Infernal Vows

The contract was bound in something that looked like leather but breathed when I touched it.

I didn't touch it again.

"You're stalling," she said from the other side of the table. Her voice had that quality, the one that made the hairs on my forearms stand up even when she was being perfectly pleasant. Which she almost never was.

I looked at her. She looked back. Black eyes, no white to them at all, like two polished stones set in a face that would've stopped traffic on any street in the city. High cheekbones. A mouth that curved like it knew things about you that you hadn't figured out yet. She was wearing a business suit, charcoal gray, tailored within an inch of its life, and she sat with her ankles crossed like we were closing a real estate deal.

Which, I guess, we were.

"I'm not stalling," I said. "I'm reading."

"You've been reading the same paragraph for six minutes."

"It's a dense paragraph."

She smiled. It was the kind of smile that made me want to check my pockets for my soul. "It says you agree to the terms as stated. It says you understand that the bond is binding in both directions. It says neither party may dissolve the arrangement without mutual consent. That's the whole paragraph, Marcus. It hasn't changed since the last time you read it."

She was right. I hated that she was right.

I picked up the pen. It was heavier than it looked, cold metal, and I had a pretty good idea what it was made of. Not steel. Something that had been alive once.

"Before I sign," I said, "I want to be clear about one thing."

"Only one?"

"Are you going to eat me?"

She laughed. It was a real laugh, low and warm, and it did something to my chest that I didn't appreciate. "I've told you. I don't eat people. I'm not that kind of demon."

"What kind are you?"

"The kind that makes deals." She leaned forward, and the light caught the edge of her collar, and for a second I could've sworn I saw something move under her skin. "The kind that honors them. The kind that gets very, very annoyed when someone wastes her time."

I signed.

The pen bit into the paper like it was drinking. My name came out in black ink that smoked at the edges, and then the smoke cleared, and there it was. Marcus Webb. Just like that. Married.

She reached across the table and took the pen from my hand, and her fingers brushed mine, and I felt it all the way up my arm, a jolt like static electricity but warmer. She signed her own name underneath mine. The letters were sharp and angular, like they'd been carved instead of written. Asmodea.

The contract folded itself shut. No hands. It just closed, and then it was gone, and the table between us was empty except for two cups of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago.

"So," she said. "That's that."

"That's that."

We sat there for a minute. The coffee shop was empty except for us and the kid behind the counter, who had earbuds in and hadn't looked up once since we walked in. Outside, the street was doing its usual Tuesday afternoon thing. Cars. People. A dog tied to a parking meter, howling at nothing.

I was married to a demon. My mother was going to kill me.

"Your apartment or mine?" she said.

I blinked. "What?"

"We're married now. Traditionally, married people live together. I'm told it helps with the bonding process."

"The bonding process."

"You really should have read the whole contract."

I had read the whole contract. That was the problem. It was forty pages of dense legal language that shifted every time I looked away from it, and I'd caught maybe half of it. The half I caught had been enough to know that saying no wasn't really an option. Not after what happened in the alley behind my building three weeks ago. Not after she'd pulled me out of that mess and looked at me with those black eyes and said, very calmly, "You owe me now. We'll discuss terms."

We'd discussed terms. For three weeks. At coffee shops and diners and once, memorably, on a park bench at two in the morning while she explained the difference between a soul debt and a blood debt and why I should be grateful she was offering me the former.

I wasn't sure I was grateful. But I was alive, which was more than I'd been three weeks ago.

"Yours," I said. "Mine's a studio. And the landlord's been threatening to evict me since the thing with the pipes."

"The thing with the pipes."

"I'd rather not talk about it."

She stood up. She was tall, taller than me in the heels she was wearing, and she moved like water, like she wasn't quite subject to the same rules as the rest of us. She picked up her coffee, took a sip, made a face.

"This is terrible," she said.

"It's a coffee shop."

"It's an abomination. Come on. I'll make you a real cup at home."

Home. The word sat weird in my chest. I grabbed my jacket and followed her out, and the kid behind the counter still didn't look up, and the dog on the parking meter stopped howling when we passed, like it knew something was different about the woman in the gray suit.

Her apartment was on the fourteenth floor of a building that didn't have a fourteenth floor.

I'd been there once before, during the negotiations. The elevator had stopped at thirteen, and then kept going, and the doors had opened on a hallway that smelled like sandalwood and something older, something that made my teeth ache. She'd told me it was a spatial fold. I'd told her that wasn't a thing. She'd told me it was a thing if you knew how to do it.

The apartment itself was bigger than my entire building. Floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on a skyline I didn't recognize. Furniture that was all clean lines and dark wood, nothing out of place, nothing personal. No photos. No clutter. It looked like a showroom, if showrooms had a faint red glow coming from somewhere you couldn't quite locate.

She hung her jacket on a hook by the door that I was pretty sure hadn't been there a second ago. Then she turned to face me.

"Rules," she said.

"I thought we did rules."

"Those were contract rules. These are house rules." She counted them off on her fingers. "One. Don't go into the room at the end of the hall. Two. Don't touch anything that glows. Three. If I'm in a mood, leave me alone. Four. Don't ask about my past. Five."

She stopped.

"Five?" I said.

"Five. Don't fall in love with me."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. The whole situation was absurd, standing in a demon's apartment on a floor that shouldn't exist, married to a creature who could probably unmake me with a thought, and she was worried about me falling in love with her.

"That won't be a problem," I said.

"Good."

"Trust me. I've got a pretty strict policy against falling in love with anyone who owns a contract with my name on it."

"Smart."

"I thought so."

She looked at me for a long moment. Those black eyes, and I couldn't tell if she was amused or annoyed or something else entirely. Then she turned and walked toward the kitchen, and I heard her open a cabinet, and the sound of a kettle starting to heat.

"The guest room is the second door on the left," she called back. "You'll want to sleep. The binding takes it out of you."

I didn't feel tired. I felt wired, actually, like I'd had six cups of coffee and a line of something stronger. But I walked down the hall anyway, past the door at the end that I wasn't supposed to open, past a mirror that showed my reflection a half-second late, and I found the guest room.

The bed was made. The sheets were black. There was a window, and through it I could see the city, my city, the one I'd lived in my whole life, spread out below like a map. Except the streets were wrong. The buildings were in the wrong places. And the sky was the wrong color, a deep bruised purple, like the whole world had been left out in a storm.

I sat down on the bed. I put my head in my hands.

I was married. I was alive. I was in way over my head.

And somewhere in the apartment, the demon who owned me was making tea, and humming, and I had the terrible feeling that this was only the beginning.