Page 9 of Demon Monster's Little Human

Her lips press together.

I step closer, watching the flicker of tension ripple through her frame. She doesn’t retreat. “Something else chased you,” I murmur, voice rough.

Her throat works on a swallow, barely visible in the dim light. “I—I didn’t see it. Just heard it. Felt it. Also, who are you? What do I call you? You can call me Liora.”

My claws twitch at my sides. Liora. Good name.

Curiosity will kill her, but I can’t stop myself from answering.

“Dain,” I whisper, staring at her.

“Dain,” she repeats, and something in me almost snaps. It’s as if it’s wrong and right at the same time. Why is that? I frown, disregarding my questions.

Now isn’t the time. We have a more pressing problem.

If she stumbled in here by chance, if her magic had truly been an accident, then why had she been hunted?

Unless…

I exhale, slow, steady. The dark elves would never leave something as valuable as this tomb unguarded.

She shouldn’t have escaped.

She was meant to die.

The realization settles over me like an old, familiar truth.

They fed her to the beast.

She doesn’t realize it yet, doesn’t understand the kind of death that had been meant for her.

But I do. And the beast still lingers.

A new sound crawls through the tunnel, slow, dragging. A deep inhalation of something ancient catching our scent.

The girl hears it too. She stiffens. Eyes go wide.

She is prey again.

I turn away from her, scanning the darkness ahead. My magic stirs, flickering in and out of reach, sluggish and wrong, still too raw from waking. I feel the echo of something more, something vast and furious, but I cannot grasp it.

A growl builds in my chest.

The girl hesitates behind me. “You… You said I used magic.”

I glance at her, irritation flickering through me. “You don’t know what you are?”

A slow shake of her head. “I’ve never practiced. I’ve never been allowed to. It just… happened.”

No. That is not how magic works. Magic is forged, trained, shaped into something precise. It does not simply happen.

Unless—

My eyes narrow.

“It felt like instinct,” she murmurs. “Like something buried—something that was always there.”

Something engraved in her soul.

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