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You meet Damien at a crossroads. Like, literally. You and Vera summon him to a crossroads. He appears in his pajamas, or lack thereof.
“Oh shit, I—are you fucking kidding me?!” he scrambles, quickly realizing that you have summoned him from his specific circle of hell while he was in his underwear. That’s just how it is sometimes. You finish sprinkling the salt onto the ground around him. “I will literally set you on fire,” threatens Damien.
“I don’t doubt that,” says Vera, “however, your state of undress and Oz’s potential bodily harm are the least of my concerns right now.” She sure knows how to make a monster feel special.
“You owe me twenty dollars,” says Vera to Damien.
He blinks at her, and suddenly he is alight with familiar rage. To be honest, this isn’t the worst he could get. This is a five on the anger scale for him.
“Are you telling me,” he speaks at a low tone reserved for people who are going to have a fit of anger, “that you summoned me from hell, took me out of bed, got that guy to help,” he gestures angrily at you. You wave back. “For twenty fucking dollars?!”
Vera says, “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m telling you.”
You stand beside her while Damien releases a plethora of unfathomable swears and literal satanic hexes out of frustration. This is kind of just a Tuesday for you, at this point.
“I hate you people,” says Damien.
You say, “We know.”
Damien grits his teeth, “See, the unfortunate thing about summoning someone while they are, and I have to stress this, in their underwear,” he says, “is that there’s a very small chance that they have cash on them, at that point.”
“If you don’t give me that twenty I will share the summoning instructions with everyone and tell them that you’re somehow benevolent,” she says, “and then where will you be, Damien? Being forced to enact demonic contracts with high school students for their stupid problems? Damning their souls for the price of helping them pass algebra or getting a prom date?”
Okay, you feel a bit called out.
Damien says, “You fucking wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t I?” asks Vera, who doubles down. “You know me well enough, Damien. You know that I have sway over others. In fact, I could have Oz make such a request of you right now.”
Oh. She’s putting you on the spot now. Well.
“Oz? Make a request for Damien, here,” she puts her hands on her shoulders, and you glance at them for a moment. Her fingers are long and narrow. Her nails are immaculately painted. “Come on, I’m sure you have some wish rattling around in that little brain of yours.”
You blink. “Do you guys wanna hang out?”
You do, in fact, sign away your soul so that Damien and Vera will spend the night hanging out with you. It’s fine, you were going to hell anyway.
Vera allows Damien to retrieve both his clothes and the twenty from his bedroom before you go out, but not before she takes some embarrassing photos and threatens to post them on Instagram. Or worse, send them to Liam so he can post them on Instagram and make some kind of artistic statement using them.
Damien reappears in his signature jacket, with a few crumpled five dollar bills in his fist. He hands them to Vera and says, “You guys are so lucky that I’m such a nice person.”
You wouldn’t call a handful of empty threats and literally damning your questionably mortal soul to hell “nice,” but what do you know.
You start the night at the arcade, because there’s one vintage arcade in this town and it has a backroom wherein you and your friends (by friends you mean Brian, who works there) stock alcohol.
“I hate to ask, but I have to,” says Vera as you lead her into the backroom and open the mini-fridge, “Why an arcade, exactly?”
You think before you respond, “Brian and I think of it as, like, a hangout spot, I guess.”
“Lame,” says Damien, and you hand him a bottle of whiskey that you are somewhat convinced Brian stole while hanging out with Polly. “Not so lame,” he amends when you hand him the drink.
You begin the night in the backroom, and after a few drinks you move it to the main section of the arcade, wherein Damien and Vera compete at Ms. Pac-Man and Damien loses several times. At some point the arcade is on fire, (you think it was because of Damien, but at some point you start to suspect you may have been an accomplice and thus would like to avoid pointing any fingers) and you graciously offer your friends residence in your apartment after the fire department puts out the ashes of the former-arcade. You expect the phone call from Brian complaining about his lost job any moment now.
You continue drinking in your empty apartment, which you don’t technically live in. Technically this building is “abandoned” and “being demolished later this year in order to make way for a Subway,” however, you’ve been living in it and thus it’s your apartment.
You’ve personally started to taper off with drinks, but Vera and Damien continue to go strong. You sit on the couch (which you technically don’t own, but if someone is going to leave their perfectly good couch in the junkyard you have every right to manipulate a passerby to bring it to your apartment) and talk.
Damien says, “Now that I have partial possession of your soul, I have to ask, am I gonna find anything weird once I go about dissecting it to find your deepest thoughts and desires? ‘Cuz, you know, that’s hell protocol.”
You think about that, “Probably,” you say.
“Tight,” says Damien.
Vera says, “This has been quite the eventful night, wouldn’t you say?” and there’s a beat before she continues, “I got paid back, I have new blackmail material on Damien, Oz sold their soul, I framed you both for arson. I think we got a lot done today.”
You don’t quite catch the last part, but you agree anyway. Vera continues.
“I think, perhaps, there is something to be said for your ability to blindly follow me when it comes to summoning our violent classmate from hell.”
To be honest, that says more about your attraction to Vera rather than any loyalty-based reasoning or otherwise. I mean, objectively, she is attractive. She’s full of sharp edges, personality-wise, but that sort of tips into the scale of her allure. She’s funny and biting and absolutely magnetic, in a weird, threatening way. You are both terrified of and attracted to her.
Damien isn’t too bad, either. He’s genuinely a danger to himself and others, which can be intimidating, but you’ve sort of created your own frame of reference for his anger and capacity for murder. Also, he’s hot. Like, you say the word objectively a lot, but really. Objectively they are both attractive in vastly different ways.
They’re both scary-attractive, but you’re more terrified of Vera than you could ever be of Damien. Sure, Damien might torture you in your own sect of hell wherein he makes your bones into soup, but Vera could probably get you sent to prison for crimes you didn’t commit and, after you died there, you would still get turned into bone soup, so.
“I find you somewhat attractive, I suppose,” says Vera, and that’s when you decide to tune back into the conversation. She’s looking at you with narrowed eyes, “Or, not repulsive. You’re cute in a loser-ish way.”
You have to assume that’s a compliment, and relative to other things Vera has said to you it certainly is.
Damien nods in agreement. You may be super drunk right now, but this is probably the best day of your life? Like, it’s way up there. It definitely outclasses your fondest memories of meeting and hanging out with your friends. Hey, you didn’t claim to be a person with integrity.
“I think,” says Damien, “that this is getting really fuckin’ tedious and stupid.”
“And what do you suggest we do?” asks Vera.
Damien says, “I mean, probably make out or something? Like, that’s the general area of shit I’m thinking about.”
“Are you suggesting that we have some kind of drunken, arson-night induced threesome in Oz’s shitty apartment? Is that what you’re suggesting?”
“Yeah, that’s the idea,” says Damien.
Vera considers it, mulling over the idea in her mind. “That’s agreeable,” she says.
Vera kisses you with a lot more of a possessive edge than expected. One of her snakes hisses in your ear, which is weird. She traces your jaw with her perfect nails and you meet her narrowed brown eyes.
“Not bad,” she says, and you think you should feel insulted by the surprise in her tone, but you are too high on your own fumes to care about any of that.
She’s so genuinely beautiful, aesthetics-wise. Everything about her is appealing, from her perfect skin to the look she gives when she pulls you back in for another kiss, like she’s analyzing you and, just subtly, can’t get enough of you.
You absolutely can’t get enough of her, but eventually she subsides and your attention is redirected to Damien, who glows with impatience, and a little bit of anticipation, if you were to make assumptions. Luckily, you don’t have to. He leans in for the kiss.
Damien kisses almost exactly like you thought he would—which is to say aggressively, and you could describe it with a lot of fanfiction-like terms such as “tongues battling for dominance” or some shit, but you find that phrasing kind of gross.
The most you can say about it, aside from it being absolutely one of the best experiences in your life thus far, is that at one point your teeth clink and you pull back for a moment, and Damien pulls you back in with this growl and you feel yourself heating up with anticipation.
So that’s the story of the greatest night of your life. Or, you know, one of them.
You get a text in the morning.
brian.
11:09am: dude you aren’t going to fucking believe this.
11:09am: the arcade fucking burned down.