She hadn’t necessarily thought she’d pass all these demon classes, sure— in fact, she still meant to drop back into angel studies after a year or so, if Adramelek would let her. Yet, it was exceedingly frustrating to fail.
“How hard can it really be?” Santiago said, looking ready to cry out of teaching frustration. “Just a few words and movements.” She had in her hand a note Maalik had written with short comments on how to pull off the angelic version of the spell. Simple, yes— an incarnation, a series of movements, and a moment of meditation.
“Clearly, very hard,” Archie said. He stopped spinning his ball of paper and then flicked it on fire, letting it burn into his palm and dropping the black ashes onto the table. “Let’s move on. I still need to work on healing.”
There were a number, technically, of types of magic. Iofiel generally thought of it as ‘stuff I can do’ and ‘stuff I can’t’. Demons were good at big, fancy ritual spells, things that rigged luck, stole life, or hypnotized humans, and spell wise they were apt at physical stuff— levitation, moving things around, affecting humans— while angels excelled at healing, illusion, and some forms of elemental magic. Demons also, of course, had the whole soul stealing thing going on. At least angels were generally better at magic than demons, quicker to learn and often stronger, so the fact healing was the one school they really had over demons was perhaps to balance this.
Archie broke his skin with one of his sharp fangs, tracing a small, centimeter line across the back of his hand. Instantly, blood beaded. He waved his fingers over the cut of a few times, each attempt quickly losing gusto, one smearing the blood across his hand.
“Healing’s more about focus than anything,” Iofiel said, internally counting down to the point in which she decided she’d intervene. Maalik had, of course, insisted she learn a standard cut sealer spell, and about three days ago she’d stayed up all night perfecting it.
“Maybe for angels,” Santiago said. “You still need to feel something, kid. A bit of determination to stop bleeding wouldn’t hurt.”
“Of all things, you’d think not-bleeding was something you, glass skin, would be pretty determined to achieve,” Damien said from under the table. “What are you afraid of?” She poked her head up, presumably to stare him down— all Iofiel could see were her horns.
Archie sighed and slammed his hand on the table. “Nothing!” He said through gritted teeth.
A dribble of blood fell onto the woodwork. In an effort to preserve the artisan table, Iofiel crept a hand towards his, quickly readying her healing.
Archie batted away her help, “I’ve got this,” he mumbled, while Damien stifled a giggle. Far too quickly, he tried three more times, each doing nothing but make him look ridiculous. Even Iofiel, who had learned the angelic version of the spell, could tell he was casting it wrong.
He slumped in his seat, dropping his arm towards Iofiel, who only took a second to reseal the wound. Then he licked the blood off his hand, wiped the table clean with his sleeve, and groaned.
“We should be used to failure by now,” Iofiel said. “I’m probably never going to get that floating spell down before midterms. What’s one failure when balanced out with a success?”
“Fifty percent,” Archie said.
“Everyone’s good at something, twerp.” Santiago leaned forward, stifling a yawn. “You’ll figure something out.”
Archie wiggled in his seat, turning his head a little and staring at the bookshelf-covered wall. “Not everyone is. I’m not good at anything.”
“Oh my god, you poor little emo soul.” Damien scooted up onto a chair.
“Oof, emo? What strong words from the edgelord queen herself,” Santiago teased. Iofiel was rather perplexed by what she meant, but this wasn’t atypical.
“Complaining about how hard you have it doesn’t make you likable or improve your situation, so stop talking and get better. You said you couldn’t do that fireball, the simplest spell we have, and look! You successfully punched someone in the face with fire,” Damien said. Then she made a quick cut across her arm with a simple slashing spell, and thrust it towards Archie. “Here.”
Archie took a deep breath, closing his eyes for a few seconds, and gave another attempt at healing. And again, he failed. He seized up immediately, collapsing back, his face scrunching up with tears.
Iofiel edged over, considering if trying to comfort him would only make him more upset, when she heard Damien huff.
“Oh, boo,” Damien said, easily sealing her cut closed again.
“Let’s go, it’s getting late anyway,” Santiago suggested, packing up her stuff. “See you next week?”
“It’s only seven!” Iofiel exclaimed. They’d only been working for about forty minutes. There was a gap in the dialogue filled by the soft sounds of Archie crying. She’d learned he didn’t like her attempts at comfort, so she tried to ignore it. “Please, help me go over my Culture essay or something. Maalik’s out of class and probably studying right now and I don’t want to deal with him.”
“Deal with him? As opposed to disturb?” Santiago had gathered everything into her backpack, but she remained sitting, flashing Iofiel a sharp-toothed grin. “Picked up on how terrible he is, then?”
“Wh— No! I don’t even get what you have against him, he’s sweet. Ish.” Iofiel’s face flushed before she got a word out. “It’s just... like, a week ago, we kissed, and it’s been awk—”
Santiago cackled maniacally, and Damien joined in with a crazed giggle. “That’s too good,” she said with a snort, “Oh, man, you have awful taste, but really? You’re just going around macking people up now? Iofi, how far you truly have fallen.”
“She is a demon now,” Damien said, wagging a finger, “Legally I believe it is her infernal right to go about macking whoever she pleases.”
“Awful taste though.”
“Truly.”
Archie was silent.
“It was just one kiss,” Iofiel said, her face hot. “Okay, two to three, depending on how you count them. And it’s not like we were being romantic. We just... happened to. And now Maalik’s being weird with me, so I need to get back to the dorm at a time when he’s asleep.”
Santiago rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to hold us hostage in order to kill time, you know. Go for a fly, birdy. Polish your halo or something.”
“I’m following my nose a little, I guess” Iofiel said, waving off her remarks. “I’m getting a little bit tired of trying to balance the line. I’m still an angel, yeah, but while I’m being allowed to study like a demon, I might as well take advantage of it. Really live this weirdo middle life.”
“If you’d like to be a demon properly, I know of a party happening tonight in town,” Damien said. “I wasn’t planning on going, but I could take you down.”
“A party? Is that what demons do?” Iofiel asked, her curiosity piqued. She’d been to an angelic one in the first week, but it hadn’t been anything like the wild, loud romps she’d seen images of in her classes. Those seemed fun. Also, horrifying cesspools of sin and terror, but also, a little bit fun. “Angels just kinda fast, sing, and meditate. I’m not sure I...”
“Oh, come on. Could be fun,” Damien said. “You’re living like a demon these days— clearly you need to party, scream, and go apeshit.”
“Aren’t those all the same thing.” Santiago stood up, slinging her bag over her back.
“...Apeshit?” Iofiel asked, not knowing the expression. It was an expression, right? She knew the words singularly…
Damien joined her girlfriend. “Hogwild.”
“What?” Iofiel’s wings twitched. Humans (and demons?) had an affinity for strange words.
“Bonkers...”
“Oh!” Iofiel exclaimed. “How do I do that?”
“What are your limits?”
“Demons do have limits, right? I suppose...” She thought it over. “I’m not going to commit arson tonight.”
“So you’d betray your own kind and mak
e out with an ugly boy, but you won’t light a forest fire. Shame.” Damien smiled. “Archie, you’re invited too you know. Wanna come?”
“No.” The conversation had at least lead to the end of his crying. His eye was still watery, but he’d calmed down, and raised a judgmental eyebrow. “This sounds stupid.”
It was stupid. Despite Iofiel’s sincere decision to do more demon stuff as long as she was allowed to— since it was a once in a millennia opportunity for an angel— Iofiel was unable to ignore the turning of her stomach at the mere sight of demons.
There were humans here, Iofiel could tell, or at least the threat of them was present: though she was able to recognize demons by energy alone, they all had hidden their more infernal bits. This was probably customary to any traveling into human territory, but it’d still taken a few harsh coughs from Damien, and then a direct reminder, for Iofiel to remember to hide her halo.
Which she could do now, sort of. She still had a certain glow to her, but her wings were gone, and it wasn’t like she was giving off light; more like she had a very good skin care regimen.
The house was a human house, as most houses tend to be, especially on Earth. It was the first time Iofiel had technically been in one, but she understood the place intrinsically from the get-go. If the lights were a bit more consistently on, she would have liked to study it regardless, but she was quite pleased to know what a mudroom was regardless.
A demon let them inside without much of a word, or maybe he said a word but Iofiel couldn’t tell: loud, too loud music immediately greeted them past the wooden front door, so overpowering that Iofiel wondered if one of the demons had cast a sound dampening spell over the outside.
Most of the house was sharp, dim populated by sudden slants of light— harsh spotlights that either flashed bright colors or else sat, still, flooding an area with too-white lights. Damien stood with Iofiel in the main hall as she took a moment to gaze inquisitively in every direction. Her eye was instantly caught on the living room, where colors flashed red, blue, and white without concern for the tempo of the music, and someone laughed a high, bubbly cackle. Most of the demons Iofiel could see were lounged about drinking or talking, but at least one was dancing.
“Dancing is so strange,” Iofiel remarked, watching the way the dancer’s body moved. In the rhythm, yes, but sometimes out of it, their hips swaying and jerking about, eyes sometimes closed, mouth sometimes moving to the words. It must have been tiring, and it might have been fun, but Iofiel had never seen anything quite like it before. When she thought of dancing, her first thought was something solemn, a ballet set to strings. This wasn’t it, but unlike a ballerina, this dancer was grinning.
Damien briefly bared her teeth when she sighed, “Remember to blend.”
“I just don’t understand it. We don’t really do art, though I suppose we can appreciate the creative merit to it.”
“Io—”
“Okay, okay, I’m done.” They went into the loudest of the rooms, guided by some innate sense of Damien’s for where the drinks were. Of course, to Iofiel it seemed the drinks were everywhere. Maybe the best drinks were in the living room, though.
It wasn’t too crowded, but Damien kept a protective hand out near Iofiel’s sleeve, her usually rough exterior replaced with cautious looks and careful reminders. She told Iofiel she didn’t have to drink, but Iofiel wanted to try some again, and she was given a cup of pale liquor. It tasted disgusting, with a hint of mint.
They settled onto the carpeted corner of the living room, shouting to be heard over the speakers, Iofiel’s eyes mostly focused on the dancers. “So what do you do at parties? Drink?”
“Drink until the alcohol starts making choices for you,” Damien said, downing hers about as fast as Maalik had at the angels’ party. Maybe they’d get along better than either of them thought. At least they had ‘the desire to consume vast quantities of alcohol’ in common.
“How do you dance?” Iofiel said, tucking her hair behind her ears. Nearby, she could feel the sadness of a human, though she couldn’t quite place who.
Damien turned her head to see what Iofiel was looking at. “That? That’s not even dancing. They’re just grinding—” She pointed to two humans preforming an exhausting looking dance— “That guy is literally just jumping a lot—” so he was— “And she’s... she’s mostly standing still and shifting her weight to the beat of the music. You could do any of those, no skill needed. I’d just advise against grinding.”
“What’s that?”
Damien looked at her pitifully. “One day, Io.”
Though the music was, again, dreadfully demanding on Iofiel’s attention, the bass stinging parts of her hearing she hadn’t ever considered before, the party seemed quite lax. Perhaps it was just early in the night. On a couch nearby, a demon had her horns out, and the human beside her eyed them warily, but without fear. There was definitely the feeling of magic in the air, a faint trickling on the nerves. Some humans chose this path for themselves, after all.
The angel in her— well, all of her— instinctively kicked up with a desire to get out of here, preferably with as many humans as possible, and then spend the next several years making sure her new charges kept away from black magic. Quite unreasonable, and more hypocritical now that she was a student of the stuff herself.
“Art is just a bit too unreasonable for me,” Iofiel said. The demon who’d been jumping frantically to the music was now lying on the floor catching his breath. “I can like it, but it’s a bit beyond my genetics, you know? I don’t think I was made with the capacity for it.”
“Again, they’re barely dancing, and it certainly isn’t art.” Damien had a deep laugh. “Don’t you birds play the harp, or sing in the choir? Surely one of you has written a poem.”
Iofiel shook her head. “I mean, clearly someone is doing some things— I have a poster in my room that was painted... but it’s just a portrait. There’s no worthwhile purpose to creativity.” Iofiel got up. “I’m going to get another drink and wander. I suppose there’s always something educational about situations like this.”
“Hey! Wait— art doesn’t need to have a purpose, it’s about— hey!” Damien was clearly offended by Iofiel’s departure, but didn’t follow her.
This party was the worst party she’d ever been to. At least the angels had had the sense to enjoy the stars— the idea to tag along, to waste some time while Maalik studied had seemed exciting, but now Iofiel didn’t know what she was thinking. She poured herself a drink from one of the available bottles, and a demon gave her a funny look. Nearly mouthed something, but she didn’t know enough about liquor to know why.
Archangel Michael had, sort of, cleared her. Most of the school was aware of her by now, perhaps even all of them. She still got mean looks and the occasional jeer, but things were good. She was studying. The higher ups didn’t seem too concerned over her behavior as long as she kept her vow of eternal loyalty, etc. Like that had ever needed to be questioned.
She just wished she felt a little more certain.
She wandered through the kitchen, keeping her head down in the full lighting just in case, then found herself heading up stairs. There was a bathroom with the door half opened where a demon was doing their makeup, and obscene noises were coming through one of the other doors. Laughter drifted past her from somewhere. On the landing, a demon was lying face down, small plastic cup of alcohol knocked over onto the carmine rug. Iofiel crouched down beside them, turning them over.
The face was unfamiliar at first, but angels have ways of recognizing energy— the demon, though now with pale skin and brown hair, was Salem. He barely passed for his violet and mint true form, though it seemed the scar Archie had left him— a sharp, white X on his cheek— had remained.
He shunned his eyes from the dim hallway lights at first, but then gradually sat up, moaning. Iofiel wondered at first if there was any sort of precaution she ought to take, but from the confused look Salem was giving her, her worries v
anished instantly.
“Are you okay?” Some responsible tick in her blood reminded her of the negative effects of alcohol, and though she was quite aware being kind to demons had gotten her into this mess in the first place, felt obliged to smile. “You should drink some water, and head home.”
“Who are you?” Salem asked, his voice... bad. It was impossible to determine if he was genuinely curious, or simply trying his best to be confrontational.
All things considered, Iofiel did not particularly care for Salem. However, he did appear to have a cut on his forehead, perhaps from walking into something, and surely anyone this drunk and alone at demon house party had a couple issues she ought to pity. So she leaned forward without a word and sealed his cut up, pleased to discover her angelic magic had no obvious ill effects.
He didn’t seem aware of what had just happened, leaning back for a moment and tracing where her fingers had run a second before with a gaping mouth. Then he looked at her inquisitively. “Hey.”
“Hi. It’s unhealthy to drink to excess.”
“I’m not even drunk.” He ran his fingers through his hair, ruffling it until it was frayed and fluffy. “Just taking a rest. Who are you?”
“Objectively?”
Salem looked down and muttered “Lookin’ after people at... parties and such,” quite quietly. Then he grabbed Iofiel’s drink and downed a couple gulps of it. “...That’s not water.”
Iofiel took the cup away from him before he had anymore, and watched him convulse a few seconds after, spitting a little bit onto the carpet. “Yeah, uh...”
Salem suddenly collapsed onto her lap, curling up around her knee. With a groan, he said, “What are you doing, talking to me about drinking safety and then carrying around a... full glass of straight gin. Fuck.”
“Please get off my lap.”
He slowly pushed himself away from her, using her legs as support, but the moment he tried to sit independently upright he collapsed again in her direction. This time, though, he was at least leaning on her shoulder. She could tolerate this, she decided, if she was going to tolerate everything else about this.
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