Page 91 of Just One Little Bargain

That gets half a laugh out of her. She picks at a loose thread on the blanket, winding it around her finger and unwinding it again.

“Marmalade didn’t come from anywhere,” she says. “When I reopened the inn, that first winter was bad. I’d sunk everything into the place, and the bookings weren’t coming. I was here, alone, in this huge old house at night, with the pipes groaning, feeling farther outside my life than I ever had. And one morning, I came down to open up, and he was just sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor. He was clean, wasn’t skinny, and he had no collar. When I put up flyers, not one person in this entire town, where everybody knows everybody’s business, had ever seen him before.” Her voice has gone smaller. “He’d been dropped out of a clear sky specifically for me.”

The fire cracks, throwing up a spray of orange sparks.

I keep my expression level, because a cat no one in town has ever seen simply appearing in the inn one morning is not a story that files itself anywhere reassuring in my head. But I don’t interrupt.

“I decided not to poke. I was lonely, and there he was. The universe had basically gone, ‘Fine, here, have a mean little ginger creature who bites you when he’s had enough.’ So I accepted him, because pulling that thread meant admitting I didn’t understand where the cat who got me through that winter came from.” She turns her head on the blanket to face me. “That’s the stupid part. I run everything. I know where every teaspoon in that house lives. Marmalade just appeared, and I’ve never let myself think about that for longer than a minute. I’m scared that if I ask too many questions, he’ll disappear the same way he arrived.”

“Your turn.” Evie shifts to face me fully. “Something you’ve never told anyone.”

I could deflect. I’ve got a compendium of half-truths and clever omissions built for exactly this. But answering her confession with something practiced would be its own kind of theft.

“The glasses.” I touch the frame. “Every demon assumes I wear them as an accessory. I let them think that because the alternative is admitting I can’t see past about twenty feet without them. Demons aren’t meant to have flaws like that. We’re bred to be perfect predators. My father would consider imperfect eyesight a personal insult to the bloodline.”

“So you hid a disability behind a fashion choice.”

“When you put it that way, it sounds almost dignified.”

“Not really. It’s what I do with superstition too. Dress up the soft parts so nobody sees how much they scare you.”

The fire is nearly gone now, just a low red glow under gray ash, and the cold has crept beyond its reach. She doesn’t move to go inside, and neither do I.

“Look up,” I say instead.

She tips her head back, and I do the same. For a while, we don’t speak.

“That one,” I say, pointing, “is already dead. The light we’re seeing left it four hundred years ago, before the end. Anyone staring at that patch of sky tonight is technically watching a corpse.”

“That’s morbid.”

“Romantic, actually. Something can stop existing, and you can spend centuries still receiving what was left behind.”

“You never run out of trivia, do you?”

“It’s the one thing I’m reliably good at.”

She laughs, and guilt follows immediately because I’m about to ruin the moment.

For five days, I’ve carried this. In the dark on her couch, I’ve turned the memory over, rehearsing a dozen openings and discarding all of them. The longer nothing happens, the easier it is to doubt whether I saw what I thought I saw. But another demon showing up in Brindlewood now doesn’t feel like coincidence.

But I know what I saw. And lying here beside her while I say nothing is wrong.

“There’s another demon in town.”

Evie stops moving. Her fingers tighten in the blanket between us.

I make myself keep looking at her instead of the tree line, though instinct tells me to watch the dark. “It was the day we were at the thrift shop. I told myself I needed to be sure, and that frightening you over nothing would be worse. But the real reason was I couldn’t explain without admitting the rest.”

“The rest?”

“Another demon showing up now means Hell has noticed how long I’m taking.” My hands have curled into fists on my knees, and I make them open again. “I should be pushing for a contract with you instead of helping you.”

The sentence sounds damning even to me. The warmth of the last hour drains out of her face, one degree at a time.

“Right,” she says. “The contract.”

“Evie.”