TAMING MY KILLER DEMON

The Stowaway's Wager

Chapter 5 

"—five minutes," I said. "Five minutes and if I'm not dead, you owe me a truth. A real one. Not the kind you tell with your teeth."

The collar tightened. One notch. It had opinions about this plan.

Kira's hand was flat on the door, holding it shut, and her claws had come out and sunk into the wood, and she was looking at me the way a woman looks at a man she's decided not to kill yet but reserves the right to revisit.

"Two minutes," she said.

"Four."

"Three, and I'm standing behind you the whole time, and if he so much as looks at your chest I take his head off."

"Odds you take his head off anyway," I said.

"High."

"Then we're agreed."

The knocking came again. Three times. Patient. The same rhythm. And the voice behind it, mild and unhurried, said: "I can hear you negotiating. It's very charming. Open the door."

I opened the door.

He was standing in the grey of the shop's front step with his hands folded in front of him like a man waiting for a carriage. He was tall. He was wearing a coat that had been good once. And his face—

His face was mine.

Not exactly. The nose was a little longer. The jaw was a little harder. There was a scar through the left eyebrow that I did not have and had never had. But the shape of the skull, the set of the eyes, the way the mouth sat when it was being patient — I had seen all of that in a shaving mirror in another world, and my stomach went cold and then hot and then very still.

"Ah," he said. "Yes. That's the expression I expected."

"You're the ghost," I said.

"I'm the owner." He stepped forward, and Kira's claws came up, and he stopped with the courtesy of a man who had been threatened by better. "I'm not here to fight. If I wanted to fight I'd have brought the Unit back with me and let it do the messy part. I'm here to talk."

"Talk," I said.

"Talk." He spread his hands. "You're wearing my body. I'd like it back. There's a procedure. It's not pleasant for either of us, but it's clean, and it leaves you alive, which is more than most stowaways get."

The collar burned.

I looked down at it. Looked back up at him. "You're lying about something."

His eyebrows went up. "Am I."

"The collar says so. The collar's never wrong." I stepped out onto the step, and Kira made a sound behind me, and I held up one hand to her without turning around. "You said 'it leaves you alive.' That's the lie. Or part of it. What's the rest?"

He was quiet for a moment. The grey light did something unkind to his face.

"Very well," he said. "The procedure leaves a you alive. Not necessarily all of you. The body's been occupied too long. The seams have grown over. Pulling me back in means pulling some of you out, and the pieces that come out don't go anywhere. They just stop."

"Odds I survive it," I said.

"Low." He said it without relish. That was the worst part. He wasn't enjoying this. "I'm sorry. I truly am. I didn't choose to die and I didn't choose to have a stranger climb into my skin. But I've been a ghost for eleven years, and I've watched three other stowaways get pulled out of bodies that weren't theirs, and I can tell you exactly what it looks like when it's done badly, and I'd rather not be the reason it happens again."

"Three other stowaways," I said. "There were others."

"There are always others. The Game opens doors. People walk through. Most of them don't fit." He looked at me with something that was almost pity. "You're the first one who's ever fit well."

The collar burned again, and this time it kept burning, and I understood that the collar was not reacting to him. It was reacting to me. To the thing I was about to say.

"No," I said.

"No?"

"No, you can't have it back. Not tonight. Not in three days." I stepped down onto the street, and the cold came up through my boots, and the collar was a band of heat at my throat, and my hands were shaking and I let them shake. "Here's what I know. You've been dead eleven years. Eleven years is a long time to be patient. You can be patient three more days. Because in three days I've got a debt to pay and a demon to keep alive and a Correction Unit that thinks I'm a mistake, and if I hand this body over tonight I lose all three at once. So here's the wager."

He tilted his head. "You're wagering with me."

"I'm wagering with everybody. It's a habit." I put my hand out. "Three days. You give me three days to finish what I started. At the end of it, I'll meet you right here, and we'll do the procedure, and whatever comes out of me that doesn't survive — I'll have spent three days making sure it was worth losing. That's the bet. Take it or leave it."

He looked at my hand. He looked at my face. He looked at the collar, and something crossed his expression that I couldn't read.

"You're offering me a delay," he said, "in exchange for nothing."

"I'm offering you a delay in exchange for my word. That's not nothing. Odds you've had nothing offered to you in eleven years."

The collar burned.

His hand came up, slowly, and I thought he would take mine. Instead he drew a sigil in the air between us — a thin, cold thing, a circle with a blade through it, and the blade was pointing at my chest. The blood cost came out of him as he drew it, a thin line of red from the corner of his mouth, and he did not wipe it away.

"This is a claim-sigil," he said. "It marks you as mine. If you break the three-day oath, it will find you, and it will not be gentle. If you keep it, it will release you clean. Do you accept?"

"Odds it's a trick," Kira said from the doorway.

"High," I said. "But the collar will tell me."

I put my hand into the sigil.

The cold went through me like a blade going through cloth, and the collar screamed — a sound I have not heard it make before or since, a high thin shriek of iron in protest — and then it went quiet, and the sigil sank into my chest, and the ghost's eyes widened.

"That's not—" he said. "That's not what it does. That's not what the claim-sigil does."

"What does it do?"

"It marks the body." He was staring at my chest where the sigil had gone. "It marks the body, not the soul. It should have gone into the skin. It went into you." His voice dropped. "What are you?"

"Tired," I said. "And three days short of a deadline."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he laughed — short, surprised, almost unwilling — and stepped back.

"Three days," he said. "I'll be here. And stowaway—" He was already fading, the grey light going through him. "Don't die before then. I'd hate to have to haunt a corpse that doesn't answer."

Then he was gone, and the street was just a street, and Kira had her hand on my shoulder and her claws were retracting one by one.

"You're an idiot," she said.

"Odds I'm an idiot with three days to live."

"High."

She turned me around. Her eyes were bright and her jaw was set and her hand came up to the collar and stayed there, thumb against the iron, and she said, "You gave your word to a ghost. You put a claim-sigil in your chest. You stood on a street in the cold and wagered your own skin."

"I did."

"You didn't ask me."

"Would you have said yes?"

"No."

"Then I didn't ask."

She kissed me. This one was not a claim and not a seal and not a shut-up. This one was angry, and frightened, and underneath all of that it was grateful, and I knew that because her hand was shaking against my throat and her mouth was too gentle for the anger in it. She bit my lip at the end, a small precise bite, and the collar flared, and she pulled back and said, "Three days. You're mine for three days. And at the end of them, if you try to hand yourself over without me, I'll drag you back from whatever's left and kill you again myself."

"Say it back," I said.

Her eyes narrowed.

"Say it back," I said again. "You're mine for three days. Say it."

The collar stayed cool.

She looked at me for a long moment. Then, very quietly, like it cost her something she didn't have: "I'm yours for three days."

The collar went warm.

And behind us, in the shop, Kirihime said, "There's a letter on the counter. It wasn't there before. It's addressed to all of us."