Page 93 of The Misfit Mage and His Darling Demon

Right. I didn’t talk about my time at the academy much, but like everything I shared with Bez over the years while he was locked inside the orb, he listened and remembered even my most random topics. He was simply sweet that way. I loved soaking in the sunshine and cool breeze of the academy courtyard, lost in my textbooks where no one bothered me. Not teachers, not classmates, and not my family.

“Now we just have to wait for the devil to do his job until you wake up.”

“You said that before. What do you mean the devil?” I asked, quirking a brow. “We’re waiting for you to finish healing me?”

“Looks like you can’t do anything right, Little One.” The hauntingly deep voice reverberated throughout the sunny courtyard, splintering the sky, and shattering the image of the academy in a billion shards of glass like snowflakes whisked away by a frigid gust.

Stone walls bound together by what looked like lava surrounded us. Bez’s silhouette recoiled, turning my gaze from the looming shadow that approached.

“Don’t look. Don’t listen,” Bez whispered. “It’s just a broken memory. Not yours. You don’t need it.”

“Once again, I gift you an opportunity to prove your worth, and you fail.”

“I’m sorry, Beelzebub,” a young Bez said, his voice squeaky and scared. “I’ll do better.”

I turned to see him knelt on the floor, gray skin covered in blood and essence, deep slashes dug into his hunched back, and chunks of his stomach ripped away. The silhouette faced me toward the wall, making me stay very still as this memory unfolded.

“Wake up, Wally,” Bez said, the voice of the grown demon, not the child. “I need to know you’re okay.”

“You shamed me in that tournament, allowing yourself to be bested by some damned demon from another realm,” Beelzebub’s voice sliced the air, creating a suffocating heat. “I am your god-king, and this is how you repay my tutelage? How you honor the life I grant you? You can’t fight. You constantly fail to protect that which is assigned to you. You made for a terrible delegate, lacking any artistry for diplomacy, and I wouldn’t waste the effort sending you to infiltrate another Hell.What can you offer the greatest devil of the best dominion? You can’t even serve well. Why did I bring you back? I should’ve left you in oblivion to rot, you worthless thing.”

“I’ll do better.”

“Perhaps you need a reminder of what happens to weak Diabolics.”

A sizzle and pop of skin burning, bubbling, blistering rang in this room, only silenced by the loud wails Bez released. The snap of something whipping through flesh and meat, splattered essence with fizzling flickers of crimson onto the walls.

My heart pounded. My eyes watered. I tried to see the horrors inflicted but the silhouette held me tight, shielding me from the cruelty of Beelzebub.

Bones crunched. Bez’s light voice cracked and went hoarse from screams of agony. His sobs trickled in and out as pure black essence seeped between the cracks of the walls, eating away the layers of the room, swallowing everything including the memory of horrors Bez endured.

Blackness swallowed the crimson silhouette, snuffing out the spark of demon essence that’d found me adrift in oblivion. This darkness wasn’t a return to the nothingness. It was empty, pure power.

It all clicked together as the devil’s violent presence slithered across my body, his primal base existence vibrating underneath my skin. It was undiluted devil essence coursing through my veins, so strong it pushed away Bez’s Diabolic energy that guided me through the memories.

I opened my eyes and sprang forward. My head nearly butted Bez’s as I sat up, taking deep breaths of life.

I was alive.

“Wally.” Bez’s face was splotchy but his expression lightened with a warm smile. Blood dripped down his chin. Slashes covered his chest and torso, deep and unhealing. I recoiled,pained by his suffering, suffering from the memories and what he endured to help me, save me. Beside him lay the discarded Demon’s Demise which he must’ve used to hack through his essence, restoring me.

“I was… I was…”

“You’re alive now, Wally. That’s all that matters.” Bez hugged me; a strong grip that pulled me in tight and should’ve hurt, should’ve something… I was too dazed, too lost to register the sensation of his embrace, but so grateful for it. Grateful for Bez. Grateful to have him in my life again because I was alive.

Alive.Bez saved me.

“You…you saved me by—”

Bez pulled away just enough to kiss me, silence my slow ramble. I was usually quicker with my words, quicker than his seductive tongue, but the haze of oblivion still lingered in my thoughts. So much was jumbled out of order. Memories piled on top of memories, mixed with the events in the darkness, and the cries of a young Diabolic who sought freedom from his cruel devil.

Bez’s quivering lips were soft, delicate, frightened too much and I’d break. I didn’t feel breakable though. In fact, quite the opposite. More than anything I wanted his passion, his fury, his love. I needed it. Craved it.

Sliding my tongue against his, I added a subtle surge of lightning. Inadvertently, perhaps, but the static buzz that passed between our locked lips amplified the intensity of this moment, making my entire body hum from the slightest graze of his fingers against my skin. I could finally feel him, feel his touch in the full electrical glory it offered.

“Wally.” Bez broke away, forehead pressed to mine keeping the warmth and spark zipping between us.

He took careful breaths, practiced and forced by the look of it, for lungs he’d removed the receptors or need of air. Why? Washe reminding me to breathe? I didn’t want to stop for air, and I didn’t need it. My empty lungs didn’t call out for oxygen. They, like every cell of my being, called out for Bez. For the flavor of his kiss, the touch of his lips, the sound of his rhythmic heart which worked to sync to mine.

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