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“Make yourself unbusy.” My older half-brother’s despondent reply had my hackles rising. Too often he forgot himself - pushing boundaries as if having a hundred years on me gave him some right. But he hadn’t been the one to inherit arch demonic strengths of B'lain, Sanctuary’s late archdemonic prince.
Before I could say anything more, loud rustling could be heard from the other end of the line. As it settled, I pulled the phone away, the awkward noise piercing my eardrum like a hurricane wind. Soft female breathing penetrated the speaker and I lifted it back to my ear.
“Your highness,” Ariella’s somber voice came through the line, all pretense of nonchalance that had clung to every word during our last encounter gone.
“What do you want?” I snapped.
“It’s about the girl,” She said, the first hints of wariness coming through the phone.
“What is this going to cost me?” There was no point asking how she knew about my Thief, or any pretense of trying to gain information from her without first striking a bargain.
Never would a demonic seer give away something for free. Not when they clung so tightly to greed that it literally seeped from their pores like mucus on a frog.
An awkward pause followed, before she sighed heavily. “I think you know what I want.”
I skirted my left hand down into my pocket, squeezing the coin from Asmodeus. This coin was not any small trinket. It bestowed upon the carrier a favor, and not just a favor from anyone. Very few of them existed, and I had never been privy to owning one until now.
“And what do you want with Lucifer?” I asked casually, more for myself than anything else. Frankly what she wanted with him really didn’t matter - if she had information that would save my Thief, I’d trade it in a heartbeat.
“My business with the King of Hell is my own, and no one else’s,” she snapped, and I raised a brow at her words. The word business implied some level of familiarity, but I didn’t have the time to dig into that yet.
“Can you tell me if she’ll live?” I asked, turning the topic back to what I needed to know.
“She can,” the reply was curt.
“And you can predict how to secure that I presume?”
“I can give you info you need,” she replied, her twist of words not lost on me.
“Listen woman, if you can save her then -”
“I can’t save her,” she cut me off. “But I can give you what you need to do it.”
“For the coin.”
“For the coin.” She replied.
I squeezed the trinket in my pocket knowing full well this likely would be the only way I could save her.
“If she lives it’s yours.”
The seer let out a breath she’d been holding. Whatever she needed from Lucifer was huge. I’d store that bit of information away for later.
“What she thinks happened didn’t.” The seer’s voice was clear despite the ambiguity of her words. “Until she can reconcile what really happened that day, she can’t escape her prison.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
The seer was quiet on the other end of the phone.
“What the fuck does that mean woman?” I all but screeched into the phone.
She sighed heavily, defeat hanging in the air. “The venom she’s been infected with -”
“The Hericous?”
“-yes, the Hericous. Please let me finish,” her reprimand had my demon chuckling, but not with humor. “It traps a person in their worst memories and forces them to relive them over and over again. Eventually the soul shatters under the impact of the memories. The only way to pull someone out is to get them through the memory, get them to accept the outcome.”
“She’s clearly lived through it already. How can she be trapped now?”
