The Sullivan family library occupied the entire third floor of Nana's Victorian house—a space that had accumulated four generations of occult knowledge in the form of books, scrolls, handwritten grimoires, and artifacts whose purposes ranged from academic to dangerous.
Margaret met me at the door with the particular wariness she reserved for requests she suspected would cause trouble.
"You want to research demon deals," she said.
"I want to understand the mechanics. How they work, how they're enforced, whether they can be broken."
"For someone specific?"
"For knowledge. Whether that knowledge has practical application depends on what I learn."
She led me upstairs without further questions. Eleanor was already in the library, surrounded by reference materials that suggested she'd anticipated my visit.
"Nana mentioned you might be coming," Eleanor explained when she saw my expression. "She's observant about coalition activities, even from Denver."
"Is she concerned?"
"She's curious. Demon contracts are dangerous territory, and anyone researching them usually has personal stakes." Eleanor gestured to the chair across from her. "Who made the deal?"
"A human associate. The specifics aren't relevant to the research."
"The specifics are always relevant." Margaret settled into a third chair, producing a leather-bound journal from a nearby shelf. "Different demons have different enforcement mechanisms. Crossroads deals work differently than formal pacts. The more we know about the original contract, the better we can assess options."
I considered how much to reveal. Bela's privacy deserved protection, but incomplete information would limit the witches' ability to help.
"Crossroads deal," I said. "Standard terms—ten years of life in exchange for the wish granted. The contract holder is unknown, probably a middle-management demon rather than a named power."
"That's both good and bad," Eleanor said. "Lesser demons are easier to locate and potentially destroy. But their contracts route through Hell's administrative infrastructure, which means the binding isn't dependent on any single demon's survival."
"What does that mean for breaking the deal?"
"Three primary methods." Eleanor pulled a grimoire from her stack—ancient, leather-bound, pages yellowed with age. "First: kill the demon who holds the contract. This works for independent demons who manage their own affairs, but crossroads contracts are transferred to collection services. The original demon might be dead already, and the contract would remain valid."
"Second option?"
"Find and destroy the original contract itself. Every demon deal generates a physical document that embodies the supernatural binding. Destroy the paper, break the deal." Eleanor's expression darkened. "The problem is location. Contracts are stored in Hell. Literally. Retrieving one requires traveling to a dimension humans aren't equipped to survive."
"And the third method?"
Margaret answered, her voice carrying weight. "Have someone else claim the soul first. Before the contract comes due, another supernatural entity with sufficient authority asserts ownership. The demon arrives to collect and finds the soul already claimed."
"That voids the contract?"
"It creates competing claims. Hell's administrative infrastructure can't handle conflicting ownership—the contract becomes unenforceable." Margaret met my eyes. "But the third method has its own costs. Claiming a soul requires binding it to something else. A territory, an organization, a supernatural hierarchy. The person isn't free—they're transferred from one obligation to another."
"Better than Hell."
"Perhaps. But the entity doing the claiming needs sufficient Dominion—supernatural authority—to make the assertion stick. Lesser powers who attempt it tend to be overruled when Hell disputes the claim."
Dominion. The System tracked that score specifically—a measure of supernatural territorial influence that I'd been building since the coalition's earliest days.
"How much authority is sufficient?"
"There's no fixed threshold." Eleanor consulted another grimoire. "Historical accounts suggest that major territorial powers—vampire elders, established packs, ancient spirits—can occasionally contest demon claims. But consistency is rare. Hell has resources that most supernatural entities can't match."
"Has anyone successfully used this method?"
Margaret and Eleanor exchanged glances.
"My great-great-grandmother tried," Eleanor said quietly. "She was a powerful witch, well-established, with territorial claims across three counties." She pulled an aged journal from the shelf. "She attempted to claim the soul of a young man who'd made a foolish deal in his twenties."
"What happened?"
"The claiming worked initially. When the demons came to collect, they found the soul already bound to grandmother's territory. But they contested." Eleanor's voice carried old grief. "The dispute escalated. Hell sent a specialist. Grandmother... didn't survive the confrontation."
I absorbed that information. The third method was possible—but it carried risks that extended beyond the person being saved.
"What determined the outcome?"
"Power differential." Margaret answered this time. "Grandmother was strong, but Hell has millennia of accumulated authority. When they pushed, she couldn't hold."
"If someone had more authority than she did?"
"Then maybe. The case studies are limited—most people don't try to contest demon contracts. The success rate is low enough that the attempt itself is often fatal."
I thanked them and left with copies of the relevant grimoires, my mind processing implications. The third method was theoretically possible. My Dominion score had been climbing steadily—coalition building, territorial claims, absorbed power from Cormac and Malcolm. Whether it was sufficient to contest Hell's authority remained unknown.
Driving back to Montana, I queried the System directly.
[INQUIRY: SOUL JURISDICTION PROTOCOLS] [DOMINION CURRENT: 375] [SOUL CLAIMING CAPABILITY: THEORETICAL] [SUCCESS PROBABILITY: INSUFFICIENT DATA] [NOTE: DOMINION CORRELATES WITH TERRITORIAL CLAIMS. SOUL JURISDICTION REQUIRES DOMINANT POSITION IN RELEVANT TERRITORY.]
Theoretical. Not impossible—but not guaranteed either.
I didn't tell Bela what I'd learned. Not yet. Not until I understood whether the hope I'd found was real or just another form of cruelty.
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