Demons 3 Draft 1 CH 02 (Patreon)

I wake, and for a fraction of a second, I can’t tell where I am. The weight I expect over me isn’t there. There I don’t hear the river or smell the forest. Instead, I am on a bed, in a room. I hear someone move, the sound muffled by walls. The only smell I make out is something acrid that makes my nose itch.

I sneeze and my body hurts.

When I’m properly fed, I heal faster than humans. Living in the wild has meant that not all my hunts have been successful. I haven’t starved, but I have had to learn to live with hunger.

The steps approach, and fear surfaces. Who are they? What do they want? Why am I here? Learning that humans are complex has not led to being comfortable around them, but if they intended me harm, it would have happened already. This is not a military installation—the walls are wood, not metal—so I have not been captured. I am weak, but still able to stop a human if their goal is to hurt me now that I’m awake.

The door opens. A man enters. He is old, the white hair in tight curls is cut close to his head, and his skin, much darker than mine, the parts not black at least, is wrinkled, two signs of age. He doesn’t show obvious weakness. The demon part of me thinks he would make for a worthwhile hunt, if a short one. I ignore it, I’m simply hungry.

“Thank you,” I say. I am out of practice being polite, but Jason’s lessons are still there. I haven’t thought about him in a long time. I push him out of my thoughts.

“You’re welcome.” He smiles, and I can’t tell if he’s amused, bring polite too, or there is another reason for it. Jason’s teaching never pushed deep into what drove humans, I had to learn that on my own, but while I can easily tell when someone intends me harm, the rest of the time humans remain something of a mystery. I can tell more from a demon’s body language in the few seconds the man stands in the doorway, and I can from the man himself.

“Where am I?” I must ascertain my location, my situation, so I can decide on a plan of action.

“My home. The hunting party who found you bandaged your wounds, but they couldn’t do more, so they brought you here. The Wrinkleskin did quite a number on you. I’m surprised you managed to kill it.”

“I’m harder to kill than I look.” Hopefully, his observation and my comment serve as a warning if his intentions aren’t good.

“I can tell that.” He chuckles. “My name is Moores.”

I get out of bed and offer him my hand, Jason’s teaching kicking in before I can stop myself. “Mine is Derrick.”

He looks away as he shakes my hand, smiling. “There’s clothing on the dresser. It should fit you. I’m afraid that what you had on is gone, Wrinkleskin blood won’t get out of anything and the smell will draw more of them to you. You’re lucky the one you killed was a loner.”

I pause as I put on the pants. I ignore the underwear. “They hunt in packs?”

“In family units. From what I could tell, this one was a juvenile, old enough for a mate, but without one still.”

I finish dressing. “You study them?”

The man smiles. “More of a consequence of looking after the health of the people living here. Over the years, attacks from the creatures living around us have happened and we’ve all had to learn to deal with them. Me more than most since not all injuries are as simple as yours. Quite a few of the creatures are toxic to us without having evolved to kill us.” He motions. “Come, you must be hungry.”

I follow him past another room with a bed, a few instruments that remind me too much of the experiments Amanda’s scientists ran on me before I left. He’s a doctor, so those could simply be things needed to look after human’s health. I sneeze again.

“What is this smell?”

He looks at me over his shoulder and I can’t decipher the expression, worry? Not fear. “I’m sorry, I cleaned the house while you were unconscious. You must have a good nose to smell it. I barely smell anything.”

Acrid isn’t how the cleaners smelled back at Amanda’s laboratory, but I know better than to expect anything I remember from that time to be the norm. There were too many lies then, even Jason lied to me, for all that his intentions were better than Amanda’s.

The kitchen is simple, a stove, an oven, a fridge. The table has two chairs, and they are made of wood. The same wood as that of walls. There is a sense of both being old. This man has lived here for a long time.

“Sit, I’ll prepare something. Do you think you can handle solid food or is a broth better right now?”

“Solid.” The chair creaks under my mass and the man’s gaze stays on me a little too long. If hunters carried me to him, he knows I am heavier than I look. Heavier than a human should be. What does he know of the experiments the military has conducted over the years to fight demons? Has he contacted them? Is he waiting for them to come take me?

The fear crawls back, but I push it away. If that’s the case, the best I can do is feed so I can heal. I can’t take on the military as I am now.

He takes out a frying pan, meat, and vegetables, and I almost stop him. I prefer my food uncooked. I find it tastes better that way. Something I now know comes from the best nourishment for me being eating the creature I hunted, so I get both types of nourishment. But I am reluctant to draw attention to how different I am from him than he has already worked out.

“Where are we?” I ask as he cooks. “I know I entered the Anounga District as I traveled, but my understanding was that with the sickness no one should be outside.”

“We’re two weeks away from the district line,” Moores answers without looking away from his work. “Inside Anounga.” He hesitates. “We do our best to listen to the orders, but we aren’t a city, with all the food production handled by factories and delivered to everyone’s door. We farm what we eat, and hunt some of it. Wrikleskin meat’s actually quite good when properly prepared.”

“I did not get a chance to taste it,” I answer, and I hear the disappointment in my voice. It had been a good fight, and I was curious if I would have gotten as much nourishment from it having been the one hunted.

“I’ll talk with Ambrose, see if she can prepare you a steak. You don’t want to eat it right off from cutting it off the body, it won’t kill you, but Wrinkleskin meat will make you sick if the toxin in it isn’t washed away.”

I’m annoyed that someone else took my kill.

Demons are possessive about their kill. The one that puts in the effort is the one who eats it. Mated pairs are the exception, but then they will hunt together. Even a cub won’t get a share from the parents. Demon physiology drives them to only eat what they hunt. It’s the most nourishing way for them.

I can survive without eating what I hunt. I did it for years when I killed demons for Amanda; under the lies that I and those like me were the only things keeping humans safe. There is no one else like me, and humans have their organizations dedicated to keeping them safe, even if their methods aren’t as clean as I was.

But I inherited some of the demon instincts when I was made. Instincts that in my time in the wild have come to the surface. One of which is that my hunt, my kill, is mine and mine alone. I can ignore it. But it still nags that someone else will eat my kill.

Moores places a plate before me and the smells force me back to his house. The food smells wrong. Cooking it does that, makes it wrong. It will not hurt me, but I will get no enjoyment from this meal.

“I know you probably don’t feel too hungry,” the man says as he places utensils next to my plate, “but you have to eat to regain your strength. Healing takes a lot out of you.” He adds a glass of water.

“Do you have any pop?” I ask. It’s been more than a year since the last time I had any, and the craving hits me hard in this almost normal setting. Eating, drinking the one can of pop I allowed myself. Jason leaning on the kitchen’s island asking me questions, trying to understand how I thought, doing what he could to make me as human as I can be.

I push the memory away. I push away the wondering about how he is. What he is doing. I no longer think of him as the parent I saw him as, back in the time of Amanda, but while I no longer hate him as I do her, thinking of him is uncomfortable.

“I’m afraid I don’t.” Moores sits before me with his own plate of cooked food. “We stick to a more basic way of living. And even before the sickness, getting something like that delivered from one of the city was expensive.”

I eat. I taste the burned meat and vegetable, the grease he added. I fight the reflexive gag, and despite not enjoying eating what is on the plate, I want more, I need more. This barely filled me, but again, I don’t want to show how different I am. I’ll hunt something more substantial later.

“Good,” Moores says. “That will help you.” He takes the plates away. “Come, you need to go back to bed. I’m sure just coming here was tiring for you.”

He misses my dismay as he puts them on the counter. I nearly tell him that what I need is to go out and hunt, if not that, to empty his fridge. Fortunately, I catch myself and follow him to the room, where I lie on the bed and wonder how long I’ll last lying there with nothing to do.