Chapter 32 #2
She held my stare for a moment. “And you agree with this? You think the sacrifice of the few is better for the many?” It was a genuine question.
“No, I don’t.” I shook my head.
She nodded slowly as she processed everything.
“I have just one more question, then I’ll stop.”
I turned to look at her and raised my head for her to continue. She had barely scratched the surface of what she wanted to ask, and if I knew her well, she wasn’t going to stop until she got all of her answers.
“You said inner demon. What does that mean?”
“Why tell her when we can show her?” my demon chuckled darkly, and I could feel the excitement bubbling in him. “We could ruin her in so many ways.”
I gave him the equivalent of a shove, then cleared my throat.
“Demons are demons because we have demons.”
Her face scrunched, clearly confused.
Damn, that’s cute.
I pushed a low-hanging branch aside and held it away so she could pass by.
“Our inner demon is what sets us apart from humans. It’s what makes us demonic in the first place.
Aside from a few physical attributes that we can choose to show,” I held up my hand and let my claws emerge before retracting them again, “we look just like humans. Except, we each have a demon within.”
She raised a brow, still not getting it.
I blew out a breath, trying to think of how to explain it in another way. “Think of it like…someone else living inside you. Not a reflection or a whisper. It’s you, but twisted. Feral. Inhuman. And…violent. They share your thoughts, your instincts, your body, and even your soul—always there.”
“So, there are two of you living inside your body?”
“It’s not as harmonious as it sounds. They want full control, and they don’t always relinquish their dominion over us.
It’s a constant battle to keep that separation—to hold them at bay and keep our grasp on any bits of the humanity we’re born with.
” I paused for just a moment, letting my own words sink in. “That’s what makes us demons.”
She chewed on her bottom lip, deep in thought for a moment. “And what happens when you lose that battle?”
“Then it takes over completely. You hunger for blood without hesitation, rage without reason. You forget the faces of those you love and tear into them without a second thought—becoming a barbaric husk of what you once were. And if you can’t regain that dominance, if you are entirely consumed in that darkness, you’re no longer just possessed—you become the demon.
A single entity, without being able to separate yourself again. ”
She tensed, her spine straightening. “Isn’t that what you want, though?”
“No.” My head tilted to the side as I looked at her. “Why would we want that? We want to be able to control it, not be controlled by it. We have normal lives outside of the Hunt that we want to live.”
“Then… But I thought…” She stumbled on her words. “Isn’t that the point of the Hunt?”
“Sort of, but not really. We can’t hold back our demons forever—at least, not most of us. The Hunt allows us to release them for a period of time, it satisfies them long enough so we can continue to hold them back even longer. So long as we can contain them again.”
Her face paled. I hadn’t intended to scare her; I was just merely stating the facts. Maybe I’d given her more than she was ready to hear. Perhaps I’d gone too far and forgotten that most people didn’t survive knowing these things.
She remained silent after that, and I wondered if she regretted asking in the first place. I wasn’t going to lie to her. I’d done enough of that already.
But that look of fear… It raised something in me, exciting me in ways it shouldn’t have. The hitch in her breath had my blood pumping faster, imagining that breath beneath me after trying to escape me.
“Stop…” I groaned to my demon.
He merely chuckled.
I couldn’t wait to get to the river. And not just to clean off the sweat and blood caked on my skin and clothes. I’d gotten most of it off my shirt, but I could still feel the grime on my skin. I also needed to cool off, to wash away the ideas my demon had implanted.
But fortunately, she finally spoke again, and I was relieved of the images conjured from my wandering mind.
“Why do you make the towns vote?”
“Uh…”
That was the furthest from what I could have guessed would come from her mouth. It was like mental whiplash to go from what I was thinking to what she asked.
I cleared my throat. “We don’t. It’s a system some of the towns came up with. Others have a volunteer system or a competition—”
“No, no, I know that,” she interrupted. “Wrong choice of words. I mean, why don’t demons just grab a random woman? Why force the towns to choose who the sacrifice will be? It seems cruel to make them decide.”
“As hard as it may be to believe, the Ministry wanted the people to have the choice.”
“Hmm.” Her eyes went distant in thought for a moment. “Do many women survive the Hunt? My town has only heard of a few, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t more survivors, right?”
“No. Just once in a while. The last one to survive was over thirty years ago. Nearly fifty before that.”
Draven’s wife had been the last one to survive.
Then she went on to marry him. But I had no idea he had been the one to save her from the Hunt.
It was also why the humans never knew about her survival.
She couldn’t talk about it since she married a demon and took the oath with the Ministry.
They were forced to move to another town, completely uprooting their lives.
“And you do this every year?”
“Demons, yes. Me, personally? No. This is my first time. We have to be invited to participate by the Ministry.”
“Why would a decent demon ever want to do this?” She shook her head.
She had called me decent which was an improvement. It was better than bastard.
“Honor. And a ranking, to potentially be placed within the Ministry. Plus, the temptation of letting our inner demon out is usually too much to pass up when we’re given the chance.”
“So is that why you’re here then?”
“What?” The question caught me off guard. I turned my head to look at her and found her staring back. I hadn’t realized I’d stopped walking. I was only here because of her.
“She knows who we are,” my demon crooned. “We’re going to have to—”
“So you can be ranked in the Ministry?” she clarified, cutting off the voice inside my head. “Since you aren’t trying to kill me, I’m assuming you aren’t here to let your inner demon out; whatever that means.”
“Oh.” I started walking again, trying to mask the fact that her question had rattled me. “It’s beneficial to know.” It was becoming increasingly more difficult to not tell her the truth while also not fully lying to her either.
“Well, when you go back to your Ministry, tell them to let you all hunt goats or something. Or at the very least, force the towns to pick a different system. Voting out the weakest or the ones ostracized by society is wrong…”
I stayed quiet, waiting for her to continue. Her eyes became glossy with unshed tears.
“You don’t understand what it’s like to be chosen to die for something you didn’t do.
For something that was done to you. By someone you trusted wouldn’t hurt you…
To have the people you grew up with, a community that raised you, turn on you because of a lie they ignorantly believed.
Then vote you to be an unwilling participant in some stupid, demonic tradition.
All after watching your family be slaughtered right in front of you.
” She stopped and closed her eyes, a single tear falling over her lips as they formed a whisper that struck my chest like a blade, “I hate demons.”
Hours.
She hadn’t said a word in hours. It made me uneasy, anxious to know what she was thinking. I wanted to shake the damn words out of her. Especially after I caught a strange glance from her at one point, as if she was studying me carefully.
Her scrutiny set my nerves on fire. I was on edge, and I couldn’t take it. My jaw clenched, and I breathed through the spiral, yet all I wanted to do was scream—
“Stop projecting your anxiousness onto me,” I snapped at my demon, realizing it wasn’t me at all. “I’m going to lose my shit.”
“Good,” he snarled. “Break. Unravel. There are only three days left, and you’re wasting our time, our only opportunity, with your pathetic restraint.”
I balled my fists hard enough to turn my knuckles white.
“That’s enough,” I roared. “We’re here to protect her, remember? Or did you forget the whole fucking vow?”
A tense silence stretched between us.
“I haven’t forgotten.” His voice dropped low, eerily calm. “We’d never hurt her. You know that.”
I did know. But I also knew he wanted something.
“There are…other ways to ruin,” he said, and I could feel the smile in his voice. “Other ways to feel a pulse beneath our fingertips. Other ways to taste what we’ve been deprived of for so long.”
I swallowed.
“You’re fighting it, but we both saw the way her breath caught when we touched her, how her pulse jumped. And she has no idea what she’s doing to us every time she looks at us like that.”
I pushed the thought away and glanced at her. She was still walking next to me, completely unaware of the war raging inside me.
“She was looking at me like she was figuring out who I am,” I clarified.
“Or maybe you’re too much of a coward to see the desire in her eyes and instead are mistaking it for what you fear.”
“Even if that’s true, she doesn’t mean it. Not anymore.” Right?
“But she wants to.”
Did she? Was she looking for a connection to who I was, and he was trying to convince me otherwise, just to get what he wants? Or was she looking at me with something I hadn’t seen in so long I no longer recognized it?
“Let us show her what it means to be desired by someone who could destroy her and chooses not to. By someone who has watched her, longed for her for years, and finally gets to break the restraint you placed on us,” his voice hummed.
I shoved him away with every ounce of will I had, but now that he had planted the thought, I couldn’t get rid of it.