A small Valentine's Day surprise -- a chapter today AND a chapter tomorrow!

Alastor kept insisting they plan Grace’s great escape from Vox no matter how much she tried avoiding the conversation. 

The silliest idea for breaking Vox’s contract had come to her in a dream but it was one of those things that seemed far too easy to actually work. And while she could share it with Alastor, she elected not to; she was embarrassed by its simplicity—and the fact that she was leeching Vox’s powers whether or not she wanted them.

When the big day came, if she had a lapse in judgment, she might try it just for shits and giggles, but if it failed as she suspected it would, at least nobody would know about it but her. And in the unlikely event she survived it, only she would have to endure that humiliation.

The mysteriously acquired Angelic Steel beskad arrived within the estimated five-to-seven business-day timeframe. Kofax received the package and whisked Grace into her neon and blacklight domain to unbox it—as well as to present Grace with a small gift. 

She handed a palm-sized, rectangular, gift-wrapped box to Grace.

“This had better not be the beskad you ordered.”

“‘Ordered,’” Kofax scoffed. 

Grace ignored the implications of what she knew full well meant Kofax hadn’t paid for the thing, and remarked instead, “I’ll be real annoyed if it was actually like a doll-house sized prop.”

Kofax laughed. “Don’t worry. I got the thing from the Hellish Home Shopping Club, not AliExpress.” She nodded toward the box in Grace’s hands. “Open it.”

And so Grace did, her face lighting up when she found a new smart phone inside. “Oh my god, thank you, K! Holy mother of all fuck, did I miss my phone!”

“Yeah, don’t throw this one off a bridge.”

“Okay, in my defense, I didn’t throw it. I fumbled it.”

“Semantics.” Kofax gestured toward the phone. “Let it bite, scratch, and demean you!”

Grace leaned back in her stance, wide-eyed. “Excuse me?”

Kofax grinned wickedly. “Turn it on just like you do your Garnet Gatsby.”

“Last time I tell you anything,” Grace grumbled, her cheeks burning as she turned on the phone. The home screen had a digital painting of an antique cathedral radio surrounded by snaking vines and blooming red roses.

“I tried to get a photo of the Radio Demon for your home screen, but—well …”

“He wanted no part of it?” Grace guessed.

“No he did not.”

“Shocking.” The phone buzzed in Grace’s hand and she glanced up at Kofax with an eyebrow raised in question.

“You don’t seriously think I’d give you a new phone without ensuring all your friends had its number, do you?” Kofax said with a grin.

Not only had Kofax given Grace’s new phone number to all her friends, but she’d pre-programmed them into the phone and already set up their new group chat that was as alive-and-well as ever.

“This is … fantastic. Thank you so much, K!”

“I should warn you: this gift comes with strings attached.”

“Now a warning?”

“When you return to Vee Tower, take this with you. And if you need help, you call me. I’m setting shit into motion that will bring their whole world crashing down around their ears. It’ll be such chaos that they’ll need to completely abandon that high-rise and find a new building for their headquarters. All it will take is the click of a single button. You say the word and it’s good as done.”

Grace was too scared to ask what any of this was so she nodded silently.

“Promise me, Grace. Call me if you need help. You’re not going in there without back-up.”

“I promise,” Grace vowed. “I’m not going in there without back-up—” as if Alastor would even let her, “—and I will call if I need your help.”

“And don’t throw this off a bridge.”

Grace smiled despite herself. “And I won’t throw this off a bridge. Or, more accurately, drop it.”

“Looked the same from where I was sitting.” Kofax patted the large box set beside herself on her mattress. “Now, onto the main event!” 

She watched with baited breath as Grace pulled out the Angelic Steel beskad and swished it in the air in figure-eights.

“What’s your plan with that?”

At the very minimum, I’m using it in self-defense. But to her own surprise, Grace replied aloud, “I’m gonna decapitate that motherfucker.”

Kofax’s jaw dropped. “Holy shit, Grace!”

Grace cast a sidelong glance at her little cyberfox friend. “What can I say? Vox has brought out the worst in me and it’s about damn time I return that favor.”

“Does your Red Romeo know?”

“Red Romeo? That’s my band name!”

Kofax laughed. “Girl. You’re avoiding my question.”

“We play hardcore death country.”

“Hardcore death country?! What the fuck even is that?”

“I dunno, I just really don’t wanna have this conversation.”

“So I take it he doesn’t know?” Kofax pressed.

“About what?”

Kofax gestured grandiosely toward the nerdy weapon in Grace’s hand.

“Oh, yeah, no, he doesn’t. But he’s gonna have to, isn’t he? It’s not exactly like I can hide something this size.”

With an impish giggle, Kofax remarked, “That’s what he said.”

“You’ve been hanging out way too much with Angel, I think.” Grace exhaled heavily, her gaze falling to the blade. “I hope for everyone’s sake that I don’t have to use this thing.”

“Grace. There you are!” Alastor popped out of the shadows just in front of the closed door.

Kofax recoiled on her bed with a shriek.

Alastor studied the surroundings with a sneer on his face. “I think I’ve just discovered a whole new circle of Hell.” He turned his attention to Kofax. “How can you live like this?”

She stared at him in open-mouthed terror. “Did—you—just—have you ever heard of knocking?!”

Grace laughed. “Yeah, no, Alastor doesn’t do knocking.”

Alastor’s gaze dropped to Grace’s hand clutching the weapon and approached her in a few easy strides. He ran his hand down her arm, clasping the beskad’s handle over her hand. “What’s this?”

He didn’t need to touch her. He needn’t hold her hand, nor meet her stare as if gazing into the very depths of her soul. Once Grace recovered her voice, she told Alastor, “It’s … insurance.”

“Looks like an Angelic Steel weapon, to me,” he countered, encroaching on Grace’s personal space.

“To-may-to, to-mah-to,” she breathed, as he leaned closer into her. “Oh, wow, this is a whole lotta you—”

“O … kay … this is getting oddly sensual,” Kofax interjected. “Kindly take this someplace—anyplace—else.”

Grace cast a smirk back at Kofax. “Prude.”

“Come on, darling,” said Alastor. “Let’s make our plans.”

Our plans, our bed, our room, our fight.

My Little Fawn.

“Just promise you’re not gonna do anything kinky with that thing!” Kofax said as she followed the other two demons to her bedroom door. “Accidents with Angelic Steel are irreversible!”

Grace grinned wickedly, waiting for just the right moment after Kofax closed her door to loudly announce, “We are totally using this in bed tonight!”

Grace insisted she and Alastor keep their plans to confront Vox a secret but just as Vox had eyes all over Pentagram City, so, too, did Kofax. To be more accurate, Kofax had her eyes on Vox’s eyes all over Pentagram City. And as insistent as Grace was that they keep their plans secret, Kofax was even more insistent upon being involved in them. As it turned out, in a battle of tenacity, Kofax was quite a bit more stubborn than Grace.

Having sensed that this was stressing Grace out and putting some degree of strain on her friendship with Kofax, Alastor quickly intervened in a way that appeased both little demons: he found a way for Kofax to feel like she was contributing while keeping her role in the plan as minimal as possible.

He, however, refused to work from Kofax’s room and didn’t want her in theirs—that is, Grace’s and Alastor’s—so they compromised and convened in Grace’s original hotel room.

Kofax set up her laptop on the small table beside the window and deftly hacked into Vox’s surveillance system almost as if she’d prepared to do so prior to this afternoon.

“Gimme a minute to find the shithead,” she mumbled, clicking through views of the inside of Vee Tower. Between clicks, Grace caught sight of several familiar rooms, including the one in which she’d slept.

While Kofax searched, Grace plucked a set of mirror-finished silver chopsticks from the pencil holder on the corner of her desk and piled her hair up into a bun between her horns, securing it there with the chopsticks tucked perpendicularly to each other through the bun.

Kofax spared a glance at Grace. “Excuse me, I eat with those.”

“And now they’re hair decoration,” Grace countered with a forced grin. 

Lucifer’s non-existent nostrils, was Grace ever anxious about this ridiculously foolhardy idea of hers.

“Racist,” muttered Kofax.

“Oh, please. I’ve seen you do this very thing with these exact chopsticks.”

“Fine, you caught me. They make damn good—not to mention discreet—self-defense weapons.”

A knot sank deep into the pit of Grace’s stomach. There was no way this wouldn’t end in spectacular failure—and that’s if they were lucky.

And lord knew neither Alastor nor Grace were lucky. Had they been fortune’s favorites, they’d have met in Heaven under very different circumstances.

Alastor glanced with an uncertain smile at Grace. “I can get myself there but … while you’re ...” He waved a hand toward Grace’s eyes. “… like that …”

Owned by Vox?

Not yours?

A traitor?

Any of those options was dreadful. No wonder he didn’t want to articulate it.

“I can’t help you travel.”

“I know and that’s okay,” said Grace. It isn’t okay. It’s horrible. She swallowed thickly and scowled at the television across from her bed. The same one in which Vox had appeared and subsequently coerced her to see him at Vee Tower. “I can get there on my own.”

“Found him!” Kofax chirped. She immediately followed that with a groan. “Oh, fuck.”

“What?” Alastor and Grace replied warily in unison.

Kofax said, “He’s not alone.”

Alastor leaned over Kofax’s shoulder to look at the laptop’s screen. “That won’t do. That won’t do at all.”

Grace came up behind Alastor, leaning past him to peer at Kofax’s laptop screen. Sure enough, the Vees and a few of their robotic servants were in the conference room. 

Kofax zoomed out a bit to reveal one more sinner sitting with them at the table.

“Fucking Travis,” Grace bit out through clenched teeth. “How pathetic is it that he’s a Vee wannabe?”

“Pathetic and poetic,” Kofax replied, tossing a quick glance and a crooked smile over her shoulder at Grace.

Grace thought out loud, “How do we get Vox alone?”

“Or at least without Velvette and Valentino?” Alastor added.

Kofax thought a moment, then smirked. “Getting rid of Valentino should be easy enough.” She held up her cell phone and texted Angel Dust directly. 

Angel’s text dots bounced, then stopped, then bounced. After a long pause, he finally sent: 

Grace glanced at Kofax. “I wonder what he’s gonna do?”

“I dunno but I guarantee we’re better off blissfully unaware.”

Growing perturbed, Alastor interjected, “And what about Velvette?”

Kofax pursed her lips. “I need something a social media influencer couldn’t resist and would drop everything to go record.”

Disgusted in herself for knowing Velvette so well now—and for using her knowledge to betray her—Grace suggested, “Send her an anonymous tip that Carmilla Carmine is about to get canceled by Katie Killjoy live at the 666 News studios.”

“Okay…” Kofax raised a questioning eyebrow at Grace but after a moment, did as Grace told her with a mumbled, “If you insist.”

And so the trio waited for the Vees’ conference room to clear out. Velvette was first to go—soon after Kofax sent her the tip about Carmine vs. Killjoy—telling her male colleagues that she had better things to do. Twenty minutes afterward, Valentino glanced at his phone and then jumped from his chair with a disgustingly lascivious smile on his face, exiting the conference room without so much as a word of explanation to Vox or Travis.

“Remind me to send that boy a gift basket,” Kofax remarked with a sneer. “I have a feeling he’s making some great sacrifice for us now.”

“Here we go.” Grace took a steadying breath and turned to Alastor, squeezing the handle of the Angelic Steel beskad. “Wait in the shadows for me. Once I pop in, that’s your cue to join me.”

Alastor impulsively clamped his hand around Grace’s throat, his eyes boring a hole right through hers. “You don’t tell me what to do, Grace,” he scowled. 

Ugh! Why the fuck is this such a turn-on?!

Kofax watched the interaction, her mouth hanging open and her eyes enormous.

“So we’re gonna pretend this was my idea and I’m following through …” His voice softened along with his gaze. “But only if you promise me you won’t get hurt.”

Grace smiled slowly. “I’ll promise to do everything within my power to avoid getting hurt … but only if you kiss me on the lips before we go.”

“I’ll kiss you, Grace, but only if you ask nicely.”

“And I’ll ask nicely, but only if—”

“For fucks sake, you two, quit wasting time!” Kofax cried, slapping her hands on her thighs. “Who knows how long Vox will be alone after what I just orchestrated, so fucking kiss already and get going, you fucking fucked-up fucks!”

Grace glanced at Kofax in shock and replied, simply, “Damn.”

Alastor pulled Grace by her neck toward himself to plant a brief kiss on her lips, slowly loosening his grip and letting his hand travel downward with the lightest whisper of a touch, stopping just at the top of her cleavage.

She stepped back with a hard swallow and shook her head to clear it. “See you there, Radio Demon.” I love you. Hoping he somehow wouldn’t see it, Grace turned into a brilliant arc of neon blue, disappearing into the bedroom TV set with the beskad in her white-knuckled grip.

Moments later, she tumbled from the camera overseeing the Vee Tower conference room, damn near decapitating herself with the weapon in hand. She should have, perhaps, practiced fiber optic travel and landings in the time since she was returned to the Hazbin Hotel. As Grace jumped to her feet, shadows gathered around her, the darkness caressing every curve and swell, every nook and cranny, bleeding out from her body and into the conference room like a growing thunderhead.

She could feel a monstrous form stretching toward the ceiling behind her, sinew warping, bones crackling. It sucked the very air from around her, all malice and fury, blaring red eyes and sharp, yellow fangs filling its drooling maw. 

Blood-laced saliva dripped onto her hair and cheeks from Alastor’s mouth as he loomed above her, absorbing every inch of space from floor to ceiling. She resisted wiping away his blood and instead tilted her head at an angle as far as she could get it, leveling the most intense stare she could at Vox. Once she knew they’d caught the Overlord’s attention, she flashed him a savage grin.

Grace had become the demure, unhinged, feral female equivalent of the Radio Demon’s batshit-crazy. 

Shrouded within Alastor’s writhing darkness, Grace brandished the beskad, watching the Angelic Steel blade flash when caught in the fluorescent office lights.

What little grin Vox sported on his screen vanished, his cyan pupils retracting to mismatched pinpricks of light. He made an altogether heinous noise, staticky sizzles drowning out a string of creative expletives before he tumbled from his chair and stood to face off with, at minimum, Grace.

“Free me, Vox,” Grace growled.

Those terrified eyes on Vox’s screen flicked up to the eldritch nightmare as it towered above them. If Alastor stayed this way much longer, Grace feared, he’d have one hell of a crick in his neck.

“This contract is between you and me, Grace Bedgood. I won’t negotiate with you under these circumstances.” Vox’s words were firm but his shaking voice betrayed his confidence.

She smirked and teased him, “Aw, what’s the matter, Vox? Dislike discussing contracts under duress?”

Vox scowled. “Fuck. You. DisGrace.”

“Ooh, burn,” Grace replied with a roll of her eyes. “You’re as original as the girls on the soccer teams I played against in high school.”

“And they were right to call you that. You’re a nobody just like the loser prick you fawn over. And you don’t get to talk to me this way. You answer to me now, and don’t you forget it!”

If Grace had any hope of regaining her freedom, she had to try her idea no matter how stupid it seemed. Vox wasn’t going to let her go without a fight and he obviously refused to fight her when she had Alastor who could come to her rescue. 

She didn’t know what, exactly, Alastor would do with the following information but hoped it would be enough to distract him long enough that Vox would engage with her. So she lowered her head and her voice, speaking into the shadows and tentacles and darkness behind her. “Alastor. That’s Travis sitting at the table. He’s the one who stabbed me through the heart.”

He responded with a growl steeped in radio static before shrinking a little. A pair of inky tentacles shot out from either side of her, winding around Travis’s legs and shoulders. “You have no idea,” Alastor said, his voice unusually deep, “the gift you’ve bestowed upon me.” And with a swift motion, the tentacles twisted in opposing directions simultaneously, as if they were wringing out a water-logged towel. Except Travis’s body was the towel, and his blood and entrails, the water.

The final noise he made before the snapping of bone and squishing of innards was a wheezed yelp and a cough.

“Oh my god, Al! Why?!” Grace gagged, turning away from the carnage.

Vox chuckled wickedly, setting his wild-eyed stare on Alastor. “Look what your temper has wrought, you obsolete prick! You disgust her.” He snapped his fingers, conjuring his chain around Grace’s neck and yanking her toward himself with a jerk of his arm.

She stumbled forward, tried regaining her footing, stumbled again. Vox yanked once more until she was on her knees before him, the beskad landing with a thump on the carpet between the tips of his shoes and her knees. “Have I finally got you where you’ve always wanted to be, you little slut?” he asked, jerking on the crotch of his pants.

“You’re revolting,” Grace growled. How much she wanted to take the Angelic Steel and run it up between his legs like an inverse of what happened to Simon the Zealot. But she couldn’t take a chance of not being free of him before he died-died. 

That could possibly end their contract, but what if it didn’t? What if that turned her into some Hell-bound, zombie-like creature?

“You once said Valentino will never have you, and I'll never have Alastor.” Vox grinned down at Grace. “Well, then? I’ll ensure you can’t have each other!”

"You sure wear a lot of blue for a sentient red flag!" Grace leaned away from him as far as she could. “And people think Al is the psychopath here? He actually let me go!”

Vox laughed, his gaze flicking upward toward Alastor who, having disposed of Travis, was returning to his normal size, recalling his shadows and tentacles to himself. “I guarantee if he’d known you’d never return to him, he wouldn’t have let you go. Not in a million years. He’d have locked you up in a dungeon deep into the depths of Hell where nobody would ever find you, or put you into solitary confinement in a tower nobody could ever hope to climb.”

“You really think so, huh?”

“Oh, I do.” Vox chuckled wickedly. “Without a doubt.”

“Well if that’s true,” Grace spat, “I’d much rather be held without bail by him than be indentured to you even if I knew I had the slimmest chance of escape!” She snatched the beskad and jumped to her feet, wielding her weapon between them.

Vox stumbled back several steps, letting the chain slacken a bit and fall from around her body to the floor.

And just as quickly as it had fallen, he whipped it back around her, pulling her so close that she could feel his torso against her back. Her skin absolutely crawling with Vox’s proximity, he plucked the beskad from her grip and pressed it to the base of her neck.

Grace’s damp gaze met Alastor’s; this turn of events wasn’t even remotely close to being a part of their plan.

In response to Vox’s threat against Grace, the Radio Demon lunged for Vox and, with a swift dive to match, Vox drove the blade of Grace’s beskad into the side of Alastor’s chest from below his armpit. 

Alastor made the most dreadful bawl, a noise Grace knew would haunt her for the rest of her afterlife, however long that would be at this rate. He staggered backward several steps before collapsing to the carpet, his hand instinctually moving to the weapon’s handle as if to remove it.

Grace stared Alastor down, yelling, “Don’t you dare move that!”

Vox promptly clapped a hand over her mouth painfully and said, “Take it out, Radio Demon. Grace hates you now; why would she tell you to do something that would help you?”

Grace screamed in fury against Vox’s palm, then chomped down full force on his hand. He released her with a string of bellowed expletives.

Alastor watched Vox and Grace in a daze, his white-knuckled grip still around the handle of the Angelic Steel blade. He hadn’t moved it.

Grace maintained Alastor’s dazed stare, realizing she’d just successfully hypnotized into submission a demon far stronger than herself. An Overlord, no less. And Vox had been unable to override her command. 

Her gaze shifted to where her hands curled into burning fists, electricity searing her fingertips as fury coursed and sizzled through her body.

“Hey, asshole?” asked Grace, winding the excess chain around her fists. “Are you familiar with Star Wars?”

Vox replied, “Familiar with what?”

Perfect! She spun around and whipped the chain around Vox’s neck, crossing it over itself and pulling tightly against his Adam’s apple in an attempt to strangle him.

Vox laughed. “You can't choke me, you dumb bitch!”

She hopped up onto the conference table to stare Vox down. In that moment, she’d never felt more in control, more powerful, and far from bored. She finally truly understood Alastor’s motivations; this was unexpectedly intoxicating.

Over the adrenaline rushing in her ears, Grace made out the sound of Alastor coughing and glanced over her shoulder in time to watch blood ooze from his mouth and trickle down his blanching cheek. He was breathing faster than normal.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh my god no no no please don’t be hypovolemic shock fuck fuck shit shit shit—

Although given where Vox had stabbed him, it couldn’t really be anything but that. Alastor was running out of time.

“You’re right. I can’t choke you. But—” Grace adjusted her stance on the table. “—I can shatter your fucking face!” She returned Vox’s right hook that had broken her nose with a full-force instep kick, putting her right foot through the television screen atop the Overlord’s neck.

She yanked her foot away in time for Vox to reel backward and collapse into a nearby chair that rolled back several feet, cupping his hands in a pathetic attempt to catch what remained of the broken glass tinkling from his fucked-up screen. With what remained intact of it—part of one eye—he glanced up and met Grace’s gaze.

With every ounce of conviction, Grace demanded, “Call an ambulance and have Kitty see the paramedics up immediately! Then stay in your seat and await further instruction.”

She didn’t believe it would work. And yet Vox pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed the number for emergency services. He instructed the emergency operator on what was needed and where, his tone flat and voice glitching every other word like a bad stammer. Following that call, he dialed down to the lobby and, with that same, inflectionless, glitching voice, he told Kitty to escort the paramedics to the conference room immediately upon their arrival.

Grace stared. Was this a trick? The way Vox’s face had fractured, she couldn’t confirm if she’d actually hypnotized him. But hearing Alastor’s breathing behind her, she had to believe she’d succeeded.

She rushed to Alastor’s side and dropped to her knees in the pool of his blood.

I can’t check your pulse pressure with the apical pulse given where that wound is—

So Grace opted for his neck, searching with two fingertips for the Radio Demon’s pulse in the soft, hollow area on one side of his Adam's apple.

She found it just as she anticipated it would be: weak but racing and fading by the heartbeat. His breathing was rapid and shallow.

Grace could no longer hope she wasn’t staring hypovolemic shock in the face.

Alastor’s gaze drifted to Grace. “When we were apart,” he said between shallow gasps, “I thought of you more times than there are stars in the sky or grains of sand on every beach and desert on Earth.”

That had a terrifying kind of finality to it that made Grace’s blood, heart, and soul ice over. Her voice shaking, Grace said, “Now’s not the time to get sentimental, Radio Demon. It makes me think you’re … you’re—” She couldn’t say the words. Even thinking them gave her a despair unlike anything she’d ever experienced.

He flashed her a charming smile. “Grace, I—” His blue lips kept moving but no noise came out.

In his silence, she applied pressure around the blade to stem what she could of his bleeding, careful not to move the blade itself. There was scarcely enough strength left in him to groan at her touch. And still, he kept that smile—albeit weak, and pained—on his face.

She leaned in and licked the wound as close to it as she could get without slicing her tongue on the blade, promptly gagging and retching as the coppery bite of his blood hit her tongue. 

She kissed around the wound between sobbed pleas: “Please don't give in please don't die you can’t leave me, you're the only light I have down here! Come on, Al! I’m giving it to you like you like it: I'm down on my knees, I can't grovel and beg any more than I am! If I could trade your soul for mine to save you, I would! Don’t give in! Stay with me! Please!”

He glanced at her, his expression softening, eyes drifting closed. Then—she insisted to herself—he held his breath.

“No,” she whispered, tears filling her eyes. “Alastor—”

***Please come back tomorrow, deer friends, for the second in these special blog updates. :)