Page 10 of The Demon Kept Me

"We find them," she says. "Together. Whoever they are."

I should refuse. I should tell her this is mine to bear, that a demon's troubles are no fit burden for a human woman who could have taken a wagon east this very morning. Asking for help is weakness. Every principle my people raised me on says as much.

Instead I hear myself say, "Together," and I discover that the word costs me far less than it should.

She nods once, satisfied, and reaches out to help me lever the jammed gate free — and for a moment her hand rests over mine on the cold iron, small and callused and entirely unafraid, and it stays there longer than the task requires before either of us pretends to notice.

8

WREN

We fall into a rhythm after that, the two of us, without ever deciding on it out loud.

Every evening, once the last cart has rattled off and the grindstone goes still, we walk the mill together. Not the ordinary rounds — Malvek's done those ten thousand times over and could do them blind. These are different. We're hunting now, and it changes the way we move through the building, both of us reading the dark for anything out of place.

"Start at the water," he tells me the first night, lantern in one clawed hand, its light throwing his horns into a great curved shadow across the wall. "That's where the damage keeps landing. Whatever they want, it lives in the river."

So we start at the water. We check the sluice pins, the gate timbers, the mounting brackets that hold the wheel to its axle. He shows me what a tool mark looks like against honest wear, how a chisel leaves a flat bright scar where age leaves something duller and rounded, and I learn to run my fingers along the joints and feel the difference before I can see it.

It's on the third night that I find the footprint.

"Here," I call, crouched at the muddy edge below the wheel where the bank slopes down to the current. "Malvek, bring the light."

He's beside me in an instant, and the lantern throws it into relief — a bootprint pressed deep into the soft ground, heel dug in, pointed toward the mill. Too large for mine. Too narrow for his, and no demon leaves a print without the mark of claws.

"A man," he says, low. He sets two fingers beside the print, measuring. "Not a large one. Light on his feet. He came up from the river, not the road." His brow draws down hard. "He's been standing here. Watching the wheel. Learning it."

A cold runs through me, and the autumn air has no part in it. "How long, do you think?"

"Long enough to know which pin to shear." He straightens, staring out at the black water as if he could summon the culprit up from it by will alone. "This isn't rage, Wren. Rage breaks things once and runs. This is patience. Someone is taking their time."

"That's worse."

"Considerably."

We cover the print with a plank so the rain won't wash it away before we can show Garrik, and we keep walking. And somewhere in the long quiet of these nightly rounds, something else starts happening that we don’t name.

I stop needing to be told where to go. He lifts the lantern and I'm already moving toward the shadow he means to light. He crouches to test a bracket and I've got the smaller wrench in his reach before he asks for it. When the wheel groans in a particular way, we both go still at the same instant, listening, and then both let out the same breath when it settles.

"You anticipate me," he says one night, sounding faintly put out by it, as though I've stolen something. "Nobody's done that in all my time here."

"You're not as mysterious as you think you are." I hand him the oil can before he's finished reaching for it, to prove the point. "You always check the far bearing last because you hate the way it smells. You've done it every night this week."

He stares at me a moment, and then — the thing I keep chasing, the low rusted laugh that seems startled out of him every time — it happens, warmer than the last, and he doesn't try quite so hard to smother it.

"I do hate the way it smells," he admits.

"I know. I've watched you make that face at it." I screw up my nose in imitation, and that gets me the laugh a second time, and I decide I could work a hundred cold nights for the sound of it.

We take our supper late those days, we each too worn from harvest and rounds to bother with ceremony. Bread and whatever's left of the pot, eaten across the small table in the room I've slowly made livable — mended chairs, a fire, dishes on a shelf instead of the floor. It doesn't look like the hollow, bare place I walked into that first rainy night. It looks like somewhere a person lives.

"Tell me about Ti'lith," I say one evening, because I've been wanting to and never found the door to ask. "The city you came from."

His claws still on his bread. For a moment I think I've overstepped, pressed on something he keeps behind a wall, and I'm ready to take it back.

"It floats," he says instead, slowly, like the words are dusty from disuse. "Galmoleth is a continent above the storms. Black stone that grows like it's alive, towers that catch the lightning and hold it. You'd hate it. There's no warmth in it anywhere. But it's — ordered. Every demon knows exactly what they owe and exactly what they're owed. There's a comfort in that a surface-dweller wouldn't understand."

"It sounds lonely."