Trustless Shadows, CH 03 (Patreon)

I catch my reflection in a store window not long after reentering the city. People have been giving me sidelong glances and moving out of my way, but I hadn’t been paying them any attention. I’ve gotten used to those looks, but I’m even more of a mess than usual. The trench-coat is ripped and torn. I should throw it out, but it still manages to hide my arm.

A black hand can be ignored—people think it’s a glove—but a full arm attracts more attention than my current state. I also don’t want to risk that Amanda gave my description to the police around the world.

I’ll need to get a new coat. That means money.

In the entire time I was Amanda’s hunter, I never considered money. Even in those last days, when interacting with Juliette made me realized just how much food I ate, my questions about money weren’t serious. 

Money wasn’t part of my survival then; if I needed something, it was provided. Even the food that brought about the questions, I’d bought it myself, but paid using the plastic card Jason had given me.

The weapons I used while hunting? Provided for me. The clothes I wore, the apartment I slept in? Same.

I’d known that money existed—Jason had told me about it—but it didn’t have any effect on my work, therefore was of no consequence. It was after their betrayal that I discovered how important money was to my survival, all the ways in which it was needed.

I left them with only the clothes I wore. I didn’t think to grab a weapon when Claws carried me out, because I’d been poisoned. Amanda thought it would kill me, but she’d miscalculated. For all the tests she ran, there were still things she didn’t know about me. Even if I’d been in a better condition when I left, money wouldn’t have been one of the things I would have thought about as part of my escape plan.

It didn’t take long for me to appreciate what young demons go through during their years of hunger-induced madness. 

I eat more than humans, much more, but I’d never gone hungry before—as I said, everything was provided. If I was hungry, all I needed to do was take something out of the fridge. If that was empty, I went to the grocery store and refilled it.

Within hours of leaving them, the thought of food gave my stomach pangs. On the next days I found myself following scents of food without realizing it. On the day after that, I was so hungry I broke into a house and raided the fridge.

I learned the hard way not to go more than three days without food. I’d been between cities. It was still early in my travels, but I thought I understood my hunger at that point. I felt it, I craved food, but I thought I could control it.

It took five days for me to reach the next city. Hunger was physical at that point, a pain that filled my body, that drove me forward. I didn’t even notice the car until it stopped and the door was shut with a bang.

A woman was standing by it, looking in my direction, talking. I didn’t hear the words; her scent had hit me. It was amazing, rich, nuanced. It told me how delicious she would be as I tore chunks of her flesh out with my teeth.

I heard myself growl, but I didn’t care. She’d stopped talking, was edging away, and her movements were all I was paying attention to—that and how she smelled. The scent had shifted, but that only reinforced she would make a satisfying meal.

She screamed as she ran, and I launched myself after her. It only took a few steps for me to catch up to her, but those were enough for her fear to finally sink in. It froze me. I was behaving just like a demon. I wanted her to run, I wanted to chase her.

Disgusted with myself, I ran off to the forest. The same desperation that made me chase her made me eat one of the animals I found there. It was the first time I ate something living.

I’d known about animals. Jason had explained where meat came from, in his attempts at making me more human. He wanted me to appreciate what went into the food I ate. He told me about farms, how humans bred animals. He even told me about animals living wild in the forests.

But until that day, it hadn’t occurred to me that I could eat one of them.

I still do it once in a while. Not because I need them to feed myself, but because there is something satisfying about chasing an animal until it can’t run anymore. There is something amazing about sinking my teeth into their warm flesh once the hunt is over, ripping it apart and feeling the blood flow down my throat.

The thought of it makes me regret not doing it this time, but I’m already enough of a mess as it is. Being covered with blood would bring the police, and questions I don’t want to deal with.

A woman walks by, giving me a disgusted look. When I look at her, study her arm, it is covered with designs. She isn’t the first person I’ve seen with drawings on their skin. Some have been strange enough my black arm might not attract much attention, but my fear of Amanda keeps me from peeling off the trench-coat.

It isn’t just that she might have told the police. There are cameras everywhere, and there’s a possibility she has access to them. I know it makes no sense. I’ve been photographed fighting demons here. If she is looking for me, she already knows where I am. My fear doesn’t listen to me. It wants my arm covered up, and I listen.

And looking like I’ve been in a fight with a demon doesn’t keep everyone away. Some are so busy talking on their phone, or looking at their tablets as they walk, that I get jostled. The person who walks into me curses me, and either tells me to look where I’m going or takes one look at me and recoils.

I’m in a foul mood by the time I reach the building where I live. The door almost slams into me as a man pushes it open. I almost grab him and throw him out of my way. I can’t keep from growling.

The building is a “rooming house”, six stories of rooms people pay money to stay in. My room is on the fifth floor. There are better places, but they wouldn’t let someone looking like I do go in, even if I had the identification they required.

The woman at the counter looks up at me and wrinkles her nose, but all she says is, “Rent’s due in two days.”

I nod. I know from experience there’s nothing to be gained by pointing out I always hand in my weekly rent on time. She’d argue that it’s because she keeps reminding me. Even if I try to stay calm she’d just escalate, and in my current mood it wouldn’t take much for me to rip the metal bars separating her from the rest of us and shoving them down her throat.

That she’s an old woman wouldn’t matter right now. She’s just one more annoyance I have to put up with. I don’t know how old she is—humans don’t age in a sufficiently uniform way for me to bother keeping track—but I know that gray hair, spots on her hands, and an irregular heartbeat mean she’s old.

I don’t know her name, just like she doesn’t know mine. She didn’t offer it when I first arrived, and I didn’t offer mine.

I’ve learned that unlike what Jason taught me, overall, people are not nice. They don’t want to get to know those around them, and trying to get to know them has more chances of resulting in an argument than a conversation.

I try to live my life by Jason’s rules. I do what I can to be nice to people, not to be noticed by them, but there are times when it doesn’t work. There are times when, if I need to find out something about someone, I have to do it the hard way.

It’s the only way that counts, Robert likes to say.

The stairs creak and groan under my weight. The building is old. The gray concrete stretches from ground to roof, and is cracked in places. The inside is a mix of wood, plaster, and metal.

Robert explained that buildings like this one date back to when humans first landed here, that they are made of materials they brought over from wherever they came from. When he told me that, it revealed another lie of Jason’s: he’d told me this was a human world, not one they’d come to later.

Robert doesn’t know I’m not human, but my lack of historical knowledge doesn’t surprise him. He often complains that none of today’s kids care about the way things were. The hardships the first settlers endured. All the kids want, he says, are the easy things—games on their phones, music, and movies.

Unlike them he loves history, and spends a lot of his time reading about it. I’ve never commented on it, but I don’t understand what he gains in knowing what happened centuries before.

The door doesn’t want to open after I unlock it, and I almost rip it off its hinges. It’s just old. I pull harder, but carefully, and it finally opens.

This apartment is nothing like where I lived before. It’s only one room, the size of what had been my living room. There’s a bed in the back, and a counter on the opposite side with a fridge. No stove. The floors and walls are brownish gray from years of accumulated dirt. There’s a shower and toilet in the corner.

Robert thinks I’m insane for living here. He says I can afford a better place with the money I make. He also pointed out this wasn’t a safe area.

“Safe” is a relative term. There is nothing humans can do to me that a demon hasn’t done harder. The few humans who’ve tried to rob me have regretted it.

I look at what’s left of the trench-coat before throwing it in the garbage.

I grab the cellphone off the counter and send Robert a text message. Tell me there is a fight tonight.

While I wait for his reply, I look my arm over. The black skin is still up to my elbow. I compare it to the picture I took a week before—yes, it’s the same.

When it first appeared, it was only my hand that was black. I still don’t know how it happened. My hand was normal when I’d fallen unconscious, and it was black when I woke up. Claws in the Dark explained that this is my skin, and I have gained some control over it, although it reacts more to my emotions than my will.

I can extend it further, but when I do, it doesn’t always revert back to the same place. It went up to my wrist, the forearm, and now it’s up to my elbow. Most of the time it spreads further after I extended it willingly, like I did to absorb the demon’s blow, but that’s something it seems to do of its own volition.

I worry about what it means for me. Is it a representation of the demon part that is in me? Is it gaining more and more of a foothold? Will I become one of them? Will I stop being me?

If Claws is right, I have nothing to worry about. The black skin is me, just like the rest of my skin. I don’t think he lied to me, but I also don’t think he knows what I am. He thinks of me as being like him, to which something human was added. I get a sense that if the human part of me were to vanish, he would be pleased.

My stomach tightens, and in response to my sudden fear, the black skin ripples along my forearm and forms small spikes. I look at it. It seeks to protect me from whatever I’m afraid of. I push the fear down, and my arm smooths.

I’ll deal with things as they come. Fearing them now isn’t going to resolve anything.

The phone buzzes. There’s a fight tonight, Robert replies. Shoshan Warehouse, by the river. You aren’t scheduled to fight.

Get me in, I send back.

I strip and wash. The water doesn’t get above tepid, but that’s fine. I don’t need hot water to get clean. I dress in a tank-top and jeans. I’m getting low on clothes; fighting demons tends to shred them.

Robert doesn’t know I fight demons, but he’s seen the effect it has on my clothes. His only comment was that ripped clothing is in, these days, and that I am sure to entice plenty of women to my pad wearing them. By his grin and the way his body reacted, I know he meant sex.

That is something I know about through the movies Jason had me watch as part of my education on being human. From them I learned it was an activity humans loved to engage in, and that I had no interest in it.

The phone buzzes again. Okay, got you in. Be here for eight.

Good. Fighting is how I earn most of my money, but tonight that isn’t why I’m doing it. I have plenty of money left from my last fight. This is about hitting someone— No, it’s about hitting humans. It’s about unleashing some of my anger at them in a way that doesn’t conflict with my need to protect them.

Or not too much, at least.

When I decided to settle in this city, when I was finally tired of traveling, I hadn’t planned on hunting demons. I was done with that. Humans could deal with them on their own. When I heard people talking about it, about this attack that had happened overnight, or this person they knew who had been killed by a demon, I felt uneasy. I told myself it wasn’t my responsibility to protect them, that had just been yet another lie. I wasn’t their protector; I was an experiment, a tool in Amanda’s quest to eradicate demons. I wouldn’t be part of that anymore.

But then came the screams, the roars, and I was running before I could think. I made it there before anyone was seriously hurt. I fought the demon, won, and it felt good.

I couldn’t bring myself to kill the demon. They aren’t the mindless creatures Amanda told me. They were beings so hungry, it drove them mad. I didn’t know then if the humans could do it, kill a demon, but I knew they would try, and whether they succeeded or not, the results would be someone dying.

So I took him out of the city. He woke up a few times on the way, and I had to punch him back into unconsciousness. The forest was the only place I could think to leave him. For him to wake up away from the humans, and hopefully hunt some of the animals.

It’s when I caught my first whiff of Lives Alone.

I still believe humans don’t deserve my protection, but I can’t stand by and let people die. Not humans, not demons. And when I’m the one taking the demon down, there’s less collateral damage. The army doesn’t care about the destruction it causes in the process, or the people who die. I also do it because I miss the hunts.

My stomach growls.

I prepare a meal—fruits, vegetables, meat. The lack of a stove doesn’t bother me. Cooking meat was something Jason insisted I do, not something I felt a need for. I cut everything, put it in a large bowl, and then drink a soda while I eat.

Once sated, I pull out the envelope where I keep my money. Most of it goes to food, but since I have more money coming in tonight, I can spare some of it and get myself a new trench-coat.

I know a few places where I can get used, cheaper clothing. I take a few hundred from the envelope and head out. I might as well resupply the rest of my clothes while I’m at it.