The Demon's Deal

by H. D. Gordon

  I sniffed, doing my best to meet his request. “I don’t think that’s how the saying goes.”

  Thomas shrugged, and I felt my mood lightening. When I realized it was because he was transferring positive emotions to me while absorbing my ill ones, I pulled my hands out of his. His aura now danced with the anxiety and sadness that had been plaguing me these last six months, while I felt better. Much better.

  My brows arched. “How’d you know to do that?” I asked.

  As a Fae Halfling and Empath, I could manipulate the moods and emotions of others by transferring feelings. It worked best when I was making physical contact with the other person. I searched my memory, trying to recall if I’d ever told Thomas this.

  A quarter smile tugged up his lips. “Along with arranging this trip, I did a little research when I was MIA…. Did it work? Do you feel better?”

  If the flight attendant weren’t with us, I thought I’d show him how much better I felt right then and there. In the name of modesty, I settled with a nod and a kiss on his lips.

  “Much,” I said.

  I bent and selected one of the books he’d placed on the floor. “How about this one?”

  Thomas smiled full on. It knocked me back the way it always did.

  We read to each other, an activity we’d taken to doing on the nights when neither of us could find sleep. Thomas’s voice was deep and soothing, and always comforted me, so much so that I often passed out during his readings.

  This time was no exception. When I awoke, I hadn’t realized I’d fallen asleep, and it took me a moment to remember where I was. There was a thick blanket draped over me, and someone had lowered my seat back to a reclining position.

  “You must have been exhausted,” Thomas said.

  I yawned, stretching as I sat up and glanced out the window. “How long have I—?”

  My words were cut short when I spotted a very blue ocean below. In the near distance, there was a strip of white sand dotted with…

  “Are those palm trees?” I asked.

  Thomas smiled. I couldn’t decide which was more beautiful, the scenery outside the window, or him.

  Probably him.

  “Where are we?”

  He tipped his chin. I stood up so that he could take my seat, and then curled up on his lap like a kitty cat. Thomas pointed at the small tropical island in the distance.

  “That is Aris,” he said. “It’s a private island in south east Asia.” He paused for a moment, and from his aura I knew it was because he was embarrassed. “My family owns it.”

  I nodded slowly. “Of course they do.”

  I’d asked Thomas one time why he always seemed to be embarrassed by his family’s massive wealth, when most people were eager to flaunt such things. Heck, even people without a lot of money liked to attempt to make it look like they had it.

  He’d told me that it was because people with so much money should be embarrassed when there were so many people in the world who had nothing. It was not a shame to be very poor, he’d said, but rather, to be very rich.

  I’d thought I’d die with how much I loved the man. Despite the shadows in his aura, he was a better person than any I’d ever met.

  Thirty minutes later, we were landing. The plane door opened, and I was greeted by the warm, muggy air and the sound of the ocean lapping at a shore in the near distance.

  Ahead, there was a row of white buildings, poised on pilings that made them look like they were floating in midair.

  Thomas held a hand out to me. I took it and followed.

  Chapter Six

  The quiet of the place was what captivated me.

  I hadn’t realized how accustomed I’d become to the constant hustle and bustle of Grant City. On Aris, there was nothing but the sound of the gentle waves kissing the shore and the salty breeze that stirred my hair.

  Thomas led me away from the small landing strip and to one of the white buildings. Other than the people who were assisting us, there seemed to be no one around for miles. When we reached one of the buildings, I saw that while the roofs looked like thatched grass from the outside, the insides were as modern as they came.

  The structure Thomas took us to was cylindrical in shape, with hand-carved wooden steps that led up to the entrance. There was a small kitchen, a living room, two bathrooms, and three bedrooms.

  Once the staff had delivered our bags and left us alone, I wasted no time taking Thomas’s hand and leading him toward the master bedroom.

  He chuckled lowly. “I have lots of activities planned,” he said.

  I looked back over my shoulder at him. “So do I.”

  An hour later, I was stepping out of a warm shower, my mind and body feeling better than they had felt in months. When I emerged into the living room, I found Thomas waiting for me. He grinned, and my heart skipped. I’d seen him smile more in the past twenty-four hours than I had since I’d met him.

  “Want to go have some fun?” he asked.

  I bit my lip, thinking that we wouldn’t get a chance to leave this room if I didn’t get a hold of myself. “I thought we just did.”

  Thomas’s aura spiked with the fiery color that I knew meant he was remembering some particular moment that had happened in the last hour.

  He held his hand out to me, and I was beside him in a moment. As he led me out of the modern hut, he whispered in my ear.

  “You’re insatiable, Aria Fae.”

  I blinked innocently up at him. “Where are we going?”

  “To play in the trees.”

  My heart jumped in excitement. “Really?”

  Thomas nodded and tugged me toward two ATVs that were waiting for us down on the beach. “Really.”

  A moment later, I was strapped into the vehicle, it’s small engine rumbling beneath me. My face was split from ear-to-ear with my grin. Thomas looked over at me from where he sat in his ATV.

  He pointed to a dirt path off the beach that led into a thick stand of palms. “It’s that way,” he said. “Wanna race?”

  My foot was slamming down on the pedal before his words were even fully out. Beneath the loud rumbling of the engine, my sensitive ears picked up the sound of Thomas’s laughter behind me.

  We tore down the path, kicking up plumes of dirt and sand on either side, creating a cloud that rose up into the blue sky. Around us, the trees began to thicken until we were riding through a forest so dense that the canopy created a perfect umbrella against the hot sun.

  Thick brown vines snaked across the path, and I sensed the auras of a whole ecosystem unlike any I’d ever encountered. The life here had gone mostly untouched by man or technology, and it had become as lush as that of the Fae Forest.

  Thomas and I jostled for first place. I whipped around a curve in the path to see a sign up ahead. I brought the ATV skidding to a stop, Thomas doing so beside me only a split second after.

  I cheesed over at him. “I win,” I said.

  Though his face remained smooth, his aura revealed that he had let me take first place. “You win,” he agreed.

  I unbuckled and hopped out of the vehicle. A young man with dark features took my helmet and smiled. Another dark-featured male did the same with Thomas’s.

  A beautiful woman with black hair and eyes and wearing a long colorful skirt greeted us. “Welcome to Aris,” she said to me in an accent I had no designation for. To Thomas, she nodded, “Master Reid. Follow me, please. Your adventure awaits.”

  As she led us deeper into the forest, I leaned over and whispered to Thomas. “Master Reid?”

  “Don’t be a buttonhole,” he mumbled back.

  I chuckled. Thomas and I had heard a young mother call her two children ‘buttonholes’ one time when we’d been walking through Garden Park in Grant City, and had been calling each other that ever since.

  The beautiful woman took us to a spot in the trees where a ladder and tree stand had been installed. I tilted my head back and looked up—way up—to see a black zip line cutting through the t
all canopy.

  “No way,” I said, my mouth hanging open in much the same way it had on the tarmac however many hours before.

  A few months ago I’d seen an advertisement for zip lining and had mentioned that it sounded like fun. Thomas had told me that he was afraid of heights, which had surprised me.

  “Then why are you always on the roof of our apartment building?” I’d said.

  “I make a point to do things that scare me,” he’d told me. “I think so many people miss some of the best opportunities in their lives because they’re afraid.”

  I’d nodded, pretending not to be as awed as I always was when Thomas would drop one of his random bits of wisdom on me.

  “You sure?” I asked, my neck still craned back as I followed the zip line. It had to be close to two hundred feet off the ground.

  In answer, Thomas approached another man holding a black harness. “Are you?” he asked.

  Ten minutes later, I was scaling the tree with the stand from which we’d be launched.

  I leapt off the platform as soon as I was given the all clear, and laughed out loud—a real, hearty laugh, the likes of which I’d not heard from myself in what felt like a lifetime—when Thomas’s deep bellow of fear sounded behind me.

  Thomas’s zip line and my own had been set up side-by-side, and because he weighed more than me, I watched him zoom by, fear spiking in his aura.

  Not for the first time, I was amazed at the things Thomas was willing to do to make me happy. I’d always dreamed of flying through the trees, the way my mother used to do before the Brokers took me from her. She’d spread her magnificent feathered wings and shoot up into the canopy with me in her arms.

  Even now, all these years later, I could remember how safe I’d felt in those moments. I could smell the honey and lavender that always clung to her, could hear her sweet voice in my ears.

  “Open your eyes, little one,” she’d say to me just before we broke cover from the trees. “The world is much easier to look at from above.”

  My thick hair lifted from my shoulders as I tried to take in all there was to see. As we neared the end of the line, I started to slow, and wondered if Thomas would be willing to go a second time when something in the branches caught my attention.

  The air rushed out of me in an excited gasp when I realized that there were little gray monkeys swinging through the trees alongside us. They moved with an agility that reminded me of the full Fae children I’d made friends with as a young Halfling in the Fae Forest. I’d never been able to keep up with the Forest children, and though I was different, they had accepted me as one of their own.

  My mother told me that this was because children had to be taught to hate, and the children of the Fae Forest were only ever taught love. Or, at least, they had been, until Tristell the crazy Fae Queen had come along.

  I was brought back to the present moment with a jolt when I noticed several things at once. First, was the adorable baby monkey sitting alone on a tree branch about twelve feet to my right. The second was the sound of wings cutting through the air. My body was moving before my mind processed what was happening. I swung to the side and kicked off a tree trunk to my left, swinging myself along with the entire zip line to the right. Then I snatched up the baby monkey a moment before the enormous bird of prey would have plucked it right from the branch.

  The bird squawked in anger at the stolen meal, but the baby monkey looked up at me with big amber eyes.

  I reached the end of the line a few heartbeats later. I was standing on another tree stand, a dark featured man staring at me in awe. The baby monkey climbed happily out of my arms, toward a mother monkey who looked like she was considering attacking.

  I sent some of my Fae persuasion her way, and the mommy monkey picked up her baby and swung out of sight.

  “Wow!” said the man who’d caught me on the stand.

  When he began rambling in some other language, I offered a sheepish grin.

  “Yeah, wow,” Thomas said from a stand ten feet to my left.

  I shrugged. “I didn’t want him to get eaten.”

  The day carried on in this fashion. We rode through the forest and went snorkeling. When it was time for lunch, Thomas pulled out a bag of foil wrapped sandwiches, and it reminded me of the way I’d first met him on the rooftop of our apartment building. I’d just been kicked out of the Peace Brokers, and was starving for lack of resources to feed myself. He’d asked me a question and I’d promised an answer if he’d share the sandwich he’d been eating.

  He’d given me the whole sandwich, and had continued to give me food every day since, even though I’d insisted I didn’t need his assistance anymore.

  We had lunch, and then the adventure resumed. We swam just off the shore, and by the time the sun was setting over the tiny island of Aris, I was just about ready to collapse.

  “Do you have enough energy for dinner?” Thomas asked as we approached the white hut where we were staying.

  I pursed my lips. “Thomas, I always have the energy to eat, and the inclination.”

  He placed a kiss on my forehead before pushing me gently up the steps to the hut. “That’s my girl. Then go clean up and come out when you’re ready.”

  I didn’t need to be told twice.

  Thirty minutes later, I stepped out of the hut to find that night had fallen. When I looked up, I could see every star in the sky, and I took a moment to be grateful for it all. If this was to be one of my last months on earth, I couldn’t think of a better way to spend it.

  I pushed those thoughts away as I knew how quickly they could lead to darkness. As I reached the bottom of the steps, I spotted a trail of lanterns leading around the back of the structure. In the sand, the words FOLLOW ME had been written.

  Stifling a giggle, I hiked up the long white skirt I was wearing and followed the lanterns. I could just sense Thomas’s aura up ahead when movement along the edge of my vision caught my eye. I stopped in my tracks when I saw one of the monkeys from the forest staring at me.

  “Hey there,” I said, feeling stupid since monkeys couldn’t talk.

  The words dried up on my tongue when the monkey blinked and a strange intelligence filled its eyes. For whatever reason, this reminded me of the homeless man from Garden Park.

  Then, the moment was gone, and I blinked. When I looked back again, the monkey was gone, too.

  I reached Thomas a few seconds later, coming around a bend in the path to find that he’d set up a candlelit dinner on the beach.

  I soon forgot about the monkey and the man in the park.

  Thomas and the time we spent together over the next week and a half was all I had a mind for.

  That, and the realization that now more than ever in my entire life, I really didn’t want to die.

  Chapter Seven

  Leaving Aris was hard.

  The days had flown by in a whirlwind of adventure, food, and Thomas.

  Just thinking the words made me blush, but getting back on that private jet to return to all the problems awaiting me back in the states took effort. Big effort.

  I knew Thomas was as reluctant to leave as I was, but now that the trip had come to an end, a sense of urgency was beginning to leak back into his aura. He was eager to get to work on saving me. I didn’t have the heart to tell him just how futile it was.

  When the lights of Grant City came into view, I rested my head against the window beside my seat and released a breath that fogged the glass. I studied the dark shapes of the buildings, many of which I’d scaled, their forms intimately familiar. It dawned on me that I would miss this place, the same as I would miss the beautiful souls I’d found within it.

  I nearly broke the armrest when we landed, but we made it safely, and Thomas had his motorcycle waiting to take us home. He handed me a black helmet with feathery wings painted on the sides—a gift he’d gotten me months ago, and I slid it over my head.

  As he revved the engine, I wrapped my arms around his waist and rested agains
t the warm and firm muscles of his back. Then I watched the world go by until we made it home.

  Once there, we shared a kiss and went into our separate apartments to get cleaned up. As soon as the door was shut behind me, I slumped back against it.

  And then nearly jumped out of my skin.

  My staff was out in a blink, my body adopting a fighting position.

  Then, I recognized the aura signature.

  I relaxed my stance and shoved some hair out of my face. “That is a really good way to get your buttonhole beaten right off of you,” I said.

  Leaning my staff against the wall, I went over to the kitchen area and filled a glass of water.

  As I drained the glass, Nick said, “You’ve never been able to take me, Ari.” He looked down at his shirt. “And I don’t have a buttonhole.”

  I set the glass in the sink and shrugged my backpack off my shoulders, turning to face him. “We haven’t sparred for a long time. I’m a different girl than the one you knew.”

  In the darkness of the small place, only his brown eyes were visible. “Yes, I know.”

  Something about the way he said this made my heart clench. I flipped on the dim lamp near where my bed was still tucked into the wall and folded my arms over my chest. “What’s up?” I said.

  “Where were you?” Nick asked.

  “With Thomas.”

  Jealousy flashed through his aura, and though I knew it was petty, I was glad I wasn’t the only one.

  “Are you going to tell them?” Nick asked.

  “About the futility of the situation? No. I really don’t see the point in that.”

  “You’re giving them false hope.”

  I snorted. “I’m not giving them anything. I don’t have any God damned hope to give, false or not.” My voice lifted a touch on these words, while Nick’s remained cool and collected.

  “You’re withholding information,” he said.