TAMING MY KILLER DEMON

The Terrain Wager

Chapter 3 

"—and I'm telling you," I said, "if you'd taken the left corridor instead of the right, we'd have three more minutes before—"

The knife went past my ear and stuck in the doorframe with a sound like a cough.

"—before that," I finished. "Odds that was a warning shot: high. Odds the next one's a question: higher."

The collar tightened. Not from a lie. From proximity — I'd learned that much in two days. It read danger the way a dog reads thunder, a half-second before the sky agrees.

Kira didn't move from the wall. Arms folded. Claws in. Watching me the way a woman watches a horse she's thinking about buying and suspects is lame.

"Three," she said.

"Four. One on the roof, I heard his weight shift when we started talking."

"You heard—" She looked up. Something crossed her face that was almost respect and mostly irritation. "Three on the ground. One on the roof. And you want to do this without me."

"I want to do this without dying. Those are different hands." I stepped left, out of the doorframe's shadow, into the middle of the room where the light was bad and the floor was worse. "You said seven days of keeping me alive. You didn't say anything about doing my work for me."

"Because doing your work for you is boring."

"Then sit down and be bored."

The first one came through the window.

He was fast, and he was good, and he was wearing a sigil on the back of his hand that had already been paid for in blood — the wound was still open, a raw line across his knuckles, and the sigil above it was drawing off it, a slow drip of red that went up into the shape instead of down. A blood sigil. The kind that costs you something every second you keep it lit.

The shape was a fist. The sigil made his fist the size of my head.

He swung. I let him. I let him swing and I moved down, into the space under it, because a man with a fist the size of your head cannot see his own feet, and the floorboards in this building had been pulled up and re-laid by a drunk in a hurry six months ago. There was a gap in them, two fingers wide, right where his weight would land.

His foot found the gap.

His ankle went the wrong way with a sound I don't like remembering, and he went down sideways into the table, and the sigil on his hand guttered — it had to keep dripping, it had to keep feeding, and he was bleeding faster now, and it was eating him to stay lit.

"Second thing," I said, picking up his dropped knife. "A blood sigil's a bet with a clock on it. You want to fight a man using one, don't hurt him. Just make him take longer."

Kira made a sound behind me. Low. It might have been a laugh.

The second and third came together, through the door and the far wall, and one of them had a sigil I didn't recognize — a spiral with teeth, drawn in what looked like soot. She clapped her hands and the soot jumped off the wall and into the air and became a shape, and the shape had a mouth and too many corners.

A demon. Small. Cheap. Bought and paid for with somebody else's blood, and it came at me with the enthusiasm of a thing that had been told it was dinner and would be eating, not eaten.

I did the only sensible thing available, which was to be somewhere else.

The problem with somewhere else is that this building had one staircase and one corridor and I'd spent two days learning both of them with my hands on the walls in the dark, counting steps, feeling for the part of the banister that was loose. I went up the stairs. The small demon came after me. I heard its corners scraping the walls on both sides at once, which meant it was too wide for the corridor, which meant—

I turned at the top, and I pulled the loose banister post out of its socket, and I threw it down the stairs.

The demon caught it. Of course it caught it. Demons catch things.

But a thing that wide, coming up a corridor that narrow, catching something thrown down at it — the wood went into its mouth-corner and its momentum did the rest, and it wedged, and it made an outraged noise like a hinge, and the woman with the soot sigil said "Oh, hell—" and had to climb over her own purchase to get to me.

Behind her, in the dark of the lower floor, Kira had not moved.

Claws in. Arms folded. Watching.

"You're enjoying this," I called down.

"I'm tolerating this," she said. "There's a difference."

The roof man came through the ceiling.

He was the good one. He landed behind me with no sound at all, and the first I knew of him was the collar burning, white-hot, a full notch, and my mouth already open to say something before my brain had—

"Left hand," I said.

The collar went cold.

He'd been going to put the blade in the right side of my back, which meant his weight was on his left foot, which meant his left hand was the anchor. I dropped my shoulder into his left hand.

And then, because he was fast and good and I was neither, he got me anyway. The blade came in under my ribs and I felt it go in the way you feel a door close on your coat — sudden, and then you understand the cost.

Kira moved.

I want to be honest about this part, because I have told it wrong before when I was tired. She did not save me. The blade was already in. What she did was arrive after the blade, and take the man's arm off at the elbow, and hold it up while he looked at it.

"He was boring me," she said. "You were not."

Then she bit her own wrist.

Not his. Hers. Claw across the vein and her mouth to the wound and she drew, and she turned, and she pressed her bleeding wrist to my wound, and she drew the sigil on my ribs with her blood and mine mixed, three circles and a line through them, the same mark as the collar.

The burning went out of my side. The cold came in. I felt something in me pay — not a memory this time. Something older. I got very tired, very fast, the way you get tired when you've been holding something heavy for years without noticing.

"Lie to me," she said.

"What?"

"Lie to me, gambler. Quickly. I want to see the collar do it."

"I'm fine," I said.

The collar burned. I gasped.

Kira smiled — the first full one I'd seen — and put her palm flat over the sigil on my ribs and pressed down, and the pain went somewhere I could carry it. Then she dragged me up by the shirt and put her mouth on mine, and this one was different. This one tasted of my blood and hers and something underneath that was none of my business.

She bit my lip. Not hard. Enough.

"You don't get to be clever and dead," she said, against my mouth, and her voice had gone unsteady. "Pick one. Say it back."

"Clever," I said.

"Wrong answer."

She bit again, deeper, and the collar flared, and I made a sound into her mouth that I will deny until the day I actually die, properly this time. Her hand was at my throat, thumb on the iron, and she held me there until my breathing was hers.

Then she let go and stepped back and looked at the ruin of the room, and the two men still breathing, and the small demon wedged in the stairwell complaining.

"Message," she said. "Give them a message."

The roof man was on his knees, holding his arm's end, staring at nothing. I crouched down to his eye level. My side was a sealed ache. My lip was split. My collar was warm as a hearth.

"You're going to go back," I said, "and you're going to tell whoever holds your leash two things. One: the corpse is not his. I'm not a debt he's owed and I'm not a piece he's moving. Two—"

I leaned in.

"Tell him a gambler named YuZen bet on himself this morning, and he should have taken the odds he was offered, because the table's closed now."

The man's eyes came up. Something happened in them.

"You're the Glitch," he said.

I stood. "Odds I'm worse."

He got out. All of them did. The sigil-woman carried her purchase. The man with the broken ankle hopped and cursed. And the roof man, at the door, turned and said, in the flat voice of a man reciting a line he'd been given for the wrong occasion:

"Correction's coming. It says the bloodline's wrong. It says the wrong one's wearing the body."

Then he was gone, and the room was very quiet, and Kirihime was standing in the corner where she had not been standing before, holding her hands in front of her like a woman carrying water and afraid of spilling.

"I heard him," she said. "And I checked."

"Checked what?"

"The blood in the floorboards. The blood in you." Her eyes came up. "There's a sigil that knows whose blood is whose. It's old. I drew it while you were being stupid." She held out her hand, palm up. On it, in her grey skin, was a line of red turning black.

"And?"

"It says the wrong one's wearing the body." Her voice went thin. "And then it says the body is wearing you."

The collar tightened. No lie in the room. It tightened anyway.

I looked at Kira. Kira looked at the floor.

"You knew," I said.

"I suspected," she said.

"Odds you tell me in seven days."

"Low," she said. "Gambler. Sit down before you fall down. And then we're going to talk about who you were before you were mine."