The Devil's Lover: The Wish

by Dahlia Lu

  She didn't realized how long she had walked, absorbed in her thoughts. She could only guess it had been a while when she found herself alone, surrounded by unbelievably massive tree trunks. She had seen trees these sizes in travel magazine, but it is one thing to see them in picture and another to stand between them. She felt so small and insignificant by comparison.

  The atmosphere was still; the surroundings were eerily quiet. Everything felt so alien. From the strangely glowing, moving plants to the little creatures she found living amongst the trees. Every step of the walk, she discovered something new. They were strange, new, and exciting things she had never seen before.

  She became increasingly distracted by how thick the atmosphere had become. It was getting much harder to breathe.

  She didn’t know where she was, or how far she was from the castle. In fact, she didn't even know if they were still on Earth anymore. Although there was no sun here, the sky still shifted color. It was getting darker and darker as she ventured deeper into the forest. When it got too dark to see her hands in front of her, she began to feel fear creeping up her spine. Strange low growls were somewhere close by. She didn’t know what to expect. At least in the castle, she was safe under Lucifer’s protection. She should have stayed put.

  Red glowing dots began to appear in the dark. They came in pairs, like glowing eyes. She didn’t know what they were, or if she should stay or run. Adrenaline rushed through her veins. Her instincts took over and she ran for it. She didn’t know how close they were behind her. She didn't know anything!

  She just ran as fast as she could until she stumbled on a hard object and fell forward. They were very near; the glowing eyes were only yards from her. Her ankle screamed at her, letting her know that something was very wrong with it. She squeezed her eyes closed and braced herself for what was to come.

  Nothing happened.

  When she opened her eyes again, the pair of eyes charged forward, but then they were kicked back by something. They couldn’t get to her.

  “Help!” she screamed out in panic. “Someone help! Lucifer!”

  “So you finally need me,” his voice was all around.

  “Lucifer?”

  The area was filled with red lights. Lucifer appeared from the shadows. At sight of him, the canine-like beasts backed away in fear, and one by one scampered off. He came to her side and scooped her up into his arms.

  “Did you…how did you know where I am?”

  “This is my realm, Kali. I know where you are at all times.”

  “Have you been following me the whole time?” she was suspicious that he did.

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  Anger wrapped her face. “And you did nothing! How could you!” she shouted at him.

  “I knew you would wander off on your own,” he replied. “That was to teach you a lesson. Fear is an excellent teacher.”

  “I cannot stand you!” she hit his shoulder several times with her fists. “Let me down this instant! Let me down!”

  He teleported them back into her room and gently placed her down on the bed. “Your ankle is hurt. At least now you learned not to leave the castle,” he grabbed hold of her ankle and quickly realigned it. She yelped.

  “You are a liar, Lucifer,” she managed to say. “You said you would be right back, but it’s been four days,” she said, half crying.

  He chuckled.

  “What?” she was surprised at his reaction.

  “I thought you didn’t want to see me.”

  “That is beside the point!”

  “I should leave for months at a time then,” he teased, “maybe even years. After all, what does a few decades mean to me.”

  “Then why have you bought me here if you’re just going to run off somewhere?” she blurted out. She was too angry to hold back her thoughts. Once she realized what it sounded like, she pushed him away with both of her hands. "Get out! I truly never want to see you again!"

  She blushed when she realized he had a pleased expression on his face.

  When she woke the next morning, he was sitting in a chair by the window. His head was resting on the palm of his hands. His eyes were locked on her. It was obvious that he didn’t sleep. Or rather, he didn’t need to sleep. What does he do with all of that time?

  “I had breakfast prepared for you,” he said. “They should bring it up soon.”

  “They?” she inquired. "I can find my way to the kitchen now. It’s one thing to bring food here, but I can't imagine your demons would be willing to bring it up to me.”

  “I have arranged for servants who are more sensitive to your needs,” he replied. "I admit I have been careless with your accommodations.”

  “I don’t understand,” she blinked.

  "Your own kind would be able to take better care of you.”

  She was alarmed when she interpreted his words. "Did you kidnap them?"

  "I made a bargain with them,” he corrected her. “They agreed to serve me if I saved their dying son.”

  “And did you?”

  “Yes, but that boy was not meant to live long. I could only prolong his life several years.”

  “You said you could make humans live forever.”

  “I can. However, the process itself is much more complicated than you think. I do not have the energy to waste on a boy.”

  “After the boy dies, after they die, what will you do?”

  “I will get replacements.”

  “How many replacements will there be?”

  “As many as it takes.”

  “I can take care of myself. I can cook for myself,” she sighed. “You cannot ruin so many lives just because of me.”

  “Why not?” he asked with an indifferent expression on his face.

  “Why not?” she responded with a rhetorical question. “These are my consequences and mine alone! I can’t drag anyone else into this. I don't think I can live with it. How can you just treat them as if they’re disposable?"

  “I do not want to argue with you over such tedious matters,” he got up from his chair. “They should be here with your breakfast by now.”

  “Please let them go,” she grabbed his hand. “I don’t want them to be here with me. Please?”

  He touched her cheek with the back of his hand. “It will be very lonely in this castle. I want you to have company.”

  “The guilt will kill me more than the loneliness.”

  After some consideration, he nodded. “If you do not wish for them to stay, I will send them back.”

  †††††

  He was caught in bad weather on his way back to Hell. Kali had been waiting for him at the entrance. His clothes were soaked. She ran back to her room to grab a towel. Before she could return, he was already in her room.

  “Here,” she handed him the towel. “Dry yourself off before you catch a cold.” she suddenly felt silly. Unlike her kind, he was unsusceptible to illness.

  He took the towel she offered and dried his hair with it.

  “What are you doing?” she asked when he unbuttoned his shirt.

  “Changing,” he said simply.

  “Not in here…”

  “We are no longer strangers, if you have yet to realize,” he headed toward the door. “However, if that is what you wish, then I will comply.”

  “We are strangers,” she said, “since Lucien was only someone you made up to deceive me.”

  He paused. “Would you have come to love Lucien the way he was?"

  “I may have if he were real!"

  “You are incapable of love,” he said. She suddenly felt a pinch in her heart. "You keep a distance with everything in your life that you can love. That is the reason you chose to befriend a selfish and hypocritical girl. You pretended to be ignorant of the cruel things she'd done to you, because you knew none of it can remotely affect you. You have lost everyone dear to you so that even caring for anyone else is taboo. That is also the reason why kept on refusing your Chevalier, your knight, because he is t
he only person who can emotionally cripple you. You chose Lucien, like everything else you’ve chosen for yourself in life, out of your own needs. You didn't chose him because you could love him, you chose him because you knew you could not. You chose him out of pure convenience and because he offered to take you away from the only thing that was threatening you. You cannot love because if your heart endures another tragedy, it will crumble and it will die.”

  She couldn't think of anything to say.

  “You need a man who cannot be taken from you, even by death. You need a man who cannot change and will not change. You need me, you are just too proud to admit it.”

  He came to her side and embraced her. His wet clothes soaked hers. “You wish everything I said was a lie.”

  Yes, she did wish it was a lie. He had dissected her and made her feel so vulnerable she wanted to cry. She hated the feeling of exposure. She wanted her life to be dictated by her own reasons and logic. When those thoughts were said out loud, she felt unreasonably selfish. He still wouldn’t let her go.

  All thoughts dissipated when she inhaled his scent. It was nothing short of intoxicating. The warm heat of his body against her skin was enough to set her on fire. She felt weak at the knees when he lowered his head to kiss her. His lips were soft and warm. The gentle kiss became something more, unquenched, passionate. Before she knew what was going on, she was already lying on the bed with him on top of her. His breath was hot against her slender neck. She desperately wanted to refuse him, but her body would not listen. His beautiful blue eyes could even bends heaven to his will. She was too weak to rebel.

  Chapter 11: Sacrificial

  “Welcome back, Chevalier,” Soren said. He was leaning against the hospital’s white wall, his arms folded on his chest. He wore a black suit that fit his figure almost too well.

  “Where am I?” Chevalier sat up on the bed. His limbs felt so weak and difficult to control, as though they weren’t his own. He rested his head on his hands. “It hurts so much…”

  Chevalier looked up at the beautiful young man. “Who are you?”

  “I am Soren.”

  “What do you mean by ‘welcome back’?”

  “Just what I said,” Soren stood up from the wall. “What is the last thing you remember?”

  Chevalier thought about it. “I was driving on the highway, and these trucks..,” Chevalier shook his head. “Then I woke up here.”

  “You have died, Chevalier Shiva,” Soren said bluntly, his voice devoid of concern.

  Chevalier raised a brow to analyze the mysterious man standing front of him. “That’s not possible.”

  “Nothing is impossible.”

  “I’m still… alive.” Chevalier looked down at his body.

  “In your deep sleep, you had a long dream; a dream so long that it felt as if it lasted an eternity.”

  “Yeah… I was walking in a barren wasteland that never seemed to end. But that still doesn’t make sense! Am I dead now?”

  Soren shook his head. “You were dead. My master, Lord Lucifer, brought you back to life.”

  Chevalier gave Soren a look of suspicion. “Are you a mental patient?”

  Laughter burst from Soren in spite of himself. “I do not believe that is important to you. What should be important to you now is your Kali.”

  “Kali!" Chevalier bolted off the bed at the thought of her. “Where is she? Is she sick? She must have been waiting in the rain yesterday!"

  “Chevalier, I do not have much time before my master finds that I am missing, so listen and listen carefully. You died in the accident,” Soren began to explain. “The Lucien you know was actually Lord Lucifer in disguise. Kali sealed a bargain with him. If Lord Lucifer brought you back to life, Kali has bargained to spend an eternity with him in Hell. You have been in a coma for a month, Chevalier.”

  “What?” Chevalier was dumbstruck.

  “It is up to you whether you believe me or not. I am here to make you an offer. If you want to get Kali back from the underworld, the only option is to face death once again and be reborn as a demon. My offer is on the table. When you have decided, called my name and I shall come.”

  “If what you say is true, why are you telling me all of this? Why make the offer at all?”

  Soren paused and questioned his own motives. Fury skittered over his beautiful face. “I’ve followed my master from Heaven to the depths of Hell! Do you think I would let a mere human take him from me?”

  A pair of wings sprung from Soren’s back. He walked toward the window, opened it, and flew out.

  “Wait!” Chevalier ran to the window and looked down to see if the young man had fallen to the ground. Chevalier was standing in a room twenty stories up. The streets below were crowded, with no sign of people screaming or the young man’s body on the ground. Any man jumping from this height would be in several pieces. Chevalier picked up a black feather that rested on the window frame. His eyes weren’t deceiving him. That had been a pair of black wings sprouting from the young man’s back!

  Chevalier left his room and walked down the hallway of the hospital. The nurses and doctors stared at him as he stepped into the elevator to leave. They had been sure he was dead. He’d been brain dead for over twelve hours, and here he was, a coma and a month later walking out of the hospital a healthy man. Modern medicine had no explanation.

  “I’m home,” Chevalier said, pushing the door open and entering his apartment. He closed the door behind him. When he didn’t hear her voice, he searched for her in the bedroom and the bathroom. “Kali?”

  Oh right, she doesn’t live here anymore. Chevalier mentally slapped himself. How could he forget a thing like that?

  After dinner, he went to see Kali at Lucien's home. He rang the bell for a while, losing his patience when no one answered the door. He was about to force his way in when he realized the door wasn’t locked. The place was completely deserted. Judging from the layer of dust and the shreds of cobwebs hanging everywhere, the place had been deserted for at least a month.

  He took the cell phone out of his pocket and called Hana. She shrieked when she heard his voice. He pulled the cell phone away to protect his ear.

  “Hana? Hey, do you know where Kali is?”

  “Chevalier? But…but you’re…”

  “Yeah. Dead. Never mind that, just tell me where Kali is.”

  “You’re alive!”

  “I just got released from the hospital. You know modern medical nowadays, they can even bring people back from the dead. Where’s Kali?”

  “K-Kali?” Hana’s voice stuttered. “After the doctors confirmed your death, Kali disappeared with Lucien. No one has seen them in a month.”

  “Disappeared? What do you mean ‘disappeared’?” Chevalier thought about the handsome young man standing by his bed in the hospital room when he woke earlier. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Wait, Chevalier!”

  He hung up the phone. Could it be that what that guy said was true? Lucien… no, Lucifer had taken Kali to Hell? How could that be? In a world of modern science, how could something like that happen? But the guy he’d met had a pair of black wings and had disappeared out the window twenty stories high. Were there still things in this world even modern science couldn’t explain?

  His name, what was it?

  Chevalier sighed. He suddenly felt like a character in a science fiction movie.

  “Soren! Soren! Show yourself!”

  He stepped back as a light appeared on the floor next to him, slowly spreading to form a magic circle on the ground. It shifted to a bright crimson red as Soren appeared in his human form. “So, you have reconsidered.”

  “Reconsidered what?”

  “Becoming a demon.”

  “Why would I want to do that?” Chevalier asked.

  “Then you summoned me because-”

  “Where is Kali?”

  “In Hell.”

  “Okay. How do I get there?”

  Soren chuckled. “And what will you d
o once you get there?”

  “Take her back.”

  “How?”

  “What do you mean, how? I’ll give Lucien a good beating and bring her back.”

  “He is Lucifer,” Soren reminded Chevalier, “the most powerful among the archangels. If you want to take her back, you must become a demon yourself.”

  “Will I be powerful enough to defeat Lucifer?”

  That was a foolish question, Soren thought. “No, but you will be able to bring Kali back. That is what you want, isn’t it?”

  “Fine,” Chevalier said without a moment hesitation, “make me into one of your kind.”

  Soren threw a small vial of potion at him. Chevalier caught it in his hand.

  “Drink this,” Soren instructed. “It will slowly kill you. You will die an excruciating death - the mortal you, anyways. I will take care of the rest. When you wake up, you will have powers beyond your imagination.”

  “Excruciating death, huh?” Chevalier opened it and poured the liquid into his mouth. “I hope she’ll appreciate what I’m going through for her. She can be quite dense, you know.”

  “Why? Why are you making such a hasty and dangerous decision for a girl?” Soren asked curiously. "I did not jest when I said this will be excruciating.”

  “Who knows?” Chevalier said. He felt his legs suddenly weakened and fell to his knees. He was able to stay upright for a few seconds before rolling to the ground. His chest felt as his ribs were collapsing into his lungs. His breathing became increasingly difficult and more painful with each breath. His blood started to burn like it had become acidic and he could feel it burning his body as it coursed through his veins. The pupils in his beautiful golden eyes contracted and the white of his eyes became bloodshot.

  He stared intently into the blue sky, savoring its beauty as a human being for the last time before becoming something else entirely. He waited for the mercy of death to relieve him of the poison’s agonizing torment.

  “…I must…really love her…”