by Gayle Riley
“I know you ache for what you’ll find there,” the demon said with the angel’s voice. “See you soon.”
All around them, ancient security measures that were woven into the fabric of Paradise itself began to activate, having woken to the presence of a demon among them. Sigils, inscribed in the First Language of Creation itself, swept through the water, up above its surface, forming complex circles and interlinking chains, old divine mechanisms connecting together for the first time in centuries. All of which were seemingly having trouble dealing with Crowley, whose angelic disguise was apparently quite convincing. He rose, false wings flapping, to the surface of the Astral Ocean, and for a moment before he vanished, he looked down through the ripples he had created at Ambriel, waving just once before a burst of magic took him away from Paradise entirely, through pathways that clearly only he knew.
Devilish creature…
Others soon swept into the space above the ocean, the Powers who were the Creator’s muscle, searching for the intruder that had somehow slipped the security systems. Ambriel remained below the water, out of easy sight, staring up at the space Crowley had occupied, her thighs clenched together and a dreamy, absent look in her eyes. Wetness of an entirely different sort, apart from the washing liquid pressure of the Astral Ocean around her, had seeped between her legs, warm and sticky, something Ambriel did not even have a name for. She stared. Slowly, she let herself rise to the surface.
Ambriel almost let herself break through without putting her clothes back on. That damned demon…
Chapter 3
Crowley felt the passageway strain around him, what little of Paradise’s security that had managed to adhere to him attempting valiantly to pull him back. The path he was using was not meant to exist. It was a doorway slung between two fundamentally incompatible planes of existence, and he could see the walls of it flexing with the strain of staying together. The midpoint crackled and seethed, where the two realities met and bucked against one another, and passing through it was a great relief for the demon. Safety lay on the other side.
It had been a risk, going after Ambriel like that. A calculated one, but a risk nonetheless.
The path spat him out some distance from solid ground, its exit point hovering a good fifteen feet or so above the shore of Styx, the river of the dead, and it sealed up behind him almost immediately after Crowley made his way through it. The demon felt the tension leaving his body at that point, the effort he exerted maintaining the spell suddenly relaxed, and so he glided gently to the ground, sauntered downward as though gravity were something that happened to other people. By the time his feet touched the dark soil on his particular side of Styx, he was almost entirely lethargic.
In truth, he would have preferred Cocytus as a meeting place, whose bubbling banks sounded mournful and sad, grieving for things lost. But one, sadly, could not have everything. Crowley sighed.
“Are you done with your game yet, Crowley?” There was a rumbling from off to one side, and Eo emerged from the black sands, huge clumps of earth falling away from his statuesque figure. “You aren’t just wasting my time, are you?”
“Remains to be seen,” Crowley replied, in a rare spasm of honesty. It was still possible, he acknowledged, that Ambriel would not arrive, which would leave him alone with an irritable, rather large demon. “But I don’t think so. You didn’t see the look in her eyes, but I did. She’ll come. You’d best keep hiding, my friend.”
“I’m not your friend, Crowley,” Eo growled, but he did as he was told, sinking back into the earth to wait for the appointed time. They may not be, as Eo said, friends, but that didn’t mean that the other demon didn’t know a good time when it fell into his lap.
And Crowley was always good for a good time.
Chapter 4
Ambriel could not say for sure how long it took her to get to the river Styx, at least not in terms of how much time had passed for Crowley. She knew for herself it had only been a few minutes, as long as it took for her to extricate herself from the massive heavenly host that had answered the security breach and find a series of points between planes that would lead her from one place to the other. She would never admit to how quickly she had answered the demon’s summons, though; frankly, she hoped it had been quite a bit longer from Crowley’s perspective.
Styx could be a strangely beautiful place, when looked at from certain angles. Its banks were composed of black sand, a sort of desert of the stuff extending all the way to the cavernous walls that contained it. On one side was as close to Paradise as a mortal could get without being explicitly invited in, the entrance to the planes that contained the dead, in one way or another. Branching paths could be seen extending off from the wall on that side, tunnels and trails that led to all the places the souls of the departed could go: Paradise at one end, Hell at the other, and a near infinite series of additional afterlives and purgatories, fit for purpose after the dead had crossed the river and found their place among the departed.
On the other side? Mortality, life, all those things both large and small that made up the mortal plane, things that angels and demons both only got to experience at a remove, as agents of other places carrying out the wills of their masters, whether divine or infernal.
Crowley, very pointedly, was standing on the mortal side when Ambriel arrived. He waited while she walked across.
“I knew you’d come,” he said, and there was no trace of smugness to be found in his voice. He had just stated what was, to him, an objective fact. His eyes flicked to meet the angel’s as she set foot on the mortal side of the river. “Curiosity isn’t a sin, but it’s the one force that drives us all to the brink, time and time again.”
“Maybe I came with reinforcements,” Ambriel sniffed, “because you are the demon who invaded Paradise.”
“You didn’t,” Crowley shook his head. “I would have felt it. Besides, you know what I am, and that’s why you’d never do something like that. You already know you’re doomed, so you came alone. You came to Fall, Mayflower.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“Stop getting so flustered when I do,” was the simple response.
Crowley took a step forward, but Ambriel did not take one back. The demon was just that little bit closer, close enough now that she could see the flecks of gold in his eyes, smell the latent magic on him keeping his physical form in check while in the mortal realm. She could see ash colored skin covering strong, masculine muscles, perhaps just a little bit more than he meant to reveal, below the loose-fitting clothes he wore.
When Eo burst out of the ground behind her, Ambriel wasn’t surprised. Lies-within-lies, plans within plans. She struggled all the same, the feeling of hard musculature wrapping around her waist awakening some primal impulse to fight back, but it wasn’t exactly the smothering, choking hold that she had been expecting. Sigils glowed bright on Eo’s forearms, things that Ambriel read immediately as protective spells, enchantments to enhance his strength and shield the demon should the angel fight back with anything larger than her own body. Any miracles she tried to summon would find themselves stopped in short order, a very prudent move.
A very Crowley move.
“We won’t be running away from this anymore,” the ashen demon said as she struggled with Eo, shaking his head. “Since I think we both know where this is going. So I have a request for you, Angel, name me.”
“What?” Ambriel said, throat constricted, heart sinking. Her eyes darted, scanning the shores of the river Styx for some form of escape, anything to give her a little room to maneuver. But of course, this place was empty—it was a stage of transition, more metaphor than physical existence. The souls of the dead flitted all around, just on a different level of being than the one Ambriel and her demonic interlocutor occupied. None of them would be in any position to render assistance, anyway.
“My name. Names are important, Queen of Cups, especially for us. They define us, grant us the borders of our power and domains, our spheres of
influence,” Crowley was walking now, pacing the black sands restlessly, and Ambriel found her eyes locking to him inexorably, as though drawn in by some strange gravity. “You know mine. And you’re hesitant to say it because it is the reason why you’re doomed to fail, why temptation will grip you tighter and tighter until you give in. You’re no stronger than any of us, no grand moral arbiter. You’re just a weak angel, the Gemini guardian infected with the same flaw as the rest of us. Name me, Mayflower, and prepare for the Fall.”
Silence. Ambriel’s lips pursed, her mouth a tight line. Crowley walked in closer, until they were eye to eye, and his gaze was an expectant, hungry thing that did strange things itself to Ambriel. She felt something twist inside her, something else tighten, lower down. A clenching, something she had no name for and no way to prepare for it. Arousal, helium-light and tingling, spreading up from the lower reaches of her body. She knew she was blushing, something that Crowley definitely had not missed, but when she didn’t speak, refused to, he rolled his eyes and gestured to the demon holding her tight.
“Eo,” he said, and in response the larger demon shifted his grip, the runes covering his arms glowing brighter, humming softly now. As Crowley continued, Ambriel felt the new spell begin its work upon her, reaching down through the layers of her form to touch at something more—fundamental.
“It has been too long since I’ve seen one of your kind in their true form,” Crowley said, offering Ambriel a sidelong glance. “Divine regalia is truly something to behold. If you won’t name me, perhaps you’d favor me with a look at yours?”
“No!” Ambriel exclaimed, without thinking, feeling her stomach flip inside her, her very body waver and lose definition as she struggled to keep it together. There were plenty of good reasons to retain her human guise here. The souls of the departed thronged around them, even if they weren’t readily visible, and not a one of them would be capable of existing in the same space as an angel unmasked, an Ophanim at the height of her power—but none of this reached the true source of her resistance. Her true form was a private thing, an intimate thing; she had already been naked in front of Crowley, in her human form, but that and the nudity inherent in being as she had been Created was another thing entirely. A longing for it, treacherous and low, settled into her belly, and for just a second, she could feel herself, her true self, pushing at the edges of her avatar, wanting to get out, coaxed to the surface by the spell Eo was working.
Crowley’s face was a desirous thing, the handsome angles of his features filled with bright energy as he watched Ambriel squirm. A voice in the back of her mind, the voice of temptation, whispered that it wouldn’t be so bad, that it might feel nice, that she hadn’t been free for so long She hadn’t been her true self even in front of the Creator for so long.
“Name me, then,” Crowley whispered, an intimate tone that belonged in the dead of night, the darkness of bedrooms. Ambriel shuddered, and for a moment there was a suggestion of something else in the air, occupying the same space as her. Wings, laden with eyes, spanning the entire length and breadth of the cavern.
With a great, wrenching effort, Ambriel pushed herself back down into human arms and legs, aware of the departed milling unseen all around her.
“Mayflower, come on,” Crowley purred, and Ambriel heard herself whimper. “Show me what I want to see.”
Another spasm of need ran through the pussy—vagina—that Ambriel’s body had, and again her form rebelled and split, another of her rending the air. A huge structure, wrought in shining crystal, impossible geometric patterns moving inside one another, fractal motion whirling right down to a center that never ended. Then it was gone, and Ambriel was panting with the effort of it, and plenty else besides. Crowley had reached out and laid one hand against her crystal side—something that should have been impossible, should have disintegrated the hand right off of his wrist—and this had transferred, once she had regained human shape, to his warm palm resting against her chest, just below her collarbone, nearly on the swell of her breast.
Ambriel shivered, but did nothing to remove it.
“Wouldn’t it feel better just to let go?” Crowley crooned. “Isn’t it stifling, always being so controlled?”
Ambriel could feel the spell ramping up, Eo’s magic and Crowley’s magnetic personality coming together to form a singular, impossible to resist seduction. Her forms came faster now, grew closer to her true self with every shift, and the time she could force herself to remain human shrank every time. She was a hand, reaching down from some high and radiant place, with more fingers than should be possible. She was a shadow, thin and black, a great pool of darkness that spanned the river, her own shadow now inverted and projected above her as an immense, awful sphere, dissonant patterns running across an otherwise featureless surface. She was a color, then a shape. A bell tone, then something with four faces. Each was a suggestion of the whole, some part of her rendered in new detail by the magics being worked upon her, and each time she returned to her angelic shape by sheer force of will.
And each time, Crowley was there, stroking her, whispering sweet, awful, tempting things, things that echoed and repeated in the darkness. He touched her freely, each shift in her form feeling very much like having her clothes stripped off, piece by piece, by a lover. His voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, and combined with his closeness, the warm hardness of the demon behind her, holding her close, it formed a sensual song that drove Ambriel to near madness, awash with emotions she neither had names for, nor knew how to deal with. Crowley put his hands on her hips, eliciting a shiver of lust from the angel, and drew close, his lips brushing hers, his breath tickling her skin. Sandwiched between the two demons, squirming and desperate, Ambriel’s defenses lapsed for the briefest of moments, resulting in a kiss that spiked right down to her core. Eo’s spellwork rushed into the weak spot, flooding down through the layers of Ambriel’s soul, and as her form blurred once more, she heard Crowley’s voice.
“Name me, Mayflower—”
Something snapped, and the Queen of Cups’ true form surged to the surface. She expanded, grew, raced skyward as skin and muscle collapsed inward into burning bright light. With a roaring sound, a great wheel of fire bloomed to life, filling the cavern with clear, magnesium sharp light, a flame so concentrated and powerful that it seemed to transcend any notion of truly burning, a band of white incandescence that was somehow still firmly within Eo’s grasp. Eyes opened along the rim of the wheel, themselves blazing with divine light, more eyes than could ever be counted. All of them turned their gaze to Crowley, who did not shrink from the blinding illumination, but merely faced it down with a reverent expression, the man who had suddenly gotten everything he wanted.
He had a name, this thing that called itself Crowley now, and in thunderous tones that rocked the cavern walls and made the River Styx itself shudder away from her, Ambriel relented. She spoke it, “Grigori!”
The walls shook. The word resounded, slammed against all it encountered. And just as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. The spell faded, Eo’s grasp faltering just fractionally, and Ambriel was allowed to surge back down onto a humanoid form, falling to newly formed knees on the black sand shore. The thing that was Crowley was there to catch her, and he pulled her to her feet and into his arms then. There was no magic in him now, no trap for her to fall into, just the simplicity of an embrace, as Ambriel regained her breath and felt her soul sing with the exhilaration of confession. It really had been too long since she had taken her true form, and now she was feeling a pair of arms around her, the sort of simple human contact that Paradise so often lacked, and the demons were smiling.
Perhaps she had made the right choice after all.
“Watcher Ikaros, they called me,” Crowley said, his voice soft, sweetened by victory. Six wings extended from his back, remnants of a divine past long since forgotten. ‘The second of three angels that descended to observe Man. And I Fell. All the Grigori did. We were trusted to do this first, the
Creator found us most righteous, and we Fell. And if even we could Fall—you know that you could. That you will, and that I know how. You look at me and you know you’re doomed, that I can get you to want things the way nobody else can… and you still came here, Mayflower.”
“All angels really want to Fall,” Eo rumbled behind her, holding her as gently now as a giant of his size possibly could. Leftover magic was steaming off of his biceps, leaving a lavender tang on Ambriel’s tongue that, in that moment, was the taste of life itself. She had never experienced such sensations as vibrantly as she did then, in a body fresh in the making, a new human form with all the kinks in her true self that had formed from being cramped into smaller bodies for so long worked out. There was so little use for an angelic true form these days, but Ambriel had still been created that way, and had been forcing her essence into more compact, more useful bodies for so long. There was freedom, in being able to shift back.
Freedom so heady that it took Ambriel a moment to realize her human form no longer had clothes.
“That’s why only one pair of wings is for flying,” Crowley said softly, sliding gentle, ashen fingers around the rim of Ambriel’s navel. “And the others are for covering ourselves. Shields. Covering our eyes when we descend. ‘Fear not…’ that’s not just for the humans, Ambriel.”
“I… I can see that now,” Ambriel felt her voice trembling, finding herself leaning back into Eo without thinking. She thrilled to the touch of skin on skin. “You live like this all the time, down here?”