The Flame & The Fallen

  Copyright © 2023 by Dalia Davies

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover art by Sophie Zuckerman (Twitter: @dextrose_png)

  www.daliadavies.com

  For anyone given godly reasons to stay

  too long in a marriage that failed you.

  Contents

  Content Warnings

  I do what the good girls don’t.

  1. See You in Hell

  2. Devil or Angel

  3. Be Not Afraid

  4. Down on Your Knees to Pray

  5. Angelic Hosts

  6. Putting the Arch in Archangel

  7. By Faith Alone

  8. Sinning for Sainthood

  9. Divine Damnation

  10. Holy Water

  11. Baptism by Fire

  12. Fallen Angel’s Folly

  13. Eternally Damned, Eternally Devoted

  About Dalia

  Also by Dalia Davies

  Books as Ava Lunaria

  Books as Andi Simms

  Content Warnings

  Some elements of this book may be triggering to readers. Please see the following list of CWs to ensure that you are comfortable reading this book before you continue.

  Blood

  Bondage (light)

  Death (implied, off page)

  Degradation (light)

  Exhibitionism

  Fluid Kink

  Human/Non-Human Sex

  Polycoria/Trypophobia (brief description)

  If you feel anything has been omitted from this list, please let me know at authordaliadavies@gmail.com or using the contact form at www.daliadavies.com

  I do what the good girls don’t.

  - Elle King

  See You in Hell

  The sun dips low in the sky and the city that sits over the pit of Hell starts to ease some of that restless energy it has held all day.

  All Hallows Eve is upon us and the unwed adults of the city await their judgement.

  Sinner or saint.

  I sit alone in my one-bedroom apartment, staring out at the horizon as I twist the heart locket on my bracelet and take deep breaths. My foot taps incessantly and I don’t try to still it.

  There is no question of what my fate will be: Sinner.

  The arrest warrant they’ve waited to serve isn’t the reason I’ll join the others on the Devil’s dance floor tonight. It’s a different piece of paper that has given my soul into the Devil’s keeping tonight—and for the next year, if no saint should kiss me.

  The warrant means I’m damned if they do. The divorce decree means I’m damned if they don’t.

  Smoothing down the skirt of my dress, I wonder if I shouldn’t change. The demand for funereal black is a tradition, but why follow the rules now when I’ve already broken so many of them?

  If the Devil cares that my dress is blue, he can change it.

  Perhaps, if he confronts me himself, I’ll issue my own list of complaints.

  They are accusations I should lay at the feet of God, but she never leaves her Heaven. And I will never see the pearly gates.

  Cursed simply by being born to a family trapped here by God’s cruel benevolence, I can’t run away from this fate.

  Her rules are strictly lined out for those of us whose forebears were created in Eden and held back when Adam and Eve were cast out.

  Paradise comes with iniquitous punishments. But this city is not the Garden and the fruit of knowledge has long since rotten away.

  A chirp from the table beside me draws my attention and I take another deep breath before I pick up the phone. Despite knowing better, I read the admonishing text there.

  I can hear her voice as I do. I can imagine the sobbing with her pleas.

  She’s already lost one daughter to the Devil’s dance. I am still surprised my mother hasn’t burst through my door with a priest and some unwitting sacrifice in tow.

  A simple “I do” would save me from one fate—so many others have wed this day to save themselves.

  But perhaps I deserve a year toiling under the Devil’s watch.

  Holy matrimony can’t save me anymore.

  I bought this dress the day the paperwork was finalised.

  Niro has already remarried—a woman barely a year older than our daughter—and knowing that he will not be on the dance floor tonight is a faint solace.

  Breaking our holy union put me on the list of sinners to dance for the Devil tonight.

  I wonder if Niro has already been unfaithful to the girl he convinced to save him. I wonder if she only used him to save herself.

  His philandering won’t take him to Hell tonight. God cares only that he is faithful to her.

  I watch the sun finally dip below the horizon and the scent of brimstone fills the air and a great crack echoes around me. I fall into the pit, landing on the glassy black surface of the dance floor. And, eyes wide, I look at the others around me. It’s been more than twenty years since I’ve danced at this masquerade. And then, I was with the saints.

  Tonight, the sinners all look the same. Only a saint would need to see their disguises.

  Like me, each of them wears a cage around their head. Manacles and chains move us like marionettes if we do not dance on our own. And when one swirls past me, dancing with a man in a black suit, I can see why my mouth won’t open.

  Dark threads stitch our lips closed.

  The next who passes has torn theirs open, bleeding as they silently scream.

  I am one of hundreds of other sinners, waiting for a saint’s kiss.

  I may be the only one unsure if I want it.

  Music echoes in my bones and the first saint deposited into my arms eyes me warily. She doesn’t know that I am not the devil I’m disguised as.

  There are too few saints and too many sinners. And the woman in my arms breaks free of me, twirling herself into the arms of another sinner. He strains toward her, silently begging for the kiss that will save him and transport them both back to the city far above our heads.

  Another saint spins into my arms. He is a mere boy, possibly only eighteen, and I recoil from him when he leans close.

  He abandons me, too.

  The first saint and sinner disappear in a dark puff as I twirl around the room and saints flit between dance partners. Very few sinners will find their way home tonight.

  Something high on the walls of the pit draws my attention away from the saints. A faint glimmer of gold in the firelight.

  But the dark spectator is neither the Devil nor a sinner… and they certainly are no saint.

  Devil or Angel

  Three more partners pass me to the next, and I barely catch a glimpse of their faces. The dark and glimmering presence has so fully trapped my attention that I watch it through every turn and dip. The chains that move me require little to no participation from me.

  If not for the golden shroud they wear, I might not have seen them at all. Black skin, veined with thin lines of gold, like marble, and wings that faintly glimmer…. They blend in with the stones of the wall behind them.

  I’m certain they don’t belong here. They are a creature of Heaven, not one of Hell.

  I can’t see their face in the dark shadow of that shroud, but I feel it the moment their gaze locks on me. It feels as though I’ve been dipped into a pool of sparkling water and I shiver, spooking the latest saint and sending them fleeing.

  They leave me without a partner, and the creature descends on me, scooping me into their arms and turning on deft feet as their wings draw close.

  “You are a pretty little thing,” they say, dark fingers taking hold of the cage around my head and with a twist of their wrist, it bursts in a shimmering cloud like glitter. The remnants fall to the floor and climb up the blue fabric of my dress in trails of stars.

  The cage is gone, the manacles too, but my lips are still sewn shut. They haven’t freed me. They’ve simply captured me for their own.

  “What is your name, sweet creature?” They ask.

  All I can do is shake my head.

  A low rumble echoes from the inside of the hood of their shroud and they raise their hand, brushing the back of their knuckles over my cheek and then drawing their thumb across my lips.

  The sutures that held my mouth closed dissolve beneath that touch and I draw in a long and shaky breath, licking my lips and wondering at the velvety softness covering them like the silkiest lipstick.

  “You shine too brightly to be mistaken for the lord of darkness. I thought you were a star when I first saw your flame.” They tip my head back and their hand draws down my neck, their fingers wrapping about my throat. “What is your name?”

  “Thea.” I whisper it, but I know they hear me.

  “Woman of god… how strange then, to find you here.” They chuckle and lean close, the feather-soft fabric of their shroud brushing my cheek. “That cunt will abandon anyone who isn’t willing to play by the rules of her asinine game.”

  I blink up at them, trying to remember the last time I heard anyone call God a cunt.

  It would have been my little sister.

  That memory makes me turn back to the dancers. I search among them and find

her twirling in the arms of the Devil himself.

  And I move myself so that she can’t see me.

  I don’t know why.

  I should flee from the creature who has me trapped in their arms. I should go to her and the safety of family.

  But that fizzing sensation still flutters over my skin. And some magnetism holds me to them.

  I look up at them, into the darkness of their shroud, but not trying to see their face beyond that impenetrable veil.

  “Who are you?”

  Their response is faint laughter and then, “Have you perchance heard the name Zuriel?”

  I sort through my memories from my childhood education and the angel names my mother made me memorise decades ago. “The archangel of virtue?”

  “I am he.”

  We turn around the room, dancing with the others, but at the furthest edges of the floor.

  Even still, when we get close to Keres, I turn my face to keep myself out of sight.

  “Why do you hide from the Devil and his dame?”

  I look at them again, blissfully unaware of me, so wrapped up in each other… Keres spent years searching him out. She found her Devil and I’ve no doubt she’s fucked him, too. She is not a coward.

  I swallow back the admission of who she is to me and look up at Zuriel clenching my jaw tight.

  “Now, that is interesting.” I can hear the smile in his voice, though I can’t see it.

  “You don’t need to tell me your secrets.” He says it as though he knows he’ll learn them on his own. “But you do need to answer a question.”

  I swallow back the instant instinct to tell him I don’t need to do anything. I want to know what the question is.

  “Do you deserve to be here?”

  “Yes.” There is no point in lying.

  His head tips to the side and the shroud moves, but not enough to see his face. “What did you do to deserve damnation?”

  I repeat his words back to him, “I don’t need to tell you my secrets.”

  It feels as though there is a warm glow on my face as he leans closer. “No, you do not. Can I tell you one of mine?”

  “Yes.”

  “I deserve to be here, too.”

  He kisses me and when he draws back, everything around us has turned blue. The flames, the walls, the glittering barrier of the broken ceiling far overhead….

  We’ve stopped dancing, and he steps back, over the threshold of a dark hallway and holds out his hand. “Will you come find absolution with me, Thea?”

  Be Not Afraid

  I place my hand in his and when he pulls me into that dark corridor with him, a different shiver slides down my skin, like I’ve shed it the way a snake does.

  “Come away from here before the Devil notices you’re missing.”

  He turns me into his arms and dances me down the corridor, never letting my feet touch the ground, but then again, his don’t touch it either.

  I can’t count the number of wings sprouting from his back. They’re constantly moving. They keep us just far enough off the ground and always moving slowly forward.

  Tipping my chin up, he brushes his fingers along my face. “I can keep you here as long as you do everything I say.”

  “Is that a threat?” It doesn’t feel like one, even though it should.

  “Maybe.” He tips his head to the side and the shroud moves, exposing the hard planes of his chest. I don’t touch it, even though I want to. “The rules of Hell aren’t kind.”

  We twirl into the transept of a cathedral cluttered with debris, its floor flooded with mirror-clear water.

  He leads me past the choir stalls and I tip my head back. I have to in order to see the broken statue of an angel that fills the space beneath the enormous stained glass windows of the apse.

  “Where are we?”

  “The Devil’s palace is a hundred angelic cathedrals crashed into each other. When he fell, she sent these places with him. This one was mine.”

  Lifting his hand, he points to the marks carved into the wall high above and the murals painted on the walls.

  His name is there, in languages I shouldn’t be able to read, but I know that’s what they say.

  We stop at the altar, at the feet of the broken statue… a statue of him.

  “Are you willing to obey me, starlight? Will you do anything I say?”

  I’m already damned. What could he do to me that is worse than what would wait for me with the rest of the sinners?

  Perhaps I hesitate too long.

  One warm finger presses to the tip of my chin and lifts my face up to him. “You always have a choice. Stay with me and play with me… or don’t. I won’t turn you out into the hellish wastes. You may hide in these halls as long as you can. But he will, eventually, catch you and cast you out.”

  “But you’ll keep me safe?”

  “I promise you’ll enjoy everything I make you do.”

  Obedience. That was what everyone has ever asked of me: my parents, God, my ex-husband….

  “And if I say yes and then don’t obey?”

  “Then you won’t receive your reward.”

  My reward. Not a punishment.

  I glance down.

  I can’t help myself.

  “Is that what you want for your reward, sweet mortal?”

  I swallow back the denial. That is what I should say. In this moment, I don’t want to lie anymore.

  My sister was brave enough to fuck the Devil.

  I may not be as wicked, but with the delights of Heaven in reach….

  “Yes.” I want it very badly.

  Down on Your Knees to Pray

  “You are a sinner, are you not, Thea?”

  I nod.

  “Then be a good girl.” He brushes his fingers over my throat, holding it for a fraction of a second before he moves and all my muscles tense… wanting. “Get on your knees to pray for mercy.”

  I blink at him for a half a heartbeat and then I comply, almost without thought.

  My dress bunches beneath my knees, saving me from the hard and sharp stones.

  “God can’t hear prayers down here. And even if she could, the cunt sent you here. She’s not going to rescue you.”

  “Are you?”

  His laughter is low and mirthless. “I can’t even rescue myself, starlight. These wings aren’t powerful enough to get us back into Heaven.”

  “Zuriel isn’t one of the fallen angels.” And this is Hell. It could be a lie, a demon’s trick.

  “The accuracy of that statement is based on timing. Zuriel wasn’t one of the fallen, and yet, time reveals us all to be sinners under her hypocrisy and false promises. Once I was the angel of virtue. Perhaps now, with your help, I will be the angel of vice.”

  “If not to God, who then should I pray to?”

  Dark hand dragging along the front of his shroud, Zuriel draws it open, revealing a cock that is more than perfectly placed… it is heavenly. More black marble, thickly veined with gold.

  I lick my lips and then force myself to look away, to look back up at the face I cannot see.

  “Would you like to worship at my altar?”

  It’s a question, not a command, and I swallow back my trepidation.

  It’s been years since I’ve done anything like that. But if an angel offers, how could I decline?

  Because Niro told you you sucked. And not in a good way.

  But I had never wanted to suck his cock. There’s something perversely tantalising about Zuriel’s.

  I take hold of him and he fits perfectly in my hand.

  Maybe it’s because I’m already in Hell that feels like tacit permission to do all of the things I was told I never should.

  Don’t want, don’t do, don’t be….

  But I do and I will and I am.

  He’s warm on my tongue. The taste of him is soft, though nothing else is.

 

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