Hellfire – Princess of Hell

The smell hit first. Burnt espresso and something underneath it, the ghost of steamed milk that the machine never quite cleaned out between shots. The particular staleness of a café that had been open since six in the morning and wasn’t planning to close until two.

I knew that smell.

I opened my eyes.

The table in front of me was small, round, the kind with a base that always wobbled unless you folded a napkin under one foot. Two white cups sat on it, steam curling from both. Behind the counter, the espresso machine hissed at nobody. The lighting was the same washed-out yellow I remembered, the kind that made everyone look slightly unwell.

This was Bennie’s. Or something wearing Bennie’s like a coat. The same cracked tile above the door frame, the same handwritten menu on the chalkboard with the letter S that always looked like a five. The same four tables, the same uncomfortable wooden chairs, the same arrangement of it all.

Except the door at the back, the one that had always led to the staff toilets, now had a padlock on it the size of a paperback. And outside the windows there was nothing. Not dark street, not passing cars, not the orange smear of London at night. Just black, the absolute and without texture kind, pressed flat against the glass.

My hands were on the table.

My hands. Liam’s hands. I turned them over and looked at them, and something in my chest did something complicated and quiet. I hadn’t realized how much I’d adjusted to the other ones until these felt foreign.

“Hello, Liam.”

She was sitting across from me.

Lily. The body I’d been living in for thirty days, now occupied by someone else, looking at me across two cups of terrible coffee with an expression I recognized from the inside. That particular stillness that wasn’t calm, it was just very good at looking like calm.

“What is this place?” My voice came out right. My voice.

She wrapped both hands around her cup and tilted her head, a small considering gesture. “Our favourite café.” A pause. “Well. Not favourite. The one we went to most. There’s a difference.” She took a sip, and something crossed her face. “Still tastes like they filtered it through a sock.”

I watched her set the cup down. “Are you the real Lily?”

She looked at me for a moment, then made a soft sound, not quite a laugh. “Why ask that when you already know the answer?”

I did know. I’d known the moment I looked at her properly. The real Lily, wherever she was, wouldn’t look at me like that. Like she knew every variable I was holding back.

“You’re me,” I said.

“Bingo.” She pointed at me with one finger, then lowered it. “Though I prefer to think of myself as the more interesting part. Better company. Better fashion sense.” She glanced down at herself. “Objectively.”

“Why do you look like that.” I meant it as a question but it didn’t quite come out as one.

She lifted one shoulder. “You tell me. You’re the one who decided this is what I look like.”

“I didn’t decide anything.”

“Didn’t you?” She leaned back in the chair and studied me the way I studied load-bearing calculations. Systematically. “Maybe part of you thinks of yourself as both, so we each get one. Maybe I look like this because I represent the instincts, the wants, and those got reshaped first and most thoroughly.” She tilted her head the other way. “Or maybe you just miss the face.”

“That’s not—”

“Pick your poison.” She turned toward the counter and raised her voice without straining. “Could we get the cheesecake? Two slices.” She looked back at me. “You still love the cheesecake. Don’t argue.”

“I’m not here to talk about cheesecake. Stop performing and answer me clearly.”

She didn’t look offended. She looked, if anything, slightly fond. “I’m not performing. You know that. Think about what I am for a second, what I actually am, and think about whether I’m capable of holding anything back from you.”

I thought about it. The back of my neck pricked.

She could only reflect what was already there. She couldn’t invent, couldn’t deceive, couldn’t know anything I didn’t know. Every word out of her mouth was a translation of something I already understood and hadn’t let myself articulate.

Which meant the cheesecake comment was genuine.

I pressed on. “Why did you bring me here?”

“I didn’t.” She folded her hands on the table. “Not directly. The body did, technically.” She paused. “The Parasite’s essence isn’t exactly compatible with us. Not in that volume. The body needed to process it somewhere quiet, so it put you somewhere quiet.”

I looked at her. “You said you can only tell me what I already know.”

“That’s correct.”

“Then how did you—”

Aria’s voice came through the wall. Not words, not yet, just the sound of her, the particular rhythm and pitch of it, muffled like she was shouting from another room, climbing up through the floor.

The cheesecake arrived on the table from nowhere. She looked at it with what I could only describe as genuine satisfaction.

“Wait,” I said.

She looked up at me, already beginning to blur at the edges, the café softening around her, the walls losing their specificity, the smell of burnt espresso thinning.

“Wait, I need to—”

She smiled at me across the table, warm and unhurried, the smile of someone who knew exactly how much time we had left and wasn’t worried about it.

“Good luck,” she said.

The yellow light went out.

The smell of concrete dust came in, and the distant hum of London infrastructure, and the specific ache of a body that had spent itself to the last drop, and Aria’s voice resolving into actual words above me, urgent and close.

* * *

Every muscle from my shoulders to my calves felt wrung out, the kind of deep-fibre ache that only came from lifting something you had no business lifting. I lay still for a moment, cataloguing it. Thirty days in this body and it had never once complained. Now it was complaining comprehensively.

The ceiling of the dorm resolved above me. Crystal fixtures. Stone. The faint crimson light that passed for night in Gehenna filtering through the windows.

Aria’s face appeared in my field of vision, close enough that I could see the crease between her brows, the careful way she was holding herself to keep her shoulder from protesting.

“Oh good,” she said. “You’re not dead.”

“Mmm.” I tried to remember dreaming something. There was an impression of it, warm light and coffee and something important, but when I reached for the details my fingers closed on nothing. I let it go. “How long was I out?”

“Two hours.” Isabella’s voice came from somewhere to my left, measured and even. “Give or take.”

Two hours. I tested my arms, pushed myself partway upright, and my spine registered an opinion. I ignored it.

“You’re stupid,” Aria said.

I looked at her. “That’s what I get for waking up?”

“That’s what you get for being mortal-level stupid.” She sat back on her heels, and the careful way she angled her shoulder told me it still wasn’t right. “You just collapsed. On the floor. Demons don’t just collapse, Lily, that’s a mortal thing, that’s a—” She made a gesture with her good arm that encompassed the general concept of unacceptable. “We didn’t know if you were going to wake up.”

“Whatever you did to that creature,” Isabella said, “it was reckless.”

“I know.” I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum, feeling the deep-empty quality the siphoning had left behind. “What actually happened? After it hit Aria, I remember—” I paused. Anger. Then nothing. “I remember being angry.”

Aria’s expression shifted into something caught between excitement and the studied disapproval she’d been performing since I opened my eyes. The disapproval lost.

“Okay so your skin went red, horns caught fire, claws came out, and then you just—” She mimed an explosion with her fingers, winced as the shoulder moved. “—absolutely destroyed it. Picked it up and threw it into the wall twice. Drained it like it was nothing. Then you sealed the rift. It was genuinely awesome.”

Isabella looked at her.

“Awesome,” Aria amended, without much contrition, “but extremely reckless. Also.” She pointed at me. “Your glamour dropped.”

I went still. “What?”

Isabella tilted her head fractionally toward my shoulders. I didn’t need to look. I could feel them, the weight and span of them, folded at my back. My hands came up before I could stop them, fingertips finding my horns, finding the smooth full arc of them.

Not the glamour’s careful, diminished version of them.

Mine.

I pulled the glamour back into place with more haste than elegance and sat there for a moment looking at the far wall.

“I won’t say anything,” Aria said. “About the whole…” She waved a hand vaguely. “Pureblood situation. Obviously. I’m not going to go around telling people. Unless you start acting like Valentina, in which case I’m selling every detail to the highest bidder.”

Something in my chest unknotted by a fraction. “I won’t.”

“Good.” She paused. “But I do need you to know that I was this close to bowing. It was a near thing.”

“Don’t you dare.”

She grinned. “Fine, fine. Lily it is. Same as always.” She tilted her head. “Your acting was really good, though. I genuinely thought you were newly turned. The whole struggling-with-instincts bit, the common-sense gaps…” She looked almost admiring. “Very convincing.”

Except it wasn’t acting.

I kept my face neutral.

“So,” Aria continued, settling in, “what was the red skin thing? Can you just do that whenever you want now, or—”

“I genuinely don’t know. I don’t remember doing it. If I could remember I’d tell you more.” I looked across at Isabella. “Do you know what it was?”

She was quiet for a moment, choosing the words. “Purebloods can achieve something called an awakened state. It burns stored essence rapidly in exchange for a temporary amplification of strength and magic. My mother described it to me. Demonstrated it, once.” A pause. “What you did was not that. It was too complete. Too stable.” Her ice-blue eyes held mine. “It looked like what happens when a Lilim awakens.”

The room was quiet.

Aria frowned. “A Lilim? But those are daughters of Lil—” She stopped. Her mouth stayed open.

I exhaled slowly. There were about four different ways to navigate this moment, and I’d run the calculation on all of them before Aria had finished the sentence, and every path led to the same place.

“The reason why it looked like like Lilim’s awakening was probably,” I said, “because I am one.”

Two pairs of eyes.

“My real name—” or at least the name that belongs to this body, “—is Lilithiel Morningstar. Lucifer and Lilith are my parents.”

* * *

Aria went completely still. Her eyes tracked back and forth between Isabella and me, and her mouth worked for a moment without producing sound.

“Wait.” She held up her good hand. “Wait wait wait. Back then—when they came to the dorm. That was. Those were…”

I nodded.

The colour drained from her face. “Oh fuck. Oh fuck. I told the Queen of Hell that I made sure her daughter was eating properly and I—” She pressed both hands to her face, winced as the shoulder protested. “I was joking about—oh no, I made that comment about the clothes—”

“Aria.”

“—and I was sitting right there on the bed like some kind of—”

“Aria, it’s fine. They liked you.”

She peeked through her fingers. “Are you sure?”

“Mother said you were doing a good job watching over me. You passed inspection.”

Isabella’s voice cut through cleanly. “So. Princess Lilithiel Morningstar.”

I looked at her. Her expression hadn’t changed, the same careful neutrality she’d worn throughout this entire conversation. No shock, no deference, just that calculating attention I’d learned to read as interest.

“Yes.” I exhaled slowly. “But please. Don’t call me Princess. Just Lily. I’m still—” I gestured between the three of us. “Still the same person. Still your friend. Succubus, Lilim, whatever. Nothing’s actually changed.”

Isabella inclined her head fractionally. “Understood.”

I waited. The silence stretched. She just sat there, hands folded in her lap, watching me with those ice-blue eyes.

“That’s it?” I said finally. “No questions? No… anything?”

“Should there be?”

“Most people have questions when they find out someone’s royalty.”

“You’ll tell me what’s relevant when it becomes relevant.” She paused. “Though if you want a question: if you’re Lilithiel, wouldn’t that make you forty-eight years old?”

Of course that was the angle she’d take. Pure Isabella.

“Technically, yes.” I rubbed at my temples. “But I was comatose for thirty years. So functionally I’m eighteen.” And more technically I’m twenty-six, but we’re not going there.

Isabella nodded once, accepting the answer the same way she’d accept a theorem proof or a contract clause. Efficient. Practical. No wasted motion.

From the corner, Aria made a sound like a kettle releasing pressure.

We both turned.

She’d lowered her hands. The panic had mostly cleared from her expression, replaced by something I couldn’t quite parse. She looked at me for a long moment.

“Lily,” she said carefully. “I can still call you that, right?”

“Like I just said. Don’t treat me any differently.”

The words came out automatically. I heard them land and felt something shift in my chest, an awareness of contradiction. I was trying to leave Hell. Had been planning my exit since the moment I woke up in this body. Yet here I was, insisting to both Isabella and Aria that I was their friend, that nothing had changed between us.

The cognitive dissonance sat there, unresolved.

Aria’s grin broke across her face like sunrise. “Good. Because Lilithiel is a complete mouthful. Or Princess Lilithiel.” She tested the word on her tongue, drawing it out. “Princess. Huh. That sounds kind of nice actually.”

“Please don’t call me that.”

“I’ll think about it.” Her grin widened. “Princess.”

I sighed.

“Still.” She shifted her weight, settling in properly now that the crisis had passed. “I can’t believe that joke I made—the one about you being a princess—actually turned out to be true. What are the odds?”

“Astronomical.”

“Right?” She laughed, then stopped abruptly. Her eyes went wide. “Oh. Oh no. Valentina.”

Isabella’s eyebrow raised a fraction.

“Valentina threatened an actual princess.” Aria’s voice climbed with delight. “She threatened the daughter of Lucifer and Lilith. Can you imagine her face when she finds out? She could’ve singlehandedly destroyed her entire house.”

The mental image was admittedly satisfying. Valentina’s carefully constructed superiority crumbling as she realized exactly how badly she’d miscalculated. The desperate scrambling, the terror.

I let myself smile. “We’re not telling her.”

“What? But—”

“No.”

Aria threw her good arm up in exaggerated disappointment. “You’re no fun, Princess.”

* * *

The ceiling came into focus first, then Aria’s face six inches below it.

“Rise and shine, Princess.”

I pulled the pillow over my head.

“Nope.” She peeled it back with cheerful efficiency. “We’re going to be late.”

The room held the particular quality of morning light that meant too early and unavoidable. I sat up, rolled my shoulders, and waited for the familiar catalogue of aches from the tunnel fight.

Nothing. The body had processed everything overnight, knitted itself back to baseline while I slept. Thirty-one days and I still hadn’t fully adjusted to how quickly it recovered.

Aria was already half-dressed, corset laces trailing, watching me stretch with her chin propped on one hand.

“You look disgustingly good for someone who passed out cold less than twelve hours ago.”

“I told you not to call me that.”

“Call you what?” She blinked, the picture of innocence.

“Princess.”

“Oh.” She grinned. “It’s funny, though.”

“It isn’t.”

“It really is.” She straightened, smoothing the fabric along her thigh. “Come on. Shower. Move.”

I gave her a flat look. She gave me a wider grin. Neither position shifted.

The bathroom took ten minutes between us, the shower running hot, steam gathering against the stone ceiling. Aria hummed something tuneless and off-key while I worked conditioner through white hair that was already longer than I knew what to do with. No particular thoughts. Just routine, and the body going through the motions with the loose efficiency I’d stopped questioning two weeks ago.

I didn’t fight it anymore. That was the simplest way to describe the last month. I’d stopped fighting.

We were out the door and into the corridor before the thought finished assembling itself.

The hallways were already populated, students moving in clusters toward the main building. I kept pace, watching the foot traffic, and let the question I’d been avoiding surface properly.

The body had acted without me. Or, more precisely, it had acted without the part of me that kept notes.

Was that? Simple unconsciousness producing the missing window? Or had something else been behind the controls?

Something passed in front of my face.

Aria’s hand, waving slowly back and forth at eye level. “Hell to Lily. Anyone in there?”

I refocused. She’d stopped walking. We were standing in the middle of the corridor and a pair of second-years split around us without comment.

“Sorry.” I straightened. “What?”

She dropped her hand to her hip. “I was asking you something.” The pout was brief but pointed. “You completely zoned out.”

“I know. Ask again.”

She made a face, lower lip pushed out. “You’re lucky you’re pretty.” She hip-checked me lightly. “I said, what do you think the alchemy field trip is actually going to be? Like, are we leaving Hell? Going to another layer?”

I turned it over briefly. The Academy’s transport budget, the logistics of moving a cohort of students through dimensional gates, the cost per passage.

“Asphodel, probably,” I said. “Gate travel is expensive even at institutional rates. They’re not burning that budget on a single class section.”

Aria considered this, nose wrinkling. “The one with the carnivorous trees?”

“The very same.”

She was quiet for two steps, then made a small sound. “Hm.”

I glanced down the corridor toward the main stairwell. “Hurry up. Isabella’s probably already there.”

* * *

Isabella had her cauldron at a precise simmer before Aria had even located her mortar and pestle.

I watched her calibrate the ember stone with two taps, adjust the heat by some internal measure I couldn’t quantify, and set her alembic at the exact angle the textbook diagram recommended. No hesitation between steps. The whole sequence took under a minute.

Aria, meanwhile, had found her pestle and was grinding dried nightshade petals with what looked like no particular technique at all, her weight shifting slightly to some internal rhythm, her tail curling and uncurling against the stool leg. She wasn’t watching what she was doing. She was looking at the girl two stations over.

The petals came out perfect. Even consistency, no clumping. I could see the faint luminescence that meant the essence was releasing cleanly.

I turned back to my own station.

The reagent in front of me was a cluster of pale blue lichen, sourced from Niflheim according to the cabinet label. Conceptual yield: endurance. Handle with measured saturation. I’d read the entry three times before class. I pressed mana into the first fragment carefully, feeling for the moment the resistance thinned.

It thinned too quickly. I pulled back a fraction late, and the extract clouded.

Not ruined. Just muddy. I set it aside and started the second fragment.

“Here.” Isabella reached across without looking up from her own work and adjusted the angle of my ventilation hood two degrees. The fumes dispersed more efficiently immediately.

I hadn’t asked. She’d simply noticed.

“Thanks.”

She didn’t respond. Already back to her own extraction, fingers moving with the same measured economy she brought to everything.

The session continued. My third attempt at the lichen came out cleaner, and the stabilization into the carrier oil held without separating, which was the actual goal for today’s practical. Functional. Passing. I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

By the time Professor Auriel called time and moved to the front of the dais, I had three viable samples and one cloudy reject. Aria had six, all of them glowing with the particular steadiness that meant clean binding. She’d apparently started a second reagent entirely out of boredom somewhere in the last half hour. I hadn’t noticed when.

The class settled. Someone near the back was still scraping a cauldron.

“You’ll have seen the upcoming schedule notation,” Auriel said. She kept her hands at her sides, the braid falling straight down her back. “Before you construct expectations I’ll have to dismantle: no, we will not be visiting a mortal realm.”

The scraping stopped. Several people made sounds.

Auriel waited. The sounds subsided.

“First-year groups do not generate sufficient academic return to justify the gate expenditure for cross-dimensional travel.” She moved to the blackboard and wrote a single word. Asphodel. “We will, however, be leaving Gehenna. Next Mournday.”

Aria’s elbow found my ribs, light and precise.

“Seems you were right,” she murmured, quiet enough that only I caught it.

I said nothing.

Auriel continued. “You will receive individual group reagent lists upon arrival. I’ve structured it this way deliberately. Purchasing ingredients in advance defeats the purpose of fieldwork entirely.” A brief pause. “Asphodel’s environmental conditions are not hazardous to demonkind, but they require attentiveness. I expect you to arrive prepared.”

She set down the chalk.

“That concludes today’s session. You’re dismissed.”

Stools scraped back across stone. The room filled with voices immediately, conversation breaking loose in all directions. I began capping my sample vials, lining them up on the basalt surface.

The tension I’d been half-aware of all session was still there, sitting between the three of us at the workstation like a fourth person none of us were acknowledging.

* * *

The vials went into my ring one by one. Aria was already at the door, phone out, jabbing at the screen with two fingers the way she’d been doing since London.

“It’s not working again,” she announced to the corridor at large. “It keeps doing the black thing.”

“Crashing,” I said, shouldering my bag.

“It crashes, yes. Constantly.” She held it up as evidence. “It was fine yesterday.”

Isabella fell into step beside me without comment, her samples already stored, hands free.

“It’s the temperature,” I said.

Aria lowered the phone and looked at me. “What?”

“The ambient heat. Phones aren’t designed to operate here.” I did the rough arithmetic in my head. The building alone ran hot by mortal standards, ambient mana adding another layer on top of whatever the natural Gehenna baseline was doing. “We’re probably sitting at seventy Celsius in here on a mild day. The components aren’t rated for that.”

“Seventy is not that warm.”

“For a mortal it’s lethal.”

Aria opened her mouth, then closed it. She looked at the phone again with the particular expression she reserved for things that had personally offended her.

“You should put it in my ring,” I said. “Or Isabella’s, so it won’t degrade further. If you keep carrying it around out here it’ll swell and then it’ll vent, and that’s going to be a problem for whoever’s standing closest.”

“It’ll explode?”

“Eventually. Yes.”

She handed it over immediately, which said something about her priorities. I stored it alongside mine, both of them suspended in the ring’s stillness until we were somewhere they could actually function.

“Why,” Aria said, in a tone that suggested she was working through something genuinely troubling, “would mortals build something that breaks when it gets a little warm.”

“Their a little warm and yours aren’t the same measurement.”

“Evidently.” She resumed walking, hands now empty and apparently unsure what to do with themselves. “Still seems like a design flaw.”

We came out through the building’s main doors into the corridor that ran along the northern face of the academy grounds. The air moved differently here, drawing heat from the volcanic stone in slow, rolling currents. Aria immediately fell into her natural pace, which was two degrees off perpendicular and involved her hips doing something that still registered in my peripheral vision as a structural engineering problem.

Isabella spoke without preamble.

“Are you planning to return to the mortal realm this weekend.”

It wasn’t quite a question.

“Charles said he’d bring us back,” I said. “So yes.”

A beat of measured silence. The kind Isabella deployed when she was lining up the actual point.

“And you know how to construct a circle that would allow them to summon us specifically.” She said it as a statement, but the pause after it wasn’t.

I ran through what I actually had. The generalist circle I’d built assumed any summoner pulling from it wanted a succubus, generic anchor points, broad parameters. Getting Charles to invoke us by name required something layered, something that embedded our specific resonance into the geometry so that the invocation locked rather than drifted.

“No,” I said. “Not yet.”

Aria made a sound of theatrical despair. “Isabella.”

“She would have gone to the library regardless.”

“Yes, but now she has a reason and I can’t argue with it.” Aria spread her hands. “Before, I could’ve said Lily, the books will still be there tomorrow, come with me instead. Now you’ve handed her an actual excuse and she’ll be insufferable about it.”

“You could still say that,” I pointed out.

“It won’t work anymore.” Aria fell back into step, her shoulder bumping mine. “She’ll just look at me with those eyes and say but Aria, summoning circles and I’ll lose.”

The main building doors opened ahead of us, and the three of us walked through.