Deal With the Demon Daddy

Chapter 1

SABLE

Breakfast should be the safest part of the day.

The little kitchen smells of barley porridge, steeped mint, singed kindling, and the faint mineral tang of the rainwater I boiled before dawn.

Smoke curls lazily from the stove pipe, too thin to trouble the rafters, and the window above the washbasin glows with a pale gray morning light that makes every cracked cup and dulled spoon look gentler than it has any right to look.

Outside, the lane is waking in pieces: wagon wheels grinding through mud, a goat bleating as though offended by existence itself, someone cursing at a jammed shutter.

It is ordinary. Blessedly, stubbornly ordinary.

Corin sits across from me with his elbows on the table, his hair still mussed from sleep, one hand wrapped around a chipped clay cup. He has one sock on and one sock missing, because he claims matching feet before breakfast is “a tyranny invented by joyless people.”

“You’re staring,” he says, lifting his cup.

“I am assessing whether you are alive enough to be useful.”

“Cruel woman. I stirred the porridge.”

“You leaned against the counter and criticized my stirring.”

“I provided moral oversight.”

“You told me the oats looked depressed.”

“They did. Look at them now. Happier already.”

I try not to smile, but the traitorous corner of my mouth gives me away. “That is because I added honey.”

“That is because I believed in them.”

He grins at me over the rim of his cup, and for one sweet, stupid moment, I let myself enjoy him.

The sharpness of his face has worsened this week, and there are shadows beneath his eyes that no amount of sleep can soften, but his grin is still his grin.

Crooked. Shameless. Mine, in every way that matters.

He starts to say something else. “You know, if old Mother Vey catches you buying honey from the west stall again, she’s going to—”

The cup slips from his hand.

It hits the table first, bounces once, and drops to the floor where it shatters into three large pieces and a spray of smaller ones. Tea splashes across my bare ankle, hot enough to sting. I flinch, already opening my mouth to scold him for being clumsy, but then blood spatters across the table.

Not a thread of it. Not a little stain on his lip.

A mouthful.

Dark red against the pale wood.

“Corin?”

He blinks at me as if he hears me from the far end of a tunnel. His hand rises to his mouth, trembling, and comes away wet. His expression changes before mine does. He understands first. He has always been quicker with fear when it belongs to him.

“Sable,” he says, and his voice breaks around my name.

He tries to stand.

His chair scrapes backward with a wooden shriek, and he gets halfway upright before his knees fold.

He clutches his chest with both hands. Beneath the thin linen of his shirt, his pulse kicks visibly under his skin, wrong and violent, a fluttering thing trapped behind his ribs. The sight steals the air from my lungs.

I move before thought catches up.

I catch him under the arms as he falls, and his weight nearly drags us both down.

My hip slams into the table. A bowl tips and porridge spills in a thick, steaming heap over the edge, but I hardly feel the burn when it hits my wrist. Corin’s head lolls toward the floor, and I twist hard, taking the impact through my shoulder so his skull does not strike the stones.

“Corin, look at me.” My voice comes out too loud. Too sharp. “Look at me, damn you.”

His eyes flutter, unfocused.

I lower him onto the floor, one hand behind his neck, the other pressed uselessly over his sternum as though I can hold his heart in place by force. His skin is clammy. His breath comes in thin, torn pulls. Blood shines on his lower lip.

“Help!” I scream toward the window. “Mara! Mara, get Healer Tovan! Now!”

Across the lane, a shutter bangs open.

“What is it?” Mara calls.

“Get Tovan!”

She sees the blood. I know the moment she does, because her face drains white and she disappears without another question.

Corin coughs again, and this time I turn him sideways before it chokes him. Blood flecks the floor. Blood on my hand. Blood in the grout between the stones. The kitchen, my plain little kitchen with its cracked bowls and crooked shelves, becomes a slaughter room in the space of five breaths.

“No, no, no,” I whisper, though I despise myself for wasting words on denial. “Stay with me.”

His fingers curl weakly around my sleeve. “If I die before washing dishes, you must admit I won.”

“You are not dying to avoid chores.”

“That sounds exactly like something I would do.”

His smile is barely there. It trembles at the edges and fails when pain tightens his body. His eyes squeeze shut, and he makes a sound I have never heard from him before, a low animal groan that rips something open in me.

By the time Healer Tovan arrives, I have blood under my nails and terror in my teeth.

He is an old man with a stooped back and sharp eyes, carrying his satchel half-fastened because Mara must have dragged him from his own breakfast. He kneels beside Corin without ceremony and pushes me back with the flat of one hand.

“Give me room.”

“I am not leaving him.”

“I said room, girl, not the next kingdom.”

I shift just enough for him to work. Mara hovers in the doorway, wringing her apron. I want to snap at her to stop looking so frightened, as though her face has power over the outcome, but I clamp my mouth shut.

Tovan draws a brass disk from his satchel, etched with rings of old temple script and healer’s notation. He places it over Corin’s heart. Then he pricks his own thumb with a needle, smears blood along the disk’s outer rim, and mutters a pulse-reading spell under his breath.

The air changes.

The kitchen sound dulls until the rain outside becomes a hush behind thick walls. A blue-white light seeps from the brass disk, sinking through Corin’s shirt and into his skin. For a moment, nothing happens. Then faint black veins flicker across his sternum.

They are not natural veins. They branch too sharply, like ink dropped into water and frozen mid-spread. They pulse once, twice, then vanish beneath his flesh.

Tovan’s jaw hardens.

“What is that?” I ask.

He does not answer quickly enough.

“What is that?”

He lifts the disk and wipes it clean with a cloth. “Magical wasting.”

The words are too tidy for what they do to me. Too small. “No.”

“Sable.”

“No. Read again.”

“I do not need to read again.”

“You will read again because I am asking you to.”

His eyes cut to mine. There is pity in them, and I hate him for bringing it into my house. “It is curse-energy. Old, embedded, and feeding through the heart muscle. Every contraction worsens the deterioration.”

Corin opens one eye. “That sounds expensive.”

I turn on him. “Do not.”

“What? It does.”

Tovan presses two fingers to Corin’s throat, counting beneath his breath. Corin swallows, and the motion looks painful. He still tries for a smile, because he is an idiot, because he loves me, because he cannot bear a room where grief has the upper hand.

“At least,” he murmurs, “I won’t have to wash dishes.”

The joke lands nowhere.

His face twists. He coughs, and the sound rakes through him so hard his shoulders curl inward. I grip his hand. He squeezes back, but there is no strength in it. When the fit passes, his breath wheezes in and out, wet around the edges.

Tovan sits back on his heels. “Weeks,” he says.

I stare at him.

“Do not say that in my kitchen.”

“I will not soften it and leave you unprepared. Weeks at best. Less, if the curse surges again.”

Mara makes a wounded sound in the doorway.

I do not look at her. “There are treatments.”

“For wasting, yes. For ordinary curse-fever, yes. For a hex lodged this close to the heart and drawing infernal backlash through the muscle, no simple one.”

“Then give me the complicated one.”

Tovan’s mouth tightens.

“Give me the name of the temple,” I demand. “Give me the rite. Give me the price. I will pay it.”

“No temple will touch this.”

“Liar.”

His face flinches, but only a little. “Mind your tongue.”

“My brother is bleeding on the floor. My tongue can go hang.”

Corin’s fingers twitch around mine. “Sable.”

“No.” I lean closer to Tovan, every part of me shaking except my voice. “You are going to tell me who can treat him.”

“The temple healers will not risk infernal backlash for a human laborer with curse-energy in his chest. They would need to draw it out through living channels, and if that power bites back, it could burn their sanctum wards from the inside.”

“He has a name.”

“I know his name.”

“Then use it.”

Tovan looks down at Corin, and for a moment the old man’s severity cracks. “Corin needs quiet. Warmth. Bloodroot infusion for the pain, if you can find it unadulterated. No strain, no stairs if you can help it. Keep him calm.”

“Keep him calm?” I laugh once, and the sound disgusts even me. “That is what you have for me?”

“That is what I can give you without lying.”

“Then lie better.”

He gathers his things slowly. “Some doors are not worth opening, Sable.”

I understand what he means before he finishes saying it. The thought comes cold and black, sliding beneath my skin like a knife slipped under a cuff.

Infernal doors.

I say nothing.

Tovan sees anyway. “Do not go looking below the city.”

Corin’s hand tightens suddenly, stronger than I expect. “Sable.”

I look down at him.

His eyes are clearer now, and that is somehow worse. He has heard enough. He knows me too well.

“Don’t,” he whispers.

I brush damp hair off his forehead. “Hush.”

“I mean it.”

“So do I.”

Tovan leaves me powders, instructions, and a look that begs me to become someone more reasonable before nightfall. Unfortunately for everyone involved, reason has never kept anyone I love alive.

By evening, Corin cannot climb the stairs.