Daniel
The little changes were harder to put his finger on.
“Wha’s wrong?” Chaol croaked, threading their fingers together on his stomach.
“How are you sleeping?”
“I’m not. I’m laying here and listening to you huff and roll around.”
Daniel glared at the back of his head. “I am not.”
“Are, too. So, what?”
Daniel sighed. “I can’t sleep. Why can’t I sleep? I should be tired, but I’m not. I’m bored.”
Chaol rolled onto his back. “Sorry, darkling. Demons don’t actually have to sleep as often as humans do. You can’t sleep because you don’t need to sleep.”
“Then how are you sleeping?”
Chaol’s mouth twitched like he was fighting a smile. “I just told you, I wasn’t sleeping.”
“You seemed pretty asleep.”
A slow smile grew across Chaol’s mouth. “You get good at going through the motions. You even good at making yourself doze when you don’t really feel like it.”
“Why?”
“Because otherwise eternity gets boring. You can read, you can watch movies and television, but eventually, it all starts to blur together. When there’s nothing else to do, you lay there and pretend. Let the time pass you by. Let your mind drift.”
Daniel sighed, fitting his chin on Chaol’s shoulder and pressing their cheeks together. “Demons sleep because they’re bored?”
Chaol nodded. “Sometimes. It’s a pain to go out during the day.
Direct sunlight kind of burns, which I’m sure you’ve noticed.
It won’t kill us, but it’s annoying. So we hole up somewhere and wait it out.
That’s a lot of time stuck inside with nothing to do.
” He tucked his arm behind his head. “We don’t have to sleep—or try to sleep—right now, if you’re bored.
You have the internet now. You can read a book, watch something, whatever. What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.” He’d never had any hobbies before. Training and fighting were pretty much all he used to do. Chaol was right, eternity was going to get pretty boring if he didn’t find ways to entertain himself.
“Do you want to go downstairs? We could make some coffee, poke around and see if these two have anything fun to do.”
“Yeah, okay.”
While Chaol dressed, Daniel swiped his brand new phone off the bedside table and opened up his texts to send one to Nicolas and Ashmedai. Nicolas, like Julian, might be asleep at this hour, but he had a feeling Ashmedai would see it.
First drawback to demonhood: I can’t fucking sleep
He and Chaol crept downstairs, dodging around shafts of sunlight that slipped in through the cracks in the blackout curtains covering all the windows.
His phone buzzed as Chaol led him into the kitchen, and he sat at the table while Chaol hunted for coffee grounds to put in the machine.
Daniel suppressed a laugh at the absurdity of it all.
He wondered if Valac was with Julian when he bought the heavy curtains, and if anyone saw them and wondered if one of them worked nights.
‘Maybe he works nights, or maybe he’s dating a demon. ’
His phone chimed.
Ashmedai
Nothing moves slower than daytime Nic is asleep Sleeps all the time He snores
Daniel chuckled.
We’re up, if you want to come hang. Been a while since we’ve wasted a day together.
For a little while before he died, Daniel technically shared his apartment with Ashmedai.
While Nicolas was keeping Ashmedai at arm’s length and trying to infiltrate Sloan’s most trusted loyalists, Ashmedai would often come to the apartment to wait until the sun fell so he could go see Nicolas.
He’d introduced the sin eater to some of his favorite television shows and video games.
It was a bit like having a little brother of his own, albeit one that could kill him with a look.
At the time, Ashmedai had been new to the world.
He hadn’t known much about Earth or any human cultures.
Daniel had been happy to help him learn.
It was funny how things had changed. Now Daniel was the one who needed help adjusting.
“I invited Ash over,” Daniel said.
Chaol glanced back at him. “Okay. Have I mentioned how weird I find it that you’re buddies with a sin eater?”
Ashmedai appeared in front of the refrigerator. “What’s wrong with being ‘buddies’ with a sin eater?” he rasped in that unnatural voice of his.
Chaol shot him an easy, lopsided smile. “Nothing, but y’know, the first time he told me he knew you, I thought he was joking. I’ve never met one of your kind before, and I hadn’t expected one of you to leave the Pit and befriend a bunch of humans.”
Ashmedai’s laugh rattled out of him. “Nor did I, to be fair. Valac!” he called, though he didn’t raise his voice loudly. “Join us. I know you’re awake, too.”
A few moments later, the master bedroom door opened and shut quietly.
The big behemoth padded into the room, wearing only a pair of navy blue pajama pants.
His pale skin was streaked with black, undulating lazily across his skin.
His violet eyes bounced from person to person as he joined them and pulled out the chair across from Daniel, passing one hand across his bald head.
“What are we doing?” Valac asked.
“Wasting the day away,” Daniel said. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Ah. You are unaccustomed to being awake for so long,” Valac surmised.
Daniel nodded. “Yeah. I’m used to sleeping a solid chunk of every twenty-four period. Feels weird.”
“Boring,” Ashmedai said. His knee-length coat swished around his legs as he approached, pulling out the chair beside Valac and flopping down. “Nic-las sleeps so much.” He threw his head back as he said it, a surprisingly animated gesture for the usually stoic demon.
Daniel snorted out a laugh.
Chaol handed out mugs of coffee to everyone and then sat beside Daniel, stretching one arm out across the back of his chair.
“Chaol says you can teach yourself to doze during the day even when you’re not tired,” Daniel said, and Chaol nodded sagely.
“We can,” Valac agreed. “I often do, if only because being away from Julian is grating. And I often slip into his dreams. Dreamwalking makes the time pass quicker, also.”
Grating, Daniel repeated in his mind. Yes, that was a good word for how it felt to be apart from Chaol.
The nagging sensation that he was missing something vital.
His blackened heart was outside his chest, sitting beside him and drinking overly sweetened coffee. Daniel could smell the sugar from here.
“Don’t sleep,” Ashmedai said. “Can’t. Don’t dreamwalk either. But I like to lay with Nic-las. Watch him sleep. Listen to him snore.”
“Many humans would be uncomfortable with the idea of a sin eater watching them sleep,” Chaol mused.
Ashmedai’s orange eyes winked in and out as he blinked, and he rumbled out a laugh. “He likes it.”
“He likes you,” Daniel corrected. “Loves you, actually. Of course he wouldn’t mind.”
“Will he or Julian be bothered to wake up without you two?” Chaol asked.
“No,” Valac said. “Julian knows I wouldn’t go far.”
“Danny sent his text to both Nic-las and I,” Ashmedai said, gesturing with black, clawed fingers at Daniel. “He’ll know where I am.”
“What do we do with our day, then?” Chaol asked, sliding his fingers up into the back of Daniel’s hair. “Darkling, what strikes your fancy?”
“Hm.” Daniel leaned into Chaol’s side, cupping his mug in his hands. The heat of it was nothing compared to the kernel that simmered in his chest, but it was pleasant nonetheless. “Have you ever played a video game?”
Chaol had not, and Daniel wanted to correct that right away.
He dragged Chaol to the living room and booted up the console.
Valac and Ashmedai joined them, sitting in the dark living room with nothing but the television for light—which was more than enough, really.
It was a seventy-inch screen. Perfect for video games.
They started with a racing game first. Chaol was in awe of the graphics, insisting they’d filmed real cars somehow.
The controls were fairly straightforward—gas, brake, speed boosts, and the joysticks for turning—but Chaol still spent more time crashing into walls than he did on the road.
He managed to beat a couple of the NPCs on the track with them, but he didn’t finish anywhere near Daniel.
Daniel teasingly gave Ashmedai his controller after that, telling Chaol he’d have better luck against the sin eater, who growled playfully at the insult but agreed to play. And it was true, Ashmedai’s claws made it a little more difficult for him to hit the right buttons.
They took turns after that. Valac was the most skilled, after Daniel, because Julian made him play the most.
Daniel lost track of time. They switched from coffee to beer as the day wore on, though he didn’t drink enough to ever get a buzz.
That might be one of the few drawbacks of being a demon—alcohol didn’t affect him the same way now.
He lamented the easy buzzes of his past, but he couldn’t deny that he preferred his present.
Being back on Earth, immortal and powerful and with Chaol by his side, was infinitely preferable to the loneliness and uncertainty of his life before.
Daniel and Valac were in the middle of a heated race when the sound of the bedroom door opening caught their attention. Valac paused the game immediately, and they all turned.
Julian, shirtless and wearing a pair of plaid pajama pants, paused beside the foot of the stairs and took them all in. He had a pillow crease on his cheek, and his blond hair stuck up on the same side.
“A behemoth, a sin eater, a kalmach, and a harbinger are playing video games in my living room,” Julian said. “If you’d told me that a year ago, it would’ve been too weird to even laugh at.”
“Did we wake you, my jewel?” Valac asked.
“No, no—well, yeah, kind of. It’s okay, though. I slept hard, so it’s fine. I’m not up much earlier than normal. Coffee, anyone?”
“No, we’ve moved on to other things now,” Daniel replied, raising his beer bottle.
“Ah, of course. More coffee for me, then.”