Page 14

AN UNBIDDEN GUEST

Ember

E mber woke for the third day snuggled into the depths of a bed she might never stop thinking of as the most comfortable place on earth.

Or the hells. Or Heck. Or wherever in blazes she was.

It hardly mattered when she could stretch all of her limbs in every direction and not reach the edges of the mattress or poke out from under the fluffy blankets.

She blinked up into the morning light, the moon a dim silver as it crested the trees.

The last of the stars had already winked out, but missing them was a small price when she had never before slept past dawn.

Shifting up onto her knees, Ember leaned on the windowsill and peeked down into the garden below.

Like she had done every morning, she spied the demon—Severath, she had finally taken to calling him—a deeply scarlet form under the moonlight.

He was already sweating, tunic abandoned on a stone bench.

Apparently she had slept through morning calisthenics but was lucky enough to not miss target practice.

Perhaps demons weren’t that terrifying to look at…not from far away, at least.

The longbow was nearly as tall as Severath, a thin piece of curved black wood.

She’d watched him call up fire on the bow itself once, and she thought he was simply burning it to ash, but it appeared he was actually shaping it, a thing she was surprised anyone would do with such a spell.

He spun the bow artfully in hand as he peered down the length of the garden.

He always did that before each shot, a nervous yet graceful tic.

Today was four spins—not a good sign—before he stepped a leg forward, angled his back toward the house and raised his arms.

Ember leaned close to the glass, watching as the muscles of his shoulders bunched up and his torso twisted, every crimson line melding into the next with the sleek movement.

A flash of fire made her breath catch as an arrow burst into life under his fingertips.

The sweeping architecture of his back expanded as he drew the bowstring to his face, and his extended arm flexed.

Fire licked at the side of his head, and sweat glistened under the moonlight.

His back swelled with a breath, her own chest expanded in answer, and then the arrow flew.

Severath remained unmoving, his bandaged eye and broken horn unreadable in the still moment, but then his arms dropped, and she saw a curse form on his lips.

At the far end of the garden, the flaming arrow missed the tree that was his target.

Though the magic projectile disappeared, the fire it left in the glossy-leaved bushes did not.

Ember watched Severath pace angrily across the garden, her grip on the sill relenting.

She flexed the tenseness out of her fingers as he snapped his, and the fire died with his magic.

The first time she’d seen him conjure an arrow and then douse the errant flames, she had been mesmerized, but at least one hundred draws and misses later, it was no longer the magic that mesmerized her.

She shivered—from the cold against her naked flesh, of course, and not for any other reason.

It was harmless to watch him, she reminded herself as she climbed out of the bed, because if she’d learned anything in the last three days it was that Severath loathed her almost as much as she did him, clear in the angry bend to his brow and the twist to his lips whenever they crossed paths.

It was only vigilance that made her want to keep track of where he was and what skills he had, or rather, what he didn’t have—archery battling for the lowest spot on the list alongside cooking and conversation.

But against all odds and experience, he appeared to be no threat.

Her tunic dress had dried overnight, draped beside the fire Severath had started when she asked for a way to light it and was met with utter contempt.

He traced some symbols on the hearth, but when he left, no amount of running her finger along the same lines would do anything—probably good since she would have had no idea how to put it out.

All demons could conjure something that looked like flames, at least that was what he’d said when he caught her staring as he cast on the hearth, but it was ones with red skin who manipulated something that truly burned, shaping it to their will and snuffing it out with a wave of their hand.

It was impressive, but mostly because they didn’t invade human cities and burn them to ashes, a thought she kept to herself.

Ember hadn’t expected to feel comfortable sleeping in the nude, but she only possessed the single piece of clothing, so she took the risk, and it had been…

fine. But then Severath was sort of oblivious—that or he simply refused to consider he or anybody else in Heck was capable of hurting her or the other humans.

Perhaps there were problems with so much gullibility, but she would rather be locked up in a house with an idiot than a monster, demon or otherwise.

Once dressed, she eased open the door to silently step out onto the landing.

Severath would still be in the garden for a while, but disturbing the quiet of the demon’s empty house felt odd.

The hall at the head of the stairs went both right and left, curving around on either side with a door each— locked, both of them, she knew after a few too-loud jiggles.

One was the room Severath slept in, the other she’d never seen open.

She took the stairs with that familiar twinge in her soles, hand skimming the railing a smidgen too high for comfort just like everything else in his hollow house.

The kitchen was always warmest as Severath kept a smoldering fire in the mouth of the oven, so she went to it and rubbed her hands, watching a tail of smoke rise into the chimney.

He had left half a deep purple fruit on the counter beside a hunk of cheese and slice of bread, something like rye this morning.

Stranger than the height of things or the interminable night or even the casual magic was finding a meal laid out for her, but Severath had made his intention clear after the drayk incident.

When she hadn’t touched the food he put out, he questioned why she hadn’t eaten with irritation and concern both, so she knew she was supposed to take it.

After a quick glimpse out the narrow window over the basin to be sure the meal’s maker was still angrily traipsing across the garden, she gobbled it up and cleaned away the crumbs.

She wouldn’t thank him, of course—who in the hells thanks their warden?

But she would quickly scrub the countertop because there was no use in leaving a mess.

And she would sweep the floors even if they didn’t look like they needed it because that was just what she was used to, and there was little else to do anyway.

After her self-appointed chores, Ember went to the parlor and did a slow loop of the room.

The walls were depressingly bare save for a set of antlers high up over yet another fireplace also lit with Severath’s red flames for light and warmth both.

A small shelf beside it held a few books originally in an uneven stack, but she’d fixed that on her second day.

When it wasn’t her duty to dust the shelves of hundreds of untouched books, she found them quite a bit more charming than the burden she always thought heavy bound parchment to be.

She couldn’t read their spines, but she could run her fingers along the raised stitching and trace the painted letters and symbols.

The leather of their covers ranged from pliable softness to a rigid wooden-like texture, and when she took one off the shelf, its pages crinkled like autumn leaves with every turn.

Today she slipped a blue one out of the stack and admired the scene of a pond and water lilies carved into the painted leather.

Inside revealed line after line of words she’d never been taught to read, but then there were also illustrations every few pages: an animal she didn’t quite recognize or a tree or rock with a face.

But more interesting were the scribbles in the margins that she may not have been able to decipher even if she could read.

She was squinting at one of those scribbles as if the meaning might just whisper itself into her brain when a knock at the front door broke into the silence of the house.

Ember waited in its wake, listening, unmoving. Severath didn’t come, but how could he hear from behind the house? Especially with all the swearing?

Another knock came, this time with a flourishing rhythm, and she crept to the window. Severath kept all the curtains drawn, and so Ember inched them ever so carefully to the side.

Two bright green eyes and a halo of ginger curls beamed back at her beneath the glow of a lantern. The human woman grinned and waved, and Ember dropped the curtain back in place with a gasp.

A voice shouted amicable greetings from the glass’s other side, but Ember was frozen. She recognized her, but the girl’s hair had been limper out in that awful forest and her face much more bruised.

And Ember had abandoned her.

But the flourish of knocks and singsongy voice couldn’t be deterred, and she supposed she had no choice.

“Hi!” The exclamation hit her before the door was entirely open, its owner rocking from her heels to her toes and back again like the living embodiment of a bounce.

Her thick curls followed suit and so did her breasts, impossible to ignore when her top scooped so low, but her clothes actually fit despite her being almost Ember’s size.

Her short sleeves didn’t fall off her shoulders, a thick belt cinched in her waist without excess material bunched here and there, and her skirt fell just to her knees. “You must be Ember.”