D E L I L A H

   She pressed her chest ever so slightly forward, cleavage blossoming from the plunging neckline of her dress. Liquid -- molten -- it was. She was blistering hot, and worth every penny he’d spent on her. A few drinks in, and he was comfortable. Looking the other way, rather than carefully fingering the key-card in his pocket. The unique, individual chip that bypassed the biometric security system. The first hurdle, but certainly not the last, standing between them and thirty-five million in solid, glimmering gold. 

   The voice sounded in her earpiece. Delilah turned into the boisterous noise of the nightclub, whispering in a husky hush. “Almost.” 

   A laugh, and she had her palm pressed upon his shoulder. A simple roam, and she’d have it— but another hand stopped her short. Two fingers, clapped delicately on her collarbone. Attached to an amiable face, hair clipped short. The mark was far too aware now. His grip was back on his card, hand severed by the fabric edge of his pocket. 

   “Miss? A call for you. Down the hall and to the left.” 

   Delilah withdrew with a decadent cheek-kiss, her ruby-red impressed upon his flesh. Several clicks of her heels, and the figure came into view. A familiar expression greeted her, just as it had so many times before. Not a call at all. Her voice was laced with impatience, flashing like a knife in the dimness.   

    “In case you hadn’t guessed, you’re interrupting.” Hand poised upon her hip, she stared icily forward. “Though I take it that was your intent.” 

    The manor had fallen into stillness. In the basement, no stubborn sand-bag swayed on its chains, collided into motion by a forceful, demon-wielded punch. In the halls, not a single footstep echoed; no soul scurried, no watchful eyes peered. In the library, no page-turn sounded, soft as an intimate, erotic utterance. The very world seemed held in suspension, awaiting the beginning, the moment, the night’s event: The humans were to come. The angels would be released from their cells. It was to be an extravagant, devastating affair. Somewhere, young Holly worked her flaxen tresses into a smooth chignon, or perhaps virginal braids, or maybe merely smoothed them to a sheen. Somewhere, Samson reluctantly pressed his sinewed arms into the sleeves of a tuxedo ( maybe thinking of her, maybe not ). Somewhere, Lilith adorned herself modestly, knowing she needed nothing more than her most basic and carnal form in order to attract, entice, capture. 

    In Delilah’s quarters, though, there was only she and one another. Two seductresses of a different kind. Two artists of vastly different medium. Two women pigmented in varying shades of the same hue. Poised at her vanity, Delilah carefully swiped her smile into reality, painting it into existence with a slash of her wrist. Rowan – the crimson horse, the dame who chose to kill rather than be killed for, War herself – danced just across from her, moving at once with brutal precision and playful abandon. A thing at once liquid, and flinty like a blade’s edge. Her words jolted Delilah from her reverie; tore her forcefully from waking daydreams, idle fantastical thoughts. They dripped like honey, viscous and richly sweet.

    And all she said, with voice nothing more than a murmur: 

    “Could you?” 

    Delilah could not help but be entranced. Contained in her was all the power she’d longed for since she was a girl; all the gall and ferocity she’d lacked. All the graceful, feminine dynamism. She was woman in its purest, most unforgivingly true form. It was shocking to look at. It was frightening. It often caused Delilah’s breath to hitch in her throat, struggling to climb its way up the cavern and enter her lungs, as if she drew the very oxygen from the air with her mere presence. Everything had a way of angling toward her, as if emanating from the fire of her tresses. Like the Earth spun around her axis.  

    And so when she turned to Delilah, a smile lilting her stained lips, an innocent inquiry on them ( oh, but nothing sounded innocent from her mouth ), the woman in red could only comply. Lift herself from her settee. Fix her grip upon the silver zipper. Straighten the metal-toothed pathway. Pull. 

    The demon’s wings exploded from her exposed back in an inky conflagration, like plumes of smoke trembling under Delilah’s strokes. Her hands trailed the material of the fabric, roaming under the guise of smoothing. There was scarcely a roll or rumple to be found, and yet her fingers touches with hunger, light as a feather upon the opposite woman. Delilah had a ghostly way about her, and her touch was, thus, utterly ghoulish. Breath whispering over brutally colored silk. And then the tickling, warm flitter of flesh on flesh as she surreptitiously brushed Rowan’s bare shoulder. 

    As slowly as it had begun, its conclusion was abrupt – she stepped away with a single press of her heel, leaning back to appraise. 

   She was gunpowder and a knife’s lash. She was the acidic stench of blood mingling with the aroma of dewy belladonnas. She was everything, all at once, in full, dazzling color.

LEAVE A “OFFER ME” IN MY ASK, AND I’LL WRITE A DRABBLE ABOUT MY CHARACTER GIVING YOURS A GIFT.

Venice, Italy. The late 1500s. She could remember it all, as she could remember everything. The perils of a memory that relied heavily on the visual; that snapshotted moments and kept them indelibly impressed upon the mind, until they began to weigh. Until her back ached from carrying all of it. Nothing was lost. She could remember the buildings, stretching high in their charm and imperfection. She’d fancied it, and had almost cared for it enough to want to stay. Ultimately, the man was the least of what she remembered. A man she’d destroyed. Rather, it was how he had treasured his copy of a particular book that she could not forget. She had meant to steal it from him – she wanted that particular token, that memory – but had been run out of the city before she could. His men looking for her, spewing accusations she’d heard too many times. Seductress. Witch. Whore. Of all the words, she’d encountered those three most frequently. Mankind did have quite a limited vocabulary. 

It had nearly fallen into her possession; an edition similar to the one the man’d had, sitting upon his luxe mantle, comparatively primitive and simple. Set in black and white, some pages stamped askew. The man who’d made it had been the first, even before the more widely circulated copy – Delilah knew things of movable type, of bookmaking, of the artistry of it. The first edition translated into Italian. A name not many individuals knew, though in Italy he surely loomed large: Nicolò Malerbi. She could not say why she wanted it, other than the ease with which she could get it. The man’s own name had departed her long ago, and yet she remembered that book. The reverence with which he regarded it. The way he had run the pads of his fingers over the edges, as if any sort of certain grip would damage it beyond repair. Corrupt its nature. He’d never let her touch it. Once, she believed it would have scalded; but there she stood, holding it within her grasp. Poised in front of Abel’s cell, her heart inexplicably quick-paced. It was all hers. A joke she would have laughed at, had Rowan or Salome ever glimpsed it. A thing she could not have explained, if Gale were to have found it. The pages were hers. The print on the back, signifying its authenticity. The detailing along the cover, impossibly dark ink wound into filigree, making the whole thing appear wrapped in otherworldly vines. 

Within, words that he could understand – a language she had once wrapped about her tongue, fixed into the muscling of her jaw, whispered in moments of ecstasy and clipped in the turn of deceit. It was not her language to own, and so the book had always felt far from her. Its words all but nonsensical, even though they read perfectly in the cavernous darkness of her mind. It was nothing as simple as the divide between Italian and English and French that separated her from its allure; the language of the Lord, as saccharine and useless as Delilah dismissed it as being, was simply incomprehensible to her. It meant nothing, even though the words married in phrases and birthed sentences lovely in syntax. She could never grasp its larger purpose – get lost in its fantastical appeal. 

She might not be able to, but he could. 

“I acquired this years ago,” she said simply, eyes downcast. Voice entirely composed, lax. As if gifting something to a prisoner so casually was in the realm of acceptable behavior. “Right after the war, in fact. Funny how instability allows for opportunistic hands to take what they want.” 

Delilah ran her palm lightly over the set of the cover, the embossing of the binding. It was a luxuriating, longing touch; a parting travel of her hand along the raw edge of the vellum, a single glance at the print on the title page. 

It was not a Gutenberg, but it was beautiful. 

Leave a “Amuse Me” in my ask, and I will write a funny drabble about my character trying to cheer your up.

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  Delilah had few homes in this world, though many places where she’d made her bed. Her quarters were spare, undecorated, impersonal. Nothing save for the furnishings provided by Lucifer, decadent as they were. One could scarcely distinguish her room from any other guest’s quarters. It was as if a ghoul lived there, ephemeral, barely present. 

  Her presence was instead impressed upon the expansive archive of books. Fingerprints smudged upon their ancient edges, scraps of paper with scrawled notes inserted in their folds, the occasional strand of hair trapped in new adhesive. 

  The library contained her very heart; in the worn spines was the rhythm of its beating, in the vellum and parchment the rushing of her blood. Literature was the most convenient means of escaping reality -- years ago, when she was a girl, it had been the only way for her to leave her own story and inhabit another, to slip into the skin of a character unlike herself. She was fifteen when she decided she was to be the author of her own story; when she discovered that one life was not enough for her. She was sixteen when she met him, and sixteen, still, when she unleashed him upon her father. 

  The conclusion to a story, but not her own. Diane’s was finished, but Delilah’s was only beginning. Delilah was a woman in motion, a woman hungry for new worlds and foreign experiences. Inhaling the perfume of the luxe mahogany room, she paced slowly, trance-like. A lover of new worlds, but still holding nostalgia for the old. All of her loathed the idea of artificial lighting; despised the harshness of the white-glow, disliked how it flattened one’s features into two dimensions. Poised in her hand, instead, was a single erect candle, and all about her she had lit others, cautiously encased in glass.  

  She was holding Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre -- the name Currer Bell penned in place of the woman’s own -- when the door creaked open behind her; a rich, luxurious sound that resounded in the vast quarters. A short glance behind her yielded the information she needed. 

  “’I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will’,” she said richly, eyes once again tracing the inked pages. Her voice swelled with the quotation, tone mocking and droll. A clip and she slammed the book shut. “How oxymoronic.” Delilah paused for a moment after she had finished, exhaling sharply. And then, formally: “Alastair.” 

JOSEPHINE: 

It took Gale only a moment—the span of a single breath—to recognize the presence of the haphazard collection of shadows and sunrays at his side. He knew it was her before his eyes fixed on the familiar lines of her face ( it was one of the few faces around here that frequented his dreams more often than his nightmares ) and before the quiet, barely audible lull of her voice reached his ears. He felt Delilah. He felt Delilah in the way only two souls made of the same stuff could feel each other; in the way the ends of magnets stirred with vibration in response to the nearness of their counterpart. 

With her face still turned in the direction of the landscape of blood and tears, Gale couldn’t quite get a read on her—but that didn’t matter much, did it? Gale didn’t need interpretations of body language or expressions or facial tics to decode the messy web that was Delilah’s mind ( and even if he did, he knew she would afford him no expressive tells of revelation, for her eyes and nose and lips and chin and cheeks were carved of stone so impenetrable that not even Michelangelo himself would’ve been able to chisel the mask away to reveal the beauty beneath ). No, no—Gale needed no help in unknotting Delilah’s tangled thoughts, for he’d been unknotting similar thoughts in his own head for nearly a century now. Delilah, of course, having far more experience in the art of coding oneself, of making oneself unsolvable and unreadable, wore masks far better than Gale did, and while he suspected that more than one bystander could discern his discomfort, he couldn’t imagine that anyone but himself would be able to accuse Delilah of the same. 

When she did turn to him, he found himself pinned in place, rendered incapable of both speech and action. There was a moment—a quick, fleeting moment, one that would have been imperceptible to someone unused to watching her—in which that mask of stone cracked, revealing truth and torment—torment that was so great it eclipsed his own. He didn’t know if this crack was intentional or not, but he felt inexplicably blessed to have been gifted with the sparse treasure of an unmasked Delilah. Gale wished he could thank her for this small gift, wished he could do something to smother the flames of anguish that scorched her eyes—but he didn’t know how to do that. He was a giver of pain, yes; a keeper of pain, sure; but a taker of pain? Not in this lifetime. Sometimes, as her eyes seemed to tell him, there were simply no words. Action, Gale supposed as he straightened to his full height and moved to Delilah’s side, was a fair substitute for words. He unfolded wings of onyx that had burdened his back since the day he’d joined the ranks of the damned and spread them outward, effectively drawing a curtain between the two demons and the carnage at the whipping post. It was a strange thing to do, really, and Gale wasn’t entirely sure why he did it. He knew Delilah had more than once wrought the kind of destruction that made Abel’s lashings look like a firm pat on the back, and the thought of blinding this legendary creature of ruin to spare her from the spectacle of a brief whipping was, in theory, rather ridiculous. But he did it anyway. Maybe he did it for himself, so that he would no longer have to watch; maybe he did it so that he and Delilah could speak privately; maybe he did it because Delilah, with her reputation as a legendary creature of ruin, could not. 

He wondered at her inner turmoil—wondered why, exactly, this tormented her so. Gale’s softness was easy enough to figure out ( Petra, humanity, moral conflict—the end ); but Delilah’s soft edges ( if you could even call them that ) were much more difficult a puzzle to solve. It was obvious ( to Gale, at least ) that Abel’s punishment had roused something—something almost human—in Delilah—but why? Was it because she favored Abel as Gale did? Was it because the lashings reminded her of some similar torture she’d once suffered as Gale was reminded of his own whippings at the hands of the Americans? Was it a matter of morality? Perhaps it was none of those things. Perhaps it was something else… “It could’ve just as easily been him tied to that post instead of Abel, you know,” he mused idly, eyes focused on the fence beyond the yard. Him. Samson. Gale didn’t bother clarifying, for Delilah would know full well exactly who the him was. “What would you have done then, Delilah?” he asked, his gaze finally returning to a sea of unreadable icy blue. It was a bold question—maybe even a stupid one. But his words were not poisoned by malice or manipulation; they were weighed down only by sincerity and curiosity. Delilah was the only other demon who appeared infected ( at least to some degree ) by the plague of humanity, and so rarely did Gale get to speak with someone who understood this terrible plague that he often found himself invasively picking Delilah’s brain, hungry for more revelation and more truth ( if only in hopes that she would reveal a truth that would make him feel less alone in his humanity—less isolated ). 

Delilah started as darkness shrouded them in its protective hold, the scene before them eclipsed entirely. There had been a moment -- fleeting, infinitesimal enough that one lesser than she could have dismissed it as illusion  -- where she was sure she felt something like tenderness transpire between them. It was hanging in the air, as dense as smog. A curious feeling, and one made tangible as he drew his wings around the both of them. A shield.  She could have smiled at that, if not for the thoughts that devoured her from within. Suddenly, with the dangerous precision acquired only by one who knew someone’s soul, Gale made manifest those exact thoughts. 

( What would you have done then? )

A question that, from anyone else, would have been met with only venom. A blade-sharp tongue, a cutting wit. They would have endured only that, her lethal weapon disguised. A knife behind her back. Delilah’s destruction would be forthcoming; it would take days, perhaps even weeks, for the reality of her work to impact them. Then, they would have been surreptitiously and deftly disemboweled, whether in actuality or in the metaphoric sense ( Delilah certainly knew enough individuals eager for such a job ). But it was him, perhaps the only other demon who understood her plight, and echoed it. One whose strength and honesty she respected, and so she deemed worthy of her own. Her gaze fixed upon Gale with unforgiving focus, stare unwavering. She needn’t dodge his eyes, compose herself in sideways glances in order to maintain her careful facade. They were shielded, and so momentarily it fell from her face, revealing only the wide, translucent blue of her eyes. The same eyes that had seduced so many somehow appeared like that of a babe -- unknowing, but curious. In their crystalline waters was all her weariness laid bare.  She need not ask Gale what he would do if someone he cared for was mounted upon it: she knew his loss. And, as for Rowan -- she was positioned to yield the whip rather than receive its lashes. 

“Why should he be any different?” she intoned, voice almost lost in the rustle of wind. It was a question in earnest, an agonized plea for some sort of explanation. Tone riddled with vulnerability, a pureness that was not Delilah’s custom. Almost fawn-like naïveté; a child begging for true clarification of a concept they could not grasp. He shouldn’t, this she knew -- and yet he was. What would Delilah have done? 

She had once possessed the ability to halt his death, and yet had done nothing. In fact had led him directly to the slaughter. Her feigned indifference ( that she maintained was real ) had been his undoing. If he were on the post, would she attempt to atone for such a thing, to set it right? Unlikely. The truth of who she was had taken years for her to grasp. Accepting one’s own cowardice, and then beginning the much simpler process of fabricating cowardice into strength, was quite a lengthy task. And so she told him, voice plain, unguarded: 

“I would have stood here with you, as I’m doing now. In action, it would be no different.” And within? That insuppressible part of her would be shrieking; the Delilah whom he had loved, the Delilah who had even loved him. The fictitious character Delilah carried with her, back threatening to give beneath the weight, each day of her endless existence.

GALE:

SAMSON:

CAIN: