Old habits die hard. The place Grace runs to at the beginning of this chapter is an homage to an old fanfic of mine, the one that really started it all--specifically, an homage to the character who walked with the villains so Grace could run w̶i̶t̶h̶ from hers.

Are we hating Alastor yet?

Chapter 20: Not as Planned

Grace’s aimless run took her to a bridge overlooking a shitty river not too far from the hotel.

Her shins felt as though they were being stabbed by a thousand knives, her lungs felt like she was breathing through pyroclastic flow. Of course, being in Hell, that probably wasn’t too much of an exaggeration.

She sagged against the chainlink fence to catch her breath, ignoring the searing metal as it branded Xs into her exposed skin. A few yards away was a sizable gap in the fence obviously created by bolt cutters; Grace assumed that was where other souls attempted escaping an eternity in Hell by taking their own afterlives only to invariably respawn in the same—or maybe even worse—circumstances.

Once her pulse slowed a bit, she dragged herself to the opening in the fence, not with the intent of pitching herself into the water below, but just to be able to sit and let her legs rest a bit while overlooking what Grace grimly nicknamed the River Styx.

The concrete burned the backs of her legs worse than the fence had burned her back. But Grace didn’t care; none of this pain compared to what Alastor had inflicted upon her last night.

She pulled her cell phone from her purse, stunned—and hurt—to find no unread messages from anyone.

Where was the check-in from Charlie? The concern from Kofax? Angel Dust’s horribly-timed inquiry into the nature of Alastor’s genitals or sexual prowess? 

There was nothing. 

Not one damn thing. Grace took a slow, deep breath, a tear slipping from her eye. How did everything go from the best it had ever been—perfection, really; paradise, even!—to the absolute worst in the blink of an eye?

Here sits a dumb demon named Grace, she thought,

who fell for a smiling face.

She’s now broken-hearted

from a 'ship, uncharted

And wants to beat Al with a vase.

Yeah, okay, so the half needs some work. Not a bad limerick off the top of my head, though. Maybe I perfect it in my gratitude journal.

A single, wry, “ha!” escaped her lips.

Behind Grace, the continuous, fluctuating combination of engines roaring and tires peeling across pavement dulled to a general whooshing punctuated with the infrequent staccato honk of an impatient, infuriated driver—which made Hell’s traffic considerably more pleasant than any given rush hour in Washington, D.C.

And above the nonstop hum of traffic, Grace heard footfalls. She glanced up hesitantly as Charlie, Angel Dust, and Kofax approached on foot. If they were following—obviously they had done just that—it would explain the radio silence in her text messages.

Grace turned away from the trio, squeezing her eyes shut and kicking herself mentally for even thinking the words radio silence.

“What’re you doing?” Kofax cried, coming to a stop beside Grace. “If you’re thinking of—” She pantomimed diving into the river below. “—don’t you dare.”

“For fuck’s sake, no,” Grace sighed. “I just came here to—” Get some fresh air … on a smog-choked street? Hear myself think … amid the cacophony of traffic? Get away from all your crazy staring? Do exactly what you were assuming I wanted to do? 

Probably the most believable response would be to tell them she’d left the hotel to keep herself from stabbing Alastor through his heart with the nearest available weapon.

Of course, then, he’d just force her to heal him, which would be an especially cruel addition of insult to injury.

Kofax sat down beside Grace. “Oooh! Hot asphalt, hot asphalt!” she yelped before saying, “It’s okay. You didn’t need a reason to get away.”

“We just wanted to make sure you don’t do anything rash,” Charlie added, standing behind Kofax where she’d sat. “We care about you.”

“Shut up,” Angel Dust told Charlie, settling on the other side of Grace with a visible wince and loud hiss. “We love you, you crazy bitch. I don’t wanna think about what my afterlife would be like without you in it.”

Kofax pulled Grace into an awkward side-hug around her shoulders. “Samesies!”

“Look: nobody’s attempting to commit suicide here, I swear,” Grace assured them. Her reply was punctuated with a horribly ill-timed scream and smack! from another hole in the chain link fence a few yards away.

“Okay, I’m not attempting to commit suicide, here! Jesus!” Grace cried. “I just needed some time to myself, okay?!”

“Do you want us to leave?” asked Charlie after a brief hesitation.

Yes.

No.

I dunno.

You can stay if you don’t piss me off … which is highly unlikely. When Grace couldn’t articulate her thoughts, she simply shook her head.

Angel Dust scooted closer to Grace, wrapping an arm around her waist.

Holy fuck … Grace thought, now firmly sandwiched between a spider demon and a fox demon. I think they really do love me. Well, that makes two sinners, anyway. Her lip trembled. She'd been well aware Alastor didn’t love her, but damn.

“Do you wanna talk?” Charlie asked.

Grace shook her head again, tears sliding unchecked down her cheeks.

“If you don’t wanna talk …” Angel Dust said slowly, “Can I at least ask a question?”

“I will push you right the fuck off this bridge if it’s about the Radio Demon’s junk.”

Angel replied hastily, “No, no! How stupid do you think I am?”

Grace looked at him wordlessly, letting her tears and sniffles and trembling lip and snotty nose speak on her behalf.

“Okay, fair.” After a moment, he followed with his question: “I’ve gotta know—I think we all wanna know—how did you get out of your soul contract with Alastor?”

“Huh?” Grace blinked. God, her eyes stung fiercely. Being ground-level with fresh car pollution probably wasn’t helping anything. “What’re you talking about?”

Angel looked at Charlie. Charlie glanced at Kofax. Kofax arched an eyebrow at Grace, holding her gaze.

“I, uh … I think you should take a selfie,” Kofax suggested.

“What? Why?”

Another voice entered the conversation and Grace felt a sharp nudge against her ass. “You gonna jump or not?”

Grace turned in her spot to see a loan shark looming overhead, his arms crossed over his chest.

In her stunned silence, he spat, “Get on with it or get out of my way! Some of us have things to do today!”

“Listen, jerkass,” Angel Dust snapped at him, all eight of his eyes narrowing as he whipped around to face the loan shark. “You so eager to do Hell a favor and kill yourself? There’s another opening at the fence a few yards down!”

“Angel!” Charlie cried. “Don’t encourage him!”

“What? He’s clearly already made up his mind that he’s gonna do it! I’m just tryna help!” Angel said, all grins.

The loan shark flipped the group off and started for the next hole in the fence. He yelled over his shoulder, “Fuck you all!”

“Big, fat pass!” Kofax chirped. “Have the suicide you deserve!”

While Charlie gaped at Kofax and Angel Dust, the latter remarked casually, “’S not like he’ll be permanently double-dead.”

Charlie remained speechless.

Grace glanced between Angel and Kofax. “What were we talking about?”

“I told you to take a selfie,” Kofax reminded her. “I just really think you’re gonna wanna take a selfie. For posterity, y’know?”

“That’s incredibly weird, K. Why would I wanna remember any of this?”

“Just take. The fucking. Selfie.”

“Fine,” Grace sighed. “Whatever.” She pulled her phone from her purse, woke it up and opened the camera app. There would be no smile in this photo. She switched to the front-facing camera and promptly gasped at the sight of her eyes on the phone screen. Her sclera had reverted to their original gray. 

Thoroughly shocked, Grace fumbled her phone and it tumbled out of her grip. “Shit!” Instinctually, she tried to grab it but several pairs of hands restrained her—only half of which were Angel Dust’s.

“Aw fuck! I needed that!” But what’s the loss of one more important thing in my afterlife? When she straightened, Grace caught sight of a low-flying Voxtek drone as it buzzed by. She glowered its way and flipped it off with both hands.

“That’s my girl,” Kofax encouraged her with a squeeze.

“‘Your girl’ isn’t doing well.” Grace exhaled a deep, shaky breath. “And I’m sorry, Angel, I have no idea how this—” she gestured toward her eyes, “—happened.”

Charlie pouted. “Well … if you don’t know that, would you be willing to tell us what happened last night? Cuz you were normal yesterday. Well, I mean, not normal, but—you know—” She sighed in exasperation, Grace hoped, at herself. “Maybe … we could help? I mean … if you want to fix things with Al?”

“He can rot here for all I care. In fact, I hope he does.” Grace bristled. She glanced up at Charlie. “Rejection reopens my lethal wound and forces me to relive the agony and memory of being stabbed through the heart. I don’t know why or how but it’s happened enough times for me to see it’s causation rather than correlation. So … I stopped pursuing anyone. Ever. It hurt me too much to be rejected and … just … as much as we all know I enjoy and need it, pursuing sex was never worth that risk.

“But on New Years Eve, Alastor told me I could initiate our … encounters. He promised me that he wouldn’t turn me down if I requested it. And when I finally gathered the courage to, um … ask for his companionship? He got the most evil expression on his face that I’ve ever seen on anyone … and rejected me.”

“So he betrayed your trust,” Charlie said softly. She looked toward the hotel and whispered, “That’s not gonna be something so easy to recover from, Al. Dammit.”

“He betrayed me,” Grace whispered. “He betrayed me!” She repeated it with more fervor several times, the gravity of the realization weighing more heavily on her with each refrain. Her blurry vision turned to Angel Dust. “When I agreed to give him my soul, I made him promise in return to never betray me; that’s what happened to our contract. Last night, in rejecting my request for sex after he promised me he wouldn’t, he failed to uphold his end of our bargain.”

Angel exhaled softly but didn’t reply. That was almost certainly not the answer he’d hoped for.

Grace’s throat burned. “I know I said he’s perfect the way he is. I thought I truly believed that for the first time … ever! But I think … deep down—” or maybe not so deep down “—I didn’t want to change him but I hoped that if I could get him to actually fall for me, he’d change for me willingly.”

“I’m afraid you did that thing again,” Charlie said softly. “What you once told us you did when you were alive?”

Grace glanced at the Princess of Hell questioningly.

Charlie elaborated: “'I can fix him.'”

“Oh," Grace mumbled. "Right. That thing.”

Charlie’s right. Whether or not I meant to, that’s exactly what I did. Again. Fuck me and my lousy afterlife!

It took a great deal of convincing on Grace’s part to get her friends to trust her enough to leave her at the bridge. Charlie and Kofax reluctantly returned to the hotel, but Angel Dust was stubborn and remained at her side with the promise that he wouldn’t say a thing, and would listen if she wished to talk, which she didn’t. 

But she had to hand it to him: the Porn Demon, unlike the Radio Demon, was able to keep a promise.

And so they sat together on the bridge overlooking Pentagram City’s River of Stank.

Bit by bit, Grace deflated against Angel, her head resting on his shoulder.

The first thing she said wasn’t until the sun started declining in the sky. “Am I just really fucking stupid, or what?”

Angel shook his head. “I jokingly called you ‘kinda stupid’ that one time only cuz you’re anything but. I’d never have said it if I thought it was the least bit true.”

“Stupid people make the kinds of mistakes I do, though.”

“He’s charming and handsome—”

“That’s not helping, Angie—”

“—and you fell in love. Intelligence has nothing to do with this. Y’know, love is blind ’n’ all that shit?”

Angel had a good point.

Good point aside, Grace had still made an egregious mistake. One that pretty much everyone who knew both her and the Radio Demon had cautioned her against. If nothing else, dismissing all the warnings from people who knew him well enough to have an accurate bead on him had to be the sign of idiocy. Love or otherwise.

“You gonna be okay, Princess Grace?”

She glanced at him, her lip quivering anew; Angel had not previously used any of those nice nicknames on her. The kindness was both unexpected and unwelcome—not while she just really wanted to hate herself, judge herself, and generally wallow in her own misery. But she didn’t say as much.

In her silence, Angel concluded, “Yeah. You’re gonna be okay.”

Doubtful. We’re in Hell. And it feels like Hell again … worse than it did before I met that garnet ghoul.

“For what it’s worth …”

“Don’t.”

“He’s handsome and charming.”

“Please don’t—”

“And anyone he turned his attention on would be helpless against his wiles. You’re no weaker or dumber than anyone else with a set of eyes.”

Grace sighed heavily and replied flatly, “Thanks.”

“So … whaddaya say? Head back to the hotel with me? It’s dinnertime.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Look, little dik dik: I’ve seen the shit that goes down on this stretch of road. You may be a masochist but—trust me—you do not wanna be here once the sun goes down.”

Much aggrieved, Grace finally acquiesced. Angel helped her to her feet, looping her arm with his upper left, and escorted her back to the hotel.

She hoped she would get at least a few minutes of peace while making her way from the front door to her room, where she planned to hide out indefinitely.

But of course, fate had other ideas. Everyone was hanging out in the common area and the moment Angel stepped inside with Grace on his arm, Alastor shot to his feet, his gaze honed in on her.

Whatever he had on his mind as he cautiously approached her, Grace had no patience for hearing.

“You!” Grace seethed, closing in on Alastor with three short, quick steps for every one of his long-legged strides. “You do not look at me. You do not speak to me. You do not think about me. You do not join me in bed. Whether by knocking or by teleporting, don’t so much as delude yourself into thinking you’re welcome there anymore. I don’t know what I would do if I found you in my bed, but trust me when I say you do not want to find out.” She jabbed him in the chest over his heart to punctuate each word as she spat it at him: “You! Are! Dead! To! Me!” 

He retreated a tiny step with each jab. After her last statement, Alastor opened his mouth and managed a single, meek, “Little—”

“Don’t!” The air between them shimmered gold. “Don’t finish that statement or I’ll tear your fucking larynx out your throat!”

After bearing witness to what Grace had done to Mimzy, Alastor had to know that was no empty threat. Further, he was holding her gaze; he had to see what Charlie, Kofax, and Angel Dust saw—a blatant indication of their broken contract, which boiled down to the fact that he would be on his own to manage healing that sort of injury.

Before he could test her sincerity, Grace shoved past him and stalked up the stairs.

The first thing she laid eyes upon in her room was that antique cathedral-style tube radio on her bedside table. She glowered at it as if glowering directly at him and considered briefly pitching it at the nearest wall. It would be deliciously satisfying to hear the crunch of wood, watch it splinter and crack upon impact. To break it just as he’d broken her.

Of course, the last time Grace attempted a stunt like that, it led her down the path that brought her here and ended with this: a broken heart and anger unlike anything she’d ever felt.

Rather than flinging the radio against the wall, or tearing it to pieces, or finding a baseball bat and using it as a seriously unfun piñata, she unplugged it and set it face-down on the floor.

Grace could detest Alastor even more for making her hate something she’d previously been enamored of—a connection to her beloved grandfather, one of few family members she remembered fondly.

She may not have had the best aim ever when it came to throwing things, but she’d played soccer throughout her scholastic career, and her body still had that muscle memory. She kicked the radio beneath the bed.

Having been apoplectic for such a swath of time left Grace with little energy. She shed the sundress and bra before climbing into bed. While she preferred to sleep in some sort of pajama, she was too tired to rummage through her dresser for anything.

The room was dark and much too quiet. Without even noticing the change, she’d gotten used to having someone’s quiet, steady breathing in her ear. Wubby appeared as if popping into her room through a wall and curled up against Grace’s chest, purring loudly.

And even with Wubby’s purring, the silence of the room pressed Grace down into the mattress.

So she whipped an arm out from beneath the covers, groping the end table until her hand landed on the television remote. She turned on the TV and after flipping aimlessly through channels, paused on 666 News briefly. It was back on the air, and with Katie Killjoy carrying on about Angelic Weapons flooding the streets; it seemed as though every teenager was having them confiscated from classrooms these days.

Grace rested her head on her pillow and listened to the broadcast, watching the ceiling flicker from the light of the television screen.

Annoyed with even the mere sound of Killjoy’s voice, Grace quickly and blindly moved on to the next channel: HHSC—the Hellish Home Shopping Club. She had vague recollections of watching its earthbound counterpart on days she stayed home sick from school.

And what were they pedaling this dreadful night?

Angelic. Fucking. Steel.

It was now being manufactured in all sorts of creative shapes and sizes and becoming too damn readily available. 

Switchblades, Balisongs. Angelic Steel Swiss Army knives. Oyster knives. Morning star maces. And for the more traditionally-minded sinner—or those who had been in Hell that long—Angelic Steel was sold in hunting knives, Katanas, broadswords, and rapiers. 

Because yes, Grace brooded, there’s still chivalry and pageantry in murdering other sinners.

“We have something for everyone!” the show’s female host boasted. “Are you a lady looking for discreet protection from the exorcists? We have a fine selection of Angelic Steel hatpins, authentic ivory-handled Angelic Steel letter openers, and Angelic Steel hair forks with pangolin leather floral detail!”

The male host added on, “Or are you a pathetic loser nerd who wants to irreversibly vanquish your bullies? Have we got the weapons for you! How about Angelic Steel bat'leths and beskads? Decapitate your enemy in geeky style!”

The weapons intended for women didn’t get Grace’s attention. But despite herself, she had to sit up to see the bat’leths and beskads for herself. “Oh, damn,” she whispered. “Those are kinda cool.”

She shook her head and lay back down, continuing to listen to the TV while she drifted off to sleep.

They talked about sets of Angelic Steel cutlery that included forks, spoons, and even chopsticks. “Watch your tongue and lips on these utensils!” the female host cautioned with a laugh.

Grace’s waning moments of consciousness that night were musing about how, thanks to Carmilla Carmine, it was getting easier and easier to get permanently fucked in Hell.

Chapter 22: Eight Keys and Still One Locked Door

See you back here next Sunday, deer friends!