by Dante King
“Would you like to come in with us?” Lilith said suddenly, her grin going just a touch too wide. “I would love to catch up with you, niece. It’s been too long…”
“Nah, I’ll wait out here,” Mareth said, gazing from Lilith to me. Then, to my surprise, she leaned over and made out with me. Her tongue slid into my mouth, and suddenly my hands were at her waist, hugging her to me. I felt her snicker as she broke the kiss, running her claws down my chest like a friendly pet.
“Don’t leave Pride without me,” the succubus panted. “You or Christina. I’ll escort you both to the dorms when you’re done with Auntie over here.”
Lilith looked utterly fucking furious. I’m sad to say I didn’t understand the reason she was that pissed off—it wouldn’t become clear until later. When it did, I’d be kicking myself.
“Sure thing,” I growled, giving her the same pat on the ass I’d given Christina. Her tail twitched like a leg kicking out in the middle of sex, then coiled around the small of her back as she strode off, winking at me over her shoulder.
“She’s so fucking cool,” Christina said, her voice thick with lust. “I can’t wait for you to claim her, baby.”
Lilith gestured angrily at the interior of the tent. “We don’t have all day,” she said, her voice rising to a high, imperious tone. “If you’d please follow me…”
The air was cooler and damper inside the tent, almost like the underground temple of the Lust school. A lush carpet covered in intricate pentagrams stretched across the floor, so thick that the heels of Lilith’s boots sank into the fabric as she walked. A chandelier with a living flame hung from the ceiling, pacing its tiny cylindrical cell like a tiger in a zoo cage as the shadows stretched and flickered over the canvas walls.
Lilith’s desk stood at the far wall. It was carved out of stone of similar hue and type of the walls of the Greed school, with one bit of ornamentation: a carved chicken’s foot at each corner rather than an ordinary table leg. Baba Yaga, I thought, remembering a class on mythology I’d taken back in college. So that’s where the Russians got that idea from…
With a gesture, Lilith dismissed her retainers. She settled down in a high-backed chair with red velvet cushions on the opposite side of the desk, the intricate goat’s head emblem I’d already begun to recognize as the logo of the Infernal Academy carved in the wood above her head. Before I could ask if it was specific to the Pride School — and if it might be a souvenir reminding Lilith of her own path up through the ranks — she motioned for us to sit in the two chairs the servants laid out. These were nowhere near as comfortable as Lilith’s seat—probably on purpose.
The Headmistress picked up a scroll from the desk, flipping through it with her long nails. “There’s a whole introductory welcome speech I’m supposed to read you, written by Lucifer himself,” she said sarcastically. “But it’s dreadfully boring, and since you’ve already spoken to the man himself, I assume we can dispense with the pleasantries and get down to the nitty-gritty.”
That sounded good to me. I nodded.
“Before I begin, would you like some water? Tea? The blood of Christ, served in a ram’s horn?”
My jaw dropped open at that last one. Christina’s, too. “You don’t really have…?”
“A joke,” Lilith assured me, though her face had a curiously pinched expression.
“How about some coffee?” Christina asked hopefully. “Luke and I are both a little tired after our whirlwind tour of the Infernal Academy. Right, Luke?”
“A little caffeine sounds great,” I agreed.
Lilith clapped her hands together three times, raising her voice. “Servants! Bring coffee!”
Two of the retainers we’d seen earlier entered the tent from the rear, carrying a steaming pot of coffee and three mugs. One poured, while the other distributed the pick-me-up to me, Christina, and Lilith. The coffee was black as the Ace of Spades and smelled the way sunlight smells to a plant as it first bursts through the Earth.
“Holy cow,” I whispered, taking an experimental sip. It was both the best and strongest coffee I’d ever tasted. “That’ll put some hair on your chest. Woof.”
“We’re connoisseurs of caffeine down here,” Lilith purred lustily. “It’s my lifeblood, Luke, really it is.”
Christina stared down into her mug with a mournful expression. “There’s, ah—no cream or sugar? Nothing like that?”
Lilith’s eyes widened a fraction, the pupils contracting. “We only drink it black in Hell,” the Headmistress said in a haughty tone. “Anything else is...well, it’s simply not coffee! Adulterating your brew is the sort of thing the cloud-sitters do. I wouldn’t recommend asking for anything to add to your coffee outside of this tent, Christina—unless you wish to be shunned even more than a Mog normally is.”
The words hit Christina in the gut. I didn’t like Lilith talking to her that way, not one bit.
“No one’s going to give Christina any shit,” I growled, angrier than I’d intended. “If they do, they can deal with me.”
Lilith sat back in her chair, her brows shooting to her hairline. Belatedly, I realized I’d just indirectly threatened the Headmistress of my new school. Great.
“It’s good, though,” I said, holding up my cup like an olive branch. “Try it, Christina. I bet you won’t even need to add anything to it.”
She took a dainty little sip. “Oh geez! Wow, I think I just singed my lip!”
“You’ll get used to it,” Lilith said wryly. “Give it a thousand years or so, you’ll be drinking it by the bucketload.”
A simple enough phrase, but the implications left me reeling. “What do you mean, a thousand years?” I asked, glancing at Christina for confirmation. As a transformed demon, I supposed I should have expected Christina to have an extended lifespan, but me as well? “I’m not really going to live that long, am I?”
“If no one kills you first,” Lilith said mildly, sipping at her coffee. “I’m surprised this hasn’t occurred to you already, Luke. Why would Lucifer go through all this trouble to install a potential successor, only to have them keel over and die a few decades later?”
My mind swam with the possibilities. “So if I make it to the top and become Archlord,” I said, trying to come to grips with it, “then I’ll live for thousands of years?”
Lilith set her mug to the side. “Young man, you’ll live for thousands of years now,” she said, giving Christina a surprised look. She clearly expected someone to have broken this down for me before this meeting. “You’ll also remain a young man for quite a few centuries, with all the...ahem, stamina that implies. The next few decades should be very exciting for you, surely. As I said, if no one kills you first, that is.”
Thousands of years. I’d never really thought about the end—I was way too young to be worried about things that probably wouldn’t happen until I was old and gray. Yet hearing it straight from Lilith’s mouth: that the power Lucifer had given me would keep me young and handsome for centuries, alive for an entire millenia or more...wow.
My jokes are going to get out of style quick, I thought, focusing on the wrong thing entirely. I’ll have to keep up on my pop culture. Shit, if I end up Archlord, maybe I’ll end up MAKING pop culture...
The retainers withdrew as quickly as they’d come, leaving the pot of coffee sitting on Lilith’s desk. I took it and refilled the top half of my mug, using the movement to check Lilith out a little bit more.
“You’ve been Headmistress for a thousand years?” I asked, taking another sip of coffee. Topping it off made it even hotter, and I had to suppress a wince. “That’s some tenure.”
Christina kicked me beneath the table. Lilith saw it and laughed.
“No, it’s alright,” she said, chuckling. “Normally it’s considered extremely impolite to ask a demoness about her age, but you were an ordinary human until very recently. Besides, we’re alone now—we can let our hair down somewhat.” She tucked her fingers together, running her nails between each dig
it in a sensual motion. “I’ve been Headmistress of the Infernal Academy for just over a thousand years, actually. I hope you don’t mind being in the presence of an older woman, young man…”
Is she flirting with me? I wondered. Fooling around with one of Lucifer’s girls was playing with fire—literally—but as she said, we were alone. Besides, I could trust Christina to keep her lips zipped.
“Actually, I prefer that,” I said, leaning back in my chair and taking another swallow of coffee. “Enthusiasm is great, of course, but experience beats it nine times out of ten.”
Lilith’s face lit up like a Christmas tree. “Really? My badness, what a forward young man you are!”
I couldn’t keep the smirk off my face. “Honestly, I’m surprised a gorgeous demon like yourself condescends to show the ropes to new students. You’d think you’d be better served out on the field, making angels kneel to you or something like that.”
A high, keening whine left Christina’s throat. I realized what I’d stepped in when Lilith’s good humor evaporated, an angry expression hardening her coldly beautiful face.
“I should be,” the Headmistress muttered, speaking as if to herself. “If only things were different, I’d be where I belong and not sitting here listening to half-formed demonic brats disrespect me…”
Shit. Christina’s leg kept right on kicking me, though this time Lilith failed to remark on it. Even more so than bringing up Mareth’s mom, I could tell I’d just reached out and pissed all over Lilith’s third rail. I probably couldn’t have made her angrier if I’d tried to.
Yet at the same time, I was learning something interesting. Lilith felt trapped here, surely, and that undoubtedly had something to do with the fact that she hadn’t spoken to Lucifer in years. Decades, if Mareth was truly to be believed—I’d have to ask her later. Assuming I left the tent alive, that is.
Lilith mastered herself with a great effort, putting both elbows on the desk. “Perhaps,” the demoness said with a snarl, “once there’s a new Archlord on the throne of Hell, my true talents will be recognized.”
“Absolutely,” Christina said, holding up her hands. The blonde looked desperate to smooth this over with Lilith sooner, rather than later. I could understand that—I’d just insulted someone she considered a celebrity. “Luke has one hell of an eye for talent, in fact. He’s building a team, and we’re going to knock those other candidates for Archlord out of contention.”
“I didn’t even realize there were other candidates,” I said, flashing Lilith a smirk that was more smug than I felt. “I figured I just had to reach out and take it.”
Lilith’s face formed a little ‘o’ of surprise. Then she grinned, quite unexpectedly, and took such a deep sip of her coffee that the mug was nearly empty when she was done.
“That’s the kind of attitude I like to see,” the Headmistress said after she’d swallowed. She’d gone back to sex kitten mode like I’d flipped a switch somewhere inside of her.
She changes moods like Christina puts on clothes, I realized. I need to be really careful around this woman.
“The Academy,” I said, pouring Lilith a new cup of coffee as soon as she put down her mug. She gave me a surprised look, startled by my gallantry. “I believe you were going to go over some of the more boring points of our orientation?”
Lilith wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. Two very cute horns sprang from either side of her head, a deep spiral groove cut into each almost like a drill. “Of course,” she said, smiling through her awkwardness. “I allowed myself to get a little carried away—my apologies. You need the basics.”
Both Christina and I leaned forward.
“Classes run year round,” Lilith explained, dropping into a didactic tone I would soon come to recognize. This was the way a demon or demoness sounded when they were giving a lecture—the kind they didn’t have much personal excitement about or stake in. Later on, I’d learn to avoid the instructors who sounded like it too much of the time. “You’ll have them six days a week, all save for Sinday—which would be Sunday to those of you used to Earth. We do the Sabbath a little bit different around here—like our coffee, it’s distinctly black.”
“Sounds like a heavy course load,” I said, rubbing my hands together. It would be a lot, of that I was sure, but I was ready. Christina, too.
“Not that we don’t have breaks and holidays, of course,” Lilith added with a wave of her hand. “The year is filled with celebratory events, most of which you’ll learn by heart. A calendar of events is published in the student commons, and you’ll be able to access it via your subspace as well, once you link that up to the Academy. Assuming you’ve learned how to access your subspace, that is.”
“I have,” I told her. Now it was my turn to kick Christina. The last thing Lilith needed to hear was that I’d had a threesome in mine the first time I opened my subspace—or that there was a live human hanging out there at this very moment. Not for the first time, I wondered how Maddie was doing.
“No problems there, then,” Lilith agreed with a smirk. “We don’t follow the calendar of the Saints, obviously, but we have our own pantheon of champions and superstars to compensate. You might be surprised at a few of the names you see when you get the full list…”
“I’m so excited,” Christina murmured. She turned to me, a big smile on her face, her wings flapping eagerly over her shoulders. “Thank you so much for bringing me here, Luke. This is everything I could have ever dreamed of and more…”
“Hey,” I told her, putting a hand on her thigh. “You’ve earned this.”
With a start, I realized I believed it. Any bitterness I’d felt toward Christina back in her human form had well and truly faded. Melted away in the hot, tight warmth of her luscious body. I didn’t even really think of her as a human anymore—this was my demon girl sitting next to me, my ride-or-die chick. We were a team, and that team was going to start getting a lot larger soon.
“So cute,” Lilith said—though, did I detect a trace of bitterness in that tone? “Now, we don’t have a lot of rules at the Infernal Academy. We leave strictness and austerity to those pious fools far up above.”
In a flash, the room was bathed in a holy, golden light. Two angels stood behind Lilith, each trying their damndest to tug her backwards, away from Christina and me. Although they worked with all their might, their muscles straining, the demoness remained calmly sitting in her chair, completely oblivious. What the Hell?
It only lasted a moment—like that strange vision I’d had while driving around Christina’s neighborhood, it quickly faded. Lilith gave me a strange look, her flawlessly plucked eyebrows rubbing together across her forehead as she tried to figure me out.
“The angels,” I said, thinking of the strange decision the Morningstar Program presented me with. What would have happened if I’d selected the Angel of Light, really?
“Just so,” Lilith hissed. “You can break quite a few of the so-called ‘rules’ down here, as you two learned in the Lust wing. But one you must follow is attendance. You’re expected to show up promptly to all of your lessons, and remain in class throughout your term. I know it’s very tempting to play hooky, or sneak out midway through a lesson for a tryst with this or that demon. You might think that such rules are flexible, the same way we treat the restrictions around fraternization, partying, and visiting the Fae realm. That’s why I’m here to tell you: it’s not. Tardiness and absences will dramatically affect your grades, and throw a wrench in your quest to become Archlord.”
I nodded. “I understand,” I told Lilith. There’s that word again, I thought, squinting. The Fae Realm. Xora told me one of the people working here was a transfer student from there. “Can I ask a question?”
Lilith trailed off, bewildered by my request. “I suppose,” she said, giving me a put-upon look.
“I know that this is the Infernal Realm,”I said, confirming it with a glance at Christina, who nodded. “And I know that the angels—the ‘cloud-sitt
ers’, as you so eloquently put it—live in the Celestial Realm.” I sat back in my seat. “But I’ve never heard of the Fae Realm before.”
“Nor should you have,” Lilith said with a shrug. “I doubt even Christina has heard of it. It wouldn’t be in any of the books our Lord gives his rank-and-file devotees. It’s possible you’ll go there one day—our curriculum involves a number of field trips to various other Realms and Circles of Hell. There’s even some practical on-the-job training for our advanced students.” She grinned. “We’re not some ivory tower where theory is exalted to the exclusion of practice. Leave that to the angels. Our graduates come out ready: ready to torment mortals, to form soul contracts, to bind lesser demons beneath them.”
“And the Fae?” I asked, unwilling to let it go. Something about that word tugged at the back of my brain.
“I suppose,” Lilith said, giving me a strange look. “If that’s your aim, however, you might want to learn to crawl before you run, so to speak. Entering the Fae Realm requires some very difficult rituals—and, potentially, some intramural cooperation with the...other side.”
Lilith spit to the side as she finished her sentence, as if mentioning collaboration with angels disgusted her. After a moment, Christina leaned over and did the same.
They don’t like the idea of working with angels at all, I thought. And yet, Lucifer didn’t have this prejudice at all. Hell, he seemed pretty excited about me potentially having angelic powers…
“Lucifer was an angel once,” I blurted, before I could stop myself. “A fallen angel.”
Christina let out a little squeak, her eyes going wide as dinner plates. Lilith looked poleaxed.
“An astute point,” the gorgeous demoness finally said. Far above her head, the living flame in the chandelier twirled, alternating dappled bars of shadow and light across the canvas walls. “We could all stand to remember that, I suppose. I wasn’t aware that you knew about the other Fallen Angels, Luke.”