The Devil's Demigod

Chapter One

Lionel

My heart was pounding as I tried to think of a way out of this situation. Christine’s office, with her behind her only mildly cluttered desk and the blinds drawn as if she’d spent the night in here, wasn’t the place I’d imagined for meeting my… well, he was my father. But I wished he weren’t. That greedy look he’d gotten when he’d first seen me scared me. Christine, standing behind her desk like a zombie because he had her under a spell, scared me. That he outwardly resembled me so much and yet seemed so completely alien was terrifying. I knew I wouldn’t be leaving this office without a fight. Maybe not at all. He had murdered people after all, and I had seen the evidence of what else he’d done to them -- dismembered them without hesitation -- back at the pier. I knew I might never be able to tell Lucifer that I loved him, and that left me feeling hollow and sad and useless.

But self-pity would definitely not get me anywhere. I stared at Christine, spelled by that man proclaiming to be my father. Minos? Well, whatever. It didn’t match the birth certificate Lucifer had found, but the man looked like me. His victorious smirk was unsettling. I wanted to be anywhere but here, and I wanted Lucifer with me… but I was equally glad that he wasn’t. Minos had the look of someone willing to cut through whatever and whoever stood in his way. The corpses we had found, cut up into bits and pieces, said as much.

Let Christine go, I said. I had to try for that at least. I hoped that he wanted me more than he cared about having her.

He looked at me as if he’d smelled a fart. The human? Why do you care? She is a tool toward a goal, nothing more.

She’s my friend, I said, warring for my heart to keep a calm rhythm. I needed to think. I needed to get Christine out of here. And you’re human, so why do you not care?

He lifted his chin, and the look of disgust on his face made me shiver. Do not compare me to the chattel, boy. You and I, we are nothing like them, not like any of them, and you know that. Why else would you have found yourself an immortal to use and tame as I did your mother?

I didn’t want to see it, any of it, but he was here, with the distaff. The legend said the distaff was his. His face was… I saw myself in him, in his features. I did not want to know about any of his actions, because if I saw myself in any of them, then… then who was I, really?

What did you do with that? I pointed at the distaff, because at least that seemed like something that wouldn’t get him angry. And if he enjoyed talking, I’d have more time to think.

He looked down at it as if he’d forgotten it was even in his hand. I used it for what it was made. I gathered life and magic, and spun it into life and magic. It took me years to be strong enough again to use it after I got free of your mother’s prison, but now I am here, and I have found you. He stepped toward me with his arms out as if to give me a hug. I wasn’t sure how I felt about hugging a man who was a stranger, but he was still holding the distaff all the while, so that made the decision easy. I walked back until my thighs bumped into Christine’s desk. Fuck. I had to get Christine out of here before he could do anything else to her.

Look, I said. I’m not sure what you have come here to find, or where you have been, or why you have been there, but this is a bit much. Drop the spell off Christine, and I’ll make sure she brings no charges, and then maybe we can meet for coffee later and talk. How does that sound? I tried to keep my tone light, but my voice trembled.

That chin lift again, and another look of extreme displeasure. I am a king, and you a prince by blood. You do not dismiss me like that, son. You bow before me and ask nothing of me but how you can be of use. He raised the distaff, and I felt the magic come at me before it did, heat of a fire before you got burned.

The distaff’s magic, despite the things it could be used for, was a beautiful thing. Smooth. Strong. I couldn’t think of anything, not in the time I had, that I could do against it. If it had killed our victims like this, they wouldn’t have felt a damn thing. But I felt it take me like a thousand thousand needles to the skin, all there to suck my blood, and then…

Nothing. The magic slid right off me. The only thing I did feel was the Devil pendant round my neck growing hot, painfully hot.

My father’s eyes widened, but the man didn’t lose a beat. I see you too have discovered the use of gaining an immortal’s love, he said, and in what I recognized as Greek, but some different dialect from what I knew, he said what I thought was, Like father, like son. It sounded like praise, sort of.

With a smirk, he pulled his magic, jerked it like reins. Christine’s arm came around my neck in a chokehold. I didn’t know how to slip those, because I didn’t know any martial arts. The only thing I could have done was zap her with magic, and I was scared of what that might do to her, seeing as how she was under a spell already.

Her other hand worked at the clasp of the necklace, but like Lucifer had promised, the clasp remained closed.

In the split second that I did have before she would choke me out, I did nothing. And then, her strong muscles pressed against my airways, and there was panic.

* * *

Lucifer

I stood in the too-high snow outside of the dragon mother’s house, leaning on the shovel and staring at my phone.

Sleeping in your arms was nice, Nelly had texted. Well, if it really was the PTSD getting him to soften up finally, I approved.

I love holding you, babe, I texted back. I’ll do it whenever you need me to.

He didn’t immediately respond to that, so I cleared away some snow, which was a damn workout. Across the street, one of the dragon mother’s neighbors was watching me unsubtly from a window. I ran a gloved hand through my hair and hoped it made them gasp.

After five minutes, Nelly hadn’t texted back, and I leaned the shovel against the dragon mother’s house.

You are not done, she said from where she looked down on me from a window on the second floor.

Tiamat, I am the Devil, and I am taking a break, I said, trying to use lack of candor to circumvent the truth.

Dodging your chores is how even the Devil gets a permanent bad-hair-day curse, Lucy.

Well, to hell went the circumnavigation of truth. Nelly didn’t text me back, so I need to go check on him. I’ll get my chores done, Tiamat.

Ah, the tribulations of young love. You’ll need the good hair, then, she said and closed the window back up again. What I wouldn’t give to know what was going on in her head sometimes. And I was more than my perfect hair. I had character. And he loved my wings.

I teleported to the station, to right outside Nelly’s office, which was basically a broom closet. The door was closed, and I heard wet noises from inside that made me burst straight in.

Marc Deacon, instead of doing what I knew he wanted to with my boyfriend, was sitting in a cheap folding chair and crying. Good for him. I’d have given him a genuine reason for tears if I’d found him fondling Nelly, like a missing tongue or twisted testicles.

What? I didn’t think you’d be the gloating type, the unskilled necromancer said.

Meaning?

Meaning Lionel picked you. He shook his head and rubbed at his swollen eyes. He’s too good for you. I don’t care if you turn my bones to jelly, but Lionel is smart and shy and sexy and really funny when he opens up, and you don’t deserve to use him for your own amusement and cheat on him while you do it. He looked back up at me, but even my hellpoodle had a more intimidating glare. You could have anyone, I’m sure. Several anyones. Let him go, please. He just -- he just deserves something real, and I can give that to him. I want to.

When had my charm ever failed me so massively? With Marc Deacon, I understood, a little, because he wanted my boyfriend, and badly. Still, he didn’t even have a little crush on me, hadn’t even fantasized a little about a threesome? And Christine was a mystery of a different order. I had to find out about whether she liked poker or not already.

You have no idea what Nelly wants and definitely don’t know what he needs. You’d do better finding another man to pine after, I told Marc Deacon and closed the door behind me. Necromancers. They all came with issues, apparently.

Before I could look around and locate my once again errant boyfriend, I felt the sharp sting of one of the defense spells built into his necklace activate. It was close, so I ran rather than teleported, and good thing, because it allowed me to feel the magic that was being hurled at him, even as I cracked open the office door behind which I could sense the necklace’s protective spell flare bright and hot.

This was siphon magic. It wasn’t so common that I knew it well, although I’d felt Sephy use it when I’d visited her and Hades.

This siphon magic was something else entirely, and just from the strength of it, from the elegance with which the siphon wove its magic, from the sheer, irrefutable force of it, I could tell the immensity of power the person who’d made it had access to. And since I had no doubt at all that the maker of this siphon was Ariadne, I knew where Nelly got his brutish power. Once he learned to really own and use it, refine it rather than just go smash with it, my boyfriend would be magnificent, something to behold. I’d take him even if he weren’t. But the more powerful he was, the more I would flaunt him, of course.

I pulled the office door open all the way. Several equally concerning things made up the scene ahead of me, and all of it was so dramatically crafted by the terrors of the real world that it should have been a painting set in oil rather than happening.

If reality were a painting, it would be called something to invoke hubris, like The Reclamation of the Prodigal Son, because the man on my left, beautiful like Nelly was, but darker in every aspect of his features and with cruel lines around his mouth and eyes, was without a doubt the man who wanted to be a bull, the beast trapped in a labyrinth by the goddess he had loved or lured into loving him.

I could guess what the minotaur wanted with Nelly. All of Nelly’s power, bound by blood, it would feed a mortal’s life, and it would give another control of who my boyfriend was and wanted to be. Knowing Nelly and his tendency to look toward innocence, he might not have seen that in the parent he had dreamed for so long of finally having.

I saw it, and I saw it without using my wings on that man. He had desired a child with the goddess so he could own them, and the minotaur thought of the man I loved as his property. His to use so long as use was to be had, then his to cast away.

Nelly was being made to feel some of that paternal desire. Christine was under a spell, which I saw now that it was being activated in close proximity. If she had been under that spell earlier, I had missed it, which told me how well it had been made, how powerful the minotaur was in his insidious ways. The spell was a finely crafted thing, because the minotaur was nothing less than what the magic users of the day called a mage. A strong one. If he’d used Christine before, he could have hidden the fact, even from me, even from Tiamat.

And that explained why Christine had refused to like me, and all the world made sense again. On the downside, she was choking out Nelly, and I could stop her by really hurting her, something for which Nelly would hate me forever.

Which meant, I’d have to kill the caster. Which was… fuck. I didn’t really want to kill my boyfriend’s father, and I wasn’t sure what the distaff would do if confronted with death magic. Possibly soak up the life forces of every being around it until it had compensated for the death magic. That’s how a ruthless king with a god complex would have asked it be made. And Ariadne surely had the power to make it so.

Now, that sucked angel balls.

Nelly’s golden eyes found mine while his fingers dug into Christine’s arm, and the relief on his face told me he was glad to see me. Clearly, he had a poor grasp on the situation.

I win, immortal pup, said the minotaur in Old Minoan. He was lifting the distaff, preparing to arc it down, presumably to cast something unpleasant at me. Or to siphon me. I lowered my center of gravity and summoned my magic to be a shield around me.

The least deplorable option, I decided, was to get Nelly free. He’d be mad, but he’d have a chance to get out or get behind me, and that would produce other options then.

Just when I seized my magic to fling it at Christine, the arcane powers in the room shifted. You might have thought it slight, and