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She still couldn’t believe she’d washed him.

She hadn’t been ordered to, but she couldn’t help pitying him. At some point, they would have tossed water on him to remove the coppery, heavy stink of his own blood. Emerie had pre-empted it, wanting him to feel something pleasant in the mess of everything else.

She wanted to show him the depth of her sorrow, and that not all humans here were terrible.

Emerie knew the other Demonslayers would have no issues with doing her task or witnessing what they were doing to him. There would be few, if any, that didn’t see him as wholly offensive.

Actually... once she’d wiped him clean, she hadn’t found him distasteful.

Plus, he’d kind of smelt nice, like burnt sugar and hickory bark. Her nose had tingled the entire time. It even became more prominent when he’d accidentally huffed directly against her face while she’d been wiping his horns.

He was odd, weird, different, and definitely a monster, but she didn’t find him ugly – unlike most of the Demons she’d faced. Funnily enough, his skull head helped.

It made him different from them, which was easier for her eyes to digest.

Perhaps it was because he was covered in lizard scales and obviously had a tail like one, but she’d expected him to be cold. Instead, his body was so hot that he’d begun to warm her wet cloth as she’d been wiping him.

She didn’t like his voice, though.

There was something about it. Something that vibrated bass through her flesh and sunk all the way down to her bones. It sounded monstrous, inhuman, and had made the little hairs on her body stand on end. It was as though it was split between three deep tones, one that always had an underline of threat and became frightful when he somehow made itboom.

It hadn’t been enough to stop her from trying to help him in some small way.

It was probably pointless. He likely thought she was a heartless cow like the woman in front of her, but that couldn’t be any further from the truth.

She cared. Even more so when Wren looked up from her letter and rolled her eyes once Emerie was done telling her of what she’d learned.

Wren slid back her chair with a grating, skin-crawling scrape and stood, acquiring a book from a shelf behind her. She threw it on the table in front of Emerie.

“Open it to June twenty-third, two thousand and eighteen,” she demanded as she sat back down to continue her letter.

Doing as she was told, Emerie opened the journal to the date, and silently read it. There were careless ink blots on the page, and the writing was messy, as though the person had been shaky or intoxicated when writing.

I lost a quarter of my members today. Good men and women. All because I allowed a Demon to enter my stronghold.

Emerie quickly flicked back to the beginning of the book to note that it was a copy of the diary belonging to the Head Elder from the western sector.

It was living among us for a year. Apprentice Charles looked like a human. His fucking face looked human, but we’d never seen him without his uniform on. It was only once we killed him and removed his clothing to clean him for the funeral pyre that we noticed the Demon void patches of skin. It must have been him. Charles was the one who opened the gates to allow through a team of Demons.

I can’t believe I sat and ate with him in the hall. That I didn’t question why most of his teams would die, but not him. I just thought he was an excellent soldier, ready to move through the ranks.

They’re beginning to look and act so much like us that we can’t even trust our fellow members.

They’re growing intelligent.

They’re learning.

Soon enough, humanity will be dead.

From this day forward, we’ll be doing a physical examination of all applicants, and a yearly one, to ensure they haven’t tricked us.

So many died because of my carelessness. Never again.

Emerie turned her eyes away from the diary to find Wren watching her. Her elbows were pressed against the table, while her clasped hands hid her lips.

“They can’t be trusted,” Wren stated, her dark-blue eyes flicking between Emerie’s. “Whatever that Duskwalker told you, it’s probably a lie.”

Emerie placed the book on the table. “We’ve always known that Demons and Duskwalkers are different.”