Chapter 1: Parental Guidance (Absolutely Not)
The couch springs groaned, a familiar sound that meant someone had been practicing spiritual meditation again. Valerie shifted on the pentagram-embroidered velvet, the faint scent of burnt sage and Morrigan’s cheap, spicy cologne clinging to the cushions. She idly turned a page in her spellbook, her long orange hair spilling over one shoulder.
Morrigan’s finger, tipped with a sharp, black-polished nail, traced a slow, smoldering infernal rune onto Valerie’s thigh. The demoness was stretched out like a contented panther, her slender, red-skinned form a contrast against the burgundy fabric. Her horns brushed the back of the couch, and her long black hair fanned out behind her.
“Mmm. If you keep doing that, I’m cancelling my afternoon,” Valerie murmured, not looking up from an illustrated entrapment ritual.
“The CEO is expecting me,” Morrigan purred, her voice like smoke and honey. “He has a… board meeting.” The way she said it left little doubt about the kind of briefing involved. She adored that part of her job as VP of Human Resources—the young goat demon CEO had very specific ideas about workplace morale.
The front door slammed with a force that made the candles gutter.
Footsteps hammered down the hall. Valerie marked her page with a crow’s feather and set the book aside, a slow grin spreading across her face. Morrigan’s tail gave a single, intrigued flick.
Kate stormed into the living room, her face flushed, a bundle of glossy magazines clutched in her white-knuckled hand. Her long brown hair was a frantic halo. She looked from her mother to her stepmother, her expression oscillating between fury and utter despair.
“I am going to set his hooves on fire,” Kate announced, her voice trembling with rage. “I am going to use every last bottle of holy water in this blasphemous house and give him a bath he won’t forget.”
Valerie sat up, eyes sparkling. “Seth?”
“Who else?” Kate hurled the magazines onto the coffee table. They slid across the polished wood, scattering between half-melted black candles and a cup of cold, forgotten tea. The top magazine’s cover featured a succubus in artful shadows, her wings arched suggestively, with the headline “Ten Summoning Sigils to Spice Up Your Sabbath.”
“He left them,” Kate seethed, jabbing a finger at the offending pile. “On my bed. Under my pillow. I reached for my headphones and got a handful of… of infernal pin-up!”
Morrigan chuckled, a low, warm sound. She leaned forward, plucking the top magazine from the table. She flipped through it with professional interest. “Oh, these are the new ones. The article on soul-binding as foreplay is surprisingly nuanced.” She glanced at Kate’s apoplectic face. “The photography is tasteful, sweetheart.”
“Tasteful? Mom!” Kate whirled on Valerie. “He’s your… your step-demon-spawn! Do something!”
Valerie swung her legs off the couch, the picture of maternal concern, though her grin hadn’t faded. “Honey, breathe. It’s just demon puberty. He’s curious. The human realm is confusing for him.”
“Confusing? He asked me last week if human females lactate when aroused! He’d read it in one of these… these things!” Kate’s voice hit a shrill note. “I can’t live like this. I walked in on him trying to use his hellfire to toast pop-tarts because he thought the toaster was a dormant mechanical beast. The kitchen still smells of sulfur and burnt cherry.”
Morrigan idly traced the succubus’s form on the cover. “Oh, darling,” she murmured, her catlike eyes glinting with millennia of amused patience. “You haven’t seen mishaps yet. Try teleporting your first century. I spent three days with my horns embedded in a cathedral ceiling in France. The chanting was incessant.”
“This isn’t about teleporting!” Kate cried, throwing her hands up. “This is about my personal space! My sanity! I don’t want to know what he… finds interesting! I don’t need to see the glossy, four-color evidence!”
Valerie patted the space beside her. “Sit. Tell us everything.”
Kate didn’t sit. She paced, a tight, angry orbit around the cluttered living room. “There’s nothing to tell! I came home from class, went to my room, and there they were. Along with a note.” She fished a crumpled piece of parchment from her jeans pocket and read it, her voice flat and dripping with sarcasm. “‘Dear Kate-sister. I borrowed your ‘humor’ magazine. It is strange. The human male is depicted as foolish and the female vengeful. I do not understand the laughter. These are my magazines. They are educational. Do not let Mother see them. She says I am too young for the advanced bindings. Your brother, Seth.’” Kate crumpled the note again. “He signed it ‘your brother’. Like that makes it okay!”
The front door clicked open.
Soft, clopping steps came down the hall, accompanied by a cheerful, slightly buzzy whistle.
Seth appeared in the doorway, his slender, goat-like frame silhouetted against the hall light. His red fur was neatly brushed, his black horns polished. He had a grocery bag clutched in one hand. “Greetings, familial unit! I have procured the spicy tortilla chips as requested, Mother-Morrigan.” His glowing yellow eyes landed on Kate, and his smile widened, showing a hint of pointed teeth. “Kate-sister! You are home. Did you find my periodicals? I believe I mislaid them.”
Kate stared at him. She simply stared, her earlier words vaporizing into pure, incandescent rage.
Seth’s smile faltered. He looked at the magazines on the table, then at Kate’s face, then at his mother, who was watching the whole thing with unveiled delight. His ears twitched. “Ah. You… found them.”
“In my room, Seth!” Kate found her voice. “Under my pillow!”
“I was conducting research,” Seth said, setting the grocery bag down carefully. His tone was earnest, academically defensive. “The succubus methodologies for soul-energy extraction are fascinatingly complex. I was comparing them to the diagrams in your human biology textbook. The similarities around the thoracic cavity are particularly—”
“Stop talking!” Kate yelled, pressing her hands over her ears. “Just stop! I don’t want to hear about thoracic cavities or soul-energy or… or any of it!”
Seth looked genuinely perplexed. He took a step forward, his hooves clicking on the hardwood. “But you are angry. I have caused this. In the sit-coms you watch, when the brother causes anger, there is a dialogue. Often a laugh from the unseen crowd. Then a hug.” He opened his arms slightly, a hesitant, awkward gesture. “Should we hug? I am still learning the timing.”
Morrigan snickered, leaning back against the couch. Valerie put a hand over her mouth, her shoulders shaking.
Kate looked at his open arms, at his confused, silly, kind face, and the fight drained out of her, replaced by a deep, profound exhaustion. “No, Seth. We should not hug.”
“Oh.” He lowered his arms, disappointed. “The magazine then. It said human females enjoy presents after conflict. A peace offering.” He rummaged in the grocery bag and pulled out a second item, holding it out to her with a hopeful expression. “I also procured this for you. It is called ‘body glitter.’ The advertisement said it makes you ‘shine like a celestial being.’ I thought you might like it.”
He was holding a tube of garish, silver glitter gel. The kind marketed to teenagers for raves.
Kate looked at the tube, then at Seth’s eager, impossible face. A strangled sound escaped her throat, part laugh, part sob. She snatched the glitter from his hand. “Get out of my room. Forever. And if you ever, ever leave your… your educational materials in my space again, I will use this entire tube to spell out ‘HELLSPAWN’ on your forehead while you sleep.”
Seth blinked, processing. “That seems aggressive. But visually striking.” He nodded, as if filing the information away. “I will adhere to your territorial boundaries, Kate-sister. My apologies for the distress.”
He gave a little bow, picked up his succubus magazines from the table, and clopped out of the room, already engrossed in an article as he went.
The silence he left behind was thick. Kate stood there, clutching the cheap glitter gel.
Valerie finally let her laughter out, a rich, full-bodied sound. “Oh, honey. Welcome to the family.”
Morrigan uncoiled herself from the couch in one smooth, elegant motion. She walked over to Kate, her pencil skirt hugging the breathtaking curve of her hips. She placed a cool, red hand on Kate’s shoulder. “He left the note because he trusts you,” she said, her voice softer now. “He finds humanity baffling and thrilling. You are his guide. Even,” she added, a smirk returning to her lips, “if his way of showing it involves poorly hidden pornography.”
Kate sighed, the last of her anger dissolving into a weary acceptance. “I need a drink.”
“That,” Valerie said, standing up and stretching, “is the first truly infernal idea you’ve had all day.” She headed for the kitchen, calling over her shoulder, “Seth! Sweetie? Come help mommy mix the margaritas. And leave the magazines in your hell-pit.”
From down the hall, Seth’s voice echoed back, bright and cheerful. “Are we using the salt for the ritual rim, or for purification?”
Kate closed her eyes, the tube of glitter still warm in her hand.
Kate closed her eyes, the tube of glitter still warm in her hand.
Kate closed her eyes, the tube of glitter still warm in her hand.
The clopping of Seth’s hooves faded down the hall, followed by the clink of glassware from the kitchen. Valerie was already rummaging for tequila. Morrigan gave Kate’s shoulder a final pat and glided after her girlfriend, the scent of smoke and office perfume trailing behind her.
Silence pooled in the living room, thick and sudden after the storm.
Seth paused just outside the doorway, his stack of magazines held carefully against his chest. He had heard the word ‘margarita’ and knew from experience that when Valerie mixed them, she sometimes let him taste the salted rim. But a sudden, nagging sense of incompletion prickled at him. He’d collected three magazines from the table. He subscribed to four.
He turned, his yellow eyes scanning the shadowy floor. There, just peeking from beneath the faded velvet fringe of the couch, was a glossy corner. He knelt, the familiar groan of his joints a soft sound, and retrieved it.
Infernal Encounters, Volume IX.
He spent a second there on his knees, flipping the cover open. The succubuses portrayed were all damn hot. Lissome forms woven from shadow and desire, wings of fractured stained glass, eyes that promised exquisite dissolution. The photography was tasteful, technically superb, capturing the play of hellfire on skin and the subtle, seductive curl of a forked tail. He had read every article twice, analyzed every sigil diagram. The intellectual pursuit was valid.
But as he stared at the centerfold—a stunning Marilith with six arms and a smile that could unstitch a soul—his mind did not fixate on the complex emotional entanglement described in the interview. Instead, it presented him with a sudden, vivid, and profoundly unscientific image: Kate’s face, framed by her messy brown hair, wearing an expression that wasn’t anger, but something else. Something his demonic lexicon lacked a word for. The human biology textbook called certain reactions ‘involuntary.’
The contrast was jarring. The magazine figure was perfection, a designed fantasy. Kate was all sharp edges and chaotic sound, warmth and irritation and that weird, squeaking noise she made when she tried not to laugh. The thought was more confusing than any summoning circle.
“Admiring the periodicals?”
Morrigan’s voice, dry as a tomb, came from above. She leaned against the doorframe, having returned without a sound. She sipped from a glass of dark liquid that smelled of iron and anise.
Seth snapped the magazine shut, a flicker of something like guilt—another confusing human concept—passing through him. “I was ensuring the collection was complete. Preservation is important.”
“Of course.” Morrigan took another sip, her eyes knowing. “The article on hybrid entanglements is particularly insightful this month. Page forty-two.”
Seth’s ears twitched. He did not open the magazine. “Mother. A query.”
“Ask.”
“The… research.” He chose his words with uncharacteristic care, his gaze fixed on the succubus’s coiled form on the cover. “It clarifies mechanics. Biology. Energy transfer. It does not clarify… the noise.”
Morrigan raised a perfect, onyx eyebrow. “The noise.”
“In Kate-sister’s sit-coms. And in the romantic films she watches when she believes I am not observing.” He finally looked up, his expression one of genuine bewilderment. “There is often a swell of stringed instruments. But in reality, when two entities are… entangled… is there a literal noise? A hum? A frequency? I have been listening, but I only hear the plumbing in the walls.”
Morrigan stared at him. Then she let out a rich, unfettered laugh that seemed to vibrate in the very bones of the house. She set her glass down on a side table shaped like a gargoyle and wiped a mirthful tear from the corner of her eye.
“Oh, my sweet, ridiculous child.” She shook her head, her black hair swaying. “You are trying to decrypt a symphony by studying the sheet music for a single violin. You are reading about supernovas to understand why a candle flickers.”
Seth frowned, his horns tilting. “The analogy is unclear.”
“The noise,” Morrigan said, stepping closer and lowering her voice to a conspiratorial murmur, “is not something you hear with your ears. It’s the silence that becomes so loud it drowns everything else out. It’s the sound of your own infernal pulse in your temples. It’s the quiet gasp you try to hide.” She plucked the magazine from his hands and tossed it back onto the couch. “No diagram can teach you that. Not even a very well-lit one.”
From the kitchen, Valerie called, “Glasses are salted! Who’s my little hellion for limes?”
Seth remained kneeling, Morrigan’s words turning over in his mind, more cryptic and fascinating than any advanced binding ritual. The symphony.The candle. The silence that was a noise.
“Coming, beloved!” Morrigan called back. She looked down at her son, her smirk softening into something almost maternal. “The research has its place. But some mysteries, my dear, require field work. And they are infinitely more perilous.” She turned to leave, then glanced back over her shoulder, her eyes glowing like coals. “Tell me, when you imagine this ‘noise’… whose face do you see?”
Morrigan’s question hung in the air, a shimmering hook in the dim light. Seth opened his mouth, then closed it, the answer caught somewhere between his horns and his throat, a truth too raw and ill-defined to voice.
But Morrigan didn’t wait for it. She simply winked, the glow in her eyes deepening for a fraction of a second, and then she was gone, the whisper of her pencil skirt the only farewell.
The smell of frying tortillas and tequila eventually drew Seth to the kitchen, where the conversation moved on to Valerie’s failed attempt to enchant the blender and the peculiar acidity of limes from this dimension. Kate avoided his eyes, but the tension had shifted, softened at the edges by salt and alcohol. Later, she even threw a chip at his head. He caught it in his mouth, and the surprised laugh that burst out of her was, he decided, a better sound than any symphony.
The next morning, sunlight fought its way through the stained-glass window depicting a rather jubilant Baphomet. It scattered crimson and cobalt diamonds across the pile of spellbooks and the empty margarita glasses.
Seth was in the kitchen, meticulously trying to align the butter knife parallel to the edge of the toast. Human breakfast rituals were intricate. Kate was still asleep, or at least barricaded in her room. Valerie hummed along to a vinyl record of monastic chants, grinding something that smelled alarmingly potent with a mortar and pestle.
The air in the center of the living room began to waver, like asphalt on a hot day. A faint scent of ozone and burnt parchment threaded through the smell of coffee and sage.
Morrigan strode into the room, the picture of corporate infernal efficiency. Her black blazer was tailored to perfection, the red silk of her blouse a violent slash against her crimson skin. The pencil skirt clung to every curve, and her stilettoes clicked a rhythm of absolute authority on the hardwood. She adjusted the cuffs of her jacket, her horns polished to a mirror shine.
“Meeting with the hellmouth management team at nine,” she stated, her voice all business. “The soul-acquisition quotas for Q2 are pathetic. I intend to flay someone’s ambition bare before lunch.”
Valerie looked up from her grinding, a smile playing on her lips. “Bring me back a souvenir? Something despairing.”
“Always.” Morrigan approached the center of the room where the air now vibrated with a low, sub-audible hum. She lifted a hand, and with a casual, twisting gesture, she ripped a seam in the fabric of the world.
It wasn’t a dramatic explosion of flame. It was a silent, professional tear. The edges of the portal crackled with black and violet energy, contained and precise. Through it, Seth caught a glimpse of a sprawling, obsidian office tower under a bruised purple sky, where winged shapes flitted between levels. The distant sound of agony was rhythmic, almost like typing.
Morrigan checked the slim, obsidian watch on her wrist. She took a step toward the portal, then paused. She turned her head, her gaze slicing across the room to land on Seth.
He stood frozen, a jar of organic raspberry jam in his hand.
“Seth,” she said, her tone shifting from boardroom to bedroom, intimate and blunt. “A reminder.”
The hum of the portal filled the space where words should have been.
“If you and Kate have sex,” she said, the words clear, casual, and utterly devoid of sentimentality, “tell me.”
She didn’t smirk. She didn’t wink. She simply stated it as a matter of necessary reporting, like a stock update or a security briefing. Then she turned, stepped through the shimmering tear, and was gone. The portal sealed itself with a sound like a sigh, leaving behind only a trace of ozone and the profound, echoing silence of her instruction.
Seth didn’t move. The jar of jam was cold in his grip. The morning light glinted off the butter knife. From the kitchen, Valerie’s chanting hum continued, oblivious.
The silence in his head was no longer a theoretical noise. It was a physical presence, thick and charged, shaped entirely by the absence of a sister who was sleeping down the hall and the echoing, impossible command of a mother who had just walked into hell.
The toast popped up.
He jumped, the sound violently loud. He stared at the slices, then slowly set the jam jar down. His thoughts weren’t of diagrams or methodologies. They were of a closed door, of glitter gel, of a laugh he’d caught in his mouth.
He didn’t move.