I Tamed the Demon Girl Who Killed Me

Chapter 5

MY FIRST DEMONIC ABILITY

The fortress was a ruin. Adrian worked that out within about five minutes of climbing out of the cellar.

Crumbling walls. A roof with more sky than slate. Stairwells that ended in empty air and a courtyard where a tree had pushed up through the flagstones and gone on to enjoy a very successful life. Whatever House Vale had used this place for, it had been abandoned long ago, and the only things that lived here now were moss and the occasional startled bird.

Beyond the broken gate, a forest stretched out in every direction. Tall, dark, and old. The trees stood so close together that the afternoon light came down in thin green threads.

“Fresh air,” Adrian said, and breathed it in as if it might be taxed. “I’d forgotten how good it is.”

“You were dead for an hour.”

“It was a long hour.”

Nyra walked ahead of him, favouring her right side, her hand resting on her dagger. She hadn’t spoken since the cellar, and he’d learned not to take it personally. She just seemed to be listening to the world, the way a cat listens to a house.

“Stay behind me,” she said suddenly.

“Why?”

“Because something’s watching us.”

Adrian looked around. Nothing. Trees, shadows, the occasional flicker of leaves. “I don’t see—”

A low sound rolled out of the underbrush. It was almost a cough, wet and dry at once, and it was joined by another, and another, until the whole forest seemed to be clearing its throat.

Then the pack came out.

There were seven of them. They were the size of wolves, but they were not wolves. Their fur was patchy and grey and their skulls were wrong, too long, and split down the middle so that their jaws opened like a book. Their eyes were milky. They moved on four legs but with a strange, boneless rippling gait, and they spread out in a half circle without a sound.

“Gloomhounds,” Nyra said. “Scavengers. They follow blood.”

“We are very bloody.”

“Yes.”

“That’s inconvenient.”

“Yes.” She drew her dagger. “I’ll handle them. You stay out of the way.”

“You’re at thirty-one percent.”

“Thirty-one percent of me is worth more than seven of them.”

She was right, probably. But Adrian watched her take a step forward and winced. Her right foot dragged. Her shoulders were tight. She had been fine in the chamber because there had been adrenaline and a clear target. Out here, with the hounds fanning around her, she looked like a candle in a draft.

The first one leapt. Nyra met it with her blade and cut it down in a clean arc. The second came in low, and she sidestepped, but slowly. Its jaws raked her calf, and she hissed.

She can’t win this, Adrian thought. Not seven.

He ran his eyes over the terrain. The pack had come from the left, down a narrow channel between two rock outcrops. Behind them, the slope fell away into a gully. The outcrop on the right was crumbling, with a seam of cracked stone running along its base and a shelf of loose boulders balanced on top.

I could use that.

“Nyra!” he shouted. “Fall back! Toward me!”

“I said stay out of—”

“Trust me!”

She snarled a curse, but she retreated, backing up the slope with the dagger still weaving. The hounds followed, pouring through the channel one after another. And there, at the narrowest point, Adrian grabbed a fallen branch, jammed it into the crack at the base of the outcrop, and leaned.

It wasn’t magic. It was leverage. A high school physics lesson he’d barely stayed awake through. A branch, a fulcrum and a very stubborn rock.

The stone groaned.

“Move!” he yelled.

Nyra leapt sideways. The first hound, still mid-pounce, looked up in what might have been confusion.

The shelf came down.

Boulders thundered into the channel with a sound like a drumroll made by gods. Dust boiled up in a brown wall. Yelping, snapping, and then silence, followed by a long rattle of settling stones.

When it cleared, six of the seven were buried or crushed. The channel was blocked. Adrian sat back on his heels, coughing, hands shaking.

“I can’t believe that worked,” he said.

Nyra stared at him through the dust. “You can’t believe it worked?”

“I had a seventy percent plan and a thirty percent prayer.”

“Hm,” she said, which from her was practically applause.

Then the last gloomhound burst out of the dust cloud, scraped and furious, and hit Adrian square in the chest.

He went down hard. Jaws snapped inches from his face, and the stink of rot filled his nose, and the weight of the thing pinned him to the ground like a boot. He got an arm up. Teeth closed on his sleeve and ripped it open.

This is it, he thought, with irritating clarity. Died twice in one day. New record.

A hand grabbed the hound by the scruff of its neck.

Nyra hauled it off him as if it weighed nothing, spun it in the air, and put her palm flat against its ribs. Red-gold fire rolled across her fingers, and the creature simply stopped existing. There was a flash, a smell like singed hair, and then nothing but a scorch mark on the dirt.

She stood over him, breathing hard, flames still curling at her fingertips. For one moment she looked ancient and terrible and magnificent, and Adrian thought oh, so that’s what the thirty-one percent looks like.

The fire died. She swayed, caught herself, and glared at him.

“I told you to stay behind me.”

“I did stay behind you. Then I helped.”

“You were nearly eaten.”

“Nearly.”

“If you die, the contract between us is meaningless.”

“We don’t have a contract.”

“I know that.” She looked away. “I’m just saying.”

He sat up slowly. His chest ached, and his arm was bleeding, but he was alive. Her expression was unreadable, but he caught the way her gaze slid, just for a moment, to the torn sleeve of his coat. To the blood.

She’s worried.

He didn’t say it. He valued his fingers.

“Thank you,” he said instead.

“Don’t.”

“I mean it.”

“Then mean it quietly.”

They sat in silence for a while, getting their breath back. The forest slowly resumed its ordinary noises, and a bird tried tentatively to sing. Adrian watched the dust settle over the rubble and thought about the fact that he had just won a fight with a boulder and nearly lost it to a dog.

He could be clever. He could read rooms, read people, read runes. But he could not stop a fast, hungry thing from putting its teeth in him, and sooner or later he was going to meet something fast and hungry that wasn’t already half dead.

I need real power, he thought. Not just plans. Something I can use when the plan fails.

As if it had been waiting for the thought, the air in front of him rippled.

[Soul Covenant: first stage available.] [Complete your first covenant to unlock a permanent companion ability.] [Target: Nyra. Compatibility: High.]

Adrian looked at the words for a long moment. Then he looked at the demoness sitting three feet away, picking gloomhound fur off her sleeve with obvious disgust.

“Nyra,” he said.

“What.”

“I want to propose something. And before you say no, I want you to hear all of it.”

She raised one eyebrow.

“There’s a thing the system calls a covenant. It’s a bond. A real one, not a leash. It would link us. We’d share some strength, and I’d get an ability out of it, and I think you’d get something too. But it would only work if you agree. And you’d keep your will, your freedom, and your name. I couldn’t give you orders. You could walk away whenever you wanted.”

“That’s not how contracts work.”

“It’s how this one works.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” Adrian admitted. “But I know that the last contract you had made you kill a stranger. I’d like to offer you a different kind.”

She was quiet for a long time. The wind moved through the trees. Her jaw worked as though she were chewing on something tough.

“You kept your promise,” she said at last. “The chains. I did not think you would.”

“I’m a man of my word.”

“You’re a man who does not know when to die.”

“Those can both be true.”

Her mouth twitched. Barely. “Tell me the terms.”

He began to talk. And as he did, the system pulsed once more, and a new line of text bloomed in front of him, red and urgent.

[Warning: Target possesses a hidden bloodline. Covenant formation may trigger an unexpected evolution.]