Slaying Monsters for the Feeble: The Guild Codex: Demonized / Two

by Marie, Annette

  No wonder Uncle Jack was in hiding. People like that would kill for a lot less than ten million dollars.

  “It cannot be sold.” Zylas’s husky tones made Amalia and me start. His mouth had thinned angrily. “No more hh’ainun can know it.”

  “We’re trying,” I replied quietly. “If we can find the grimoire in time, then no other summoners will get your House name.”

  “What do you care if other demons of your House are summoned?” Amalia snapped irritably. “If you make it back to your world, you’ll never be summoned again.”

  I blinked in surprise. If Zylas returned, he couldn’t be re-summoned?

  He gazed at her, then leaned forward and scooped me off my seat. The moment my butt was clear, he jammed his foot into my stool, which hit hers and sent it toppling. Amalia managed to jump away and landed unsteadily as her stool crashed to the floor.

  “Zylas!” I exclaimed angrily, squirming against his arm around my middle. He’d swept me onto his lap, his thigh under my rear, my back against his chest. Heat radiated off him, his body several degrees warmer than a human’s.

  I wrenched at his wrist but couldn’t budge his arm. His strength was impossible. “Let me go.”

  Tightening his arm, he pushed his face into my hair.

  “Zylas!” I jerked my head away. “Quit that! Let me go!”

  His low laugh slid under my skin. He blew on my hair, making it flutter. My jaw clenched. A couple of days ago, there would have been nothing I could do to stop him; I’d have been entirely at his mercy.

  Daimon, hesychaze, I thought clearly.

  With the silent “rest” command, crimson light erupted across Zylas. His body vanished from under me—the weirdest feeling ever—and my butt landed on the counter with a painful thump.

  Zylas’s power hit the infernus and bounced right back out again. He rematerialized in front of me, teeth bared and crimson eyes blazing.

  “Let me go when I tell you to!” I snapped before he could speak.

  “You do not command me,” he snarled, stepping aggressively closer. “You do not control me.”

  Panic jumped in my chest. Daimon—

  He grabbed the front of my sweater and hauled me onto my tiptoes, the sudden movement interrupting my thought. Fear thrummed along my spine as we glared at each other, our faces inches apart, his fist clenched around my sweater and my hand gripping the infernus.

  Which was faster? The agile demon or the two-word command that would send him back into the infernus?

  “Don’t make me use the command,” I said quietly, “and I won’t use it.”

  A tearing sound as his claws pierced my sweater. His fury singed the air and the faintest hint of crimson power flickered up his forearms. If our mysterious contract wasn’t enough to prevent him from hurting me, I was about to find out the hard way.

  His upper lip curled. He opened his hand and I dropped back onto my heels. Tail snapping, he strode into my room.

  I let out a shaky breath, my pulse thundering in my ears, and climbed back onto my stool. Amalia stood for a moment longer, then righted hers and sat down.

  “That was … intense,” she muttered.

  “Y-yeah. I’ve n-never …” I gulped back the tremble in my voice and tried again. “I’ve never challenged him quite like that before.”

  “It was good. You did good.” She lowered her voice. “He might only be doing that shit—touching you and stuff—to get a rise out of you, but what if he decides to take it further to see how you’d react?”

  Icy dread rolled down my spine. I wanted to say he couldn’t do that, but I had no idea what he could or couldn’t do. Our contract was dangerously simple: he protected me and I baked for him. I’d made the critical oversight of failing to define “protect,” which meant Zylas was obeying his own definition. I didn’t think he could arbitrarily decide what the word meant to him—he was bound by his genuine interpretation of it—but I had zero clue what his interpretation was.

  Fear shone in Amalia’s eyes as she observed my reaction. I dealt with Zylas the most, but the contract protected me. Amalia had nothing except Zylas’s promise not to kill her as long as she was helping us. How brave was she to keep coming back to this apartment day after day, never knowing what the powerful, violent demon might do to her?

  She cleared her throat and turned to the papers scattered over the counter. “Okay, so, this is all legal stuff and completely useless, but I did find one valuable tidbit.”

  She slid a document in front of me and pointed.

  I squinted at the first lines. “‘This agreement is made and entered into by and between Jack Harper of 2936 Blackburn Road and Claude Mercier of 302 Theodore Way, hereafter collectively referred to as the Partners.’”

  “Claude’s address,” she declared triumphantly.

  “We aren’t looking for Claude …” I straightened on my stool. “But Claude is looking for Uncle Jack.”

  Claude, my uncle’s enigmatic—and treacherous—business partner, had straight up told me he’d been working for years to get his hands on a demon of the Twelfth House. He wanted the grimoire for himself, and he’d nearly killed his partner’s children to get it. Clearly, their relationship wasn’t as buddy-buddy as we’d all thought.

  “How much do you want to bet Claude is the one who broke into the safe?” Amalia asked. “He knows it’s there, and you said his demon is in an illegal contract. Maybe it used demon magic to break the safe open.”

  I nodded. “So we’re going to investigate Claude?”

  “We’re going to turn the bastard’s place upside down and find out everything he knows about my dad—and whatever else he’s got his slimy hands in.”

  I grinned, fighting back nerves. “Sounds good. I’ll talk to Zylas. If there’s a chance we might have to go up against Claude and his demon again, he needs to decide our plan of attack.”

  “Go talk to him, then. Maybe a good demon-on-demon fight will settle him down and he’ll leave us alone for a few days.” She gazed dreamily at nothing, as though remembering what her life had been like before having to share her living space with a demon. “I’m going to run to the grocery store. Want anything?”

  “I’m good.”

  I hopped off my stool, feeling fired up for the first time in weeks. Our progress had been painfully slow so far. First, I’d gotten sick and lost nearly two weeks to an on-and-off fever. Then Zylas had gotten me kicked out of the Arcana Historia library and I had yet to work up the nerve to return. But finally, we were making progress.

  As I walked into my bedroom, the front door banged shut behind Amalia. Mind on the coming challenge of breaking into a dangerous summoner’s home, I belatedly noticed the hissing.

  I stopped dead.

  His back to the rest of the room, Zylas was crouched on top of the dog crate, balanced on the balls of his feet as the steel bowed under his weight. The kitten inside was plastered into the farthest corner, hissing and spitting with terror.

  “Zylas!” I shouted, sprinting toward him. I grabbed his arm. “Get away from her!”

  As usual, my best efforts couldn’t budge him. His tail lashed in annoyance, clanging against the bars. The kitten arched her back and spat more loudly. The poor thing was scared out of her mind. Zylas peered down through the bars, head tilted as he observed the small, terrified creature.

  Protective fury singed my blood and I didn’t even think to use the infernus command. Releasing his immovable arm, I grabbed his tail with both hands and hauled the demon backward with all my strength.

  Next thing I knew, I was on my back on the floor and a hot, heavy weight was crushing me into the musty rug. Pain throbbed through my face.

  The weight vanished off me and a weird dual sound filled my ears—high-pitched hissing and low-pitched snarling. Something wet ran down my face.

  “Payilas zh’ūltis! Eshathē hh’ainun tādiyispela tūiredh’nā ūakan!”

  Zylas’s face appeared above me, his eyes blazing. I pressed
my fingers under my aching nose. Blood coated my fingers. I was bleeding?

  “You are bleeding,” Zylas accused angrily.

  I pushed up onto my elbows. When I’d pulled him backward off the crate, he’d fallen on me, his miserably hard head smacking into my squishy human face. I gingerly prodded the bridge of my nose, but it felt solid. Not broken, thank goodness.

  “What is wrong with you?” His snarling voice competed with the noise from the spitting kitten a few feet away. “You pulled on my tail.”

  He sounded outright offended. My lips twitched and I might’ve giggled if my face weren’t hurting so much.

  Since my shirt was already ruined, I balled up the hem under my nose and pushed to my feet. Taking Zylas’s arm, I dragged him out of the room. He followed me to the bathroom and stood in the doorway as I grabbed a wad of tissue. His nose was wrinkled in distaste; he hated the metallic scent of human blood.

  “What is wrong with you?” he repeated in the same acid tone. “Why did you do that?”

  I whirled on him, furious all over again. “You were tormenting the kitten! What’s wrong with you?”

  He bared his teeth. “I was looking at it.”

  “And she was terrified of you, which you knew perfectly well! You were frightening her on purpose!”

  “You are wasting time.” His crimson eyes glinted with impatience. “All you have done is waste time. You promised to send me home. You promised to find the grimoire and remove my House’s name. You have done none of that.”

  “I warned you it would take a long time.”

  “I thought it would be slow because it is difficult, not because you are hardly trying.”

  “I am trying!” I flung the bloody tissues into the garbage and wet a cloth to clean my face, my hands shaking. “You haven’t been helping! Bullying Amalia, interrupting me all the time, and now you’re torturing the kitten too.”

  “The kitten is worthless. It’s a distraction.”

  “Saving a life isn’t worthless!” I swallowed hard, tasting blood in the back of my throat. “Do you have no heart at all, Zylas? Are you that incapable of empathy?”

  “I do not know that word.”

  “Of course you don’t.” As I wiped the blood off my face, I decided I would deliver the kitten to the animal shelter tomorrow. She’d be better off there than exposed to Zylas’s whims. “Leave the kitten alone. I’ll take her away in the morning so she won’t be a ‘distraction.’”

  He watched me from the doorway. “What is empathy?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I can understand anything you can.”

  I shot him an icy look. “You’re a demon, so no, you can’t.”

  “Explain,” he growled.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because when it doesn’t make any sense, you’ll say ‘zh’ūltis!’ and decide I’m the dumb one, even though the problem is you.” I rinsed out the cloth and turned to the door. “I’m leaving the bathroom now.”

  He didn’t move, gazing at me with an unreadable expression. “Tell me what empathy is.”

  Stubborn demon. Jaw tight, I folded my arms over my bloody shirt. “Empathy is the ability to understand and share what others feel.”

  His eyebrows drew down in confusion. “Share what others feel?”

  “Yes.” I pushed on the armor plate over his heart and he stepped back, allowing me across the threshold, but he followed right on my heels as I returned to my bedroom.

  The kitten, exhausted and huddled in her bed, watched us with wary green eyes.

  I opened my closet and grabbed a shirt at random. “I’m changing. Turn around.”

  He turned his back on me and I slid my bloody shirt off. This, at least, was a civilized compromise we’d reached early on. Sharing my room with a demon was unpleasant enough without the complete lack of privacy. He might be able to hear my thoughts half the time, but he did not get to see me undress. I’d extracted that promise from him in exchange for teaching him how to use the shower.

  He loved the shower. I was pretty sure he’d save the shower before he’d save me, contract or no contract.

  I tugged on the new shirt and straightened the hem. “Okay.”

  “Explain more,” he commanded, facing me again.

  I wasn’t sure whether his refusal to drop it annoyed me or gave me hope that he wasn’t a total lost cause. “When you scared the kitten, I could imagine how the kitten felt—how terrifying it would be, being small and weak and trapped with a huge predator so close.”

  As I sat on the foot of my bed, I almost missed his darting glance toward the kitten’s crate.

  “And,” I continued, “because I can empathize with the kitten, her fear was almost as upsetting to me as if you’d been scaring me instead.”

  He looked from me to the kitten and back, his forehead crinkled under a tangled lock of black hair. “That’s zh’ul—”

  “I knew it!” I burst out, my anger surging back. “I knew you’d call me stupid because you don’t understand!”

  “It is stupid!” he barked. “It’s dilēran.”

  Yep, he was a lost cause. A total and absolute lost cause.

  “It’s ‘stupid’ that I can care about another living thing besides myself?” My voice rose in volume and pitch. “If I was as selfish and heartless as you, you would’ve died in that summoning circle, because I would never have bothered to help you.”

  “You had reasons.”

  “What reasons?” I shook my head. “Helping you has only ever caused me trouble, and it almost got me killed. Now we’re stuck together until I can send you home.”

  “I protect you.”

  “Yeah, but if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t need protection. No one would be trying to hurt me.” I pulled a book off my nightstand. “Along with your protection, I get your bad temper, your constant insults, and your disrespect. Not a great deal.”

  His eyes narrowed.

  “Just forget about the empathy thing,” I told him tiredly. “You’ll never understand. Why would you want to, anyway? Caring about others is a waste of time, right?”

  I could feel his attention on me, but I ignored him as I opened my book to the bookmarked page. The intro to that demon psychology text was right on the mark. Zylas didn’t care about anyone but himself, and he assumed everyone else was either selfish like him or a worthless animal like the kitten.

  Unexpected tears welled in my eyes and I hastily wiped them away, afraid he’d notice—but when I looked up, he was already gone.

  Chapter Seven

  “Is this the place?” I asked.

  Amalia shot me a cold look and I privately admitted my tone hadn’t been particularly polite. I was still furious. Right before leaving our apartment this morning, I’d caught Zylas terrifying the kitten again. This time, he’d been crouched in front of her cage, and poor little Socks had been huddled in the back corner, shaking with fear.

  I shouldn’t have named her. It would just make it harder to take her to the shelter this afternoon.

  “Claude’s unit is the third one,” Amalia said, tucking her phone in her pocket now that we were done navigating. “Do you want to find a spot to call out Zylas?”

  Last night, we’d decided to tackle our infiltration of the summoner’s home in two phases. First, during the day when the street was busy and loiterers would be less conspicuous, we’d scope out the area and Zylas would check for signs of Claude and his demon. Then we’d go home, plan our attack, and return at night to sneak in.

  I glanced around at the rows of neat townhouses facing each other across a narrow street, each identical front door framed by a white railing and three steps. The only differences between the houses were the drapes in the windows and the occasional blow-up Santa Claus or snowman decorating a front lawn. It wasn’t as busy as I’d hoped.

  “Let’s walk down the street first,” I decided. “We’ll find a back alley and I’ll call Zylas out there.”
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  My suggestion had nothing to do with delaying the moment I had to see my demon. Nope, not at all.

  Amalia fell into step beside me as we strolled along the sidewalk. I wasn’t surprised to see that Claude’s townhouse was devoid of Christmas decorations. His blinds were closed and no car was parked out front; he didn’t seem to be home. Now that his business partner was in hiding, what was Claude doing with his time? Was he spending every minute searching for Uncle Jack?

  “I can’t wait for this,” Amalia whispered excitedly as we turned the corner. “We’re going to catch that rat bastard and find out where my dad is. I can feel it.”

  I wasn’t so sure but I held my tongue as we cut into a back alley.

  “Are you going to call Zylas now?” she asked.

  Normally, she was the last person to encourage me to bring out Zylas, but as she glanced nervously across the rooftops on either side of us, I knew where her eagerness for a protector came from. In our last encounter with Claude, his demon had choked Amalia unconscious.

  “Not yet,” I answered as I waved at all the windows that overlooked the alley. “Anyone could be watching.”

  She frowned but didn’t argue. We unhurriedly walked along, the alley bordered by tiny backyards with chain-link fences. The townhouses were nice enough, but any residence in this neighborhood was a far cry from Uncle Jack’s oversized mansion. Yet another way in which Claude and Uncle Jack were complete opposites.

  As we drew level with Claude’s unit, I scanned the empty backyard. The grass behind each property was the same length, which suggested the lawns were maintained by the same company. His yard was empty—no plastic lawn chairs, no grill on the small patio beside the back door.

  Was it my imagination, or was the back door cracked open an inch?

  “Robin,” Amalia hissed. “Do you see that?”

  I started to nod.

  “The window is broken.”

  I stopped nodding and scanned the townhouse. She was right. The window beside the door was broken, the gauzy white drapes fluttering in the icy breeze. It was easy to miss; most of the glass was gone, with only a few shards sticking out of the frame.