have each other. The faith part is mostly just… like being in a relationship where nothing’s truly a dealbreaker. I don’t care about things like her moral absoluteness. I have faith that we’re going to keep talking it through, even when things could literally not get any worse. Commitment, the whole nine yards.”

  “Wow, that’s… intense.”

  “Not really, mostly it’s pretty boring. Lots of talking, lots of crying. Typical lesbian relationship. Why do you ask? Looking to convert?”

  I briefly fantasize about telling Miri everything. Only briefly. Because what would that do? If the Council isn’t powerful enough to avoid infiltration by Beelzebub, no way Miriam’s family is. I’m not bringing a gallon of gasoline from a wildfire into my friend’s house. Miri’s had enough of that from me. “Just curious. You free next week?”

  “I can make myself free, why?”

  “I’ll buy you coffee. And dessert.”

  “Aww, you softie. Alright, I’m game. You think Luce will be back from San Francisco by then?”

  “Luce?” I actually have to pause to stare up at the ceiling, trying to remember. “I don’t know, I think she might be back. Why do you ask?”