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“Erm, thank you, Father. Thanks. I… I’ll make my amends, yes, of course, I mean they sort of–no, no, I know, eye for an eye and all. I will make it right.” The mousey man that he wasn’t supposed to know the identity of stammered his goodbyes and caught his finger in the sliding door of the confessional booth as he left, finally allowing Father Crimm to relax into a solitary moment of silence and darkness before he’d need to–
“Well if it ain’t Trent Crimm of the Independent Alliance.”
Trent’s demon was back, and it had assumed the freshly vacated seat the parishioner had warmed in the confession booth. Or perhaps it had been there all along. Perhaps it had caught a ride.
The demon had been haunting and taunting him for some time now, claiming to have hitched a ride on some deviant American crossing the pond for some sight-seeing. Soul stealing, more like. Coach Lasso, the thing called itself. A betailed, man-shaped evil that stood taller and broader than any human Trent had laid eyes upon, with hair of blue fire and brimstone, horns red as his forked tongue, and one gleaming yellow eye mismatched with its pair.
Trent could picture the entity easily. In fact, he couldn’t stop himself from picturing it.
“I don’t know how you manage it,” The demon continued, “Day in, day out… Repeating words you don’t believe in. Pretending their souls can still be saved as they deliver their dirty little dealings into your pure, virginal ears. Granting them false absolution all while knowing that they’re leaving out the juiciest bits…” The demon leaned in toward the divider, dark blue hairs of his mustache prickling through, shifting as the thing smiled wide, “Do you wanna know what that one wasn’t telling you, padre?”
Father Crimm pressed his tongue to his upper lip, denying that initial impulse to take the demon’s bait. It was easy more than it was natural, and he was good at it: denying impulses, denying demons. “If we confess our sins, God is faithful to us and forgives us and cleanses us. But we must confess our sins to one another,” Trent recited easily, sliding open his side of the booth and ignoring the way the shadows on the other side shifted with curiosity.
“It is not my place to hear a confession unspoken. We will answer to Him and Him alo–” Trent’s words and departing steps were stopped by large fingertips pinching the long plait of his pulled back hair between them. He told himself it was unpleasant. “Unhand me.”
The demon had already stepped soundlessly out of the confessional, his size immediately bringing into question how he had fit in the first place, and smiled at Trent’s command. “Are you sure?” It asked, finger twirling easily around the length of Trent’s ponytail to pull them closer together, to bring his entire hand to the back of the priest’s scalp.
Father Crimm denied the shiver that demanded to be felt and slapped the demon’s hand away, breaking free and quickly putting two pew lengths between them. “Begone, demon.”
“Come on now, Trent, I think you and I are past name-calling,” Lasso’s words were matched with long, languorous strides that forced Trent to slip between the pews to enforce the distance. “Get like Knowles, Rowland, and Williams and say my name, woncha?”
At this, Trent had to laugh. “And that would be ‘Coach Lasso’ from America, would it?” Crimm knew that if he had the true name of this demon, he could banish it. He had tried once.
“Touche, pops,” Lasso raised his thick, hair-smattered arms up in mock surrender and mirrored Trent’s escape through the pews down his own row. “But you can’t blame me for playing coy, can you? I seem to remember someone getting a little feisty with just the backend, and not the one I’d like him to get feisty with.”
The demon smiled as if this attempted banishing was a cherished memory, a fun first date. Trent tried to restrain his frustration and said, “Forgive me.”
“Pretty sure that’s your gig,” The demon shrugged, hopping effortlessly up to sit on the pew behind. Trent knew it should have buckled under the weight, but the wood refused to bow. This was still a House of God. It was all the reassurance Trent needed.
“And if I’ve already forgiven myself?” He asked, “Would you tell me your name then?”
“Would you promise not to use it against me?” Before the priest could answer, the demon went on, “Swear it here, now, in one of your god’s millions of global real estate properties?”
Trent’s silence was answer enough, eliciting a laugh from Coach Lasso. “I didn’t think so… But… I like you, Trent. Themodeus Lasso. But you can call me Ted.”
Trent blanched. Had the demon really just offered it’s name, simple as that? There had to be a trick. And yet… “I just want to make sure I have this right,” He began, “You’re a demon, from America, one whose never set foot in England; whose prior claim to fame has come at the amateur level of surviving puritanism - American puritanism at that - and now you’ve just offered your true name to an ordained priest in a chuch.”
“There a question in there, Trent?” The demon chuckled, not bothering to act chagrined.
“Yeah. Is this a fucking joke?”
“Hoo-ee. Language, daddy.”
“It’s Father Crimm, and I’m serious. What is your game here, Themodeus Lasso? Is this a trick? Are you trying to be banished? Why me?”
“I just want you to be free, Trent Crimm. You might be able to hide from them: those dopes lining your pews making eyes at that get-up, with that good boy dog collar and those crisp black robes of yours. Those folks? They don’t question it. You ever wonder why?” The demon didn’t pause for Trent’s answer, “Cause they ain’t curious, Trent. They judge, and they judge, and they judge, and they think they know all they need to. But me? I know what I don’t know… And what I do. And Trent, I think I’ve come to know you.”
“The devil is a liar, and I will not be fooled. All you want, ‘Ted’ is my soul.”
“Trent, (“Father. Crimm.”) you gotta understand. For me,” Lasso sighed, “Being a demon is not about the souls we win or lose. It’s about helping people be the best versions of themselves, in this life… And the next.”
Trent swallowed his scoff, his words failing him. His understanding failing him. His faith–
“And it ain't always easy, Trent, but neither is living in this world without someone believing in you. The real you.”
Defensive, Trent snapped back, “And the real version by your standards is, what? A lascivious, philandering, thief? A liar, a murderer?”
“Well, what is it you want, Trent?”
“Excuse me?”
“Is it this? Priesthood? Being a man of the cloth, spouting words from an old god who stopped listening hundreds of year ago–”
“Yes.”
“Sure you’re good at it, but do you really want to die with that starched white collar choking out the man you really are?”
The demon had closed the distance between them somehow. He–it–hadn’t crawled over pews, stepped around them: in just a few charged, distracted words it was simply there, towering over him. Crammed together in the row, the demon leaned back against the next pew, drawing Trent’s eyes level with his curled smile and gently fanged teeth.
The priest averted his gaze away, down, and saw that the demon’s left hand–a huge, meaty hand, a hand that Trent knew could wrap around his wrist, his neck, his–it lingered just a breath away from white collar, its black nail threatening to press through the linen and into warm flesh. All it would take was a deep breath and Trent knew he’d feel it against his Adam’s apple. He held it, instead. “Why me?” He barely whimpered, his eyes now trained over Lasso’s shoulder. He feared moving an inch more would be a mistake he could never return from.
“Like I said: I think I know you, Trent,” The demon’s drawl was whispered now, an invitation. A temptation. Father Crimm couldn’t stop himself from looking up and meeting its–his–gaze. It was softer than he expected, warm like melted chocolate. Eyes he could have sworn he’d seen on men before, men he denied himself from thinking about. He was so good at denying things.
The demon stooped, holding the priest’s gaze steady. But no–he wasn’t stooping. A taut, belt-like weight was pressing around Trent’s waist and lifting him. The demon’s powerful tail was wrapped around him.
Even with their bodies now pressed into one another, with the intoxicating warmth of the Lasso demon’s massive chest against the sleight of his own, Trent knew he would still deny it.
And then Lasso breathed the truth over his lips, and Crimm knew it was over.
“I see you,” The demon told him, and Trent answered by pressing his lips to Ted’s and taking everything he’d foregone in all his forty-two years.
“I see you,” The demon was a liar, but this was the truth; Trent’s fingers strode over skin and bone and hair and horn and from his throat there came a sound more holy than any he’d uttered before.
“I see you,” The demon confessed exactly what they had both always known, and ran sharp teeth over Trent’s breathless lips; and grasped with sharp nails at Trent’s back; and obeyed as Trent urged him around the pew, and back, and anywhere he wanted to go so long as their lips remained clasped and they drew breath from one another.
They crashed back against the pulpit, each sound resonant with the next as their voices sighed and shivered in an echo through the aisles. The demon’s clothing transformed under Trent’s touch, fabric tearing and harnesses tightening as if by a phantom force but truly only responding to the priest’s unchained desire.
But with no warning, Trent pulled himself off of Lasso, earning a discontened groan from the demon. “Hey, come back here–” He whined, moving to reach for his prize before hissing from pain shooting into each wrist: silver chains, double-latched to the firm base of the solid oak pulpit, were bound around each, holding the demon in place. Ted’s face was slack with surprise as he tested the bonds once, then twice, and found them solid. Themodeus didn’t necessarily dislike the sharp burn of the pure metal, but a worry settled into the back of his mind as he looked up to see Trent straightening his ponytail, his sleeves, his collar.
“Now, Trent, what are you–”
“It’s Father Crimm, Ted,” Trent corrected firmly, eyes stern as they looked down upon the massive form of the demon laid low and spread out before him.
Ted licked his lips at the proposition behind that stare and made a decision to obey. “Father Crimm,” He repeated, savouring the words in spite of the way they cut through his tongue like barbed wire, “What might you be doing?”
“Well, ‘Coach’ Themodeus Lasso from Hell,” Trent recited, stepping around the chained demon and running a light hand over the exposed skin of his calf, the soft pudge of his stomach, the raised mounds of his chest, “I’m giving you exactly what you’ve been begging for: what I want.”
With that, Trent half-grasped the succubus’ weapon of choice in one hand, and slipped the other beneath the chest harness to tug Ted forward against the silver restraints. “The wicked shall not go unpunished.”
Themodeus was glad to know that he had been very wicked indeed.