The Devil's Favourite Obsession

Cassian did not move a single muscle because a question had lodged itself inside his skull, and it would not leave.

”How did you know what I said to Cixi? In private?” His voice was low. It carried no warning. It carried something past warning — the voice of a man who has already decided the outcome and is asking only to hear the answer before the killing begins.

”We are demons, Cassian.” He tilted his head as though the question were beneath him. ”How hard do you imagine it is for me to overhear a few words?”

Cassian then declared, ”I have sealed my floor.” Cassian’s eyes turned pure black in fury. ”I asked a witch to cast the spell for exactly that reason. Sound doesn’t leave it. Nothing escapes. Not a mortal, not an immortal, not the faintest breath of what’s said inside those walls.” His voice dropped further. ”So tell me again. How did you hear it?”

Rafael’s lips curved, the smile of a man who knows something and is deciding how much of it to spend. ”The spell must have broken,” he said.

”How?” The word dropped between them like a stone into still water.

And a doubt began to form in Cassian’s mind. It started small, then a flicker, a hairline crack in the certainty he had built around himself. Rafael was two full ranks below him. In the order of demons, that gap was not a step; it was a canyon. No demon two ranks beneath him could so much as scratch a spell the Devil had laid into the bones of his own floor.

And yet Cassian hadn’t felt it break. That was what unsettled him most. When a spell breaks, the one who cast it feels the snap like a cold thread pulling loose from the weave of the thing. He had felt nothing. He had sat in his study while Cixi and Emily argued in the next room, and the wards had come down around him without a whisper.

Someone had unmade his work without tripping a single alarm. And that took a power Rafael simply did not have.

His anger flared, and he moved before it had finished forming. The fiery sword came up out of nothing and swung in a tight arc, low to high, and this time he did not aim to miss. The blade opened Rafael across the thigh, biting through ashen skin into the muscle beneath, the wound glowing orange at its lips where the heat sealed it shut before it could bleed.

Rafael screamed. The sound tore across the volcanic plain. His leg buckled, and he dropped to one knee, both hands clamped to the wound, amber eyes blown wide with pain and fury.

”Were you the one who sent men to kill me?” Cassian lifted the sword. Lava-light ran the length of the blade.

Rafael’s hand shot out, the lightning whip snapping back to life, but the power wasn’t in it now. The pain had broken his concentration, and the lash came thin and slow, snaking up toward Cassian’s chest. Cassian cut it out of the air with a single stroke. The lightning split and scattered into dying sparks across the obsidian, and the sword carried through and stopped against Rafael’s throat.

The heat of the edge pressed into his skin. A thin ribbon of steam rose where the metal met him.

”Answer me, Rafael.”

Rafael’s jaw clenched. From his knees, he glared up the length of the blade, and the blood from his thigh had begun to seep dark and thick onto the stone beneath him.

But Cassian’s mind was already running ahead of his sword.

He knew an ancient spell had been used. He knew it because of what happened to him now, in this body. When Cixi was near, Cassian changed in ways that should not have been possible, and he turned human in quality. His skin could open from an ordinary accident. A common blade could cut him. That alone defied everything he was. Not the Devil. Not an entity of his rank. To make him bleed should have required an equal, or an angel, or one of the oldest things in the oldest worlds.

And yet near Cixi, he bled, and his wounds were slow to close, and his body behaved as though something had quietly reached in and turned him mortal.

The sword that had pierced his chest the night of the attempt had been no ordinary steel, either. It was carved with ancient script symbols of the old magic, the kind never taught on earth, practised only in the world he had been cast out of. The Damnation World.

Someone had hired a witch. A powerful one — one who knew the old inscriptions, who could carve the dead language into metal and turn a common sword into a thing that could wound the Devil himself.

And Sashkia had failed to find the daughter of the dark witch. That failure told him more than any clue could have: whoever stood behind this was no minor player working from the dark corners. This was someone with reach. With knowledge. Someone who moved through the Palace the way water moves through stone — present and invisible at once.

Was it Rafael?

Had he hired the witch, planned the assassination, worn all that charm and provocation and hunger for Cixi as a mask over something far colder?

Or was it the King?

Cassian’s eyes narrowed. The King had surfaced from nowhere — claiming three centuries of absence, yet plainly watching the whole time. The King, who knew about the mark. About the blood. About the thing Cassian had done while Cixi wasn’t looking.

He would not be surprised.

”I am a warrior,” Rafael spoke through the pressure of the blade. His voice came strained but level. ”Not a coward.”

”You are also a demon,” Cassian reminded him.

Rafael didn’t laugh this time. His face had gone hard, the playful amber flat and serious now, the wound at his thigh pulsing heat.