little devil dance
Where compassion is the most violent kind of exorcism.
He felt the cold first— a predatory, too-familiar chill that prickled the nape of his neck. It wasn’t the honest draft of an autumn door, but a sudden theft of everything worth living for in the room: the youth, the warmth, the blissful absence of hungry ghosts. The air turned brittle, plunging into a hollow, late-November exhale the moment she slid onto the stool beside him.
“You look like hell, Father,” a voice rasped. It was melodic, yet frayed at the edges.
The scent hit him then, a violent contradiction: pumpkin lotion and opium perfume masking the low, wet tang of rotting insides and the sharp bite of sulfur.
He didn’t look up. He remained anchored to his whiskey, staring into the glass where the ice had long since surrendered, leaving nothing but a pale, amber bruise.
As she reached out, her fingers grazed his against the slick, sweating surface of the glass. He didn’t shudder— not because he didn’t fear her, but because his nerves had been cauterized years ago.
She didn’t pull away either. She simply took the glass from his hand. He watched a weary, ghosts-of-better-days smile pull at her lips— an expression that didn’t quite reach the emeralds of her eyes— as she took a slow, deliberate sip of his drink.
Around them, the pub hummed with the aggressive vitality of the living. Art students provided a rhythmic scratch-scritch of charcoal. Bass thrummed through the floorboards.
A single drop of condensation tracked a jagged path down the glass, his hand resting inches from her black fingernails tapping on the counter. Finally, he forced his gaze upward, locking eyes with her— the shimmering, unnatural green that burned brighter than it should.
“And you, Morgana,” he said, his voice a dry rasp, “look like an angel who missed a deadline. When, by all rights, you should look like shit.”
She laughed slowly, a sound like wind through cathedral glass— beautiful, until you realize no throat of this world could produce it.
“Flattery will get you another sip, darling,” she whispered, leaning closer. Her breath coated the back of his throat like incense gone horribly wrong. “But let us not pretend that either of us qualify for halos.”
She set the glass down between them with deliberate gentleness, the way someone might handle something fragile and forbidden, leaving it where he could reach without crossing the line he’d drawn years ago.
Her eyes, the deep pools so different from the emptiness she was used to, watched him grab his poison again, watched his throat move around the swallow before he set it back down. One black nailed finger traced slow circles around the rim of the glass, never close enough to touch but enough to feel the truly human heat of his flesh.
The pub noise swelled around them— bass thrumming slow and steady still— but it felt distant. Muffled. As though the world had stepped back to give them this small pocket of torment.
“You could send me away tonight, you know?” she said when the silence got too long to hold. “Say the words. The full rite. I’d let the light tear right through me.” She hesitated for a fleeting moment. “If that’s what you really want.”
When his only response was the stutter of his carefully measured breathing, Morgana continued. “You can’t finish it, do you? You always stop right at the edge, like a man who keeps one foot on the shore even as the tide pulls.”
“Do you really believe that?” he spat, the words catching on the dry shelf of his throat. “After all these years? How long has it been? You haven’t aged a day, and look at me. Really look at me, you fucking leech!”
So, she did. She didn’t need the black magic to see the ruins. Didn’t need to be reminded of the scorching zeal in his younger, brighter blue eyes when she’d first emerged— jaw clenched in prayer, knuckles white as bone around his grandmother’s rosary. His mind had been so focused back then, anchored to the exhausted, sweaty flesh of the woman she had stolen. That poor soul had still been fighting her, clawing from the inside.
He was a husk now. A map of failures written in deep-cut wrinkles. Grey hair clung to his forehead, dampened by a cold sweat that never quite lifted.
Very little remained of the stripling who thought he could save the world— or at least save that one girl. One foolish student who touched the wrong book and answered a demigod’s question with a plea for eternal youth.
“How many years of you trying to tempt someone who has no love to give?” His voice dropped, losing its edge and gaining a hollow weight. “How many years of me trying to send back to hell something that…”
The air between them seemed to ionize. Too far. Not yet.
He locked eyes with her again, refusing to blink. She saw her reflection in that icy blue— still cold. Still inaccessible. She saw the sheer, bone-deep exhaustion behind his pupils, and something inside her fractured before he could finally finish her off.
“...that doesn’t belong there?”
The words hit like a fist to the sternum. She gasped— a sharp, violent intake of air that rattled in her chest like dry leaves. She tried to swallow the reaction, to pull the mask of the predator back over her face, but failed miserably.
Because suddenly she understood.
Not the words. Not the casually broken way he said them.
The night.
In the cellar. The light, burning low. The girl’s voice hoarse from screaming. His hand shook as he clutched his rosary and she’d laughed in his face.
He had stopped then. Just for a second. He didn’t look at her like she was evil.
Not a demon. Not an unclean spirit. Instead, something broken that desperately ached to have a form.
He’d said her name. Not to purge her out of this world. But to call her. And she’d stopped laughing. She hadn’t known how to react. At the time, she had thought it was misguided hesitance. Doubt or even strained reluctance.
“Why did you even come here? Just to torment me some more?” he asked, the fire gone, replaced by a weary flatline.
Morgana looked at the amber puddle in the bottom of the tumbler, at the way the bar light fractured through it like stained glass in reverse— the holy colors turned profane.
“I came because the silence got too loud,” she said, leaving out the parts that felt too connected to him. Her voice was stripped of its usual velvety rasp, left thin and cracked like the tiles beneath the bar.
“I miss our struggle. I miss the balance. I thought I won when they took me away from that cellar. Now, I just feel like a coward,” she continued, softer, almost to herself. Her eyes flicked up then, meeting his— dimmer now, the unnatural shine banked like coals under ash. Nearby, an indie, natural, beeswax candle flickered where no wind blew.
“It’s been too long. I’m getting bored playing inside her skin. She still remembers how it was before me. Barely though. She’s fracturing every day. One small wrinkle on her soul after another.”
Her voice was whiny— petulant— but he pretended not to see the crack in her armor, staring into the amber bruise of his drink.
“And I hate how much I miss feeling that small panic again. How alive I felt. The thought that maybe this time you will get your shit together and exile me to the kingdom of my father. How much I miss… you looking at that pathetic little girl like she was worth saving, while you were really looking at me…’
She didn’t lift her gaze. Didn’t dare look away from the sticky countertop. The pub moved around them. Indifferent. A heartbeat that didn’t belong to either of them.
“I could do whatever I want, Father. Snap my bloodied fingers and have it all. But I sit here instead, breathing in your cigarette smoke and your alcoholic sweat, watching the grey creep into your hairline like frost on a window I can’t fucking open. Because the only thing worse than being sent back would be knowing you finally meant it when you said the words.”
The condensation on the glass had slowed to a single, trembling drop, hanging on the edge like it couldn’t decide whether to fall or evaporate. She reached to share his doom, but before her fingertips touched the cold surface he made a cross over liquid and said the words of the prayer.
“Really? It seems blasphemous even to me. And if it wasn’t, do you really think I’m going to believe you still carry enough light to…”
“Why don’t you try me?” He finally smiled, handing her the consecrated liquid.
She could feel anger mixing with cynicism and bitterness inside him. The turmoil. The indecision. All of it, rolling under his skin like hellfire. And still, the art students’ charcoal scratched on, frantic and alive. The bass kept thrumming its low fever. And between them, the air stayed charged. Waiting. The way it does right before the lightning.
“Maybe I will.”
“I hope so.” He leaned back, watching her with a sarcastic smirk illuminating his troubled face.
She didn’t take the glass immediately.
Her fingers hovered above it, close enough to feel the warmth of his hand still clinging to it. The scent of whiskey rose, but beneath it lay something older. Sharper. Like the sun on a newborn’s face. Like early mornings in hell.
For the first time in years, she hesitated.
The last time he had tried, she had laughed. She knew he would fail. This time, she didn’t know what she wanted herself.
The certainty began to crumble. And beneath it, something small and fragile stirred. Something she had buried so deep she had almost convinced herself it had never existed.
She looked at him.
He didn’t blink.
That frightened her more than any angel ever did.
She lifted the glass with deliberate care, as though it might explode in her hands. The rim brushed her lower lip.
She paused.
Searching his face for hesitation. For mercy. For doubt.
There was none.
“Still stubborn and cocky,” she murmured, then drank.
The first burn was familiar.
The second was not.
It spread too quickly, slipping past flesh, into places she had no language for. Her spine arched. The bass faltered. The scratching charcoal dissolved into static.
Something inside her recoiled. Not hunger. Something smaller. Something that remembered warmth.
Blood filled her mouth, metallic and bright. She coughed into her hand. She stared at it in her palm as though it belonged to someone else.
“Jesus Christ, Father,” she rasped. “It burned like Michael’s sword in my throat, when he cast me out.”
He laughed so unexpectedly, he started coughing himself. He wiped his mouth, trying to conceal the blood on the tissue, but failed miserably.
He lit another cigarette. Took a deep hit, then handed it to her.
“Welcome to my world, darling.”
Her eyes bored into the side of his face until he looked up, icy blue meeting unnatural green. The imprint of his lips on the cigarette touched hers for long enough for him to notice. Smoke of his demise mixed with the one caused by consecrated bourbon scorching her insides.
“Cancer,” she said. Not a question.
“Lungs,” he admitted. “Stage three. Three months. At best. I’m enjoying my retirement, as you probably noticed by now.”
The revelation hung between them heavier than smoke. She stared at the blood specked tissue in his hand, then at the deep circles under his eyes, the way his once stubbornly strong shoulders curved inwards like a man already folding himself into a fresh grave. For once, she had no quip, no seductive taunt. Only silence. Thick and unfamiliar.
“What’s the matter, sweetheart? Did you forget humans are mortal?” He tried and failed to conceal the grief with a weak half-smile.
Her body trembled, the borrowed skin crawling.
“Fine,” she said at last, voice stripped to something almost human. “Finish it. Your cursed drink has done half the job. Exile me. I’m tired of wearing her like a stolen fucking dress while you slowly decay in front of me. Say the words, Father. Mean them. Send me back.”
He studied her. The shine in her eyes had dulled, weary. No game to be seen within them. There was no resistance, no mocking laughter or taunts. She simply waited, eyes fixed on his face as if memorizing it.
He opened his mouth, but the prayer faltered before he spoke the first words. A cough tore through him, wet and ugly. Blood flecked the collar he wore. He slumped against the bar, breath ragged and rattling.
She caught him before he fell, arms wrapping around the frail shell of the man who had haunted her for years.
“No.” He looked straight in her eyes, as if he wanted to see her soul. His body trembling against hers, the strength draining out of him faster than the blood soaking the collar at his throat.
“No?”
“No. Not like that. I’m no better than you. I’m tired of pretending I am. That’s what is killing me.” He pulled her closer. “You want to know what it’s like?” he whispered, his voice barely audible over the hum of the pub. “You spent all these years trying to tempt me into your abyss. What if there’s one inside me already? One, waiting for you.”
He reached out, his calloused, trembling hand cupping the side of her face— the girl’s face, warm and soft— hiding the ancient, cold thing beneath. Not an act of violence. An invitation.
“I trust you. Can you trust me?” he whispered.
When their lips met, the pub didn’t disappear— it sharpened. The smell of stale beer and ozone intensified, not into decay, but into the scent of a storm breaking. The kiss wasn’t a spark. It was a slow, deliberate drowning.
He didn’t try to push her out of the girl. He opened himself, inviting the cold, stagnant weight of her to settle into the hollow, inhospitable spaces of his failing lungs and his dying, rhythmic heart.
He felt her— not as a monster, but as a vast, starving void.
Contracting. Shrinking. Small enough to fit between his ribs.
She gasped against his mouth, her fingers tangling in his hair, not to pull away but to anchor herself as his memories and emotions flooded her senses. The ache in his back, the rattle in his chest, the slow, ticking clock of his remaining heartbeats— she took it all. No questions asked. She drank the death out of him, and in return, he gave her the only thing he had left. His own, rotting flesh.
The student slumped over the bar, confused. Eyes clear, human and terrified.
She stared at the priest who had once fought to save her. He looked familiar in so many ways, and yet… different. Wrong. When his eyes flicked up to hers— one ice blue, one blinding green— something ancient rippled through, lurking behind the unnatural flickers of neon lights above.
He lifted the glass of whiskey, his fingers steady now, but his expression etched with a newfound, crushing storm of emotions. He looked at the lost girl, then back at the glass.
A smile ghosted over his face— too graceful, too cruel, and yet, somehow still profoundly, achingly human.
“Hello there, little lamb,” the voice said, soft and inviting. Not his. Not the devil’s. Blended. Theirs. Familiar and foreign. Cursed and holy. The new kind of blasphemy, not yet seen in this world.
“We’re gonna have so much fun together.” He stood. No. They stood. Steady. Ear-to-ear smiling.
The girl rose too, legs trembling. They offered a hand. She took it, uncertain and ignoring the unnatural frigidity of their pulsating skin against hers.
They walked out with her into the night. Hand in hand.
The streetlights cast many long shadows behind them, ambiguous and sharp.
All at once.
 | A guest post by
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I really liked this one... bloody and gruesome, but thoughtful and contemplative... very satisfying to read.
I love the symmetry: their souls merging in his body while your two voices merge in the storytelling. Also, of course Michael’s sword had to show up. I think I know whose line that was.