James Exosia

Emily was sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing nearly nothing. Her hair cascaded down over her shoulders, and her lips were deep red. I saw her cheeks start to flush.

She was beautiful.

The handful of times that Emily and I had slept in the same bed, we had worn full pajamas, both out of respect for her past and due to our own desire not to rush into potential bad decisions. And, if I was being honest, my own inexperience with girls was also a contributing factor.

But now, Emily was nearly naked, looking at me from across the room with her bright blue eyes. And I was feeling a slightly overwhelmed.

Emily took a deep breath and stood up, letting me cast my eyes all over her body. In three short steps that seemed to take far too long, she was on me, wrapped her arms around me and nuzzling her face into my neck. My own face was covered in her hair, and the scent of her shampoo filled my nose. I inhaled deeply, taking it all in, savoring the moment and returning Emily’s embrace. The feeling of her skin on mine was electric.

And then she kissed me. Her lips locked on to mine, my eyes closed, and my head went fuzzy. My awareness, my world, was reduced to a moment of pure bliss and unrestrained… love?

I think I loved Emily. And with that sobering - and exciting - realization, my head cleared, and I pulled away, just a bit.

“What was that for?” I asked. My own voice seemed soft and distant.

“Well,” Emily whispered. She took a deep breath. “I need to be able to move on. To prove that I can be normal.” Emily smiled, not just with her mouth, but with her eyes as well. “And besides, I know you’ve wanted that”

I felt my face turning red. “Yeah.” I grunted. “I’ll admit it. I have.”

“Then come on.” Emily took my hand, and pulled me the two and a half steps to her bed. We flopped onto it in a confusing tangle of limbs - and suddenly my own nerves kicked into high gear.

“You sure?” I couldn’t stop myself asking.

Emily’s hand twitched.

Insecurity. Insufficiency

She blinked. Something was wrong - and suddenly the conversation from a few days ago came flooding back into my head.

“Emily, you don’t have to do anything. You do realize that, right?”

Emily rolled away, covering her face with her hands. I shifted, and gently scratched at her scalp .

Finally, Emily spoke. “I want to. You’re the first person I could even think about being with.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. So turned towards Emily, covering her lips with my own, and holding her in my arms. Not quite sure what else to do, I trailed kisses across her cheek and down her neck. I heard and felt Emily’s breath in my ear as I went lower, towards her cleavage…

And then it stopped, abruptly. I felt Emily stiffen and freeze. I hesitated, and looked up. Emily’s eyes were wide open, and her expression was no longer one of happiness.

“You alright?” I asked.

Emily shut her eyes. A tear leaked out each corner. I didn’t have to be semi-omniscient to know that the answer was no.

I rolled off of the bed in a flash, as I realized what had happened. Emily had let me in, closer than she’d ever let anyone else, but it had been too much, too quickly. She was still for a few minutes, breathing in short, ragged gasps.

Finally, Emily sat up, and I grabbed a tissue box and sat back down next to her “I’m sorry, James.”

“You have nothing to apologize for.” I replied, tucking a loose strand of Emily’s hair behind her ear.

“It’s just… I was hoping for tonight to be special. And I can’t even get out of my own way.” Emily blew her nose.

“It’s already special enough.” I said, turning on what I hoped would pass for charm. “You’re beautiful.”

Honk “Thanks.”

“But… let’s take it easy, alright? One step at a time.”

Emily nodded her head.

“I know you’re trying to make progress” I said, tentatively reaching an arm around with a little bit of backscratch and shoulder rub. “So just do whatever you’re comfortable with, and we can go from there.”

Emily nodded again.

“And to be honest, I was about ready to pass out when I saw you. I don’t think I could have taken much more myself.”

Emily smiled and wiped her nose one more time with the tissue. I pulled her in from the side, and she leaned her head on my shoulder.

“But it’s all going to be okay. You still want me here tonight?” I asked.

Emily nodded a Yes. We sat there for a few minutes, before climbing back into the bed.

“You going to be alright?” I asked.

“Yeah. I’m sorry about that. I’m trying.”

“Don’t worry, you’re doing fine.” How, exactly, was a virgin supposed to reassure their nearly naked girlfriend - who was also a victim of sex abuse - that her attempts at regular intimacy were perfectly welcome? I, for one, had absolutely no idea. Because, well, virgin.

Emily fell asleep with my shoulder under her head and my arm around her back. I stayed awake, wondering how the night had gone so wonderfully right and so horribly wrong at the same time.

Eventually, slowly, sleep came.

A demon, with Emily’s face and Lucifer’s body. I want to push it away, but it needs to stay here, because we’ll all freeze to death if it leaves. I turn, and see a massive industrial boiler looming over me. Of course, it all make sense now. I point to the boiler, the demon seeming to understand. It walks underneath, looks up, takes a deep breath, and spits flame. Engulfed in hellfire, the boiler quickly reaches temperature, the steam heating the dormitories above. But then the fire fails, shrinking, jumping away from the demon’s mouth, landing on the ground. It coalesces into a figure: Nigel Butler. He approaches, the anger burning hot in his soul. One arm stretches out, reaching for the Emily-demon. The other snakes towards me, reaching for my face-

I awoke with a start. It was still the middle of the night, and Emily was still pressed up against me. I was hot. I nudged Emily off of me, sat up, took my shirt off, and laid back down. She mumbled something, and curled right back into me.

I laid there, feeling increasingly nervous and aroused by having Emily’s mostly bare body all over mine.

Despite the awkwardness earlier in the night, it occured to me that I was lucky. Lucky to have someone who understood not only my social difficulties and academic mistakes, but also the whole supernatural world that had been forced onto her by way of me.

It certainly wasn’t fair to either of us, and definitely not to Emily, but it had given both of us a chance to make a difference in the world. And in the month and a half or so since the semester started, we had made a good impact. A child predator was locked up. A handful of thugs were off the street. As a side effect, I had a girlfriend.

And when we woke up the next morning, her body was stuck to mine with sweat.

Lucifer

I bathed in the fire, soaking in its warmth, feeling it rejuvenate my very essence. The steam boiler was a raging inferno around me, a powerful torrent of flame that I normally never saw outside my own demonic fire jets. It was an interesting study in human engineering. The simple concept of “stay warm in wintertime” had started with the ordinary fire pit, and evolved into a sophisticated and streamlined - if noisy - machine that had taken thousands of hours of labor to create.

The fuel for which depended on yet more complex machinery in the oil and energy industries. The engineering process for hellish advancement was not nearly so involved. If only we’d had a few thousand of these boilers running after the Rebellion, my followers wouldn’t have been incapacitated for so many centuries.

There was at least one positive takeaway from this whole Aamon debacle: take a page from human engineering before the time for Armageddon eventually rolled around.

Assuming that Aamon didn’t somehow force the Enemy’s hand and trigger it prematurely, of course. But knowing how headstrong and impulsive Aamon is, that was nowhere near a safe assumption.

I turned and shifted, standing up within the boiler. There was a vague tickling sensation where the hot water tubes passed through my slightly incorporeal torso. I stretched, taking in the heat. As long as the weather stayed cold and the boiler stayed on, it wouldn’t be too much longer before I was back to full strength.

Special agent Samuel Ramsey

I pulled up the transcript of the interview with Emily, and the charges record for Nigel. Knowing - intellectually - what her father had done was one thing. Hearing it from Emily’s point of view was something else altogether. Though the enormous pile of evidence from Nigel Butler’s laptop was certainly damning, it was Emily’s testimony that put the final nail in his coffin, and left no room for “it was planted” or any similar excuse.

For a few moments, I sat in silent contemplation, trying to wrap my head around the horror and severity of the thing. To Emily’s credit, she’d been stronger and smarter than nearly every other sexual abuse victim that I’d worked with. Many victims grew up to perpetuate the cycle, and many abusers were themselves abused earlier in life.

But not Emily. Somehow, she’d been lucky enough to recognize her father’s actions as wrong and push herself as far away from that as she could.

If Roscoe ever got the chance to do an in-depth psychological interview with Emily, she’d probably have a field da-

ding

The email notification derailed my train of thought. I opened it - something from Cold Cases. I’d asked them for possible connections to older cases, and they’d gotten back to me.

To: Samuel Ramsey

From: Tyler O’Connell

Subject: Butler evidence

Sam:

Your case has a connection to an unsolved murder from a few years ago: Madeline Magdell, age 5. File is attached, but the tl;dr is that she disappeared, and her body was found a week later. The cache of evidence off Butler’s laptop includes photos of her, with the timestamp during that interval.

While there isn’t yet anything to indicate that Nigel was involved in the actual abduction, the photographic evidence does attach Nigel Butler to an established case of sexual assault resulting in death. Per 18 USC 2251, he may be a candidate for the death penalty.

That was the only one I was able to find. Will let you know if anything else turns up.

-Tyler

Well. That was terrible, albeit not entirely unexpected. I added the newest violation to Nigel Butler’s file.

I went through the checklist. We had statements and interviews with the known victim. We had heaps of carefully indexed evidence off the laptop, which had been digitally scoured with every forensic tool available. Dr. Roscoe had done a psychological evaluation to ensure that the Butlers were fit to stand trial. The fishing expedition to catch the rest of the ring had been an absolute disaster, but at least we knew there weren’t currently any loose ends in that direction. And with Tyler’s search, we had a cherry on top of being able to ask for capital punishment.

I zipped everything together with the list of recommended charges and evidence exhibits, and dragged it into a new email draft to the federal prosecutor. I hesitated for a brief moment, and then hit Send.