Chapter 1

One

I t took two weeks for the bishop to arrive.

I'd seen Bishop Fazio from afar on the day of his appointment to our little town, just hours after Bishop Jonah was buried. Since then, he had changed very little. Around him wafted an air of disapproval like incense, which clouded him in a constant haze. His resting expression had been permanently altered by the persistence of this feeling in his life, and his brows ow barely eluded his eyelashes, so low they clung to his face. He had aged remarkably poorly, however, which I chose to believe was down to his bitterness. He had a great size to his pot belly, but he wore it somehow gracefully, walking with an ease and a comfort I found hard to emulate. His priestly garb fitted him the way mine never had: like a second skin. Like it was meant to be there.

I disliked that I felt anything close to jealousy for him in that moment. Seeing him arrive reminded me that I wasn't intending to stay here. Priestly duties would be nothing but a distant memory if I got what I wanted.

Yet I still felt anxious.

I was giving up the mortal plane, was I not? My body, as it was, meant nothing to me. Here, on earth, I felt pathetic, worthless—but beneath Asmodeus' lustful gaze, purpose burned to life in me. Worth was bestowed upon my body.

It had given me a use. What was more, I had the good fortune of feeling that purpose truly when I was touched. Pleasure and pain and every thrust had been a grounding motion, as if for years my soul had wandered above my head and now was being stuffed back inside. I felt myself as I never had before. With Asmodeus, I felt good.

In this way, I managed to conquer my fears about Bishop Fazio's visit fairly easily. I had burned anything that might have led to conclusions I wanted no-one to reach: anything ruined by the demon's touch or cum had burned away the same night I replaced the summoning scroll in its restricted cabinet.

The first night, I had been anxious. He would know—Bishop Fazio would sniff me out, smell the sulphur on me, know intrinsically what I'd allowed to be done to my body. But over those two weeks of waiting for him to take the time to visit our small town, my fear became blunted.

He stood now in the abbey's courtyard, which was little more than a beautiful strip of grass and potted plants against the sandstone exterior. The ocean moved in the distance, a faint blue ripple near the horizon. Bishop Fazio stared out at it, hands clasped around his back, and a rosary was threaded through his fingers and around his wrists like manacles. His fingers stroked over the cross solemnly, or perhaps sensually. His manservant—a miserable looking child—announced my arrival and deposited me like that, standing in the courtyard with nothing more than the Bishop's summons to understand the situation.

Bishop Fazio did not turn around. I tried to breathe deeply and slowly, hoping the steadiness would ease the anxiety that had flared to life in my chest. The voice of Bishop Jonah, the old man who had confirmed me, whispered the knowledge of my blasphemy to me as the silence stretched. He knows . He knows, he knows, he knows all about you, you filthy whore. He knows how pathetic you look with a cock in your mouth, how your eyes light up when you are on your knees in worship to a demon: knows the stark contrast with which you have worshipped our Lord. You are seen and you are known and you are found filthy.

And Asmodeus' voice in my ears, its deep chuckle resonant as it saw me, and lauded me for that same filth: Little priest, you are the most willing piece of meat I've ever fucked.

Bishop Fazio twitched and my mind went suddenly blank as I chased all impure thoughts away, as if he could tell what was in my head. He looked over his shoulder—but not at me. As my heartrate softened, I heard how the grass crunched underfoot, and saw the child had returned with another priest in tow.

Oliviero.

"Bishop Fazio," Oliviero said sweetly. I realised belatedly I hadn't acknowledged the Bishop, and certainly not given him his dues. I bowed with Oliviero now and went to kiss his ring. One after the other Oliviero and my lips skirted over a gold signet ring glinting on the Bishop's finger. The sea breeze tousled through our hair; my mind corrupted the moment. I saw briefly Oliviero and mine own mouth pressed against the Bishop's cock, lips parting in desperate adoration?—

Stop it.

I felt the flush consume my cheeks and bowed lower, but the Bishop caught my expression. A finger grazed beneath my chin and he raised my face upwards. If he had pressed firmly, he might have felt the last remains of the scab from Asmodeus' more brutal touches. I noted his fingers carefully avoided the slow healing cuts across my right cheek where the demon had pressed its clawed fingers into the giving flesh; the first time it had split me open. Bishop Fazio's eyes scanned my face. I felt exposed, in a way; worried God would show him my secrets, that he would see every humiliating desire I had pulsing in my veins. But from the way the bishop looked at me—all pitying, lip-curling disgust—he thought very little of me. Certainly, I thought he had not even considered a man like me might have summoned Asmodeus to our realm.

"Don Alessandro," Bishop Jonah said. His voice had an airy pitch to it, as if only half his lungs were in working order at any given time. A wheeze accompanied every sentence, and so he blew my name and title out in rasp that did nothing to dissuade me of the certainty I, and most priests of my station, disgusted him. He was much closer to God than I was by the church's standards. He must have thought so, too.

"You are the Lord's humble servant. You have reformed yourself in His light; I have heard the tale of what you encountered in the scribe's room, and I shudder to think of that unholy presence intruding on sacred ground. But faith won out. Faith won out."

He repeated that line and shook my own head for me. I went limp with the touch, whorish for anybody, and vaguely remembered to close my eyes as if in thoughtful prayer lest they roll back into my skull.

I was let go, and I drooped forward. I splayed my hands on the warm grass and tried to feel below, for the depths of a plane I had never seen but had been conditioned to believe in. Of course, it wasn't heaven I prayed to. I prayed to it. To Asmodeus. I tried to feel him waiting for me in Hell.

Prince, why have you left me here? Give me the strength to crawl to you. I will drag my body through Hell for you to touch me again.

Bishop Fazio's wheezing rattle of a voice cut over the prayer. I flinched at the sound and rocked back onto my haunches, standing with a crack and a groan and all my wasted time flaying the flesh of my heart.

The bishop looked between us. "Tell it to me, as you remember it. The both of you."

I looked over to Oliviero, frightened. How did the young man remember things? Had weeks softened the image of the demon, and me before it? Or had he ruminated on it, prayed on it, cultivated a truth more damning even than my reality?

He saw me looking and flushed. "Please," he said. "It is your story to tell. I merely. . . found you at the right time."

"God found me at the right time," I said quickly, and the bishop let out a thoughtful humming noise. His arms moved as no doubt behind his back he continued fondling that rosary.

I did not say aloud what I was really thinking: of the new religion I had given myself to. I tried to inhabit the fearful, religious part of myself, trying to understand what that version of Alessandro would say. I summoned both false outrage and false fear.

Shaking my head with falsified revulsion, I muttered, "It looked. . .like a distended, larger human, though it had horns, a tail, and claws. Its skin was reddish. And its eyes,"—I saw them in my mind's eye, the way it looked at me, and I felt fire burning in my groin—"Uh, it, uh. . .It seemed confined to the circle. When Oliviero so bravely disturbed it. . ."

"It was my duty," Oliviero whispered, and he made the sign of the cross with a furtive prayer accompanying the flight of his fingers.

I glanced up at Bishop Fazio, whose gaze hadn't moved from me.

"The circle," the bishop wheezed. When our eyes met, he recoiled ever so slightly and turned his eyes back to the horizon; back to God's holy light. "How do you suppose it got there?"

This felt like a question for me. Oliviero stilled by my side as if he had never considered that before now. I felt the distance between us grow, and spiritually I was stranded on my own isle, moored and alone. My fingernails dug into the soft flesh of my palm, and I focused on the bite of them against my skin. Pain had an anchoring force to it. I let it pull me into its harbour, breathing through the sting.

"My holy bishop," I said. I cast a look back at Oliviero, whose head had fallen deeper in his prayer, and I said, "I would like to speak with you alone."

Why I did this, I couldn't tell you. I had opened my mouth to say one thing—a bland lie about finding the circle like that, about wandering in during the dead of night by chance—and said instead something that frightened me.

The bishop turned around bodily now. His eyes drifted over me, over Oliviero, and then to the child servant, who had been so unmoving since delivering my holy brother that I'd forgotten he was there.

"Child." Bishop Fazio summoned the boy forward with one hand. "Have young Oliviero show you the abbey's chapel. Both of you shall pray for God to have mercy on all of us sinners."

The boy and Oliviero dipped their heads and bodies lower and turned so hastily I thought them to be fleeing. What had I done? My stomach twisted—foolish as I was, I hadn't thought I would be my own demise.

A lie, Alessandro. You were willing for all your brethren to hear you scream that night the demon took you. You knew this was coming. You knew you would be caught, and you still wanted it.

"Speak, Don."

Unease shuddered out with my exhale. I shuffled forward and placed my hands over the sandstone wall so I might extract the warmth from the stone, and not because I wanted to hold on to something with dear life.

I took a few moments and the bishop let me. I closed my eyes and breathed deep, and in some mockery of every time I had prayed for God's intervention in the years before now, my desperation was answered. From the soles of my feet, heat seeped up into my body. I could feel every inch of my flesh come alive, every vein popping with the warmth, and when it reached my head, I shuddered. I heard no voice, and saw no sign, but I felt it—I felt Asmodeus. I felt a calling, a claim on my soul and my body, and the urge to get onto my knees to dig my own grave, my own path to Hell, became almost unbearable.

I imagined burrowing into the earth. I imagined dirt in my lungs turning muddy with the wetness of my frantic breaths. I imagined entombing myself in my urge to reach Hell. If I could only get lower. If I could only?—

"Don Alessandro?"

I jerked back to this moment and shook my head. The motion did little to clear my body of the sensation. My cock twitched, a bodily reaction to a presence only I could feel. I pressed myself closer to the wall and I leaned into both the stone and the surety I had of some greater force on my side.

"I. . .am worried about the circle," I told him. Rather, I opened my mouth, and let something speak through me. It was. . .not possession. It couldn't be, by the church's definition, and as much as I might have wished it, Asmodeus had well and truly been sent back to its domain. This was?—

Inspiration.

"What worries me greatly, Bishop, is the knowledge that something of that design could not appear miraculously. God would not allow it."

The bishop sighed but did not interject. I continued, "The abbey must have been infiltrated. Someone must have. . ."

I trailed off and the bishop came beside me, sniffing and groaning as he adjusted himself. He clasped his hands over the walls with the rosary between his fingers. The wind picked up and went through my hair and that rosary, sent them straining in the air, breeze whistling as it tried to drag us both out to sea.

"You are simply too good of a man to speak the truth," the bishop said. He would not look at me as he said it. "But you know as well as I that no one except your confirmed brethren would have access to that room. Let alone the scroll."

I felt a terrified flush beginning in my cheeks and tried to shield it by dropping my head into my hands, fingers tousled and gripping my own hair. The bishop made a noise with his teeth and sighed.

"I know. It is horrible to believe. But. . .it is the only truth I can think of."

I let the question hang. What were we meant to do? What was I meant to do? I had a horrible vision of the bishop's next words. We will remove such illicit material from the abbey. Or: we will reinforce access to those tomes, we will find a way to protect them from dirty, unclean hands.

If it was my idea, then I could get close. I could see what other illicit books we had stored in that section. Though from what I recalled, nothing as evil as what I needed was stored here.

At least one of us would know.

I put a shake into my voice, placed a finger at my quivering lip, and whispered, "Are there. . .worse things than that tome in this abbey, Bishop Fazio?"

He looked at me strangely, and quickly came to some decision about what I meant, because his face crumpled, and he put his hand on my shoulder. "I think Bishop Jonah was wrong about you, child," he murmured, and that sent a confusing flare of heat into my belly. Stuck somewhere between the want for praise and the urge to squirm out from under this man's touch, I stood paralysed and smiling.

Bishop Jonah knew what you were. Bishop Jonah could smell it; sulphuric desire wafting from your pores .

This man was no different, and I could not trust him.

He slipped his hand away. He answered my question finally with, "No. Not here. There are far worse things, certainly. But this abbey does not house them."

Which wasn't what I wanted to hear. I wanted the ease of access, I wanted it to be right under my fingertips; I wanted to be able to tear hell open at my doorstep so I might crawl easily into Asmodeus' cruel embrace.

But if it wasn't possible? If I had to travel, and search, and dedicate more years of my life to the cause? The fire of my desperation raged in my gut, and the fear and distress of waiting—of more years slipping away, of the last stretch of my youth dashed upon the rocks, its innards rotting, God, all I wanted was to be had and had roughly, all I wanted was for this body to be worth something , I wanted pleasure, I wanted to be fucked--!

Bishop Fazio touched me, and I jolted. Nausea threatened to erupt. I thought about vomiting over the edge of this wall.

"That upsets you," the bishop commented.

He had no idea. Keep him on your side. Play the devout and pious follower of Christ; make deception and trickery your prayer.

I let my voice shake. "Because. . ."

Enticed, he leaned forward, pulled by the quiver in my voice; the innocence and the piety he could lord over. "Because what?"

I dragged my body back over the warm stone and turned to look at the bishop. How I had moved meant I had to crane to look at him. The sun set his hair alight, haloing him, and I let myself feel holy and righteous in my deception. "Because the demon. . .I know they lie, bishop. I know there is trickery afoot. But it said someone was trying to open a gate into hell itself."

His jaw clenched so tightly that I could see the movement. I averted my gaze, but his hand moved forward. Forefinger to chin, he tilted my gaze back to his.

"Don Alessandro," he murmured. "You have done us a great service. You have warned us of something terrible."

I swallowed. I saw what could happen next. He would leave. He would escalate things; he would whisper things up the chain of command until even the pope knew, and I would be stuck here, having made things worse for myself.

"We must take every illicit tome that is here, and move it somewhere safer," I said.

To my great relief, the bishop nodded. "There is a place."

He stared out at the ocean again, tone shifting, edging towards something apologetic. "I would. . .I would hate to disturb your life here, but?—"

"I have been called," I said quickly. I shot to standing; I could not hide my eagerness. "Please," I said, without regret, without shame. "Let me do this."

And he looked at me and blessed me with, "Yes, you shall come," and my heart raced with the same ferocity as a charge of horses, and briefly, I found God again, just to say: Thank you for your trusting servants. Thank you for all your fools.

Asmodeus.

I am coming.