Mazikeen was having a fantastic day. Or year. Or whatever the hell it was supposed to be in Hell. She licked the blood off one of her curved knives. Maybe it was an eternity; this couldn't last long enough. The raucous cheers, gore at her feet, Lucifer nodding approvingly, fire snapping in the stratosphere—Hell at its finest. There was only one thing missing.

Screams.

She could fix that.

Mazikeen flicked one of her knives under her victim's toenail. She leant in close to him, putting her neck to his, feeling the vibrations scurry down his vocal cords like rats as he screamed. "Do you understand?" she whispered. She licked his earlobe. He whimpered. She snarled and shoved her other blade through the lower portion of his neck and down towards his heart. She could eat the sounds coming from him and live off of them for the next millennia, so full, and delirious, and agonized. Tantalizing.

She pushed her knife farther inward and used it to pull herself closer to him. She snaked forward, her mouth covering his, his pain echoing in her mouth. Mazikeen made it good. She could feel the soul losing himself. She could feel him losing his pain, forgetting the fire-branded agony that laced through his shoulder and touched his heart. Her whole body compressed and twanged with pins and needles. He moaned.

Mazikeen yanked free her blade and with both weapons simultaneously pierced his cheeks. Their tips clawed at his tongue. She withdrew her own, nibbling a line down his chin. He tasted like Sulphur and blood and pride. No better combination. But it was like she was being squeezed in a vice. Maze drew blood above his Adam's apple and put her lips, softer, to it. Hell, that compression. "I'll visit you in—

"Cocytus." Mazikeen stumbled. "What the fuck?" This wasn't Hell. Maze scowled and flipped her knives. This felt like Earth, and looked like a human's house complete with three humans and arm chairs and a couch and framed photos and bad drawings mounted on the wall. Actual, live humans. Maze froze. Living humans; limitless, permanent possibilities.

"Good job, monkey." The male said that. Maze smirked, pointedly appraising him. He was tall, not bad looking… she could enjoy him. He ruffled the hair of a child and pulled her behind him. The other adult, the woman (whom Maze decided she could also enjoy) readjusted her grip on something. Maze couldn't see it from where she stood. But that didn't matter. What mattered was that these humans had summoned her when she'd been having fun.

"Couldn't summon a demon on your own?" Maze snapped at the man. She flipped her knives again and began slinking across the wood floor to him. "Had to have the spawn do it for you." She licked her teeth. He would have to make up for Maze's abandoned victim back in Hell.

"Excuse me, Miss Demon?" The spawn poked her head out from behind the man's back.

"Trixie, honey—" That one was the woman. She had a pendant with a banishing symbol inscribed on it. How cute.

Maze paused her forward approach and stared at the child. "What?" Why was her chest compressing when this child looked at her like that? "He's using you. I bet he can only summon angels."

"It's hard to understand you." The girl had a pendant around her neck, smaller than the woman's, but still powerful enough. Maze formed a glamour over the demonic half of her face. The girl had used that pendant to summon her here, but the summoning pentagram hadn't been written by her. "Cool!" The child smiled, teeth bared.

"He's using you." Maze jutted her chin towards the man. She savored the affronted look plastered onto his face. No one ever looked affronted in Hell. "Can't summon a demon on his own—I'll see him in Hell."

"Hey!"

"He can summon demons just fine—" said the female human.

"I'm not a bad person," the man muttered.

"—And so can my daughter, Beatrice, who wants to talk to you." The woman, her hand tight around the banishing symbol, gestured towards her daughter.

"Trixie," Beatrice said, holding out a hand. Maze stared at it. Was she asking to be flipped, or for her bones to be snapped, or… Maze didn't know. Maybe some of the blood that was still on her? Maze set one of her knives into her other hand. "You're supposed to shake it, silly." Trixie closed the distance, the man reaching to stop her but falling short, and took Maze's hand. Trixie felt cold, but clean, and what the hell was going on? "What's your name?" Trixie didn't retreat from within Maze's reach after she dropped her hand.

"Mazikeen."

"Wait." The man. Disbelief, now. They had that frequently enough in Hell. "Mazikeen of the Lilim, Mazikeen?"

"That's right, angel boy." So he'd heard of her.

"I'm a good guy," he insisted. Then, he blinked, obviously clearing his thoughts, and began again on the more pressing topic. "Monkey," he said, now staring at Trixie in rapt disbelief, "just, uh, what were you thinking when you summoned her?"

"Did I do something wrong?"

Maze felt the constant pressure that had been with her since she was summoned twist in her stomach, and she growled. She returned a knife to each hand. "Yeah," Maze said. "She do something wrong?" The man—Trixie's father, Maze decided—raised his hands non-threateningly.

"Leave him be, Mazikeen," Trixie's mother said. Maze glanced at her. She still had one hand around the pendant, while her other she rested near her hip; she had a gun, but wasn't touching it. "Dan." Maze snapped her attention back to the man, Dan. He snuck something back into his pocket but kept his hand firmly on it.

"No, Trixie, you did nothing wrong," she continued, smiling. Maze kept her eye on Dan, even as she steadily relaxed as her summoner's distress began evaporating. "In fact, you did so well, you surprised us. That's all. See, Mazikeen's the first demon you've ever summoned, but did you know that Mazikeen is the personal bodyguard of Lucifer?"

"Chloe," Dan began.

Trixie ignored him, eyes wide. "Like, the Devil?" Chloe nodded. Trixie turned her massive brown eyes back upon Mazikeen. "You're his personal bodyguard?"

"I'm his personal everything." Mazikeen smirked. "Bodyguard, advisor, torturer, sexu—"

"You can stop there," Chloe said, holding up a hand. "She's nine." She was nine? So what? Younger than the usual summoner, from what Maze had heard, but it wasn't like she had much experience with summoners. Well, the ones that were still alive or with corporeal bodies, anyway.

"It's my birthday today!" Trixie bounced on the balls of her feet. She bounced better than most people Maze fought. "I get to have chocolate cake for breakfast tomorrow morning."

"If you go to bed on time," Dan said. He had finally withdrawn his hand from his pocket. Maze didn't know how to interpret his expression; not one of the more common ones in Hell, not in The Big Book of Human Emotions for Demons. Still, she raised an eyebrow.

"You taught your spawn to summon demons for her birthday but you won't let her stay up to party." Maze ran her tongue along the edges of her teeth. "I bet the angels are getting sick of your mug."

"Jesus—for the last time, I don't summon angels!" Dan shoved a hand back into his sweater pocket, and Maze twirled her knives. "I'm. A. Good. Man."

"Uh-huh." Maze grinned, energy trickling into her as she poked him. "But 'don't' doesn't mean 'can't'."

"Stop." Chloe came between Maze and Dan, gently nudging Trixie out of the way. "No fighting." Dan and Maze both frowned, the latter glaring at her. A human, telling her not to fight? Psh. Maze spun around Chloe and lunged for Dan. Her stomach tugged. She came up short.

"Please don't argue," Trixie said. She'd gone to sit on the arm of the couch, feet dangling off the ground. Dan and Chloe glanced at each other, their awkward look not going unnoticed by Maze. Then, Trixie spoke again, and she returned her attention to the spawn. "Miss Mazikeen, will you help me?"

Maze flipped her knives. "With what?"

"Mom and Dad are scared that something bad will happen to me, or I'll be kidnapped again." Again? Trixie kicked her legs off the couch, swinging them as much as she could before they smacked back into the cushion. She shrugged. "You're probably really busy, but you must be really good at protecting people if you help Lucifer."

"I am." Maze set her hands on her hips, knives dangling from her thumbs. "I'm the best."

"Can you teach me?"

"Monkey," Dan began, but Trixie continued past him.

"Mom and Dad want me to ask you to protect me, but you're probably too busy for that, and I don't want to ask you to do anything you don't want to do or that I wouldn't do, because that's rude, so will you teach me to fight so I don't need to ask you to fight for me and get hurt for me?" Trixie took a massive gulp of air.

"Trixie, honey—" Chloe said.

"What do I get out of it?" Maze asked, cutting Chloe off. Teaching a human spawn to fight? Not bad. Going against her parents' wishes? Better.

Trixie stared at her feet for a moment, then smiled. "Chocolate cake!" Dan was cringing. Maze smirked.

"Chocolate cake, huh?"

Trixie nodded. "And maybe we can be friends!" Friends? Whatever that was, Dan didn't seem fond of it, as he was staring desperately at Chloe, whose face was steadily going blank.

"Friends?" Maze repeated.

"Yep." Trixie jumped off the couch. "Friends. Friends talk to each other about things, and trust each other, and help each other." Right. Friends. Trixie pursed her lips. "Like, you're probably with Lucifer a lot, right?"

"With him in every definition of the phrase." Dan was steadily wilting while Chloe was continuing to lose all sense of emotion. This could be fun. "Why?"

"Well, he probably gets kind of annoying, right?"

Dan gaped in the corner, and Maze was inclined to mimic him. Trixie just called the Devil annoying. A kid. Him. Annoying. Then, Maze snorted.

"Yeah. Don't tell him."

"I won't," Trixie promised. "Friends get to talk about what's annoying them to each other, and friends don't tell anyone else. So, you could complain to me about Lucifer, and I wouldn't tell anyone."

"Trixie," Dan said, "I don't think listening to complaints about the Devil is a good idea, monkey."

Maze sneered at Dan. "Do I still get the cake?" she asked Trixie. Trixie summoned her, and if nothing else, Maze was at least going to have fun with this.

"Yeah!"

Dan gaped, and began formulating words to protest again, but Chloe stopped him before he could give Maze more opportunity to provoke him with a simple, "Dan. This works." He crossed his arms but didn't argue. Too bad—Mazikeen had been having fun.

"Can I summon you next week, Miss Mazikeen?" Trixie asked coming closer to Mazikeen to stare up at her with the largest, most innocent brown eyes the demon had ever witnessed. How long was a week on Earth? Chloe's blank mask was impenetrable, but Dan's brow was twitching.

Mazikeen look back down at the spawn and nodded once. "Yeah. Next week, little human. And I want cake." Then, she grinned, baring her teeth, mainly for Dan's sake. He looked just about ready to try banishing her. "And if we're gonna be 'friends', you don't call me Mazikeen. It's Maze."

AN: This one was prompted by a user over on AO3.

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