Page 66 of Wrath's Call

“Why?”

“Clearly you’re too young to understand.” I taunted, and the demon flashed the glimmer in her silver eyes yet again.

“I am much older than you think.” she replied, the first genuine signs of emotion coming from the creature before me, “She really is safer here.”

“I can protect her,” I replied.

“Protect her?” The childlike laugh sent chills up my spine despite the heat. “The only protection she needs is from me.”

To punctuate the statement the girl spread out her arms, waves of silver crashing across the flames leaving only scorched marks and smoke behind.

“Do you see? Wrath has nothing on me,” she giggled, but the inflection had no humor.

“I am the ruler of all demons on this plain, I can protect her.” I said, folding my arms over my chest.

“Oh? And where were you then?” she asked, tilting her small head to the side, blinking large luminous eyes where black had seeped in to replace the white around her reflective irises.

“What do you mean?” I asked, a v forming between my brows.

“All the times I had to protect her, where were you?” she asked again, tilting her small head in the other direction.

“I didn’t know about her.”

“Ignorance is no excuse,” the entity seethed, “She needed protecting. You weren’t there. I was.”

“Give me a chance now.”

The entity raised her pinky to her teeth, nibbling slightly at the end reminding me of the first time I’d seen my Little Thief in the clearing. Had that only been days ago?

“I’ve been watching you for a long time,” her words sending a shiver of unease down my spine.

“You have?” I asked, the furrow deepening between my brows tugging at the scar there.

“Yes,” she replied without inflection. “I’ve had to wait for her, you see.”

“Wait for her?”

“To come here.”

The furrow deepened. “You waited for her birth?”

The demon removed the finger from her mouth as she stared at me with deadened eyes. “No, I didn’t wait for her birth. I waited for her. To join me.”

“I don’t understand.” This was much more difficult to admit than I would have liked. Not understanding something belied weakness, and I did everything I could to avoid appearing weak - even to a childlike demon.

The entity sighed, raising her hand to her forehead. Her expression seemed aged, as if centuries weighed heavily upon her rather than the mere two decades she’d lived.

“Are you the one that was controlling her memories?” I asked, trying to get the demon to continue to talk to me.

“Her friend tried to fix her and get her to forget. The friend feared for her. And she was right to be afraid - she hurt too much to know the truth. So I fixed it instead.”

“Did you kill her mentor?” I asked, refusing to beat around the bush on the topic.

“No, the judgment did,” the child ignored me again and continued. “She blames herself for it, and rightly so. She made a judgment. Judgments get people killed.”

Without warning my demon rose, and for only the second time in decades the bastard pushed me back and out of the way. Only this time I lost all my senses but sight - something he had never been able to yank from me during his little soirees of control. But by all the sins below he had tried.

I watched as he approached the girl, towering over her much smaller frame as she looked defiantly up at him. Words were exchanged, and not for the first time did I curse my inability to read lips. I would have to rectify this, especially if the burning bastard was using some of my overly pent-up stores of wrath for play time.

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