Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction

  He shook his head, to clear it of darkness and anger. This was not the time. The chair in which he sat became confining, and like a creature that knows no cage, he stood and began to walk across the floor, searching in silence—just one of the many.

  He found his quarry with little difficulty, but he expected no less; he had been watching the man for three months. He knew where he worked, where he lived, and who he occasionally went home with; he knew what he ate, what he preferred to drink, the style of clothing that best suited him, and the amount of money that he made at his job. He knew his phone number, his credit card numbers, his license-plate number, all the numbers that made his modern life.

  He even knew, in the haze of smoke and dimmed light, the lines that his face would take when a stranger, unknown and perhaps unwelcome, joined him at his customary seat.

  He was wrong.

  “I wondered when you’d get around to introducing yourself.” The young man stood, pushing his chair back noiselessly. He held out a hand. “I believe you know my name already, but in case you don’t, I’m Michael Brandt.”

  This was not expected. Michael Brandt, standing at full height, was tall; his eyes, dark and shadowed, were at a level with his visitor’s. He was pale, but winter did that to the skin, and this winter had been particularly harsh.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Brandt. I’m Aazian.” Aazian reached out then and took Michael’s hand firmly in his own. Shook it, with just the right firmness, at just the right length. Felt a warmth and a pulse that was so clear, it dwarfed all visual impressions.

  “Aazian.” Michael nodded quietly. “I don’t suppose you’re interested in a drink?”

  Aazian inclined his head, staring. He caught the attention of the waitress with a flick of his fingers in the crowded room. She came, he ordered. His companion grimaced oddly but did not demur. They looked at each other, silently letting the noise of the bar’s multiple conversations and arguments fill the air. Only when the drinks arrived did they attempt to resume a conversation.

  “Do you like snow?” Michael asked softly, gazing across the surface of amber liquid as if it were an ocean. He lifted his glass and looked through it as his companion.

  “Snow?” What he had been certain of was gone; Aazian raised a brow in surprise before he realized he had let surprise show. He felt a quickening of heat—how odd—and realized that he had, by accident, chosen a better victim than he could have imagined. “Why do you ask?”

  “Why don’t you answer?” Michael set the drink down on the table, without touching it.

  “Snow is … snow. I neither like nor dislike it.”

  “Then if you don’t mind, I think it best to dispense with pretense. Let’s go for a walk.” He stood again, and the motion drew his companion to his feet, as if one were steel and the other magnet.

  The snow drifted down in thick flakes; it was not bitterly cold, but it was not warm either. Michael Brandt, covered head to toe in wool and leather and other winter items, seemed lodged against the background of ice and night; if he was cold, it didn’t show.

  Aazian wore a coat but no hat, no scarf; these were confining. He did not actually wear boots, but no one noticed this; he was careful when he chose to be. But he cast no shadow in the street lights.

  “So, Aazian,” Michael said, his tone casual, his eyes intent, “what do you do for a living?”

  It drew a smile from Aazian; the light flickered off his teeth. It was a quaint question and a clumsy opening. He felt better for it, but oddly disappointed as well. “For a living? I shape souls, Michael Brandt.” As he said this, he let his voice be. All illusion, all pretense—as Michael had requested—were put aside.

  Nothing could fail to hear the voice that Aazian spoke with. Michael heard it. But his reaction was, again, different from the expected. He chuckled almost bitterly. “Figures.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and slowed his stride, turning his cheeks to catch snowflakes and let them melt, like tears, down the side of his face. Under the conic glow of the lamps, he looked almost beatific.

  Aazian snarled. It was not a noise he was given to making.

  Michael stepped back for a moment, and then shook his head. “I’m not laughing at you,” he said mildly. “Tell me about your work.”

  “And what,” Aazian replied, equally mild, “will you give me for my explanation?”

  “Is there a price?”

  “Of course.”

  Michael shrugged. “What do you want?”

  Aazian mimed a shrug; it was an exaggeration of motion and silence. “Your soul.”

  Michael laughed. “My soul?” But his laughter died quickly in the chill of Aazian’s remote expression. “You’ve been following me,” he said at last.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it just for this?”

  Michael Brandt was perhaps the most irritating human that Aazian had ever met. “Yes.”

  “Oh.” Then: “I thought you were some sort of serial killer or something.”

  “I have no interest in your body, Michael Brandt; it dies, decays, and becomes nothing.” Then he stopped. “If you thought I was ‘some sort of serial killer,’ why did you volunteer to walk with me, here, in isolation?”

  Michael Brandt kicked at an imaginary stone. He shrugged. “Maybe you don’t feel all that dangerous.” He looked away. “Or maybe I knew what you were.” And at this, his eyes came back to rest within Aazian’s. They were sharp; it was hard to tell in the light whether Michael’s cheeks were flushed with cold or some other reaction.

  Aazian did not refute the words. Instead, he shrugged, a shadow of Michael’s movement. “Very well, you knew. It has happened before.” This was not exactly the truth, but it was as much of the truth as Aazian was willing to share. “What is your price?”

  Michael smiled, his lips pale, his eyes unblinking. “Just like that? No song, no dance, no special effects?”

  “If you want special effects, you can make that part of your bargain.” But it was said wryly. In spite of himself, Aazian was amused.

  “And if I say that I don’t want to sell my soul?”

  Aazian shrugged. “Then I find someone else.”

  But Michael’s expression told him that they both knew it was a lie. Another devil could utter those words and mean them; Aazian could not. He had chosen. And he had chosen well, he was certain of it. This play of words, this strange, fey expression—they were of a piece with both reticence and challenge. Michael Brandt would fall.

  “How can I sell my soul?” Michael asked quietly.

  “Why or how?”

  “How?”

  “It has something to do with choices and permanence; to be honest, I’m not clear at all on the mechanics of the actual bargain. But basically, it’s like any human relationship; you gain something you want, and I gain something I want.”

  “You gain it forever.”

  “I gain it,” Aazian replied, almost by rote, “for as long as I live. As do you.” He held out a hand; the snow that fell against it did not melt.

  “What if I ask you for something that you can’t give me?”

  “Then I don’t get your soul. You don’t have to be tricky with words; in spite of general human wisdom, a devil and a lawyer are not the same creature. What you mean, you know, and the moment I agree to the challenge, I will know it as exactly as you do. Or more so; humans lie to themselves in ways that devils cannot.”

  “The challenge?”

  Aazian’s eyes narrowed. “To me, Michael Brandt,” he replied, relenting. “This is a challenge. It is a work of art, of planning, of understanding. I did not choose you because you would ask me for money, women, men, or fame.”

  “If I asked for world peace? A perfect place?”

  Aazian snorted. “Do I look like God?” He smiled, and his grin was almost feral.

  “I don’t know. What does God look like?”

  The humor fled Aazian’s face in a moment. It was gone; there was a starkness and then a distance that
he placed firmly between them. “Not even for your soul, little mortal, would I answer that question.” Then he shook himself, as if remembering the game. But when he spoke, it was as if part of the heart had left him. “I cannot grant world peace unless the population of the world is willing to sell its collective soul to me. Which will not happen.”

  “I didn’t think so, but I felt I had to ask.”

  “Conscience is such a petty thing.”

  “I imagine a lot people would agree with you.” Michael fell silent for a moment, and then he began to walk again.

  Aazian fell in step, smoothly and perfectly, blending the sound of their feet into one harmonic noise. “What do you want, Michael Brandt? I sense this is all a game, and I bore easily.”

  “I imagine, at your age, you do.” He shrugged. “But that’s easy; at my age, I do. All right.”

  “Yes?”

  “I want to be loved.”

  This was hardly a new request. Aazian could feel the disappointment like the taste of metal in his mouth. But he had chosen, and he had spent much time pondering; he had left little time for the work itself—the drawing of the contract. He had an artist’s leeway, but he still had to answer to a higher authority. He held out his hand, palm up. Michael laid his hand, palm down, across the devil’s. There was a momentary burst of pain; fire traveled up Michael’s arm and lit past his shoulder into the core of his chest.

  Before it was gone, before it had died, Michael Brandt took the last step and said two more words, each felt, each true. “By you.”

  Aazian froze in the Making, and the disappointment vanished; the heat of the words and the strangeness of the request burned it away like morning fog in the coming sun. He wanted to look at his hand, at his palm, but Michael’s hand was tight and not easily evaded. “Clever,” Aazian said at last.

  “If you fail, I go where I go.” Michael shrugged. “If you succeed, I go where you go.” His expression was wistful apprehension; he looked much younger than his thirty-odd years.

  “If I succeed,” Aazian replied, “you go to Hell.”

  “If you succeed,” Michael said, not to be frightened or put off, “why would I want heaven?”

  Then, only then, did Aazian laugh bitterly. “Because,” he replied, and he returned Michael’s grip with a ferocity of his own, “only in Heaven can you gaze upon the face of God.”

  It was a clever bargain, really. Aazian wondered, in the darkness of Michael’s sleep and the warmth of Michael’s breath, if it was rather too clever for a devil of his distinction. Because he could see, clearly, how Michael hoped to gain eternity in the safety of hell. If Aazian succeeded.

  And if he failed—he could allow for the possibility, given the unnatural request—then Michael’s life would be, before that point, the pampered domain of a devil trying desperately to enshroud a soul.

  He curled his fingers in Michael’s hair; Michael stirred, whispered a word or two, and drifted away again. There is a risk. Like an edge, it glimmered in darkness, taunting Aazian with its unnatural complexity. Risk. But he did not clearly remember what the danger was when the dawn broke over the windowsill in a spill of colored light.

  He knew, of course, the moment when the bargain was recorded. It did not happen immediately; there were other devils doing more primitive work, and they worked quickly. Of course, they tended to take those that would no doubt work their own way down to Hell, but that was all that was expected of them. Sloppy.

  Aazian’s Makings always required special attention, and each request was tended to by the Lord of Hell himself. So when Lucifer rose through the floors of Michael’s three-bedroom apartment, Aazian was only mildly surprised. Michael was cooking—for some reason, Michael liked this sorry human preoccupation enough to refuse any aid—and the smell of eggs and bacon filled the air. On Sunday, eggs and bacon. During the week, oatmeal, bran or granola.

  “Aazian.”

  Aazian bowed, as low as the floor would allow. “Lord.”

  “I have seen the Making, and I do not approve.”

  “Lord.”

  “Break it.”

  Aazian rose swiftly; were he human, his cheeks would have been flushed with the first hint of real anger beneath his fear. “Break it? When I have spent months following only this quarry and no others? Break it?”

  “Even so.” Lucifer’s light was blinding. “You play a game that you do not understand, and I will not have it played. Break the Making; there is no risk to you.”

  Aazian bowed his head again, as if in defeat. And then he raised it, and his eyes were shining. “There is the loss of pride, Lord. And pride is greater in Hell than anything.” It was a chancy thing to say; it could have gone either way.

  “Is it?” The Lord of Hell said softly. Before Aazian could move, Lucifer’s hand shot out; he gripped his servitor’s throat between his perfect fingers. “Remember that pride is greater, Aazian, and perhaps I will let you continue.”

  Lucifer disappeared then, in a flash of light and beauty. But the marks on Aazian’s throat remained there.

  “Aazian? Were you talking to someone?”

  “No one you know,” Aazian said, turning away from the empty room.

  He did not understand what love was. He could, of course, be sexual—that he understood well. He could manipulate, could emote in a certain way, could even react. But he knew, from his Making, that that was not what Michael Brandt would be content with. It was not romance he wanted, although he was a romantic. It was not sex, although he was sensual. It was not gestures, although the gestures gave him pleasure.

  Michael tried to explain it, of course. He even seemed eager to do so—eager to lose his soul, lose what he was in eternity. But he could only tell Aazian what it wasn’t; what it was was elusive.

  Still, they talked. They always talked. Michael loved to talk. He also liked to listen, which Aazian found unusual in a human who possessed the right kinks to sell a soul. They walked in the winter, and then they walked into the slush and mud of early spring. Michael worked; this Aazian had offered to make unnecessary, but Michael derived some sort of pleasure from the tedium of his daily existence.

  After a while, Aazian understood this; he, too, took a certain pleasure and pride in his work—but at the beginning it was hard to understand.

  Spring passed into summer and summer into autumn; the seasons turned in time the way the seasons do. Winter returned, and with it the chill of long evenings, the huddles of cold people seeking warmth. There was Christmas, but this indignity Aazian would not suffer.

  “If Christmas is a time of love and giving,” he asked Michael, “why are there more suicides on Christmas Day than on any other?”

  “You already understand it,” Michael said.

  “Yes,” Aazian replied, his eyes on the darkness, on the people that walked to and fro beneath the uncurtained window. He turned to Michael, drew him into his arms. “But I wanted to know if you do. You do. And yet you play at it as if it were real.”

  “Aazian,” Michael’s voice was edged. “I don’t care if you don’t come home with me. But I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.” Michael pulled away, angry. “Sometimes people need pretenses.”

  “I know this, Michael. I see it everywhere. Over a pretense, many have given their souls.” He touched the back of Michael’s shoulder almost gently. “But not you. And if you don’t want pretense, why don’t you despise those who do?”

  “No point,” Michael replied tersely. “Just drop it, okay?” He was tense, shaking. Then, slowly, his back smoothed and straightened, his breathing returned to normal. “Besides, you won’t win any brownie points by celebrating Christmas, will you?”

  “Pretense costs me nothing,” Aazian replied. “But if you wish, I’ll wait for you here.”

  “Wait, then.” But Michael turned to stare at him. “It’s part of love sometimes, this pretense. We go home, it makes my parents happy. We pretend that we’r
e glad to see each other, that everything’s perfect for just the day.”

  “But you’ve lied to your parents.”

  “Have we? We’ve also given them something to treasure. Sometimes it’s not the big sacrifices that defines love, it’s the little ones.”

  “But if they love you, Michael, why would they want you to make those sacrifices?”

  Michael shook his head. He walked out of the living room and came back wearing his coat. “Aazian, love is a human concept. Or at least my understanding of it is. Try to remember that.”

  “I do. Every day. Your concept of love is not mine.”

  Michael’s eyes widened. “What is your concept of love?”

  It was Aazian’s turn to look away. “Go, Michael. Your family is waiting.”

  It was frustrating. Aazian struggled with it daily, this lack of understanding, this lack of power. Michael left him at the beginning of each day, and during the solitude and the quiet, Aazian would walk through the streets, sometimes choosing to be seen, sometimes to be invisible. He watched people feed birds, walk dogs, hold hands, and die along the concrete thoroughfares. He did not interfere.

  But he looked at their souls as if they, prisms, were the only glimpse he was ever to have of the light. No, not the only glimpse. In Hell he had four near perfect gems, souls of very little darkness. He had taken them all, one by one, carefully preserving their color and their sheen. He had bound them with Makings and spells, teased them into his eternity. They were his art.

  Yet none of them, so foreign to his own nature, perplexed him as Michael did. None of them—perhaps because of their milieu—had ever thought to ask of him what Michael asked. The near-impossible. What was this human love, this human sufferance? How was he to offer it fully if he couldn’t understand it?

  Yes, it frustrated Aazian.

  It continued to frustrate him. Years turned in time; he could see their quiet march across Michael’s face. He helped Michael as he could, listened to him, tried to teach him to look at the shadows in each man and woman, to use them to the best advantage. He held him, guarded him, existed at his whim. Five years. Ten.