Lucifer Reborn

by Dante King

  “Where am I?” I asked, hoping that whatever this was, it would help me. It did look just like Christina after all.

  The reflection looked me up and down, chuckling. “It’s been a long time, Luke,” she said. “How did you end up running your own business? Back in college, you seemed like such a…”

  I’d seen all this before. We’d had this conversation. “A slacker,” I grunted. “Yeah, that’s what I used to be—”

  The reflection giggled. “—a loser,” she finished, something malicious entering her eyes. “You couldn’t have gotten a date with me if you were the last man on campus. You just had to sit there and seethe like a little loser…”

  My eyebrows shot to my hairline. “Come again?”

  “Other people have what you want,” the reflection purred, wrapping a lock of blonde hair around its finger. “The money. The power. The status, and the pretty girl on their arm so everyone else knows they have it, too. Don’t you want it, Luke? Don’t you just want it so bad you can fucking taste it…!”

  I shook my head. “Whatever you think this is, it isn’t working,” I said, the beginnings of a smirk tugging at my lips. “I’m already having sex with you, Christina. Why would I be jealous...wait a second! I know what you are!”

  “I’m what you can’t have,” the fake Christina growled, her tone going vicious. “All the things dangled in front of your face that you can never, ever touch—”

  “Exactly,” I shot back, the smoke settling around me. “This is the Envy School, isn’t it? Which must make you one of their top students…”

  The false Christina looked like I’d punched her in the stomach. Her expression collapsed—then she stepped right out of the mirror, flickering into the form of an obscenely beautiful demoness. She only stayed that way for a moment before transforming again, taking the form of a white stag with a twelve-point spread. Then a floating sword, a swarm of bats...every step brought a new form.

  “Uh, hello?” I asked, reaching out a hand. “What’s up with you—?”

  “There you are!”

  A hand came down on my shoulder. I turned, the last of the smoke sinking to the floor, just in time to see Xora standing behind me. A worried expression filled the rusalka’s face. Christina and Mareth were just behind her —evidently, we’d been together the whole time.

  “You have to be careful here,” Xora chided me. “There are some powerful demons practicing their tricks in this School. It’s—”

  “Envy, yeah,” I said, jerking a thumb at the transforming demon. “I got that. That demon sure tried to make me jealous as hell.”

  Mareth looked gobsmacked. “What did she do?”

  “Transformed into Christina,” I said, with a lustful gaze at the real woman. “And told me some things I didn’t like.”

  A low, knowing chuckle left Xora’s throat. “They like to do that. They say they’ve ‘turned you green’ if they provoke an actual reaction out of you. You know, green with envy and all that?”

  “She failed,” I grunted, wrapping an arm around Christina’s waist. “Because I don’t envy anyone at all. I’ve got everything I need, right here.”

  Christina, I thought. Mareth. Maddie. Nice little group I’m forming here, isn’t it?

  Xora shook her head, watching the demoness make her way through the smoky, mirror-filled hall. “She’s been studying so hard, she doesn’t even notice she’s casting a mimicry spell with every other step,” she muttered. “It’s a surprise that one managed to latch onto you at all.” She shook herself, as if she were in danger of breaking apart as well. “I hope she didn’t say anything too disturbing, Luke.”

  “Not at all.”

  Xora nodded. “Envy School students,” she said, waving away some smoke, “specialize in getting inside of their targets’s heads. They master mimicry, glamors, illusion magic, that sort of thing.”

  “Smoke and mirrors,” I agreed, gesturing to the decoration.

  “Exactly. Very useful for those demons who are enlisted by mortal forces.”

  I reached out, steadying myself against a mirror. It left a smear from my fingertips, which some janitorial demon would no doubt have to clean up. “Mortals? I wasn’t aware ordinary humans could command demons?”

  “Not command,” Xora said coldly. “And not ordinary humans. Mediums, spirit-catchers, psychics. The real kinds, that is —not the kinds with commercials on TV. When they do their so-called ‘magic’, what they’re really doing is communing with the spirit world. They might touch a creature like that one,” here she gestured at the transforming demon, “and it would need to take many forms in order to convince her of its honesty.”

  “All while ensnaring them in your traps,” I said, thinking of the mind-fuck the fake Christina had tried to lay on me. “No offense, but this is definitely not my thing, Xora. I’m more of a direct guy.”

  “I had figured,” Xora said with a smile. “Should you remain with Mareth for a long while, she can assist you in that area.”

  I looked over the now-blushing succubus, who’d been fidgeting with her schoolgirl uniform while Xora spoke. “So that’s your thing, then, Mareth?”

  “Something like that,” Mareth trilled, clearly embarrassed. “I’d be happy to show you a few illusion tricks later, if you’d like? I can make myself look like just about anybody…”

  About a dozen different erotic possibilities filled my head at the words. “I’d love that. First, though, maybe we should get somewhere where I don’t feel like I’m in a goddamn funhouse?”

  Xora led us through the hall of mirrors, pausing here and there to reorient herself. toward the end of the hallway the room stretched like one of those optical illusions, and what had appeared to be a tiny door halfway up the wall became a full-sized one down on the floor.

  “Gluttony, Wrath, Envy,” I told Christina as we reached the door, counting the words on my fingers. “I’m starting to sense a pattern here.”

  “I was wondering when you’d figure it out,” Christina giggled, flashing her demonic smile. “What do you think the next one will be? Lust?”

  “Kinda hope they’ll save that one for last,” I said with a smirk. “Maybe Sloth, though. I could use a break…”

  Chapter 15

  As we passed into the next hall, the carnival attraction air of Envy’s hall of mirrors gave way to the sedate gray walls of a bank. We walked across marble floors, patterned in overlapping scales of green and silver. The green was the same shade as money, the silver the gleaming surface of a coin. Everything in here gave an appearance of age and security, the stability of a great monument or building to weather the years and remain standing tall. This wasn’t your local bank stuck in the corner of a strip mall or suburb—this was more like Fort Knox.

  Christina’s heels clicked across the floor as she followed Xora through the lobby. Across the way I could see the entrance to a massive vault, a grate made of heavy iron bars half-retracted into the ceiling and ready to snap shut at the slightest security threat. Imps and other demons came in and out of it, their arms laden with sacks of coins, jewels, and heavy gold bars.

  “So this has got to be Greed,” I said, matching my step between Christina and Mareth. It felt good to have them on either side of me—we felt like more of a team that way, like they were my entourage and I was some kind of Infernal Academy VIP. I felt like that more and more all the time. The fight with the demons who had wanted Maddie had already faded into the back of my consciousness. Nothing I’d seen since then raised the hairs on the back of my neck, made me feel like taking this place over would be too much of a challenge.

  I had a fighter in Christina and a potential illusionist in Mareth. What else would I need to rise to the top of the ranks?

  “Very clever,” Xora said, her words dripping with good-natured sarcasm. She gestured just past the vault, where a small glass window stood out in the marble wall. “Was it the dragon that tipped you off?”

  I hadn’t seen anything like that. “Bullsh
it,” I said, craning my neck to see. “There’s no dragon! Dragons aren’t demons.”

  “Of course they are,” Xora said with a laugh. “Someone’s not familiar with the Book of Revelation, I see.”

  “You will be,” Mareth said, blowing a lock of dark hair out of her eyes. It flapped over her horns, giving her a cute, rumpled appearance before she smoothed it down. “Course prerequisites. You have to be able to give chapter and verse before they’ll let you handle advanced grimoires…”

  I discarded that worry for the moment. The dragon was more interesting. “Let me see…”

  The window looked out onto a vast, cylindrical chamber. There was no other way to put it—it looked like Scrooge McDuck’s money pit, with the thick carpet of gold coins to match. Diamonds, rubies, and other precious jewels studded the hoard like piercings on an alt-model, gleaming and glittering with an eerie light. I gasped at the sight. There was enough money in there to buy most of Earth’s nations outright—if not permanently tank their economy, at least.

  The pile bulged in the center, rising as high as a hill, and sitting on the top was a red-scaled dragon. Xora had been right, this was no fairy-tale beast. Malice glittered in its dark, ancient eyes, its body sinuous like a giant snake rather than the more dinosaur-like creatures I’d grown up seeing in fantasy movies and TV shows.

  The dragon’s gaze met mine, a puff of smoke escaping its nostrils. Don’t even think about it, that puff seemed to be saying. I could sympathize. With so much wealth on display, every new student to see this horde must have been green with envy.

  Ah. So that was why the two were set up this way. Envy did lead to greed, after all.

  “I’m almost frightened to ask what you all do with all this money,” I said, glancing at Xora and Mareth over my shoulder. Christina stood next to me, tapping a heel against the floor as she waited for her turn to see. “It’s enough to make anyone the richest man or woman on Earth…”

  I turned back. The splendid vista was gone. The only thing I could see through the window was a blurry red smear. The hell?

  “Where’d the money go?” I asked, tapping the glass. “Is this some kind of spell?”

  Blink. The window moved like a shutter, a massive eyelid coming down and raising up just as quickly.

  I shot back from the square of glass like a bullet, nearly going over on my ass. “The dragon!” I cried. “Fuck!”

  Both Xora and Mareth began to laugh. “It does that,” Mareth giggled, looking like she’d been through the same prank the first time she’d been to the Greed School, too. “Just about every student falls for it, too.”

  “The dragon’s an ornery beast,” Xora said in a cooler tone. “And with good reason. Those are no ordinary coins you see in that vault, Luke.”

  The massive eye retreated, the dragon settling back on top of the hoard. Undaunted, Christina peeked into the tiny window when it became clear I was in no hurry to look again. “I feel like I could go for a swim in all that,” the demoness whispered, a strange tone entering her voice. “God, I bet it would feel like the most decadent thing in the whole world…”

  Dimly, I remembered Christina had strong feelings about decadence being a laudable quality for those who followed the Prince of Darkness. She might have been a demon now, but some things remained the same, no matter what.

  “It would likely be quite painful,” Xora said with a faint smile. “Cartoons are just that —entertainment. They don’t reflect reality in any way. Case in point: each of those coins is far more than a simple means of exchanging goods and services. Each represents a mortal’s soul.”

  Christina’s jaw hit the floor. “They’re soul contracts?”

  Xora looked briefly confused at this response. “That’s right,” the rusalka said with a chuckle. “You’re a Mog—I keep forgetting. You probably signed one of those contracts, didn’t you?”

  As Christina nodded, I looked out over the pile with new eyes. Each one of those tiny coins represented a mortal’s soul? There were so many —picking a single one out from the pack was like plucking a single grain of sand off of a beach. And yet they represented the very core of what it meant to be a person. A human soul, individual and irreplaceable…

  “Mine must be in there somewhere,” Christina purred, putting her face against the glass. “It’s been years since I signed my contract with the Prince of Darkness, though —it’s probably near the bottom somewhere, underneath too many coins.” A frown spread across her demonic visage. “Or maybe I’m one of the jewels?”

  “The jewels are...special cases,” Xora said, turning away from the glass. “They don’t represent mortals at all—they’re the tokens of powerful demons who have sworn their service to our Lord. Not your ordinary imps or incubi, either. Names like Nyarlathotep. Yaldabaoth. Abbadon…”

  Abbadon. Where had I seen that name before? That’s right—on the Morningstar Program. The computer program that had brought Christina and I to hell in the first place. As I stared at those jewels, taking in each one, I wondered what forces beyond my control those glittering gems might represent.

  “Come along,” Xora said, disrupting my train of thought. “The dragon’s not going to do a trick if you keep staring at it. You wouldn’t like the pranks it starts playing after it finishes with the eye thing.”

  Not wanting to know what the dragon would consider a ‘prank’ for someone caught staring at it for too long, I quickly followed Xora and the rest of our group. Beyond the cavernous entrance of the bank lay a hall of lecture rooms, facing each other at intervals like the rooms of a courthouse. In fact, almost before I’d realized it, we’d swapped one for the other.

  Xora paused before a room in which two cackling demons in white wigs were arguing vigorously. It seemed to be some kind of organized debate, where the two argued a point in front of a hooting crowd while a handful of instructors scored their responses and arguments.

  “Demonic law,” the rusalka explained in a whisper. She put a finger over her lips to indicate we should stay silent. Only a moment later, I realized it wasn’t a finger—that was one of her living strands of hair, teasing her glossy, pouty lips. I recoiled backwards, hitting the doorframe, and both demons turned mid-argument to stare at me.

  “As I was saying,” the taller demon growled, turning back to the crowd, “the evidence is ridiculous on its face! Prima facie, the presence of a fine summer morning or the dappling of rain on one’s forearms while running down the street with a loved one is not admissible evidence against a legally binding contract! Res ipsa loquitur, Your Honor!”

  Several demons in the front row hooted and hollered. One even tossed a wig of its own in the air, catching it in clawed fingertips before shoving it back down on top of its bald head.

  “Sunlight?” I asked, dropping my voice as I spoke to Xora. “Romance? What the hell are they talking about?”

  It was Mareth who spoke up. “They’re rehashing the Daniel Webster case,” the succubus said with a giggle. “It’s a common first-year scenario. One of the very few times in which a court of law found against the Devil, in point of fact.”

  “And he never forgot it,” Xora added ruefully, watching the demons argue.

  “‘If he be merely on a frolic of his own’,” the first demon quoted, trying to regain momentum, “then one can hardly—”

  “Silence!”

  “Heretic!”

  The whole thing broke down rapidly from that point. Xora shuffled me away, a little embarrassed at the sight. “Without the law, mankind is little more than an angry mob,” she said by way of explanation. “As you can plainly see.”

  “Demons, too,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t get it. Wrath being an arena makes sense, so does Envy being all smoke and mirrors, I guess. But Greed’s both a bank and a courthouse?”

  Xora shrugged. Behind her, a fat demon in the silken robes of a judge squeezed through the opposite doorway, entering a different classroom to thunderous applause. “Every sin of man comes through a
courtroom, it’s true: from avarice to usury. But these demons aren’t just arguing old court cases. Witness!”

  The rusalka peeled back a curtain near the end of the hallway. Within, a number of demons with academic robes thrown over their street clothes worked with long pens, scraping them across parchment. As I watched, a cute demon with a single horn growing from her forehead dipped a quill in ink, licked the tip, and made an alteration to her work.

  “Mara,” Xora said, indicating the one-horned demon. “Show our new students a sample of your work.”

  Mara looked up from her work, irritated by the distraction. She handed the scroll over to me, and I held it between me and Christina so that both of us could look it over.

  “Yep,” Christina purred knowingly. “I’ve seen one of these before.”

  I hadn’t. I’d heard of such things, of course—horror novels and science fiction were full of them—but I’d always expected the language in them to be flowery and full of double meanings, like a blade capable of wounding its wielder as easily as its target. This was a contract that spelled out in precise legal wording what a person would receive in exchange for selling their soul to the Devil. This one contained a complaint so long it covered most of the scroll. Apparently this person had been wronged by some sort of customer service associate, and they were willing to exchange their soul in return for the business the employee worked for going bankrupt. Evil, indeed, I thought, my eyebrows raising. Someone would sell their soul to the Devil for that?

  Well, not the Devil. Some demon with a name I didn’t recognize. The Devil himself probably didn’t need to bother with contracts: a handshake and a crossroads was all he needed.

  “Thank you, Mara. That will be all.” Xora took the scroll from my hands and gave it back to the demon. She began working on it again almost immediately, smoothing it out across the surface of her desk. “Greed is all about what binds people, Luke. What they truly value. Be that gold, their good looks, or power over others.”

  “We give it to them,” Mareth said solemnly from behind the rusalka. “For a price, of course.”