People in my time were not big fans of Halloween, as you might expect. The holiday had become a kind of interdimensional sport, as demon lords held an annual competition to see who could start the most fires and cause the most damage by November first.

Lydia says Hell gets closer

The holiday was making a comeback in the corporate arcologies, where people knew they were safe and could dress up like fake monsters without antagonizing real ones.

I spent most of that Halloween night fighting a river monster made of shadows, basically a cloud with teeth, that enveloped us and was impossible to punch.

I could break the teeth if I was lucky enough to hit a set while they were solid, but something about the potency of evil magic or the collective sins of everybody dressed up and getting drunk that night gave this thing powers I had never seen before, as it left weird burns and welts all over my body, completely ignoring my armor.

Minerva finally had to finish it off with the brand, since I was damn near useless against it. I asked Minerva how to fight it, and she said, “I guess you’re gonna need some new magic.”

I did make one small error in judgment that Halloween, something I didn’t even think was worth talking about, but Azael made me remember and write about it, since it was one of the few times I stopped pretending Lydia was my roommate and asked her to be a demon for me.

I knew I would be up all night on Halloween proper, and my shift didn’t start until just before sunset, so I got up at noon and called Lydia to the bedroom.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“Is this a special day for you?” I asked. “Was this a special day for my ancestors?”

“This is really more of a faerie holiday,” she said, like a girl at a party, explaining why she was too cool for my shitty mainstream music.

“Are you more powerful today?”

“Not the way I am now,” she said. “I could draw magic from Hell very easily today, but now that I’m drawing magic from Earth, this is just another day.”

“Oh, come on!” I complained, authentically disappointed. “You’re a literal demon! Shouldn’t you be sacrificing babies or dancing naked in a pentagram tonight?”

“Please don’t joke about that,” Lydia said.

“Sorry,” I said. “But you know what I mean! Are there special demon rules for Halloween? Do you have to answer questions truthfully or show me your true form?”

“I always answer questions truthfully and you have already seen my true form.”

I sighed. “Don’t take this personally, but I’m starting to feel a little ripped off. If there is one day a year a guy is supposed to enjoy having a demon girlfriend, it’s today.”

“You want me to give you a present?” she asked, adorably surprised instead of sexy.

“Yeah, I do.”

“It seems foolish to buy you candy with your own money. What do you want?”

“You’re always holding back with me, right? Saving the real freaky succubus shit for when I’m older?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “If I do too much too soon, it makes it harder to bond at this stage.”

“I want you to break that rule. You’ve spent all this time trying to convince me you’re not a typical succubus. You try so hard to be gentle and careful with me, for the next few hours I want you to take the training wheels off. Stop pretending to be human. Go back to your real form. Everybody keeps telling me how dangerous you are, so show me dangerous. Show me what I’d get, if I was with a succubus who didn’t love me.”

“Very well,” Lydia said. “I’ll seduce you exactly the way Sylvia taught me. We’ll start with a Latin lesson. I’ll teach you the Latin word for a part of the body, then I’ll show you what I can do with that part. The first word is digitus.”

* * *

“It’s gone,” I said, a sleepy hour later. “I didn’t notice before, but Baalphezar’s Mark on your ankle, it’s gone.”

“Yes,” Lydia said. “That’s how I know he’s dead. I check every morning, just to make sure.”