Chapter 6
The Path to Acceptance Is Riddled with Dickbags
Brioni
Brioni didn’t know about the five stages of grief because they didn’t exist in her world, not in a handy psychological model that could be passed out at funeral homes and group counseling sessions anyway.
There was a theory held by the healers of Heck that was quite similar, but Brioni didn’t know about that either.
What she did know was that she had cycled through the same set of intense emotions about a hundred times over the past three days and had come to zero resolutions.
Well, maybe it wasn’t quite a hundred, but she was almost as prone to hyperbole as the author.
It started with shock—shock that Ragnar had thrown her over his shoulder like a sack of qapian feed and hauled her down the forest path.
Denial came swiftly after—so swiftly she ignored the wantonness that hid beneath the shock at being manhandled.
He didn’t mean to be so rude, surely, and she probably just misread the situation.
But Brioni almost never misread anything—reading properly was how she survived, after all—and Ragnar had just been so angry.
But you know what? I’m angry too, she would inevitably huff to herself with a sour pout. Why couldn’t Ragnar just say thank you even if he didn’t like her stupid gift? Demons had manners—he even expected Moar to have manners, and he was a dog. Gods, it just wasn’t fair!
But…but maybe if she just went to talk to him again, they could clear things up. Maybe if the moon was out, and maybe if she didn’t accidentally sneak up on him, and maybe if she brought an extra piece of bacon…maybe it would all turn out the same anyway: bad.
Because that was how everything always went when she wasn’t exactly the person everyone else wanted her to be, wasn’t it?
Something about that clearing and the barn and the animals and maybe even the demon himself encouraged her to act differently.
Not as painfully polite and sickeningly sweet, but a little… wild.
And nobody liked her when she was wild.
Brioni gave the pebble she’d been kicking an especially hard boot, and it disappeared beneath the ferns. Stupid rock. Apparently, she was back to anger.
The path had run out, and she found herself deep in the wood, but not lost this time.
She recognized the gnarling trunk to her right and the patch of white flowers just ahead.
Those weird, shiny leaves were probably demondrakes like the orange demon had said, but she couldn’t be sure, she was no plant-ologist. In a few more paces, she would duck beneath a fallen tree and round a pair of scandalous-looking boulders, and there would be the green door to the stone-front, thatched-roof cottage.
No lantern illuminated its entry, and the shutters were all latched, but she knew now not to expect a greeting.
When she first visited three days ago, she’d knocked for what felt like an hour.
It had only been about five minutes, but Brioni’s tendency to exaggerate was only exacerbated by her frustration.
Why that orange demon from the Scholar’s Hall had her delivering a second letter to this abandoned place, he refused to say, but he had been thrilled with her work the first time.
Unrequited love, she assumed—there was some demon hiding themselves away inside, and he was doing his best to win them back.
That was the best scenario she could imagine as the other contender, a crumpled demon skeleton and a heap of unread letters, was way too sad to consider. Not to mention too creepy.
When he asked her to hand deliver the second—and he had asked, technically, even though there didn’t seem to be an alternative—his appreciation had temporarily chased away her moping, so of course she accepted.
Being a tiny bit blackmailed about her broken rune cuff was also pretty encouraging, but she liked thinking about that almost as much as she liked imagining the demon’s deceased betrothed rotting behind the door.
Thick vines climbed the cottage’s stone front up to the purple moss that hung off its eaves, and an uneasy chill climbed up her back.
Moonlight in a cloudless sky broke through the curved branches overhead, casting shadows that quivered with every breeze as if there were figures darting around the cottage’s corners.
There weren’t eyes on her, of course, but she couldn’t shake the feeling of something eerie, almost like walking into the portal chamber at the post right after a magical delivery.
But that’s it! This is just like delivering supplies to the girls, she told herself even though creeping up to the weathered door and dreading what could lay beyond it wasn’t at all like visiting the Arts District or the apothecary.
When she’d finally met Aofe, surrounded by interesting-smelling elixirs and shimmery potions, she’d been elated.
The spooky cottage didn’t inspire any of the good, sunshiney feelings another friendly human did, though, especially when that human had such pretty blue hair.
“One dose of Aofe’s Super Special Belly-Quelling, Blood-Busting, Good-Time Tonic, coming up,” she whispered as she slid the letter underneath the door.
Pretending she was rolling a vial of Aofe’s contraceptive under Kat’s bedchamber door didn’t wash away all the eeriness, but it helped.
Kat wasn’t keen on Brioni’s name for it, but she was less keen on being told, “This makes it so you can canoodle anybody you want without expecting a half-demon to come shooting out of you tail-first in ten months or however long it takes their babies to cook.”
Brioni giggled at the memory of how red Kat had turned at the suggestion of intimate human-demon relations, but then a stiff breeze blew overhead, and Brioni shot upright and fell silent.
She listened, but there was nothing more, which was exactly what she wanted as she turned and fled.
Rounding the scrotal boulders and skidding under the tipped trunk, she sped all the way to where the trees ran out.
When she spotted the abandoned well, she huffed a massive sigh of relief.
Oh, I just can’t believe he tossed me over his shoulder like that!
The cyclical emotions began again, and so Brioni continued on with her day as if she hadn’t just been past the Veilwood runes meant to keep her safely contained to Heck. No one was supposed to know anyway, and it was a whole lot easier to keep her broken cuff a secret if she forgot about it too.
Another hour of deliveries had her juggling friendly greetings and a cranky mood.
Hilde had noticed the destitution she tried to hide, though, and cheered her up with a sample of blackberry wine.
Her children were all at the tavern that afternoon, and the sight of the six of them running around was also a mood booster until Brioni noticed one of them didn’t have a red tail like the others but a gray one.
There was a patch over his eye as well, and a streak of hair that had gone black amongst the scarlet strands.
“Not to worry,” Hilde had said when she caught her staring. “It’s nothing catching.”
“Oh, I didn’t think…I’m sorry.”
“Nah, don’t be.” The red demon smiled after her children as they shrieked and ran through the unopened tavern.
“Micha’s just a little different, but his brothers and sisters make sure no one says a nasty word to him.
He hardly notices nowadays. And you should see his pie crusts—they’re perfect even without magic. ”
Without magic. Was that what it meant to be gray? Brioni didn’t have the courage to ask, but she wondered if Ragnar had any siblings to protect him when he was little. Probably not. But then again, siblings weren’t always the defenders the world made them out to be.
Eventually, Brioni had no choice but to visit the barracks.
Alamar had given her a stack of important-looking letters to deliver by hand: it was a tradition, she’d been told, but the details were left out.
One of those letters had accidentally made its way underneath the teal drayk, though, and the seal had accidentally been melted by the creature’s body heat just enough to pop it open without evidence of tampering.
Not that it was worth the effort since the fancy letter was only an invitation to some stuffy fundraising event.
With Stephan and the cart left across the road, she sneaked past the sparring demons in the front courtyard, quelling her urge to loiter and ogle.
Inside an office building, she was met with a musty smell and sparse stone walls but not the one demon she hoped to avoid, so she pushed her luck with the young scout doing paperwork in the entry chamber.
When he didn’t let her skip past with a smile and wiggle of her fingers, she surrendered all but one of the letters addressed to a demon whose name she recognized.
“I have to hand deliver this one,” she lied.
The scout tipped his horned head with disbelief.
She let her lips twist into a pout. “I just want to thank him for saving our lives is all.”
Black eyes rolled in that demonic way, but he gave her directions to find Ozirax anyway.
The purple demon was leaning against a wall just inside a large training chamber when she happened upon him, his dark eyes trained on a human sparring with a yellow demon.
Brioni crooked a finger at him and beckoned him into the hall before presenting the letter.
“You’re welcome,” she chirped, and because her own patience was wearing thin, she didn’t bother with anymore niceties and jumped right to the thing she actually wanted: “How’s Kaly doing? ”
He blinked, looking her up and down like he was still confused by her presence at all. That was a pretty good start. “She’s running drills inside. I’ll take you—”
“No, no.” She held up both hands, and Ozirax’s next step came to an abrupt halt. “How is she doing?”
His brow furrowed all over again. “You can ask her yourself.”