Chapter 3: Off the Record
The chain changed color first.
You were halfway down the spiral stairs in your robe when it happened, a cold prickle at your throat like a draft. You looked down. The green links lying against your collarbone had started to flicker, green to blue, green to blue, a bad signal fighting for the frequency. Somewhere far away, across the city, something tugged.
Not hard. Just enough to turn your feet a half-step toward the window. Toward the Vees' tower, glittering on the skyline like a syringe.
"No," you said out loud, and grabbed the banister. "Absolutely not."
The lobby was chaos. Every screen in the hotel was still showing Vox, waving that glowing parchment and going on about lawyers and precedent and fair market value. Angel Dust was sprawled across the couch with a bag of popcorn, watching like it was a soap opera. Charlie was pacing. Vaggie was sharpening her spear with ominous concentration. Husk was behind the bar, and when he saw you he set out two glasses and filled both.
"Told you," he said. "Somethin' else."
"Where is he?"
Before anyone could answer, the lights went out.
All of them. Every bulb and screen in the hotel went black at once, and in the dark there was a sound like a radio being tuned too fast, a howl of static rising into a shriek. When the lights came back on, they were red, and Alastor was standing in the middle of the lobby.
He was in his full coat again, cane in hand, smile bolted on so wide it looked painful. But his antlers were out, tall and black and branching, scraping the chandelier. The shadows in every corner of the room were standing up and watching him. And his eyes were dials, needles swinging hard into the red.
"Good morning, everyone!" he said, in a voice that was nine voices. "Don't mind me. I'm simply going to go and kill a television."
"Al." Charlie stepped in front of him, hands up. "Al, wait. You can't go in there like this. You're still hurt. That's what he wants."
"Of course it's what he wants, my dear. It's still going to be very satisfying."
"Alastor." You said it quietly, but every head in the lobby turned. You crossed the room to him, the chain flickering blue-green at your throat, the tug toward the window getting stronger with every step. "Look at me."
He did. The needles in his eyes trembled.
"Can he do it?" you asked. "Can he actually enforce it?"
For a long moment the Radio Demon didn't answer. Then something in his posture gave, just slightly.
"The loophole is real," he said. "I've spent the last four hours confirming it. If I am unable to enforce my claim, a third party may assume it. And I am..." His jaw worked. "Not at my strongest. If he pulls hard enough, for long enough, he wins. And you'll belong to him."
The chain tugged. You swayed on your feet. Alastor's hand shot out and caught your elbow, steadying you, and every demon in the lobby stared at the place where the Radio Demon was touching someone of his own free will.
"Then there's an easy fix," you said.
"There is no easy fix. I've been through every..."
"Let me go."
He stared at you.
"Tear it up," you said. "Release the contract. If there's no contract, there's nothing for him to buy. His paper's worthless. You said it yourself. I'm an asset. Assets can be liquidated."
"You," Alastor said, his voice gone very low, "are not an asset."
"Then prove it." You held his gaze. "Let me go, and see if I stay."
The silence went on so long Angel's popcorn stopped crunching.
Then Alastor laughed. Softly at first, and then wildly, head thrown back, the laugh track roaring up out of nowhere in a burst of applause. He lifted his left hand. The other end of your chain was wound around his fingers, as it had always been, and with his right hand he reached into the air and pulled out a piece of parchment. Old, yellowed, covered in tiny crimson script, your signature at the bottom in a hand that had been shaking.
"Do you know," he said, "how many souls I have ever released?"
"How many?"
"None." He held the contract up to the light. "Not one. In nearly a century." He looked at you over the top of it, and the dials in his eyes stilled, and went back to plain red. "You'll be the first."
He tore it in half.
The sound it made was a chord, a single deep note played on every instrument in Hell. Green fire raced up both halves of the page and consumed them. The chain at your throat turned to light and then to nothing, dissolving off your skin like sugar in tea. And on every screen in the hotel, Vox's triumphant grin froze, then twitched, as the parchment in his hand burst into flames.
"Hey!" he squawked. "Hey, what the... that's my... AL!"
Alastor snapped his fingers. Every screen in the hotel exploded at once in a shower of sparks.
"Ratings," he said pleasantly, into the smoking quiet, "are going to be so low."
You found him later in the tower, sitting at his sound board with his coat off and his chin on his hand, staring at nothing. The ON AIR sign was dark. The gramophone was silent.
He didn't turn when you came in.
"You may leave whenever you like," he said. "The Low Note is yours, of course. I've ensured it will remain under my protection regardless. Exterminations included. That part of the bargain I intend to honor whether there's a contract or not." His voice was perfectly light. "Charlie will be devastated to lose you. She's already planned a trust fall around your schedule."
You crossed the room and stood beside him. He still didn't look at you.
"Alastor."
"Mm?"
"Seven years," you said. "You came to my bar four times a year for seven years. You never drank the whiskey. You never asked for anything. And you never collected. Why?"
His fingers tapped once on the sound board. Then again.
"Because if I collected," he said finally, very quietly, "you would have been mine. And then I would never have known whether you'd have come up those stairs on your own."
You put your hand on his shoulder. He didn't flinch.
"I'm free," you said. "No contract. No chain. Nothing you can make me do."
"Yes."
"So listen carefully," you said, and turned his chair around to face you, and climbed into his lap. "Because this is me choosing."
He looked up at you, and his smile came back, slowly, small and astonished and real. Not a broadcast smile. Not a show. Just his face, doing something it had forgotten it could do.
"Oh, my dear," he whispered. "You really are going to be trouble."
"You already said that."
"It bears repeating."
This time you kissed him, and this time it was slow.
You took his hands and placed them at your waist, and then you took your time with him the way he had taken his with you. You unbuttoned his vest. His shirt. You pressed your palms flat to his chest and felt him tense at the contact, felt it the way you'd feel a deer freeze at the edge of a clearing. You waited. You didn't move your hands. You let him get used to it, breath by breath, until the tension melted out of him and he leaned into your touch with a sound like a sigh pushed through static.
"Is this all right?" you asked.
"Yes." His voice cracked on it. "Yes. Don't stop."
You didn't. You learned him the way he'd learned you, with your mouth and your hands, the cool smooth skin of his chest, the sharp line of his collarbone, the soft fur of his ears, which made him gasp when you stroked them and grip your hips hard enough to bruise. You found the place at the base of his antlers that made his eyes roll back. You found the place under his jaw that made every speaker in the tower crackle. He let you have all of it. The Radio Demon, who never let anyone touch him, sat in his chair with his head tipped back and his eyes half-closed and let you take him apart.
When you finally sank down onto him, both of you still half-dressed, his hands spread wide across your back, he said your name. Your real name. The one you'd signed on that contract, the one no one in Hell had said out loud in seven years. He said it like it was the first word he'd ever learned, against your throat, where the chain used to be.
You rode him slowly, your foreheads pressed together, the chair creaking in rhythm beneath you. He didn't try to take control. He followed your lead, matching every roll of your hips, his breath coming faster and rougher, his claws carefully sheathed against your skin. Static built in the walls like a storm about to break. When it did, when you shuddered and cried out and clung to him, he held you through it and then followed with your name in his mouth, and every radio in Pentagram City played a single note of a love song from 1933.
Afterward, you stayed in his lap with your head on his shoulder. His hand moved through your hair in slow strokes.
"I did miss you," he said. "These past four months. I want that noted."
"Noted."
"I lay in a bed in this hotel being fed soup by the princess of Hell, and all I could think about was whether some other bastard was sitting at the end of your bar on a Friday." He sounded mildly appalled at himself. "It was ghastly. I had feelings."
You laughed into his neck. "How awful for you."
"You've no idea." But his arms tightened around you, and he didn't let go.
You were drifting toward sleep when you felt him go rigid beneath you.
Not the stillness of a predator. Something worse. A jolt, like a man stepping on a live wire.
You lifted your head. Alastor was staring straight ahead at nothing, his eyes wide, and his smile was gone. Completely, utterly gone, his mouth a thin flat line.
And around his throat, coiled tight, was a chain.
It wasn't green. It was a deep, burning gold, thicker than yours had ever been, and it trailed off into the air and through the tower wall toward somewhere far beyond the city, beyond Pride, beyond anything you knew. As you watched, it pulled. Once. Hard. And Alastor's head jerked with it like a dog brought to heel.
"Alastor," you breathed. "What is that?"
He swallowed. When he spoke his voice had no static in it at all. It was just a man's voice. Quiet, and very old, and for the first time since you'd met him, afraid.
"That, my dear," said the Radio Demon, "is the other end of my own bargain. And it seems someone else just heard that I've started letting things go."