Chapter 4 The Best Squadron
THE BEST SQUADRON
Kalypso
By the time Kalypso was cleared of all the sorcery in her system, she was ready to claw her way out of the infirmary into whatever cesspool these demons called their city.
She didn’t even care that it meant she’d be stuck with the purple bastard for the foreseeable future, as long as she didn’t have to see these four windowless walls anymore.
“Everything seems to be in order,” Balran, the demon healer, said, pulling her two fingers away from the pulse point on Kalypso’s wrist. Clawless, Kaly noted, which was apparently a thing these demons could do, including elongating their fangs.
She imagined if they had the ability, her new prison warden Ozzy likely elongated another of his physical assets to compensate for being such a dick himself.
Why else were those spikes of his always raised?
She went to pull her sleeve back over her wrist and stand from the bed, but the healer stopped her.
“Not yet. The runes will need to be adjusted.” Kalypso rolled her eyes and stuck her hand out again, but the yellow demon shook her head. “Not by me.”
“Then—”
The door opened, and Kaly’s eyes immediately narrowed into a glare.
“You.”
Ozirax flashed her his fangs, folding his arms—spikes laying flat—as he leaned against the jamb. “I don’t want to be here any more than you.”
She flashed him a vulgar gesture in response.
“I don’t know what that means,” he grumbled, then looked to Balran. “Everything done?”
“Just waiting for you.”
The yellow demon’s smile was about as warm as her personality, and Kalypso wanted to hate her for it, but she’d reluctantly come to enjoy the demon’s company when she was otherwise left alone within these suffocating walls.
Then the healer’s words settled.
“Wait, he’s adjusting the runes?”
Balran shrugged. “He’s the expert.”
Kaly snorted. She doubted he was an expert in anything besides being a dick. Maybe in being an ass.
But then he flicked a claw out and began prowling toward her, and she had to fight every instinct to not scramble away.
He halted in front of her, black eyes narrowed. “Wrist.”
“You could say please.”
“Not in my vocabulary. Wrist.”
“You’re a real treat, you know that?”
Balran tried to cover her snort with a cough, but Ozirax held his glare and said, “So I’ve been told.”
Kalypso flung her arm forward, fist catching his abdomen in an attempt to accidentally punch him. But her fake apology instead left her lips as a hiss as she was met with solid muscle. She jerked her hand back on instinct.
His body shook, and she glared up just as his laugh faded, his smug grin still plastered on his face. “Impressed?”
“I hate you.”
“Feeling’s mutual.”
And that’s exactly how it should remain.
She shouldn’t care that she’d barely hit him and cracked her knuckles on his abdomen.
He was a warrior, after all, so she should have expected he’d be in shape.
It’s not like she could forget what he was when he wore that sleeveless top, leaving his tattooed, purple arms on display alongside the leather straps with silver glinting across his body.
She was simply… envious of his privilege to pack on strength through training and proper meals. Meals her body was starting to crave now that she was getting them regularly. A concern she’d deal with when she got out of this cursed place.
Bored of their standoff, Ozirax snatched her hand and yanked it forward.
Kalypso almost snarled, but then his claw was swiping across her cuff in a fluid motion, and she couldn’t pull her gaze away.
The etchings he drew over glowed faintly, and Kalypso forgot all of her anger as the symbols burned themselves into her mind.
She wouldn’t have noticed he was done except he thrust her hand back like she’d burned him. But she lifted the cuff closer to her face, watching the fading glow disappear and leave a dark scratch where he’d made the changes.
“You reversed it.”
Ozirax stopped mid-sentence in his conversation with Balran. “What?”
Kalypso cocked her head. “The patterns you added. They look like…” Fuck. She didn’t know the word, so she quietly settled on repeating, “Reversed.”
“Inverted,” Ozirax supplied, not unkindly. He glanced at Balran who simply blinked and quietly excused herself. Then his gaze was back on her. “You memorized the runes?”
Memorized? She’d painstakingly studied those symbols to their finest detail, until she could recreate them in her mind. She didn’t understand them, but at the same time, they made a lot more sense than—
It was in the quiet that Kalypso realized the vulnerability she’d almost let slip, and her defenses slammed back into place. “What? No, I was just bored. Not much to do in a room with no windows.”
He stared at her, dark eyes narrowing in suspicion. “Well, don’t bother yourself. You can’t understand them, and there’s one that will shock you like the pulse from a scyphomoth if you stray more than ten yards from me on our way to the barracks.”
Ozirax spun on his heel and strode for the door, and Kaly was forced to scramble off the bed to chase after him. “What? You’re lying.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” He turned a corner so fast she had to use a wall to help propel her back to his side. “Do you want to risk it? Do it while we’re still in the infirmary so I don’t have to drag you far.”
That only tempted her to risk it as far from the infirmary as possible, just to be another inconvenience to him, but she also preferred consciousness after all the sorcery in her blood, so she stayed close.
Ozirax chuckled, like he thought he’d won, then shoved through the front doors into…
“Oh.”
Her feet stopped moving on the front steps, eyes wide as she took in the world around her. What she vaguely remembered of the outskirts of the Achreos Barrens—the forbidden forest that concealed vicious demons—was nothing like what she saw now.
This was a city. With buildings, and, yes, trees that weren’t green and bright like the ones on the human side, but they were flourishing with life.
A giant fucking pit that looked like a scar in the center of their town—completely accepted by the passersby, who looked none too vicious and bloodthirsty, unlike the stories told by humans.
A winged creature that was definitely not a bird swooped overhead.
Stars and a glowing moon hung in the dark sky.
“I thought it was day?”
To her relief, Ozirax had paused less than ten yards away, and while he looked mildly annoyed at the delay, he still answered her. “It is.”
“Sure, asshole. This is day.” She flung her hand toward the moon.
But he only cocked his head. “The daymoon. Signifying daytime.”
“So your night is—”
“Moonless—are you really wasting my time for this?”
Kalypso crossed her arms. “Fuck you. No windows, remember? How was I supposed to know Achreos Barrens didn’t have a sun?”
Ozirax rolled his eyes. “Our city is called Heck.”
“Yeah, I’m not calling it that.”
He grumbled something that contained the words stubborn and not worth it before gesturing to the street. “Are you finished gawking? We are late for meeting the squadron.”
At least this time he waited for her to start walking before he continued. And despite the stares that blatantly followed them, Kalypso found herself more nervous about their destination than the passersby not hiding their interest in the human.
A squadron. She’d never been one for teams, other than her and her sister, but these demons would determine if she could see Kat again, so she’d need to play along.
Did she even know how to participate in something like a squad? Would they even try to accept her, or just write her off and make sure she never had the chance to see her sister again?
Ozirax certainly wouldn’t care.
A fist caught her sleeve and yanked her back.
“What the fuck?” she snapped, jerking her arm away from the purple demon.
“Remember the shock?” he asked plainly, gesturing to two unassuming trees in their path.
Kalypso almost snarled at him, but then her gaze caught on the bark of one tree. The trunk was a dark purple, almost indistinguishable from black, but carved into the surface was a symbol—bisecting lines and a whorl that somehow seemed to ripple.
She lifted her wrist. “That’s on my—” She bit her tongue at his suspicious gaze. “It’s a rune.”
After a long moment, he nodded. “It’s a checkpoint. Walk through it without waving your cuff over the rune and you’ll need another trip to the infirmary. The one in the barracks is not as nice, fair warning, and much less accommodating.”
Kaly frowned. “Wait, a checkpoint for going inside the barracks? Where I’m supposed to be?”
One side of Ozirax’s lips popped up in a smirk. “No, only when you leave,” he teased. “But that rune on your cuff also alerts me if you leave. So if you try it, know when I catch you again, you won’t like the consequences.”
He breezed past her before she could even think about trying to punch him, and she was forced to sprint after him or test that ten-yard theory before they were inside the barracks.
As she passed under the trees, she could feel the magic settle on her shoulders. A vast difference between what the sorcery had done to her, but uncomfortable nonetheless at the thought of something intangible having such a tangible effect on her. Again.
But unlike the sorcery, that weight passed in an instant, and Kalypso was surprised to find the barracks barely another one hundred yards from the path.
Three major clusters of stone structures took up the open space, sharing a central courtyard of rich purple grass and trees. Just beyond two of the buildings, she could make out even more purple fields, spots of color showing demons training with weapons and fists. Even a stray blast of fire.