Page 6 of The Demon Kept Me

Harvest season arrives the way it always does — all at once, as though the fields conspired to ripen on the same morning purely to test how many hours a demon and one determined woman can work without collapsing. We start before the sun clears the ridge and finish well after it's gone, the mill wheel turning until my arms ache from the vibration and Wren's hands go raw from hauling sack after sack toward the chute.

I've stopped pretending the pace doesn't wear on me. What I haven't stopped is looking forward to the mornings, because Wren fills the early hours with conversation the way she fills the mill with the smell of baking bread — constant, warm, entirely unbothered by my silences.

"Garrik's youngest is getting married in the spring," she tells me, hauling a sack onto the scale with more strength than her frame suggests she should have. "Elsie's already planning the cake, though the wedding's months off."

"That's a long time to plan a cake."

"That's exactly what I said." She grins at me, flour already dusting her forearms. "She told me I clearly haven't met her mother-in-law."

I find myself listening for these small stories more than I'd admit aloud — the threads of a village I've long served but never truly belonged to, delivered to me secondhand through a woman who's only lived here a matter of weeks and somehow already knows everyone's business better than I do.

"You like them," I say. "The villagers."

"Most of them." She considers this while stacking the next sack. "They're careful with me still, some of them. But careful isn't cruel. I can work with careful."

I think about that longer than the observation probably warrants.

The night it happens, I'm asleep in the small room off the grinding floor where I've kept a cot for years, more habit than necessity, when the sound wakes me — a groan of stone under stress, wrong in a way the river's usual rhythm could never account for. I'm on my feet and down the stairs before I've fully registered what roused me.

The main millstone has split clean through the center, a fracture running the full width of the grinding surface. Stone that old doesn't crack like that from wear. I crouch beside it, running my claws along the break, and find what I already suspected I would — narrow gouges near the edge, evenly spaced, the unmistakable mark of a chisel driven deliberately into a weak seam.

"Malvek?"

Wren stands at the base of the stairs, wrapped in a blanket, hair loose from its usual braid. She must have heard the crack from above.

"Someone did this on purpose," I tell her, holding up the stone so she can see the tool marks for herself. "This isn't age. This is sabotage."

Her eyes widen, but there's no panic in her, only the same steady focus I've come to expect from her when something needs solving. "Who would do this?"

"I don't know yet." I set the broken piece down and start toward the workshop where I keep the spare stones, my mind already cataloguing the hours until dawn, the hours until the next delivery arrives expecting flour I won't have if this isn't fixed. "But whoever it is knows exactly where to strike. This seam has been weak for years. Only someone who's studied this mill closely would know that."

"Then we fix it." She's already moving toward the workshop behind me, blanket abandoned over the stair rail, sleeves pushed up despite the cold. "Tell me what you need."

"You should sleep. This will take until sunrise."

"So will you, and you're not sleeping either." She meets my eyes, chin lifted the same stubborn way it was the day I bought her, daring me to argue. "I'm not leaving you to do this alone."

I have no energy to fight her on it, and if I'm honest with myself, I don't want to. I hand her the smaller chisel and show her where to help brace the replacement stone while I work the heavier lifting, and we settle into the kind of silence that doesn't need filling — just the scrape of tools and the low murmur of instructions passed back and forth as the night wears on.

"Tighter here," I tell her, guiding her hands toward the mounting bracket. "The stone needs to sit level or it'll wear unevenly again within the season."

"Like this?"

"Exactly like that." I check her work, surprised by how quickly she absorbs what most apprentices take months to learn. "You have a good hand for this."

"I have a good teacher." She says it simply, without the flirtation I half expect, and something about the plainness of it settles somewhere in my chest I don't have a name for.

We work through the deepest hours of the night, the two of us alone in the lamplight with the river running steady outside the walls, and somewhere in the labor of it, the fear that first gripped me at the sound of cracking stone settles into something more useful — a cold, careful determination to find whoever did this before they strike again.

"Do you think it's someone from the village?" Wren asks, wiping sweat from her forehead despite the chill of the room.

"I don't know." I lift the new stone into its final position, testing the weight against the bracket. "But I intend to find out. This mill feeds half the valley through winter. Whoever did this understood exactly what they were threatening."

"Then we'll figure it out together." She says it like it's already decided, like there was never a version of this where she'd let me handle it alone, and I find I don't have the will to argue that point either.

The stone locks into place just as gray light begins creeping through the shutters, and I test the mechanism twice before I'm satisfied it will hold. When Garrik's cart rattles into the yard an hour later, the mill wheel turns exactly as it should, and if he notices the exhaustion carved into both our faces, he doesn't comment on it.

"Everything alright?" he asks instead, eyeing the fresh mounting bracket with a farmer's practiced attention to detail.