The Devil's Playthings (20 page)

The next day she did not see Luc at all. What she did not know was he spent the entire day in the padded cell with Father Peter. He took a more human, yet frightening form. He was big, and bald, and full of muscles and tattoos. He looked like the biker you’d be afraid to walk near on the sidewalk. And he sat with Father Peter, invisible to everyone else, and talked to him.

“You know, Peter, you would have been Pope,” Luc taunted. “You would have been the savior of the Catholic Church. And look at you, you’re locked up in an insane asylum.”

“Get behind me, Satan,” Father Peter insisted, but Luc only laughed. “In the name of Jesus, get behind me Satan.”

“I have free reign here until Jesus comes back,” Luc stated. “And until that day, I can do whatever I want. And what I want to do is torture you beyond your endurance, to make you helpless and make you beg me to stop.”

“I will never beg you,” Father Peter countered. “I will never bow to Satan.”
As he said that the angel that was ever present reached out to him and touched his
shoulder, and he felt calmer.

“You will,” Luc shrugged. “Everyone does eventually.”

A doctor came into the room, and Father Peter called out, “He’s here, do you see him?”

“Who is here Peter,” the doctor asked.

“Satan, he’s right over there,” Father Peter pointed at Luc, but the other man didn’t see him.

“Peter, you’re imagining things,” the doctor insisted. “There’s no one there.”

“He’s right over there,” Peter insisted, and Luc laughed that maniacal laugh. “Please, you have to believe me. Please,” Peter cried as the doctor gave him yet another injection.

“It’s for your own good,” the doctor insisted. “You need to rest.”
Peter fell asleep, and Luc followed the doctor out the door.
The angel wrapped her arms around Peter, and held him as he slept.

Emma had not left her room all day. Rosa brought in food, but Emma wasn’t hungry. She lay on her bed, sobbing and crying. She
didn’t want to believe that she had played a part in destroying such a gentle man’s life. She also felt the loss of Father Peter as a spiritual leader.
She had seen what he would be as real as if she’d lived it. And now, because of her, it would never be.

She heard the door open in her room, and close softly. She heard his footsteps on the soft carpet, and felt him crawl into the bed beside her. He pulled her into his body, and held her there. He kissed her softly on her cheeks, her hair, and her eyes.

“You’re calling me to you, like a moth to a flame,” he murmured. “You pull me to you, just as I pulled you to me last night. My blood, it’s joined u
s in a way I couldn’t have
foreseen
.
We are one now, Emma. You are the other half of me.”

She stopped crying as
she
listened to his words. She turned to lo
ok at him as well, and he appeared
so innocent with his dark brown hair hanging on his forehead, and his dark almond eyes wide with emotion. He wore a soft white sweater, and she rubbed her cheek against it, drying the tears.

“We belong
together now, Emma. W
e will rule the world, you and I.” How could he look so sweet and be so evil. She had no
idea, but what she did know was
that she was his. Every fiber of her screamed out to him, and he answered. He slowly removed her clothes and made love to her in a way that removed any doubts.
And as her eyes grew wide during her orgasm, he could see they were blood red.

The next day he was again Mr. Reinhold her guardian, and she
the sweet
and innocent school girl. She
dressed modestly in a soft pink sweater and jeans. She
appeared, at least,
very young and fragile.
On the inside she knew what Luc did was wrong, that nothing happened between her and Father Peter.
She couldn’t tell anyone because they would think she was as crazy as Peter.
And she thought at any moment she might break down in tears.

The driver delivered them to
Lakewood Academy
w
here they met Luc’s lawyer,
Father Thompson
, and the lawyer for the local dioceses. Luc’s lawyer, an older balding man with too much weight sat uncomfortably in a chair beside her
. S
he could hear h
is heart struggling to beat, and
the blood s
loshing through his body. She knew he would be dead of a heart attack within a year.
He had a
small demon following after him.
I
f she
hadn’t known before she did then
; he was one of Lucifer’s followers.

“We will not sue your school or the diocese as long as Father Peter gets the proper treatment he needs, and is not allowed to resume his post at any school or church. Mr. Reinhold has no interest in your money. He will care for Emma, and see that she gets the psychological treatment she needs as well to get over this devastating event.”

Emma’s bloodshot eyes and drying tears verified his words. She was distraught, and everyone in the room could see it. But not for the reason they all thought. Not because Father Peter hurt her, but because she hurt Father Peter.

“That is very generous of you,” the other lawyer nodded his acceptance. “We will make sure Father Peter stays in a treatment facility.”

“That’s all we’re really after,” the lawyer stated. Luc stood to leave, and took Emma’s elbow. There was something else she wanted, but she was afraid to ask Luc. She stared at the lawyer for several moments, until he turned to the headmaster.

“We’ll need Emma’s records to transfer to a different school. She won’t be returning here after the break.”

“Yes, of course,” the headmaster stated, and quickly handed the file that sat on his desk over to the lawyer. Emma blinked, and the lawyer handed the folder to her.

“Thank you,” Emma said to the room before she walked out the door, her hand in Luc’s elbow.

“Are you enjoying this,” Luc’s eyebrow raised, and when they were in the limo once again he transformed. She wondered, only for a fraction of a second, if she could do it as well. She had no reason to, though. She would continue to be a teenager, and with her transcript in her hand she could enroll in any school in the city.

In her room after dinner she studied the various schools in the area
.
She
finally chose one, a school for gifted children only a few blocks from the apartment. When he saw it his eyes squinted, but he did not argue.

“If it makes you happy,” he conceded. “
But, I think you will be bored quickly since you will know all the answers.”

And he was right
; knowing everything was really not any fun. Knowing everything meant knowing every wicked thought and every wicked deed people did. Knowing everything meant knowing what the other students thought all the time. If a male student looked at her and thought about having sex with her she knew it. It became almost too much for her to handle. She would have to excuse herself to go to the bathroom just to get it to stop.

Weeks went by and she became bored
with school
. The teachers could not challenge her, and the students bored her
and disturbed her at the same time
. They all wanted to talk about hair and make-up and who was dating whom, and she wanted to talk about the validity of the theory of relativity and the possibility of deep space travel and human teleportation.

The Wait

Emma
left the school a short time later, with a somewhat valid diploma, and set her sigh
ts on college. She enrolled at New York Polytechnic Institute. She CLEPed out of most of her freshman and sophomore classes. She finished her doctorate in less than 5 years, and she had not aged at all. She knew her teachers thought she was a freak, and her ideas were nothing more than daydreams, but they still passed her because they knew she was smarter than them.

She had seen very few angels or demons as she moved through college. But when she saw a demon following one of the students or
professors she avoided them
intentionally. And that hurt her more, because she knew they were the only ones who might actually understand her.

While she was going to school, Luc was going to visit Father Peter. Every day he snuck into his cell, taking the image of a hardened criminal, and every day he taunted him.

“Where is your God now, Father Peter,” he would hiss. “Where is your savior? Is he going to rescue you from me?”

T
he angel never left his side
, but no others were sent to defend him. One angel could not challenge the devil. Perhaps because Michael knew that Lucifer would not hurt Peter, only tempt and torment him.

At first Father Peter answered him back, took the bait, and insisted that his God would intervene. But after several months Peter wore down, depending on his prayers, saying the rosary over and over while Luc was in the cell with him. Luc gave up eventually. It wasn’t any fun for him if he couldn’t get Peter to interact with him.

She was utterly alone. With her newfound intelligence she grew bored with most things quickly. She knew that humanity had no hope for survival other than God; but how could she tell people when they were more open to evil than good? Greed was king, and charity was lost.

She’d even developed ways to synthesize crops so that they would grow in the harshest climates in Africa, but chemical companies would not help her develop it because it would be extremely expensive and they saw no profit in it for themselves.

The one thing she
found solace in was painting. She was stunned when she stumbled upon his studio on the floor beneath his dungeon. Not only by the half finished painting on an easel, but by the fact that he created such beautiful art. She realized that he had painted each and every portrait in his gallery when she saw unfinished canvas of herself in the gorgeous moss green dress and the jewels. Every inch of her seemed covered in diamonds and platinum. She was mesmerized.
But of course he created the paintings. Who else but him would know what Eve looked like, and be able to paint her in such vivid detail.

Somewhere nagging
in
the back of her mind she wondered if she could do it as well. An empty canvas sat on
another easel, and a table beside it held every color of oil paint and an empty palette.
As if he’d placed the items there
for her.

The smell of the paint made her
giddy. It touched a spot inside her
that she never knew was there. She spent all day and all night there, lost inside her own little world. Every color had to be perfect; every stroke of her brush precise.

“It’s breathtaking
.” His words were airy from behind her. She wondered if he would appreciate it or not when she had the image in her mind. But she d
idn’t care if he hated it
, she had to be sure that moment would live somewhere other than her mind.

“It should be,” she smiled as she beheld her creation. “It is the most
wondrous thing
I’ve ever seen.”

His body was behind her, so close she could relax against him. She
hadn’t realized how sore her muscles were until that moment. She had been standing without a break for over a day. He folded her body into his and sat on the floor with her cradled in his arms as they
admired it
.

She’d painted him on the evening of the ceremony. But not the Luc of the black clothes and red eyes, not even Lucifer of the misshapen form. No, it was the
Archangel Samael
that showed himself for only a moment.

His hair was black as the night, but shined with bits of sta
rlight. His eyes were as
silver and clear as a raindrop
.
And his skin was as pale as the moon. Where Michael had all the light of day, Lucifer had all the darkness of night. The
sword at
his side shined
like liquid mercury.
He wore a black sash over his brilliant silver armor.
Even in heaven she felt he must have been a dark, brooding figure.

His wings were unfurled, and his hands reached out toward heaven. His body, as white as snow, was even more perfect than the mortal form he took. The black, macabre setting of the satanic ritual only emphasized the elegance and purity of the figure that stared at her.

“You’ve been carrying that image around in your head since…” He stopped and turned his face toward hers. She cried silent tears from bright red eyes. “I can’t go back to that.”