TAMING MY KILLER DEMON

Sigil of the Empty Street

Chapter 2 

The collar woke me before the knocking did.

It went tight, one clean notch, the way a rope goes tight when something at the other end has decided to move. I came up off the floor with my heart going and my hand already reaching for a weapon that wasn't there, and my mouth said, before my brain had voted on it:

"I'm not going to die today."

The collar loosened. Went cool. Approved.

"Well," I said to the ceiling. "Good to know the thing has opinions."

The knocking came again. Not on the door. On the air, about a foot inside the room, which is a sound I have never enjoyed and never will. I looked at the doorway and the doorway had gone wrong — not dark this time, but thin. The wood was still wood. It just didn't mean anything anymore. I looked at it and my eyes slid off the way a hand slides off a wet pane, and I could not for the life of me remember what a door was for.

Kira was already awake, standing between me and the thin place, and her claws were out and low, and her shoulders had dropped into a stance I was learning to read as this one's serious.

"Don't look at it," she said. "Look at me."

"Odds that helps," I said, and looked at her.

"Better than even." She didn't smile. "Kirihime. She's early."

"Does she do that?"

"She does whatever she does, and then you find out you've been standing in an empty room for six hours."

The thin place widened. Not a door opening — a door forgotten. The floor between us and it lost its color, then its texture, then its right to be considered part of the building. And a woman walked in, except I only know she walked in because I saw her feet arrive. The rest of her kept not being there. She was the shape of a person in the way a coat on a hook is the shape of a person, if you squint and you're lonely.

She had a sigil in the air in front of her, drawn in something pale and cold, and it was already turning. A spiral with a gap in it. The gap was the dangerous part. Things you could remember went into the spiral; things you couldn't fell out the gap and were gone.

The sigil reached me and my collar burned.

I bit down on a sound. The iron went from cool to white-hot to something past hot, and behind my eyes a whole shelf of small things came off the wall and shattered — the smell of a particular rain, a joke my brother told, the exact weight of a coin in my palm. My knees went. I got a hand on the floor and kept it there.

"Kira." Kirihime's voice came from the general direction of the coat. "Stand aside. The dead one is confusing the ledgers."

"He's mine," Kira said.

"He's warm, which is the problem. Warm things get remembered, and remembering is how they find us." The spiral turned another degree. "I'll be quick. He won't know he's missing."

Here is the thing I had figured out in four minutes of thinking about a woman made of forgetting: she wasn't attacking. She was tidying. And a person who's tidying will stop if you make the mess interesting.

I said, "What's your name?"

The spiral stopped turning.

"...What?"

"Your name." I got my other hand under me. The collar was still burning but the burning had settled into something with a rhythm, like a pulse, like it was waiting. "Say it out loud. Full thing. Go on."

"Why would I—" She stopped herself. The coat-shape turned slightly, as though checking something behind it. "That's a strange question."

"It's not a strange question," I said. "It's the strangest question in the world, and you didn't answer it."

The sigil in the air began, very slowly, to dim.

"Kirihime," she said. "I'm — Kirihime, I'm—" and then the dimming got faster and she made a sound like a house settling. "Kira. Kira, what was I saying."

Kira's claw came down. Not at her. At me — hooked in the collar of my shirt, hauling me up to my feet, close enough that I could see the wet at the corner of her eye and the way she was absolutely not going to acknowledge it. Her voice in my ear was a scrape of gravel.

"You just broke her," she said.

"I gave her a question she couldn't answer and she forgot how to finish it. That's not breaking, that's—" I was grinning, which was stupid, my hands were shaking, my collar was on fire and I was grinning. "That's reading the table."

The sigil guttered out. Kirihime stood in the middle of my room looking like a woman who'd just come up from underwater and wasn't certain which way was up. She was thin and pale and her hair was the grey of a page left in sun, and she was there, all of her, every inch, and she was looking at me like I'd committed a crime.

"You can't do that," she said. "Nobody can do that."

"I can't do magic. Turns out I don't have to."

"You—" She took a step. "Do you understand what that cost me? I don't know. I don't know what it cost. That's the horror of it. I don't know if I lost a memory or an hour or a—"

"Ask me again in seven days," I said. "Odds I've got a better answer."

Her hand came up. I thought she'd strike me. Instead she pointed, one finger, trembling — a dangerous, vulnerable detail, that tremor, and I filed it away the way I file every hand that shakes.

"You," she said. "You're going to be a problem."

"I'm going to be a project," I said. "There's a difference, and the difference is I'm going to make you interested in staying."

Silence. The candles came back up. Kira's hand was still in my collar, and she hadn't let go, and I noticed she hadn't let go, and she noticed me noticing.

Then Kirihime said, quietly, "Nobody's ever asked me my name before."

Kira's claw tightened.

"Don't," she said. Not to Kirihime. To me.

"Odds I listen," I said.

"Low," Kira said.

"Correct."

And then she kissed me.

Not gently. There was nothing in it that resembled a gift. Her hand knotted in my shirt, dragged me in, and her mouth landed on mine like a door slamming, and when I made a sound against her she took it. Her teeth caught my lower lip and she bit down until something copper spilled across my tongue, and the collar at my throat flared hot, not in warning — it flared the way a wick flares when it catches, and the whole of me lit up with a low, sick, wrong warmth that I have never been able to explain.

She pulled back an inch. Her eyes were very close and very bright and her breath wasn't steady.

"Now it's sealed," she said. "You're not going with her."

"I wasn't going with her."

"You were being interesting at her." She shook my shirt once, hard. "I don't share, gambler. I don't even lend. If you want to be looked at, you look at me. Say it."

"Odds I say it," I said, lips already swelling, "high."

"Say it."

I said it. Her claw loosened. Her hand stayed.

Behind her, Kirihime had gone to the window, and was standing in the grey that comes before dawn, and her shoulders were doing something that was either grief or laughter and I genuinely could not tell.

"You found my gambler," Kirihime said, to the window, to nobody. "And he found my name. How long have I—" She stopped. Her finger traced the sill and left a clean line in the dust. "Kira. How long have I been forgetting things?"

And in the doorway, the thin place came back.

Not Kirihime's forgetting. Something else. A shape leaning in from a corridor that hadn't been there a minute ago, and this one wanted — I could feel it wanting the way you feel a cold draft on your neck. It looked at me. It looked at Kirihime. And it said, in a voice like a ledger closing:

"Neither of them is the bloodline. Check again."

Then it was gone, and I was standing in a room with two demons, my lip bleeding, my collar warm, and my whole body asking a question my mouth was smart enough to keep shut.

Kirihime turned around. Her eyes were very wide.

"That was a Correction Unit," she said. "They only come when there's a mistake."

"I'm not a mistake," I said. "I'm worse. I'm a bet."