A moment later, she absorbed the memories in the crystal. It wasn’t a particularly disorienting process: just a sort of mental click and then they were there again.

  She could even remember the exact moment she’d decided to betray him. It had been in her room, right after he’d let slip that he had a history with Hell and then asked if she’d have given her life to save Earth.

  Once he’d left, she’d set things in motion. She’d told General Matthews, in no uncertain terms, that she needed him to bring her a human psychic as soon as possible. And not just any human psychic: she’d requested the Mozart of human psychics, the guy who was good enough to play for the Pope even though he’d only been initialized into the system a few weeks ago.

  Naturally, the human bossmen would have been very interested in asserting control over as much psychic power as they could from the very get-go, and so it wasn’t a surprise to her when they warped in their candidate not even ten minutes later. They already had exactly the guy she was talking about.

  And he was good. Not good enough to be confident in the information he gleaned from her mind, of course… but he didn’t need perfect confidence. Once he found both her memory of her contract with Dazel and her clear plan for dealing with him, the psychic had to suspect she was being honest.

  The bossmen had been alright with the plan… so long as the Eldunari could double-check before they went ahead.

  The psychic might have been humanity’s newfound psychic prodigy, but he was still mostly untrained. His changes to her mind were clumsy and inexperienced, but they did their job. After that night, she’d never suspected Dazel again. Every time she should have, her mind had veered away from the thoughts as fast as possible.

  Hunter had been their messenger. He hadn’t just been spending time with Sadie; he’d been going ahead through the Eldunari realms to make sure that the soulweaver was in on their deal, likely paying them with funds that the elves had put up themselves.

  The soulweavers would be in on it, too. They knew how to set up traps that circumvented contracts, of course: soulweavers were a critical part of the cosmic slave trade. This one had likely been verified by one of the elves. There was probably another person in the building, perhaps even another soulweaver, responsible for managing their psyche: making the soulweaver forget and remember whatever they needed to, commit to whatever actions they needed to, to sign their contracts.

  It took Ashtoreth only a few seconds to think through it all as she absorbed her lost memories. Then she watched Dazel just… sitting there, not figuring it out. The map crystal had almost filled completely.

  She was winning. In fact, she was winning precisely because Dazel had underestimated the humans. And after he’d forced her into signing his contract, all of this was exactly what he deserved.

  She’d beaten him.

  So why did she feel so… bad?

  It all happened a moment later, though at first it was hard to see that anything was happening at all: the soulweaver seemed to slump almost imperceptibly from where she sat by Dazel’s circle, manipulating mana, but that was all.

  Then a shimmer ran through the circle around Dazel, and the soulweaver simply fell back to land against the stone floor with a thud.

  Dazel’s ears flicked and he cocked his head, then quickly turned to Ashtoreth.

  Get out, he told her. Javelin me and go—now!

  But Ashtoreth just stood there looking at him.

  Dazel blinked. “Oh.”

  The tone of his voice said all that it needed to. For a second they just stared at each other.

  Then Dazel prodded at the air before him with a wingtip, hissing as the air crackled and formed a barrier that sparked and pushed him back. He spun in place, eyes frantically scanning the space around him as he examined the newly-made containment spell.

  As he did so, a second masked woman entered the room by stepping through a solid stone wall across from Ashtoreth. She looked exactly like the first soulweaver, mask and all, and she strode calmly into the room to sit beside the unconscious form of the contract-signer before setting to work by manipulating the mana outside Dazel’s circle.

  Dazel prodded the barrier a few more times, then rounded on Ashtoreth, slumping a little where he stood. “So I guess you get to laugh at me for being surprised now,” he said to her. “You’d be right, too.” He let out a shaky, despondent laugh. “I’m a damned fool.”

  She let out the breath she’d been holding. “Dazel…”

  “Daddy even taught you how to do this, hey boss?”

  “I’m an archfiend.”

  “I suppose I could ask you how you managed it all, but I guess now it doesn’t matter.”

  “It was the human psychics that I met,” she said. “The contract was tight enough to keep me from giving them a composed message, but they could find out about its existence and put together everything else they needed to. You dismissed them because I could lie to them, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t put them on the trail…”

  “Oh God,” he said, his head lowering as he shuddered. “God, I deserve this, don’t I? I underestimated humans.”

  “I think you might deserve this,” she said, answering his question. “But not because you underestimated humans—because of what you did to me.” She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, though. This isn’t about revenge, Dazel. It’s about doing my job. Removing my need to trust you is like putting on humanity’s seatbelt.”

  “Your need to trust me,” Dazel repeated, shaking his head. Then he jerked his head back to the second soulweaver. “And Thing 2? I’m guessing she’s got the real contract, right? With who—the elves?”

  “Yes and no,” Ashtoreth said. “I wrote it. Eldunari vetted it. It was Hunter who signed.”

  Dazel sighed, then looked down. “All I wanted was to feel sure,” he said. “To feel safe. You were an archfiend… and I couldn’t predict you. I should never have had to leave my fate up to trust.”

  “It’s not about revenge, Dazel.”

  “Look,” he said. “I know I asked you something that I shouldn’t have when I was angry. I know that just apologizing wasn’t enough. I know—”

  Light surged at the base of the circle, gathering beneath Dazel before rushing upward into his body. He hissed, his back arching. “What is that?”

  “Should be a reversal,” Ashtoreth said. “As long as you’re in that circle, you’re going to answer my questions—and I don’t have to answer yours.”

  “Listen, boss,” he said. “I’ll tell you everything, okay? Let me explain and you can ask afterward if what I said to you was true, but don’t squeeze me, Ashtoreth. If you just ask whatever you want—”

  “This is all time-sensitive, Dazel. We need to get through this and get out of here.”

  “Astoreth, please,” he said. “The things I know about your father—you’re not ready to hear them yet.”

  She almost rolled her eyes at him. “I’m not going to be led to the questions you prefer, Dazel. What do you know that you least want to tell me?”

  Dazel immediately tensed, his tail going rigid. “Don’t—” he cried, grunting in pain. “Ashtoreth!” He fell to the floor, shaking, then writhed there for a little bit.

  So he was going to fight it, then. He’d take the painful way just like she had. Her mouth formed a bitter line: she hated him for making her hurt him like this.

  “I’ll hurt you as much as I have to,” she said, her voice toneless.

  “That’s—right, isn’t it?” He groaned. “Go—go—g-g-g—” He gasped. “I-was-human!” he cried suddenly, words spilling out of him against his will. “I w-w-was—no! I was the—the boss—like an emperor…”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Thoughts wheeled through her mind, but she pushed them away. She could react to what she learned later: for now she had to wring everything out of him that she could—and as fast as possible. She didn’t trust that Dazel was powerless, not at all.

  “Emperor of what?” she asked. “What did you rule?”

  His head snapped upward, red eyes meeting hers. “All of it.” Then he winced, his answer clearly not complete. “Old Earth,” he said. “Many K-k-kingdoms. Stop it, Ashtoreth. It’s, it’s a—a rose!”

  She cocked her head at him as he struggled. A rose?

  “Every realm a petal,” he breathed, seemingly too exhausted to fight the pain. “All locked up in one pale blue dot…”

  She frowned. If the pale blue dot was Earth, what did that mean? Were there demiplanes somehow locked up on the human home realm?

  “And that’s what Pinnacle is,” she said.

  He locked eyes with her. “Fuck you.”

  She didn’t press him about it. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to know: she just didn’t want him to railroad her into certain lines of questioning, which was probably what he was trying to do.

  “What do you know that you least want to tell me?”

  “Please, Ash,” he whimpered.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “The war!” he hissed. “We were—no! We couldn’t—no!”

  Ashtoreth just stared down at him as he jerked and spat, seemed to do everything to stop himself from answering. She hated to watch it—but he’d done this to her, after all.

  “The war,” he said again. “Humanity’s war—we—we were at war…” He sucked in a breath.

  “With Hell.”

  “With Heaven,” Dazel said, looking up at her and then quickly looking away.

  Her mouth twisted into a grim frown. So he had known more about the angels than he’d let on. Did he know why Heaven was interfering? What their limitations were?

  She spoke again, her voice harsher. “What do you know that you least want to tell me, Dazel?”

  “I saved every last one of you!” He roared suddenly. “How many times? How—how—augh! I. Helped. You.”

  “No one say anything,” Ashtoreth said levelly, her eyes never leaving her familiar.

  Dazel’s head jerked to Kylie. “I-I-I taught you to fly! I—I…” He sucked in another breath, and then his voice steadied. “I’m going to kill you, Ashtoreth.”

  She blinked. The clarity with which he said the last part made it clear that it wasn’t a threat that he’d spat out before he was forced into giving his answer.

  It was his answer.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice frail. “But you’re perfect. Compositionally flawless.” The words started to flow out of him, coming fast now that he wasn’t straining to keep them in. “You don’t even know what this means but you’re the realization of the vision I had when I first made your—no—no—no—”

  He gasped, twitching. “—Your species!”

  “God above,” Ashtoreth whispered, staring at him. She could react to it all later… she couldn’t get distracted by realizations now…

  “—You’re like—like—like a frictionless pulley,” he said. “The ones they use for theoretical problems. You—damnit, Ashtoreth, let me t-t-tell you—normally!”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “Think lossless transmission,” he said. “No decay no matter how big my spell is, no matter how far it travels, no matter how many targets I split it between. I can do it.” He took a few rattling breaths. “I can do it. I can fix it.” He raised his face to look at her again. His eyes were haunted. “I just need… you. And a shard.”

  “You’re going to kill me?” she asked.

  He gulped. “That’s the plan.”

  She shook her head in disbelief. “No, Dazel. When I signed your contract, you said you’d make sure it was good for both of us. Mutually beneficial.”

  “That was before I realized what you could do.”

  “You mean what I could be used for.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Look down on me all you want—but you of all people don’t get to pretend you don’t understand trading the life of one archfiend to save untold billions. Billions!” He drew in a breath, then exhaled with a hiss. When he spoke again, his voice was almost a whimper. His wings went limp. “So many people, Ashtoreth. It’s just been like this for so long…”

  “And how long did it take you to figure out how you’d spend me?”

  “Not long. Once we were into the daily grind, I ran tests while you were sleeping.”

  She grimaced. “So ever since we started with the scenarios… for almost the entire year we spent outside time, you’ve been planning on using me as a sacrifice?”

  “Yes. If we could have talked more when you were ready…”

  “When you were ready, you mean! You’re just like him, aren’t you?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “No. I’m not. That’s the truth.”

  “That’s what you believe!” she shouted. “But all I am to you is some… some nice cut of meat, something you can fit into your plans somewhere. You tell me that I’m perfect, but that just means that I’m perfectly useful!”

  “Ashtoreth.”

  She blinked, then quickly looked over. It was Kylie.

  “Ashtoreth,” she said. “You gotta focus up, okay? It can’t be about everything.”

  She drew back a little, then gave a curt nod and turned back to Dazel.

  “Listen, Ashtoreth,” Dazel said. “Please just hold off with the questions for a second—just a second! I need to explain some things, all right? I just need to tell you—”

  “About how guilty you feel, I’ll bet,” she said, her voice calmer. “But then you did that already. Over Dereemo after we killed Morax Tol. Remember?”

  “Of course I remember,” he said. “And you—”

  “Quiet,” she said, thinking. “When you told me about yourself over Dereemo… you were taking advantage of me. Letting me build myself a nice little story about how I was going to help you find some redemption for all the evil you’d helped to bring about, letting me know that you were just the sort of person I should keep around if I wanted to kill my father. A perfect little pair of narratives to manipulate me with. Isn’t that right?”

  “It’s not—n-n-n-n…” At last, he snarled. “God damn you, Ashtoreth. You don’t—don’t—don’t—”

  He screamed in pain, jerking and twitching as his muscles spasmed. She stared down at him, trying to suppress her own shaking.

  “Of course I knew that’s what I was doing!” he shouted at last. “Does that make me manipulative?! I told you the truth! More of it than you deserved!” He gasped.

  “Like you can decide what anyone deserves! You’re a better fit for the pits than as the emperor of anything.”

  “Is this how it felt to do your sister?” he asked. “Is this how she looked at the end—trapped and helpless while you looked down on her?”

  She clenched her teeth hard enough that several of them cracked in her mouth, then snarled as they regenerated. He wouldn’t get to her. “What do you know that you least want to tell me, Dazel?”

  He let out a pained, wheezing laugh. “I know what humans are,” he said. Then, his voice tightening, he added, “I t-t-tried, Ashtoreth. Pure souls. Nascent angels—but we could have been so much more…”

  “You knew all of this,” she whispered. “All this time. You let us wonder…”

  “It’s what I’ve spent my time doing these past days,” he said. “I know you thought I was getting ready to hide from the humans, but I tested every possibility. Tried every way I could think of to figure out how to keep you from dying.”

  She shook her head, not wanting to take the bait. “You didn’t tell them what you know about them. It’s their species, Dazel. Your species. You wouldn’t even tell humanity its own history.”

  “Instantaneous gene shearing with a simultaneous essence transplant… you’d reject the new spirit, unravel before you could even wake up…”

  “I became Monarch of Earth… and you still didn’t tell me.”

  “...Take a more direct approach, then, with brute force soul transmutation… turn it all human and sacrifice a facsimile of the fiendish parts… but humanity integrates too thoroughly, too perfectly, it’s too damned pure—there’s no way to grasp only the fiendish soul because there is no ‘only the fiendish soul…’”

  “I could have understood some lies, Dazel. But this is beyond anything I imagined. You betrayed me.”

  Dazel stopped. He looked back up at her, his face hardening.

  And then he looked past her.

  “Please,” he said, clearly speaking to someone else. “Please—don’t hurt them.”