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“I suppose I could carry you if you don’t want to walk,” he inflected the most disinterested tone to his voice.

“If I don’t want to—” the human spluttered, his arms flailing around in indignation.

Melchom smirked. That temper was good news to him.

“Fine.”

Melchom stopped himself from rubbing his hands together, but he couldn’t have been happier about the way this was progressing.

Or about the way the human’s face was flushed red, lips pursed like an angry little kitten. His ashy dress was askew, torn in a few places. Melchom guessed that was the minions’ doing while he was descending to their realm. The fabric still flowed a bit, moving with the sway of the flames, revealing patches of dewy, freckled skin underneath.

The scaredy human jumped back when Melchom took a step toward him.

Adorable.

“You wound me,” he teased. “You don’t want to be burned by the eternal fire, do you?”

“Uh, n-no, but…” The human shivered. “Why would I trust you?”

Melchom cocked his head to the side. “You can’t claim the privilege of trust when you have the need to survive.”

It was easy to tell his words had an effect on the boy. Man? He couldn’t be more than twenty-five.

Twenty-three, he mused after diving in the human’s brain.

He’d gotten oddly good at guessing their ages over the decades.

“Tell me where we’re going.”

“My chambers.”

“You don’t even know my name.”

“An odd thing to focus on,” Melchom chuckled. “But I do, David.”

“W-what?”

“Demons get inside your head, remember?”

But as entertaining as their conversation could be, Melchom had better plans for them—plans that didn’t involve being stuck in a random hallway. So, he took matters into his own hands and lifted the human off the floor.

For a second, he considered carrying him like that, at arms’ length, simply for the annoyed pout it pulled in the human’s face.

It was a matter of time until he started trying to kick or scratch, though, and that got really tiring after a while. So he pulled David close to his chest, almost choking him in the tight hold he kept, and he started walking.

For the first few minutes, the tiny human stayed still—or as still as he could be when slight tremors still ran through his spine, the lingering scent of fear still exuding off his skin and giving Melchom a high.

After a couple of turns, the human started growing antsy, trying to shift in his hold.

“What do you have against me breathing?” he huffed eventually.

“Nothing in particular.”

It was true, for the most part. He just didn’t care too much about the amount of oxygen the human was getting, whether it was enough, too much, or too little.

Melchom chuckled. He’d remember to make a point about his breathing another day. “Here I was, thinking you’d appreciate my shielding you from the scary flames. Isn’t that what you wanted, tiny human?”

The human grumbled something. Melchom didn’t care enough to hear it. He wanted to see what was going through that messy mind of his. There was an intoxicating allure to it. Each mind looked and was organized differently. This one looked like a house of mirrors, its ceiling neurons and splashes of brain matter swimming around, some of them playing memories while others seemed to be full fantasy.