Prologue
She
was being followed.
The tears on her pale cheeks had long ago
dried; she was too consumed by her fear to feel miserable. Her
parents loved to paint pictures of the forgotten downtown alleyways,
but she had always chalked it up to them not liking the lower
classes. They were predictable like that - if they had seen what she
was wearing now, they would have thrown a fit. But she hadn’t cared
then. She was going to run away, and they would no longer be dictating
her life.
And yet this wasn’t the picture perfect escape she
had imagined for weeks upon weeks. She had been followed for the past
twenty minutes. She took random turns and entered random streets, but
he was almost always there when she turned around. Something about
him didn’t feel right,
but she couldn’t put her finger on what. Maybe it was how he had
bandages on his fingers, or maybe it was how none of his clothes fit
quite right. Maybe it was the way he concealed his face underneath a
hood. Or maybe it was something else, some inkling of something else
that she couldn’t quite comprehend.
Whatever it was, she just
had to lose him.
She turned the corner-
-and realized she had
come to a dead end.
She spun around, heart pounding in her chest
as she stared at the figure at the end of the alleyway.
“You’re
Quinn Holt,” he said. There was a strange static to his voice,
almost like he was trying to talk over a bad telephone connection or
on a radio that was about to give out. He took a step forward, only
to pause when she took a step back.
“And?” she asked. Her
hands were balled into fists at her side, but she doubted she could
swing them. All she could do was dig her fingernails into the palms
of her hands.
“I want to make a deal with you,” he said.
She
stared.
The man let out a sigh — he was frustrated, but she
didn’t know why. Was it because she hadn’t given a response?
Answering would solve that, but she didn’t want to agree to
something like this when she didn’t even know what the deal would
involve.
“I need someone skilled with robotics,” he said.
“You’ve won countless competitions. I’ve seen the story on the
news. I wouldn’t ask for a deal unless I was certain you could
uphold your part of the contract.”
“...Who are you?” Quinn
finally asked.
He shook his head. “I can’t tell you unless
you agree.”
She took a deep breath. She could do robotics, and
it seemed like it was an easy way to get out of this situation. She
just had to find out what she would get, and what the “deal”
entailed. “So what will I get out of it?”
“I can’t do
much right now,” he admitted, “but I can fulfill almost any dream
of yours. Money, fame, power - I can give it to you, though I draw
the line at anything involving murder, kidnapping, or torture.”
“Anything I want?”
He
nodded.
An idea - a preposterous one - suddenly came to her, but
she had to see if it was true.
“Are you the Devil?” she said.
“Are you...Are you trying to get me to sell my soul?”
He let
out a little laugh - it didn’t last long, but something about it
sounded wrong. Yet
the noise strangely made her happy, too; something told her he didn’t
laugh all that much. “I don’t deal in souls, Ms. Holt, and I’m
not Satan. I just have friends in very high places. All I need you to
do is to fix a robot. If you do that, I’ll do anything outside of
my restrictions.”
She took another deep breath.
She
already knew her answer.
“I’ll do it,” she agreed. “Help
me leave my family. Please.
I-I can’t stay there anymore. If they could never find me, I’d be
happier than I’ve ever been.”
The air suddenly felt heavy
with a strange warmth, and, for just a second, she thought she could
see a line connecting her heart to the man’s. But that was stupid,
wasn’t it?
“The deal’s been made,” he said. “I’m
bound to my word, just as you’re bound to yours.”
He pushed
back his hood.
Quinn’s breath caught in her throat.
He
could have passed for a human, if it wasn’t for the metal showing
through artificial skin and the iris of his left eye flickering from
blue to dark brown in quick succession as it jerked from one part of
his eye to the other.
“You’re the robot,” she managed to
get out.
He nodded.
“My name’s Azazel,” he said. She
recognized the name - she had heard it before on a TV show when
flipping through the channels, though she couldn’t remember which
one. “I would have told you before, but I doubted you would believe
me until we made the deal. I’m...restricted. I can’t show you my
full range of abilities, but I’m a demon. Not Satan, though you’re
not the first to confuse the two of us.”
She gulped. “I-I
made a deal with a demon?”
“You’re not damned,” he
reassured her. “It’s a common misconception. It just means that
our souls are bound until we each fulfill our end of the bargain, or
until one of us dies. It’s little more than a feeling - it wouldn’t
harm your chances of getting into whatever afterlife you desire.”
She
glanced at the mouth of the alleyway. Was it too late to back out of
this? “But I thought demons were supposed to take souls,” she
pointed out. “Aren't you going to bring me down to hell after our
deal is done?”
Azazel
shook his head.
“Demons
simply make contracts,” he said. “Some deal with souls, but doing
that would require connections to reapers that I don't have – and
wouldn't use, if I had them.”
She
took an unsteady breath.
“...So
now what?” she quietly asked.
He
gave her what could have almost been a smile and held out his hand.
“I
help you leave your family,” he said.
After
a moment of hesitation, she grabbed his outstretched hand.
Despite knowing that his hand was metal underneath fake skin, she
found that it was surprisingly warm.
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