Confessions of a Demon
Nauthiz timeline, total lunar eclipse
Three of Cups Compound, somewhere in what was once the State of Virginia
He let the invisible silver cord pull him back to The Book of Time. Raven didn’t open his eyes until he felt his spine against the boulder.
Deep breaths, deep breaths.
Lilah was nowhere in sight, and the courtyard was dark. He tried to shake the memories of her in that cellar from his head, but they were too vivid. All good though. He’d saved her from the demon’s control, and he’d taken away memories that would never return.
An open door to one of the shipping containers caught his attention. Raven smiled to himself. He and Lilah had often slept inside there wrapped in each other’s arms. She had probably grown tired of waiting and had gone to bed. He was tired now, and his brain muddled from the journeys. In truth, he was downright fatigued though it was more of mind than of body. She had let both bonfires burn out, down to ash. It was usually his job to tend them, but if he failed or was too busy meditating, Lilah never let him down. The bonfires, each tucked into opposite ends of the rectangular compound, kept the orchard and gardens warm enough during cold nights. They would not be seen. They were well hidden behind the walls of shipping containers and both a thick canopy of trees and a little priestly magic kept them hidden from both Aoife’s drones and satellites, assuming satellites were still there and still monitoring human activity.
Raven was still smiling when the half-moon of the eclipse above caught his attention. One last journey to make, and he had promised it to Lilah. She might be better anyway to sweet-talk the Angelseed into joining their cause. Maybe that was what was meant by the empath leading him to the angel for ordination and ascension? He had to hurry to solidify this timeline. Then Lilah would have to hurry to find the Angelseed and recruit the chimera who carried Archangel Michael’s DNA in her body.
First things first.
Raven patted his topknot until he found one of the hair-daggers and pulled it out gently enough that his bun stayed in place. He rubbed the fleshy part of his thumb over its surface until he felt the tiny bump at the end, then gave it a hard punch. The razor-sharp blade jutted out from the other end. He traced the fading sigil—so clearly the window he could now see in his mind—with the dull end of the hair-dagger. With a deep breath, he carved the rectangle and its perpendicular lines into the inside of his forearm, next to the sigil of a sword embraced by a poppy and a… a tower. The cuts were just deep enough to draw blood. A droplet ran down his elbow and from there fell to the black robe he wore. Almost instantly it healed into a thin, raised scar.
Everything around him seemed to blink and solidify. His memories were jumbled. He couldn’t separate them. Too many of these journeys would lead to madness! He shook himself. Where were the fruit trees? The summer squashes? The labyrinth of stone and grass that he and Lilah had built together?
Lilah. He could remember every single time she slept in his arms. Thousands of nights. Thousands. And he could remember every last one. And yet, the sweetness of all those nights warred with a different memory that seemed to overwrite them. Like looking at a white-painted doorframe and seeing only the darkness in the negative space.
It was her absence he remembered most. The lack of a Lilah in his life. Wandering through the apocalypse alone, searching in futility for another empath and for an Angelseed. He had been okay in that timeline. Stoic. Not really caring what havoc he wrought in the name of his mission and his ongoing war with Aoife. He had accepted that life and the lack of warmth that came with it.
But now he remembered another timeline where he had had it all. Even if he had not thought so, and even if life with Lilah as his wife and partner hadn’t been perfect, he had, in every way that counted, had it all.
Raven tried to scramble to his feet, but a wave of despair drove him to his knees. He heaved into the charred grass. Digging his fingernails into the dirt, he willed it not to be true. No more than thirty feet away, the door of a shipping container repurposed into living quarters yawned wide, only darkness inside and no Lilah to be seen.
He crawled toward it. She had to be there.
“Lilah!”
A high-pitched whine started quietly all around him. He clapped his palms over his ears as it reached a crescendo and faded back to a merely annoying decibel level. At first, he couldn’t tell the difference between the whine and laughter, until the whine faded to something more manageable.
Raven flipped on his haunches and stared up at the source of the laughter.
The demon stood tall atop the boulder. Blue and gray spheres circled him, runes and sigils floating in the air around him and across his skin.
“No.” Raven shook his head, hair tumbling down over his eyes. “No, no, no. No!”
“Young Aryx. You cannot amend who you are at your core. No matter the incarnation. Some things will always be true to your soul. You must always help others and that, priest, is your undoing. You cannot fight the instincts that color your soul. I see across all timelines. I see you. You will always, in any form and in any timeline, be the man who rescues the innocent if it is within your power. Again, you have abused the power of The Book of Time. The last time we stood here together, you had saved the empath’s mother as well as the one who mothered you. This time, you saved the child just as her empathic gifts were being tried, and you would have saved the boy with her if you had been quicker. These actions have consequences. Each requires a sacrifice. As I told you already, even the smallest action ripples across timelines and changes futures. In the arrogance of your certainty that you knew the best life path for those around you, you changed the course of their lives. And of yours.”
“For the better!”
“Who are you to judge what is for the better? Verily you are gifted, but you cannot see all.”
“I’m…” Raven pushed the hair out of his eyes. “I’m just an average guy doing my best to make the world a better place and make life better for those in it. Anyone else would do the same under the same circumstances.”
“Jakin Crutchfield? Aoife Jung?”
Raven understood but wouldn’t give the demon the satisfaction. Had he lost Lilah? Was that the sacrifice? Was it for nothing?
“Do not grieve yourself, Young Aryx. This is the reason your god chose you at the beginning of the priesthood to be the Last Priest, yea, even before your first incarnation.”
Raven froze.
“Do you still not believe me, priest? I am not your enemy. Nor have I ever been your enemy. I told you, I do not lie. I have been your god’s greatest ally all these centuries, guiding all your incarnations, exchanging great gifts for the things I desire. To you and your incarnations. To the others. But you can still have your ascension. It is your destiny to usher in the next eon of humanity. Why would I want your kind to perish? You sustain me. You fulfill me.”
“Where’s Lilah? Where is she?”
“Where you left her.”
Raven frowned at the spot next to the boulder where he’d held both Lilah and The Book of Time, where he’d promised her the last journey across time with the sigil of angel wings. Where he’d told her he loved her. Where he’d left her? He pushed to his feet, propelling himself forward through this fatigue toward the open shipping container that had been their bedroom for the last two years. He leaned into the darkness, squinting.
“Lilah! Lilah? Where are you?”
The demon stood over him now, eight feet tall or more, glowing, sigils and ancient alphabets swirling in the spheres around it. “As I said, she is where you left her.”
“Where?” The word came out as a howl. “She’s not here.”
“I did not say she was here. I said she is where you left her.”
“Where I—?” With the big man with the bald head and tears streaming down his cheeks. Who then handed her off to a uniformed officer who ran with her to an ambulance. Taken to safety. That’s where he’d left her.
“Ah, yes. You see now. Where you left her.”
“Where is she now?”
He had to find her. He dug through the fog of memories from multiple timelines, each stream of noisy memories splitting off into cacophony but in this one, the one most vivid, there was a nothingness. A silence. A gap in his life and heart. He had memories of the journey back to the cellar but none of her since. Not the naked woman hanging from a dungeon wall in Budapest where he’d first seen her in the last timeline. Not walking the hills of Tara with her as “just a friend” and later gazing out over the Cliffs of Moher at the sea above the lost city of Cill Stuifin. Not smiling at him from behind the librarian’s desk at the St. Augustine Special Collections Library in Florida. They’d had everything, and he’d traded it for a gift to her of more peace in her troubled mind when the damage done to her was something they could live with—together.
“She is not here.”
“Wh-what do you mean? Tell me where she is. I’ll find her.”
“Lilah Burns survived her imprisonment but did not survive her childhood.” The demon thumped him on the forehead, directly on his brow chakra, and Raven dropped to the ground.
“Lilah,” Raven whispered, seeing the child at the ambulance. The bumpy ride to the hospital. The weeks there. The therapists she refused to talk to. The medications she hid in her mouth and then under her mattress. The news of her mother’s death in a faraway land. The funeral she could not attend. The gashes in her wrists that looked like runes in her mother’s favorite book, not because she meant to design her own death so dramatically but because she couldn’t manage the unwieldy knife she’d used. If she had, she might have chosen more favorable markings to carry through life as humiliating scars.
Raking in his breath, mouth open in a half-sob, Raven lunged for the demon’s throat. Instead, it caught his arm and held him in place.
“Careful, priest. You know not what you do. Perhaps after you ascend, but all you do now is offend.”
Raven wrenched away. “But I saw you. You didn’t join with Lilah. You left that murdering—”
“Ah! No. He was never a murderer. He would have been, had one child not had mercy for another, but he was not.”
The boy. He saw it even after the demon’s touch. Lilah had been merciful in giving the boy a better death than the two thought would come for him, but it was the boy who had tried to be merciful. He’d known that Lilah, even though she could escape, was loyal and would never leave him as long as he lived. That was a trait that would endure past her imprisonment in the cellar. No matter how bad, she would never leave as long as there was hope for something better.
“Fine! He wasn’t a murderer. Call him a kidnapper. Pervert. I’m not here to argue his hobbies. You made him that way. I saw you leave his body.”
“True. And not true. I did not create the evil in him. That was present before I entered, and I did not drive him to his deeds. I never bent him to my will. But I did join with him for a time until I no longer had use for him. The priesthood promised him to me, an interim agreement for a contract not fulfilled, but I was starving. I feed off the regrets of my host, and he had none. No hell of remorse to sustain me. So I left him. I feasted for a decade off the next one.”
“The man who carried Lilah from the cellar.”
“Yes. So full of self-loathing. He had known something was amiss and did not act. I gorged myself on his guilt until he drank more than he slept. Finally, he no longer woke.”
“You never possessed Lilah in this timeline. How could she have died?”
The demon tilted its head. “Possessed is not an accurate description. I am no parasite. The relationship between demon and host is more symbiotic. Had the child retained her memories, I would have fed well for the rest of her life on her remorse for killing the boy in the name of mercy. When you took her memories, she was no longer a suitable host. Without me, she had no one to protect her. No one to heal the wounds on her wrists before she bled out. You look surprised, priest. It is true that I fed off her pain, but I also kept her alive, time and again. As I have in many timelines. Verily, doing so was beneficial to us both.”
Shoulders sagging, Raven trudged toward the book. The page where the window sigil had once gleamed taunted him. Blank. Captured only as scar but missing from the page. No going back. No using the sigil a second time to undo what he’d done.
The eclipse above brightened by the second. He had one last chance. He could use the last sigil to journey to find the Angelseed so he could ascend and lead the next age of humanity as was his duty.
Or he could use it to try to bring back Lilah.
An empath or an angel?
He picked up The Book of Time and turned to the sigil of wings. He glanced over his shoulder at the demon, who only smirked and nodded.
Raven already knew what he had to do. So did the demon.
You’re reading Sleeping with Demons free, right here in the Library. Want a copy to keep on your Kindle or e-reader? Buy the e-book direct from me →
© 2020 Lorna Tedder. All rights reserved. Free to read here — please don’t repost elsewhere.