Chapter 9 – The Thing in the Trees

The sword hit the floor for the fortieth time.

My fingers were not fingers anymore. They were sausages. Sad, swollen, betrayed sausages. My hair was glued to my forehead. The marble of the training hall had personally tasted my back at least nine times this hour.

Hannah stood across from me. Calm. Dry. Annoyingly upright.

“Pick it up.”

“I am literally on the floor.”

“Yes.”

“I cannot feel my elbow.”

“Good. Means you used it.”

“Hannah.”

“Young master.”

“Mercy.”

“No.”

I groaned.

I rolled onto my side. The pinky ring caught a bar of afternoon sun and threw it across the wall. The black stone in the center looked smug. Stones cannot look smug. Mine had figured it out anyway.

I hauled myself up.

My boots squeaked. My knees filed another complaint. I lifted the practice sword like it weighed three of me, which, at this point, it might have.

Hannah tilted her head.

“Better.”

“That was barely vertical.”

“You are vertical.”

“Is that the standard now?”

“For you. Today. Yes.”

I almost laughed. Almost.

I lifted the sword higher. I shifted my weight back onto my heel as she had shown me. The sun cut through the high window in long gold ribbons. Dust spun in the air. Somewhere in the gardens below, the fountain horse kept doing its rearing thing for nobody in particular.

Then the wall exploded.

Not a metaphor. The actual east wall of the training hall. Stone, dust, and one entire wooden bench launched into the room like a very rude opinion.

I ate the floor again.

My ears rang. My mouth tasted like a brick. The sword had gone somewhere. A column of grey dust the size of a small horse had replaced the sun.

Something stepped through the hole.

It was tall. Way too tall. Long arms. Long fingers. Skin the color of wet ash. Two eyes. One forehead. A mouth full of teeth that looked grown by committee.

A demon.

A real, actual, in-the-room demon.

In my training hall.

On a Tuesday.

I scrambled backward on my elbows like a crab with regrets. My shoulder hit the weapon rack. A practice spear fell on my head. The universe, as a rule, did not let me have nice things.

The demon spoke.

“Alex. Vandermere.”

Its voice was wrong. It sounded like two voices stacked—one high, one low, both unhappy about it.

I did not answer.

I was busy being, statistically, a stain.

The demon took one long step into the hall. Its claws clicked on the marble. Dust drifted off its shoulders. It tilted its head. The motion was almost human. That was, somehow, the worst part.

“Vandermere.”

I cleared my throat.

“Wrong house.”

“You are Vandermere.”

“Common name. Three blocks down. Different guy. Tall fellow. Big beard.”

The demon did not laugh.

The demon did not have a sense of humor. The demon, I was now realizing, had been sent for one specific person, and the wiki was about to update my obituary in real time.

I looked at Hannah.

She was already looking at me.

She was leaning, casually, against the rack on the opposite wall. Her practice sword rested on her shoulder. Her braid was perfect. Her stormy grey eyes flicked to the demon. Then back to me. She raised one eyebrow.

“Hannah.”

“Young master.”

“There is a demon.”

“I see it.”

“In the hall.”

“I see it.”

“Hannah.”

“Young master.”

“Help.”

“No.”

I blinked.

“What?”

“You need real fights.”

“I need a wall behind me.”

“Walls are real. Use them.”

“Hannah.”

“I will step in if you start dying.”

“I am dying right now.”

“You are scared. Different thing.”

The demon swung.

A long grey arm came at my head like a falling tree. I rolled. The claws went through the bench I had been sitting on this morning. Wood splinters rained on my hair. The lavender smell from upstairs, somehow, was here too. Bullying me. Personally.

I came running.

The demon turned. Its head moved before its body. That was not a thing necks were supposed to do. Cool. Cool, cool, cool.

I grabbed the practice spear off the floor.

I did not know how to use a spear.

I held it anyway. Pointy end out. That seemed important.

“Hannah.”

“Young master.”

“Even one tip.”

“Move your feet.”

“That is a tip.”

“Hips before hands.”

“Two tips.”

“You are welcome.”

The demon lunged.

I sidestepped. Barely. The claws clipped the spear shaft and snapped it in half like dry pasta. I stared at the broken stick in my hand. The pointy end was now its end. I had the boring end. Of course I did.

I threw it at its face.

It hit. Bounced off. Did absolutely nothing.

The demon paused.

Its two eyes did the slow, confused blink of a creature that had not, in its long career, been pelted with garbage by its prey before.

I bolted for the rack.

My boots slid on dust. I grabbed a real practice sword. I almost dropped it. I caught it on the second try. The pinky ring went warm against the wooden grip. The same low warmth from Lira. From the Duke. From Hannah.

A bad idea bloomed behind my eyes.

A really bad idea.

The demon was strong. The demon was fast. The demon was, by every measure that counted in a fistfight, going to fold me into origami inside of a minute.

But the demon had ears.

The demon had ears, and a brain, and senses, and senses could be lied to.

I dropped my voice.

“Demon.”

It froze.

Just for a beat. Like the word had punched through whatever simple program ran behind its eyes.

The warmth bloomed. The hum behind my teeth lifted. My voice, on the way out, picked up that other thing again. The weight. The pull.

I did not aim big. I did not say sleep. I did not say die. I did not have the juice for that, and we both knew it. So I aimed small.

“Your left side. There is nothing there.”

The demon’s head jerked.

It looked left.

Its left arm dropped, just a fraction. Its weight shifted. Its eye on that side went unfocused for one long, beautiful second.

I went right.

I swung at the side that it was not watching. The wooden blade hit grey ribs with a flat, satisfying thock. The demon staggered. Half a step. It hissed. I felt the impact ring all the way up to my shoulder.

I scrambled back.

It swung blindly.

The claws went through the air where my head used to be. I hit the floor on my knees. I came up swinging again. I did not aim for the body. I aimed for the eye on the side that it had stopped trusting.

The wooden tip clipped the eyelid.

The demon roared.

It was a sound a building should not make. The chandelier two rooms over, somehow, swayed.

Hannah, against the wall, clapped twice. Slow. Measured. Approving.

“Better.”

“I am dying.”

“You are improving.”

“Same thing.”

“Different.”

The demon recovered.

It moved fast. Way faster than the first time. The bored, lazy walk was gone. Its long arms came at me in a sweep. I ducked. I rolled. My back hit the broken bench. A splinter found a rib, personally.

I dropped my voice again.

“Demon.”

“VANDERMERE.”

“Listen.”

The warmth flared.

I sharpened it. I pictured the thread Hannah had described. I pictured a single, thin line going from my mouth straight into its bad ear.

“You cannot smell me. The room is empty.”

The demon paused.

Its nostrils flared. Then flared again. Then a third time, like a search engine refusing to load. Its head turned in a slow, confused arc. It sniffed the air where I was, decided I was not there, and looked the other way.

I almost cried.

I stayed quiet instead.

I crept along the broken bench. I slipped behind the weapon rack. My boots whispered on the marble. The demon turned in place, one slow circle, then another, blinking at a room that had, for one dumb second, lost a person.

I came up behind it.

I swung at the back of its knee.

The demon went down. One whole leg buckled. Its claws scraped four white lines into the marble. Dust rolled. The hum behind my teeth lifted higher. The pinky ring pulsed once, hot and proud.

I swung again at the base of its skull.

The wooden sword cracked. The demon’s head snapped forward. Black blood, thick as syrup, drooled down the back of its neck. It hissed. It scrabbled on the floor. Its claws tore another long groove through the marble.

It was almost down.

I lifted the broken sword for one last swing.

A clean line. The kind of line a hero would draw. The kind of line that would, in any other story, end the chapter on a cool one-liner and a freeze frame.

The demon stopped moving.

Its hiss cut out.

Its body went very, very still.

The hall went quiet. The dust hung. Even Hannah, leaning against the rack, took her sword off her shoulder and set it down.

The demon lifted its head.

Its eyes were not its eyes anymore.

They were not eyes at all.

Two black holes. No pupils. No whites. No lids. Just two clean pits, bottomless, and inside each one a tiny, distant point of red light, like a lantern at the end of a very long hallway.

A second mouth opened on its chest.

It split the grey skin from the collarbone to the navel. Inside, more teeth. Smaller. Whiter. Arranged in a perfect, polite circle, the way teeth should never be arranged.

A second pair of arms peeled off its back.

Slow. Wet. The skin parted like a coat unbuttoning. The new arms were thin. Long. They ended in hands that had too many fingers and not enough joints. They flexed once in the air, testing themselves, the way a musician tests a new instrument.

The wet ash skin hardened.

It cracked. It plated. Black, glassy scales bloomed along its shoulders, its ribs, the long line of its spine. Where the scales caught the dust-filtered sun, they did not shine. They drank.

The demon stood up.

Both knees, this time. The bad one held.

It tilted its head. The motion was not human anymore. The motion was something a thing did when, mid-fight, it remembered it had a second draft.

The chest mouth smiled.

The face mouth smiled too.

Both, somehow, at me.

The pinky ring on my hand went cold.

The hum behind my teeth cut out, clean, like a string snapping.

Hannah, against the wall, slowly, very slowly, picked her sword back up.

“Young master.”

“Hannah.”

“Move.”