Page 1 of The Demon Kept Me

1

MALVEK

Rain finds every gap in the mill's old shutters, and I let it. The sound of it hitting the water wheel outside is the only company I've kept for two decades, and I stopped minding the silence between drops a long time ago.

I check the grain chute for the third time this morning, running my claws along the wood to feel for splinters that might catch a sack and tear it open. The chute is sound. Everything in this mill is sound, because I make certain of it, because if it isn't, people starve before the snow clears in spring.

My tail flicks against my leg, restless, though there's nothing here to be restless about. Just another autumn morning. Just another day tied to a building I never asked to own, in a village I never asked to serve, on a surface world I never intended to stay on longer than a season.

The bell above the door rattles, and I know who it is before I turn. Garrik's boots have a particular weight to them, uneven from the limp he pretends doesn't slow him down.

"Malvek." He nods the way he always does, brief and businesslike, though his eyes still flick to my horns before they settle anywhere else. Years on, and the villagers still can't help themselves.

"Garrik." I gesture toward the cart he's dragged through the mud. "That's more than you brought last week."

"Fields came in heavy this year." He starts hauling sacks toward the scale, grunting with the effort. "Figured I'd get ahead of the rush before everyone remembers winter's coming."

"Smart." I take the first sack from him before he can argue, because his knee gives out if he lifts too much, and he'll never admit it himself. The weight is nothing to me. I set it on the scale and watch the needle settle into place.

"You always did make it look easy," Garrik mutters. Not quite a compliment.

"Grinding this will take until evening." I mark the ledger, my handwriting cramped and efficient, the same as it's been since I opened this book decades ago. "Four days for the flour, if the rain holds off the wheel."

"And if it doesn't?"

"Then it takes five."

He grunts again, satisfied enough, and doesn't linger. None of them linger. They bring their grain, they collect their flour, they thank me with the fewest words possible, and they leave before the light fades. I used to think it was fear driving them off so quickly. Now I think it's a habit. Either way, it makes no difference to the work I owe them.

When the cart rattles off down the muddy road, I stand in the doorway and look out at Ashbrook — crooked rooftops, smoke curling from a dozen chimneys, the river cutting through the middle of it like a vein keeping the whole village alive. I can walk as far as the stone marker past the bridge. Past that point, something in my chest pulls taut, a leash I cannot see but always feel, and I have to turn back before the pain of straining against it drops me to my knees.

Twenty years, and I still test the boundary sometimes. Foolish of me. The contract doesn't loosen with time. It never loosens at all.

I remember the day I signed it the way I remember losing a limb — not the moment itself, but everything that came after, hollow and unfamiliar. I read every line I was permitted to read, twice over, checked every clause against a lifetime spent enforcing contracts for demons far crueler than the surface merchant who hired me for what should have been a single season's work. I found nothing wrong in the wording. That was the point of it. The wrongness was never in what the contract said. It was buried in what it never bothered to say at all.

Bound to the property. Bound until the debt is paid in full, by terms the mill itself shall determine.

A mill cannot determine anything on its own. That was the lie folded inside the truth, and I walked straight into it, certain that nothing in this world could outmaneuver a Volvath contract-binder. Certain my pride made me untouchable.

Galmoleth doesn't answer when I reach for it anymore. I stopped reaching years ago.

The bell rattles a second time, harder now, and I expect Garrik has forgotten something in his hurry. Instead I find a stranger's cart pulled halfway into the yard, its canvas cover sagging with rainwater, and a dark elf climbing down from the driver's bench with the particular grace his kind rarely loses, even soaked through.

"Shelter, if you'll have me," he calls out, silver hair plastered flat, violet eyes narrowed against the downpour. "I'll pay for the roof and the grain both, whatever your custom is out here."

"The mill doesn't rent shelter." I cross my arms. "There's an inn two roads east."

"The inn turned me away an hour past. Full up with harvest traders." He offers a smile that's all transaction and no warmth behind it. "Varek. I deal in goods that move — spices, silks, the occasional debt owed and collected. I won't be trouble to you."

I study him. Dark elves rarely wander this far from their own cities without a reason worth the risk, and Varek's cart sits heavier than a man traveling light usually carries. But the rain shows no sign of easing, and turning away a soaked traveler isn't worth the lecture I'd earn later from the village priest, who has firm opinions about hospitality that outlast most storms.

"Under the eave. Not inside."

"Generous of you." Varek's eyes flick past me toward the mill's dark windows, assessing, the way traders assess everything they pass. Then something shifts in the back of his cart, and a second figure climbs down after him — smaller, slower, wrapped in a cloak far too thin for the season.

I don't mean to look twice. But she moves like someone bracing for a blow that never lands, shoulders drawn tight around her ears, and there's an exhaustion in the set of her jaw that the rain soaking through her cloak has no part in.

"Yours?" I ask, though I already suspect the answer.