i
She asks, he gives. And because he's in a generous mood, he informs her of the ten year grace period before Juliet and her ilk come to drag the girl off to hell. Straight off the bat, because he can, because he has fifty-three souls coming due in the next week alone and he feels magnanimous.
"I don't care," she says, and he wonders how many of them would say yes had they even a glimpse of hell's true nature. Fire and brimstone - sure, there's no reason not to keep to the classics, but hell is a whole lot more personal than that. "I want it anyway."
"What is you want, then, love?" he asks, flicking a speck of imaginary dust from his suit. "Fame? Fortune? Enough money to bathe in?"
"No," she says scornfully, rather too dismissive, he feels, for someone who's summoned a crossroads demon. He would regret his earlier generosity, were he capable of regret.
"Then what? Come, come, dear, I haven't got all day." It's night, but he doesn't let a little thing like that stop him. "Some boy break your heart and you want him strung up nice and proper?"
Her whole face changes, and unconsciously she presses a hand to her midsection. "Just give her back to me," she whispers, voice cracking, and then he understands. Then he sees the blood glimmering black and sticky in the single streetlight above, still dripping gently down her thighs, soaking the fabric of her thin skirt.
"Have another," he says brutally, and thrills to the way her face crumples, mouth drawing in and eyes spilling over.
"She's the fourth," the girl replies, a fresh wave of blood spilling down her legs, and she moans, a low, guttural sound of pain. He wonders if he could tear that sound from her throat in other ways. "I can't do this again. I'd rather die. Please."
"Please?" he echoes. "Aren't we polite when we want something." Hope flares in her eyes, and how he'd love to crush it out. But. A deal's a deal, and bringing one dead babe to life is hardly the feat that is usually required of him. Money, sex, power. "Very well, love. A deal's a deal."
"Wait," she says, and he lifts an eyebrow. "I know what demons are like. Take me in ten years, fine. But my baby lives to a ripe old age. Yes?"
He's impressed against his will. He might honour his deals and demand the same of his subordinates, but still. It's nice to see some of humanity have a speck of promise in them. Particularly the ones he's got earmarked for the downstairs. "I'm hurt you would think such a thing," he says, feigning sorrow as he presses a hand to his meatsuit's heart. She just narrows her eyes, and maybe he should have done a little research on her. Maybe.
"If you know what I am, then you must know how to seal the deal," he says, moving closer to her. She eyes him, but not with the usual apprehension he causes in his… business associates. More along the lines of suspicious acceptance, the glint he usually sees in the eyes of hunters. Curiouser and curiouser.
"A kiss," she replies in a matter of fact way. "Let's get it over with, then."
"Get it over with? Again with the hurt," he drawls, but he gets no farther. Firmly, she takes his lapels in her hands and kisses him, lips demanding and tongue seeking his. Usually, he enjoys it more when they're trembling and whimpering and (in the case of the men) suffering as their rampant homophobia wars with their need for whatever they've sold themselves for. But this, this is good, too, in a different way. He threads a hand through her dark hair and pulls, and she retaliates by biting (hard) on his lower lip.
On a whim, he slips a hand between her legs to touch her where she's slick with blood, coating his fingers with her essence, before breaking the kiss. Thoughtfully, he suckles the crimson from his fingertips, waiting for the horror to cross her face, but it never does.
"What now?" she asks, when he's finished, and he shoves his hands deep into his coat pockets.
"Go home. Get into your bed and go to sleep. When you awaken, your child will be alive within you once more." The expression on her face is raw hope at war with suspicion.
"How do I know you'll keep your word?" she demands, and he huffs an outraged breath.
"King of the Crossroads, love. My word is my bond." A crooked smile tilts her lips.
"You call all the girls 'love', King of the Crossroads?"
"And most of the boys," he retorts. "Go home, Elizabeth Ford."
"I never told you my name," she says, hesitating by a patch of yarrow flowers. He scoffs lightly.
"I made a deal with you. Of course I know your name. And in ten years, I'll find you." She merely smiles as drops of water begin to fall from the sky.
"It's raining," she says softly, and he curses. He'd just had this suit dry cleaned.
"How observant of you," he bites back. Thunder crashes in the distance, and the girl stretches out her arms, her smile becoming an all out grin. "What on earth are you doing?" he splutters.
"Rain purifies," she says, spinning in a slow circle, still covered in blood from the waist down. "Run along, King of the Crossroads. See you in ten years."
He doesn't like being dismissed, but he likes the rain even less. Still, he watches her make her slow, steady way home, until she is out of sight.
He just doesn't get humans.
ii
He's unaware of how much time has passed. He's been in hell, only popping upstairs occasionally for the big fish, letting his boys and girls take care of the lower level stuff. Which is why he finds himself surprised when he's called, name and all, to a familiar crossroads somewhere in the south of Australia.
"Hi, King of the Crossroads," drawls a soft voice, and he turns to see the girl. He'd only answered her call that night because all his little devils had been out on deals of their own, and he'd felt like stretching his legs. "I thought you'd look different. Don't demons like to change their meatsuits?"
"I happen to like this one," he retorts. His moderately successful literary agent from New York serves him well. "If it isn't Elizabeth Ford. One deal per customer, love. Your soul is already mine."
"That's not why I called you," she informs him. "I want you to meet my daughter."
He's flummoxed, to the point where he's rendered silent for about thirty seconds. "Your… daughter," he repeats as Elizabeth turns to the pram parked by the side of the crossroad.
"I figured she should meet you, at least once," Elizabeth retorts, unbuckling the child from the stroller. "You're the reason she's alive, after all."
"Because you sold me your soul!" he shouts, and the babe whimpers. Elizabeth fixes him with a dagger glare, and he lowers his voice. Only because the screaming of children tends to give him a migraine. "I'm a demon, not her fairy godmother!"
"Shut up," Elizabeth says comfortably. "Hello, angel," she coos to the child, and he wants to vomit. "This is Uncle Crowley," she says to the child, hoisting it into her arms. "Come say hello."
The child is still too small for speech, but it waves a chubby fist at him anyway. Unbidden, a faint memory of another babe comes to him, and he shoves it away. "Do they all look so… odd?" he wonders aloud, offering the child a finger to hold. Elizabeth chuckles.
"Yeah, they all look like that. How's tricks, King of the Crossroads?"
"Tricksy," he replies. "You're a fool, by the way. Bringing a child to a demon meet? It's almost criminal, taking the soul of someone as stupid as you."
"I asked for you by name," she says, gesturing to the remnants of the summoning spell in the middle of the road.
"And why am I less likely to spit roast the kid than my brethren?" he asks, the babe gurgling in its throat. He hopes it throws up on her, the idiot human.
"The deal, remember?" she says. "You can't harm her. Not without going back on our deal." He winces internally. He was hoping she'd forgotten that. But anyway, he doesn't tend to harm children. That's Lilith's gig, not his. And just because occasionally back in the day they'd knock boots doesn't mean he's keen to gut babies in her memory. And Elizabeth's right, gods curse her. A deal's a deal.
"Very well. How about you, infant? Want to make a deal with Uncle Crowley?" he asks the babe still clinging to his finger. He says it to rile Elizabeth up, to get her angry, but the girl is practically made of steel. She just frowns at him, and even that is half-hearted.
"Bite me," she says, and he just can't resist. Wouldn't be a demon if he could.
"As you wish." But he doesn't, at least at first. Instead he nuzzle into the sweet warmth of her throat, before letting his teeth and lips carve out a bruise into the soft flesh. The tiny noise she makes inflames him, before she shoves him away.
"I'm holding a kid here," she informs him, and he shrugs.
"You asked."
"No, I didn't! You arse."
"Guilty as charged," he says, sweeping a mocking bow as well as he can one-handed. "That's enough of that." He uncurls the small fist of the sleeping child, and Elizabeth adjusts her embrace.
"You're off, then?" she says, cradling her baby. "See you soon, then."
"That's not the way this works," he replies. "You can't just call me every time you feel like a chat."
"Screw you," she answers. "You like it, anyway. The banter."
"Like hell," he snaps, and she shrugs.
"You would know. Being a demon, and all."
"Ooh, clever," he hisses, properly angry, and the streetlight bursts and goes out.
"Drama queen," she says, putting the babe back into the pram.
"Fuck you," he replies, and she grins.
"Maybe, if you're very, very good." She flicks her fingers in a wave, and heads off along the river, to the city in the distance.
"Elizabeth!" he shouts, voice ringing out across the distance, and she turns. "What did you name it? The child."
"Tell you next time!" she yells back, and is gone.
iii
This time, she summons him straight to her living room. He'd been midway through a sentence to one of his lads, one of his slow verbal traps like a noose slowly closing around a throat. The idiot had fucked up a simple deal, letting the sorry excuse for a human walk away with a hell of a lot more than he should have. "Negotiating," he was saying, as the demon cringed in front of him, "Is a whole lot more than -"
And that's how he arrives in a semi-lit, cluttered living room, with his finger jabbing thin air and his mouth open. Not the most dignified of entries, but he'll take it.
"Crowley," greets the woman on the floor. She's a woman now. She's lost that coltish awkwardness she'd had before. "I didn't expect that to work."
She's also considerably sloshed, and has trapped him in a devil's trap. He resigns himself to being here a while, and drops to the floor beside her.
"I should fillet you," he sighs, blowing out the candle she'd used to bring him here. "Slice you up, pull out your goodies and sauté them with a nice sauce."
"Screw you," Elizabeth replies, filling up another glass and handing it to him.
"Garlic, maybe," he contemplates, giving the glass an experimental sniff. "Heavens, girl. This stuff will burn a hole in your guts."
"Before or after your hellhounds drag me kicking and screaming to hell?" she asks wryly, taking a sip and shuddering.
"Probably not before," he acknowledges. "Where's the little tyke?"
"She's with her dad for the weekend," Elizabeth says, and he snaps his fingers impatiently.
"So you're minus the baggage for an evening and your first thought is to bother me?" he says, beginning at normal volume and rising to a bellow towards the end. To her credit, she doesn't flinch.
"Crowley, I don't know anyone else," she replies. "It's kind of hard to get to know people as a single mother / former hunter with six years and change left on the clock."
"So," he drawls, "you have nothing better to do on a Saturday night than kick back and relax with a demon." She grins, but there's no humour in it.
"Something like that," she answers. "What were you doing to top that, then?" He considers it, and acknowledges he's beat.
"Never you mind," he says instead. "Important, scary, hellish, demony things. Things that you could never conceive of, that you would tremble at the thought of - oh, stop laughing. I was building up to a really impressive spiel."
"Shut up," she chuckles. "You were doing the demon equivalent of watching Bridget Jones' Diary and hitting the Cadbury hard, weren't you?"
"Even less impressive," he retorts dryly. "I was working. Lots of inebriated idiots make deals on a Saturday night."
"Sorry to take you away from it," Elizabeth chirps, sarcasm dripping from each word. "Demons don't really get the whole 9 to 5 daily grind shit, huh?"
"Precisely."
"It doesn't sound enjoyable."
"Not particularly."
"So really, you should be thanking me for taking you away from it." He just glares at her in response, and she's laughing again. "You, speechless? Perish the thought."
"I'm going to enjoy killing you, Elizabeth Ford," he intones darkly.
"Yeah, right."
Three glasses later:
"Why the devil's trap, anyway?" he asks.
"In case I got one of your minions instead, moron."
"As you once said to me, you pathetic excuse for a human, bite me."
"Fine," Elizabeth says, as though he's thrown a gauntlet, and rolls onto his lap. And suddenly he's got himself an armful of inebriated, foolish human, her lips at his throat, biting at his pulse point. And don't get him wrong, he likes sex as much as the next perverted, deviant soul, but he prefers having the upper hand. Fucking a confused, homophobic businessman until the man moans for more, or sex with another demon so intense they shred one another's meatsuits to pieces. This, however, smacks of equality, of surrender, from the weight of her on his lap to the teeth at his throat and the traitorous hardening of his cock.
Well, his meatsuit's cock. But his too.
"Stupid human," he growls, gripping her hard by her hair and lifting her from his neck. "That's not the way I do things." He shoves her flat to the floor and pulls her under him, swallowing her protest with his mouth. He kisses her violently, cruelly, and more than once his nose smashes into hers, and he expects it to end quickly, for her to shove him away. Maybe he'll rape her just for fun. He'll be damned (well, more than he already is) if he'll fuck her sweet and slow like some human arse. She wanted a demon. She'll damn well get a demon.
And yet she takes his harshness and gives it back to him, like a shock absorber made flesh, ricocheting his own violence back against him. When he parts her legs and forces his tongue brutally against her flesh, she only arches into his hold, her hands anchored in his hair and threatening to give him bald spots. She begs and curses and says his name, and for a moment he wants to raise his head and tell her to call him another. But the urge passes as though it never was, when she's quivering in his grasp and his face is wet with her.
"Don't stop," Elizabeth whines. "Fuck you, you demonic bastard, don't you dare stop, I'm so fucking close -" He crushes his mouth to hers, forcing her to taste herself on his tongue, until the realisation of her fingers opening his trousers distracts him.
"You do that when I say you do," he groans against her lips, pulling both hands above her head and holding them there easily.
"Fuck you and your demon strength," she gasps, arching against him, seeking his touch. He tweaks her nipples in punishment, which of course goes awry because she fucking enjoys it.
Humans, mate. Humans.
She's laughing, which is not on the agenda, staring up at the ceiling and laughing her idiot arse off. "What?" he rasps, relishing the mewling noise that tears from her throat. He's rubbing his stubble against her breasts, harsher and harsher, and she just shakes underneath him, both need and merriment creating tremors in her frame.
"I'm fucking a demon in a devil's trap," she chuckles as he kicks off his trousers. "If my daddy could see me now."
"So what if he could?" he asks. "Your father watching you fuck a demon like a filthy whore." Purposefully, he turns his eyes red, even though generally he tries to avoid doing it, and then returns them to normal. "Because hat's what you are," he continues conversationally. "A whore who couldn't even stick to her own kind. So desperate for it that you'll fuck anything, isn't that right?"
"Go to hell," she replies, but she's still moving under him, still twitching in his grasp as he aligns himself against her cunt, brushing against her.
"Been there, done that," he reminds her. "Don't be shy about it, darling, it's not a criticism. Why, just the sight of this delicious wet cunt of yours - it's enough to inspire me to poetry. Shall I compare thee to a summer's - holy fuck, Jesus."
She's bucked her hips against him, taking the length of his cock fully inside her, and the shock is enough to render him speechless. He lets her hands fall from his grasp, lets his head fall to her breast, rutting against her with the instinctive movements that even hell can't erase. "Ah, you bitch," he groans as she flips them over; she might not be a hunter anymore but she's still got the muscles of one.
"Yes, I'm a bitch," she counters, riding him like a pro. "A dirty, filthy, slutty bitch, isn't that what you like?"
"Something like that."
"Shut up, I'm about to come," she growls, and the demonic thing to do would be to not care, but he's always been vain when it comes to sex. Takes it as a personal insult, in fact, if the other party (or parties) don't get off. He likes the power of it, the sheer undoing.
"Go on, then," he encourages, finding her clit with his fingers. "Good girl."
"Fuck, oh God - come here," she snaps, leaning down to take his mouth savagely with her own, and comes with her eyes wide open, boring into his own.
He's almost there himself when she starts to move again, slamming her hips down onto his own. Her smile is bloody where he'd bitten through her lip, her tits bouncing, a warrior woman astride him. Of course. It could only have ever been like this.
"Come on, King of the Crossroads," she hisses, and fuck, that's an indecent turn-on, the sound of his title as he's a hairs breadth from coming. The noise he makes must indicate his approval of this, and she grins, wild and free, hair streaming down. "King of the Crossroads?" Elizabeth asks sweetly, her tone at odds with her savage eyes. "King of the Crossroads. King of the Crossroads. Crowley." Her eyes are deep and dark, an inch from his own, as merciless as any demon's.
"You talk too much," he rasps, and falls over the edge into light, and then darkness.
Much later, he wakes up. "I slept," he says in bafflement. From where she's curled against him, Elizabeth nods.
"All men do that after sex," she drawls. "Even demons. Don't be too freaked out." He taps her hard on the head.
"Is this the part where we have some deep and meaningful chat about how fucking one another's brains out has exposes deeper, truer feelings beneath? Because I am a demon, you know."
"I'm aware," she retorts. "You've stamped your claim on my soul." Which actually sounds kind of hot, now he thinks of it. "This isn't some kind of 'please don't drag me to hell' fuck. It's more of…"
"Just a fuck?" he offers, and she swats him lightly.
"Bingo."
"Most hunters hate my kind," he says, staring up at the devil's trap etched into the ceiling. "You don't."
"I used to," she replies softly, her words a hum into his chest. "But you gave me Sophie."
"For your soul," he reminds her. It irks him, the way she always phrases it. Like it was a gift. Like it was something good.
"Regardless, it was a kindness," Elizabeth murmurs. "I'll go to hell, I'll suffer there. And I'll be glad of it. I'll know she's in the world, safe and happy. That's enough for me."
Once, he would have told her of what she would become. That she would forget her daughter, forget every minute and moment of humanity. Forget lying here with him on the floor of her lounge room, her head pillowed on his chest, as though listening to his heart like it's something bright and beautiful.
Once.