Maze didn't have friends.
She had a friend (period) in Linda, but the very short list seemed to end there. She had Lucifer, she guessed, but somewhere between their excruciatingly long journey from torturers to fuckbuddies to club runners to whatever the hell their dysfunctional, semi-dependent relationship was called, he started to feel like family more than anything else.
(Though she'd sooner take a carving knife to the esophagus than say that to him out loud. They didn't do "feelings" — blech — in the Morningstar household, regardless of whether or not she still lived there. He didn't ask about her emotional bullshit, and she didn't ask about his, and when the day was done, the lowlives of L.A. punished, and his daddy issue of the week done and dealt with by someone else, they just clinked their whiskey glasses over his stupid grand piano and started again tomorrow.)
Amenadiel was immediately out of the question because reasons. If besties were like sisters (at least, according to Trixie's in-depth explanation of elementary school social dynamics), then Amenadiel was like the brother-in-law she used to screw but was only barely tolerating now because they both loved Linda, and at least one of them had to play nice.
(She didn't know why it had to be the demon, but whatever. She was a 21st century bad bitch. Far be it from her to wait for the man to do all the hard work.)
Decker was pretty close to making the cut, but that still depended on the outcome of next month's roommate meeting. If she finally took the dishwashing out of Maze's chore list, then fine. They could be gal pals. They could have matching t-shirts and roll around in pink glitter, for all she cared. As long as she stopped nagging at her to soak the damn cereal bowls after breakfast.
("Maze, I told you this like a thousand times already. Vodka and toasted sugar frosties leave stains-"
"For the love of everything unholy, Decker, just shut up.")
Dan was a wussy little asshat. She said that to his face once, and he didn't even flinch. But she respected asshats who were at least honest about their past asshattery, so maybe there was hope for him yet.
Besides, he was pretty baller with the whole Russian mob thing. Mikhail (big guy from Kazan; she met him after beating his brother senseless with a sock full of soap) tried to shake his hand after making their Perry Smith deal, and Dan almost pissed his pants. Maze would be lying if she said it wasn't the single most gratifying experience of her entire life.
All in all, if she ever wanted to have a fun night out and talk about awesome stuff like torture and knives and really hot sex, she'd either have to wait for Linda to have a client-free weekend so they could get totally shitfaced on a Friday, or she'd cave in and call up Lucifer, only for their evening to end with him wondering how he managed to screw things up with the detective for the 50th time, and her wishing she could just throw him off a building one of these days and be done with it.
(Who the fuck told God to give his kids those stupid fall-preventing wings anyway? She didn't want any trouble. She just wanted to talk. Preferably at an abandoned Denny's parking lot at 3 a.m.)
At that point, she was just biding her time till Trixie became the President of Mars. Who knew? Maybe by then, she'd have more than one person to drag over to the nearest extraterrestrial watering hole. She could even hit it up with some aliens, provided they looked as hot as those green-skinned chicks from the space show Ellen can't shut up about.
(What was that nerd fest called again? Star Tech?)
She mulled it over, listening to her sharp-heeled boots crunch on the wet grass of the Scottish countryside.
"I'm just saying, if you had listened to me and we took a left at the last creek, we wouldn't be going around in these infernal bloody circles—"
"Spellman, so help me, I have two swords, and I can carry on with my day perfectly well even with one of them lodged between your ribs."
Maze snorted as she listened to the two witches arguing behind her. (They wanted her to walk ahead of them which was, okay, fair. Turning your back to a demon was probably witchy no-no number one. If anything, at least they weren't idiots.)
She heard the whoosh of a blade being unsheathed, the frantic rush of a disarming spell spilling out of the warlock's mouth. Bit back a laugh.
Now that she thought about it, maybe that friend list of hers wasn't gonna stay so painstakingly short, after all.
It had been three days since Maze, Prudence, and Ambrose started roaming Western Europe like a bunch of backpackers on steroids. The demon's sense for Blackwood's magical trail led her to the general vicinity of Scotland before drawing up a blank, and the same went for the Creole voodoo ritual that took the Greendale witches to the outer fringes of the countryside and not a step more.
It likely meant the guy was using a different kind of magic now. Something older and rarer and smarter that Maze never had to deal with before.
(And she'd dealt with almost everything back at the Pit. From overly-ambitious Satanists to Ouija-board-toting hipsters who thought they were slick enough to bend the laws of nature and actually get away with it. Of course, none of them ever did. Not if she had anything to say about it.)
The fact that this Blackwood bastard was one-upping her over something she didn't know only made her want to skin him alive with a nail clipper even more.
"Which one of you suckers has the map this time?" She threw over her shoulder, not even bothering to look back as she kept marching into the growing darkness.
All manner of flies and field insects were buzzing around them, but none of the flying fuckers dared land on her. It probably had something to do with how she stabbed Beelzebub between the ribs for April Fool's that one time.
"I'm a witch," Prudence sniffed, all too smug for someone who's been discreetly putting healing magic on her foot blisters for the past hour and a half. "I have sun and stars and magic. I don't need maps."
"Yeah? And how's that working out for you?"
The witch shot her a glare. Maze sent a mocking smile back.
"You know what, funny story," Ambrose cut in with a strained laugh, sensing tension in the air and trying to move past it with whatever breezy English charm he thought he had. (News Flash: he had none. Lucifer could walk circles around him with his pompous Prada shoes.) "But I remember back in my day — before I took off for university — the navigation courses at the Academy were absolute shite. I mean, this one teacher we had, Brother Stine, gave all his lectures with a glass of bourbon in hand. He even passed out on us once or twice. You ever taken one of his classes, Pru?"
Prudence gave him a flat look. "Call me that idiotic name one more time, Spellman, and I swear to Hecate you'll never touch me again."
"I was just asking—"
"Never," She repeated, staring him dead in the eye. "Again."
The warlock gave up trying to make conversation after that.
The first time she'd met them — when the two (hundred-year-old) kids tried attacking her like a pair of amateurs and she beat their asses like nobody's business — she wrestled the role of lead navigator away from them just like she'd had to wrestle for everything else in her life. It was pure instinct, really. Nothing personal.
She'd been kicking and screaming from the womb the day she was born ("Weed out the weaklings," Lilith ordered her children, slitting the throat of the first one that dared cry. "I have no use for weaklings."), and she'll probably be kicking and screaming the day she dies. Lucifer told her it was poetic once and she rolled her eyes, elbowed him a touch too violently in the gut.
("Of course that's what you think. You're an angel. Everything's poetry and pretty things to you."
"Oh, really? What's everything to you then, Mazikeen? Sex? Blood lust?"
"Survival.")
Still, once they spent the better part of a day walking around in circles and she figured out how mind-numbingly useless her bountyhunting tactics were (stupid fucking Blackwood and his stupid fucking magic tricks), she let Ambrose take a whack at it since he was calm and logical and reminded her just the slightest bit of Amenadiel, and that in itself made her feel like he wouldn't let her down.
(Tell any of that to God's Right Hand, though, and she'll personally gut you like a fish.)
"Alright, if either of you ladies want to stop at any time or have any useful suggestions, feel free to speak up," he said, grinning like a theme park attendant on his first day of work. His enthusiasm was rolling off of him in waves as he charted a course on the still-bloodstained map he got from the voodoo priestess. "This might be quite a long trek, but there's some water if you're thirsty, and snacks in the—"
"Just get going already!"
She should've known, of course, that like Amenadiel, the warlock also had a sense of leadership that was so deeply scrupulous, well-meaning, and democratic that if she were to smuggle him into Capitol Hill, he'd be fed to the wolves within a day. Maybe even less. It was pathetic, really.
So after leading them this way and that using secret wayfinding witchcraft he allegedly learned from Crowley himself — surprise surprise, the dead guy's methods didn't work — Ambrose was quick to admit that maybe he needed some time to reevaluate his plans, but until then, it was only fair that Prudence got a chance to lead the group, too. You know, like he was one of those suffocating suburban moms who made sure every kid at the sleepover got to play Super Mario.
(Also known as Chloe, everytime Trixie had friends over for the weekend.)
Which brought them to where they were now, tired, grumpy, and hungry (the snacks were just a bunch of granola bars, what a fucking bust), being led through a magical forest adventure by Greendale's knockoff Cruella de Vil. That is, if Cruella ate the puppies instead of wearing them, which she guessed wasn't outside the realm of imagination for the Class A cannibals traveling with her.
"Maybe we should just stop here for the night," Ambrose said, leaning against a tree trunk and chugging from his water skin like it had the elixir of life. She wouldn't be surprised if it did. "Set up camp."
"Finally he says something useful," Maze groaned, already shaking her hair from its ponytail and dropping down, spread eagle, on the grass.
She normally didn't like grass (unless it was the kind that could be rolled up and smoked), but in the absence of the goose down pillows and Egyptian cotton sheets that Lucifer got her addicted to, this was the next best thing. Humans weren't exactly setting up bed & breakfasts in Scottish no-man's-land, so they didn't have much in the way of options.
Just when she was cozying up to the thought of some well-needed rest, however, Prudence decided to open her perpetually hostile mouth, and Maze almost wanted to bury her head in the ground like a godforsaken ostrich because holy hell, not this again.
"But I'm not done," Prudence said through gritted teeth. "We've barely covered enough ground—"
"Well, you had your chance, little miss sun-stars-and-magic, and you blew it," Maze bit back.
She's been riding out this bitch's — witch's? Fuck it, what's the difference — temper for days now, and yeah, at first it was kind of fun, and the kid was kind of cool, but even a demon had her limits, and the limits very clearly said, do not disturb when it's time to sleep. Seriously. Don't even try.
She stretched out her limbs, trying to get more comfortable. She even dug out one of the blankets from Ambrose's Mary-Poppins-like endless knapsack.
("You ever seen that movie? With the dancing penguins?"
"No. Aunt Zelda says it's a blasphemous exploitation of witch culture. Like the Harry Potter series. We shouldn't condone it."
"...Your aunt has a lot of opinions, doesn't she?")
When Prudence did nothing more than scoff at her in response, the demon added, "What? You wanna go home and cry to mommy about it?"
You know, as all chaos-creating hellions do.
She should've known by the resigned look on Ambrose's face (like he was in a slow motion car crash or something, and he's had time to make peace with it) that by then, their whole evening had already gone to shit.
"I'll have you know, demon, my mother is dead," Prudence hissed, lips pulled back into a snarl as if she had something sharp in her mouth to show for. Maybe she did. Maybe Maze wanted to poke at her some more and find out. "My father killed her. And now he's running around out there, doing Satan knows what."
"Satan doesn't know what," Maze drawled. "That's what I'm here for, so I can find out for him. But I can't do that now, can I, when I can barely think in the morning 'cos you're keeping me up with your mommy issues!"
"Maze—" Ambrose began.
"Oh, don't tell me. He killed your parents too?"
She swore to everything unholy, these people had one hidden agenda after the next. Their backstories were like Russian nesting dolls that just got more and more depressing the further you got.
Ambrose drew in a patient breath. "Well...no. My parents were killed by witch hunters when I was ten. But that's not the point—"
"The point is, you're a coven of motherless Disney princesses with such deep-rooted Abandoned Child Syndrome that it's a wonder your faces aren't printed on the DSM-5," Maze said dryly.
The two witches stared at her, surprised.
"What? Linda talks a shit ton of therapy when she's drunk."
Ambrose looked visibly relieved, like even the prospect of an educated demon would've been enough to topple his worldview.
(And honestly? Same. Maze's siblings were already smug and insufferable when they were as dumb as a bag of doorknobs; just imagine them with college degrees and all the pretentiousness that came along with it. She'd rather gnaw off her own foot.)
"Maybe I should join your sad little cult," the torturer mused. "Maybe Lilith will finally get the hint and throw herself off the nearest cliff. 'Cos, you know, she's petty and dramatic like that, and she's nothing if not a whore for the aesthetic."
"As if Her Unholiness would ever want you in her church," Prudence said snidely under her breath.
"Church? She doesn't have a church. She doesn't even have a parking space," Maze retorted, narrowing her eyes at the younger woman. "What kind of hardcore drugs are you on and why the hell didn't you give me any of it? You know, I'm starting to think you don't like me very much."
Prudence just gave up at that point and flipped her the bird, and Maze flipped her one back, but the witch didn't even notice because she was already far too busy folding herself against the tree trunk and finding a comfortable position in her boyfriend's arms. As if their demon companion needed any more reason to be repulsed.
"Hey!"
"Hey what?" Prudence said, annoyed, not even bothering to open her eyes once she found that nice, solid spot on Ambrose's chest to rest her head on. She even snuggled deeper into him as if she didn't just threaten to stab that same chest with her dual swords a few hours back.
"Um…you call my mother 'Her Unholiness' like she's some kind of respectable person, casually mention she has a church, and you're not even going to explain?"
"I thought you wanted to sleep, demon," Prudence ground out.
"Well, I did, but now that you've got me worked up over your stupid little throwaway lines, it's sort of impossible now, isn't it?" Maze said, pushing herself up on her elbows.
Ambrose dragged a hand down his face. "Look, Maze, can we talk about this in the morning? It's getting late."
"Oh, please. Everyone knows you people stay up past 3 a.m. to drink virgin blood or sacrifice goats or whatever it is you do at the witching hour. I'm pretty sure you can spare me 5 minutes of your time."
"We don't sacrifice goats—"
"Disturbing," Maze said, pulling a face, "that that's the first thing you found wrong with that sentence."
"—but if it's so important to you, then fine. Lilith is the new queen of hell. She's been the ruling monarch ever since Sabrina gave up the throne. But it's basically common knowledge at this point, isn't it?"
The demon grew unnervingly quiet at that.
"Erm…" Ambrose frowned, raising a tentative hand to poke at her shoulder. "Maze?"
"Lilith is what!" She suddenly exploded.
The warlock reeled back like he was afraid she might rip off his face. To be fair, his fears weren't entirely unfounded.
"Why am I only finding out about this now? You could've at least mentioned it in your long-ass story three days ago!"
"I thought you knew!"
"How the hell was I supposed to know?" She roared back.
"But...but you're a demon," the warlock fumbled. "At the very least, shouldn't you be aware of who's ruling over hell?"
She threw him a nasty look. "What, you think I get an infernal newsletter every month? That my mother has a fucking mailing list on family milestones?"
"Well, I'm sorry, alright!" Ambrose said, narrowly dodging the handful of grass she ripped from the ground and aimed at his head. It carried with the wind and landed in a pathetic heap next to his knapsack. "I'll be sure to lead with that information next time."
"Forget it," Maze snarled, already climbing to her feet.
This couldn't be happening. Screw what the warlock said about common knowledge. If Lucifer had known about this, he would've flown down to hell with her the first chance he got.
"I don't see what the big deal is," Prudence said, rolling her eyes. "You said the other devil was an imposter anyway and the real one's partying in L.A. Who better to occupy the throne than one of us?"
"One of you?"
"A witch," she said like it was the only obvious answer.
Maze curled her lip. "Yeah, right, like that's any better."
She started picking up her things one by one — fingerless gloves, knives, half-eaten granola bar — and stuffing them back into her duffel bag. With a satisfied nod at the bareness of where she used to be, she slung the weight of her belongings onto one shoulder and began her trek deeper into the woods.
"Wait, where are you going?" She heard Ambrose call after her. She didn't bother looking back.
"I need some fresh air."
"But we're already outdoors," he said, the confusion clear in his voice even in the thick of animal howls and darkness.
The demon turned a sharp corner, disappeared from view.
With the all same stealth her mother used to praise her for (break her for), Mazikeen Smith faded into the night like all things free and fearsome, and should the witches dare seek her out in the morning, they would be left with nothing but the memory of the name she refused to give, and the thoughtless trail of blood she planned to leave behind.
("This is what you were made for," Lilith used to tell her. "This is all you'll ever be.")
"Well, mother," she whispered at nothing in particular, knives hanging dangerously at her sides. "We'll see about that."
The flick of a blade. Sacred symbols on the soil. The harsh glare of the late evening moonlight.
She ran one of the hell-forged knives down the length of her arm, and with glazed, empty eyes, watched the gushing stream of crimson as it pooled to the ground.
Chanting. For as long as she could remember, there was always a hell of a lot of chanting involved.
Maze was curious about her mother's rituals once. Back when she was younger and dumber and eager to please. Demons were never children the way that humans were, but for a brief, shining moment, there was a lull before they were given cells to guard and souls to punish, and that was when she foolishly thought Lilith was the greatest power in the world. The woman who stole faces and shrugged them on every other day like a new coat. Who bent reality to her will as if it was nothing more than putty between her fingers.
Now, after knowing true power — angels and antichrists and a god who played them all like cheap, plastic pawns — Maze recognized her mother for what she actually was in the grand scheme of the universe.
Her mother was nothing more than an ant.
And she wished she realized it sooner, because then, she wouldn't have wasted so much time trying to love something that she could've already crushed beneath her boots when she had the chance.
"The blood of hell I spill as I seek the soul I claim. Earth unshroud him, heaven betray him, Faustus Blackwood is the name."
Maze waited, brows screwed in concentration, as her words echoed through the air in the exact same cadence her mother always used: loud, steady, and just the slightest bit enraged. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end as she felt something rush through her, old and powerful, and she was almost impressed with how easily it came.
("You're my mother. We're the same. I don't understand why you can't teach me what you know."
"You were born from the stolen seed of man, while the False God himself molded me from the clay of the Garden," Lilith practically spat, the sneer on her lips a permanent fixture no matter which face she took. "Don't make me explain what makes me different from you.")
Soon enough, though, the feeling faded, and everything stayed as it was — still and undisturbed.
The demon cursed quietly under her breath and sliced another deep red gash into her palm to try again.
Of all her siblings, she was the only one fascinated by her mother's magic. They feared it, the cowards. They knew Lilith used it to keep them in line. But Maze? Oh, she craved it. She wanted that power. She wanted to enter a room and see the same petrified sheen on everyone's eyes.
And she knew she was capable of it, too. She had her mother in her. The worst parts, sure, but it was Lilith all the same. The Mother of Witches. The Mother of Demons. The Mother of Maze. But it was clear from the beginning that she only ever considered one of them her true children, and funny enough, it was the proud, posturing flesh-eaters that didn't even come out of her womb.
"The blood of hell I spill as I seek the soul I claim. Earth unshroud him, heaven betray him, Faustus Blackwood is the name."
A slight gust of wind. A murder of crows flying calmly in the horizon.
Maze grunted in frustration and switched to a different hand.
After rising through the ranks in hell and catching Lucifer's eye, she was able to convince her mother that she could serve the Dark Lord better with a face that wasn't half-mangled, that was easier to stomach. An archaic thought that made her want to gag at the time, but she knew it was Lilith's weakness if she ever had one. The woman was a puppet master by nature. She'd pull every string possible if it meant someone she could manipulate was going to end up on top.
So after years and years of pestering, the old hag finally relented.
She taught her daughter a spell.
("Just a simple glamour to hide that wretched half of your face. Nothing more, nothing less." She eyed Mazikeen with thinly-veiled displeasure. "All the proper magic in the world still belongs to witches, so don't go around thinking this makes you any special.")
It was the most bare-bones of magic by any standard, but it was enough. It was extraordinary. It was the most powerful Maze had ever felt.
And she hated that some deep, twisted part of her knew that so long as she went down this path, she would only be as powerful as Lilith allowed her to be.
"The blood of hell I spill as I seek the soul I claim. Earth unshroud him, heaven betray him, Faustus Blackwood is the name."
Maze detested all magic after that. She still kept using the glamour, if only because it was easier to prowl after the humans when she looked like one of them (except on the rare occasion she could remove it to go trick-or-treating with Trixie), but beyond that, she was determined to rise out of her own power and not the table scraps her mother begrudgingly gave.
That never stopped her from learning, though. She gleamed bits and pieces from the witches she tortured. Little insights from Lucifer when he started teaching her the cheat codes to hell.
("See, the trick is in the wording. Satanic witches don't know this — and I would very much hate for those wretched goat worshippers to find out — but everything becomes that much more powerful when you invoke the three planes. Heaven, earth, and hell. I thought at least one of them would figure it out by now, but I guess all that cannibalism rots the brain.")
Still, she never had any reason to try it out for herself. It was always enough, she thought, to know these things that reminded her she didn't need jack shit from Lilith.
Well, until now.
Because now, more than anything, what she needed was for Lilith to get the fuck away from the Morningstar throne.
Squeezing her bleeding palms harder over the perfectly-drawn pentacle on the ground, she summoned in a voice, low, guttural, and just daring the universe to cross her, "The blood of hell I spill as I seek the soul I claim! Earth unshroud him, heaven betray him, Faustus Blackwood is the name!"
Lightning streaked across the sky like a white-hot knife to the heart. In a blink of an eye, all her blood on the ground pooled into a black, bubbling stream of tar, almost something alive as it drew a line that breached the pentacle and moved forward and beyond. Lightning struck a second time, and it was uncanny, the way it lit a spot in the heavens that the stream of tar seemed to follow on its own.
This was it. Three days of witches and warlocks, her mother's favored ones, and in the end, the answer was her all along. The thought left a gratifying glow in the dull chasm of her chest, but Maze tried not to dwell on it too much. After all, her work wasn't over yet.
Bring Blackwood to Los Angeles. Let Lucifer exact his punishment. Maybe have a word or two with the little princess about all the secrets that weren't hers to keep. Only then, when everything was said and done, would she find a way to rip the gates of hell off its hinges and throw Lilith off the throne.
It was time to crush the ant under her sharp-heeled boots.
She smiled, clutching her knives in the darkness, and followed the tar-like trail of blood to wherever it led her next.