Chapter 7 #2
“Significantly more complicated than Nix.” He glances at the creature, who has started building a small nest out of ribbons and spare practice skirts. “He’s actually the simple part.”
I should be angrier. I should be demanding explanations, threatening to call the police, and kicking him out of my studio and my life. Instead, I find myself studying the tension around his eyes and the way he’s holding himself like someone bracing for a blow.
He’s scared, I realize. Scared that I’ll send him away.
“Mal.” I wait until he meets my eyes. “What are you?”
The question surprises both of us. I watch him consider and discard a dozen possible responses.
“Does it matter?” he asks finally.
“Of course it matters.”
“Why?”
“Because—” I falter. Because it changes things? Because I need to know who I’m kissing, who I’m teaching, who I’m trusting? Because my mother’s voice in my head is screaming that this is exactly the kind of chaos I’ve spent my whole life avoiding?
“Because you’re hiding something,” I finish lamely. “And I don’t like not knowing.”
“You don’t like not being in control,” he corrects gently. “There’s a difference.”
“Don’t psychoanalyze me.”
“I’m not. I’m just pointing out that your need for information isn’t about safety. It’s about maintaining your carefully constructed walls.” He steps closer, and I don’t step back. “You want to categorize me and put me in a box. To decide if I’m worthy or unworthy, safe or—”
“You have an imp,” I interrupt. “A talking, stealing imp that you’ve been sending to spy on me. I think my concerns about safety are valid.”
“Nix wouldn’t hurt you.”
“How do I know that?”
“Because I wouldn’t let him.” His voice is suddenly fierce with the kind of intensity that makes my breath catch. “Whatever else you believe about me, believe that. I would never let anything hurt you. Not Nix. Not anything.”
The silence that follows is thick enough to taste.
Nix has stopped arranging his nest. His enormous yellow eyes flick between us, and his skin shifts to a soft, uncertain pink.
“Boss likes the dance lady,” he announces. “Nix can tell.”
“Thank you for that observation,” Mal says dryly.
“Nix likes her too.” The imp hops off the filing cabinet, waddling toward me with surprising confidence. “Dance lady has good energy. Warm. Like fire but soft.”
I stare down at him. He stares up at me.
“Nix is sorry for taking the shiny things,” he says, extending one small paw. In it rests a single ribbon—pink, slightly crumpled, one of my favorites. “Nix will give them back. Most of them. Not the straw.”
I relax, just slightly.
“Keep the straw,” I hear myself say.
Nix’s face splits into a grin full of tiny, pointed teeth. “Dance lady is kind. Boss picked good.”
“Boss didn’t pick—” Mal starts.
“Boss picked.” Nix nods sagely. “Nix has watched. Boss watches dance lady when she’s not looking. Boss’s heart does the fluttery thing when she laughs. Boss—”
“That’s enough, Nix.”
“—talks about dance lady in his sleep.”
“Nix!”
The imp cackles, a high-pitched sound that shouldn’t be as endearing as it is. He scurries behind my legs, using me as a shield against Mal’s mortified glare.
“Is that true?” I ask, fighting a smile.
“He exaggerates.”
“Does he?”
“Imps are notorious liars.”
“Nix doesn’t lie about boss.” The imp peeks out from behind my legs. “Nix just observes.”
Mal pinches the bridge of his nose. “I’m going to trade you to a lesser demon for a pair of socks.”
“No you won’t. Nix is adorable.”
“Nix is a menace.”
“Menace and adorable.” The imp shrugs. “Both can be true.”
I look at Mal—flustered, frustrated, and somehow more human than I’ve ever seen him.
Then I look at Nix, who has apparently decided that hiding behind my legs makes me his new protector.
Then I look at my studio, visible through the office window, where chaos still lingers in the form of overturned chairs and scattered props.
“I have questions,” I say finally.
Mal’s shoulders tense. “I imagined you would.”
“A lot of questions. About Nix. About you. About whatever else you’re clearly not telling me.”
“Isadora—”
“But.” I hold up a hand, stopping him. “I also have a class to reschedule, parents to reassure, and a business reputation to salvage. So the questions will have to wait.”
Relief flickers across his face, quickly hidden. “How long will they wait?”
“That depends.” I meet his eyes, letting him see that I mean it. “On whether you plan to actually answer them.”
A long pause. Nix shifts nervously, his skin cycling through colors like a small, worried mood ring.
“I’ll answer what I can,” Mal says finally. “Some things I’m... not free to discuss.”
“Not free?”
“Bound.” His hand touches the bracelet again. “It’s complicated.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it keeps being true.”
We stare at each other across the small office. The afternoon light slants through the window, catching dust motes and turning them to gold. Somewhere in the distance, a car horn honks, a reminder that the normal world continues outside this strange bubble we’ve created.
“Tonight,” I decide. “After the studio closes. You’ll stay, and we’ll talk.”
“And if you don’t like what I tell you?”
“Then we’ll figure out what happens next.”
It’s not a promise. It’s not a threat. It’s just the truth—messy and uncertain and entirely unlike the controlled life I’ve worked so hard to build.
Mal nods slowly. “Tonight, then.”
“Tonight.”
Nix tugs at my practice skirt, drawing my attention downward.
“Does this mean Nix can stay?” His eyes are huge and hopeful. “Nix promises to be good. Mostly good. Good-adjacent.”
I look at the imp and look at Mal, and I feel the foundations of my carefully ordered world shifting beneath my feet.
What are you doing? my mother’s voice demands. This is exactly the kind of chaos that destroys everything.
But for once, I don’t listen.
“You can stay,” I tell Nix. “But if you steal anything else, I’m confiscating every ribbon in this studio.”
His face lights up—literally, his skin flushing a brilliant, joyful gold. “Deal! Dance lady is the best. Nix is going to tell everyone.”
“Please don’t.”
But he’s already scrambling up the filing cabinet, chattering to himself about warm fire energy and good choices and something that sounds suspiciously like “tiny romance babies.”
I don’t ask.
I really, really don’t want to know.
The rest of the afternoon passes in a haze of damage control.
Three parents call to express concern. Two more send strongly worded emails.
Mrs. Delacroix posts a video on the Bellamy Cove community Facebook page with the caption “DEMON CREATURE ATTACKS CHILDREN’S DANCE CLASS”, which gets forty-seven comments before Bianca somehow convinces her to take it down.
By the time the last class ends and the final student leaves, I’m exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with physical exertion. My brain feels like it’s been through a washing machine, spinning and tumbling and coming out wrinkled and damp.
Mal has stayed, as promised. He sits in the corner of the studio, reviewing the choreography notes I gave him last week, looking for all the world like a normal student in a normal dance school.
Nix is curled on the windowsill, fast asleep, his small chest rising and falling with each breath.
I lock the front door. Flip the sign to “CLOSED.” Take a moment to lean against the glass and watch the evening light fade over Bellamy Cove.
An imp, I think. He has an imp. A talking, stealing, color-changing imp that apparently lives with him and does reconnaissance and knows things about his feelings that he doesn’t admit out loud.
It should be a dealbreaker. It should be the final straw, the point where I walk away from whatever this is and return to my safe, controlled, monster-free life.
Instead, I find myself crossing the studio toward him, drawn by the same inexplicable pull that’s been tugging at me since the moment he walked into my beginner class.
“Ready?” I ask.
He looks up from the notes. His eyes are darker in this light, shadowed and deep.
“Are you?”
I think about the question. Really think about it.
“No,” I admit. “But ask me anyway.”
His smile is soft, almost sad. “Brave.”
“Terrified,” I correct. “But I’ve learned they’re not mutually exclusive.”
He sets down the notes. Stands. Moves toward me with that fluid grace I’ve come to recognize as not-quite-human.
“Where should we start?”
I look at his bracelet, at the two ruby stones that glow faintly against the black.
“There,” I say. “Start with the bracelet. Start with why the stones have changed color.”
Something flickers in his expression. Pain, maybe. Or hope.
“That,” he says, “is going to take a while.”
“I have time.”
He studies my face like he’s looking for something. Whatever it is, he seems to find it.
“Then we’d better sit down.”
And as we settle onto the floor of my studio, backs against the mirrored wall, the evening light painting everything in shades of gold and shadow, I realize that I’m not afraid anymore.
I’m curious.
And for someone who’s spent her whole life avoiding chaos, that might be the most terrifying thing of all.