Demons 3 Draft 1 CH 06 (Patreon)

We walk through large pens containing creatures. I recognize some of the larger ones from travels, my hunts. Others are foreign. Each pen contains over twenty of one kind of creature and is large enough they can run.

“What are they?” I indicate one of the pens containing six-legged creatures with a short neck, thick body with a coating of gray-green down. They run around the periphery of the pen.

“Demons call them fast runners. We’ve been calling them horses because they resemble animals of that name back on the homeworld.” He indicated other pens. “We raise multiple kinds of animals, each better suited for a different hunting age.”

“What do you feed them?” each pen has a trough with something I can’t discern.

“They’re vegetarians, and they’ll eat anything that’s plant-based, so we feed them mainly the leftovers from our food growing along with some plants we grow specifically for them. To make sure they’re healthy.”

In the distance, I see a structure, tall and large. We head toward it, but Moores turns away halfway there, after the pens end. He heads toward three pens, these made of concrete walls instead of wood, two meters tall, without any openings in them.

I stop as I notice the demon on the other side of the pen, perched on the wall, looking in. They are half the size of Protect and only looks up from whatever has their attention when Moores speaks.

“It’s okay,” he calls to me; he kept moving. “That’s Kills. He’s here for the same reason I want you to watch.”

The wall has steps that allow us to look over the top. In the pen is motion, quick, darting. It takes me a few seconds to understand what I look at as the half dozen small creatures running around are of similar size and coloring. When one of them leaps, it’s body shifting in a way that makes it miss its target, I identify that one. A demon. The smallest one I have ever seen.

“That’s Kills’s cub. They’re only a few days old.”

Kills watches us instead of their cub. Watches me. They are silent, but they are ready to move.

The cub lands on one of the creatures. There is squealing and growling, tearing of flesh. Then it is running after another of the creatures. It didn’t even leave bones.

I smell a new demon’s scent on the wind and watch it approach from the creature pens.

“That’s Watches,” Moores says, “Kills’s mate. He’s bringing more skitterers for the cub. As it gets better at catching them, they’ll have to keep throwing more of them in for a time, in a few years, they’ll get a few minutes of rest between bouts of eating. When Baby can go an hour between feeding, it’ll transition to the maze.”

Watches opens his arm, their skin retracting, and a dozen of the skitterers drop in the pen. They watch me, a rumble of warning sounding. Moores leads me away and once we are far enough, I look over my shoulder. Kills and Watches are together, looking into the pen.

A memory flashes; Fangs pressed against Claws in a tall tree, looking down at a cub catching a slithering creature twice its size. Happiness and pride fill the memory and then it’s gone; leaving me wishing for more of the sense of belonging I see in these two. That I feel in the occasional memories of Fangs.

The large structure I’d seen is at least ten meters tall. A ladder leads to the top and a path ???wrong word. Those elevated paths in factories??? leads to an observation platform in the center. The building is over fifty meters wide on each side, a maze of corridors and larger rooms.

“This is the maze,” Moores says. “We can close it partially to make it smaller, or the younger cubs, but with one the age of Cub, they can deal with the full maze.”

“You name a cub, Cub?” I look at the paths within the building. It isn’t a true maze, simply a series of divisions forcing whatever is in it to run around them. Some corridors lend themselves to ambush, while open areas can allow for full-on confrontations.

“Demons don’t take names until they can reason. Their language doesn’t require them to have names, they can identify one another by the timber of their growls and by their scents. And as you must have noticed, their names are more identifiers. Protects the Community, Kills in One Strike, Watches the Territory. The people who look into that theorize that until they had to deal with us, demons never bothered defining who they were.”

The platform shakes as someone large lands on it and I turn to face them, stepping back to the edge.

“We know who we are,” Protect says. “Humans never learn.” They watch me, eyes flicking to the edge. I watch them think, their body tightening, either making more space or preparing to pounce at me.

“We don’t have the same modes of communication,” Moores answered, still looking at the maze. “It’s also narrower, so we need to compensate.”

Like the community versus family difference from back in the town, I have the sense this is an old discussion between them. Moores is so comfortable with the demon’s presence he has not reacted to their landing. The need to scream a warning wars with that of cursing the human for putting himself at risk. Demons can not be trusted my years of training scream at me, in spite of knowing better from experience.

“There,” Moores says, pointing. Curious, I turn to look. A creature is running through the maze. It is a smaller version of the horses I saw, with a coloring more toward red than gray.

Protect is next to me, too close, but I refuse to react. They look at the maze, first the creature, then search and a pleased rumble escapes them. I find what they spotted. A small demon running through the maze toward the fleeing creature.

I remember Fang’s pride, and wonder if this cub is Protect’s.

I look away from the chase; too much a reminder of my own hunger, and look at the structure. The walls are a mix of wood and metal. There is a sense of it having been haphazardly expanded over time, then reinforces.

“This isn’t going to hold an older demon,” I stated. “There are too many places they can grab on to climb.”

Protects lets out an annoyed growl. “By the age a child thinks of the sky, it is time for a true hunt.”

“We have around three hundred hectares set up with detectors to keep track of them when they reach that point,” Moores adds. “Once they can think in three dimensions, they’re close to being able to reason. They can also go weeks without eating.”

I recall the demons I hunted in the city. I didn’t know about how they could think then, but too many of them used rooftops for it to be a result of reason. I watch the cub track the creature, use the walls as jumping points to do rapid turns.

It has no need to think in height, its prey remains on the ground. In the cities, humans could be on multiple levels of a building. With cars, there were more dangers on the ground. Police had guns. They couldn’t do permanent damage, but demons still tried to avoid being hurt. They had instinctively adapted to their surroundings.

Here they provided a ground-level hunt without threats or elevated prey. It meets the cub’s need to feed without adding unexpected dangers.

The prey is in one of the large openings and rounds on the cub as it enters is, raising its front legs and bringing them down on it. It has two blunt claws at the end. The cub jumps back, then forward, clamping its jaws on a leg. The creature rears again, and the cub is sent flying. I tense as it lands and rolls, but it is up again, running at the creature, which limps away. The cub’s bite did serious damage.

The cub catches up to it, jumps on its hindquarter. The creature tries to dislodge it by bucking, but the cub has its claws in deep. When it tires, the cub climbs further, making it onto the creature’s back before it shakes itself. This time the cub is almost throw off, remaining on by bitting and extending its jaws to hold on better.

The cub makes it to the creature’s short neck and stretches itself to wrap around it as it bites down. Blood flies as the creature staggers, shaking itself in an attempt to free itself, but it’s too late. I smile at the cub’s victory. It was a good hunt. I feel Protect’s gaze on me and he huffs in annoyance before looking at the cub again. I glare at him, annoyed in turn. I can appreciate a good hunt too.

The creature falls on its side, then grows still. I watch the cub flow out from under it and set about devouring it. I have not seen many demons eat. If I came across one in the process of eating before, they were eating a human and I stopped them. I was present when Claws ate Adam, but I couldn’t put all my attention on it, not with the military and the other demons present.

It isn’t graceful, but it is efficient and quick. Within twenty minutes there are only bones left, and even some of those are missing. I do not understand how this system can function not over time. “What are you going to do when you run out of space for all the demons to hunt here? When the cub in the other pen is older, how are you going to handle having both of them use the maze?”

Moores looks at me. “I’m not sure you understand how demons mature. It’s going to be years until Baby is old enough to be in the maze. By then, Cub should be able to go a few hours between feeding, and have enough control to wait a little if needed. They aren’t like us. Demons live for centuries, so they mature much slower.”

That is an aspect Amanda and Jason never taught me about. I wonder if they know. Does the military know how demons live or are they simply interested in exterminating them all?

It isn’t my fight. Humans, or demons, I decided not to deal with them. I chose the wild over any of them. “Thank you for rescuing me,” I say as I head for the ladder. “I’m leaving.”

“No,” Moores says.

“No,” Protect echos, but the threat in the undercurrent stops me. He sees me as more of a danger now. Now that I know about the cubs.

“Don’t threaten him,” Moores chastises the demon.

“He will tell others.”

“No, I won’t.” I turn to face them. Moores’s mouth is open. “I understand your fear. What you have here goes against what humans know. If I was still the hunter I was made to be, I do not know what I would make of this, I do not know how I would react. But I am not that anymore. I do not want to be involved in this. In anything. I am in the wild to be alone.”

“Being alone isn’t healthy,” Moores says.

“Being around people hasn’t been good for anyone,” I reply. How I feel wars with what I say, but that is only right now. If I stay, something will happen. I will get angry at the humans or the demons.

The man studies me, then sighs. “Fine. It’s your decision.” He raises a finger as Protects opens his mouth and the demon glares at it but remains silent. I stare at them, unable to comprehend how the human can dictate anything to a demon.

“Before you leave,” Moores continues, “Maliya will want to examine you, make sure you’re okay. Which you clearly are, but she won’t let you leave without making sure.” He raises a hand to silence my protest. “If you want to argue with someone, do so with her.

Why did I obey his motion? Protect looks at me with an expression that is oddly similar to a human smirk.