TAMING MY KILLER DEMON

Sigil of the Unpaid Debt

Chapter 6 

"—read it again," Kira said.

I read it again. The collar burned on the fourth line and I had to stop and swallow and start over, and that was how I knew the letter was doing something to me and not just sitting there being paper.

"'To the occupant of the body,'" I read. "'You are hereby notified that the debt attached to your skin is now due. The holder of the note has waited eleven years, which is longer than the arrangement allows. Present yourself, or the note will be presented to you.'"

Kirihime's hands were folded in front of her, and she was very still. "Whose seal?"

I turned the paper over. The seal was wax, dark red, and pressed into it was a sigil I had seen once before — a circle with a blade through it, blade pointing down.

"The ghost's," I said. "But the wax is warm."

Kira took it out of my hands. She held it up to the candle and her claws were out and her jaw was tight. "He made a claim-sigil on you and now there's a note with his seal. That's two hands in the same deck. He's not playing straight."

"He said he wasn't here to fight."

"He said a lot of things. You believed the collar, not him." She turned the letter over. "And the collar doesn't read paper."

"It reads me." I took it back. "And it burned when I read the part about the debt being due. That's not him lying. That's the letter being true."

The wax cracked.

Not from heat. From the inside. The seal split down the middle and the sigil inside it lifted off the paper and hung in the air over the counter — a circle with a blade, turning slowly, dripping red onto the wood. Blood. Fresh. The cost was being paid by something, and the something was not in the room.

"Down," Kira said.

I went down. Not because she'd said it. Because the collar had gone white-hot and the iron had tightened a full two notches and I could not breathe, and my knees had decided on their own that the floor was the only honest option.

The sigil widened. The blade turned point-up. And the room went quiet in a way I had felt once before, on a battlefield in another world, right before everyone stopped caring.

Mukanshin came through the wall.

Not violently. That was the horror of it. He came through the plaster the way a man walks into a room he's been in a thousand times, and behind him the wall did not crack or crumble — it simply stopped mattering, and then it was a wall again and he was standing in front of it, looking at nothing in particular.

He was tall and grey and slow, and he did not look at any of us. His eyes were the color of a window on a cloudy day, and the whole room got tired. I felt it come off him like heat off a stove — a great, wide, patient tiredness that settled into my shoulders and my knees and the back of my skull and said why bother.

Kira's claws went down. Not retracted. Down, hanging at her sides. Her face went slack.

Kirihime sat on the floor. She did it gently, as though sitting had been the plan all along, and she looked at her own hands with mild interest.

And I was on my knees on a shop floor with a burning collar and a letter in my fist, and my own body was telling me to lie down and let it be over.

"Odds I get up," I said.

The collar went cold.

I got up.

I want to be honest about the cost, because the cost is the part I remember. Getting up took something. It was not blood. It was a memory, one of the small ones, and it went out of me like air out of a bellows — a face, a room, the sound of someone laughing at something I'd said — and I have never been able to find it again. The sigil was feeding. Mukanshin's presence was feeding. And the only thing standing between the three of us and the floor was me and my mouth.

"You're a demon," I said.

Mukanshin turned his head. Slowly. It took a long time.

"I'm the absence," he said. His voice was a flat, faraway thing, with no edges. "The debt-holder bought my attendance. He paid in a memory he could spare. I came. I will stay until the note is settled. Then I will leave."

"He bought you with a memory."

"Everything is a memory, eventually."

"That's the saddest thing I've heard all week," I said, "and I've died once and been told I'm a squatter in a borrowed corpse, so the bar is high."

Something moved in his face. It might have been nothing.

"The note is simple," he said. "Your body is owed. The claim-sigil is in your chest. You agreed to three days. The three days are on the letter, and the letter is running."

I looked down at the paper. At the bottom, in a hand that was not the ghost's, was a line I had not read because the collar had stopped me before I got there. Small figures. Little marks, one for each hour, and three of them already dark.

"It's counting," I said.

"It began counting the moment the wax broke. When it reaches the end, the note is called in. The ghost will come for what's his, and I will help him take it, because I am paid to attend."

"Odds I can beat a note," I said.

"Low." He said it without cruelty. That was the worst of it. There was no cruelty in him. There was nothing at all. "Nobody beats a note. Notes are the only honest thing in this world. You sign them, you owe them, you pay them."

"Then let's play."

He blinked. It took a long time too.

"You are on the floor," he said, "in a borrowed body, with a counting letter, a sick demon, and a demon who has forgotten how to sit. And you want to play."

"I want to wager." I straightened my spine, and the collar burned, and I let it. "You're paid to attend. Fine. Attend. But a debt has to be paid by somebody, and the somebody's the ghost, and the ghost isn't here. So the note is unsettled. Unsettled means there's a table open. Tables open mean a game."

Mukanshin was silent for a long moment.

"That," he said, "is not in the rules."

"Odds the rules were written by somebody who never got a bad hand at a worse table. High." I put the letter flat on the counter and put both hands on the wood. "Here's the bet. I'll take one hour off that counting letter. Not by asking. By gambling. One hand of chance, mine against yours, and whatever I win I spend on time. You're the note's attendant. You can't refuse a settlement offer in front of witnesses."

"Who are the witnesses?"

"Kirihime. Who forgot how to sit." I looked at her. "Say something."

Kirihime, from the floor, with her hands in her lap, said: "I witness it."

The paper on the counter flinched. The count at the bottom shivered and went one hour lighter.

Mukanshin looked at the letter. Then at me. And then something happened in his grey face that I have thought about a great deal since.

"Choose," he said. "Knucklebone or coin."

"Coin."

He drew one out of nowhere — a flat grey disc, worn smooth. He turned it over in his fingers, once, and set it spinning on the counter. It wobbled. It went round. It did not fall.

"Name your side," he said.

The collar was burning. It had been burning the whole time, and now it burned in a way that was almost eager, and I understood something I had not understood before: the iron did not just punish lies. It read the table. It knew the odds before I did.

"Heads," I said.

The coin fell.

It was neither. It came down on its edge and stood there, upright, quivering, and the room held its breath.

And Kira, from the doorway, said, "The coin's mine."

She had her hand on the frame. She was standing. Her face was grey and her voice was a scrape, but she was standing, and her claws were out.

"You don't get to play with him," she said. "He's mine. I'm the one who says what he spends, and he's not spending an hour. He's spending me."

Mukanshin turned. "The note does not accept a demon as payment."

"The note doesn't have to. I'm not paying the note." She crossed the floor, unsteady, one hand on the counter. "I'm paying the coin. It was my hand that cut him. My blood in his collar. My mark on his ribs. He's a debt on my ledger before he's a debt on anyone's, and I want a seat at this table."

The coin fell flat. Heads.

The count on the letter went two hours lighter.

Kira put her hand on my chest, over the claim-sigil, and pressed until it hurt, and leaned in and bit my jaw — hard, precise, right on the bone, the way a woman signs a document with her teeth — and then her mouth found mine and the collar flared and I stopped being able to think about letters.

"You don't gamble without me," she said against my mouth. "Not ever. Say it."

"Not ever."

"Say it properly."

"I don't gamble without you."

The collar stayed warm. She held me there a moment longer than the bite required, and her thumb found the iron at my throat and shook against it, barely, and I filed that away too, because it is the only hand I ever want to see shake.

Then she stepped back, and her legs nearly went, and she caught herself on the counter, and she said, "Now. Somebody tell me what's outside the window."

Because there was something outside the window. A shape, patient, in the street. And a voice came through the glass, flat as a closed book:

"You found my gambler. Now find the fourth before the count runs out."