SAM: The Devil Went Down to Sunnydale 4 (Patreon)

Los Angeles, Summer 1997 Please,” Harold Winters whispered, his voice cracking on the single syllable. “Please, I’m begging you.” Sam didn’t

Los Angeles, Summer 1997

Please,” Harold Winters whispered, his voice cracking on the single syllable. “Please, I’m begging you.”

Sam didn’t answer right away. Of course he didn’t. That would’ve been charity. No—he let the silence stretch, let it steep like tea left too long on the burner. Silence made men remember what they feared, and Harold Winters feared the slow rot more than the Devil.

Which, in fairness, was redundant.

The room had that curated menace only rich men managed to mistake for class. Everything dark wood and deeper leather. Glass the size of confessionals. An office built to impress exactly the kind of person who no longer visited—namely, people who still mattered. This is the church that ego built.

Now the preacher was on his knees.

Sam reclined an inch deeper into the chair Harold once ruled from. The throne fit. Of course it did. Luxury tends to recognize royalty, even when it doesn’t know why. The devil in a borrowed seat is still a devil.

Harold knelt. His Armani wrinkled, spine bent as dignity leaked from him like breath from a punctured lung.

And still, Sam waited.

There was always something holy about desperation, especially from the powerful. It peeled back their doctrine. Left the bone.

“Begging,” Sam murmured at last, tasting the word like wine with too much history. “There’s art in it, Harold. Cadence. Color. A man’s final melody, if he sings it right.”

His dreadlocks slid as he tilted his head, the motion deliberate, theatrical in its intimacy. The kind of slow movement that let silence stay close, like a lover you weren’t done bleeding yet.

“Some cry. Some scream. You—” Sam gestured vaguely, vaguely enough to offend—“you pitch it like a meeting.”

He leaned forward, elbows on knees, posture loose in the way only predators ever truly mastered. His eyes didn’t leer. They studied. Catalogued. Filed.

“You’re still thinking in contracts,” he said. “Still clinging to your old currency. Very American of you. Very Harold Winters.”

The smile he offered then was an heirloom thing. Polished, ritualistic. The kind of expression carved on stained glass windows—radiant, misleading, older than the gospel that stole its shape.

Harold looked up like a man trying not to. Sweat found its way down the side of his temple, absorbed dutifully by the dye-blackened fuzz lining his brows. The tumor hadn’t taken his vanity. Pity.

“What exactly is it you want?” he croaked, trying to aim for authority and landing squarely in panic. “Money? I have—God, I have more than enough. Or connections? I know everyone worth knowing.”

Sam laughed the way a lion might purr. It wasn’t cruel, not exactly. Just… amused. And certain.

“Harold. My dear fading star. If I needed capital, I’d wring it from the market. If I needed favors, I’d whisper a little louder.” He swept a hand across the air, indicating the skyline with the kind of careless grandeur that came from knowing he could unmake it if he chose. “I’m here because it amuses me.”

He stood then, letting his full height fill the room like incense. Made his way, slow and indulgent, to the drinks cabinet without looking back. Movements smooth, almost bored. His silhouette cut the room in half.

A crystal decanter. A glass in his hand. The pour was silent and measure, the alcohol golden and expensive.

He didn’t offer Harold a drop.

“Three months, yes?” Sam asked without turning, swirling the glass. He wasn’t one for liquor, and truly, he wasn’t going to drink it. A nigh-invisible tweak of his power with Winter’s eyes to weak to catch the flash of red and—Perfect. “Four if you behave. Though I hear the pain’s already begun. Icepick through the skull sort of affair, if memory serves. Very Old Testament.”

He took a sip, letting the silence confirm what Harold wouldn’t admit as the chilled apple juice splashed deliciously on his tongue.

“And the mind—that’s the part that really terrifies you, isn’t it?” Sam’s tone shifted, slipping toward sympathy but never quite touching it. “All those little synaptic bridges collapsing like bad investments. One day you’re Harold Winters. Next, you’re a statistic with a drool problem and a diaper budget.”

“Stop.” The man whispered, his voice fading even quieter before the full word left his lips.

Sam turned, drink in hand, the glass a secular sacrament. He walked back slowly, letting the sound of each step fold into the room like punctuation. He wasn’t threatening. He was inevitable.

“You came to me,” he said, voice velveted and low, “after every foundation and every fund failed to buy you more time. You vut your finger. You bled on my card. You summoned me.”

He knelt—not truly, not humbly—but lowered himself just enough to look Harold in the eye. For once, there was no performance as his blue eyes flared red. “So let’s not pretend this is anything but what it is—a transaction.”

He set the glass down with a quiet finality, the crystal meeting lacquered wood in a sound not quite ceremonial—but close enough for Sam to enjoy the symmetry.

“Sure, that’s really nothing to me. Harder than fixing a hole in your heart, of course, but really, much less of a time crunch given you’re not bleeding out or anything.” he answered finally, thinking back to a certain dark-haired Imp about two hours away.

“Wha-” Winters halfway asked, confusion clear in his voice even as he kept his head low.

Sam held back from rolling his eyes. “I’ll fix your brain cancer.”

Harold’s head snapped up like a puppet yanked by hope, the motion too fast, too desperate. Bloodshot eyes hunted for loopholes in Sam’s expression and found only clarity.

“And in return, all I want is nine-tenths of your company,” Sam added, conversationally, like asking for more cream in his coffee was the same as a deal worth at least ten million, and that was being conservative. “Fair deal, I think.”

Hope shifted, curled and curdled all in the span of half a second. Harold blinked, and you could practically hear the math happening behind his eyes, panic masquerading as pragmatism. “Ninety percent? That’s—” He stopped short, lips parting in a silent recalculation. “That’s everything. I’d be a figurehead in my own company.”

“You would.” Sam smiled. Not kindly. Not cruelly. Just correctly. “Your company would be renamed, rebranded, and would effectively cease to exist as you know it.”

“That’s highway robbery,” Harold said, the words meant to land with outrage but landing like a failed bluff at the poker table. Not quite a fold, but far from a raise.

“Come on now, Harry. Don’t disrespect either of us by lying to yourself. Is it?” Sam turned the question like a key in a lock, head tilting as he spoke words that he knew were just sealing an already done deal. Harold had no other choice after all. “What’s the going rate for a miracle these days, Harold? How much of your company is your life worth?” He shrugged with a kind of studied elegance, demonic grace and ingrained lessons guiding his motion. “Go ahead. Shop around. I’m sure there are other entities willing to cure terminal brain cancer in exchange for… oh, let’s say your soul, your firstborn, or a few decades of posthumous torment. Something tasteful.”

He extended his hand. The motion was smooth, stylized, and the red energy that bloomed around his fingers was slow-moving—like ink unfurling in water, like fire politely waiting its turn.

“No hidden clauses. No subtextual curses. No apocalyptic riddles that rhyme.” His head tilted slightly, dreadlocks catching the overhead light like threads of garnet. “Just a clean trade between professionals. I give. You sign. Your miracle comes gift-wrapped in contract law.”

The energy pulsed once, casting the room in muted crimson. Harold’s face looked older in it. And smaller.

“Isn’t that what you believe in?” Sam added. “Isn’t this capitalism, Harold? Mutual need. Equal value. The market, manifest. You dedicated your life to the altar of leverage. Consider me the sermon.”

Harold stared at the offered hand. Not transfixed. Cornered. Like a man realizing the elevator cables had been cut, and the floor was pretending not to notice.

“Who… what are you?” he asked, the whisper dredged from some part of him that remembered chapel pews and bedside prayers—long since abandoned.

Sam’s smile sharpened by degrees, white teeth — perfect and neat — stood out even more in the dim lighting of the office. “Me and you, Harry. We’re the same, nothing more than entrepeneurs, who just want to make and receive the best deals and do the best business.” He didn’t blink as he half-lied, the words flowing from his mouth with as much ease as any fae. “Only real difference between where you work and how I work is that my… stock options are… less regulated.”

The glow around his hand brightened ever so slightly, casting the room in a richer shade of scarlet as Sam held it out. “So… do we have a deal?”

“If I accept,” Harold said, voice rasped out around dry air and disbelief, “you’ll cure me completely? It’s not gonna pop back up, never again right?”

Sam nodded once. “Your brain will be healthier than the day you were born. Neural elasticity, restored. Degeneration, reversed. You may even pick up Chinese by accident.” He let the pause hold, let the joke breathe. “Babies are notoriously underperforming thinkers, Harold. Terrible ROI.”

A startled laugh escaped from the older man’s throat. Frayed, a little too high, almost self-accusatory—like he was mocking his own need to believe.

“So, I ask for the second and last time, Harol Winters,” Sam murmured, words velvet-soft and steel-weighted, “do we have a deal?”

Harold’s hand hovered just above Sam’s, trembling like it remembered things the man had forgotten. Fingers flexed. Doubt screamed its last sermon in his bones.

“I could just refuse to sign,” Harold offered. It wasn’t a threat. It was the final bargaining chip of a man who didn’t know how to lose. “Once I’m cured—”

“You won’t.” Sam said it simply. No volume change. No dramatics. Just fact, spoken by someone who had already watched this exact thing happen, dozens of times in the last twelve months.

His gaze locked onto Harold’s, and behind the boyish charm, behind the sculpted smirk, was something older than contracts and kingdoms. Something that didn’t need to flex to frighten.

“I uphold my end,” he said. “Always. Without exception. And I expect the same.”

The smile remained, but its warmth stepped aside to let the weight through. No threat, just understanding. Like gravity explaining its presence.

The room didn’t get quieter. The quiet just started listening.

Then Harold nodded. A breath. A nod. A surrender so unceremonious it almost looked like relief.

“Deal,” he whispered. The tears came after. Slow, resigned. Honest in a way Harold Winters had never quite learned to be until now.

Their hands met.

The magic answered.

It wasn’t fire. Fire would’ve been theatrical. This was movement—coiling red spirals, living heat, hungry grace. It danced up Harold’s wrist like a question mark and moved like a tide across skin and suit, over shoulder and temple, into gray matter and marrow. Harold gasped, eyes wide as the light didn’t just glow—it radiated. A human soul lit like a lantern held against the gates of Hell, marked with infernal power and human greed both as the man’s wish was granted in full.

Then it ended.

The power vanished, leaving silence in its wake, and Harold’s weight dropped forward—palms braced on the edge of the table like prayer gone practical. He panted. Not from exertion. From awe.

Sam pulled his hand back, brushed his palm against one pant leg with the dismissive grace of someone flicking off ash.

“Well, look at you. I can see the light getting brighter in your eyes already. Congratulations on your clean bill of health, Mr. Winters,” he said, adjusting one cuff, then the other. Every motion methodical, graceful, pointed.

“I’ll have my legal team contact yours in the morning. We’ll begin the transition.” He turned, hand already reaching for the doorknob, then paused.

When he spoke next, Sam’s voice was almost kind. Of course, it wasn’t soft or anything like that, but at the very least, Sam did his best not to sound mocking. It wouldn’t do for the man not to take this seriously because Sam wasn’t.

“Oh—and Harold?” Sam didn’t turn as he spoke and neither did the balding record producer.

“Skip the MRI. The results will only confuse your doctors. And you don’t need more questions.”

Harold stayed frozen. One hand pressed against his temple, the spot where pain used to live. What he found there now was silence. Sam didn’t doubt that would cause him just as many sleepless nights as it fixed, the man wondering exactly what powers could do something like that.

Granted, even Sam didn’t really know how it worked. Thaumaturgy was an interesting ability and by interesting, he meant nothing short of absolute bullshit. With enough power and imagination, you could do anything. Imagination was the key part there too; a Wish granted from a particularly cruel or malicious devil was the same as getting a wish granted from most djinn. Blame it from being a creature descended from God and adjacent to angels. A miracle from the Devil was still a miracle.

“Why?” The word was quiet, caught between gratitude and fear. “Why my company? You could’ve taken anything.”

Sam’s expression twisted as he thought back to something he remembered from his childhood, the only reason he was even here, in this office, in this time, in this word, of all places.

“Because Hell is crowded, Harold.”