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The door burst open, the bells dangling from its handle jangling erratically. I turned slowly, sensing the tension rising in the air. There, standing inside, was a young woman with long, messy brown hair. She was tall and lanky, wearing a backpack and muddy boots. All her clothes were stained with mud — mud...and blood.
She froze, scanning the room. Every eye was fixed on her, and three pairs of them were hungry. Her scent was intoxicating, sweet with lingering magic. But the blood on her wasn’t her own. I knew the smell of it immediately.
It was the beasts’ blood. She’d been fighting the Eldbeasts.
“Hey!” the waiter called sharply. “Hey, I know you! Juniper Kynes! You — you’re supposed to be locked up! You tried to kill that girl!”
She took a deep breath, and wiped a splatter of blood from her face with her sleeve. She walked across the dining area, heading toward the corner where the bathrooms were. The waiter likely didn’t hear her mutter, but I did.
“She tried to kill me first.”
She locked herself in the bathroom. Every demon in the place was tense, their eagerness for her palpable. I chuckled softly, taking a sip of the steaming coffee. Young soul hunters like these were always desperate for easy prey, eager to make a deal with someone who they didn’t need to convince that magic and monsters were real.
This girl already knew. She’d seen the worst of it. But that wouldn’t make her easy, no. Far from it.
“I should call the cops,” the waiter said, staring warily at the bathroom. The sound of running water from within cut off, and the door opened again. Juniper trudged out, her wide eyes flickering around the room. She moved like a frightened animal on the verge of sprinting. Like a wolf...a little wolf, left without a pack, alone and hunted.
She really was fascinating.
She came up to the counter, eyeing me. “I need food.”
The waiter shook his head. “No. No, you gotta get out.” He was reaching slowly for the phone.
She whipped out a pistol and aimed at the waiter. With her other hand she pulled a knife from its sheath on her thigh, and pointed the blade toward me. I raised my hands innocently.
“Don’t do anything funny,” she hissed, her voice shaking. “Just give me some fucking food. I don’t care what. Just put some food in a bag. Now.”
The waiter nodded, his face white as a sheet as he disappeared back into the kitchen. Juniper kept the knife pointed at me, shooting nervous glances in my direction and at the demons seated behind me. She couldn’t have known what we were, of course. We all wore our human disguises in public.
“You know he’s going to call the cops while he’s back there,” I said. She jumped at the sound of my voice, her breathing quickening as she looked rapidly between me and the door leading back to the kitchen.
“Fucking hell.” She climbed over the counter and reached beneath it, hurriedly collecting bags of cookies and tiny packets of oyster crackers that she stuffed into her bag. She vaulted back over, right as a shout came from the kitchen, and ran out the door.
“Cops are on their way!” The waiter crept out from the kitchen. The cook stood behind him, a massive man with a frying pan wielded in his hands like a baseball bat. That vicious woman had really put some fear in them.
I liked that.
With their prey on the move, the demons were moving too, all of them heading out the door. I sighed, and gulped down the rest of the coffee. I wasn’t interested...or at least...Ihadn’tbeen. But with so many other hunters after her, and that desperate, vicious look in her eyes when she’d brandished the knife at me, I couldn’t help but feel intrigued.
I left the restaurant faster than I should have. To the confused waiter’s eyes, it would have looked as if I simply vanished, leaving an empty mug behind. The hunters were in the lot outside, heading toward the road, laughing amongst each other and betting who would reach the woman first. I got ahead of them.
They stopped abruptly, their human disguises instantly slipping. Three pairs of golden eyes watched me cautiously, claws extended, and the hunter I didn’t know bared her teeth. I smirked.
“Don’t growl at me, darling, it’s rude,” I said, and the hunter beside her gave her a hard nudge in the ribs. “All this fuss for one little mortal woman, eh?”
“You know she’ll be desperate for a deal.” Amiria was the one who spoke up. I knew her to be a fresh soul hunter, yet to make her first bargain. She was hungry for it; I could see it in her eyes. “But we were here first, Zane. Let a novice get a soul for once.”
I cocked my head, stepping toward them. With only one step of mine, they all jerked back. I chuckled at their nervousness. “I don’t think I will. There’s plenty of souls out there, fledglings, trust me. Find someone selfish, someone greedy, someone eager for life’s riches with no care for the afterlife.That’san easy bargain. But this one…”
I let my body change. My veins ran black, like trails of ink beneath my skin, as my teeth grew sharper. I gathered energy around me, condensing it, creating a shroud of darkness. It was petty, perhaps, but it was a warning. It let them know how much power I had at my disposal: enough to destroy all of them, here and now, if they dared try to argue with me.
“This one is mine.”
Juniper had covered a lot of ground in the time it had taken me to disperse the other demons. I spotted her along the winding road, her pistol still in her hand. She was walking in the middle of the road, her head jerking from side to side. The forest had grown right up to the edge of the asphalt, and thick blackberry bushes formed a wall of tangled thorns on either side. The trees loomed high, and beneath their boughs, monsters lurked in the shadows.
I could hear them scrambling through the trees.
The woman heard them too.
