Chapter 02 | Twin Troubles

His apartment was a seven-minute walk from the plaza.

They had managed perhaps two of those minutes before Matthias stopped walking.

She was standing at the gate of his building with the stillness of a statue that had decided, on its own initiative, to become a person. Her posture was straight. Her hands were folded loosely in front of her. Her eyes, ruby-red, the colour of garnets held up to a lamp, were moving across the street in a slow, systematic scan, the way a sentry's eyes moved, covering angles rather than looking at things.

Her hair was the colour of winter frost, short and fine, cut just below her jaw in a way that framed a face that was...

Matthias stopped thinking in a complete sentence.

Because the face was Belial's. Not similar to Belial's. Not reminiscent of Belial's. Identical to Belial's, feature for feature, down to the particular set of the jaw and the precise tilt at the outer corner of the eyes, translated wholesale into a different register, silver hair, ruby eyes, skin the same impossible pale perfection. Where Belial wore white, this girl wore a dress of the same cut and length and fabric in black that absorbed the streetlight rather than reflecting it. The overall effect was of a mirror image viewed through a changed filter.

Matthias became aware that he had stopped walking.

Beside him, Belial stepped forward with the comfortable familiarity of someone approaching a family member at a train station.

"Astreal," she said. "What are you doing here?"

The girl's scanning gaze completed its arc and came to rest on them. A beat passed.

"I conducted a perimeter survey of the surrounding four blocks," Astreal said.

Her voice was even, precisely measured, with the cadence of a recorded announcement, informative, neutral, efficient.

"I identified no active threats, no surveillance, and no anomalous spiritual signatures. Having completed my assessment, I positioned myself here to await the master's arrival."

Another beat. The corner of her mouth moved, almost imperceptibly, in a direction that was not quite a smile and not quite not one.

"It seemed the logical conclusion."

Matthias turned to look at Belial.

"What," he said.

Belial opened her mouth.

Before she could speak, the girl in black stepped forward with a short, precise bow that had the character of a military salute expressed through civilian posture.

"Astreal," she said. "Twin sister of Belial. Servant to my lord, across every age and every life in which I am given the grace to find him."

She straightened. The ruby eyes met his with complete equanimity.

"It is good to see you again, Master. You are shorter than I remembered."

"I..." Matthias began.

"The previous incarnation was taller. Broader through the shoulder, also. The current frame is adequate."

"The current frame is..."

"Adequate," Astreal repeated, with the air of someone offering a generous assessment.

Matthias looked at the sky. The sky offered him nothing useful. He looked back at the two identical faces watching him with the quiet patience of people who had, between them, approximately six thousand years of experience waiting for this specific man to process information.

There was, he decided, a hard ceiling to the amount of recalibration a person could perform in a single evening. He had clearly reached it.

"Come inside," he said.

His apartment was, by the standards he applied to it, reasonably tidy. By the standards apparently applied by Astreal the moment she crossed the threshold, it was something closer to a minor humanitarian concern.

Belial made directly for the kitchen without being shown where it was, set her grocery bag on the counter, and began unpacking with the focused efficiency of someone who had prepared this meal in their head several times over. The sounds of cupboards opening, water running, a pan settling on the stovetop followed with reassuring speed.

Astreal stood in the centre of the living room for exactly three seconds. She turned to survey it in a slow rotation. Her gaze moved across the stack of unread mail on the side table, the jacket slung over the back of the sofa, the arrangement of shoes near the door that could generously be described as a general intention of order.

"Mm," she said.

It was a single syllable, compressed into a shape that contained, somehow, both an editorial comment and a floor plan. The mischief that lived at the edges of her expression surfaced briefly, dry and precise, a sister's version of the warmth that lived in Belial's.

"You have been living alone," she observed. "This is evident."

"I manage perfectly..."

"I will tidy," she said, already moving.

"You don't need to..."

"I am already doing so," Astreal said, in the tone of someone for whom I am already doing so was the complete and sufficient answer to any objection.

Matthias sat down on the sofa, the part of it not currently being straightened, and watched them.

It was a strange thing to witness. Belial moved through his kitchen with the intuitive ease of someone who had cooked in a thousand different kitchens and found them all essentially the same, her long hair pinned back with something she'd produced from nowhere, the smell of something that was already remarkable drifting through the apartment in defiance of how little time had passed. Astreal worked through the living room and into the hallway with methodical precision, everything examined, assessed, assigned its correct place with a no-nonsense efficiency that somehow coexisted with occasional small, telling pauses where she would consider an object and set it down with just slightly more care than strict tidiness required.

He had no objections to raise. He had no idea where he would have found them.

The dinner was, objectively, the best thing he had eaten in recent memory. Matthias recognised this as a fact the way he recognised other facts, without drama, simply by measuring it against existing data. He did not comment on it at length. Belial did not seem to require the comment; she watched him eat with an expression of quiet, settled satisfaction that was its own complete conversation.

Astreal ate with neat efficiency, her posture straight, her movements economical. When she set her chopsticks down, she folded her hands and looked at him across the table.

"You will have questions," she said.

"One or two," Matthias said.

"Then I will provide context." She drew a breath, precisely, like a speaker beginning remarks. "Three thousand years ago, Belial and I were consecrated priestesses of the Ecclesiarchy. It was considered a position of honour. We were young, or young as you would understand it, and we believed, as one believes when one has been taught nothing else, that the institution we served was what it claimed to be."

Matthias listened.

"It was not."

Her voice did not change. It reported this as it would report any other fact, no bitterness, no heat, just the clean delivery of a conclusion long since arrived at.

"The corruption within the high ranks had by then penetrated deeply. The cardinals were men who wore sanctity the way one wears a coat in poor weather, useful for appearances, discarded when convenience demanded." She paused. "On one occasion, the convenience they sought involved Belial and myself."

"They did not succeed," Belial added, from across the table, with a pleasantness that did not entirely conceal the specific quality of the memory.

"No," Astreal agreed. "They did not. But the attempt was, clarifying." The faintest shift crossed her face. "We had already, by that point, encountered you. Your former self. The circumstances of that encounter were unusual, and the nature of who and what you were was not in question." She met his eyes steadily. "But the truth is that what persuaded us was not fear, nor pragmatism, nor even the aftermath of what the cardinals had attempted. What persuaded us was you."

A brief silence.

"He was," Belial said, and there was something in the word that was both entirely genuine and very carefully not elaborated upon, "persuasive."

"He was," Astreal agreed, with the same economy.

The corner of her mouth moved again.

"In various respects."

"So you left," Matthias said.

"We left," Astreal confirmed. "We became his servants. And, in the fullness of time, his wives. He granted us both our immortality. We have carried it since."

He looked at Astreal. She looked back at him with the patient, uninflected gaze of someone who had just delivered a completely reasonable summary of events and was prepared to answer follow-up questions.

"You explained all of that," he said, "without any change in expression whatsoever."

"I find a measured tone reduces panic in the listener," Astreal said.

"Right."

Matthias set down his chopsticks. He allowed himself a moment. Then, because the evening had already thoroughly abandoned the familiar, he said it:

"And I assume the two of you are here to, continue, in that capacity."

Belial's eyes lit up. There was no other phrase for it; they simply became brighter, the green going luminous, and she straightened in her chair with the eager alignment of someone who had been hoping, with great discipline, for precisely this segue.

"When can we share a bed?" she asked, with complete sincerity and no apparent sense that the question required any additional framing.

"No," Matthias said.

The light in Belial's eyes dimmed by approximately thirty percent. "No?"

"No."

Astreal let out a breath through her nose. It was not, technically, a pout. But it occupied the same emotional address as one. "Stingy," she said flatly.

"You've known me for forty minutes in this lifetime," Matthias said.

"We have known you for three thousand years," Belial pointed out.

"I have known me for twenty-eight years, and I am the relevant authority on this." He stood and began collecting the dishes. "You'll take the bedroom. Both of you. I'll use the sofa."

Belial and Astreal exchanged a look, the rapid, wordless exchange of people who had been communicating in compressed signals since long before language had a name for it.

"The sofa," Belial said.

"Is small," Astreal observed.

"I'm aware of the dimensions of my own sofa," Matthias said.

Another look passed between them. This one lasted slightly longer. Then, with the synchronised grace of two people who had made a joint decision and would not be announcing the details, both girls rose from the table, offered him small, identical bows that managed somehow to be simultaneously respectful and privately delighted, and retired down the hallway.

He heard the bedroom door close. He heard, for a moment, quiet.

Then he heard the sound of two voices, one warm and animated, one precise and dry, moving beneath the door at a register just too low to make out individual words.

Matthias stood in the kitchen with a stack of clean dishes and listened to the faint, industrious sound of plans being made.

He considered, briefly, going to the door. Knocking. Inquiring. Establishing ground rules with the kind of firmness that the situation clearly warranted.

He put the dishes away instead.

He retrieved a spare blanket from the linen cupboard, settled himself on the sofa, which was, as noted, small, and stared at the ceiling for a while.

The voices behind the bedroom door continued, punctuated once by a muffled sound from Belial that was unmistakably a giggle, and once by something from Astreal that his tired brain assessed, without much certainty, as a low, satisfied laugh.

Three thousand years, he thought. Three thousand years, and they end up in my apartment, in my bedroom, and I'm on my own sofa.

The ceiling had nothing to offer on this point.

His eyes were heavy. The dinner had been excellent. The apartment was, he noticed dimly, considerably tidier than it had been two hours ago.

Matthias Titus, reincarnated demon lord, thoroughly overwhelmed, let his eyes close.

He was asleep before he could finish the thought.