Page 11 of Drawn to the Demon Duke
How rude.
I did try to call after him, telling him it was a mistake. I mean, if I can understand him, then he can understand me, right? I don’t know what happened, if his picking me up and carrying me through that fiery portal made it so that, once I was here… whereverhereis… I could suddenly speak his demon language, but when I told him to wait, I heard English, but the sounds my mouth made were anything but.
Deciding I would deal with that later, I refused to let the big white demon walk away from me. The purple-eyed mage disappeared once he removed the chains and closed the door behind me, but at the sound of my voice, Haures—because I’ll be darned if I call himDuke—hesitated just enough that I knew I had his attention.
He turned slowly. “Yes?” he grumbled.
So he wasn’t happy. That made two of us.
I moved toward the bars, gripping one in each hand. “Okay. Look. My name is Susanna. I didn’t mean to bother you or anything, and if it’s fine with you, you can just send me back home through that portal thing. That would be rad. I’ll be out of your hair?—”
Haures lifted his hands, running his claws through his long, white hair, before saying pointedly, “You are not in my hair, mortal. You are exactly where I want you to be.”
I squeezed the bars so tightly, my fingers ached. “Can’t I just go home?”
He sniffed. “For now, youarehome.”
Only it’s not my home. It’s notanyhome. It’s a dingy dungeon, with chilly walls, a narrow cot, a single blanket folded up at the bottom, and—when I finally realized he’s gone away and wasn’t coming back—a friggin’holein the corner that has to be a toilet. It’s weird, though. I put my hand over it, curious, surprised when there’s just enough suction to suggest that it’s like a vacuum. You do your business, and the hole takes care of it more efficiently than a flush.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t any running water in here. On the other side of my cell, there’s a… I guess the best way I can describe it is a tube. There’s a top to it disappearing into the ceiling, a bottom that eats through the stone floor, but about a one-foot gap in between.
As curious as Alice, I thrust my hand between the gap. Only too late do I think that that might’ve been a stupid thing to do, but I sigh in relief when all that happens is that a steady flowing stream of warm water trickled over my fingers.
With water in one corner and a weirdo toilet in the other, this is clearly a place where someone could be abandoned for a long, long time. Without food, I could starve to death, but before I can even start to think that that’s my fate, another demon appears outside of my cell.
For a second, I think it’s the purple-eyed demon who—on Haures’s order—trapped me in here. That gets dashed to bits when the amorphous, black shadowy shape with hazy horns and broad shoulders stalks down the hall, stopping right in front of my cell.
His eyes aren’t purple. They’re not blue, either.
This guy is green—and that’s not all. As I peer through the bars at him, the weirdest thing happens. In between one blink and the next, he goes from a mass of shadows to a nearly seven-foot-tall demon somewhat similar to Haures.
There are a few notable differences. This demon has deep-red skin, long black hair, and a long nose. He’s still huge, just not as massive as Haures, and he holds himself more rigidly than the duke. In my limited experience with both, Haures is all coiled-up tension, a dangerous demon masquerading as a crown-wearing duke. This demon? He screams ‘soldier’ at me.
Oh, and while Haures watched me earlier with a hint of heat and barely concealed interest that I’m pretty sure I’m not making up because I’m delusional, this guy? All I see is wariness and annoyance.
And food.
I take a step away, frowning. He didn’t have a plate of food before when he appeared at the bottom of the stairs before marching down the hall toward me. Now? He has a crystal plate piled up with something that has to be charred meat. It looks—and smells—like barbecue, thought that obvious fire scent might actually be coming from the demon instead.
I’m sorry. I should be grateful that they’re not intending for me to starve, but…
“Where did that come from?” In case he doesn’t know what I mean, I point. “The, um, plate.”
The green-eyed demon glances at it. “I held the meat in my shadows to keep it warm.”
In hiswhat?
“Eat it,” he orders. He crouches down, sliding the plate under a small gap between the bottom cell bar and the floor. He twists his wrist and, suddenly, he’s holding a crystalline fork-type thing. He tosses it on the plate, and it must be made of stronger stuff because it doesn’t shatter. “His grace will have my horns if he discovers that I was tasked to feed his mortal and you went hungry on my watch.”
Oh, sorry. Don’t want to getyouin trouble…
I grab the plate, eyeing the meat closely. “What is it?”
“Ungez,” is his answer, and I guess my newfound built-in translator goes beyond just communicating with the demons because I have a sudden mental image of what he means.
It’s… I don’t know. Made of the same shadows as the green-eyed demon was before he turned solid, with white eyes and the shape of a normal housecat on Earth, it has pointed ears, a pointed face, and a large, bushy tail that reminds me of an oversized squirrel.
Darn it, it’scute. Sure, this one is dead and cooked, but I… yeah. I’m no vegetarian, but I’m not hungry enough to gobble that down just yet.
