“How could I possibly trust you to keep your word?” Virgil strode toward the demon, which sank to its knees and laid its swords on the ground. Hellfire crackled just beneath Virgil’s fingertips. It would have been invisible to the human eye, but the demon was well aware of the danger.

  “My people live and die by our contracts,” the creature rasped. “I could no more lie to you than the sun could fail to set.”

  Every ounce of logic screamed at Virgil that this was a trick. The demon was not to be trusted.

  And yet, he believed. Virgil had been raised on stories of angels and demons. Angels, golden white and too bright to look at, and demons tainted black and red. The realms of heaven and hell were two sides of the same coin, with angels incapable of speaking the truth and demons unable to lie.

  Angels, then, spoke in metaphor and riddles. They told stories which housed greater truths than the words themselves could convey. Demons, on the other side of the coin, could only speak the truth, but their hearts were twisted with deception. The words themselves would be true, but through omission and implication the demons could mislead their unwary prey.

  Angels and demons alike were mythical creatures, no more real than faeries or dragons. Only one history wrote about them as if they were real, and that was largely treated as a joke.

  And yet. Here before him was a creature which could only be a demon. Even the System acknowledged it as a demon lord.

  Was it so much a stretch to believe the stories were true? Perhaps not in their entirety — surely demons did not seek out naughty children, and that was a parent’s creative addition. But the broad strokes, the general themes and warnings, those could be true.

  Virgil knew the stories. He knew how to see through the half-truths and sidestep whatever dangers the demon intended to hurl him towards.

  He nodded to the demon. “You will address me as Master.”

  The demon lord bowed its head. “Yes, Master.”

  It was petty. Virgil knew that. But it also felt like a clever precaution, a quick way to verify that the demon lord would see through its promised subservience.

  The scholar clenched his fists. For the first time in his life, he wanted to give himself over to emotion. He wanted to set logic free like a caged bird, let it fly away and leave him to the rage and despair and the grief of what he had lost. He had power now; hellfire coursed through his veins and urged him to let loose, to vent his frustrations on their very source — to kill the demon which prostrated before him.

  How many times would he have to reel himself back in? Virgil closed his eyes and breathed deep, inhaling calm and exhaling rage, until his thoughts were clear once more.

  Throwing a tantrum wouldn’t help. It might feel better in the short term. It might vent his rage, but he would be left with despair and worse — no answers. No way to get answers but to summon yet another demon (and how was he supposed to do that?). No. Venting would feel better, but it wouldn’t accomplish anything worthwhile, and it would set him back further than he already was.

  When Virgil blinked open his eyes, his gaze landed on the bodies of his friends. He wanted to close them again, to pretend they weren’t gone, but he forced himself to remain steady.

  Cassian was slumped over Ren’s body; he’d tried so hard to bring the young man back to life. Cassian should have known it wouldn’t work, but the panic of combat and denial of grief made him try anyway.

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  Virgil swallowed. His heartbeat was thunderous and he knew that if he held his hands out, they would shake.

  But his voice was steady. “Bury the bodies. Respectfully.”

  “Yes, Master.” The demon rose to its feet. He held out his hands and spoke in a different language. It was guttural and raspy, and the earth parted into two deep furrows. The demon raised his palms, and both bodies rose like ragdolls. floated to the graves, and disappeared gently underground.

  No sooner did the earth cover the bodies than Virgil keenly felt his mistake. Tears fell from his eyes in a silent stream. He did not want to show weakness in front of the infernal creature which stood before him, but he could not stop the well of grief.

  He should have buried them himself. He should have found a shovel and worked until his muscles burned and his palms bled. When the ground grew too tough to work, he should have softened it with his tears.

  They very last thing he should have done was have them effortlessly buried by their own killer.

  Virgil clenched his fists. Hellfire surged through him. He hated the sensation. It felt slick as a salesman’s pitch and vicious as a winter wind. Yet he clung to it, because it was the only thing which gave him power over the demon lord who inspired all of his pain and hate.

  “Where do you come from?” Virgil snapped. The sooner he asked his questions, the sooner he could kill the creature and be done with it.

  The demon stood a few feet away. Its swords were drawn respectfully behind its back, and its hands were clasped at its front. If it weren’t for the blackened skin and the split, faceless head, it would look demure.

  “I am from the infernal realm, Master,” the demon lord said.

  “Tell me about that.” Virgil did his best not to look at the demon. He kept it in his peripheral vision, close enough to keep an eye on it but not so much that he could lose himself in the whorls and threads of red goop that strung the two halves of its head together.

  “My realm is very different from this one, Master, although in some ways alike,” the demon said. “We do not have your System for skills and stats, but we do have a set of rules by which we are all bound. I see now that your people are far less prone to violence. We keep our organization through contracts, which protect us from each other and from ourselves.”

  Virgil’s lip curled. Prone to violence, he thought. What a disgusting understatement.

  “Why come here? Why do this?” Virgil gestured at the freshly dug graves of his two best friends.

  The demon had no face and therefore no expression, but in its body language, Virgil read disinterest. It was in the way the creature turned its head as though surprised to still be talking about the fallen.

  “Grimora is much nicer than hell, Master,” the demon said. It did not elaborate. It did not need to.

  Bile rose in Virgil’s throat. “How did you get here?”

  “The creation of the System,” the demon explained, “weakened the veil between our realms. As a result, I was able to create a doorway to Grimora.”

  “The System…” Virgil’s eyes widened. He thought of every debate he had ever had about the virtues of the System, of every argument he had made for the good it brought to the world. The only people who disliked it, he’d always said, were those who preferred to hoard power and lord it over the less fortunate. The System was the great equalizer. “The System allowed this?”

  The red strands that held the demon’s head together glowed briefly with inner scarlet light. “Yes, Master.”

  “How?”

  “The exact workings are beyond my understanding, Master.”

  Virgil looked around. Given a puzzle, he was able to push his feelings aside and give in to the cold workings of his brain.

  There. On the arm of the rocking chair lay Ren’s notebook. Virgil glanced sideways at the demon — he was growing more comfortable having the thing around, but he was still uneasy. The demon was like a snake, coiled and prepared to strike; the only thing stopping him were words.

  But there was nothing to be done. He could kill the demon. Hellfire Bolt remained at the tip of his tongue, and now he had had at least a couple of his questions answered. According to the stories, the longer he allowed the demon to speak to him, the more he would lose sight of its deception, making him more vulnerable to its intentions.

  At the same time, he could not ignore the steady rise of the demon lord’s HP. Every second he waited, the demon’s health restored. Soon, he would not be able to kill it in one turn.

  But there was a part of him — the scholarly part? He wasn’t sure anymore — which whispered that the demon could yet be useful.

  Virgil opened Ren’s notebook. The familiar scrawl was almost enough to send him spiraling once more into grief, but he pressed on.

  The last entry was hastily written, more scribble than script. Virgil sat down, and he read every word.