That took about four steps. The moment I closed the door behind me, my body remembered it was hurt. Suddenly, all pain returned and intensified, together with intense tiredness.

  Kallisto passed through the wall next to the door. “You didn’t even hold the door for me. How rude.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Was hoping you’d vanish.”

  “Liar.” She graced my main room with an imperious glare. I had effectively a small apartment here in Isabella’s mid-rise, but ninety percent of it was this one room. “You are in sore need of company. Any company. But first, what’s the tentacle dildo?”

  “Beats me.” I started peeling off my blood-drenched clothes. My endurance, over-invested through the System, had already helped me mostly recover from the sustained injuries, but the clothes didn’t regenerate. “It’s the second time I’ve heard it referenced.”

  “You should ask Isabella about it.”

  “I could also jump from the window. It would be easier.” I managed to get the jacket and the shirt off. Shoes came off easily, so I opened my belt. “Care to give me some privacy?”

  “From what?” Kallisto looked around, as if puzzled. “You didn’t mean me, did you?”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but managed to stop myself. She seemed to be a figment of my imagination, so I effectively asked a part of my subconsciousness to give me privacy. Well, she might have been something else, but Isabella didn’t react to her presence at all.

  With a frown, I activated the System’s level scanner. It didn’t pick up on Kallisto at all. Next, I tried the magic-detecting vision. No hits, no magical energy around the room. Not even mine, because I didn’t have enough to leave findable stains.

  Isabella also surely had magical protections on the mid-rise, and those would have picked up on Kallisto if there was anything real or magical about her.

  I limped to the bathroom, pulled off my pants, and surveyed the carnage. Bruises mapped my torso in constellation patterns. My regeneration worked from the inside, so the exterior wasn’t pretty. Still, I didn’t see anything stuck in my skin.

  That was one danger with regeneration. It hasn’t happened yet, but I could, theoretically speaking, regenerate with something stuck inside.

  Kallisto stood next to me. I couldn’t see her in the mirror, just from the corner of my eye. “You bruise well. I can see why she whips you.”

  “Really?”

  “You’re delightfully whippable. Whipping someone who can’t heal out of it is too short-lived fun, but at the same time, whipping someone who heals out of it too quickly is boring. You’re the perfect in-between.”

  I rolled my eyes, and with my back to her, I undressed completely. I slipped into the shower, closing the door behind me.

  Before I even managed to start the water, Kallisto walked in through the shower wall. “I wasn’t finished.”

  My cheeks started turning red. “Even in the shower?”

  She shrugged. “How’s that any different?”

  “I don’t know, maybe that I’m naked?”

  “So?”

  “Give me some privacy, damn it.”

  She shook her head. “We’ve been through this already.”

  Yes, we have. I glared at her. But since I had no way to interact with her, all I could do was to start the water, and hope it would evaporate into steam. It didn’t, at least not fast enough. I started washing.

  The imagination of Kallisto kept me company in the shower. She observed me with a faint, pleased smirk, savoring my discomfort.

  I did wash, scrubbing all the dried blood off me. My collection of scars gained a few new pieces.

  Nothing hurt too badly, though.

  I got out of the show, accompanied by the vision of Kallisto, and I dressed up in my sleeping T-shirt and boxers.

  “Wait, are you actually going to sleep?” Kallisto asked.

  “What else would you expect me to be doing?”

  “Going out and meeting with some friends to celebrate. Music, booze, drugs, hookers, that type of stuff. The night still has a few hours in it.”

  I dropped into bed, exhausted. “That’s not how things work in my life.”

  “Then do something to change that.” She slipped into the bed, still immaterial, but looking as if she was straight there next to me. My tired mind started slipping out of consciousness, and I could swear I caught a whiff of blood and sulfur.

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  “Not happening, not until after your real self stops trying to invade my world with a demonic army.”

  “That’s an excuse, and you know it. There will always be some imminent crisis on the horizon. If you don’t make a life outside of that, nobody will do it for you.”

  I closed my eyes, adjusting to a comfortable position. “Whatever.”

  Sleep found me in an instant.

  The next morning, I woke up without an alarm clock. And to my surprise, I felt rested.

  Kallisto lay next to me, staring at the ceiling, looking exactly the same as yesterday. “You know, you are really boring when you sleep.”

  “That’s how sleeping usually is.” I closed my eyes, counted to five, and got up from the bed. Blood rushed from my brain, but this was always the fastest way to wake myself up.

  “Not really. Some people sleepwalk, many snore, some speak out of sleep, or grind their teeth, or flip around a lot. You sleep like a corpse. No sound, no movement, no fun.”

  I rolled my eyes and went to shower. Like yesterday, Kallisto kept close to me, offering no space for privacy. She even stood next to me when I took a morning dump.

  I started getting used to it though. She wasn’t doing or saying anything annoying. She was just there, and my sense of shame was quickly dissipating.

  A fresh suit awaited me in the wardrobes, one of the many identical, brandless suits that Isabella filled my wardrobes with. As always, I finished the outfit with a black tie and a pair of the many identical shoes.

  I stuffed my gauntlets into the pockets, and left my room.

  In the lobby between the doors hung Takezo. He was strapped into an elaborate setup, balancing with one fully stretched leg on a narrow brick, his other leg and arms tied up behind his back.

  A black collar held his throat, with a leash caught on the ceiling. The extra beef burrito from last night was lodged in his mouth, all the way to the throat, while sticking out, matched with a ring gag, so he couldn’t bite on it.

  Even I smirked at the sight of that, as he shot a desperate glance with the eye facing me.

  Isabella indeed loved the burrito.

  I walked past him, heading for the dining room.

  Kallisto walked next to me. “I see baby girl isn’t at all vengeful.”

  She would never. I couldn’t reply though, because Isabella already sat in the dining room, gaze glued to her phone screen. Not by the table, but in the window frame, the window open, wind blowing through her unreasonably long hair.

  “Morning,” I said, heading to the fridge.

  “Did you tell him to bring me a burrito?”

  I opened the fridge door. Inside awaited an assortment of bottles and cans, but also a floor filled with vegetables and fresh fish. How could Takezo live on that? “Nope,” I said, and grabbed a can of beer.

  After I kicked the fridge door closed, I joined Isabella at the window, cracking the beer open. “As your apprentice, I know that the correct thing to bring you from Taco Bell is nothing, and to deny I ever set foot into it.”

  Isabella’s hair stretched out and swished through the air. She lashed me over the back so hard I grunted in pain. “That’s for knowing me too well.” The hair hit me again, and then two more times. “And this is for being smug about it.”

  Ding! Level up!

  I couldn’t help but snort as I leveled up. Level twenty-seven. I must have had almost all the experience needed for the level, and the hair whipping just tipped me over the level.

  “Why are you snorting?” she asked.

  “I’ve leveled up from the last lash.”

  “See how educative I am?” A vicious smirk spread over Isabella’s lips, and she pocketed her phone. “You should offer yourself to me three times per day for whipping. On your knees. With a collar.”

  “You wouldn’t enjoy that.”

  Isabella rolled her eyes and looked in the distance. “I need a lot less mouthy apprentice.”

  I drank from the beer. A strange feeling of disgust and satisfaction passed through me. I hated how the beer tasted, but at the same time, I enjoyed drinking it. “So, how am I going to meet my mother?”

  “In person, obviously.” She smirked. “She’s holed up in a monastery in New York, most likely waiting for an opportunity to rescue you from my evil clutches.”

  “It’s going to be really awkward when I go knock on the door.”

  “It will be hilarious. You should stream it, so I can watch it live.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you coming?”

  “I’m not fully recovered, and I’m not leaving my apartment unless I’m at full power. I’ve got way too many people that want to kill me to risk doing that.”

  In the time I’ve spent with her, I’ve never seen an assassination attempt against her. Though my mother did try to rescue me earlier via violent means. “All right, so I grab Takezo, drive to the monastery, and hope for the best?”

  “No. Takezo is busy savoring the burrito. It will keep him occupied for most of the day. You go by yourself.”

  I shrugged. “What should I say?”

  “No idea. She’s your mom, not mine. Our goal is to get a meeting with Raphael, or any other senior angel.”

  “Why a senior one?”

  “Because they remember the time when Lucifer ran rampant around the world. Many of the powerful angels are a result of the past decade. They are strong, but their perspective is limited.”

  I took a long swig from the beer. Lucifer referred to a mage who speed-ran from being a nobody to being one of the five rulers of the magical underworld, then beating the other four rulers, and exiling himself from Earth, all in the span of a few decades. He was also my father, though I inherited nothing but similar facial features from him. “How does that make a difference?”

  “Seeing Lucifer fight is enough to make a demon religious. The whole religion thing is kind of abstract until you meet the emperor of Hell and see for yourself what you pray to God to protect you from. That gives one perspective on the boundary between freedom and excessive use of power. Lillith perfectly understands that boundary, choosing to willfully ignore it. She wants to bring Kallisto to Earth to remind the world why they should pray to God. The devil has vanished, so she thinks she needs a new one.”

  “But Raphael and the older angels understand that it’s pointless theatrics,” I filled in as it clicked in my mind. “It would only bring suffering and oppression.”

  “Faith forced through oppression isn’t really faith. It’s subjugation.”

  “Why doesn’t God stop Lillith then?”

  “To test us.” Isabella paused for a long second. “Or because He doesn’t care. Pick your answer depending on how religious you are feeling today.”

  Or because He agrees with her. “How religious are you feeling? You always carry that cross around your neck.”

  She laughed. “God and Devil are two sides of the same coin. The religion doesn’t make sense without either of them, so it’s nonsensical to separate their symbols. To me, my cross is the symbol of Lucifer, the bond to my master.”

  And that was after he was gone for over a decade. Was I going to end up like her? Was I, one day, going to be wearing a broken chain to remember her by? The thought unsettled me. I would have wished the answer was no, but I wasn’t sure it was going to be.

  Kallisto walked into my view. “Make a move.”

  I couldn’t answer, so I just raised an eyebrow.

  “You heard me.” She stepped out of my view again and vanished.

  What an absurd idea. I did nothing.

  Isabella slid down from the window frame, heading to the door, heels clapping rhythmically. “Get to work. She’s in Corpus Christi Monastery in New York. You’re bound to catch her there in the morning.”