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And what could they think of a demonslayer who screws demons as anything other than an abomination?
It had to end.
Before I got discovered.
If for no other reason than I couldn’t let those rooting for me to fail get to gloat that I had actively been failing our kind for months. Fine, well over a year.
Make no mistake, there were a lot of people who would love to see me fail. Some, simply because I was a woman who had gotten the chance to work alone quickly. More quickly than a lot of my male counterparts.
Others, because they didn’t want me to wear the title my great-grandfather before me had held, a title that other families had gotten to claim as their own during the generations after where none of my family was called.
I wanted that title, damnit.
I mean, I wasn’t eating, sleeping, and breathing it.
But I wanted it.
I’d actively been showing it through my actions, through my many kills, since I graduated.
I would continue to work toward it until it was mine, until my portrait was on the wall a few spots down from my great-grandfather.
Which was why I was absolutely not going to go seek out Minos.
Would it be good, sweaty satisfaction?
Absolutely.
But did that make it worth it in the long run?
Ugh.
See, the problem is, the longer I went without it, the harder it got to say No, it is absolutely not worth it.
I sat there another forty-five minutes with a blissfully numb ass, reminding myself of my plans for the future.
“Oh, fuck it,” I growled, reaching to turn the car over.
I was getting nowhere on my demon.
Sitting there all night hoping my information was good wasn’t doing anybody any good.
Should I have just gone back to The Academy? Maybe done some intense sparring with someone there?
Yep.
Yes, absolutely. That was exactly what a sane person would do.
Was that what I did, though?
Nope.
I drove around town for a couple minutes to make sure no one was following me. Was that paranoia? Maybe. But I did know that sometimes seniors tailed demonslayers on missions. Not necessarily to babysit them, but to take notes on how they operated, information they would use to teach the next generations of demonslayers what to do—or not to do.
That didn’t mean, though, that they wouldn’t note bad behavior, wouldn’t report it back to superiors.
When you were about to do something against the rules, it was okay to be a little paranoid about getting caught.
After a couple laps, when I was sure there was no one following me, I went ahead and made my way toward the outskirts of town, parking behind a building that had been abandoned for more years than I’d been alive.
Climbing out of my car, I made my way toward a busted window, and hauled myself through.
The inside wasn’t as bad as the outside suggested. Old, yes. A little dirty? Sure. But it wasn’t disgusting.
It would do.
I figured that if I removed the comfort of a hotel, of a bed, of the suggestion of intimacy, maybe it would make the whole thing easier to compartmentalize in my head.
Decision made, I took a slow, deep breath, closed my eyes, and tried to lower the wall.
Not an actual wall.
I didn’t have powers like that. That was witch stuff.
No, it was a wall inside my head.
See, for reasons I didn’t even begin to understand, there seemed to be some strange tether between Minos’s mind and mine.
I could, I don’t know, sort of… sense him at times?
And I knew he could sense me. I could feel him sensing me.
I’d tried to research it in the many tomes we had about demons in our library, but I couldn’t find anything that explained what I’d been experiencing since the first time Minos and I got physical.
That said, I knew that whatever it was, was dangerous.
So I did something that, while not expressly against the rules, was one of those things that a superior—if they caught you—would say it “went without saying.”
I consulted a witch.
Not one of the ‘deep in the woods’ earthy witches.
No.
I went right to an occult store outside of town and found a witch that actually did tarot readings and shit for the normal people to pay good money for, then promptly ignored the advice of.
And there she was.
A real, actual, modern-day witch. With powers. With knowledge.
“Oh, that is interesting,” were the first words she’d said to me when I’d walked into her store that reeked of frankincense and clary sage.
“I need to know how to… psychically block someone.”
“Yes, yes, my dear, you sure do.”
I didn’t ask at the time, but I was pretty sure she could sense what was going on. If not the exact specifics, then at least that the connection was not only unwanted on my part, but forbidden.
So she gave me exercises to work on to build up my wall.
