Demon Contract

The door groaned shut behind them.

Chloe stepped out first, barefoot and blood-streaked, one arm braced against the tiled wall. The air outside the chamber was colder, but it clung to her skin like steam off old meat. Behind them, the red-lit room still pulsed faintly – low and rhythmic, like a thing not quite dead.

Alyssa followed, limping slightly. Her fists were still clenched, blood slicking her knuckles. She didn't speak. Just breathed, ragged, chest heaving under the wet cling of what used to be a silk harness. Tomas's blood, or someone else's, stained both of them from shoulder to shin.

They were naked.

And worse – violated.

Chloe's eyes swept the hall. A wall-mounted locker marked Overseer – Shift B gaped open, a cracked padlock dangling loose. Inside: two long coats, deep black with red trim. Slightly too big. One was missing a button. Good enough.

They didn't speak as they dressed.

Chloe slid into hers slowly, fingers trembling just once when she buttoned the cuffs. Alyssa grunted as she yanked hers into place, too tight across the shoulders. She winced but didn't complain.

Then they turned toward each other.

A moment passed. Long enough for the silence to crack.

Chloe's voice barely carried. "You alright?"

Alyssa didn't answer. Her eyes were locked on her hands – stained, trembling. She pressed them against her coat like she could rub the memory away, but the blood just smeared deeper. Her lips moved once. Then again. No sound.

"I can't stop shaking," she finally said. Not a confession. Just a fact.

Chloe stepped closer.

Alyssa kept talking, like the words had to come or she'd choke. "I counted them. All those arms. All those mouths. All those... parts. It wasn't even looking at me. Like I wasn't real. Just... something it could use."

Her jaw clenched. "I should've screamed. I wanted to. But I didn't want to give it that."

"You didn't," Chloe said. Her voice cracked. "You didn't give it anything."

Alyssa looked up. Her eyes were rimmed red, but dry. "You?"

Chloe hesitated. Then nodded once. "It touched me. I don't know how long. I don't even know how many." She swallowed. "I didn't think I'd get back up."

"You did."

"Because of you."

Alyssa's breath hitched. She turned, wiped her mouth on her sleeve like she was scrubbing off the taste of it.

"I feel fucking dirty," she said. "And I swear to god, Chloe... if I see one more Enforcer, or King Tomas-the-pervert, I'm gonna rip it them half."

"We will," Chloe said. Not cold. Just certain.

They stepped back. Not apart. Just enough to breathe.

Chloe's grip was rough, knuckles scraped raw. Alyssa didn't pull away.

"You remember Shanghai?" Chloe asked.

"That alley with the butcher's son?"

Chloe nodded.

Alyssa exhaled – shaky, but smiling now. "Yeah. We've done worse with less."

Chloe's fingers grazed Alyssa's, then held on – brief, firm. Not as comfort. As reminder.

They had each other.

"I'm not broken," Alyssa said again, quieter this time. "But I think... I need to break something."

Chloe nodded, eyes still fierce. "Good. Because we're not done."

The speaker crackled.

High above them, recessed in the ceiling's vault, came the voice.

Smooth. Measured. Tomas.

"You don't understand what you've broken."

No sirens. No footsteps. No guards storming the corridor.

Just that voice – disembodied and calm – humming like a razor laid flat.

Chloe glanced back toward the red door. The wall beside it was still pulsing. Barely. Like it was breathing slow, drugged breaths.

She didn't look long.

She turned forward, pulling the coat tighter around her frame.

Alyssa spat onto the floor.

"Come and get us, fucker," she muttered. "I'll smash your face in."

Ahead, the corridor curved to the left. Lights flickered near the bend.

Somewhere past that – something moved.

And they walked toward it.

…………………

The corridor led into open air – a stone causeway curved between wings of the Old Palace, flanked by tall archways and broken statues. The wind cut sharp along the wall, but it couldn't cool the stink clinging to their coats.

Chloe and Alyssa stepped out side by side, boots thudding against damp stone.

Then he was there.

King Tomas.

Another King Tomas. Exactly the same as the one they just killed.

Standing calmly at the edge of the causeway. Crown insignia at his throat. Black coat pristine. Not a smear of blood. Not a flicker of recognition in his eyes.

But that smile.

The same one they'd torn off the last Tomas's face.

Chloe froze. "How are there two of you?"

The smile widened.

He didn't answer. Just licked his lips – slow, snake-like. His tongue was wrong. Too long. The movement rippled down his throat, as if something squirmed beneath the skin.

"Ahhh," he said, voice dripping with sick longing. "There are my twin beauties. I love your spirit. But this time... you will not win." His gaze drifted down their bodies, lazy. "I will taste you. All of you."

Alyssa took a step forward, fists clenched.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

But Chloe raised a hand. "Wait."

She could feel it. Wrongness.

Not the usual twitch of ghost-light or aura drift. This was deeper – biological. Structural.

Tomas tilted his head. His shoulder blades bulged beneath the coat. The fabric twitched. Ripped.

His arms spasmed – once, twice – and then began to split. Elbows reversed. Joints multiplied. A second set of hands began to push from his ribcage. Flesh tried to extrude, growing tendrils of gristle and teeth like vines. His neck stretched. Vertebrae popped like buttons undone too fast.

It wasn't a transformation.

It was a failure.

His pupils disappeared – white sclera swelling. His knees buckled. His smile sagged, still etched into his face as the skin sloughed off in layers, peeling like wax from a candle left in the sun.

Then he dropped.

Collapsed into a wet heap of twitching fat and black-threaded muscle. No bones. No blood spray. Just jelly and tendon and the stink of rot.

One of the Enforcers nearby screamed.

Another dropped to his knees and vomited.

Chloe didn't blink. She just turned away, shielding her face from the stench.

Alyssa spat on the ground. "What the hell did that?"

Chloe stared down at the pile of quivering ruin. The nerves were still twitching. Trying to move. But whatever connection held it together was gone.

Her mind spun through possibilities.

A virus? Maybe. But humans didn't glitch like that – not from anything mundane.
Some kind of sabotage? A timed collapse? No— the thing had looked straight at them. It had known them.
A failed clone? Closer. But not quite. This wasn't programmed death.

It was a severing. A soul-thread cut mid-sentence.

She felt it. Like a tether snapping in the dark. Not decay. Interference.

Which meant… someone had done it. Someone on their side.

Chloe exhaled through her nose, gaze fixed on the steaming heap of half-melted tissue. Her mind went to the one person who bent biology like language. The one who made the impossible regular.

"Victor," she said. "Always causing mayhem."

Alyssa let out a breath that almost turned into a laugh. "He's alive. Goddamn. He's alive."

Chloe said nothing – but the tightness in her jaw eased. Just a little.

"That means Max could be too," Alyssa added, more quietly.

Chloe nodded once. "It means we've got a way in."

The air shifted. Not wind – just something inside the walls, retracting.

Chloe's eyes narrowed. "Let's finish this."

…………………

Chloe knelt beside the heap.

The ground steamed, fat bubbling from the collapse. Nerves twitched along the edges of the ruin like they were still looking for commands. But the soul-thread was gone. She was sure of it. This thing had no centre. Just memory.

She let her breath settle. Then lowered her palm.

Ghost-sight ignited behind her eyes.

A ripple shivered through her skull – heatless, voiceless, bright. The world dimmed at the edges as the shimmer took shape. Light bent. The air above the corpse shimmered like oil on glass.

And the echoes began.

First: a woman— arms bound, face already bruised. She screamed, then whimpered, then signed her name in blood. A Contract. Not power. Just survival.

Then: an old man clutching a coat in a silent hallway. Watching his grandson walk through the Selection Gate. No goodbye. No resistance. Just the sound of boots and the heavy, final click of a latch.

Another flash— shorter. Sharper.

Children. A line of them. Naked. Drugged. Their eyes unfocused as they were marched past a smiling man in a black coat. Tomas. His fingers trailed one girl's cheek. She didn't blink.

Then: an altar. Exorcism runes scrawled in chalk. Screaming. A girl convulsing. Light spilling from her mouth – and then snapping inward. Her soul ripped instead of cleansed.

The air above the corpse twisted harder now. Chloe's nose bled. Her hand shook.

None of these ghosts belonged to Tomas.

But he wore them. Collected them. Stored them.

A flesh suit soaked in trauma.

And every memory – every soul fragment – pointed in the same direction.

Not physically. Emotionally. Like a gravity. A pull.

Chloe's breath hitched.

She saw it.

Not here. Somewhere deeper.

A cocoon of flesh – pulsing. Webbed with tendrils. A mouth that never opened. A body suspended like a fetus in thick, humming light. Slender. Genderless. Beautiful in the wrong way – like a corpse preserved in honey.

The name slid across her mind like a blade dipped in ice.

Belphegor.

She recoiled.

Her hand curled to a fist, streaked with her own blood now. The echoes blinked out – but not the feeling. That humming pull. Like something beneath Prague was still watching her through a thousand blind eyes.

He wasn't gone.

He was feeding.

On fear. On faith. On flesh.

On everything.

…………………

The corridor sloped down, narrow and hushed. The air was too thick for sound. Even their footsteps came muffled, swallowed by stone that no longer echoed.

At the far end loomed a gate – gilded iron once etched in royal filigree, now tarnished to the colour of dried blood. A ceremonial seal stamped its centre: a lion, split down the spine.

No guards.
No surveillance.
Just a silence that leaned inward.

Alyssa stepped forward, tested the handle. Locked.

She didn't hesitate. Cracked her neck once, then drove both fists into the hinges.

The gate shrieked.

Metal tore like meat. The door collapsed inward with a shudder, dust blooming out around it – thick, perfumed, and wrong.

Chloe caught the scent first.

Rotting lilies. Burnt ozone. And something else beneath it – old breath on velvet.
Like a room that remembered what it had held.

Inside was a hall that might've once been glorious.

Now it pulsed.

Tapestries hung in rotted loops. Velvet carpet soaked through with grime. The chandelier above them twitched faintly – not from wind, but from something deeper in the walls. Beneath it, the floor moved.

Veins.

Dozens of them.

Tubes made of meat – thick, bioluminescent cords coiling like leeches across the hall. They didn't just lie there. They slithered, slow and deliberate, retreating through vents and ceiling cracks. Some twitched when Chloe moved. Others recoiled like burnt snakes.

Alyssa stepped forward, boots squelching. She crouched near the largest vein. "That's not fucking normal."

She didn't sound afraid. She sounded disgusted.

Chloe didn't move. Her gaze followed one coil as it vanished into a cracked cornice.

"They're alive."

"Yeah, no shit. Question is— what are they doing?"

Alyssa tapped one with her knuckle. It spasmed.

Chloe stepped closer. Her ghost-sense wasn't flaring but something else buzzed low behind her eyes. Instinct. Not memory. Not magic. Just wrongness.

"They're not feeding anything," she said slowly. "They're draining."

Alyssa looked up. "Siphons?"

"Worse. Think... veins. Nerves. They're pulling something out of this place."

Alyssa's lip curled. "Soul-goop?"

"Memories. Pain. Power. Whatever that monster's been feeding on – this is where it goes."

Chloe crouched, just above one of the thicker tubes. She didn't touch it. Just watched it twitch.

"They're responsive. Like reflexes. If we're this close to the surface network... we're close to the brain."

Alyssa crouched beside her, more impatient. "What if these aren't just nerves? What if they're... strings."

Chloe turned to her.

Alyssa pointed. "You saw Tomas glitch back there – folding like wet cardboard. What if that wasn't just a death? What if someone pulled his string?"

Chloe's eyes narrowed. "A puppet."

"A hive," Alyssa said. "You cut the right nerve, and the whole clone collapses."

They both looked at the nearest tendril. It was retreating now, slowly curling backward through the floor.

"He sees us," Alyssa muttered. "Through these. Hears us. Maybe even speaks through them."

Chloe felt her stomach tighten. "Then he knows we're here."

Alyssa stood.

"Then let's make it worth his attention."

Chloe didn't answer.

Not with words.

She reached out – not with hands, but with sense. The pressure in her skull surged. Not pain. Just signal. A tension behind her teeth.

The cords weren't just retreating. They were converging. They weren't bleeding upward toward power cores. They weren't powering any grid.

They were going inward.

"Not the surface," Chloe murmured, eyes flaring faintly. "They're going home."

"To daddy?" Alyssa said.

"To whatever made this network," Chloe said. "Whatever built Tomas. Fed the monster. Wove these nerves through the whole fucking city."

A pause.

Then Alyssa's voice, rougher now. "That's the wrong way."

Chloe stood tall beside her. Her coat fluttered slightly as she moved between the coils.

Her voice didn't waver.

"Then let's go the wrong way."

Alyssa stared at her. "You sure you're good?"

"No," Chloe said. "But we don't leave things half-dead."

Alyssa gave her a crooked smile.

"That's my girl."

And they stepped into the dark.

…………………

The palace changed as they moved deeper.

Not crumbled – hollowed.

The marble tiles warped beneath their boots, curving inward like ribs. Once-grand halls narrowed to winding arteries. Wall sconces still flickered with antique flame, but the light felt wrong – sluggish, heavy, casting shadows that didn't match their movements.

They passed beneath a vault etched with gold filigree, tarnished and cracked. Portraits hung on either side – ancient rulers of Bohemia, eyes proud, crowns askew. But something bled from each frame. Thin lines of black-red ichor slid from every painted mouth, tracing down the canvas like drool.

Alyssa muttered, "What kind of freak paints this shit?"

Chloe didn't answer. Her halo had begun to shimmer again – faint and pulsing like a migraine blooming behind the eyes.

Ghosts followed.

Not with malice. Not with form. Just… presence.

Children stood at the hallway's edges. Transparent. Silent. Heads shaved. Uniforms torn. Eyes hollowed by something deeper than starvation. One reached toward Chloe, hand outstretched – not begging. Just touching the air she moved through.

A shiver climbed her spine.

"They're fragments," she whispered. "He didn't kill them clean. Just... pulled pieces."

They moved on.

The air turned damp. The floor flexed. A sick heat radiated from the stone – like breath behind a wall.

Then they saw it.

The hall ended at a door.

Not stone. Not steel. Flesh.

A massive slab of black-veined tissue, taller than any cathedral gate, sealed tight by threads of coiled muscle. It twitched, slowly. A heartbeat, slow and arrhythmic. Dozens of meat-veins pulsed into it, vanishing through its centre, feeding inward.

The sound changed. No longer footsteps. Just breathing walls.

Alyssa stopped walking. "That's... it."

Chloe didn't blink.

She stared at the door, then at the veins, then at the quiet space between them all.

Her voice came low. Dry. Certain.

"He's still here."

She exhaled.

"And he knows we're coming."

Her chest ached with pressure – not fear. Something colder. Older. Chloe didn't flinch.

"Let him see."