Page 3 of Each Their Own Devil

“How do I choose?” she whispered.

“You just do. It’s your first time. Pick something easy.”

“Easy?” Aleja hissed. “Am I going to have to kill someone?”

“If you decide they deserve it. You’re a Dark Saint now, beholden only to me and the Second. Human laws cannot touch you.”

Otherlanders and humans had morals that did not always overlap, but the flippancy with which Nicolas suggested she murder someone made a muscle in her heart flutter. The tremor must have made it through their bond.

“There are many ways to exact your wrath on someone, wife. Do you think Bonnie and Taddeas go around slaughtering humans who displease them? You will be the Dark Saint you decide to be,” he amended.

“Fine,” she breathed, closing her eyes again. Searching all the threads tugging at her was too daunting a task, so she concentrated on the whispers closest to her ear. Aleja couldn’t say what focused her attention on a single thread. It was as if, from the corner of her eye, she’d spotted a shining light. The thoughts came to her easily. “This one. Her name is…Josephine. She was jilted in some way. That’s good, right? I hardly think I need to scorch some college ex-boyfriend who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants.”

“That is entirely up to you, Wrath.”

“Gods, you Otherlanders are dramatic. How do we go to her?”

“You’ve done this before. It’s like taking a very wide step—almost wide enough so that you think you won’t be able to make it. Picture the candle she has lit for you. Hear the prayers in your name. Make the decision to help her.”

Aleja opened her mouth to argue again, but like a newborn foal, she realized she didn’t need spoken instructions on how to run. Instinct drove her across the tether between herself and the human woman in southern France. Just as Nicolas had described, it felt like taking an uncomfortably wide step over a ravine.

As Aleja’s head cleared, a woman gasped. The sounds of the room came first: a French heavy metal song crackling through a tinny Bluetooth speaker, the goose-like honks of a traffic jam below, and a neighbor shouting in the apartment upstairs. The room smelled of Nag Champa incense and cherry body spray.

A candle toppled as the young woman fell back onto her bed, her bleached blonde hair splayed across undone black sheets. If her eyeliner hadn’t already been intentionally smudged, it would have run when she ground her fists into her eyes, blinked hard, and then wiped her face again.

“Mon diable! I did not light the black candle—I called?—”

“It’s fine,” Aleja said. All the French she should have known were the few words she had picked up in college. It must have been another of the Second’s dark gifts that brought this sense of understanding. The phraseI’m newnearly left her mouth, but she realized it might not be the best way to inspire confidence in a devotee. “The Knowing One is accompanying me to make sure that you’re satisfied with my—with my service. Customer feedback is very important to us.”

Josephine’s fists gripped the bedsheets. They were frayed at the edges like the shawl in the Stevie Nicks poster on the backwall. The smell of incense was replaced by that of cigarette smoke as a neighbor stepped onto the shared balcony outside.

“I’m sorry. Customer feedback?”

“Fo-Forget I said anything. Our HR department made a big mistake when they suggested it,” Aleja stammered. “Let’s start over. Tell me what you would ask from the Lady of Wrath and Fire.”

Josephine’s eyes again returned to Nicolas. “Well, now that I haveyouhere, perhaps I should make a bargain.”

“Believe me, I will demand a much higher price for whatever you ask than Our Lady. Better you deal with her.”

“Fine. Frankly, I don’t care who makes him suffer,” Josephine spat, sitting back. She had a remarkably pretty face with dark eyes that were enhanced by the heaviness of her makeup. When the light shifted, a greenish bruise on her cheek was visible beneath her foundation.

“My ex-boyfriend betrayed me. He had a nice car. A nice apartment. After getting clean, I was practically homeless, and he took me in with all sorts of promises. It was beautiful at first. Dinners on the beach, parties that lasted until dawn. Then he started stealing my phone as I slept and deleting my contacts. He told me my friends and family were poisoning me against him. He told me they hated me; he told me?—”

“Shhh. Tell me what happened next,” Aleja soothed on instinct. She had never been a particularly social child, but she had grown up believing she was going to die at the devil’s hand at any moment. Her cousins, in their more tender moments, had sometimes slipped into her room as she cried.

“He dealt coke,” Josephine said in a choked voice. “I didn’t know at first, but by the time I realized it, no one else would speak to me. I started making plans to get away, but I had no money. One day, he said, ‘I need you to do a job. Just pick something up at this address.’ I could sense he was setting atrap—that he wanted me to take the fall for him. So, I… Fuck. I hate to say it, but I contacted the police. I told them when and where I was supposed to be, and they suited me up with a hidden microphone to catch the transaction. But those bastards were in his pocket too.”

Aleja smothered her instinct to glance back at the Knowing One. “And then?” she asked.

“They tried to kill me for betraying him,” Josephine told her, voice steadier than it had been a moment before. “I realized the plan and ran. I was panicking. One of his men tried to catch me, and I picked up a rock and threw it at his face. The rock hit him on the temple, and then his ears were bleeding. He fell to the ground, twitched, and that was it. Now all of the fuckers are after me, and I can’t even go to the cops because they?—”

“What’s his name?” Aleja asked.

Josephine wiped her eyes again. “His name?”

“You called for the Lady of Wrath, didn’t you?” Aleja asked. The next sentence felt clunky in her mouth, but she tried to picture what Nicolas would say. “Tell me who I should bring that wrath down upon.”

“Oh,” Josephine muttered, leaning back so that her head hit the wall, crinkling the Fleetwood Mac poster. “Marc. Are you going to kill him?”

---