Page 5 of The Demon Kept Me

"You've been busy," he says one evening, surveying the newly cleared room. There's a mended chair in the corner now, and a shelf I built from salvaged boards that holds the dishes I no longer have to stack on the floor.

"It bothered me, seeing good wood go to waste."

"Most people wouldn't bother." He runs a claw along the shelf's edge, testing the joint. "This will hold weight."

"I made sure of it."

He glances at me, something considering in the coal-red of his eyes. "You're thorough."

"I had a lot of practice not doing things halfway. Half-finished work gets you sent away faster than no work at all."

He doesn't respond to that directly, but later that night I find a proper hinge waiting by the cabinet door I hadn't managed to fix myself — brass, well-oiled, better than anything I could have scavenged from the storage piles. He never mentions leaving it there. I've stopped expecting him to.

I catch him at the grinding wheel two days later, crouched beside the main gear, running his claws along a bolt that's worked loose from the vibration of daily use. He doesn't say anything about it. He never does. I only notice because I'd been about to reach for that exact gear myself to clear a jam, and if the bolt had given while my hand was near it, I'd have lost fingers to the mechanism.

"You checked that before I got here," I say.

"It needed checking." He doesn't look up from the bolt.

"You check everything before I touch it. I've noticed."

That gets his attention. He glances at me, guarded, like I've caught him at something he'd rather I hadn't. "The equipment is old. It requires vigilance."

"Malvek." I cross my arms, and I don't bother hiding the small smile that wants out. "You're worried about me."

"I'm being practical." But he doesn't argue further, and he doesn't meet my eyes again until the bolt is tightened and the danger is gone.

I let him have the lie, because I understand now that this is simply how he speaks — not in soft words, but in boots mended before they wear through, in food left without comment, in danger cleared away before I ever know it existed. Nobody has ever shown me care this way before. I didn't know it was a language until I started learning to read it.

A few days later, young Bren delivers grain from his family's farm, and unlike most who come through the yard, he doesn't hurry to leave once his cart is unloaded. He lingers near the doorway, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of Malvek working the runner stone inside.

"Is it true he can crush stone with his bare hands?" he asks me, not bothering to lower his voice.

"I've never seen him try."

"Would you ask him to?"

"No," I say, though I can't help smiling at the eagerness on his freckled face. "But you're welcome to ask him yourself, if you're brave enough."

Bren considers this seriously, glancing toward the mill, then shakes his head and grins instead. "Maybe next time." He waves as he climbs back onto his cart, and I notice he doesn't flinch the way the older farmers do when Malvek steps into view to help him turn the wagon around in the narrow yard. Children, I'm learning, carry fewer years of rumor to unlearn.

That evening, I mention it over dinner, mostly to fill the quiet. "Bren wanted to know if you could crush stone with your bare hands."

Malvek doesn't look up from his bowl right away. "Can I?"

"I don't know. Can you?"

"I've never needed to find out." A pause, and then, almost too quiet to catch, "Tell him next time he asks, I'll show him something less destructive. The boy doesn't need more reasons to think demons are only good for violence."

I file that away as something worth remembering — that beneath the reputation the village has built for him, he'd rather be remembered for something gentler than strength, if anyone ever gave him the chance to prove it.

Standing in the milling floor with flour dust in the air and rain against the shutters, I wonder, for the first while ever in so long, whether I've finally found a place that might actually want to keep me. It's a dangerous thought to hold too tightly. I've had homes taken from me before, always when I least expected it, always by people who'd promised something different than what they delivered. But Malvek hasn't promised me anything beyond his three rules, and somehow that makes the trust easier to give than every hollow promise that came before it.

That night I lie awake listening to the river instead of footsteps, and the thought that follows me into sleep isn't fear of what tomorrow might take from me. It's something closer to hope, small and unfamiliar, that maybe tomorrow will simply be more of today.

5

MALVEK