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Education and Collars, a further continuation

Jan2

A Change in Routine
[personal profile] inventrix‘s Let’s Pretend
Class is in Session
A Brief Reunion
[personal profile] inventrix‘s Unexpected Visitor
Lessons in the Dojo
[personal profile] inventrix‘s from RP logs

Dinner with Leo had been… Interesting. Educational, Luke decided, like every visit to the Ran- to Boom’s place. Wherever Boom’s places were.

For one thing, it had taught him that he needed to visit Howard, or maybe talk Shira into doing so.

For another, it had taught him he owed Apollo an apology. So, sitting in Cynara’s living room while Cynara and Leo made small talk about their students, he looked Apollo in the eye. “I shouldn’t have split your crew up. I’m sorry.”

There was a pause while Apollo processed that. Then, “Yeah. No biggie, I guess.” Apollo tugged on his collar and looked away.

Luke coughed. That. “I’m not going to apologize for asking jae’Red Doomsday to Keep you.”

Apollo glanced at him sideways. “Why not?”

“Because you needed it. Because being here is good for you.” He could see Apollo readying a scoff. He kept talking. “I failed you as a Mentor. But I’ve seen what Cyna- Cya can do as a Keeper.”

“Yeah? Have you seen her collar collection?”

Luke snorted. “I’ve watched her pick her Kept for the last sixty years. If I were Regine I could tell you their survival percentages…”

“Please don’t,” Cynara murmured. When Luke glanced over, she was once again chatting to Leo about something one of their Students had done.

“…I can’t. I’m not that good at numbers. But I’d bet you anything it’s higher than that of the rest of the Addergoole grads.”

“Anything?” Apollo leaned forward, a fierce twist of an expression on his face. “Would you bet a year under this collar yourself?”

Cynara and Leo stopped talking. For a moment, it seemed to Luke that the entire city stopped talking.

It was a fair question. He glanced over at Cynara, only to see that she was studiously watching a patch of wall over Leofric’s shoulder.

“Well,” he started to hedge, “there’s the problem of my teaching job…” No. He needed to give the kid a fair answer. “Yeah. Yeah, I’d be willing to gamble that.” Mike would kill him. Slowly. But it wasn’t like there was much danger of it. “But are you sure jae’Doomsday is interested in being gambled with?”

Apollo glanced guiltily back at his Keeper. “Um. Well. She Keeps someone every year. You said it.”

“All students just out of Addergoole, all of them. Hell,” he added with some frustration, “there was a good chance she would have picked you up without my intervention.” The boy certainly had the look, and that was something Luke wasn’t going to say out loud in front of any of the three of them. “I’m not exactly her type.”

“She doesn’t need a ‘type’,” Apollo retorted with some frustration. “She has Leo and Howard.”

Oh. Well. Luke coughed. “Anyway. Yes. I’d be willing to gamble on that if jae’Doomsday would be willing to be gambled with.”

And the dead gods help him if he was wrong.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1038122.html. You can comment here or there.

Lessons in the Dojo, a continuation of a continuation

Dec31

A Change in Routine
[personal profile] inventrix‘s Let’s Pretend
Class is in Session
A Brief Reunion
[personal profile] inventrix‘s Unexpected Visitor

Luke had been curious who this Nanaya was that could get Apollo training against haybales. As it turned out, she was an Amazonian strawberry-blonde woman with an easy smile and a mischievous lift to her eyebrow. Watching her run through kata with the other students, Luke was willing to bet she was deadly in a fight.

He noted, too, that although most of Leo’s students managed to hide their surprise when he called Leo jae’ – as was right, he reminded himself; he still had a couple centuries on Lightning Blade – Nanaya just smiled more broadly. She’d be an interesting one to hunt alongside.

That was a thought for another day, and probably for some other world. He was here to see Apollo and Leo, and he was talking to Leo.

“I’ll be starting class in a few minutes; would you like to stay and watch?” Leo had grown up somewhere along the way. Luke had seen it the last few times he visited Cloverleaf, and yet he still found himself surprised by it every time.

“I’d love to.” Luke smiled. “I hear you’ve got some interesting tricks here.”

“Oh, well-“

“They’re sneaky,” Apollo interrupted, half in awe and half in complaint. “You think they’re coming up to your left and then all of a sudden, boom.”

Luke chuckled ruefully. “Sounds like a hunt, doesn’t it?” He raised his eyebrows at Leo. “It doesn’t usually work well with my Students, but I remember when you were training with Ciara.” His expression slipped. He wanted to be proud of her, he really did, but…

…another day, another world. “It’s a good thing to learn.” He pulled the conversation back to the dojo. “The Nedetakai and the monsters don’t usually fight fair, do they?” He was talking to Leo, but his words were still aimed at Apollo.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1036114.html. You can comment here or there.

A Brief Reunion, a story bit of Doomsday

Dec31

A Change in Routine
[personal profile] inventrix‘s Let’s Pretend
Class is in Session

Regine had sent Luke for the kid because he was in a bad neighborhood, as far as their data could discern, he was a descendant of Aelfgar, and he was male.

It made as much sense as most of her decisions, so Luke had armed up, tapped their current staff teleporter, and headed into the wasteland that had once been St. Paul.

It had been surprisingly easy to find the kid; Luke had followed the shouting and found a scrawny, filthy, sunburnt kid holding a stick in each hand and fending off three grown men. Not from himself, Luke quickly noticed; the kid was protecting three smaller children who were, it seemed, roasting a pigeon over a small fire.

“Hey!” Luke had absolutely no problem getting everyone’s attention. “Let’s even this fight up!” He noticed the moment where the kid thought he was going to attack him, and the way the boy’s stance, untrained as it was, shifted.

Me or Shou, he decided, although they were supposed to let the kids choose their own mentors. This one would need training if he was going to survive more fights like this.

When the boy – who everyone called Pony – refused to leave until Luke promised not only to find a safe place for the kids he was protecting, but also to help Pony find his mother and the kids’ mothers, if they were still alive, Luke amended the decision to mine. The kid had Mara instincts. They were going to need a lot of honing.

Maybe he should have let the kid go with Shou.

Luke had been chewing that thought over for well over a year now; by the end of Apollo’s third year, it’d been clear that there were some holes in his education that he had no interest in filling. By the end of his fourth year, Luke had on his hands an Adult – but an Adult it would be a crime to send out into the world.

Cy’Luca had taught Apollo how to fight – but every heroic, stupid, suicidal impulse had just been reinforced by the cy’ree and, unfortunately, by Luke himself. The kid was too full of himself, and any lectures otherwise came out as hypocrisy and worse.

So Luke had asked Cya Red Doomsday to clean up his mess.

It had been a few months, and the guilt was beginning to eat at him. So Luke visited Cloverleaf – walking in, like a normal person – and asked around until he found Red Doomsday’s Latest Kept.

He found him in the pasture, sparring with a haybale. Luke watched for a minute or two, noting that the kid’s technique had improved, that the frown of concentration was the same, that he was putting on color and keeping his muscle tone, and that his tempero huamu was definitely getting better. The haybale moved almost like a person.

“Keep your guard up, you’re leaving your left open,” he barked, both because he couldn’t help himself and because he wanted to let Apollo know he was there.

Apollo nodded, lifted up his off-hand dagger-stick, and lunged into a tricky stab-and-roll that Luke definitely hadn’t taught him. When he came up to his feet again, the haybale settled into an unmoving pile.

“Nanaya keeps doing this thing with her off-hand weapon. It’s tricky, and I haven’t quite figured it out yet.” He pushed his hair out of his face and settled into a more still position. “Sa’Hunting Hawk.”

There was a quietness to his body language that Luke certainly hadn’t managed to teach him. “jae’Sun-fire.” He nodded politely. “Nanaya?”

“She’s cy’Inazuma, one of his best students. I’m still figuring out how to beat her.” Apollo shifted hie weight from his front foot to his back. “Why are you here, sir?”

Luke sighed. “I wanted to check up on you. See how you were doing.”

Apollo tugged on the collar around his neck. “Still Kept.”

“She has only once in her entire history Kept someone for more than a year, and she’s never Kept anyone for less than a year.”

“There’s always another chance to be an anomaly, then.” Apollo smirked. “She might get sick of me, or she might decide I’m hopeless.”

“Last time, the world was ending.” Luke allowed himself a grim smile. “Let’s hope that doesn’t happen again.”

“We found Olindo.” The change in topic came with a shift in posture. He sheathed his wooden practice weapons.

Luke fought down the instinct to move into a combative position and stayed casual, wings folded, hands loose. “Yeah?” The kid’s crewmate had been less than happy with Luke over Apollo’s Keeping.

“You shouldn’t have split us up.” Apollo twisted his lips in something almost like a smile. “We’re too stupid on our own.”

Nanaya cy’Inazume
BASICS
The character is female.
6 ft. 3 in. tall
slim build
cropped short perfectly straight strawberry blonde hair
blue-grey eyes
light skin
Their eyes is notable in some way.

CHANGE
They have a large feline Change.
Significant physical Changes include: eye color
Their innate ability allows them to attract weather in some way.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1035741.html. You can comment here or there.

Class is in Session, a story of Cya/Doomsday

Dec29

after [personal profile] inventrix‘s Let’s Pretend, which is after my A Change in Routine.

When Leo walked into Cya’s front yard carrying her Kept over his shoulder, she found that she wasn’t surprised, and that she was more than a little relieved.

It wouldn’t be enough, of course. Apollo was the most stubborn, ridiculous, arrogant man she had had the misfortune to deal with…

…since Leo and Howard were that age, a thought she was doing her best to suppress, especially considering how Leo’s fierce smile vanished when he caught her looking at him.

He set her Kept down on her porch as Cya opened her door and deftly avoided the angry punch Apollo attempted to throw.

“I see you’ve met Professor Inazuma. Come in.” She made it an invitation for Leo and an order for Apollo. “Leo, I see you’ve met my new Kept. I hope he wasn’t too difficult.”

“He wasn’t difficult at all!” Leo was having fun, a smile flashing onto his face before he remembered he was supposed to be feeling bad. “Ah, we got in a bit of a fight…”

“You kicked his ass, you mean.” She watched Apollo’s face; she didn’t need to watch Leo’s to know what was going across it. He’d be hang-dog for a moment, and then proud of himself again.

Apollo was warring with something simpler: pride and fear. He’d noticed, then, how much stronger, how much more skilled than him Leo was. Good. “Are you just going to let him manhandle your Kept like that?” He spat out the word Kept. He always did. But the end of the sentence was more like a plea. “Or–“

“We were playing a bit of Let’s Pretend.” The pride was clear in Leo’s voice, and the anger and fear were sparking in Apollo’s face again.

“You were playing! I was–“

“You were saying you could handle yourself.” She could hear the sharp smile in Leo’s voice. “If I’d been a slaver, you’d be in chains by now.”

It was hardly a fair challenge. They had great-grandchildren older than this boy.

Slavers wouldn’t be fair, either.

“Leo was cy’Luca, too, Apollo, back when we were kids. A lot of kids have been, through the years, if you do the math.” She kept her eyes on him. “One or two in every Cohort… One or two cy’Fridmar, too, and they’re just as vicious in a fight, more likely to cheat, and more likely to turn evil. Never mind the cy’Sakamoto; nobody knows which way they’ll go. And most of the cy’Doug would rather kill you than look at you.”

“I get it!” He flung his arms upward violently. “Yeah, sure, there’s lots of assholes out there. But I’m good, okay? This jackass got the jump on me, that’s all.”

He didn’t believe it, or Cya would have been more harsh with him. Instead, she raised her eyebrows and waited for the moment where he shifted from foot to foot and dropped his arms and his gaze.

She glanced back at Leo, wondering if he remembered when he was that young and stupid. Time enough for that conversation later.

“By the time I’m done with you, it will be a lot harder for anyone to get the drop on you. And step one is realizing that somebody can and will.”

And, because he was her Kept and this one, damnit, she could protect, she kept going. “In the meantime, this is my city. If anyone other than Leo here attacks you, you tell them that you Belong to me. If that doesn’t stop them, you can feel free to tell anyone who can hear you that you’re mine. For this year, at least, that ought to keep you safe.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1033777.html. You can comment here or there.

Such a nice girl…

Dec19

Content warning: mind control, threat of violence, implied non-con, straight out nastiness.

Pls. don’t read if that’s gonna make you need to yell at the characters or the school. I wrote this one just for fun.

“That’s it. Hands behind your head.”

She’d been so nice.

Archimedes put his hands behind his head. Not because he wanted to; at the moment, he really didn’t want to do anything but run away. He was, sadly, already kneeling.

“Keep them there. Stay. Good boy.”

She’d helped him figure out this place, with electricity he barely remembered and food he’d never eaten. She’d gotten between him and some bullies, and if it grated that a girl was in between him and bullies, well, she’d softened that with a kiss.

He shifted his weight from knee to knee. The good boy felt good, but she was holding something that looked like a mop made of leather strips. “I don’t-“

“I know you don’t. But you’ll learn, won’t you?” She dropped down to her knees in front of him, the whip-thing falling to the floor. She was looking in his eyes, her own purple and terrifying.

She’d been so nice. It had felt so good talking to someone who got it, who could show him all the wonders of this place like the miracles they really were.

Archimedes held very still. The whip, the whip-thing had come out because he’d gotten freaked out. She was pretty, she was still pretty, but she was not, definitely not, human.

“Attaboy. That’s good. You’re not afraid of me, are you?”

He didn’t really know what had happened. She’d been holding him. They’d been enjoying the shower together. And then, then…

“Some of us are monsters,” she’d said. That had been the first day.

Archimedes swallowed. “You’re gorgeous. And it feels really good when you touch me.”

She’d told him not to lie, and he’d found that what she told him, he couldn’t disobey. Maybe she’d forgotten that, because she smiled. He focused on those purple eyes and tried to ignore the sharp, sharp teeth.

“That’s a good boy.” Her hand cupped his balls, her claws just barely pricking his skin. “Maybe if you can be very, very good for me, I won’t have to whip you, hrmmm?”

She’d been so nice. And then she’d looked at him, and her voice had dropped down low. “Don’t ever forget the nice guys ruined our planet as much as the bad guys.”

Archimedes nodded slowly. His throat was dry and his skin was crawling. “I can be good for you. You’re so beautiful.” Nobody’d ever said he wasn’t a quick learner.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1028265.html. You can comment here or there.

Listen to your Teachers

Dec10

Year 23 of the Addergoole School; 6 years after the beginning of the apocalypse

“Kallan, please stop by my office. I want to discuss matters with you.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever. Maybe later.” Kallan kept walking, a very firm hand on her companion’s bicep.

Jeriel, in turn, walked along with her but aimed an uncertain look Kallan’s way. “I thought you said we were supposed to listen to the professors. And, uh. The Director.” Jeriel stole a peek back at the disproving woman. Kallan picked up her speed.

“I said you ought to. I did not, you’ll note, say anything at all about me.”

“But you’re a student here. Wait, you said Eighteenth Cohort, didn’t you?” Jeriel skip-jogged a few steps in an attempt to keep up with Kallan’s ever-increasing stride.

“You weren’t supposed to be paying attention to that part.”

“What, I was just supposed to listen to the part where you gave me like, an entire manual on how to survive in this school and then totally ignore the parts on how you knew all of it and like, why everyone, even the upperclassmen, are both a little scared of you and, uh.” Jeriel’s mouth snapped shut.

Kallan chuckled dryly. “…and they think I’m a little bit dumb, because nobody fails Literature and certainly not twice. Even if you’re not sleeping with Mike.”

“Mhrm Mmmm-nnn MMM mmh.” Jeriel’s answer came through tight-closed lips.

“It’s fine.” Kallan slowed pace to make it down the stairs without breaking Jeriel’s neck – or her own. “It’s not like I haven’t heard it all. And you’ve taken a couple weeks of Mike’s class. Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep failing out of it?”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1022750.html. You can comment here or there.

Walk the Fields, talk some more

Dec7

First: The Reveal
Second: Find an Exit, Talk it Over

“Who still farms, anyway? I mean, gas, right? The pipelines stopped. Tractors gotta run somehow, don’t they?”

They were walking – ambling, really – down an almost-invisible path between two fields of something Urania was pretty sure was wheat. The demon pretending to be a gym teacher hadn’t said anything since they started walking, so Urania grabbed at the first topic she could find.

“Magic,” he answered mildly. “And horses. Mostly horses.”

“Horses? What is this, the eighteen-hundreds?”

“Last time I checked, a couple years after the pipelines stopped running.” He looked, she thought, amused. He also looked human; with the wings gone, he didn’t look anything at all like a demon.

“…Touche, creepy demon man.” He still was a demon. It was important to remember that.

“You ran into some pretty bad fae out there, didn’t you?” He sounded sympathetic. She wasn’t sure she wanted to deal with that.

“I ran into ‘fae’,” she answered shortly, “if you want to call them that. They were bad. That’s because they were demons.”

“Mmm.”

“What?” She glanced at his face, wondering if she was seriously worrying about insulting a demon.

“Just thinking I’d heard that before.”

“Well, you’re a demon.” It was just logical that someone would have pointed out that demons were evil, right?

“Not because of the ‘demon’ thing.” He didn’t make air quotes, but he somehow twisted the word anyway. “No.” He stopped and looked at Urania straight on. “Something like ‘the Dakota attacked my people. You’re a Seneca, therefore I can’t trust you.”

“But… Seneca and Dakota are totally different tribes! That’s like saying all Italians are the same as all Irish!”

“Exactly.” He raised his eyebrows at her.

Urania wasn’t having any of that. “You saw what the demons did to the world! You have to have seen it!”

“I did.” His voice was quiet now, and his expression serious. “And I’m sure Alastair did as well. It was horrible. The aftermath is devastating. I’m not denying that.”

Urania snuck a look at Alastair. He was still following along, but seemed content to stay quiet, listening. That seemed to be his thing, so she didn’t push it.

“So you’re saying, what, some other tribe of demons did it?”

“Not all of it, no. Some of it was done by well-meaning idiots who never learned to watch out for their surroundings, even when they were taught better.” His voice took on a bit of heat. “Some of it was done by humans desperate for an answer, any answer.”

“And this other tribe? Who are they? Why aren’t you them?”

“Well,” he coughed, and a ghost of a smile crossed his lips. “There’s a whole school down there, and that’s on the curriculum.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1020014.html. You can comment here or there.

When Lady Mack Came to Cleveland, an intro to… something

Dec5

The thing is, Maggie Konev, Lady Mack, is a legend. And Antonio Bianci is a legend. Corwin knew their stories like he knew Goldilocks and the Three Bears.. He knew them the way he could walk around his childhood home, the way he could reach for his gun and never fumble, never wonder. They were those sorts of people.

Boss B, he ran Detroit and a few other rust belt cities. Everyone knew it and nobody, not the mayor, not the police, not the feds, nobody fucked with him. It was just the way it was. You stayed out of his way, or you got plowed over.

Maggie Konev, people said, was some sort of Robin Hood, except twisted, or, as one friend had put it, “her moral compass points to W-T-F.” She stole from people, gave to people, and flitted through life untouchable by the law or by the criminals. She was the sort of person you avoided if you could, and appeased quickly if you caught her eye. They both were, B and Mack.

And Corwin was up to his elbows in it with both of them, and not a paddle in sight.

He’d fallen into working for Boss B when he was a teenager and gotten big into it when he was in his twenties, ended up a lieutenant before he turned thirty. It wasn’t good work, it wasn’t clean work, but it paid well and, after all, there weren’t that many options in Detroit.

Life hadn’t really been fine or good but it had been going, moving along at a predictable pace, until all of a sudden, there was Lady Mack in town. They hadn’t been sure it was her, at first. The woman had copy-cats who had their own copy-cats, for Christ and the Last God’s sakes. Hell, they hadn’t been sure it was sure it was her when she started showing up at city functions.

They’d been damn sure it was her when she started ruining Boss B’s businesses, sniping in, stealing small but crucial lynchpins, kidnapping the people he’d bribed or over-bribing them, mis-routing shipments, and generally being a nuisance. She wasn’t outright attacking, she wasn’t killing anyone, but she was murdering the Company, strangling profits.

It went on for months. A sneak-attack here, a smile and a kiss on the cheek in public. A missing weapons shipment followed by a friendly card. It was as if Lady Mack was going out of her way to make sure Boss B never forgot she was there. And he didn’t. The Boss grew cranky, and then he grew angry. He grew livid, and then he grew irrational.

Corwin’d been keeping his head down, trying to keep his end of things from getting too fucked with – and, thank whatever was actually listening, so far Lady Mack had been mostly staying away from his stuff, that one shipment notwithstanding. He’d been trying to stay away from the boss, let his closer lieutenants deal with the anger, let someone else take the brunt of it. It had stood him in good stead every crisis before this.

This time, it meant he missed the boss challenging Lady Mack, full on proper challenge. He didn’t miss the actual fight, because who’d miss that, and it was a thing to behold. But because he’d missed the challenge, it wasn’t until Boss B yielded that Corwin understood the stakes.

“Detroit is yours, Lady Mack.” B didn’t even seem that broken up about it. “I trust you’ll give me a day to pack up?”

“Detroit and all the operations.” Her smile was something to behold, but it didn’t look friendly or even happy. “All of them. We can walk through now, if you’d like.”

Corwin was starting to understand why the other lieutenants were antsy. He was getting why they were shifting around, mumbling, looking at each other, looking at the exits. They worked for B. They’d always worked for B. Some of their fathers had worked for B, and their mothers, maybe their grandparents.

And now B was clearing his throat. “Right. You, Corwin.” His gesture was short and only vaguely directed at Corwin. “Turn on the thing so they can hear this in the whole place. Down in the cellars, everything.”

The “place” was the Boss’s warehouse complex, hidden in the middle of the biggest manufacturing plant in Detroit. It had cellars and sub-cellars, offices and holding cells and things Corwin didn’t even like to think about, all of it hiding behind a nice wall of whatsits and widgets. It wasn’t all of the Boss’s assets, not even all of his Detroit assets, but it was a nice central clearinghouse.

And it had speakers wired all through it. Corwin turned on the thing, surprised to find his hand was shaking. He jammed both hands in his pockets to stop that. The Boss cleared his throat. “You would take all of this from me? They’re like my family.”

And Lady Mack shrugged her shoulders and smirked. “You put your family up as wagers often? Next time, you care this much, don’t lose.”

Corwin flinches and doesn’t care who sees it. The boss, however, the boss just smiled.

“Next time, I won’t. All right. If you can hear me, if you are part of my Detroit operation, you answer to this woman now. You belong to Maggie Konev now, and may whatever god is watching have mercy on both you and her. You belong to her now,” he repeated, and Corwin’s gut tangled up and his vision went blurry.

When he could see again, the Lady was standing over him while the other lieutenants gathered around. “Which one are you?”

She had piercing eyes, he noticed, and an equally sharp smile. Corwin cleared his throat. “Uh. Corwin, ma’am. I work in, uh. In human resources.”

The smile, if anything, sharpened. “Oh, really. I’ll get to you later.”

She walked away with Edwin, who handled pharmaceuticals, leaving Corwin sitting on the floor. This, he reckoned, was why they called her Mack. Meeting her was certainly like being hit with a truck.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1017601.html. You can comment here or there.

Find an Exit, Talk it Over

Dec4

directly after The Reveal, from yesterday.

Urania ran straight into the demon’s wing membrane, dragging the skinny kid along with her. If she shoved through fast and hard enough, the door ought to push open. It might hurt a bit, but that was nothing compared to what would happen if a room full of demons got their hands on her.

She’d been hiding in the bleachers when they attacked her school. Urania had a very clear idea of what demons were capable of.

The demon made a surprised grunt, but they were going too fast for him to stop them. One sharp shove through with the heel of her hand, an awful bending and tearing noise, and they were through.

Forward and to the left, that was where they’d come in. Urania didn’t stop, didn’t slow down, just ran, catching the skinny kid as he stumbled, pulling him upright when he fell.

She’d be quicker without him.

She wasn’t going to leave anyone to the demons.

The warehouse-like room was right where they’d left it – Urania hadn’t ever seen a room move, but she’d heard about the possibility – and the stairs were still there, too. She darted up the stairs, stopping to help the skinny kid one more time, and shoved the door open.

There was a demon standing there, his tattered wing flapping about in the breeze. Urania stared at him. “How did you…?” It was enough to throw her off her stride.

“I guessed,” he admitted. He folded his wings against his back, and once again looked more or less like the gym teacher. “Take a walk with me? You have my word that I won’t attack you today.”

“Today.” She raised her eyebrows. “They say demon promises are binding.”

“It’s true.” He tilted his head at the wheatfield. “You’ll be able to see anyone else coming, if we walk out there.”

If he had beat her here, if he’d known where she was going, he could just stop her, couldn’t he? Maybe once they were in the field she could dart again, once he thought she’d relaxed. Then he couldn’t “attack” – probably.

“I could walk a little. But then we’re leaving.”

“Shouldn’t you let Alastair decide for himself?”

She glanced at the skinny kid. The name was nearly bigger than he was.

The kid, in turn, shrugged defensively. “Leaving sounds… I dunno. They may be demons, but there’s food.”

She pursed her lips, unwilling to admit he had a point. “I won’t make you. But I don’t want to leave you behind to be…” She trailed off, biting her lip. If he hadn’t seen what the demons could do, she didn’t want to be the one to tell him.

He raised his chin. “Talk to the man. He’s waiting patiently.”

“I don’t think he counts as a man.”

“Well, he killed three warcats who were trying to kill me. So. Call him what you will.” The kid who was too small for Alastair shrugged.

Urania turned slowly back to the demon, to find he was looking like a gym teacher again, wings nowhere in sight.

“I guess we talk?” she offered cautiously. “Since you promised. Just talk. And then I leave.” And she might just carry Alastair of with her, too.

“Just talk.” The demon nodded. “Let’s walk this way, the three of us.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1017255.html. You can comment here or there.