Page 53 of Malice in e minor

“I’m so down with that,” Azriel said.

He would be. Misha and I were fine with it too. It wasn’t my thing, but Harlowe was the one who needed comfort and distraction. I’d watch whatever she wanted.

She started out on the couch. Azriel managed to get his puppy pile by coaxing her into bed like you’d do a feral kitten under the dumpster. He told her it would be easier to share the popcorn when we did have bowls in our room. I had a feeling she didn’t call him out on that because she wanted to snuggle with us.

The three of them fell asleep around the second movie where the sentient bong was still fucking things up. I looked it up and there were way too many sequels about a demon possessed bong for me to be comfortable.

Still, it was adorable this was her kind of comfort movie.

I’d protect these people with my life. No one was taking an eye or ruining a career. Harlowe was going to have a long career and we were going to make sure she never signed a contract.

I fell asleep last, and I was awake first. No one had bothered us and we still didn’t know what Dante’s big plan was. The one person who knew everything about everyone was Topher and he couldn’t be everywhere at once.

He would have been lurking while we had her safe in our dorm room. Topher looked at her the way he used to look at me. I didn’t want him anywhere near her, even with his new rules, but I’d take him looking out for her.

So, I texted my evil ex to find out what he knew.

Dante and Isobel had been doing all their nefarious planning in Dante’s room. I couldn’t get in to overhear what they were saying. I knew what that meant, but I hadn’t said anything because everyone would freak out. Orion, Azriel, and Misha didn’t use to care about that part of me, but they sure did now. Harlowe didn’t need to know. She’d be on the first train home.

I knew they expected me to lurk, but I already knew what was going to go down. I went back to my room, threw on my crocodile onesie, grabbed a pint of Ben and Jerrys, and put the latest season of Bridgerton on the telly.

They’d be calling when they wanted me. It would probably be exactly at midnight because it was cliché as fuck. I set an alarm on my phone so I could pause the TV when it happened. It would be annoying as fuck if I had to deal with this and the episode kept going.

I plowed through the whole pint of Chunky Monkey when my alarm went off at eleven-fifty-eight on the dot. I could be wrong, but I usually wasn’t about this kind of thing.

At midnight on the dot, I got the call I was waiting on. It had been a while. I had to stop being Topher because Topher was too obvious and everyone knew him. Topher was still needed here.

I let the glamour drop. Honestly, how long had it been since I let my horns and tail out? Dante found the book in the library on how to summon a demon to make a deal. I was the resident demon at Blackvale Academy.

I was good looking in my true form. I was seven feet tall and purple with respectable horns and a glorious tail. I got hit on way more than the other demons who responded to a summoning. Some of them gave me a hard time about it because people weren’t screaming in terror when they saw me, but they were just jealous because they were ugly.

I let the summoning pull me through time and space to the protective circle in Dante’s bedroom. He must have taken down the warding that was keeping me out before. Isobel was sitting with him with huge eyes.

“Holy shit. It worked!” she said.

I gave them a deep bow.

“I am Mephistopheles. At your service.”

“Like the musical Cats?” Isobel said, opening her mouth like she was about to sing that infernal song.

First of all, our names were similar, but different. Secondly, that cat was named after me. This was why I started going by Topher. It was frowned upon to disembowel people who got my name wrong with a song I hated.

“If you sing that song, I will appear to you when you least expect it, and poop your pants. Visualize that however you need to.”

“You can’t hurt us, demon. The protective circle prevents that. You are trapped until you give us what we want,” Dante said.

What a demanding little nugget. He was also wrong. The protective circle protected me. Once upon a time, when people believed and there were a lot more demon summonings, fucking Gadreel decided to whisper our weaknesses to the Church. He told them to summon us and then kill us. So, we devised the protective circle and didn’t say who it was actually protecting.

I could also come and go as I pleased. We didn’t grant every deal people wanted. Free will was the one thing the devil and his dad agreed on, but the devil was also into consent.

So, basically, I couldn’t make Isobel love Dante and I couldn’t make Leif love Isobel. I could give Isobel the talent that she could compete with Harlowe and I could make her famous. She just had to be really specific with her wording or I’d make her famous for being terrible because frankly, I didn’t like her.

I was rusty. I wasn’t a freelance demon anymore. I didn’t respond to every summoning, just the ones here. I was pretty sure the last time a student found the book and asked me for a deal, it was in the seventies and it was a creative writing student with writer’s block. I didn’t take that deal. The only reason he couldn’t write was because he thought he needed ecstasy to be creative. No point in taking his soul when he just needed to lay off the drugs. He wasn’t vital in breaking the cage and freeing my master.

I had a feeling whatever these two were going to ask me, I either couldn’t do or I wouldn’t do. Orion, Azriel, and Misha asked me for talent, but they already had that. They didn’t need a magical intervention. They needed to be placed in front of the right people, which I did.

Except I couldn’t force anyone to do anything they didn’t want to. Orion summoned me four hundred years ago when racism was a lot more blatant. People wanted his music, but they didn’t want him. It wasn’t what anyone intended, but the only way he could pay his bills was to pretend someone with no talent, but the acceptable skin color wrote it.