AUTHOR'S NOTE: yeeah… I did hold off on posting this chapter a bit.. Tried to get some new people to come through! Hehe I think it worked… but apparently the link to Maxwell's picture STILL did not. So I've done the extreme. He's now my "Homepage" under my profile, for those curious…

SHOUTOUTS:
Wiseupjanetweiss - -waves to loyal reviewer- sorry this update took so long… I held off a bit. Not to mention I was on vacation. Hehe but here it is! As always, danke schon!
Katatonia - hallo my newcomer! Lol nice to see there's more people reading this than I think! So this is your dedicated chapter, darling… haha THANKS MUCH!

Chapter Nine

He was absolutely inconsolable. An artist creates beautiful things and puts nothing of himself into them, but Maxwell had put everything into Brian. Bri had cracked under the pressure and thrown it all back in the his face, and Maxwell was bitterly wounded by it. I had made the assumption that, as a demon, he would have attachments to nothing but himself. If anything. But I was proven wrong. I could not have out-mourned him if I tried.

He cried frequently but silently, not always tears, sometimes blood too. Once I swear it was glitter. Glitter tears for the god of glam. He didn't move, didn't eat, didn't drink, but it wasn't until after I saw his glossy black eyes go dull and his blue hair was matted and he had grown thin that I intervened again. I didn't want anything to do with him, not after his last round of attacks on me, but I refused to let him die.

-You said you would kill me. Why don't you? I want to die…- he told me once.

"Brian told me not to," I answered. "You don't deserve it anyway. You would die some triumphant creature in mourning, and I would be the lover who killed you out of spite. Now swallow."

Swallow because I had been spoon-feeding him. It was the only way to get him to eat. Don't make the mistake of thinking this was some delicate, refined act of generosity. This was me straddling the Demon so he couldn't squirm away, sometimes holding his head because I had to practically force the soup or whatever I had into his mouth. I think I said earlier how I was keeping him alive out of spite. It gave me some sort of twisted pleasure knowing he would have to spend another few hours in his tortured existence. At this point, I was at the stage where I was going for any sort of pleasure I cold get.

He became something of a hated pet, like Mandy's dumb parrot that was for some reason still in our flat. While he was still too lethargic to fight me, I carried him out of the stairwell to the living room couch. I would brush through his hair and the feather of his tail, making sure it was clean and glossy, not tangled. I found a nail file and filed down his claws, testing them against my own skin to make sure they were blunt enough that he could no longer cut me even if he did scratch. And I kept "force-feeding" him.

The Demon was either not used to or didn't like being handled. He would tense up, then get even stiffer as my hands moved over his hair or muscles. So it was pretty rewarding that I could annoy him with the slightest bit of effort. I got another collar, a third one, no garnet this time; it was just to piss him off, because once I'd put one on, he could never get it off, no matter how much he fought with it.

He got pretty hostile sometimes, and I would have to go out those days. It was practically the only reason I got out back then, after Brian died. Other times he didn't seem to care if I was around. I'd sit on the other couch and watch TV and shoot up and drink. He would watch sometimes, but he was like Brian. Didn't much like TV. Once I turned on music videos, though; he watched that. Once I got drunk enough to fall asleep on the same couch as him. I woke up in the morning with a fuckin' killer hangover and my hands tangled through his hair and on his shoulder and him yelling at me that I was disgusting and pathetic and filthy and worthless. But I was alive.

He made it clear he was not on friendly terms with me. Most of his time he spent sleeping, but when he was awake, he seemed to look for ways to piss me off. Other than the occasional bite, he would also ignore me, curse at me, whatever struck his fancy. And he wouldn't be in the same room with me, unless it was the living room. If I left there, he never followed. Actually, he never got off the damn couch.

Not that this bothered me much. At least I always knew where he was.