Chapter 2: Dead Air
The Hazbin Hotel was louder than you expected.
Charlie Morningstar hugged you in the lobby before you had both feet through the door, a blur of blond hair and red suit and real, uncomplicated delight. "You must be Alastor's friend! He never brings friends! He never says the word friend! Vaggie, look, he brought a friend!"
"I see her, babe." Vaggie, arms crossed by the stairs, gave you a long one-eyed look that said she had seen the green chain around your throat and had opinions about it. "Welcome to the hotel. Breakfast is at nine. Trust falls are optional."
"They are not optional," said Charlie.
"They are for her."
Alastor had vanished the moment you crossed the threshold, leaving you with your one suitcase and a sentence that was still rattling around your skull. Someone who is about to learn exactly what it costs to touch what's mine. You weren't sure you liked it. You were extremely sure you'd been thinking about it for three hours.
You found the bar around midnight.
Behind it, a large gray cat-demon with wings folded tight against his back was polishing a glass with visible spite. He glanced up, clocked the chain, and reached for a bottle without asking.
"Welcome to the club, sweetheart," Husk said, and slid you a drink. "Bourbon. Don't ask what's in it."
"What's in it?"
"I said don't ask." He leaned on the bar. His own chain glowed faintly at his neck, older and heavier than yours, its links worn smooth. "How long's he had you?"
"Seven years."
"Rookie numbers." He snorted. "First time he's called it in?"
"Yes."
Husk was quiet for a moment. He shuffled a deck of cards one-handed.
"Lemme tell you somethin' about that bastard," he said finally. "He collects what he thinks is useful. Power. Leverage. Fear. And a soul he don't need, he trades. Or he leaves it sittin' on a shelf." He flicked a card across the bar at you. The queen of hearts. "Seven years, and he never cashed you in, never traded you, never once put you to work? That ain't useful. That's somethin' else."
You turned the card over in your fingers. "What?"
Husk took the bottle back and drank from it directly.
"Hell if I know," he said. "But I've known him a long time, and he's never once kept somethin' just to look at it."
Your room was on the top floor, at the end of a long hall papered in crimson damask. It had a four-poster bed, a claw-footed tub, and a cathedral radio on the nightstand, a big wooden thing with a fabric speaker grille shaped like a church window. It was not plugged in. It was on anyway, playing something low with horns.
At two in the morning, the music stopped, and the screen on the wall turned on.
You had not noticed there was a screen on the wall.
"Well, well." Vox's face filled it, his whole head the screen, blue and too sharp, his grin a pixel-perfect arc. "If it isn't Mister Static's mystery girl. Hiya, toots. You've been hard to find. He hid you real good, I'll give him that. Took me forever to notice the one place that old deer keeps going back to."
You stood very still in the middle of the room. "What do you want?"
"Me? I wanna help! Here's the pitch. Al's weak right now. Everybody saw Adam carve him up like a Thanksgiving turkey. So I've got lawyers, sweetheart, real good ones, and they've found a tiny loophole in those old soul contracts. Turns out if the holder can't enforce for a while, a third party can buy the paper out from under him." He leaned in until his face warped at the edge of the glass. "You come work for me, I buy your contract, I set you free. No chain. And all you gotta do is tell me what he's got planned. Where he sleeps. What he's scared of."
"He isn't scared of anything."
"Oh, honey." Vox's laugh was a burst of white noise. "He's scared of you."
The screen snapped off.
You stood there in the dark with your heart hammering. Then you picked up your robe, and you went to find the Radio Demon.
His tower sat at the top of the hotel, up a spiral staircase that hadn't existed that afternoon. The door at the top was open. The room beyond was a radio studio from a dream of 1930: walnut panels, brass fixtures, a sound board with Bakelite knobs, an ON AIR sign glowing a soft dead red. A gramophone in the corner turned without a record, playing faint static like rain.
Alastor stood at the window with his back to you. He wasn't wearing his coat. In his shirtsleeves and red vest, with his hands clasped behind him, he looked narrower. Older. Not in his face. In his stillness.
"Vox found me," you said.
"I'm aware." He didn't turn around. "His signal has all the subtlety of a brick through a window." A pause. "I suppose he made you an offer."
"Freedom. If I spy on you."
"And?"
"And I'm here, aren't I?"
He turned then. His smile was in place. His eyes weren't. They had changed, the pupils gone thin and strange, the red at their edges ringed like radio dials, and you realized with a lurch that this was what he looked like when he was frightened, and that you were the only one who'd ever been allowed to see it.
"He said you're scared of me," you said.
Static rose under the music. "Vox says a great many things."
"Is it true?"
Alastor didn't answer. He walked toward you, slow and measured, his shoes finally making noise on the floorboards. He stopped an arm's length away. The chain between you lit up, pulsing in time with something.
"I could make you forget he said it," he said softly. "I could make you forget you came up here. I could tell you to go back to your room, and you'd go, and in the morning you'd remember none of this." His voice dropped. "That is what a contract like ours allows. Do you understand? Anything I want. Anything. All I have to do is ask."
"Then why don't you?"
"Because a command is a dreadfully dull way to get anything worth having." He looked at you. "I don't want to be obeyed, darling. I've been obeyed by thousands. I've never once been chosen."
You were barely breathing. You thought of seven years of Fridays. Of untouched whiskey. Of a man who flinched from handshakes standing at the end of your bar, every season, without fail, so he could hear you sing.
"Then don't command me," you said. "I'm not asking because I have to. I'm asking because I want to." You took the last step. "Touch me, Alastor."
He went so still the gramophone stopped spinning.
Then his hand came up, and this time it landed.
His fingers were cool and long against your jaw, his claws a careful, delicate pressure just behind your ear. He traced the line of your cheek with his thumb like a man reading braille, like he had to memorize it in case it was taken away. Your eyes fluttered shut. When you opened them, his face was very close, and he was not smiling. For the first time since you'd met him, Alastor was not smiling at all.
"Say it again," he said hoarsely.
"Touch me."
He kissed you.
It was not careful. You'd half expected careful, from him, the man who never touched anyone. Instead it was hungry, seven years of hunger, his hand sliding into your hair and tilting your head back to open your mouth for him, his other arm around your waist drawing you up against his body. He tasted like smoke and something sweeter beneath it, like burnt sugar. Every bulb in the room flared and dimmed in time with his breathing.
You pulled at his bow tie. He let you. You got it loose and opened his collar and pressed your mouth to the side of his throat, and the sound he made went out over every speaker in the hotel before he caught it and cut it off.
"Careful," he managed, half laughing, half wrecked. "I'm still technically broadcasting."
"Turn it off."
He flicked two fingers at the sound board. The ON AIR sign went dark.
Your robe went next. His hands found the tie and drew it open slowly, his eyes on yours the whole time, waiting for you to stop him. You didn't. You shrugged the robe off your shoulders and let it fall, and stood in front of him in the thin slip you'd slept in, and watched his pupils go wide and black.
"You," Alastor said quietly, reverently, "are going to be the absolute ruin of me."
"Good."
He lifted you. He carried you to the deep leather couch beneath the window and laid you down on it like something precious, and then he knelt between your knees and looked at you in the red light of the city with his hands on your thighs, just holding them, his thumbs moving in small slow circles over your skin.
"If at any point," he said, "you want me to stop..."
"I'll say so."
"You will." It wasn't a question. His eyes held yours. "You will tell me, and I will stop, and the contract has nothing to do with it. Promise me."
"I promise." You reached down and pulled him up by the open collar of his shirt. "Now stop talking."
He laughed against your mouth, and then he stopped talking.
His hands slid your slip up over your hips, unhurried, unbearably patient, as if he had all of eternity and intended to spend it here. He kissed down your throat where the chain lay, over your collarbone, the swell of your breasts through silk. When he drew the fabric down and closed his mouth over your nipple, you arched off the couch with a gasp, and you felt him smile against your skin. Of course he smiled.
He took his time. He mapped you with his mouth and his long cool hands, learning which touches made you sigh and which made you curse, and every time you made a new sound the lights flickered and he murmured "there it is" like a man finding a station through static. By the time he slid down your body and pressed his mouth between your thighs, you were already shaking. He held your hips down with both hands and made you come apart slowly, deliberately, his tongue patient and relentless, until you cried out his name and the gramophone in the corner screeched into a burst of trumpets all on its own.
When you could see again, he was braced over you with his shirt half-open and his hair falling into his face, and his antlers were showing. Black and branching, curling up from his head, the thing he never let anyone see.
You reached up and touched one. He shuddered from head to foot.
"Please," Alastor said. You had never heard him say that word. "Please, darling. Tell me you want this."
"I want this," you said, and pulled him down. "I want you."
He sank into you slowly, his forehead pressed to yours, and you both went quiet with it. The fullness of him, the cool heat, the way his whole body trembled with the effort of going slow. You wrapped your legs around him and drew him deeper, and he groaned something in a language you didn't know, Creole and old and soft, against your mouth.
Then he began to move, and you stopped thinking at all.
It was a slow, deep, rolling rhythm, like a song he knew by heart. He watched your face the whole time, learning it, adjusting, and when you gasped at a particular angle he gave it to you again and again until you were clinging to his shoulders and saying his name like a prayer you had no right to say in Hell. His control frayed. You felt it go, felt his rhythm stutter and turn rough, felt his claws dig into the leather beside your head instead of your skin. Static roared up through the walls, through the floor, through the hotel's bones. When you came the second time, clenching around him with a cry, he followed you over with a sound that blew out every bulb in the tower.
In the sudden dark, he held you. He didn't let go.
You woke at dawn, or what passed for it in Hell, with the light through the tower window going from red to slightly paler red. The couch was empty. A blanket had been tucked around you with alarming precision. On the sound board beside you sat a glass of whiskey, neat.
Beneath it lay a note in an elegant, looping hand.
You always asked me what I wanted to drink, it said. I've finally decided.
The glass was empty.
You were smiling when you picked it up. You were still smiling when you heard the screens. All of them, every television in the hotel, every billboard in the city visible through the window, flickering on at once in a wave of blue light.
Vox's grin filled the sky.
"Good morning, Hell!" he crowed. "Turns out the Radio Demon's got himself a sweetheart. And as of nine o'clock this morning," he held up a sheet of paper, old parchment, glowing faintly green at the edges, "I own her contract."