TAMING MY KILLER DEMON

Chapter 1

The collar was already burning when I finished counting my fingers.

Three. Three still attached, blood to the wrist, and a woman standing over me with claws the color of wet slate. She watched me breathe like it was a trick she hadn't paid for.

"You died," she said.

Low voice. Unhurried. The way people talk when they've said the same thing a hundred times and were never once wrong.

"Four minutes and eleven seconds. Your heart stopped. Your eyes went the color of old milk. So." She crouched, and the floorboards complained about it. "Why are you breathing now?"

The collar at my throat had tightened the moment I opened my eyes and hadn't loosened since. Iron, or something that wanted to be iron. No clasp, no keyhole. It sat against the pulse and hummed, and the hum had a temperature.

I did not reach for a weapon. There was one, three feet to my left, still in the hand of the man who'd owned this room before I did. I didn't reach for it, because her claws were out but her weight was on her back foot, and a woman who means to kill you doesn't waste a question on you first.

"Odds I'm a threat to you," I said, "low. Odds I'm interesting, higher than you'd like."

Her head tilted. Something moved behind her eyes that wasn't mercy. It was nearer to appetite.

"You're bleeding on my floor," she said.

"It's a nice floor. Figured I'd christen it."

"You put this on a corpse," I said.

"I put that on a corpse." No apology in it, which I respected. "You were warm for a dead thing. Warm is useful. Then you sat up, so now you're a problem, and I'm deciding what kind."

"Deciding," I said. "Not very hard, by the look of you."

Her claw came up. It stopped a hair from my throat and stayed there, patient as a held breath. The collar tightened a full notch and I made a small sound I'd deny later.

"There," she said, satisfied. "That's the look I wanted."

"Here's what I know," I said, and my voice came out steadier than the rest of me deserved. "You could have killed me while I was asleep. You didn't. Which means you want something a corpse can't give you, and you've already tried the alternative."

Her eyes narrowed.

"Name it," she said. "Before I get bored."

"Seven days," I said. "You keep me alive for seven days. Nothing else. No binding, no bargains inside the bargain. Just seven days of not dying, and at the end of it, one favor owed. One. Whatever you ask, no matter what it is."

The silence went long enough that I heard the candle guttering.

"Whatever I ask," she repeated.

"Whatever you ask."

"You're either very stupid or you've got a hand I can't see."

"Odds it's both," I said. "Better than even."

She laughed. It sounded like ice deciding to crack. It was the first honest sound she'd made.

She cut her palm without ceremony — one claw, one clean line — and held the hand out, palm down, blood welling in the cup of it. "Your hand, gambler."

I gave her my hand. She cut it. It hurt more than dying had, or maybe dying had simply been quieter about it.

She pressed our palms to the floorboards and drew the sigil with the heel of her hand. Three circles and a line through them, all of it in our blood, none of it any shape I'd been taught in any world. It caught. I felt it catch. A fishhook set behind my ribs, tugging at the base of my throat.

The collar stopped humming.

And then I lost something.

I didn't know what, at first. I felt around inside my own head for it the way you reach for a step in the dark. Then I tried to hear my mother's voice — the way she said my name when she was annoyed, that specific tired affection — and found a clean, quiet hole where it had been. Not blurred. Not faded. Gone, with the edges filed smooth so I wouldn't cut myself looking.

I looked at her.

"That's the cost," she said. "Blood won't do it alone. Little things. Small ones, at first." She watched my face. "You're taking it well."

"I'm taking it," I said. "There's a difference."

"You're mine for seven days." She said it the way you'd read off a debt. "Try not to embarrass me."

She still had my cut hand. She lifted it, and I thought she meant to inspect the sigil. Instead she put her mouth to the wound and drank.

I want to be precise about this, because I've had a long time to think about it and precision is the only thing I've got. Her tongue was rough. Her teeth were not gentle. The pain went up my arm and turned into something else around the elbow, something with a lower temperature and a worse reputation. I did not pull away. I'd like to say that was strategy. It wasn't. I stood there in a dead man's blood and let a demon drink out of me because some part of me had been waiting my whole life for someone to want something that badly.

She lifted her head. A line of red at the corner of her mouth. The claw came up and rested under my chin, tilting my face to hers.

"Now the sigil has a taste," she said. "Don't waste it."

"I'm not afraid of you," I said.

The collar burned.

I stopped. She stopped. We both looked down at the iron like it had said something rude at a funeral.

"What," I said, "was that."

"A lie." Her mouth curved. "The collar doesn't care for them. Yours, specifically. I didn't build that in. It's just fond of you." She tilted her head. "Say another. Say something true and watch what happens."

I thought about it. Considered several lies, discarded them, and then — because she was standing close enough that her breath moved the hair at my temple, and because I'd already lost my mother's voice tonight and didn't see how a smaller truth could cost more — I said the thing I don't say.

"I'm not afraid of you. I'm afraid of being forgettable."

The collar went cool. Not loose. Just cool, and the claw under my chin retracted half an inch, and her hand — the cut one, still wet — shook. Barely. Just enough that a man who reads hands for a living would notice, and I am exactly that man.

"Say that again," she said, quieter, "and I'll take something bigger than your mother's voice."

"You could have just said don't."

"I don't say don't." She let me go and turned away, and the room got warmer by a degree I hadn't noticed she'd been stealing. "Sleep, gambler. Tomorrow I put you somewhere useful."

"Odds you're a good employer," I said. "Low."

"Odds you live to see the end of the week." She didn't turn around. "I'll tell you in seven days."

And behind her, the doorway went dark in the shape of a woman.

Not a shadow. Shadows do what light tells them. This was an absence with posture, and the candles bent toward it like they were trying to remember being lit. I couldn't hold it in my eyes. I'd look, and it would slide.

"Kira," the dark said, in a voice like a room after everyone's left. "You're keeping it."

"Seven days," Kira said, without turning.

"Seven days," the dark agreed. "You'll never last seven days."

Then the candles remembered themselves, and the doorway was just a doorway, and I was alone with a demon who had my blood in her mouth and a collar around my neck that burned when I lied.

I sat down on the floor, because standing had gone out of fashion, and I did what I do.

I started counting my odds