Page 22 of The Dame & the Devil

“What are you going to do when you run out of names?”

“I’ll ask for a pen.”

“So hungry for vengeance.” He brushes his finger along the next name on my list, and pain sears against my skin as the letters brand me.

The Devil You Know

I trail my fingers over the raised lines on my leg, counting them and remembering the faces of the men and women I’ve dragged to their correct fate.

The politician, the billionaire who let his workers starve and die, the woman who led a congregation and turned them to actual violence. I trace over all seven of them.

They’ve ruined hundreds of thousands of lives, with no remorse. And now, they’ll pay.

One name per day.

That seems to be the Devil’s schedule.

I wake alone, descend to this floor, and then search the empty halls until I find him. We dance, we condemn, I find another reason to have him inside of me….

But today, we go to a room I hadn’t found in my many wandering days.

I sit on an oddly comfortable sofa and toy with my skin as the Devil watches from his place by this room’s window.

As with every day before this, I find a question I don’t know if he’ll answer, but one I know I should ask.

“Is Purgatory as bad as they say?”

His gaze drifts to me and a calm silence stretches between us before he says, “God’s Hell is simply a different kind of torture.”

I nod and take a deep breath as I look out over the damned. “I guess I’ll find out, eventually.”

His gaze narrows.

“Forgive me for not ascribing to the ‘devil you know’ philosophy when I’ve seen what goes on beyond those windows.” When the next All Hallows Eve rolls around, I’ll be snapped back to the land of the living, never again dragged to the Devil’s dance.

I’ll never be able to come back to him.

Rules are rules.

“Why are you so willing to stay here?” He asks, brows pinching as though he hadn’t given a thought to what my absence from the living world meant. “What happens to your life up there while you’re gone?”

“I left instructions with my sister. She’s got it handled.”

“Don’t you miss your family?”

I drop my head to the side, not sure how to answer the question. “No….” I draw the word out, feeling it in my mouth as I try to taste if it’s true. “No, I don’t. I was always the odd one out, I suppose.”

He doesn’t look satisfied with that.

“I love them, and I hope that my disappearance hasn’t caused them any harm, but… I would much rather be here than there.”

He blinks at me once, twice… and then turns away. I swear I hear him mutter the only name he’s ever called me.

But his little fool is tired of thinking of the world above.

I stand and hold out my hands to him. “I want to dance.”

But he shakes his head. “Later.”

---