Why yes, I'll take your soul

Alastor slammed the tome shut hard enough to rattle the desk, barely resisting the urge to tear the damn thing to shreds. Fortunately, he knew how to contain his rage when the time called for it.

Several days had crawled by since Charlie had found him, comatose in his chair, as good as dead.

Since then, Alastor had done what he always did when reality annoyed him. He worked. He cracked open every mystical grimoire he owned, every brittle, ink-stained volume that promised forbidden knowledge if you were clever enough to interpret it. He sifted through rituals and evocations, circles and sigils, diagrams drawn by steady hands and ramblings scrawled by lunatics. That was practically all he had done with his time since.

He also kept up his broadcasts, of course. Habit. Image. Control. The city expected a voice, and he refused to let anyone sniff out his weakness through silence. 

So far, he’d found nothing of use. Cursed wounds, hexed organs, infernal parasites, those he had in abundance. But blessed wounds? Very little. A few frightened paragraphs written by creatures who had clearly never been within striking distance of Heaven’s power. Nothing that accounted for the gilded infection crawling through his blood. 

And every night, like clockwork, Charlie knocked at his door. She slipped inside with that careful, too-bright smile and those tired eyes, took his hands between both of hers, and poured herself into him.

It helped. That was the infuriating part. He would surely be dead without it. He could feel the difference in himself the moment her hands closed around his and her power started to pour. The stabbing burn in his ribs cooled to a manageable ache. His thoughts, which had been slogging through mud, began to move again. He could feel his lungs expanding without squeaking, his heartbeat losing its frantic stutter.

But it wasn’t a solution.

Every day it proved less effective. Each infusion gave him a little less. Each time the hallowed rot reclaimed him faster than before, pushing its golden veins back up his ribs.

It wasn’t sustainable.

And, to make it worse, it was unpleasant.

Not the pain. He could handle pain. It was the position. The ritual of it. The nightly appointment where he had to sit there and allow himself to be tended to like a wounded animal. The fact that Charlie saw him at his worst and didn’t even have the decency to look satisfied about it. She looked worried. She looked guilty. 

It infuriated him.

He hated bearing himself before her like that. Hated exposing his failing flesh in open, undeniable detail. Hated the way she knelt to check the spread of the golden veins along his ribs, her face drawn, her mouth pressed thin, as if she were the one being inspected. Hated relying on anyone, even when cold, impersonal logic told him pride was a luxury he could not currently afford.

Every night was a reminder that his deal almost killed him. A reminder that he only lived because of her benevolence. And luck. A lot of luck.

The only silver lining, if he was forced to admit one, was her magic.

It was… delicious. Like a good cup of coffee in the morning and a fine whisky in the evening.

He shoved the grimoire aside, letting it thump against the cluttered edge of the desk. Useless. All of them were. He clearly wasn’t going to find a treatise on wounds inflicted by archangels in his private collection. Not in volumes written by things that had never been close enough to Heaven’s power to describe it properly. 

He knew the rot responded to infernal influence. Beezlejuice slowed it down, Charlie’s magic pushed it back more aggressively, and he knew, he’d felt, that it clung to his own magic like fouled water. Every time he called on his power, the burning returned, the sickness rose gleefully to meet it. The gilded veins seemed to leap along his nerves, hungry for the conduit it offered.

Perhaps he could infuse himself with a stronger source of infernal pressure, more focused than Charlie’s broad flood. Something with sharper intent. Something guided by a more experienced hand.

He snatched up a blank sheet of parchment and a pen, dragging them into the small clear space in front of him. Ink blotted dark and heavy as he started to scribble, his hand moving faster than his thoughts could fully articulate. The pen scratched quick circles and jagged lines, the nib biting into the paper as he wrote.

It would have to require very little of his own power, but remain wholly under his direction. A delicate trick. He could not trust his dwindling reserves of raw strength; therefore, he would rely on what he had always possessed in abundance.

Skill.

Five sinners. That seemed a reasonable number. Five souls, bound in a pentagram drawn from his own blood, each anchored at a point. If he sacrificed them simultaneously, tore the souls apart in one controlled detonation, the backlash, the shock of destroyed souls could be harnessed. He could catch that wave of infernal power, run it through himself as a purging current. Burn the celestial infection out from the inside.

For a few heartbeats, it felt plausible. He sketched symbols around the imagined circle, crossing some out, replacing them with older variants dredged up from long-buried memory. Stabilizers, inversion runes, siphons. He pulled up dusty, half-forgotten fragments of obscure rites.

‘This might work.’

A stabilizing mark to prevent feedback from compounding. An inhibitor to keep the burn from turning inward too fast.

He just needed a—

No.

The thought cut cleanly through the building frenzy. His hand stilled. Ink pooled at the tip of the nib, then dripped onto a half-formed glyph, blurring it.

It wouldn’t work.

Not like this. Not with his body already frayed and thin.

Alastor stared at the page, at the messy web of lines and symbols, and felt a hard, cold clarity settle in behind his eyes. In his current state, he would burn out long before the ritual reached completion. The infection would roar into the empty spaces left behind and consume what remained of him without resistance.

The pen snapped between his fingers with a sharp little crack, ink splattering across the parchment, his palm, the edge of his sleeve. This time, he did not bother swallowing the impulse. He seized the page and tore it down the middle, shredding the paper into ragged strips until nothing remained but a small, fluttering pile of ruined plans at his elbow.

Charlie sat in the hotel’s library with an open book in front of her, staring at the same page she’d been pretending to read for the last ten minutes. The room held that particular kind of quiet only libraries ever managed

When she’d started renovating the hotel, she’d had a good chunk of books brought over from the family library. She’d always liked spending time here, reading a good book. 

She hadn’t gotten to do that enough lately. Too busy handling the latest crisis as of late.

The last few days, she’d taken what time she could here. Not as much as she wanted, but “discretion” practically demanded she only spend time here when no one would notice her absence.

Right now, she was pouring through every bit of literature they had on angels. Again. They had a lot, and even after many hours, she had barely made a dent in their collection. Or at least… that was what she should have been doing.

In reality, she’d hit a bit of a slump.

Her eyes drifted over the same paragraph for the third time without absorbing it. The words blurred into the page. Her attention kept slipping away, dragged back to the same problem no matter how many times she tried to force it elsewhere.

Alastor.

His treatment wasn’t going well. Even with her keeping him topped up—an exhausting, draining process that left her head aching and her body heavy—he was still deteriorating. It was like charging a dying battery. She kept refilling him, but he could handle less and less each time. She wasn’t healing him, just buying him time. Not much of it at that.

Charlie forced herself back to reading. She lost track of time. She was midway through a long, dry passage about the cosmological distinctions between different classes of demons when a hand landed on her shoulder.

Charlie flinched, jerked out of the haze.

“Whatcha readin’, kiddo?” Lucifer asked, his voice by her ear.

Her dad stood close behind her, leaning just enough to peer over her shoulder. Charlie’s heart kicked hard. Her first instinct was to slam the book shut and fling it across the room. Her second was to freeze, because doing that would look guilty as hell.

Lucifer’s hand stayed light on her shoulder as his eyes scanned the text. “Huh.” He read another passage, then another, brows slowly climbing. “Why are you reading this?

Charlie’s mind flicked to Alastor. Bloody, gold veins, his absolute rage when she’d suggested telling him, his order to keep it discreet, and she felt the lie build itself in her mouth before she even chose it.

“I—um,” Charlie said, forcing a laugh that sounded thin to her own ears. “I’m just… worried the angels might come back. And I want to be prepared.”

Lucifer paused.

For a heartbeat, Charlie thought he might see through it. She felt her shoulders go tight under his hand.

Then he snorted, like she’d said something adorable. “Aww. Charlie.”

She knew it was wrong, but lying to him it didn’t hit the same way it did with Vaggie. Lying to Vaggie felt like poisoning something precious. Lying to her dad just felt… bad. Wrong, sure, but distant. Like disappointing a teacher instead of betraying a partner.

Lucifer squeezed her shoulder lightly. “You don’t have to worry about that,” he said with bravado. “Not when I'm here. I can fend off the big scary angels.”

Charlie’s mouth tightened. A familiar frustration bubbled up. “Yeah? Well I can’t exactly count on you being here, Dad.”

His expression dipped. The smugness flickered out, replaced by guilt. He frowned and shook his head.

“I will always be here for you,” he said quietly. “Always.”

Charlie felt really bad. She hadn’t meant to let that slip out. 

“And—” Lucifer’s tone shifted, “If you’re really worried about angels… I can teach you a trick.”

Charlie’s breath caught in her throat. “A trick?”

He nodded, eyes brightening, “For treating angelic wounds.”

Charlie went still.

For a second she thought she’d misheard. Her brain stuttered on the words like they didn’t belong together. Excitement flared so hard it almost hurt, a bright, sudden hope she hadn’t let herself feel in days. 

She was flabbergasted. And desperately, embarrassingly thrilled. Charlie tried to play it cool anyway. “That sounds—I mean—Yeah!”

Lucifer crouched down so he was level with her, clearly excited. He slid an arm around her shoulders and pulled her into a side hug with a bit too much vigor. “At its core, angelic power is the purity of magic. A fraction of the Almighty. Most people think it’s the bane of demons. And sure, arguably it is, but that’s a side effect.”

stood up and unfurled his wings with a showy stretch, feathers shifting and catching the light as he struck a dramatic pose. He was trying to look cool, clearly. Instead, he looked… goofy. Charlie couldn’t help it, a smile bloomed across her face, warmth easing some of the tightness in her chest. She was glad they got to spend time together like this, even in the middle of everything else.

“What makes it special,” Lucifer went on, pacing slowly in front of her with his hands clasped behind his back, “is that it’s self-correcting. That’s why even morons like Adam can do impressive things with it. Because it does half the work for them.”

Charlie leaned forward, elbows on her knees, absolutely hooked. She’d never heard him talk about anything with this much ease and certainty. Not politics, not Hell, not even Mom. It was… weirdly comforting, seeing him in his element.

“And because it’s self-correcting,” Lucifer continued, voice dropping slightly like he was sharing a secret, “when enough of it comes into contact with a large enough source of infernal magic, it gets… confused. It starts trying to correct that magic. Most of the time it just disrupts, suppresses a goetia’s magic, unravels a demonic spell, that sort of thing. But get enough of it into a demon’s system, and it starts ‘fixing things.’” He made air quotes, nose wrinkling.

“How did you figure this out?” she asked. It didn’t make sense. He and Mom had been the first two in Hell. Heaven hadn’t launched a raid like this before. Even if there had been smaller skirmishes she didn’t know about, he wasn’t the type to swoop in and protect random sinners. He barely tolerated them now.

“Oh—well—uhh—” he stammered, scratching the back of his head, wings giving an awkward twitch as he suddenly found the far bookcase very interesting. “Well, me and your mom liked to do some… things…” His voice dropped lower. “I’m overflowing with angelic power, and she’s a demon, so… we, uh… did some testing to make sure those… things were safe.”

Charlie’s face burned as crimson overtook her. She buried it in her palms. It didn’t help. She wished she’d never asked. She didn’t want to imagine what kind of “things” they did together that needed them to know how to treat angelic wounds. And now, because her mind was a traitor, she was picturing… things.

Lucifer cleared his throat, “Anyways!” he said brightly, forcing the tone back into something instructional. “When it does this, it’ll latch onto a demon’s magic, slowly… converting it.” He dragged the word out with a grimace. “Which is obviously bad for said demon.”

He held up a finger. “You can slow it down by flooding the magic with an external source, distracting it. Give it something else to chew on. A demon’s magic should naturally try to repel it, but that only really works if you catch it quickly. Failing that, you can actually take advantage of its sticky nature.”

Charlie lowered her hands just enough to peek at him.

He lifted both hands, fingers pointed outward, like a cartoon witch about to hex someone. “You send out thin tendrils of agitated, sloppy magic” he explained, wriggling his fingers to illustrate, “and weave them through the angelic power that’s already in the demon. Let it sit there for a bit, all tangled up.” He frowned thoughtfully, searching for the right phrasing. “Divine magic will prioritize what looks most wrong. So it’ll go after the weak, chaotic threads before anything else, because they’re the least stable. It thinks those are the biggest problem.””

He clapped his hands together sharply, feathers rustling.  “Once it’s latched on, you rip your magic out as quickly as possible and let it dissipate into the air. An afflicted demon can do this themselves in a pinch, but it’s not ideal.” His mouth tightened. “Any use of their magic will advance their decline. Every time they reach for it, they’re feeding the thing that’s eating them.”

It sounded so… simple.

All that dread, those nights of dragging Alastor back from the edge, all the useless pages she’d flipped through, and the solution was something so basic. A trick. Not a miracle nor some impossible spell hidden in a forgotten tome.

She was shocked by how easy it sounded. She could do this. Tonight. 

And yet, she never would’ve thought of it on her own. Not in a million years. Nothing in their library would have pointed her toward this.

Charlie let out a tremendous sigh of relief, her whole body sagging. Then the tension snapped into motion. She shot up from her chair so fast it scraped loudly against the floor, then spun and threw her arms around her father.

She hugged him like a vise, squeezing with all her strength, actually lifting him a few inches off the ground. His wings flared instinctively to keep his balance.

“Thank you!” she said, voice bright and breathless against his shoulder.

She half ran out of the library, something in between sprinting and skipping, leaving a confused King of Hell standing alone among quiet shelves.