“Maybe I like prickly things,” he says as he opens one eye to grin at me.
I scowl at him in the hope he’ll shut up with all of that nonsense. I really don’t care to hear it.
But now that I’m lying here, I don’t quite know how to get up. Asmodeus seems to have fallen asleep, which is a surprise when I swear the man never sleeps. There hasn’t been one time when I’ve woken in the middle of the night and found him asleep. He’s always on the roof, holding his rifle to his chest like he’s waiting for something.
I glance over at him. He has a rifle in one hand, his other hand on the ferret who is also asleep.
Here I am, torn apart by a family who haunts me no matter what I do, and there he is, a man with a family bad enough he killed them all.
Some days, it feels like I killed my family too.
He’s dead because of me, after all.
Fuck, fuck… I rub my head, trying to get away from my thoughts. I want to focus on something else. My chest hurts, and I press my hand against the scar and close my eyes.
I can still see him smiling at me… having no idea what I was going to do to him.
The sound of movement makes me open my eyes as Asmodeus flips onto his stomach, one hand holding his ferret as he pulls the rifle in place and fires.
He hesitates before shoving the ferret at me and standing in front of me.
“What’s going on?” I ask while I scramble to my feet.
“He was here.”
I look around because I’m positive that I was awake and would have noticed something, but I didn’t even hear anything besides Asmodeus waking up. What was loud enough he heard them in his sleep? Or did he just sense them?
“I shot him… I know I got him,” he says before he grabs my wrist, pulling me behind him while he moves in the directionhe’d fired. The ferret is startled enough that it hasn’t bitten me at this point as I’m ushered through the trees.
Asmodeus stops in front of a tree and looks around, his hand still tight on my wrist. I realize he’s angled me so my back is against the tree and he’s covering my front. He lets go of me and lifts his rifle, but he doesn’t seem to see anything. Instead, he pulls out a knife and digs the tip of it into the tree where the bullet is embedded. He pulls it out and examines it.
“Huh.”
“What?”
“I missed,” he says. “I fucking missed. I never miss.”
“At this point we have to assume he has some superpower that is aiding him, right?”
He turns the bullet this way and that before popping it into his pocket. “I never miss. I missed…”
I want to ask him if he’s sure anyone was even there, but he’s far too adamant for someonenotto have been.
“Why?” Asmodeus asks.
“Why what?”
“Which of us do these people want dead? Me? Or you? That guy stabbed you, so I have to assume it’s you, but… they’ve only shown up when I’m around.”
“You’ve been around me a lot,” I say when my phone beeps.
Unsure if it’s something important, I pull it out and see that I actually have two messages. One from my mother, which I missed, and a new one from Landon.
I click the one from my mother first.
Mother: I cannot believe your recent behavior. Why do you insist on disappointing me?
I glance up and see Asmodeus staring at me, but I can’t tell whether he read it or not. I switch to Landon’s text and realize it’s a group text.
