My One Deadly Night With the Demon: Dante, the Demon Lover Who Came Back Wrong

What is My One Deadly Night With the Demon about?

Three years ago, Dante's brother Marco put a bullet between his eyes and watched the dirt go in on top of him, and the devil, being an opportunist, offered terms: a thousand guilty souls fed to the pit, and in exchange Marco's soul becomes Dante's to collect. Nine hundred are already accounted for, which means the remaining arithmetic is essentially the entire series, and it is also the reason this demon lover spends his evenings checking a number instead of a calendar.

The complication arrives on a mezzanine in a masked club on Marco's own territory, where Dante — hunting number nine hundred and one — looks up at a woman who does not register as sin at all, but as something closer to illumination. Her name is Aria Vance, she has not voluntarily left this building in three years, and she has been dreaming his face for most of them.

If you loved shows like Interview with the Vampire, this is the same engine in ninety-second episodes: a damned man setting out precisely what he is, in his own words, to somebody who refuses to be frightened of him. My One Deadly Night With the Demon just gives its demon lover a deadline, and then starts the clock.

Who is Dante in My One Deadly Night With the Demon?

The rain has not stopped since Episode 2. He is the only one of us who has stopped noticing.

InterviewerYou are indoors, you are dry, and there is central heating. When did that last happen?

DanteThree years ago. Maybe longer. I don't feel cold the way you do — I am cold, so the rain never registered as a problem. It registered as weather that agreed with me. Standing in a warm room is the genuinely disorientating part, because it turns out that comfort is a sensation I retained and simply never had occasion to use. My coat, incidentally, is going to take approximately a week.

InterviewerWhat do you actually see when you look at a room like this one?

DanteRot. Not here — here there is nothing, which is the whole reason I am standing in it. But out there, everyone is smoke. Green, thick, coming off them like something left too long in a bin. The worse the person, the harder it is to see the face underneath. I have been to this city's best restaurants and I could not tell you what a single diner looked like.

InterviewerAnd when you take the glasses off?

DanteThen they swallow every drop of pain they have ever dealt. All of it, at once, in the order they dealt it. It tastes like copper in my mouth for hours afterwards, because whatever they experience travels through me on its way to wherever it is going, and I have never been offered an exemption from the transit. That is invariably the part nobody bothers to put in the ghost stories.

What makes Dante a demon lover and not just a monster?

InterviewerAria Vance put both hands on your face tonight while your eyes were open. Walk us through the moment you realised she was not going to scream.

DanteThere was no moment. That is what I keep trying to explain to myself. There was a scream, and then there wasn't one, and the silence was so loud I thought something had gone wrong with me. Nine hundred people have looked into that and come apart. She looked directly into it, stayed exactly where she was, and then — having established that the most dangerous thing in the building was standing eighteen inches away with its eyes uncovered — asked me whether I was hurt.

InterviewerWhy is she immune?

DanteI don't know. \[pause\] I have had three years to get comfortable with the rules and she breaks all of them at once. There is no rot in her. There is nothing for the curse to catch hold of. I could manufacture a theory, but it would be a man guessing confidently about the single phenomenon he has never previously encountered, and she deserves better than that. So, no. I don't know yet.

InterviewerShe knew your name before you said it. She recognised this room from her dreams. There is a word people use for a story like this one, and the word is demon lover. Would you sign that?

DanteI would sign that she has been in my head since the night I died, and that I assumed she was an illusion. A trap. He is not above that sort of thing, my employer. I spent three years being careful not to want the one beautiful thing I had, in case it turned out to be bait. Then she opened a door for me. Call it what you like. I am not going to be clever about it.

Why does Dante collect souls for the devil?

He answers this one facing the window, which is not the same as not answering it.

InterviewerNine hundred people are in the pit because of you. Make the case for the demon lover being the one anybody roots for.

DanteI don't have one you would accept, so I will give you the true one instead. Every soul I have taken was guilty, and I could see exactly how guilty before I moved. I am not the judge — the smoke is. But I chose the deal, and I chose it because the alternative was staying in the ground while the man who put me there kept my share. If you want a resurrected hitman with clean hands, you have the wrong series. What I will say is that in three years I have never taken anybody the smoke did not condemn first, and on the nights it ran thin I walked past and went home.

InterviewerYour brother shot you.

DanteBetween the eyes, at close range, in his own building. He thought he was sending me to hell. He was right. He was just wrong about the paperwork.

InterviewerDoes the number on your back help?

DanteNo. It is a soul debt, not a scoreboard. A branch lights up, my back burns for an hour, and I am one closer to a door I am not sure I want to walk through. Nine hundred of them have taught me one thing and it is not a comforting thing: I am extremely good at this. That is not the same as being owed a happy ending, and I have had enough time in the rain to understand the difference between a debt that is nearly settled and a life that is nearly earned. The first is arithmetic; the second was not available to people like me until approximately an hour ago.

InterviewerDo you know why there are four locks on this door?

DanteI haven't asked her. \[long pause\] She will tell me or she won't.

The interviewer moves on.

What happens when the demon lover runs out of souls?

InterviewerLighter one. Nobody ever asks the demon lover about the administration. What is the single worst part of being a shadow?

DanteLaundry. I own one coat. It is a good coat, it does not photograph, and it has been wet since the spring. There is no dry cleaner in this city that opens at four in the morning for a man with no reflection worth mentioning. Before tonight I had genuinely forgotten that buildings contain heating, and that people arrange their entire lives around the assumption of being dry. Your species has been quietly winning at something for several centuries and nobody thought to mention it to the man standing outside in the alley.

InterviewerOne hundred souls left. What happens at one thousand?

DanteMarco's soul becomes mine. That was the arrangement, and the arrangement has been the only structural element keeping me upright for three consecutive years — and now, extremely inconveniently, I have acquired a reason to be upright that has nothing whatsoever to do with him, which is a considerably worse problem than it sounds like when you say it aloud in a heated room. I know exactly what I am supposed to do when the number lands — and I am no longer willing to say out loud that I will do it.

InterviewerWorse how?

DanteBecause it always starts like this. The gold, the quiet, the two of us somewhere warm. And then it turns into a nightmare, every single time, without a single exception in three years of it, and I have never once managed to stay in the first part long enough to find out what the first part is for. So the honest answer to your question is that I am considerably more frightened of the next twenty minutes than I am of the devil, who is at least predictable and who has always, to be fair to him, honoured the terms. Ask me again in an hour.

InterviewerLast one. Anything you want to say to the people about to watch all of this happen to you?

DanteWatch her, not me. Everyone watches me. I am the loud thing in the frame and I am not the interesting one — I am a man who made a deal and is paying it off on schedule. She built four locks and a wall of surveillance screens and then, on the strength of nothing but an assumption that something in front of her was in pain, put her bare hands on the worst thing in this city. One of us is demonstrably brave, and it is not the one who cannot die, and I would appreciate it if somebody other than me eventually noticed that.