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The black around her eyes dripped down her cheeks and the same impossibly dark liquid spilled from her lips and ears. Her skin was pale and brittle as paper, her black hair stringy and coarse.
She looked like the most delicious sort of nightmare given a physical form in the waking world, but he knew at once that her soul did not belong.
“Where am I?” she asked, her teeth honed to needles and stained with the black that leaked between them.
“Why, Hell, of course.”
Hell seemed to be doing wonders for her complexion. The dry translucence of her face turned to smooth white porcelain. Her hair became thick and softer than clouds. The ink in her mouth turned her lips full and black and her tears smeared to shadows around her eyes.
“I don’t understand,” she brushed her fingers over the points of her teeth. “I wasn’t the one who did it, so why am I the one here?”
“Oh, they’re so cute when they’re young,” he cooed and patted her head. “You don’t get stuck down here for no reason, dear. Think hard! I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”
She dressed in black and white and gray. It seemed that whatever she possessed lost its color and faded to muted monochrome.
“My favorite color was red,” she looked enviously upon his appearance. The red dress she had bought had bled to gray as soon as she had paid for it. She sighed and turned towards a pile of colorless clothing. “I’d give anything to wear any color again.”
“Were you expecting to be remade in glory and splendor and beauty?” he teased. “You’re in Hell, you make do with what you’ve got.”
Little sheets of paper littered the floor. Napkins and receipts covered in script were pinned to the walls. Notes and musings and lyrics decorated her grayscale rooms.
She’d borrowed a neighbor’s red pen, but the ink simply dried black as she wrote.
But she wrote.
Wrote anything and everything, then tossed it aside, scrambled for another available surface, and wrote some more.
He was surprised she hadn’t simply begun to write on the walls.
“Love what you’ve done with the place!” he quipped.
“I miss it,” she muttered, scribbling furiously on the inside pages of a black and white book. “I miss it so much.”
The book was released under the pen name “La Belle d'Noir”. The first printing sold out in two weeks, the black and white cover in the hands of every Hellish literary critic and damned book lover in Lucifer’s domain.
Then the second printing sold out in one week and the book was in the hands of every wannabe fiction-enthusiast in the top four layers of Hell.
“I must say,” he admitted, licking his index finger and turning the page, “you really are one Hell of a writer.”
“It’s just words,” she said, draped across the sofa with her Abyss-black hair tossed over the arm. “It’s not about the writing, it’s about what you put into it.”
“And what’s that?”
She closed her eyes and a black inky tear ran down her face. “Everything.”
“It’s mine,” he told her. “And I want it back! You can’t keep it!”
She buried her face in the red blanket and looked at herself wrapped in it in the mirror.
“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” she laughed, rearranging the blanket like a dress. “If only you had a dress you’d never let me have. I’d never forgive you for keeping it from me.”
“Ha! Time’s up!” He snapped his fingers and the blanket appeared folded back on his arm.
There was no speaking to her when she wrote.
Her eyes turned black, her skin cracked, her hair turned to wires.
Her hands were stained with ink. It coated her fingertips and splattered up her arms. It dripped from her eyes and leaked from her mouth and ears as if her frantic writing was not getting her ideas out of her fast enough.
“Writing another bestseller, dear?” He had to bend down to see her face from where she sat hunched on the floor.
She did not even acknowledge him, just muttered, “I miss it. I miss it so much,” over and over and over.
“Fair enough!” he chirped and left her alone.
Critics raved and reviewed. Black and white colors were flying off the shelf. And after exclusive interviews with La Belle d'Noir herself, black and white began to dress all kinds of fans on the streets as a sort of cult following bloomed.
“Why do they choose to wear that?” she sighed, picking at the black and white plaid of her skirt. “This whole afterlife of color and flamboyance and sin and they choose to be muted and dull and gray.”
“Dear, there is nothing dull about you,” he patted her shoulder. “You know, imitation is the highest form of flattery!”
“This is Hell, Alastor,” she told him as if he didn’t already know. “There’s nothing flattering about being damned.”
Curiously, the red of the dress faded in streaks, as if uncertain whether or not this counted.
“I see I’m going to be needing that back sooner, rather than later,” he mused, tapping one claw to his chin. “Too bad, I was almost going to let you borrow it.”
At his words, another blotch of gray paused and then retreated an inch from its determined path to the hem.
She clutched the fabric of the skirt in stained, fisted hands and gritted her teeth against the black welling up in her eyes.
“It’s beautiful,” she lamented with a whisper. One off-the-shoulder sleeve blackened as she spoke. “ Almost beautiful.”
“Ah, the most devastating word in the English language,” Alastor agreed, moving to untie the back of the dress. “ Almost. ”
It had been weeks, this time, and her bones were becoming countable through the sheer sheets of her skin.
She coughed and black covered her palms and with ink dripping from her claws, she tore through paper like it was nothing.
He wasn’t sure how anything made it past her intact and covered in drying prose, but stacks of paper filled her home, the air smelled of fresh printing and nostalgia.
“You know, you look rather dangerous when you’re like this,” he commented as he flipped through an unrevised chapter of her work.
Her head snapped up and she snarled.
He smiled gruesomely in response and she returned to her “work” with a satisfied murmur of, “I miss it.”
It was dubbed her best work yet, and now all of Hell had at least one of her novels in their homes. It was like some kind of unholy recreation of a bible, Demons and Sinners and Imps and all the lowly hell-spawned Bastards got a hold of her words.
“What is the secret to your success?” the news anchor all but sneered at her. “Where do you get all your inspiration from?”
“It’s just words,” she said with a painted smile that made him proud. “There is no inspiration in Hell, just the desperate souls of the damned.”
She smelled the red roses but refused to touch them, in awe of their vibrance in her black and white dwelling.
“Beautiful,” she whispered as if afraid admiring them would rid them of their beauty.
“And not for you,” he reminded her and the color that filled the flowers. “Nifty deserves something nice for all her hard work.”
“You’re very kind to her,” she said, closing her stained black eyelids to enjoy the scent of the roses. “Such sentiments don’t belong in Hell.”
“I remember a little.”
“Oh? Do tell!”
“It was me.”
“Well, I figured as much!”
She sighed and looked out at the city, her thick black hair dancing around her face in the scorching breeze.
“I gave everything I had. I put everything I was into my work. It was never enough for them. It was never enough for her. My mother was . . . sick. Mad. Crazy. Whichever you prefer. She started poisoning my ink so that little by little, over time, I got sick.
“She may have killed me, but she’s not why I’m here.”
“No?”
“No. It’s because I put my soul into those words.” The black around her eyes glimmered. “And there was no one willing to put it back.”
It was only getting worse.
The black had stained past her elbows and the floor was slippery with ink. She choked on it as it filled her lungs and throat, her hands moving on paper so dizzyingly fast no mortal could have seen them moving at all.
He clicked his tongue and danced out of the way of a sheet of paper thrown so violently and precisely that its corner embedded into the door and became stuck.
“You know, if you keep this up, there’ll be nothing left of you for the Angels to Exterminate,” he chastised the monster in the corner.
It no longer cared to snarl at him, it just shifted to one side and glared. Ink filled its eyes and poured out of its mouth and its breath came in great heaving gargles.
“ Miss it! Miss it! ” it growled around a mouthful of black.
“I don’t have it,” he said, his patience wearing thin. “This is Hell, my dear. If you were expecting to gain back your soul here, then you are nothing but a fool.”
It howled at him and his static howled back.
She feebly wiped ink from her mouth.
“I’m sorry,” she rasped, her throat raw. “I don’t understand how it happens, but I can’t just stop writing. It’s the only thing here that takes away the suffering.”
“It’s ruining you,” he said cheerfully, brushing rubble off of his coat. “If you don’t stop, you’ll use up what’s left of the soul you came here with.”
“If I stop,” she clutched the pages of the fourth book in black-stained claws, “I’ll give up what’s left of it myself.”
She was a blot of monochrome, but scarcely out of place in the gothic tones of his home. Even so, she kept to herself, scarcely breathing at all and stepping so lightly she might have been navigating a nuclear minefield.
“You can’t steal any of the color in here, dear, I own this little corner of hell and everything in it!” he reminded her, hanging his coat on the coat rack.
“I know, I know,” she waved a hand pathetically and admired the fresh bouquet of flowers on the entry table. “I just can’t help it, I don’t want to ruin your things.”
“You can’t ruin my things, they’re mine,” he reiterated and grabbed her hand. “The only things you ruin are your own.”
She wasn’t quite familiar with his kind of dancing, but she was a fast learner.
“Why do you do this?” she asked as he twirled her around and pulled her back towards him. Not even his power could dress her in color, but she looked nice all the same in the clothes he’d chosen.
“Do what, dance?” he chuckled and gave her a little toss in the air. “I was bored, my dear! It’s simply a way to pass the time.”
“Why do you show me such kindness?” she insisted, an exasperated smile splitting her black lips despite her earnestness. “I’m just another Sinner among millions in Hell, there’s nothing special about me.”
“Ha! You’re only partially correct. See, most people sell their souls to people like me or one of the Lords of Hell. You, you tricky little thing, managed to sell yours to a dream!”
She frowned and avoided his eyes and the music came to a scratching stop.
“What is it, my dear? Cat got your tongue?”
“So . . . It’s a sin to want to touch people’s hearts with your words?”
“Huh,” he tilted his head as he pondered. “If I was a betting man, I’d bet that it’s because you devoted too much to that and not enough to the Big Man Upstairs.”
She nodded glumly and looked on at her stained black hands. “I miss it—”
“Ah, ah, ah,” he snatched up her hands. “Now, now, dear, shall we find something else to occupy us?”
Her voice was clear and passionate. She read every word with the same emotion that she lived with.
The whole room held its breath while she read the final pages, and when she closed the black and white book, the audience leapt up and cheered.
She smiled and took a bow. Flowers and undergarments and other trivial prizes of the like were thrown onto the stage. As soon as they were willingly given up to her possession, they turned to monochrome in the air.
La Belle d’Noir caught a black rose in the air and admired it ruefully.
The curtain closed and he approached her with a grin. “You did absolutely marvelous! Bravo, bravo!”
She curtsied just for him and clutched the blackened flower to her chest, leaving her book on the seat behind her. “Thank you,” she smiled, but there was a hollowed-out look in her eyes. “I need to do another.”
He sighed and shook his head. “Need or want, dear? There is a difference!”
“Need,” she insisted. “If I don’t write, I’m going to lose my mind!”
“Then lose it,” he laughed, static popping clicking in the air. “It’s Hell, ma belle. You don’t stay alive here by being sane.”
“Look at this, Alastor!” She held the rose in front of him. “It’s all colorless. All meaningless. That,” she pointed at the crowd beyond the curtain, still cheering and whooping and celebrating with vile profanities, “that is what I gave up my soul for in the first place. It’s the only thing that makes me feel alive again!”
He bristled and the shadows swelled up around him. “You had your chance to live and you wasted it chasing dreams. I told you already, you’re in Hell now. And unless you want to end up Nowhere, it’s in your best interests to abstain from this nonsense. ”
“Why do you care?” she demanded, the shadows and static droned, but she was not afraid. She never had been. “You are one of the most powerful Sinners in hell! By all accounts, you’re an Overlord to these damned souls. Why does it matter what I do with my afterlife?”
The shadows retreated and the feedback died down in an instant. He adjusted his bowtie and turned around. “It doesn’t!”
“Critics are losing their minds over La Belle d’Noir’s latest book! Copies are flying off the shelves faster than tickets to Angel Dust’s new adult film, released in theaters this Saturday. Everyone is too busy at home reading to watch it!
“No one knows how she keeps topping the charts and knocking her own books off of the bestseller’s top five. Where does she get her inspiration from? How is she writing these books so fast? And what is her relation to the infamous Radio Demon?
“All this and more at ten on 666 News.”
“Hmm, they really are getting better,” he noted, finishing the fifth book and glancing at her.
She was motionless in her black and white bed, pillows stained black with inky splotches. She had been watching him while he read it with tired intent. “Thank you,” she said quietly, her throat sore and scratchy.
The building shuddered as something landed on top of it before taking off again. Something was thrown against her bedroom window and both of them glanced at the boards nailed over them.
“Why, you’re welcome, of course! Now, what shall we do? Do you feel up to dancing?”
Outside, somebody screamed.
She rose shakily from bed.
“Might as well,” she leaned against him immediately, barely able to hold herself up. “What better to do in the face of the annual genocidal massacre?”
“My thoughts exactly!”
When the Angels left, the Sinners emerged. The streets were painted with gore, buildings and vehicles and streets were destroyed.
“You know, there’s something . . . beautiful about the day after,” she whispered, for his ears only. She admired their silent world stained red. They had to walk around the corpse of a dead demon child and she closed her eyes against anything else. “Almost beautiful,” she amended.
The static distortion of his voice wavered.
“Almost,” he agreed.
“You’ll just have to borrow this too,” he said indignantly. “And that, and that, and that—”
“Are you sure?” she asked, comically trying to cover up the gray blush of her tear-stained white cheeks. He was sure that she got more and more beautiful with every ounce of her soul she wrote away and was a little envious of it. He wrapped one of his red robes around her and she slipped her feet into soft red slippers. “I don’t want to—”
“Nonsense, dear! These are all things of mine I’ve had for a while. Nobody uses them but me! There’s no possible way they could be yours!”
The colors did not fade. The color-sapping curse that plagued her seemed apt to hold her to the letter of its law. Nothing of hers, nor anything acquired to lend with her in mind, was off-limits. These things of his were things he’d bought for himself and he still had every intention of continuing to use them for himself afterward.
She finally let herself smile and she danced around in the ill-fitting robe and slippers as if she was in a full gown and heels, grinning at the color in the mirror and then turning that grin on him.
“You spoil me!” she laughed and she threw her arms around him. “How can I repay you?”
He petted the soft black of her long hair. He glanced at his signed, first edition collection of her books on his bookshelf. She hugged him tightly and he sighed. “Why, you could stand to dedicate your next book to me! I am, after all, the one who has known you the longest.”
“Alastor.”
“Hmm. Yes, dear?”
“I think I can only do one more.”
He felt his smile turn strained. “Oh? Why’s that.”
She closed the pages of the bright blue and green book she’d borrowed from him so she could look at him. He did not put down his own book, however.
“Because I don’t think I have much else left in me, and I need to tell a story that’s my best yet.”
“Want or need?” he asked her again, refusing to meet her eyes.
“Need,” she said, as always. “It’s my life I need to tell. It’s my heart I have to leave behind. All that’s left is my heart.”
“And, must you give that up to them all too?” he only barely managed to make it sound jovial, but he couldn’t have stopped the words themselves if he’d tried.
“It was never for them,” she was trying earnestly to meet his eyes. “It was for me. I understand that now. It was never about them. That’s my sin.”
He couldn’t help himself anymore, he snapped the book shut and turned to her, taking her face in his claws. “Ma belle, listen to me because I don’t like to repeat myself, so I’ll only say this once:
“You don’t belong here. You never did. Your only sin was being born to your crazy mother, and even that wasn’t your choice. She is the one who is supposed to be here suffering, not you. But she gave you up at birth for a swift end when she got here, and you’ve been damned ever since.”
She bit her lip with the sharp needles of her teeth and took a deep breath. “Were you the one who made the deal?”
“Yes,” he grinned with all the Hell that had corrupted his soul. “I’m the one who dragged you down to Hell.”
He could not read her expression and an unpleasant thrill ran through him as she reached up a hand and touched his cheek.
“That’s why,” she murmured, brushing some hair out of his eyes. The contact made him shiver. “After all this time.”
“No,” he let go of her and picked up his book again. Her hand dropped back into her lap. “Yes. Not anymore.”
“Imagine if there was a way to redeem yourself here,” she mused, head in his lap, letting him drag his claws through the smooth black ink of her hair. “If you had the chance to go to Heaven, would you take it?”
“Well that’s a silly idea,” he scoffed. “Can you imagine Demons in Heaven?”
“No, not Demons. Just mortal souls turned from Sinner to Saint. If it was possible, would you do it?”
He laughed and the audience track joined him. She pouted and made as if to sit up and away from him. “Now hold on just a minute! Let me think, dear.” She settled back down but crossed her arms and waited expectantly. “Hmmm. You know, I don’t think I would! What is there for me in Heaven that I don’t already have here? I have everything I could ever want here, and more. There’s always something more I can take from someone else!”
She huffed and closed her eyes as he resumed combing her hair. “I don’t think that’s true. I think you’ve given up on your own humanity.”
“Ha! What a concept! I lost my humanity even before I died if the history books are to be believed!”
“That’s what I mean,” she insisted. “I think you’re afraid you’re too irredeemable to be saved. But,” she continued as he opened his mouth to deny her, “if you could be saved and then you did get saved, what would you do?”
“Frankly, dear, I’ve been a Sinner since I was conceived. I’d hardly know what to do with myself if all that lied before me was the straight and narrow!”
“One more, just one more.”
She had begun to make preparations to write, stocking up on paper and resting for days on end. He told her she could stay with him while she wrote it and with some sort of mournful smile, she’d accepted.
He watched her push the furniture of the room to one side and stack reams of paper against one wall. Her eyes were already damp and black and he doubted it would be much longer before she began.
“There!” she announced happily when the room was to her taste. “That should do it!”
“Splendid!” he rejoiced with her, the static of his voice more distorted than usual. Even to his own ears, it sounded like he was speaking on the radio from another room. “Now what?”
“We dance, of course,” she took his hand and led him out of the small sitting room she’d cleared for her purposes. She shut the door behind them and pulled him towards the guest room she’d been borrowing. “Just let me get into my dress.”
He paused outside her door, but she tugged him in with her.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked pleasantly, his confusion bringing his voice into a better focus.
“Changing,” she said. “But it ties up the back, I’m going to need some help.”
He’d politely averted his eyes as she pulled her work clothes off and slipped the black and white dress on, then she turned her bare, white skin to him so he could lace up the back.
He found his hands a little shaky as he started, but steadied them as he worked. The only sounds in the room were the electric hum of his existence and the soft breath of hers.
When the dress had been sufficiently tied, she turned to face him and he found himself unable to keep smiling any longer.
She looked beautiful in the dress. It had been tailored specifically for her. It was the same one he had bought to try to keep for her, but the color was all gone now. She took his claws in the stained black of her own and drew him close to her.
“It’s just words, you know,” she whispered. “Just a book.”
“It’s not,” he growled, but his throat stung. “ It’s everything.”
Her glimmering black lips quirked up and she let go of his hands to rest on his shoulders. “Smile, my dear,” she urged him down to meet her. “You’re never fully dressed without one.”
When they kissed, the static turned into a distressed whine and black, inky tears leaked from her closed eyes.
Her flesh was dry and fractured by black inky fissures. Her eyes were filled with black and it spilled down her face in thick stripes. Her teeth were hidden behind mouthfuls of ink and there was no inch of her arms not blackened by it. She merely had to wave her dripping claws and words leaked into existence on the paper.
He stood in the corner and watched it all, not daring to speak or touch her or anything she wrote.
Every so often she had to pause to heave up lungfuls of suffocating black. She clutched at her throat and drowned in it and clawed at her chest.
When on such an occasion, she finally broke through her own skin, it was to his surprise that he saw her blood was crimson, the finest shade of murderous red he had ever seen.
Then and only just then did he whisper, “Beautiful.” Her blood joined the ink on her claws and the words on her pages became colored by it too.
“Almost beautiful. ”
After two weeks, it was finished and the room became quiet.
She lay in the middle of the chaos looking more radiant than he had ever seen her and barely breathing at all. So much of her skin had been stained that barely any white remained. In shiny black claws, she held the precious manuscript, bound by hand in a blood-red cover.
He knelt next to her and combed his claws through her hair which was softer than air and darker than sin. She sighed and opened her eyes weakly to meet his.
“Ah, there you are, ma belle.” He didn’t have it in him to say it enthusiastically. He settled for smiling without his teeth and she smiled at him so brightly his dead heart stuttered. “Are you happy with how it turned out?”
She nodded minutely and her arms began to shift. She could not bring the book off her chest, however, so he took it in one arm and snatched up one of her hands in the other.
“Good. Then let’s get you into bed, and I’ll send this to the publishers. After you rest, we’ll dance to celebrate. How does that sound?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. Her hand was icy and frigid. “Not- for- them. ” It sounded as though she had been gargling nails and when she spoke, a small drop of blood pebbled at the corner of her mouth.
“I know, I know,” he put the book aside and took her other hand too. “It’s for you.”
She shook her head again and the small bead of blood began to work its way down her cheek and to her hair. He brushed it away with his thumb before it could get that far and she rested her head in his palm.
“For- you. ” She winced as she spoke and fought to open her eyes again. “Only you.”
His smile dropped altogether. He glanced at the book again and gritted his teeth against the frustration rising in him rapidly. “I never wanted that. I always preferred—” His breath caught in his throat, but he gave himself a shake and forced the words out. “Only you,” he told her. “Always you.”
She smiled again and her teeth were stained red and black. “Smile? ”
His eyes stung and the air began to crackle and pop around him, the low hum of his presence turning to a high-pitched ringing. “I can’t, you fool. Not now.
“Why did you do this? I don’t want some fucking book, I only ever wanted you! And I told you! I told you what would happen, so why did you do this?”
“For you —”
“Bullshit!” he shouted. His voice was as clear as it had been when he was alive. Though the air around them was alive with radio noise, it no longer colored his voice. “Bull shit! If you’d cared to do anything for me, you would’ve stopped when I told you to!
“Why didn’t you stop? ”
Her smile grew steadily weaker and with a barely suppressed cry, he pulled her all the way into his arms.
“Only thing- I- had- to give,” she stuttered, her whole body cold and still, “w as- my- heart.”
“You didn’t have to give anything.”He pressed his hand against her face and black tears and red blood alike slowly began to gather where their skin met. “Not a damn thing.”
She sighed and panic coursed through him when she closed her eyes again. “Your- redemption . . . Not cheap. ”
“What?” he froze, his blood running cold as her skin.
She cracked her black lashes open, her smile turned soft and eyes gone dull. “Only for you,” she whispered. Then her smile fell entirely and a ragged breath left her lips without another to replace it.
“No. No, what do you mean? What did you do? Damn it, belle, what did you do? ”
His frantic words were met with nothing but his own loud static feedback and shadows overtaking the room.
Then a loud and thunderous noise split the air and a blinding light warped into existence above him.
Before him stood an Angel, but not one of those made solely to kill his kind.
Nevertheless, in an instant, his eyes went to dials, the space between them roared alive with ringing and static and electricity. The shadows overtook all but the Angel’s light.
“Now, now,” it said with a voice as sweet as honey. “Please, do not be afraid, Alastor. I am not here to do any harm.”
“Oh, I am not afraid,” Alastor growled, holding her tighter to his chest. “I am fucking furious. ”
The Angel bowed its head and pressed its palms together. “And you have every right,” it said. “But please, allow me to explain my presence.”
“You have one minute before I rip you limb from limb. Speak! ”
“She gave her heart so that you could choose.” The angel straightened and spread its hands in a nonconfrontational way. “Her soul was bound to hell and to you. We asked her if she wished to be free of this binding to join us in her rightful place, but she bargained to save you instead.”
The shadows retreated, the air went quiet. For the first time since he had arrived in hell, the Radio Demon was utterly, completely, and unequivocally silent.
Vaggie’s eyes were wide, one hand pressed over her mouth.
Then her eyes narrowed and she hissed, “But you said it wasn’t possible!”
Alastor took her distraction to finally steal away the prize and the instigator of the whole conversation from her iron grip. She was deceptively strong and exceptionally and irritatingly stubborn.
Those were the excuses he gave himself for why he told her anything, but a whisper of a voice in the back of his head insisted it was because of so much more than that. She didn’t deserve to be forgotten, left to the history of Hell as some fantastic author who disappeared after the Extermination. Someone deserved to know that she was better than every soul in Hell combined. That she was a Saint among the damned. Someone deserved to know other than him.
He deserved to be cursed for what he did.
“Wait,” Vaggie froze once again as he turned his back on her to replace the only copy of La Belle d’Noir’s sixth and final book back on his shelf. “If what you’re saying is true . . . Alastor.
“You said no.”
He stopped before sliding the book all the way onto the shelf. He pulled it back into his hands and opened to the dedication page.
Alastor:
I know you will not understand, but in time, I hope you can forgive me.
Please know that I never want to leave you. I would have stayed by your side until the end of time, if such a blessing was in our stars.
But it is clear to me that there is a greater redemption for you than I could ever give you while we still exist in this Hell. And I want you to know such a love as a lowly Sinner like me could never give you.
And so, this book, my life, my heart, and all that I am is for you.
You are my greatest love and nothing ever made me feel so alive as to dance with you under our beloved red sky.
“Almost,” he muttered, tracing the scarlet letters with his claws.
“What?” Vaggie asked, approaching him and staring with poorly concealed curiosity at the famous Belle’s book.
Alastor sighed and closed the book. He pressed its cover to his lips and replaced it, finally, on the shelf.
“I almost said yes,” he admitted, glancing out the window at the miserable red of the sky.
“But understand, dear, when I tell you that no redemption is worth the cost of the only one worth redeeming yourself for.”