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Who knew the devil had eyes like the sky?
Levi had encountered The Devil many times in his life. He had seen Him when he was a child, watching his mother waste away until nothing was left; saw the demons she called clients leave her to rot. Stealing her life, He fled, leaving ghosts whispering into Levi’s ear in chorus with the ringing sound of silence that Levi came to associate with the aftermath of The Devil’s work.
The Devil came next in the form of his uncle. Kenny pressed a knife into Levi’s hand and left bruises under his glass skin; depositing remnants of hard truths before leaving just as he came. This time, The Devil marked Levi in the blood that stained his hands, running red down the knife’s blade and falling onto the cobblestone street like tears he never let himself cry. This time, the silence of His departure was a welcome punishment.
He didn’t stay away for long; Levi could see The Devil around every corner, in the eyes of every crying child or starving mother. He saw His fingerprints on the edge of every coin passed between merchants’ pockets as they gauged what they could from the people of the underground. Levi saw The Devil in the reflection of the knife in his hands as he cleaned off blood only he could see.
Levi expected The Devil to materialize in Furlan and Isabel’s shadows; he was waiting for the taint in his soul to infect theirs. Alas, The Devil didn’t make room for others in his isolation, as the other two managed to fly through the air on their own while Levi was a marionette tied up in The Devil’s strings. He wasn’t even allowed full relief at them being spared, as his solace grew amongst vines of jealousy seeded by His careful hand.
And then, The Devil reached out his hand, trading medicine for treason and the chance that a glimpse of the sun would cleanse the rot from his soul. Levi met The Devil at the entrance to the underground, his face shielded in the depths of a carriage and words sweet as poison dripping down the back of his throat. Levi dealt in His disloyalty with a vow of his own, twin blades poised at his own heart as he flew higher than someone with The Devil’s handprint on his throat should.
All this time, Levi thought he knew The Devil. Thought he could recognize his shape in the shadows and his signature spilling ink across his heart. Kneeling in the filth strewn across the underground’s streets, stench marking Levi’s skin as tainted ground and mud painting his pants in wretched letters as His servant, Levi looked up into the next Devil to chain his hands.
For someone as marked by The Devil as him, Levi ascertained the error of his certainties. After all, he didn’t know His Devil had eyes like the sky.