Page 28 of Cookbooks and Demons

Beside her, a pair of knees hit the ground.

She jumped, making a smallyip sound.

A hand dropped next to the knees, and a wing appearedover her.

Rafferty panted, fully back in his demonic form.

“What happened? What did you do?” she croaked out, her tongue feeling large in her mouth.

“I paid the cosmic debt,” he ground out, voice full of pain. “You’re going to be alright now.” Then he leaned forward, resting his forehead and the curved bend of his backward sweeping horns on the ground before laying his wings over himself, like he was tryingto hide.

Helena pushed herself back up to sitting, wrapping her arms around her legs. The wrongness feeling was back, but she didn’t pay it any mind. She knew it was just Rafferty. She stared at his form as it pulsed with his breath.

“Are you alright?” she made herself ask.

“No,” hegrowled.

Her vision became cloudy, and Helena rubbed the grit from her eyes. “I don’t understand. How did you paythe debt?”

“If, for whatever reason, a demon cannot get someone else to take the debt for them, the cosmic imbalance will burn us away instead. Permanently. We have no bodies, no memories… all we have leftis souls.”

Helena’s eyes went wide as she realized what that meant. “And when that isall gone…”

His wings tightened around his body reflexively.

“But Rafferty… why did you do that?” Helena asked.

“I don’t know,” hewhispered.

Chapter 16

Inviting a Demonto Dinner

“We have our own debts to pay back, and if we don’t find someone else to take our places when that happens…” Rafferty said. “It’s how they motivate us into joining the demonic Ponzi scheme. A small glimmer of hope that we can actually save ourselves,” Rafferty said calmly.

They had returned to the dining room, and he had shifted to his easier-to-be-around human form. To Helena’s surprise, most of the food Rafferty cooked had been destroyed, along with several of the dishes they had been sitting on, leaving nothing but ash in its place. Not her new Fiestaware for some reason.

“And why did it damage all the food?” Helena asked, taking another sip of a new bubble water can. The original bubble water had turnedbrackish.

“The imbalance doesn’t really care what pays the price, just as long as it’s paid. Most food is made of organic compounds, fruits, vegetables, flesh. Living stuff, or recently living stuff from creation, but has no will any more to resist. Those sorts of sacrifices can replace the body price. It was easy and nearby.”

Helena furrowed her eyebrows. “So like, the ancient feasts to the gods were really this sortof thing?”

“Humans have always tried to play with these forces. More than one civilization has been destroyed trying to keep up with the price. That’s why the majority of humans moved away from this sort of thing,” Rafferty said. “Because it is stupid.”

Helena looked down at the floor of her dining room, trying to process. The floor itself was surprisingly clean. “But my house?” She indicated the wood table and wood floor. There was no damage that she could see. “Those things are made from organic compounds fromcreation?”

“Longer dead, older, covered in lacquers it would have to eat through. It would consume them eventually, but it would take longer and isn’t as easy. It would have devoured you first before it would start in on the floors. Even stone would eventually be crumbled into dust, turning all of this around it into a hellscape until the balanceis paid.”

Helena looked down at her hands, which still shook. The skin hung dry over her bones, like all the moisture had been sucked out. She had been sipping water for a while, but when she had managed to crawl out of the kitchen with Rafferty, her tongue kept sticking to the roof of her mouth. She didn’t understand what any of this meant, or what exactly had happened to her, but she knew one thing—she was never going into her kitchen again.

Helena had to fight the urge to run out of her house.

“Are we safe now?” she asked in a small voice.

“Yes, the debt is paid, and if we don’t use any more demonic magic, we won’t incur any more debt. Except the one that I inherently already have just being here. The circle is more or less closed. If I hadn’t used demonic magic at all, I’m not sure it would have gotten through now.”

“I’m never going to sleep tonight,” she said, shaking her head at all this horrible information.

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