26

Beelzebub

Wally stopped moving, his body limp in my cradled clutches. Still, his grip hadn't released his dagger—valiant and vigilant to win this fight. A fight I should've shielded him from. Delicately, I unwrapped his fingers one by one until the blade clinked against the metal grates. Fatigue had washed over Wally's body, but he didn't have any injuries. Nothing external at least.

Every single cell in his body came to a halt, steam seeping from his pores releasing the final traces of Diabolic essence he had coursing through him. What was he doing with so much essence? What was he doing with essence to begin with? I clamped my jaw. This was my doing. My inability to stop Eligos.

Burying my doubt, I focused on what I could do now. I would fix this. Had to.

I channeled my own essence into my fingertips, piercing a tiny hole into Wally's chest and sending my essence to repair the damage. Closing my eyes, I fixated all my attention to the piece of essence swirling in Wally. There was so much damage. His heart had rips and tears, bits of muscle tissue floated around the organ, lost chum after it stopped beating. Blackened decay ran along the veins and arteries leading to liquified insides. Every part of Wally had been riddled with damage, from melted organs, shredded muscles, to rotted bones picked clean. In a matter of minutes, the essence he took had devoured what little mana he had and feasted upon what remained soaked into his mortal coil.

He had died.

Dead. Gone.

No. I shook him.

"Walter." My voice cracked. "Wake up."

Nothing.

I pressed my hands to his chest, forcing a beat to stir, to waken.

Nothing.

I struggled to breathe, calling out his name again.

Nothing.

I poured more essence into his body, commanding it to stitch together what remained, willing it to make the chunks of his heart beat again, and using it to create a flow of circulation as a way of accounting for the lack of blood he had left.

It didn't work.

His hazel eyes were glossy, hollow, and empty. There was nothing I could fix, nothing my essence could heal. He'd taken his final breath. All my essence did was stir a corpse.

"W-w-ally." I pulled him into a hug, crying inconsolably.

I'd failed him. I'd lost him. The nightmare Eligos locked me in was right—I would be alone forever.

"Where's that damn knight?" Mora's feet dragged as she shuffled into the engine room, subtle but there was a pained ache in her steps. "Way to leave me with those three demons. No worries, though. Naturally, I made a game of it before slaughtering—"

Mora silenced an almost audible reaction. The stiffening of her posture lessened, either too exhausted from her battle or no longer finding the need to present herself with poise.

"Bez, I'm…" Mora knelt beside me, blood seeped into the fabric of her clothes, and trickled out of deep slashes. Wounds that would heal given the host body she'd picked.

That's it.

"We can bring him back." Gently, I set Wally down onto the metal grate floor. "Give him your blood. He's not a Mythic and there's no essence so Maurice's blood will resurrect him."

"Bez, I can't. It won't work."

"You haven't even tried."

"Vampirism is a dice roll and requires a mortal to die with the blood in their system. Walter is… Wally's already dead."

"I might have a spell." Kell wheezed, dragging herself forward with each step.

Mora darted to her wife in a haze, wrapping an arm around Kell's back and steadying her shaky stance. "You don't have the magic to cast anything right now."

"Might need a little more essence, then I'll be right as rain." Kell had a weak smile, her somber eyes locked on Wally.

"No. Any more essence and you risk…" Mora swallowed hard. She wouldn't say it but all three of us knew what she'd stopped shy of warning. She wouldn't risk Kell being consumed and killed by ingesting too much Diabolic essence in one go. A failure I hadn't protected Wally from, a failure that killed him so I could live. Fact was, it was probably only the half-century of regularly sharing in Mora's essence that offered Kell such immunity to the effects when taking in larger doses like what she required after being set ablaze.

"I know necromancy spells, it'd be easy to reanimate his corpse, but I need magic now," Kell said, pleadingly. "The longer we wait, every second he lays there dead, memories are fading, falling away to the afterlife. It'll be impossible to restore them all if we wait."

"No." The word burned my throat, cascading sinking guilt through every fiber of my being.

Every second that ticked took away a memory. I'd witnessed a few zombie and revenant resurrections, they took hours under the best circumstances, most took days to enact. If we brought Wally back, he'd only be a shell of his former self, spending his eternity inside a rotting body and unable to remember half the things that brought him joy, mind lost in a fog. I couldn't do that to Wally. I couldn't punish him because I feared living without him.

"But I can't live without him, either." I caressed his damp blond curls.

Now that all the tension of pain had released from his body, Wally looked at peace.

With a telekinetic pull, I dragged the Demon's Desire dagger into my grip.

"Let's not get hasty, Bezzy." Mora approached, careful in her steps and words. "I could, perhaps, parlay with Bael. It's been centuries, but we parted on mostly good terms."

"That's right." I held the tip of the blade close to my chest. "A devil can do or undo anything at their whim."

"He never did quite comprehend the fragility of morality," Mora continued. "But he's a sentimental old fool."

"No." I swallowed hard, definitive. "Wally's body wouldn't survive the trip to Hell."

"He might," Kell chimed in. "I can figure out how to travel, maybe circumvent some stuff to account for the massive loss of Diabolic essence fueling transport. Give me some time and I'll have this villa front and center in Bael's Court."

"I'd advise against that, love," Mora said.

"If the only thing that can fully restore the dead is a devil, then a devil will bring Wally back." I plunged the dagger into my chest, grinding my teeth as demon essence raged against me—instinctively protective when I carved upward and through my sternum. "I may be a fake, a fraud, but I have devil essence."

"Bez, ripping it out could kill you. For all you know that essence will fade the second its untangled from your body."

"It won't." I struggled, slicing tendrils of demon essence interwoven with threads of devil essence. Power that'd protected me for centuries. Power that'd guided my path. Power that'd kept me alive through difficult battles. "Devils are undying, refusing to accept defeat."

"You don't even know if throwing away those pieces will result in bringing back Wally." Mora stood in front of the pooling blood and essence pouring from me.

Scarlet and black whirled together, crimson sparks of light revealing how much of my essence spilled out during this endeavor.

"The piece of the devil I took lacks sentience, but it still has a will to live." I paused, ignoring the needled tar stabbing me from inside, attempting and failing to stitch together the large gash I'd crudely carved across my torso. "If I give Wally this essence, it'll restore him."

I hoped. I had to hope because otherwise he was gone forever.

"You don't exactly have a lot of your own essence to work with," Mora said.

"Got a whole slab of ‘abandoned me' pieces over there." I nodded to the headless corpse Eligos kept propped as a trophy, a lure, something to bait me back to the engine room to steal the only part of me he wanted—the devil. "I'll regather it, collect my strength… After."

"Fine." Mora knelt beside me, further ruining her outfit as it soaked in the pool of carnage. "Let me at least help."

"Maurice is going to be pissed when he sees what you did to his clothes."

"He can eat me." Mora took the dagger, and delicately cut between the threads of my essence; her touch held artistry, reminiscent of how she would handle a former lover.

As tendrils lunged from my chest cavity, whipping about and striking indiscriminately, Mora unleashed her own creating a black shield with an emerald hue.

"Thank you, Mora," I said as warm blood spilled from my lips.