[Part 6]

Dante’s P.O.V

It’s pretty much another day for me, just another slow day. Demons aren’t coming through, and I’m not earning much. Not that I want to be moving. The weather is just right, anyway. It was great if I could just stay here and sleep things off…

A boot on my chest wakes me up, but I grab the ankle connected to that boot, pulling my sweet wifey down. Darling Mary Ann must not have expected my fast movements, for she gave a soft shriek before she crashed on top of me on the floor, hands pressed on my shoulders to keep herself upright. I reminded myself that this beauty looking at me is my fiancé, my would-be-wifey, as she glared down at me. I grinned back happily, and my little counterpart between my legs definitely was equally happy.

“Daddy’s home.” I grinned, trapping her above me with arms around her waist as she hit on my chest with her strength, struggling against my restraints to get up. Instead, her struggles rub her beautiful part over my stomach, and I groaned. Was there a beauty more amazing than this one whom I have captured with a ring on her fourth finger?

“Dante,” She complained -sounding both pleading and frowning at the same time, hitting me again on the chest to prove her point, “Not now. I’ve still got things to do.”

“Things like pleasing your man?” I suggested, grabbing her amazing ass. I had already taken this woman so many times, and yet she was just something I would never tire of. This was Lady, my Lady, after all.

“Things like a job.” Her reply was supposed to sound stern and strict, but I heard a caving in of her tone instead. Her blush had already risen up to her face, and damn it, the lust written in her eyes was just… amazing. My Lady was caving in, and at the moment, there was no woman hotter than she was at this moment.

“It’s your job to please your man, darling.” I suggested, purposefully moving her ass over my tight abs. There was nothing more that pleasured my woman, as her eyes shut tight, her lips pressed hard together to suppress the moan I knew was to come. Relentless, and extremely happy to see her, I kneaded my fingers harder, moving her rump over my stomach.

“You… one hell of a bastard…” Her moan finally escaped from her lips, along with her curse as she finally caved in entirely. Her hands made quick work of Kalina Ann around her shoulder, and I heard a noisy clatter of the weapon on the office floor as she laid herself along my length, claiming my lips for a hot kiss while I continued concentrating on her rump.

My Lady was venturous as her hand began to continue south to locate happy Little Dante straining hard against jeans. She definitely was happy with her find, as she laughed the amazing sultry laugh against my lips. I was beginning to get real hot and bothered, just kissing her amazing lips, feeling her amazing fingers over my little counterpart until…

“Where is Vergil?”

“What the fu-” Lady and I froze simultaneously, as I tilted my head to look at the guy upside down. He stood over us, face totally unfazed. There was an amused twinkle in his eyes, but his face was stern and strict, exactly like my twin brother.

“Where is Vergil?” He repeated again, standing where Kalina Ann was discarded. Neither of us had even heard him arrive, and yet he was standing so close for a free show. That… son of a…

“Look if you wanna join for a threesome, you’re not getting anywhere with that tone. If you’re looking for Vergil, why the damn hell are you asking me? Do I look like Marcy to you?” I spat, annoyed that he had broken the atmosphere with his bland question. Honestly, was he trying to copy my brother and being a spoilsport in everything? I thought at least Damon had some sense of fun more than Vergil had. I couldn’t blame them for being doppelgangers, but I definitely could blame the hell of a half-devil for breaking my imminent sexy time with my lady.

“Marcy sent me here. She’s been looking for him for at least a week already.” Damon replied simply, as if seeing nothing wrong with the two of us lying on the floor here, our shirts rumpled. Was he daft, or was he purposefully pretending to be like his twin –pretending to not know anything?

Embarrassed, my hot lady climbs off me, smacking my lingering fingers away as she straightened her clothes, taming her wild blush that should have only been for me. Scowling, I picked myself up long enough to drag my ass back to the chair, leaning back and leaving my boots on the desk again.

“If you expected Daddy Sparda to have installed a Vergil-Tracker inside me somehow, you’re going to be disappointed.” I yawned, ready to fall back asleep now that it’s been clear that I’ve been cock-blocked by Damon. Seriously, didn’t he have other things to do? Didn’t he say he wanted to enjoy his time with his children and make up for the ten years lost? Didn’t he say he wanted to find a way to get rid of Mundus for us all?

“I understood exactly how much you don’t care about your brother during the first year I met you, Dante.” Damon’s voice came leveled in reply, but the tone makes clear that he had more to say. “I’m not asking you to track him down. I’m asking if he left any clues with you as to what exactly he was trying to investigate.”

I shrugged.

“If you expected Daddy Sparda to have installed a read-Vergil’s-mind-Device inside me somehow, you’re going to be disappointed.” I repeated, watching a dangerous flash of annoyance fly past his face. How long have I not seen such an expression made at me? The last time I saw that expression was on Vergil –before my brother went MIA on the world, making effectively everyone except me give a damn.

I pretty much wouldn’t have given a damn about the flash of annoyance, but this was Damon we were talking about. Ever since he discovered how much he could affect us with his powers, he seemed to take the morbid pride in taking me –somehow he aimed only me, but not his hell of a brother –to hand through his new powers. He extended a hand towards me, and with a flick of his wrist, invisible strings pulled me up from the chair standing up straight.

“What the-” My protest was canceled when his eyes narrowed on me, his powers clamping in. I struggled against my mute bindings, but obviously he was stronger now as he stood satisfied at my tortured state. I looked to my fiancé for help, expecting her to be indignant and angry that someone would put her future-husband through such humiliation.

Of course, what else could I expect, but to see Lady’s amused expression as she turned to meet Damon’s eyes contact.

“I swear, if I had powers like yours, Dante would be so screwed.” Lady commented admirably, as I let my eyes plead. Obviously, she was immune to me eye-begging. I began to curse my luck and wondered why in hell I even proposed to her at all. It wasn’t too late to take off the ring around my middle ring finger… if only I could move at all.

“Now that he’s silent and obedient,” Damon commented, “do you know anything about where Vergil might have gone to, Lady?”

“To be honest, I wasn’t even sure when he left DMC. But before that, I heard that Patty dropped by and bumped into Vergil. She said she heard Abigail discussing about Mundus sending his strongest demons over to end you. Vergil wanted to investigate about that, but Marcy fell sick for a short period of time. He postponed it, but when your sister got well, he went off immediately to search for rumors.” Lady explained, and even I was surprised at how much she knew about my brother when I didn’t even hear a thing about it. Had Marcy and Lady been exchanging pointers on how to deal with their husbands or something? Maybe they had a sister-thing going on.

Too bad Vergil would never give me tips on how to please my debtor-plus-would-be-wife.

“Marcy said he went down to Hell.” Damon nodded, as if the stories he had heard corroborated with Lady’s viewpoint. “He might have gone straight to look for Abigail.”

I made annoying sounds at the base of my throat –since he couldn’t control my voice box –until Damon was irritated enough to take his attention from whatever he was thinking deeply about, turning to me with the same annoyed look.

“What?” He barked, but I made the noise again. Even if I wanted to answer, how the hell was I going to do it with my lips glued shut?

“If it’s going to be nonsense from you again, Dante, I swear I’m going to pull you apart and reassemble you all the wrong way.” He threatened, but I felt his power over me loosen its grip. I tested my control by opening my mouth, glad that I had my mouth back again. I had prepared a few choice cuss words, but for the sake of my precious particles, I decided against pissing the guy off. Fatherhood must have made Damon a short-tempered man, for I didn’t remember him being so snappish before. Then again, maybe 10 years of absence had made me forgot every tiny bit of him.

“Hell’s on crazy shutdown since you left. If Vergil went there, he could have possibly got himself caught by the crazy number of demons trying to break through the gates.” I put in, making myself sound reasonable so that my particles would be saved. Though I did appreciate Damon’s wanting to help out to find my brother –just a tiny little bit –the way he approached it was not appreciated at all. You’d think someone who barged into my office would have more manners than standing over the sexy time I was going to have with my fiancé.

“What do you mean?” He asks, his face growing dark. Damon probably wasn’t aware of it, but talk of Hell definitely made him a much more scary man these days. Granted, he had spent 10 unwilling years there, but it was part of our lives. Hell was somewhere that was always there wreaking havoc on our lives. Demon hunters like us; we took advantage of that to earn a little bit of money.

But Damon was another level. Damon was pretty much the only person I knew who dared to aim at destroying Hell to keep his family safe.

Then again, he was probably the only person who could destroy Hell.

“I don’t know if it’s related, but we demon hunters have been losing lots of jobs since you returned. Less gates are being opened, and less demons are here in this world. It’s like Mundus is keeping his forces back. Maybe he’s amassing his army.” Lady put in with a conspiratory tone, which totally answered why my fiancé often came home early these days.

Hey, who knew a Lady without a job was going to make for a happy Dante? When she didn’t have work to do, we always ended up with sexy time everywhere in the office.

“He doesn’t have to amass any army.” Damon replied off-handedly, his thinking face turning on quickly. “But if less gates are being opened, it probably means that he already sent his best people after me. And if what Dante says is right… Vergil could be in real trouble trapped in Hell.”

“You’re forgetting the part where he’s the eldest son of Sparda. And he has Yamato.” I put in helpfully. See? Who said I didn’t stand up for Vergil? Vergil usually didn’t need anyone standing up for him anyway, so I couldn’t be blamed for being a bad twin brother, right? It was kind of like how Daniel would never need to worry about Damon being in trouble anyway –since Damon was perpetually always in trouble with demons and Mundus.

“Think about the number of demons you’ve fought throughout your lifetime as a demon hunter.” Damon said abruptly, turning to me with a serious spark in his eyes. “Then double that. That is the number of demons that Vergil has to deal with single-handedly down in Hell right now.”

“Can’t he –I don’t know –open a portal and escape back here?” I asked, not impressed by the analogy given. Vergil was probably capable enough of dealing with twice the number of demons I’ve dealt with so far… right?

Okay, I might have overestimated his abilities, but Vergil with a devil trigger was definitely strong enough to escape back into DMC before his life was threatened –at least that much I was confident of.

“Creating portals in Hell isn’t as easy as we do things here.” Damon explained, but his expression seemed as if he could not bear to spare a minute standing here and explaining the physics of portals to someone. “In Hell, there are special areas of convergence where the divergence of Hell and DMC is blurred. I had to walk through a large plain from Lucifer’s crumbled castle before I could open a portal back home.”

“So you’re saying for the first time in his life, Vergil’s stuck?” Lady put in curiously, almost unbelieving of the situation. It wasn’t surprising, considering how infallible my brother had been all this while when he was still present. The only people who could ever hope to contain my brother’s powers were only Sparda, Mundus and… well, Damon.

“Not the first time,” I reminded on instinct, “he was captured by Mundus long ago, remember?”

“Regardless.” Damon’s hard voice pierced through, and I received a glare that probably said that he didn’t appreciate the reminder that Mundus’s reach had once been powerful enough to not only trap Vergil, but also him for ten years. I wasn’t sure if it was pure dumb luck that Damon and his doppelganger both were trapped by Mundus and his minions, but I knew enough that I didn’t want to stick with that son of a hell ever. “We need to find a way to get to Vergil.”

“You’re the portal-guy. You’re the one who can control demons.” I reminded, but Damon turned away.

“I can’t.” The strong voice disappeared almost immediately, giving way to something soft and helpless.

“You’re kidding. You can’t go to Hell?” I asked, surprised. After all this time Daniel and I’ve been cursing for Vergil and Damon to go to hell for the things they put us through, Damon really can’t go to Hell?

“I was trapped there for 10 years, Dante.” Damon’s protest was weak, and I sensed something irrational going on here. So what if he was trapped there for 10 years? He could bust himself out anytime now. He had the powers to control demons, for heaven’s sake. He could just order the demons to perish and swagger his way to a portal back to DMC, couldn’t he?

“So? Vergil’s stuck there, and I’m not the one who can disintegrate demons with a thought.” I pushed, but Lady, somehow sensing something wrong, stepped closer with a hand on my forearm, squeezing as if trying to tell me something.

“I swore I wouldn’t go down there until I find a way to destroy Mundus. The next time I go there, I will destroy Mundus. Before that, I can’t go down.”

“Well, so you’re going to leave Vergil to die down there then?” I asked, raising my voice a little. Didn’t Damon always emphasize on protecting his family? Wasn’t Vergil his family? Just because of his petty little swear, he would leave my brother to die down there? I wasn’t really worried about Vergil dying –since he was Daddy Sparda’s favorite boy –but what the heck, man.

Lady’s hand on mine tightened, but I shrugged her off. Whatever she wanted to tell me; she could tell me after I settled things with Damon. Did getting all that power from the seven princes of hell make him selfish? Just because he was powerful didn’t mean he could throw his family into the wind. Did we mean nothing to him, after all those years we spent watching over his wife and children and making sure that nothing happened to them? I even put myself on the line protecting the two little devils from Mundus’s demon force!

“Why can’t you do it then? You’re his twin brother!” Damon spun back around with explosive force, his hard blue eyes piercing. Lady took a step back in hesitation, but I stood my ground. So what if he was more powerful and probably could crush me in a moment? I needed to know where Damon’s loyalty laid.

“Why don’t you? Mundus is going to hide in Hell forever, and you’re going to leave Vergil down there, searching for a way to protect your family while you cower here in DMC because you don’t dare to step in there?” I met the volume of his previous declaration, puffing my chest out to show I wasn’t affected by his sudden spike of power. He stepped dangerously closer, his blue eyes almost like my brother.

Maybe it was a being-in-hell-thing, because I saw the flash of chaos flying through his eyes dangerously, like Vergil when he first got back from Hell. In that single strike of a moment, Damon didn’t look like the brother I had for that one year at all. Damon looked like someone else.

Like a demon.

“Vergil is protecting our family.” He corrected in a dangerous voice.

“Well, I was beginning to doubt that you ever considered him your family. Or me for that fact, if you don’t even dare to step into Hell to save his ass.” I challenged back, and something sparked to life in his eyes. The mark of a tyrant, the mark of a demonic being sparked in his eyes –a look I knew well –in Mundus.

“You question my loyalty to you and Vergil?” He asked, his voice low as his fists clenched. It didn’t take an idiot to see his rising aura of redness, and this time, even I had to step back to escape the atmosphere of his electrifying aura ascending from his being. “You question me, after all that I have done? After all that your family have done to me?”

I must be courting my death, because I opened my mouth with words ready to my lips. But before I could say anything more, my darling fiancé jumped forwards, covering hands over my mouth and forcing my words in as she pulled me back –serious this time.

“Damon, we mean nothing by that at all!” She said shrilly, in a voice that said she was scared at what was happening –the transformation that we were just beginning to see happening to Damon. Was it happening –his devil side struggling to change him? He had been saying all this while that he didn’t feel like human at all, as if he had been stripped of his humanity. But all that we felt from him was that he had been turned half-devil; pretty much like Vergil and me. But maybe we thought wrong?

Maybe he was right, maybe he really wasn’t human anymore. Maybe he was just a demon, hiding behind a guise of a human mind, body and heart. Maybe if we pushed him over the edge, he would become a demon entirely…

For the first time since he returned, I began to consider the fact that he might really be a full demon and not a human anymore.

Behind Damon, the front door to the office opened.

“Hey, Damon, are you done? You’re taking awfully long with Dante.” Marcy’s bright voice rang through the office, but the smile quickly faded at the sight of Lady and me, as well as her brother with his crackling, electrifying aura.

“Damon! What are you doing?” Marcy demanded, rushing into the building, but stood a safe distance away somehow seeming to know that something was happening to her brother. It must be a sibling connection, and I marveled how Marcy could know that Damon was tipping over the edge so easily.

“I’m struggling not to kill Dante; that’s what I’m doing.” Damon’s voice was clipped as he answered Marcy, his fists still clenched tightly.

“We’re looking for my husband, not killing my brother-in-law!” Marcy exclaimed, looking as if she wanted to step forward and restrain her brother, but not daring for fear of his scary aura harming her in some way.

“I’m tempted to just kill one and leave the other one in Hell.” Damon’s cold reply shocks us, but I’m pretty much more shocked at what happens afterwards.

The slap swung out of nowhere, and in the silence of the office, the sound of skin-to-skin contact echoed.

“Listen to yourself! What are you talking about? You’re scaring me, Damon!” Marcy barked, but for some reason, the slap seems to have worked.

With bowed head, a hand on his cheek, Damon refused to look up from his feet. His shoulders are hunched, and all I could say was that he looked ultimately defeated. It seemed like more than a slap had woken him up, and he seemed to be dealing with his own struggles as he stood there in silence, one fist clenched tight while the other hand cradled his cheek.

“This is why I can’t go to Hell, Dante…” He resumes, his voice soft and pained. “If I go down, I cannot control my devil side. I won’t be the Damon you know anymore. I’ll be exactly like Mundus. I’ll change, and I don’t want that to happen, ever.”

“What do you mean by change?” I demanded, not exactly in the mood to make nice and all. After all, he had threatened me with his power, and sons of Sparda didn’t react well to threats at all.

“That’s what I’ve been struggling with ever since I came back. I knew I didn’t feel right. I knew I didn’t feel like human anymore, but every one of you assured me that I was as human as any half-devil can get. I want to feel at ease with that explanation, but it doesn’t work. I’m not even sure if I’m half-devil or not. Even if it is, I’m definitely not like Vergil or you. I just know that this power… it struggles every day to consume me. And I’m afraid that when I cave in, I’ll cease to be Damon Kries.” The voice that replied me was soft and scared, and for the first real time ever since he returned back to the world, I saw an uncertain, afraid man.

“Why would you cease to be Damon? You’re still my brother!” Marcy put in, a lost look on her face as if having a missing husband wasn’t enough. I dreaded to know what would happened to her if her brother crumbled right now.

“When I get consumed by this demonic power that flows inside me… Marcy, I won’t be Damon anymore. I’ll become someone else, and if I have this much demonic power right now… I’m afraid I’ll be a second Mundus. Powerful, determined and chaotic.” Damon’s reply was helpless as his hand rested softly over his heart, as if he could feel the struggle happening right inside him. We had all assumed he was fine with his new crazy power, but what if it came with a heavy price? That was what he had been worrying about all this while, and here he had to worry about his family, my brother, everyone.

“Fine.” I sighed. Sometimes, I swear Damon has more than one way to make me work, and I hate how it seems so effortless from him. I was totally going to hate the day that Lady learns anything from him, but for the moment, what else was there left for me to do?

I was, after all, the unofficial uncle of a pair of little devils. Even if I didn’t want Lady breathing down my back, Damien and Wynter were going to cry their eyes out at me if they knew their Uncle Vergil had died in Hell without my gallant saving. Besides, if I managed to save Vergil this time, he was going to owe me a lifetime’s worth of favors.

And seeing my would-be future with my debtor, I would need a lot of them –where I can get them.

I walked to where Rebellion stood, and tucked Ebony and Ivory into their holsters. Silence followed me, along with curious eyes, but I purposefully gave an explosive sigh to show that I was extremely reluctant. I swear, if Daniel appears around somehow, I’m going to drag his ass with me. Enough that his twin brother makes me do work. If I see the son of a hell going around flirting and ramming his junk into hot models in his own world, I was going to drag him down to Hell and lock him there.

Yeah, that was a good idea.

“Where are you going?” My darling fiancé asked before I stepped out of the office, but the smile on Damon’s face betrays his faked confusion. He knew exactly what he’d made me do, and I swallowed my curse. No point pissing the guy off more than he had already done me. This was a guy who could turn into Mundus No. 2 anytime. And for the moment, we didn’t need Mundus No. 2 with us when we haven’t even found a way to get rid of Mundus No. 1 yet.

“Kicking Vergil’s ass out of hell.” I grumbled, and for a good measure, I slammed the door to DMC behind me.

The rain chose the perfect moment to fall, and I stood in the middle of a torrent, glaring at the floor, because I couldn’t go back and glare at Damon –having made my dignified exit and all.

Vergil, I swore as I walked down the road in the rain, was going to get it from me.