Page 13

BETWEEN YOU AND ME AND THE DRAYKPOST

Severath

S he hates me.

Severath stared down at his script, as messy as it was inappropriate, and then he drew a line through it with such force that the drayk quill ripped the parchment. What in the hells did that matter? With a grumble at himself, he collected a new piece and began again.

The human presents as aggressive, mistrustful, and intolerant.

Better, if not as viscerally accurate.

The demon hefted a sigh and peered out the window above the desk in his bedchamber.

Across the rolling hills of Hushed Hollow, blue lanterns glowed in the windows of another cottage, midmorning moonlight dappling over the roof.

Severath did not expect to make a companion out of his homicidal houseguest—he didn’t even expect that of the demons he served beside in the Dreadmoor—but the irritation at her abhorrence persisted anyway.

Reasonless irritation was some of the worst kind as it often beget itself, and so Severath continued:

The likelihood of her assimilation is improbable. She is distrustful of our culture, our appearance, and our food.

He had not made any of those things easily digestible, though, the food especially.

In the neighboring cottage’s window, the silhouette of a demon appeared, blotting out the lantern light with curled horns.

The human was lucky to be holed up in a place where her insults did not fall on the pointed ears of a demon who might headbutt her into oblivion for her insults.

She was a killer though—she could perhaps defend herself despite her apparent wariness of violence.

Initial interrogations revealed very little new information about her crimes.

But he had learned that she was concerned for the other humans.

Even a killer could have compassion, he supposed, but there was something…

endearing about an unease that extended beyond herself.

Severath was too wrapt in his own offense to fully consider her belligerent questions for what they were, but now they swam uneasily in his mind.

His father had always spoken of humans as heartless, and though he’d grown out of believing everything his parents told him, it was an entirely different experience to see the obverse right in front of him.

He watched a second featureless figure join the first in his neighbor’s window, more lantern light lost, but the two stood so close their shadows melded together.

Yes, she was very lucky it was only him in this house who had to suffer her presence.

Further evaluation will be required.

Severath extended a claw and burned his signature into the parchment with a simple spell then folded and sealed the assessment.

A small stack of discarded parchment from the night before sat beside him—if he was going to write these at day’s end as he’d originally intended, he would need to start getting the first drafts right.

That was an impossible task, of course, but Severath was convinced it could be done because he had yet to really try.

A shriek from downstairs snapped Severath out of his glum musing and had him bumbling down the staircase at a speed his aching body protested but failed to stop.

He rounded the corner into the kitchen to find the source: the human pressing herself against the wall with those strange whites of her eyes peeled on the counter across from her.

Atop it there was no blood, no weapon, no body. But there was a breadbox.

“Report.”

She flinched, the dark spots in her eyes flicking to him as if she hadn’t heard him cause a ruckus on the stairs.

Severath waited for her to bark out an account of what led to so much commotion, but then she wasn’t one of his soldiers, and her mouth only remained open.

“Casualties?”

She jolted again, squeezing inward like he had shouted. To be fair, he sort of had, but that was what one had to do in the field.

He blew a breath through his nose and tried again, quieter, but mostly because he was giving himself a headache. “Are you injured?”

“Me?” Her face screwed up, and that was better than the pallid fear. “No.”

“You screamed quite loudly. You’re sure you haven’t been harmed?”

The woman curled her lip but remained pressed to the wall. “I’m fine. Why do you even care?”

Severath shrugged—it seemed obvious to him. “My duty is to protect,” he said simply and moved toward the bread box. “Even if it is from a loaf of sourdough.”

“It’s not bread!” she hissed just as his hand went for the lid. He took a moment to once again assess the kitchen and the human, ordinary and overwrought respectively. She didn’t seem to be feigning her upset—or she was an especially good liar, which would be useful in the art of killing.

The chances she had turned his breadbox into some sort of complex murder machine were low, but it would be good to know what she was capable of, so he opened it anyway.

A bright green eye peered up at him followed by a sleepy squawk .

Severath snorted a single laugh. “You are afraid of a drayk?”

“A what ?”

“A drayk.” He reached into the breadbox, but was immediately nipped by the creature and pulled back.

“See?”

He grumbled and more forcefully slipped his hand under the drayk.

Her feathered belly was hot, but she only complained a little as she was lifted away from the bed she’d made.

Four legs hung from his hand, and her long neck, tail, and wings stretched in every direction with sleepiness or to show off, it was hard to tell when drayks had such brilliant plumage to put on display.

This one was mostly bright green with a yellow underside, orange neck, and a scarlet snout.

The human looked horrified, and Severath was immediately amused. “What’s a bird doing in your breadbox?”

“I don’t believe they are considered birds, but you’d have to ask the beastkeeper about that. She was probably just nesting.” Severath peered inside the box at the squished loaf of bread. “Ah, breakfast.” He retrieved a freshly laid egg as warm as her belly.

“Well, it tried to bite me,” the human said, frowning deeply.

“They do that.” He took a step toward her with the creature, and despite its mostly docile nature, she shrank back into the wall. It had opened its snout and put all its teeth on display, but they were such small teeth. They hadn’t even broken Severath’s skin.

“And you let them inside ?”

“They let themselves in.” He gestured with the egg to the window beside the back door, the pane pried open. “Usually they leave letters in the post box, but if they want to lay while they’re out delivering, they can be unrelenting. This one has good timing though.”

He set the egg on the counter and offered the assessment he had just finished to the drayk.

She sniffed the parchment then reached with her back claws, wrapping talons around the edge of the letter.

Severath brought her to the back door, and with perhaps a few more flaps in his face than takeoff warranted, she took to the sky.

“She’ll bring that to the post where your counterparts are working, and they’ll sort it and send it off with another drayk to where it belongs.”

The human was eyeing the breadbox like she was disgusted, wringing her hands.

“ Did it bite you?”

“No,” she spat. “I said it only tried to.”

Severath clicked his tongue, annoyed then mostly with himself for bothering to ask.

Back at the counter, he moved aside the flattened bread loaf—an acceptable trade off for the egg, he supposed, though he would have to ask Laz for another—and discovered a letter.

Severath rarely received mail, but when he read the script on the front of the folded parchment, he realized he still had not.

“This is addressed to The New Small Creature in Severath’s Home .

I believe that would be you.” He extended the letter toward her .

Her eyes widened but she pressed against the wall again as if he were offering her a whole flock of biting drayks. “You read it.”

He growled, no one’s servant, but found himself slicing open the seal with his claw anyway. “ Welcome to our neighborhood. Please feel free to stop by for tea anytime —no, you will not be doing that— Zaretha .” He heaved a sigh. “She could have just dropped this off herself.”

The woman blinked, the disgust falling off her face, and as it softened it was like looking at someone completely different. “That’s…that’s from your neighbor?”

“Yes, just across the road, but you will not be taking her up on this offer.”

“I don’t want to anyway.” Her return to irritation was immediate, and Severath was sure he had imagined anything else. She gave him a wide berth as she left the kitchen, stumbling once and covering it well.

“Did you not come down here for food?” he called after as he listened to her thunder up the stairs.

“I’m not hungry anymore,” she shouted back, and the chamber door above slammed.

That was fine, he only had one egg anyway.