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Verweald glittered like a dragon's hoarded trove, incandescent in the fading afternoon with the I-5 freeway as its tail, slicing through the accumulated mounds, scales flashing red, white, and neon. The lights blurred and conflated into tapered streamers as my car chased along the dragon's spine, and my thumbs idly tapped the steering wheel.

Are dragons real? I wondered to myself. I couldn't imagine so—and yet, I couldn't have imagined demons being real either.

My eyes flicked to the side.

The oncoming headlights oscillated, illuminating the Sin in the passenger's seat in brief, yellow bursts. The wayfarers lay discarded in the empty cup holder where they'd been tossed as soon as Darius entered my car, and so the headlights bled and gleamed against his revealed eyes, hollowing the plains of his stoic face, glancing against his proud, patrician features like flats stones off a glassy lake. He sat recumbent in the seat with his knees spread, arm propped against the window, and he stared into the distant taillights we chased across the city.

Darius hadn't said much at all once we left Imor's lobby and returned to the parking structure and my waiting sedan. He sniped half-heard directions leading us from the city's main heart toward the west, toward the coastline, and I followed his instructions despite riled misgivings because his manner of delivery didn't matter so long as the Sin delivered.

Voices crackled on the radio, then faded into static.

"Danyel has finished preparing arrangements for your sister," he said without prompting, not turning from the road. "He used...e-mail to lay a false trail, indicating Tara Gaspard was recruited into one of those...doctors over borders programs with little prior notice. She sent notices to her friends, your family, and yourself—all written in her usual verbiage—stating she would be leaving the country, and pointed out a backlogged missive that was not previously there at her place of employment to show she gave prior warning."

I swallowed the grief his mention of Tara elicited. "I don't people will believe that. My parents especially. Tara was always a planner, not one to make last-minute changes."

"You'd be surprised what humans are willing to believe."

With that snide comment, silence fell again like a physical thing, and I kept driving. We passed from the industrial dregs fringing Verweald's main artery into the darker and more utilitarian Warehouse District, replacing fashion outlets with squat, unlabeled facilities and gated manufacturers, skinny stacks highlighted against a smoggy sky, belching long lines of steam and smoke that rose until they caught the wind and dispersed.

"I wanted to ask you a question," I said slowly, unsure of the Sin's mood. "About him."

"About whom?"

"About him. Balth—."

He waved a hand, sneering. "What?" he snapped. "Ask your questions, get on with it."

Very encouraging, wonderful. "Before, you said...you mentioned you'd tried to kill him in the past?"

"If you must speak of that foul bastard, call him Envy. I can stomach only so much of your rambling and I refuse to let you deify the monster in your prevaricating by stuttering 'He' and 'Him' every few seconds."

"Envy, then," I said, frustration strengthening my voice. "You tried to kill Envy before."

"It isn't a topic open for discussion. Turn on this off-ramp."

Gritting my teeth, I cut across two lanes of traffic to do as he bid and almost rear-ended a swerving minivan. "I get it, okay? I'm not a simpering moron, despite what you think. You hate me, whatever. You hate Envy, whatever—but I meant what I said at the house. He's just as responsible as any of those cloaked people, and I want him dead like the others. He took everything from me."

"If he'd taken everything from you, you wouldn't be sitting here sniveling to me."

The steering wheel creaked under the force applied by my squeezing hands. "I'm not sniveling," I snapped, flicking on my blinker to turn onto a new avenue. "And even if I was, I think I'm entitled to it, aren't I? If you do succeed in—in all this, then it's not like I've long to live, now is it? I'm entitled to a bit of complaining."

"You're entitled to nothing." He turned his face away, clearly meaning to end the conversation. Eyes narrowed, I cut around an idling pickup truck with a sharp jerk on the wheel—satisfied when Darius' head hit the window with a dull thump and a grunt. He turned back, a new red spot above his brow, and glared.

For a long minute, the creature only stared, and my amusement soon dwindled into apprehension, waiting for a comment or a retort or—or anything, really, anything aside from the deathly staring conveying a clear desire to inflict bodily harm on my person. "I said I would kill those responsible for your fate. I agreed to hunt those who murdered your kin and her fiance, those who left you suffer the same end on that filthy floor—and, unbeknownst to me, that includes the Sin of Envy." The black of his eyes gave way to a sudden, startling crimson flare. "I can only surmise starvation drove me to such sheer stupidity."

His bitter tone conveyed the Sin didn't mean starvation in the typical sense, and so I questioned what he did mean, and what that implied.

"It pains me to admit as much, but I cannot kill Envy," Darius muttered. "Kings above and below, I want to—creation knows only how badly I crave to break his wretched bones into splinters with my bare hands...but I cannot. I cannot best him, and so I...cannot complete our contract to the letter."

The car slowed, and we passed fewer travelers and fewer streetlights, leaving us to the mercy of Verweald's omniscient, polluted glow. "...why do you hate Envy so much, Darius?"

The Sin disregarded my question and seethed, lacing his hands together between his knees. "Our contracts are our law—our means of survival in this squalor-filled realm and our own protection against...intervention. Naturally, I could twist your arm and force you to let me do as I please, but not without repercussions. If I did not act upon the duties of my contract, you would be able to break it and thus send me from this place, and if I abused my...shall we say, visiting privileges, I would be subject to the kind of scrutiny a thickheaded mortal such as yourself would never comprehend. Our contract is my shield and my noose, and if I cannot fulfill all the duties therein...." A muscle ticked in his tight jaw as if every word coming out of his mouth physically pained him. "I am bound to you and your word until you experience a death beyond my influence."

"What does that even mean?"

"It means I cannot have your soul until you die a death outside my influence; until you die from old age or disease or walking in front of a bloody train—something I do not cause to happen on my own." Irritation fizzled out, and the demon slumped, eyes closed. "It is simply something you should know before we move forward."

I almost clipped a parked car's mirror; I was so thrown by his words. The inference alone stilled my lungs, and my head swam until I sucked air down my throat and blinked the moisture from my eyes. My fate rose like golden tarot cards from the sightless, consuming depths of the end; my world reignited with each swiveled card, blood roaring in my ears, relief like fine wine on my tongue. The Sin couldn't—or more precisely, wouldn't—take my soul because he'd acted rashly in the contract's creation and hadn't considered possible variables. Like a blundering, half-dead Faust, I'd outsmarted Mephistopheles through outright, dumb, impossible luck.

Through no doing of my own, I'd entrapped the Sin of Pride.

No emotion passed through the demon's face as he opened his eyes and watched the tired, desolated streets pass us by.

For one glorious moment, I held those golden cards between my fingers and cherished them—those unrealized dreams and forsaken futures clutched close like old friends come again—and, one by one, I let them slip free and fall once more into the end's waiting night.

In a perfect world, Tara and Rick lived; they lived, their child lived, grew, and endured weekly visits to and from odd Aunt Sara, who finally got her shit together and did something with her life. That perfect world didn't, and would never, exist. The dead didn't return, and no future waited for me beyond the event horizon of a silver dagger slicing across my twin's throat and plunging into my abdomen. No force existed to pull me from that gravity; I could kill them all myself and their deaths would do nothing to assuage the grief, would do nothing to turn back time and free me of the nightmare. There was no going back.

I didn't broker a deal with the devil because I believed myself better or above others, or because I deserved his servitude; I reached out because I would've taken the hand of anyone who'd offered it, anyone at all, if it meant crawling my way back to some semblance of living and ensuring those who dared steal my sister's life suffered for what they'd done.

"No," I muttered as my eyes burned. "No, I...don't plan on living like that. Technically, Envy didn't kill my sister; that's a personal grudge, I guess." A ragged, disappointed sigh left my lips. "We'll destroy the cult, the humans, responsible for Tara and Rick's deaths and be done with it. Contract complete."

Watching the road, I didn't see the Sin reaching for me until he grasped my chin and jerked my head to the side with enough strength for me to fear he meant to break my neck. "What the fuck—I'm driving!"

He brought his face close to my own and glowered. "Why?" he demanded, nails biting into my skin. "Do not presume to toy with me, girl."

"I'm not toying with you!" I strained to turn without success, Darius' grip unrelenting, breath scalding on my cheeks. "Let go!"

"Explain yourself before I lose patience, mortal."

"Are you seri—? Fine. It's because I don't want to toy with you; you refuse to kill Envy, whatever, but I will not live a purloined life dogged by a resentful demon like a stealing, dishonest beggar. If I wanted to live through this, I would live, dammit—not survive by your begrudging, hateful grace. God, give me my dignity."

His grip slackened and twisted forward, shivering as his heat receded once more to his side of the car. Darius leaned away, eyes never leaving my profile, confusion warring with disbelief in his distrusting scrutiny. In a stilted voice lacking his usual aplomb, he finally asked, "...why?"

I wiped at my eyes, at the traitorous tears welling among the lashes. "Because even stupid humans like me have their pride."

Static hissed between pretty little choruses sung in gentle harmony, and I likened life to my cheap radio; moments of lulling harmony strung between long belts of static dissonance. Sometimes the harmony can't make up for the static, and we decide to turn the music off.

"You're...crying."

"Yeah," I replied, ceasing my attempts to hide it, letting the moisture drip onto my cheeks, and I drove on while refusing to meet the demon's questioning attention. "Yeah, I am."

It was one thing to have your future—your dreams, your hopes, your aspirations—snatched away by someone else's hand; it was another to deal the killing blow yourself.


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