Page 93 of Run Like the Devil

I went to reach for the serving fork, but Cain took it before I could. He went about serving food for me, not asking what I liked but instead giving me some of everything. No doubt he did that so he didn’t have to fight over each and every dish.

Afterward, he filled one of my glasses with water and the other with a red liquid, doing the same with his own cups from the same pitchers.

“Nona said you were limping when you arrived.”

“Had a run-in with a hentai monster.”

He frowned for a moment, his expression flattening a bit as Nona’s had earlier. It was beyond strange, the way they seemed to freeze for a moment before resuming as if they hadn’t paused at all. “You mean The Guardian.”

“Yeah, that bastard. He’s had a hard-on for me since I got here, and he’s not great at taking no for an answer.”

“Perhaps it sees you as an easy target.”

“First—rude. I’m not an easy target. Secondly, yeah, it’s targeted me. Even when I’m not the easiest to get to, it swipes at me. It grabbed my leg and dragged me through the forest.”

“But you survived.”

“Let’s say I taught it a lesson in consent. It doesn’t seem to care for things shoved into it without asking, so I’m hoping it applies that pretty liberally.”

“Hmm.” The sounds he let out would have made me think that he wasn’t paying any attention, that he cared little for my answer, but when I looked up from the food to his face, his expression said that was far from the truth.

He stared at me with an intensity that would warrant a restraining order for most people.

“How did you make this place?” I asked, desperate to change the conversation.

“The Path is like mud. It is created around those who exist here. If there is no one here, nothing exists. Once someone understands this, they can control the form it takes to some extent. I arrived here a very long time ago, and I created this place as a haven. Over the years, others have come to me, and I have taken them in.”

“Why stay here though?”

Cain tapped his finger on the table. “The Path is a raging river. On one side of that river is the Chasm, and on the other, the Plains. This place is a log resting in the center, a place for the lost to rest. We have no way forward, have not discovered how to pass from the log to the riverbank. We wait until we find it.”

“So why not go back to the Chasm? It has to be better than this?”

“The Chasm is a dead end. It is chaos and it is violence. This small haven may not be much, but it allows us to be closer to the Plains than anywhere else. It is the best chance we have to make it through, to find the way past The Guardian and into Paradise.”

“But you’ve been here so long. How can you still believe there’s a way? I mean, if you haven’t figured it out yet, why do you still think it’s possible?” I shut my mouth before I went on, before I insulted him by basically asking how the fuck he hadn’t given up on this stupid idea yet.

And given I was here in the same exact position, that was probably a pretty unfair thing to ask.

Cain leaned back in his chair, his fingers drumming over the armrest. “I know because I can feel it. I know it is possible because if there were no route through, they wouldn’t need The Guardian to protect anything. I learned long ago that the larger the beast that protects something, the more valuable the treasure must be. The Guardian is a very large beast, and the only thing worth protecting with that is the Plains.”

I shook my head. It was probably stupid to think someone as old as him as naïve, but that was exactly how it struck me. Still, his information might help. If he’d failed a hundred times, well, that was a hundred theories I could mark off my list.

“So how do you think you get past Guardian then? If you think it’s possible, how do you think you do it?”

“The Guardian is connected with Hubis. It kills without mercy, though it toys with its prey first.”

“That doesn’t sound promising.”

“The Guardian is not mindless. It is connected to Hubis but it is not without its own personality. I didn’t realize it at first, of course. It took so many years here, so many deaths from others, for me to understand. It does not cross here, into this town, I believe because we do not leave the town. Its purpose is to prevent others from gaining access to the Plains, so as long as we remain here, it pays us no attention.”

“Lucky you.”

“Indeed. Your arrival has changed that, however. While you were resting prior to dinner, I walked the boundary of our town, and The Guardian prowled there. It did not enter the grounds, but it has never ventured so close nor stayed so long. Even now, it sits just past the clearing, as if waiting for something.”

“So apparently my lesson didn’t stick.”

He reached out and caught my chin, leaning in to stare into my eyes. There was so much desire in his eyes, but it wasn’t lust. Instead, it felt like he was salivating over a meal, as if he saw the final piece to a puzzle. “You stir The Guardian in a way no one else has. We have had demons here—damned never survive this far—and we have even had Lords before, but The Guardian has paid them no mind.”

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