TAMING MY KILLER DEMON

Sigil of the Cradled Receipt

Chapter 10 

The collar burned, and the bundle kept crying, and the street kept being white.

"—don't touch it," Kira said. "Don't you dare touch it."

"I'm not touching it." My hands were up, palms out, and my collar was white-hot, and the thing in the light was small and wrapped and making the sound that gets into your ribs whether you want it there or not. "Zansho. Say it again, slowly. What am I looking at."

"A receipt." Zansho had not moved from the well. "The Collector comes with a ledger. The ledger has to balance. When a claim is contested, the Council issues a receipt — a thing that looks like what you owe, so you'll reach for it. It's a trap, gambler. It wears the shape of the thing you'd die for."

The bundle turned its head. It found me. The old-milk eyes did not blink, and the crying stopped as though someone had closed a door on it.

"Take him," the woman in the light said again, gently. "You said you'd take him."

"I never said that."

"You said it in a room eleven years ago. You said it to a man whose skin you're wearing." She smiled, and it was a tired smile, and it was so kind it made my teeth ache. "He promised. He signed. Now it's yours."

The collar burned.

The baby reached out one small hand.

Kira's arm came across my chest like a bar of iron. "Kirihime," she said. "The light. Do the thing you did to the Unit."

Kirihime was already walking.

She went past us and into the white and the light did not touch her — it went through her, the way sun goes through a window, and she did not cast a shadow because there was nothing in her for the light to refuse. She stopped in front of the woman and looked down at the bundle for a long moment.

"He's cold," she said.

"He's a receipt," Zansho called.

"He's cold." Kirihime's voice had gone strange and flat and very quiet. "Nobody's holding him properly. Whoever made him made him from a template. He doesn't know up from down." She reached out. "I know what that's like."

"Kirihime." Kira's voice cracked like a whip. "Don't."

She picked him up.

The white light guttered and went thin and the street came back in around us — the grid cobbles, the square stones, the crooked shutter that had straightened — and Kirihime stood there with a small wrapped thing in her arms, and the crying started again, and this time it sounded different. It sounded like a child.

"He's not a trap now," Kirihime said.

Zansho's face did something complicated. "What did you do."

"I forgot he was a receipt." She looked up, and her grey eyes were wet. "I put my hand on him and I forgot what he was supposed to be, and now he's just a child who's cold, and the Council can't collect a child who isn't a receipt anymore, because the ledger reads the shape of things and I changed the shape."

"You changed the shape," I said. "Of a piece of the Council's own ledger."

"I did." She held him closer. "It cost me my name again. I don't remember what I'm called. I know it starts with a K and it's mine, and it's gone, and I don't care." Her chin came up. "I've been forgettable for a hundred years, gambler. I've been the thing nobody remembers. Do you know what it's like to be the only one who can't stay in the room?" She was crying now, openly, and her hands were steady around the child. "This one. He can't remember either. He was made without memory. So I'm keeping him. And you can all go to hell."

The count in my pocket chimed. Thirty minutes.

And then the street was full of gold.

---

The Collector did not come with light. It came with paper. Thousands of them, thin and white, drifting down out of the air and settling on the cobbles, and each one had writing on it, and each one was a receipt for something.

It walked out of the paper in gold robes, and it was not tall and it was not short and its face was the face of a ledger — columns for eyes, a running total where a mouth should be. It carried a book in both hands. The book was open.

"Discrepancy," it said. Its voice was the sound of a pen.

"Odds you're the Collector," I said.

"High." The running total moved. "Discrepancy: one deposit unclaimed. One receipt altered. One witness unlisted. Two claim-holders present. One debt due in three days." The columns of its eyes turned. "The ledger is unbalanced. I am here to balance it."

"Here's my offer," I said.

Kira's hand closed on my shoulder, hard.

"Your offer is noted," the Collector said. "Offers are not entries."

"Then make it one. You want balance. I want thirty minutes." I stepped forward, and the collar burned, and I let it burn. "You've got a receipt that doesn't read as a receipt anymore. That's a loss on your book. I'll take the loss off your hands. Give me the child and I'll sign for it. My name on your ledger, my debt, my problem. You get a clean entry and I get a cold baby with a warm blanket. Odds that balances."

The columns narrowed.

"A stowaway cannot sign."

"A stowaway can sign anything if he's got a claim-sigil in his chest and a ghost waiting on him." I held out my hand, cut palm up, still bleeding. "You want to know what I am? Put me in the book and find out."

The Collector looked at my hand for a long time.

"The offer is accepted," it said. "The entry will read: deposit holds the child against the debt. Payment due in three days. If the debt is unpaid, the child reverts to the ledger."

The collar did not burn.

"Deal," I said.

The pen-voice said, "Signed," and a line of ink went across my palm like a brand, and the count in my pocket stopped.

Kira turned me around so fast my neck cracked. She had the child in one arm — she had taken him from Kirihime without my seeing it, and she was holding him the way you hold something you have decided to die for — and her other hand was in my collar, and she pulled me in until our foreheads touched.

"You signed for a child you can't pay for," she said.

"Odds I pay."

"You signed for a child and you didn't ask me."

"Would you have said yes?"

"Yes." Her voice broke. "That's the problem, you idiot. I would have said yes in a heartbeat and then I'd have spent three days watching you kill yourself to make it true." She kissed me — hard, and short, and furious, her mouth closed and her teeth on my lip and the taste of blood between us. "You're mine. The child's mine. The debt's mine. All of it. Say it."

"All of it's yours."

"Say the whole thing."

"The child's yours. The debt's yours. I'm yours."

The collar went warm.

She pulled back. Her eyes were wet. She looked down at the child, who had stopped crying, and who had his small cold hand wrapped around her claw, and she said, in a voice I had never heard from her, "What's his name."

Kirihime said, "I don't remember."

"Then I'll name him." Kira's jaw set. "He's Kage. It means shadow. He can grow into something better."

The Collector's pen scratched. "Entry recorded."

And then it turned its columns on me, and the running total where its mouth should be went very still, and it said:

"One further discrepancy. The child's bloodline does not read as the stowaway's. It does not read as the ghost's." The columns turned. "It reads as hers."

Its eyes went to Kira.

The collar burned.

"What," I said.

"The child was drawn from the demon's blood. The claim-sigil in your chest required three hands and three bloods. The receipt used what was closest." The pen scratched. "The child is hers. The mother is on the ledger."

Kira did not move. She did not breathe. She looked down at the small cold thing in her arms, and her claws were out and shaking, and she said, very quietly, "Then whose is he?"

And the Collector said, "The deposit's."