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“—okay, Alastor?”
Light shifts, rippling like sand, and Alastor twitches his head to the side in a convulsive movement to meet Charlie’s plaintive, concerned gaze. She’s smiling, and so is he, but the corners of her mouth twist on the upturn, dimpling the bold red spots on her cheeks into warped ovals. It’s an unattractive echo of her normal exuberance, and Alastor cannot fathom what he has done to bring it on.
“Good morning, my dear,” he crackles absently, looking back down at the bowl in front of him. The whisk in his hand and the thin batter indicate crepes, which means it must be morning. He wouldn’t make crepes in the afternoon or evening. Perish the thought. “I thought I’d get an early start on breakfast today, if that’s alright with you. After all, we ought to celebrate! Two victories under your belt is no small feat, and I’m sure everyone is famished.”
“Uh, yeah. That’s great, Al, thank you.”
Charlie is quiet for a moment as Alastor flutters through the kitchen, placing the batter in the fridge to chill while he fishes out the appropriate pan and accoutrements for toppings. He drops the carton of strawberries in her hands, prompting an eyebrow raise.
“Rinse and dice those for me, won’t you? If you’re going to stand around here and chitchat.”
“Oh! Okay.”
As soon as she’s removed herself from his personal space at the stovetop, Alastor’s shoulders relax. He sets down the pan and begins unpeeling the butter from its wrapper as Charlie runs water in the sink, opening the strawberry carton.
How domestic. Alastor likes domestic, always has. It baffles people sometimes when they learn that he likes to cook and host and take his coffee on the balcony with a newspaper, as though his reputation precludes creature comforts or extraneous habits, humanity clinging to him like muck on his soles that he can’t ever scrape away, try as he might, and oh how he’s tried. Perhaps it would be easier if he were merely a monster, enshelled within a simulacrum of personhood, but committing to the role with gleeful abandon has thus far not succeeded in ridding him of himself completely.
His hand flexes around the crumpled wrapping. Grease from housing the butter clings to his skin. Domesticity. He’s played house with so many demons over the years. For a time, with Rosie. With Mimzy, on a few memorable occasions. Before his sabbatical, with Niffty and Husk. Now, with the hotel—with the Princess of Hell, rinsing strawberries at his request, a haze of blonde and crimson that quivers like a mirage in his periphery.
Always, always playing. Never a homebody in truth. He’s never had a home in truth. Perhaps he could have once, years and years ago, but it had been ruined because—
“Because you got scared,” Vox says.
Dizziness washes over Alastor and he sets the cold butter down with a hard clack.
“Alastor?” Charlie asks. It takes him a moment to register that she’s turned the faucet off, now looking at him with open worry. His skin prickles under her lamprey eyes. “Are you… feeling alright?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Well… you kind of disappeared during the battle. I mean, it was basically already over once—um, once the Vees were defeated,” she course-corrects, when his ears briefly flatten before he forces them upright again. “I just wanted to check on you and make sure you weren’t hurt. I really didn’t want to have a repeat of—”
“Of Adam, yes, I know,” Alastor interrupts. He almost presses a hand to his chest, as if to check that his wound is still nothing more than a deep, jagged scar, but he resists the urge. “No need to fret, my dear. I promise I’m whole and healthy.”
“You’ve kinda been spacing out a lot.”
He hadn’t noticed. He flicks the burner on with a tad more force than necessary. “Oh?”
Charlie winces. “It’s not a criticism, just an observation! If you’re in any pain—”
“Come now, it’s quite rude to not take a demon at his word! I said I was unharmed in the fight, and so I am.” He cracks his neck on its axis to leer at her dangerously, teeth bared. “Stop asking.”
She holds up her hands in surrender. He snaps his neck back into place as he scoops up the butter to grease the pan, jaw clenched, and stays silent when Charlie slips guiltily around him to take down a cutting board for the strawberries. Her knife skills leave much to be desired. Another byproduct of her royal upbringing—the incentive for home economics can be neatly bypassed with a fleet of maids, or better yet, the handwave of a neglectful but absurdly powerful father who can summon mountains of caviar on demand but can’t give his daughter a single supportive word. But Charlie can hardly be held responsible for such gaps in instruction.
Alastor is not a good teacher, though he’d dodged the question rather than admit that the last time she asked him to guide her in the kitchen. He’s impatient, judgmental, and verging on cruel when people don’t catch on immediately, and he’d rather that not be the impression Charlie has of him as an instructor since it’s an attitude that rarely extends beyond the kitchen.
Territorial much? Vox, laughing with his hands up in the doorway, screen smudged with flour and claws sticky with dough. You’re pretty bad at being a teacher.
You’re bad at being a student, Alastor sniffed. Now stay right there while I try to salvage—
“I think the pan is hot enough,” Charlie says, and Alastor spins on his heel as he announces, “Right you are!”
The crepe batter comes out of the fridge, and then time… passes. It’s an odd thing: Alastor knows, consciously, that he finishes making breakfast with Charlie, down to the minute details. He fills Angel and Vaggie’s with cream and chocolate and diced strawberries, Husk gets a thin layer of biscoff, and Niffty likes to shred hers into little pieces like confetti, so he leaves hers plain. He sets some aside for Charlie to taste test, and he himself tries a bit of cream on the tip of his claw. Breakfast is rowdy and communal and he participates in banter, he holds conversations. All this he is aware of.
But each individual moment is a splotch of clarity between long, tacky smears of time where Alastor drifts. He hasn’t been sleeping well. It’s nothing to be alarmed about, no matter what hopeless narrative Charlie has been building out of twigs in her fussy little brain; he has gone longer with even less rest. He hardly needs it, anyway. But the haziness. That is mildly concerning. He entertains the romantic possibility that Vox had poisoned him in his final moments, like a honeybee expunging its stinger in a last ditch attempt at murder-suicide.
No. Alastor had not given him enough time for even that.
“So, uh,” Angel says, ribbing Alastor lightly with his elbow. There’s a realism in his heterochromic gaze now that his soul is his own again; some dimension of vitality that had been lacking before, that glassy, animal dullness of the eyes that everyone on a chain shares in common. “Smiles. You ever gonna tell us what ya did with Vox?”
Static crackles, crisp and pitchy, and everyone at the table winces. Alastor thinks he’s smiling. He can’t quite feel his face.
“Yeah, Al,” Vox teases in his ear. “What are you gonna do with me?”
It’s a fair question, Alastor muses, as he peels back a strip of wallpaper from one of the upper floors. What to do with Vox, indeed.
Scraps of plaster dust his hands, chalking his palms white. Lucifer’s touch, tainting everything, glister and gold and the rancid tang of apple flesh sloughing off the core, rotten pulp mouldering under the floorboards and Alastor supposes he’s the only one bothered by it, the only one whose stomach roils when they stalk through the hallways that once swallowed them with warm red shadows but now glow with inhospitable light, a noxious and blistering shine.
He’s made a hobby out of pettiness in the intervening months since they fended off Heaven and Niffty slew the First Man where he stood. Lucifer is a transient presence, swinging by in a feathery explosion of grand words and overbearing gestures, until he is inevitably whisked away by the whims of his ephemeral attention span and leaves Charlie strained and wilting with forced cheer in his wake. Alastor cannot do anything about that, but he can run his claws along the length of the wallpaper trim and shear away the white and yellow serpent patterns, bit by bit, until all that remains are dark oak backboards awaiting whatever new design seizes his fancy.
Something macabre, certainly, something elegant and maroon. If his luck holds, by the time he finishes renovating the entire hotel to his tastes, the process will have been so gradual that no one will have taken note before he adds the final touches, at which point it will be too late to reverse without offending him.
Needlessly time-consuming? Yes. Rude and childish? Perhaps.
“Not like that’s ever stopped you before,” Vox says.
Alastor bats a hand in the air. “Oh, trust me. It’s hardly stopping me now.”
“Are you going to spend the whole afternoon peeling wallpaper?”
“Why do you care?” Alastor flicks his nail, slicing through the strip he’s peeled back, and banishes it. “Feeling neglected, my dear?”
“Maybe.” Vox’s voice is low, amused; it fades in and out, cloaked with a gentle hiss of static. “You haven’t been sleeping.”
“Simply haven’t felt the need.”
“Or you’re avoiding me.”
“Me? Avoidant? Preposterous.”
“Alastor.”
Vox’s tone makes Alastor hesitate, one hand resting lightly on the wall, ears twisted back. The hesitation worms into his throat and coils around his esophagus, a heavy, breathless weight locked behind his teeth, and he briefly closes his eyes to focus on swallowing around it. Static trickles like water.
Weakness. It’s weakness. A bright shimmer like heat lightning wicks against his eyelids, silver and nauseating, a flash of steel plunging into a warm, gasping body like sheathing a sword, a knife, a rung more intimate than a gun but he still regrets that he didn’t do it with his hands—but the blood ran down his wrists in thick rivulets and stained his shoes all the same, so what does it matter, he asks, what the hell does it matter if he avoids the corpse upstairs when it will still be there in the cold morning, hollow and waiting?
“Come see me tonight,” Vox says.
Alastor doesn’t reply. The hallway leers around him, silent, and he goes back to picking at the wallpaper.
Glass slides across wood, bumping his fingertips. Alastor looks down at it. Ice swims in a cocktail of amber and orange peel, a single stemmed cherry tucked against the rim, and he drags his eyes up to meet Husk’s impassive gaze, one eyebrow lifted.
“Vieux Carré,” Husk says, shrugging. “Looked like you needed it.”
Alastor resents how easily the French rolls off of Husk’s tongue. He’d never managed to fully adopt a true French accent when he was alive; his unusual inflection always gave him away as lesser, made it far too obvious where the waves in his hair and the olive tone to his skin came from, so he never spoke anything but English in polite society and feigned alienation from his French heritage if ever the topic arose. And here Husk is, Vieux Carré rumbly and honey-sleek in his mouth, and Alastor could get angry but instead he just scoops up the glass and brings it to his mouth, sipping the rye with a quiet sigh.
Flipping a rag off his shoulder, Husk starts to polish a different glass, deft and easy. “Wanna talk about it?”
“No.”
Husk grunts. It’s a neutral sound, but it makes Alastor want to throw something anyway. He imagines glass shattering, alcohol spraying everywhere, the humiliatingly empty look of total indifference verging on pity Husk would give him if he followed through, and knows he needs to get it together.
“The other Vees are lyin’ low, seems like,” Husk murmurs after a moment, turning around to place his clean glass on the shelf. Alastor watches the heart-shaped tufts of his ears shift and sway as he moves. “Angel says Velvette’s accounts have all been deleted, and nobody knows what foxhole Valentino’s scurried off to.”
“I’m certain nobody cares.”
“Damn right. If I never hear about that bastard again it’ll be too soon…”
Husk continues to mutter about Valentino under his breath, something or other about waterboarding, but Alastor is already losing both interest and focus. He takes another mechanical sip of his cocktail and stares into the middle distance.
He can’t put it off forever. He’d lost his grip on his self-control the first night, yes, but hiding from Vox won’t take it back, won’t make him feel any less disgusting and wretched when he recalls the way he’d choked on the tough, bitter meat of Vox’s heart as he ground his hips into the cold pool of blood smearing Vox’s stomach like some sort of desperate, wanton creature, more pain than pleasure, no, no pleasure in it at all.
If even after all that, Vox still wants to see him, then it is only cowardice that keeps Alastor away.
A familiar accusation, admittedly—Alastor is not a demon known for his bravery. He has no use for it. But Vox loved to levy his lack of it against him, as though staying behind and dying idiotically for his pride was preferable to a timely exit, and that was always Vox’s problem, wasn’t it? He never knew when to fucking quit.
Glass squeaks in Alastor’s iron grip and he carefully sets it down, barely touched, before he does anything rash. Besides the norm, of course.
Without a word, he dissolves into shadow, leaving Husk to his bar.
He has a date to keep.
Up, up to his quarters on the top floor of the building, Alastor’s body lances through the dark like a knifepoint shearing silk. No one has ever loved the shadows like him. People whimper and gag and flail about in the inconstancy of the void, their tag-along souls vibrant, mouthy things that reject the feeling of being shafted into unreality with a vehemence that Alastor gradually began to find insulting. Vox, too, was not immune to the eldritch bends. It had been funny at first, to drag Vox halfway across the city through the shadows and dump him onto the asphalt, sparking and green-gilled, but back then the man also accepted it with far more grace than what would come later. Perhaps even a sort of reluctant affection. By the time he started insisting on transporting himself through the city’s electrical grid, he’d lost any fondness he once held for Alastor’s shadow. Ungrateful to the last.
Alastor manifests just outside his suite door. He wants to have to turn the knob to enter. It’s his space, of course, but it’s only polite to give some warning when one is hosting a guest. He steps inside, eases the door shut behind him, and then, as helpless as light seeping around the rim of a black hole, his eyes dart down to the floor.
Relief and shame twine up his spine like dancing snakes. There. Precisely as he left him. He needn’t fret that Vox may choose to abandon him—Vox will never choose to do anything again.
On the floorboards, Vox rests quietly, arms at his sides and his head propped up on the cushion. His screen glitters darkly, spiderwebbed with fine slivers of broken glass, and in the low, green gloom emanating from the swamp, he could almost be sleeping. Niffty’s ministrations have done away with the blood. The air tastes sweet, loamy with leaf-rot, fireflies winking gently in the meadow beyond and not a hint of insectile carrion-eaters encroaching on Vox’s body, because he will not begin to decompose until Alastor permits it.
“Hello, dear,” Alastor says. “I said I’d be back with you soon.”
Vox is silent.
Alastor begins to shed his jacket and shoes, stepping around Vox as he makes his way over to his wardrobe. He’s hungry, but nothing in his cabinets appeals—and what’s more, he is always hungry.
Vox’s jacket is hanging in his wardrobe. Niffty must have placed it there after laundering everything. It’s an unseemly navy blot in a sea of red and black, steamed and pressed and mingling with the earthy scent that lingers in every nook and cranny of Alastor’s life, the bayou he carries with him everywhere. The detritus of Vox’s existence littering the grass.
“It’s what you always wanted, I presume,” Alastor says loftily, hanging up his own jacket next to Vox’s, bracketing it in. His ear flicks. An unsettling crackle of static wavers at the edges of his hearing. “To have indelibly stained me. But I will say, you’ve gone to ridiculous lengths this time. You didn’t have to—that is, you hardly needed to—”
His voice fails, guttering out like candleflame. On the floor, Vox gazes sightlessly at the ceiling, quiet and small and still. Vox’s clamor and bombast must have bled out of him as well when Alastor ate his heart.
He doesn’t remember crossing the room, but he’s crouching beside Vox now—perched on his haunches like a scavenger, arms curled loosely around his bent knees and his head lolling to the side, cheek to shoulder. A sight for sore eyes, the pair of them. Echoes flit through Alastor’s mind, insubstantial as smoke, memories turned to lustrous poison in the slow steep of bitterness that brought them to this ignoble end: Vox’s screen winking on, eyes bright in the dim—Vox with his claws digging into Alastor’s hip, holding him up after Alastor toppled over into his lap, whiskey warm in his blood—Vox glowing with pride—incandescent with rage—laughing and electric in the rain—
Alastor brings a hand up to his mouth, pressing it over the curdled corners of his smile. Wretched, wretched man. He hates Vox with a passion so exquisitely rendered that it feels unlike hate at all.
“I hated you,” Vox muses, from very far away. Alastor closes his eyes. “More than you ever hated me… I still think you don’t know how to hate. You only know how to be hurt.”
“I’m not hurt,” Alastor whispers through his fingers. “I’m…”
Hungry, he thinks, with a sudden, torturous intensity that it overpowers all else. He is so, so hungry. Vox understood that in a metaphorical sense, if nothing else. Vox chased satiation like a slavering dog and then further, but he never did come around to the futility of it all, the settling, not like Alastor did—knowing there is a bottomlessness in you that no amount of money, drugs, sex, or blood will ever fill.
Oh, but it’s alluring, isn’t it? The temptation that perhaps this time it will.
Alastor waits until he can hear again over the blood rushing in his ears, then moves. He gathers Vox’s body in some mockery of a funerary shroud, allowing his shadow to coil around the limbs and torso and ferry him over to Alastor’s bed. Alastor unfolds himself and follows, dizziness making him stagger briefly before he recovers his balance. He doesn’t want Vox on the floor anymore. He murdered the man with an angelic dagger, it hardly seems decent to keep him sprawled on the hardwood like an unfortunate rug, even if in death he would resemble how Alastor treated him in life.
Not that Vox didn’t deserve it.
Crawling into bed, Alastor slides under the thick blanket and tucks his knees up against his chest, curling into the chasmal space his shadow has created with Vox’s body—laid out on his back, one arm spread over the pillows like an invitation, and it is there that Alastor slots himself, scrunched up so small that he can press his forehead into Vox’s ribs. Yes. This is better. He can hide here, like this, both of them tucked under the sheets and sequestered away.
He never could give this to Vox in life. He never trusted him enough, never liked him enough, whatever excuses he used to tell himself—but it’s better, now. Vox cannot see him. Vox cannot touch him in return. Vox will never touch him again.
The radio on the mantle crackles, hissing. Vox sounds amused. “Your line in the sand, not mine.”
“Be quiet,” Alastor mutters into Vox’s shirt. “It’s very likely that you’re not even real.”
“Maybe. Maybe this is just what happens with angelic steel—you break a soul apart at the seams, and it sticks around.” Vox chuckles distantly. “Or maybe I really am a hallucination. A manifestation of your guilt.”
“I don’t feel guilty for killing you.”
“Not even a little?”
“Be quiet,” Alastor repeats, staring dully at nothing.
Static ebbs and flows. “You’re being pathetic, you know that? Wallowing isn’t a good look on you.”
“Be quiet.”
Vox laughs and Alastor flinches, hard—it’s a cruel sound, noisy and disruptive and bursting from the radio in an eruption of gibbering noise, like a scanner skipping frantically over channel after channel. Alastor’s ears flatten and he tries to hide in Vox’s shirt, but the noise continues, worming into his skull and thrumming in his bones, and suddenly he scrambles up onto his knees and grabs Vox by his collar, snarling, “Shut up!”
Vox’s screen lolls, hanging dead weight. His corpse remains limp when Alastor shakes it, bile rising in his throat, and when the static doesn’t stop, Alastor rakes his claws down the front of Vox’s chest and shreds his clothes open, tossing the tatters of fabric to each side in search of bare skin.
There. There. The ruinous cavern of Vox’s chest, hidden under his clothing; his ribcage cracked open in a frill of white, jagged bone, exposing the fetid gore of his inner cavities as the green glow from Alastor’s bayou glimmers over weeping flesh, the dark hollow place where Alastor wrenched his heart out at the root. Something churns violently in Alastor’s gut. His hands are slick with coagulated blood but he is careful, he’s careful, unlike the first night where he was sloppy and desperate and made such a mess—
But here and now he is careful when he takes Vox’s liver into his hands, cupping it tenderly as he lifts it from the noxious slop of organs inhabiting Vox’s abdomen. Vox’s laughter distorts further with every bite, every sliver of cold, rancid meat that slides down Alastor’s gullet and makes him choke on the awful taste, soupy mouthfuls of blood getting stuck with each pained swallow like trying to force down gelatin chunks, and that’s really the worst part of it all—that it feels like forcing rather than relishing, that this isn’t making him feel good and it isn’t making Vox go away, that it’s just as rotten and revolting as anything else.
Alastor trembles, bent over Vox’s chest cavity and breathing hard. He imagines a phantom of claws petting over his flattened ears, something Vox had done only once when Alastor was outrageously drunk—but he just shakes his head sharply, dissipating the sensation before it can metastasize. His throat burns. Vox is no longer laughing. The radio still hums, but it is quiet.
How many days of quiet will this buy him? Vox’s heart granted him three. Eventually, he will eat so much of Vox that there will be nothing left, and that will be what he is owed.
Alastor slumps down beside Vox. He hooks his claws into Vox’s shirtsleeve, hides his face in Vox’s shoulder. He has bound them together more intimately than Vox could have ever conceived, and it is an excruciating gift—to be the only one left to appreciate it.
“Vox,” he says, raw and ragged, unknowing if it’s a plea or a curse.
“Oh, Alastor,” Vox murmurs pityingly. And says nothing more.