Page 16 of Angel I Am Not

“Not sure how you ever got that idea.”

“You’re the Prince of Darkness. You literally introduced yourself like that.” Raphael tugged at my hand under the table but if they thought I was just going to roll over and bow down to yet another angel—fallen or not—that thought they owned me, they all had another thing coming.

“I did.” Dante leaned back, rubbing his fingers along his chin. “I see how that could be misconstrued. One of my gifts, or should I say curses, is that I can’t lie. It’s not in my nature. I truly do need you to check on my creations and see that they’re doing alright.”

I knew the bastard was hiding something from me but getting information from him was like pulling teeth. The longer I sat here, the longer I’d get nothing. My frustration was growing. “That’s what you want in return for my soul?” This didn’t even make any sense. Dante couldn’t even watch over his own demons? That sounded suspicious as hell. “Fine, when’s babysitting starting?” It couldn’t be too hard unless they had fire powers or I had to go to hell to do it.

Silence filtered between us, Raphael frozen beside me. He seemed a lot more worried about Dante’s intentions than I had thought he would be, which worried me as well. I waited for Dante to elaborate, watching him hide the hint of a smile, his shoulders shaking with silent laughter.

“Sweet girl, my creations aren’t in need of daycare. Just a little bit of guidance. Purity, to be exact.”

And now I was even more confused. Of all the possible angels that Dante could have gotten in this deal, he had chosen the least pure of them all. If his demons needed purity…

“Wait, why do they need guidance? Aren’t they already in training? You just said I had to check them out and report back to you that they were able to use their gifts. How am I supposed to know whether their gifts are strong enough? Can’t you just do the same thing you’ve done with the other… uh… hellions.”

Dante barked out a laugh. “We do not call them hellions, although I quite like the term now that you’ve said it. Sweet girl, we don’t have training camps like heaven does. That’s so… barbaric. Their entire learning experience is on earth including their practicals, to learn, to adapt, to figure out their gifts. What better training ground than the one they are going to utilize when they graduate to full status?”

The pure horror that flooded through me at the thought of hellions running around earth…

“And,” he continued, “they are given guides to ensure that they do not disrupt the balance of the realms. Not too much, anyway. Raphael, she looks like this is the first time she has ever heard of this! I might need to break my vow of avoiding dear old dad and ask him what’s been going on upstairs.”

“Without a gift, she was unable to pass her lessons,” Raphael pushed out.

I growled at him. “But I read the goddamn literature and they never taught that.”

Dante snorted. “So, I have a little rebel on my hands?”

Just hearing the word rebel used to describe me made my insides squirm. It felt good. Especially when he said it. Still, I wanted to correct the record. “Uriel fighting God kind of made everyone hate me.”

“So you would have been passing your lessons if everything with Uriel hadn’t happened?”

I thought about it for a minute and realized that I had been using my creator as an excuse. “Yeah, no.”

I could feel Raphael’s disappointment by my side but if Dante was going to be my new mentor, what Raphael believed didn’t matter anymore. Especially not when what Dante was saying was the truth.

“Wonderful. As I was saying, our creations have mentors as well. It’s just that mine are a little more… rambunctious than the rest. They need a different kind of push. They need a little piece of heaven. And I’m busy.”

There was that nontruth again. It wasn’t a complete lie because I’m sure the Devil had things to do but too busy to check in on his own mentees? Impossible. This meant that while Dante couldn’t lie, he could skirt the truth.

I hated the way he said that. It sounded ominous and I should have known that the price of my soul was much higher than babysitting some bratty little kids at a human daycare.

“They’re currently attending Forest Crystal Institute, well the first two are, just up the street a ways. I’ve already alerted them that their new guide is on her way. I’ve set up a room there for you and while I’ve told them to be on their best behavior, they are demons and they are the heirs to my throne should I choose to leave it.”

First off, they were grown men. Well… demons. Which was the second problem. I was babysitting demons. Like the nightmares I had grown up believing because we had been told from day one if we didn’t obey all the goddamn rules that demons were going to come get us. And he said that those were only two of them.

I had my suspicions about what he created, after all there were seven of them, but I decided not to push my luck.

I knew what seven demons usually meant. I was just really fucking hoping I was wrong.

Because here I was, promised to Dante, and being shoved into a task with literal nightmares as my quest. Not to mention that I would have to attend college—issue number three—and room with the fuckers—issue number four.

Dante seemed perfectly content to ignore every issue currently exploding inside my head while I tried to sort through them fast enough to keep up.

Raphael was positively furious beside me but there wasn’t much he could do. He had demanded that Dante give me some kind of path forward, and Dante had done exactly that. Unfortunately, none of us had bothered to specify that it needed to be a good one.

I stared at Dante, keen to get this over and done with.

“Should you work quickly, you might just be done within the week. And then I’ll set you free and you can mosey your ass right on back up to Heaven.”