Chapter 3
A Hound of a Different Color
Ragnar
Two weeks he had waited, and finally it was here. Ragnar rolled the vial between his palms—carefully because eagerness and his strength were a dangerous combination—and ensured the contents were properly mixed and warmed. Moar didn’t care for cool liquids, and he had been through enough.
A rhythmic and loyal thumping met Ragnar when he entered the loft.
At the foot of the bed, Moar lay curled on a stuffed mat.
He lifted his head feebly, white spots of fur over his eyes knitting as if with great concern but his wagging tail relentless.
Ragnar went to him and knelt as he uncorked the vial, and the smell hit them both.
By Vitae, it was revolting.
Ragnar tried to cover his flinch, but he could hide nothing from Moar. He offered the medicinal tincture, but the animal turned away with a speed that did not suggest he had been ill for a fortnight. Of course this wasn’t going to be easy.
“Come now, friend,” Ragnar said, gently taking the creature’s jaw in hand. “You must.”
Through a firmly shut snout, Moar only grunted.
“Do not make this harder than it needs to be,” he warned, though it was more a plea than anything.
Moar’s grunt turned into a whimper, brown eyes pitiful.
There was an unfair sinking in the demon’s chest, his resolve under threat, an infrequent but disturbing sensation. “Perhaps it won’t taste as bad as it smells.”
Neither believed that suggestion, and Ragnar’s contrived grin surely didn’t help. Especially not when his fangs were still on display.
“Is that a dog?”
Fucking hells, and neither would that.
The human stood just on the threshold to Ragnar’s home, bright eyes wide and locked on Moar. Dog. Yes, that was the human word for the creature that Moar was, though most demons called him a frail-hound with an unkind snicker.
Why in blazes had she followed him?
“You are not allowed up here.”
Her next step hovered, hem of her dress tickling around a pale knee as it lifted. “Well, I am up here, so…”
Ragnar opened his mouth, but nothing came out. It was a difficult enough assertion to argue with on its own, but when its speaker was so…human, it was apparently impossible.
One of her orange brows rose high, and then she simply dropped her foot to the floor.
That would not do.
Ragnar stood, jaw tight, fist clenched, everything stiff.
Well, not everything, thank the gods, despite her presence arousing a number of new and strange feelings.
Never mind—she had to go. He had scared off far more threatening beasts with just a glare, so he began there, yet she was undeterred, hands clasped behind her back as she wandered deeper into his home.
Under the colorless candlelight, he could see her as he imagined he was meant to—or rather, as he shouldn’t have since she wasn’t supposed to be there.
She was neither yellow nor green like the hue the lanterns below cast, but a striking lack of color, as if she’d been dipped in goat’s milk.
In spite of her short height, there was quite a bit of that strange skin on display: calves and knees, forearms and shoulders, collarbones and…
well, at least her hair covered a bit there, long curls of copper bouncing with each of her steps.
Her eyes darted all over the loft, bright rings of green surrounded by white and nestled into a round face.
At least he had tidied recently—not that it mattered.
Ragnar occasionally encountered humans in the forest, but they were almost always male and almost always dead. This one, though, had none of the rigid muscle or the worn features he was used to. And she wasn’t splattered in blood with her entrails on the outside either.
But she did have one thing in common with those other humans: trespassing.
“Alamar said that was important, so she sent me here right away.” She pointed to the vial in his hand before he could order her to leave. And then she held up a slip of parchment. “Do you want the directions too?”
Ragnar snorted out an altogether irate breath, but the human took it as an invitation. Perhaps in human culture, snorts meant something different. He didn’t care to learn the translation.
“Administer over the course of three days,” she read as she bounded toward him. “Once in the morning, once in the evening, and always with food—preferably a special treat.” It took only a moment for her to reach Ragnar, and he had never wished the loft were larger than a single room until then.
She peered up over the edge of the parchment, fidgeting with barely restrained curiosity like a kewniq peeking from beneath a Veilwood fern.
Right—that was what she reminded him of, her hair just like a kewniq’s eyes, ruddy and wild.
Despite making themselves painfully easy to catch, kewniqs weren’t worth hunting as they had so little meat to give.
A quick flick of his gaze down her body said that was where this human and those tiny creatures diverged.
Ragnar snapped out of the observation and snatched the parchment from her grip. He did his best to ignore the sharp gasp she let out, the sound pricking at his ears in an odd way, but his brow furrowed deeper. “This says nothing about a treat.”
“I know. I made that part up, but doesn’t he deserve it for being so sweet?
” She was kneeling then, offering the back of her hand to Moar.
The dog’s tail thumped, and if Ragnar didn’t know better, it was even livelier than before as he sniffed.
“The medicine’s for him, isn’t it? Poor baby doesn’t feel well,” she said, taking the dog’s head in her hands and gently rubbing thumbs over his cheeks.
Moar was a fool for such treatment, eyes closing as she smoothed back his fur just the way he liked with seemingly magical intuition. Human sorcery was tricky, he had learned, and that may well have been one of their mischievous ways.
Ragnar grunted but found himself pacing around the central hearth to the kitchen nook of his loft. A promise of something pleasurable would make the pain more bearable, he supposed.
He rifled in the larder for shreds of dried hiriivi longer than needed, listening to the honeyed words the human was whispering to Moar.
“Handsome,” she called him, which was true, and “such a good boy,” which was a little less true.
“You remind me of the puppy I had when I was really little,” she was crooning when Ragnar returned.
Moar weakly licked at her cheek, and she didn’t push him away.
“I never thought I’d see a dog in Heck, but here you are. ”
“There are no others,” he told her before she could ask for one of her own. “Moar was found in the Dreadmoor as a pup. He likely fell behind a human caravan or was the only survivor of an attack.”
“Oh, kind of like us,” she said with more humor than she ought have, if what Ragnar had been told by the scouts about the slavers was true. “But you’re so cute, Moar. Everybody must love you.”
“Stop—you will spoil him.”
The human blinked up at Ragnar as Moar gave her cheek another lick.
There was a kind of sulkiness in the downturn of her mouth and the further rounding of her eyes, though how it was possible those green rings could get any bigger, he didn’t know.
Her bottom lip jutted out, and she angled herself slightly, the swell of her breasts too well on display from her spot at his feet.
“But doesn’t he deserve to be spoiled? At least a little? ”
While the sulkiness remained, Ragnar could suddenly see through it, as if her spell had been lifted. “What Moar needs is medicine and rest, one of which you have successfully delivered, and the other you are hindering.”
“Oh, well, by all means.” With a wide grin, she released the dog and shuffled back barely an inch, presenting Moar with fingers spread.
While a human-concocted medicine he’d ordered from another demon population better integrated across the sea seemed appropriate to be delivered by a human, that same human making herself so at home in his loft was decidedly not.
Yet she wasn’t leaving, so Ragnar knelt again and showed Moar the hiriivi shreds. “Be good, and you will get this.”
“Ooh, yummy,” the woman said from his side, leaning in far too close.
Ragnar swallowed, refusing to look at whatever part of her was hovering near enough to put out warmth. Without words this time, Ragnar held up the vial, and Moar was slightly more cooperative, letting the demon open his snout and pour a sixth of the liquid down his throat before capping it again.
“Oh, you did so good!” She clapped as if the dog had grown thumbs and given himself the potion.
Ragnar’s brow furrowed more, painful at this point, but he offered the hiriivi and was pleased to see Moar accept it. The dog’s increasing listlessness had been distressing, but this turn was a boon no matter that it came with such an annoyance.
“Tell him he did good.” The whispered voice tickling Ragnar’s pointed ear made him jolt, and he glared at how close the woman had gotten.
From this distance, he could see the honey color to her eyelashes and the strange buff dots peppering her skin, like a speckled hiriivi fawn.
Gods, if she introduced some grisly human pox to his barn, he would—well, he didn’t know what he would do to her, and it was probably better he didn’t consider his options.
Ragnar slowly rose to his full height. “You are dismissed.”
The scrunching of her nose fell away, and the new dejection that took her rounded features was genuine. “Tell him.”
Ragnar did not like being told what to do—he was the one who did the telling, and he was sure that read clearly all over his face as hers shifted momentarily into trepidation.
But then she shrugged a bare shoulder and clasped her hands in her lap. “Please?”
Oh, that would do it.
“Good job,” he said to Moar flatly, and then to her, “Now go home.”
“Well, I can’t do that.” She chuckled, pushing up onto her knees. “But I can go back to the post.” She gently patted Moar’s neck and finally stood.
The top of her head barely reached Ragnar’s collarbone, yet she didn’t take a step back. She simply tipped her head up and grinned as if waiting for…blazes knew what.
He jutted his chin toward the entry, unwilling to break the eye contact she seemed insistent on maintaining.
She just continued to beam up at him. “Well, I suppose my job is done.”
It had been done. “If you need assistance leaving, I would be happy to toss you down the stairs.”
She squeaked, a sound similar to the offended gasp when he yanked away the parchment, and what followed was another tingly sensation behind his ear. Perhaps that was a symptom of human pox. “You wouldn’t.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” Ragnar conceded. “Because then you would be injured, and I would never get rid of you.”
A look of indignation flashed over her face, and for once, Ragnar was pleased until she crossed her arms obstinately.
Her breasts were already remarkably displayed, but that small move had almost made his knees buckle.
Before she could open her mouth again and curse him with another squeakily arousing noise, Ragnar hooked a hand around her elbow and marched her to the door.
The human lost what little resolution she had, tripping over herself as he dragged her to the head of the stairs and quickly released her on the small landing. “Hurry,” he said. “It will be dark soon.”
“It’s already dark.”
Ragnar squinted into the dim light of the barn, hesitating with a hand on the door. She was rather small, and the way back was rather dangerous.
She bent sideways to see around him and called into the loft, “Get better, Moar! I’ll visit you soon!”
Ragnar huffed—whatever happened to her was not his problem and would perhaps solve a future one if she intended to return—and he slammed the door in her face.
Ragnar was both correct and not as being his problem was exactly what Brioni and the plot intended, but returning readers will have expected that.
The demon listened to the familiar quiet of his loft, suddenly oppressive rather than curative. The fire popped, the dog gnawed, and the human remained, for once, silent. Then there were steps, audible only because he truly listened, and Ragnar pulled open the door.
“Do not touch any of the veilhounds.”
She whipped around on the stairs. “What about—”
Ragnar cut her off with a growl and shut the door again.
He strode across the loft to the seating area and dropped down on his small sofa.
The comfort he expected didn’t come, muscles so tight he immediately knew the soreness would last for days.
How a single simple, small human could inspire more annoyance than an entire squadron of demons, he couldn’t know, but his shoulders refused to loosen.
He flexed his fingers, the feel of her skin still lingering uninvited.
Cruel, he thought, gaze falling to Moar across the loft who lazily gnawed the dried hiriivi meat. He’ll be disappointed when she doesn’t return.
Moar had no such fear, of course, because dogs were optimists—obtusely so.
Demons, however, were obtuse in a whole different way, and they often masked their disappointment in anger and coldness.
And humans were…well, they were something entirely new.