Knockoff religions, that’s what they are. Nothing more.

See, when you’re serving a proper god, you know where you stand. You can have certain expectations when you’re serving one of those.

Even when it’s one of the more dodgy ones, like the Night Father or the Many Hooded One. At least they’re still proper gods. You know they’re not going to stick their fingers into ordinary folks business unless they have good reason.

A couple of commandments, a taboo here and there, maybe a few ritual festivals sprinkled in for good measure and you’re good to go. As long as people stick to the rules and don’t cause a fuss, you can trust that no deific being will suddenly stride down from the clouds and demand all of the blood in your body.

But the things these kinds of people worship? Bah. Parasites. Filthy, bloodsucking, outsider opportunists throwing around what precious little power they have to impress the impressionable and lure honest folk into giving up their livelihoods – and often their lives! – to the service of their often whimsical desires, all under some misguided notion that it’s ‘better to rule in hell than serve in heaven’.

In any other city, these cults would be rooted out and burned to ash, but here in Grailmane? They get given their own district and told that as long as they don’t cause a fuss or disappear anybody important, they’ll be given the same considerations as any other god.

To make matters even worse? They gave them the old, bloody Mining District behind ours!

-Augustian IV, High Warbishop of the Church of Creutus, Grailmane Chapter, on the so-called ‘Cults’ of Grailmane

“Uhh… Timothy… I…” Ixxy spluttered, blinking in shock.

Obviously she knew what a girlfriend was. In theory. Mostly in the sense of how to pretend to be the contractee’s girlfriend or how to handle it if the contractee’s actual girlfriend caught them at it.

Surely Timothy didn’t mean she was just supposed to cuddle and act lovey-dovey with him for a year, though?

It was one of those mortal concepts that didn’t really mesh with demon sensibilities. What did being a girlfriend even mean? Was it just sex? Hanging around a lot? ‘Love’, whatever that was?

How do you even put any of that in a contract?

“Timothy, I…” Ixxy began, before she found herself at a loss for words.

Timothy just stared at her like a schoolboy who’d asked his high school crush to the prom. Like he was expecting to be rejected at any moment.

She’d just taken a breath to speak again, still not sure what she was going to say, when a loud knock at the door saved her.

Immediately, the confusing details of her new offer from Timothy was roughly shunted to the side as her current contract with him forcibly propelled itself into her mind. Specifically, the page stating in detail what she needed to do in the case that they were disturbed by someone at his door.

Luckily, it wasn’t particularly onerous. In legalese it might have taken an entire page, but in practice it basically amounted to getting out of any compromising position – which just meant standing up, at that moment – and pretending to be his sister who had come over for a visit.

That was where she’d gotten the idea for her cover story.

“Who’s that?” she whispered, quickly getting to her feet.

She was still reeling from his demand, but she was secretly thankful for the reprieve the unknown visitor had given her, if only for a chance to think.

“How am I supposed to know?” Timothy whispered back.

“Well, were you expecting anyone?”

“Of course not, or I wouldn’t have invited you in!”

Someone again banged loudly on the door with their fist, a muffled voice calling out from the other side.

“Open up, Twigley! We know you’re in there!”

Ixxy gave Timothy a quizzical look. Twigley?

“Ugh, it’s Dalten,” Timothy sort-of explained in a low voice. “Stay back, I’ll go get rid of him.”

“Okay…” Ixxy said uncertainly, not quite what to make of things. Who was ‘Dalten’ and why did he call Timothy ‘Twigley’?

Timothy shot her a warning look to stay quiet before opening the door a crack.

“Guys, I’m busy, right now’s not a good time…” he said to someone Ixxy couldn’t see from her angle.

“Twigley, is your sister really here?” a deep voice asked from outside.

“My sister? Who… oh! Er, what do you want with my… er… sister?” Timothy asked hesitantly, momentarily glancing back at Ixxy in confusion.

Ah, right. She’d forgotten to tell him about her cover story. Oh well, he figured it out.

“So she’s still here?” the person outside asked, before his voice dropped to a low, yet still clearly audible whisper. “Is she hot? Alvin said she’s hot. Is she hot, Twigley?”

Ixxy could quite clearly hear every word. Alvin… wasn’t that the wierdo who’d told her where to find Timothy? This wasn’t him though. This voice was different. Deeper. More masculine.

Timothy glanced back at her in consternation, but Ixxy just shrugged at him. How was she supposed to help? She had no idea what was even going on here.

“Guys, it’s my sister!” he hissed back at whoever was outside.

“Let us in, I wanna see what she looks like!” someone else spoke up from outside.

“Not now, you guys! We’re busy! Come back later!”

“What are you guys even doing in there?” the first voice asked again.

“That’s none of your business…!”

There was a grunt and Timothy was suddenly sent stumbling back into the room as whoever was outside forced the door open.

A guy Ixxy had never seen before stepped through the now open door. He was tall, about half a head taller than Timothy, and significantly broader. Where Timothy looked like a scarecrow dressed in a potato sack, this guy had some actual muscle underneath his perfectly fitting and clearly tailored student’s robe.

His face could have even been handsome, if it wasn’t ruined by the cocky smirk and pattern of ugly, black tattoos covering his cheek and one side of his neck. It was strange, the tattoos seemed oddly familiar, though Ixxy couldn’t quite place where she’d seen them before.

“Well, fuck me. Alvin was right! Twigley, your sister is fucking hot!” the guy exclaimed as he caught sight of her and his eyes shamelessly roamed her body.

While she wasn’t quite sure what the relationship between Timothy and this guy was, it was clear was that this guy was Grade-A douchebag material.

Behind the Douche, two more flunkies leaned around the doorframe, one short and squat, the other tall and lanky. Neither looked particularly intelligent, in Ixxy’s opinion, but each sported similar black, runic tattoos on their necks and hands. Some sort of gang or group?

“Wow, yeah, Dalten. She’s fuckin’ fine,” the squat one added. His was the second voice that she’d heard.

“I’d tap that any day,” the lanky one snickered, a new voice that she immediately pegged as ferociously annoying.

Normally, Ixxy didn’t particularly mind being objectified. Being seen as just a sex object was fine when you happily identified as such. But these guys were going on as if she wasn’t even present. That was a little rude. And sexual objectification was no excuse for rudeness.

She wasn’t quite sure how she was supposed to react to this, however. Were they colleagues of Timothy? Friends? Some kind of authority figures? Was she supposed to flirt back or would that make Timothy’s life more difficult?

Plus he wanted her to be his girlfriend. Did that mean he did not want her to be flirting with other people? Wait, was she supposed to pretend to be his sister or his girlfriend? It was all so confusing!

In the end, she just stood awkwardly and looked towards Timothy for some sort of clue.

“Dalten! Please! We’re busy…!” Timothy whined, trying to herd Dalten back out the door. The larger man simply wrapped an arm around Timothy’s shoulder and pulled him in close.

“Why didn’t you tell me you had a sister, Twigley? Especially one who’s such a fine piece of tail?” he whispered, still loud enough for Ixxy to hear.

“I… it’s none of your business, Dalten! Now, please, let me go! I wrote your paper for you, just like you told me to, so please leave me alone!” Timothy responded in a similar whisper.

Ixxy’s eyebrow rose. Twigley… er, Timothy wrote Dalton’s paper? Like, did his work for him? Surely that wasn’t how it was supposed to work? Were they partners on some kind of project?

“Don’t be such a stiff, Twigley! Introduce us and make sure to paint me in a good light, okay? If I get lucky today, I’ll leave you alone for a whole week, yeah?”

Wait, he was trying to convince Timothy to help him get lucky with his sister? What kind of twisted moron thought that was a good idea?

And she was only worth a single measly week? What the fuck!

“If I introduce you, will you go away?” Timothy asked, whispering.

“If you don’t, I’ll kick your ass,” Dalten responded, smirking even wider. “Again.”

Timothy groaned. “Right. Dalten, this is Ixxy, my… er… sister. Ixxy, this is Dalten, my… er…”

“Friend!” Dalten interjected boisterously, squeezing Timothy helplessly against his broad chest with one arm. “Yeah, me and Twigley go way back, haha! Took the little guy under my wing on day one. Been looking out for him ever since. Ain’t that right, Twigley?”

“More like under your boot...” Timothy muttered.

“What did you say?” Dalten demanded.

“I said, ‘It’s been good!’ Yeah!”

It finally clicked. Dalten was Timothy’s bully. Suddenly she knew exactly how she wanted to handle him.

“Damn straight it has! Now what about you, sweet thing? Ixxy, huh? Can I call you Ix?” he asked smugly.

Seriously? ‘Ixxy’ wasn’t already short enough for him?

“You can call me Ixilis,” she replied coldly. “And my brother was right, I’m afraid. We were rather busy before you so knocked. Could you perhaps come back another time mister – Dalten, was it?”

Polite, but distant. Shut him down cleanly, but quietly, so that Timothy suffered the minimum retaliation in the future. Perfect. But Dalten just flashed her the sleaziest grin Ixxy had ever seen in her admittedly short time in Aer.

“Ixilis? That’s a weird name. But come on, Ix, who would you rather hang out with? Your nerdy brother, or this stud?” he asked, cockily hooking his thumbs back.

Ixxy winced. Like the others of her kind, her name, and by extension her identity, formed an inseparable part of her being. Someone mangling her name was actually painful. Unfortunately, the Grand Contract didn’t acknowledge it as an assault, so she wasn’t allowed to maul him in response. That didn’t make it any less irritatingly painful.

“Why do you call him ‘Twigley?’” she asked instead, scowling in irritation and ignoring his question. “His name’s Timothy.”

“It is?” Dalten asked, seemingly puzzled as he turned to Timothy. “Shit, Twigley, why’d you tell everyone your name was Twigley?”

“I didn’t…” Timothy began, but Dalten just continued talking over him.

“He does look like a ‘Twigley’, though, doesn’t he? Like he’s made of twigs. Not like this.” Dalten flexed his arm in front of Ixxy’s face, trying to show off a somewhat muscular bicep.

It wasn’t even that impressive. The last two guys she’d almost contracted with, had both done hard physical labour of some kind for a living, and had had the musculature to match. Even the asshole who’d… who’d… who’d killed her had been significantly bulkier than Dalten.

Coming out of his flex, he casually stepped in closer and casually rested his hand on Ixxy’s shoulder. She froze.

“So, I got some wine back in my dorm room,” he said in a low, husky voice. “How about we leave Twigley to finish with whatever it was you guys were doing and you come join me and the guys and we can see how many bottles we can polish off, huh?”

That was his play? ‘Let’s see how much we can drink?’ Wow. Classy. On the one hand, Ixxy found the very idea of going anywhere with this jerk repulsive. On the other, she really needed the souls right about now. She rather doubted that ‘paying for it’ was what the Douche had in mind, but you never knew.

Unless, Timothy wanted her to just bang the guy for the free week pass? She did offer to let him whore her out if he wanted. This could be the perfect opportunity for her to show how useful she could be to him as a slave, if only he would let go of silly notions such as her being his ‘girlfriend’ or whatever.

She raised her eyebrows enquiringly towards Timothy. All he had to do was give her some kind of indication and she would take it from there!

Instead, he gave her a slight shake of his head, a deep scowl on his face.

So that was a no. Oh well. Honestly, Ixxy couldn’t say she was too bothered at not having to sleep with this particular guy.

“Umm, thanks for the offer, but I’m going to have to pass for now. Why don’t you and your friends run along and maybe I’ll see you around?” Ixxy said brightly to Dalten, carefully peeling his hand off of her shoulder and trying her best not to say something Timothy was going to regret down the line.

As she did, her finger briefly brushed against his wrist, allowing her to feel his pulse. It was all she needed to read his soul.

Souls weren’t all that interesting to read, generally speaking. Some demons said they could tell if a mortal was a good or a bad person from their soul, but Ixxy had never put much stock in that. ‘Good’ or ‘bad’ according to whose standards? But looking into Dalten’s soul gave her an idea what they were talking about.

To start with, it was trimmed to the absolute limit. Someone had sucked him as dry as the Grand Contract allowed no more than a few days ago, and judging by the sheer amount of permanent damage that he’d accumulated, it hadn’t been the first, or even the tenth time. More than that, however, his soul felt strangely… oily. Like it was covered in a thin sheen of disgusting, slimy residue. Just reading it made her want to gag.

On second thought, she wouldn’t sleep with him for ten souls if it meant having to nosh down on that shit.

“Dalten, please, can you just leave us alone? I’m busy helping her with something and she doesn’t want to go with you right now,” Timothy tried to interject.

“Shut up, Twigley,” Dalten growled, grabbing Timothy by the front of his shirt and yanking him backwards, sending him stumbling towards the door, where his two flunkies caught his arms.

“What’s he helping you with, anyway?” Dalten asked Ixxy as Timothy struggled to pull away from the goons. “Whatever the Twig can do, I can do better, trust me, Ix.” He winked at her.

She flinched again at the misuse of her name.

“None of your business!” Timothy exclaimed, before the taller flunky cuffed him on the side of the head.

“Dalten wasn’t talkin’ to you,” the guy stated.

Ixxy blew out an annoyed breath through her nose. Despite her firm rejections, Dalten showed no sign of losing interest. And now they’d grabbed Timothy as well, and she wasn’t even allowed to retaliate. Nothing in her contract with Timothy stated that she had to – or was even allowed to – defend him. That meant the default Grand Contract clauses held, which in turn meant that unless one of them physically attacked her somehow, she was completely forbidden from harming them.

That wasn’t what was really worrying her though. She could always just leave, if she really wanted to. Attempting to stop her would simply enable her to defend herself. No, what really worried her was that they’d probably give him a ton of grief over the next few days to get at his ‘sister’. So much so that he might just decide she was too much of a hassle and just wash his hands of her. That meant she was going to have to work fast.

“Just some contract stuff. Boring as hell. But we were almost done anyway, just had a last few things we needed to sort out,” she said as nonchalantly as she could, hoping he would be as enthused at the prospect of work as she believed him to be. She was wrong.

“What kind of contract stuff? Maybe I can help? You know, I scratch your back and you leave scratch-marks on mine, eh?” he smirked, giving Ixxy a leering grin.

He reached for the stack of papers on Timothy’s desk, but Ixxy’s hand shot out, firmly pinning the pages to the desk before he could grab them.

It hadn’t even been a conscious decision on her part. Her contract with Timothy had forced her to move to preserve their secrecy. Similarly, she wasn’t allowed to simply revert to her demon form to scare him off. Nobody was supposed to know she was a demon. Those were the rules of her contract with Timothy.

Stupid, repressed boy.

“I’m sorry, mister Douche… I mean, Dalten, but this is a private matter and none of your concern,” she stated firmly.

“Aww, come on, Ix, don’t be like that,” he grinned at her, tugging playfully at the contract under her hand, not realizing she physically couldn’t lift her hand to let him have it even if she wanted to. Which she very much didn’t. His constant abuse of her name was getting on her nerves. In fact, everything about him was getting on her nerves and, to make matters worse, he was not taking her polite hints that she was not interested.

Then perhaps it was time to try being a little less polite.

“I’m afraid it’s a bit early my day to get drunk and sleep with morally bankrupt loser fucknuggets,” she said coldly. “I usually hold off until at least after lunch. So could you please take your bum-buddies back there and kindly fuck off?”

For a brief moment, the smile fell off of Dalten’s face. He stood stock still, eyes boring into Ixxy’s. His face began twisting in anger as what she’d said sunk in, before his stormy expression disappeared with a laugh and he casually rested his hand on top of hers.

“Haha! That’s a good one, babe! You really got me there! But you don’t know who I am, do you?” he asked, waggling his eyebrows suggestively.

“Somehow, I suspect you’re going to tell me,” Ixxy replied.

Dalten leaned forward, forcing Ixxy to lean backwards to keep her distance from him while she did her best to not be creeped out by the feeling of his hand on hers.

Then he reached into his shirt with his free hand and pulled out a medallion, holding it up in front of her face. It consisted of a collection of intricate, interlocking shapes forming a clenched fist in the centre of bunch of nested, oval rings.

“Cute, but is this supposed to mean something to me?” Ixxy asked dismissively, not giving the thing more than a passing glance.

“This is the symbol of the one of the most powerful cults in Grailmane,” he grinned. “The ‘Cult of the Abyss’.”

The Abyss? As in where she was from? She’d never heard of them before.

She gave the medallion another, closer look, noticing how the ovals seemed to blend together into a spiral when you lookeed closer like some kind of optical illusion, but nothing of it looked familiar.

There wasn’t even anything in her pre-installed memories about it.

“The ‘Cult of the Abyss?’” she repeated, wrinkling her nose in puzzlement. “So you’re like some kind of anal-sex-cult? Sorry, that’s really not my kind of scene.”

Dalten’s face turned stormy again. “’Abyss’ as in where demons come from, not… Argh, it doesn’t matter. The point is, we don’t just contract with demons like the amateurs at the Diabolist Institute. We learn their secrets. Their language. Their magic. How to command them,” Dalten finished, a nasty glimmer in his eye.

What?

“Command? That… that’s not possible,” Ixxy said, hesitating. “Not unless they agree to it via contract, that is.”

“Oh, no, I mean command,” he leered, slowly pushing her backwards until the back of her legs bumped against Timothy’s small bedside table. “As in force them to do whatever we want. As in binding them to our will!”

Oh fuck, did he know what she was? Had he known all along? And could he really bind her, somehow, against her will? Did they have something to do with Mulder & Heath?

How the fuck did she keep running into these nutjobs?

Could she fight him? No, the runes slammed down the moment she even considered the option. Whatever he was doing right at that moment, the Grand Contract did not consider it a threat to her. Perhaps once he started whatever magic it was that the cult used she’d become free to act, but would that be too late? How long did the Grand Contract take to recognize a threat?

“Do you know what demons call us?” he spoke again, his voice dropped to a low, menacing whisper, making Ixxy shiver involuntarily.

She shook her head as he loomed over her.

“The Morix Stana.” Ixxy froze. “And I am the son of the cult leader,” he continued. “My father is the ‘Eyge Stanox’.”

At this point, Ixxy simply couldn’t hold it in anymore.

She burst out laughing.

“What?” Dalten demanded, stepping back in confusion. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing, oh mighty son of the Eyge Stanox of the Morix Stana,” she giggled. She pronounced the words slightly differently, like there was a slight musical quality to them.

“It is a name that demands respect, even from demons! It is a name that is spoken by them only in hushed whispers! In their own Abyssal tongue, it means ‘Head Chainer’ of the ‘Black Chains’!” Dalten insisted, turning a little red in the face as he ranted.

No. No it didn’t.

Actual demonic didn’t translate to this world very well, which was why demons always spoke local languages with each other. But you were a masochist and decided you were going to try your best to translate it, simplifying a bit and cutting off the parts of the words that didn’t have equivalent sounds in this reality, the phrases in demonic for which the closest translation was ‘Eyge Stanox’ and ‘Morix Stana’, was ‘Biggest Idiot’ and ‘Bunch of Idiots’ respectively.

This wasn’t some dangerous cult, enslaving demons for their own nefarious ends, this was someone’s pet project!

Someone who was taking these guys for a ride!

Unfortunately, as much as she would have loved to spill the beans and reveal to these idiots just what fools they were, that would be ruining someone else’s fun. And you didn’t screw over your fellow demons like that.

Unless they were named Vrazhk.

“If you say so,” Ixxy giggled. If it did turn out to be Vrazhk behind these guys, she was going to do a lot worse than just ruin her fun.

“You don’t believe me? Look! These are demonic runes of power!” Dalten insisted, pulling the collar of his robe down so that she could get a better look at the tattoos running down the side of his face and neck.

Ixxy’s eyes widened as she finally recognized the tattoos. They were indeed demonic… sort of. Each one was a stylized representation of different three dimensional projections of her kind’s equivalent of reproductive organs.

Someone had convinced these idiots to tattoo penises all over themselves.

Ixxy doubled over, howling with laughter.

She absolutely had to meet the mad genius who was running this scam!