Not anymore.
“No!” Nico shouted, stepping away from Den, her body flashing between hard flesh and smokey shadow as she tried to push the demon back.
Oh yes, the demon answered, completely ignoring her efforts. I told you. Every time you used your powers, I would come back. Every time you were weak, I’d be here. You just suffused your body into shadow to beat this man. How can you even dare to say you’re still human?
“No!” Nico screamed again, clutching her head between her claws. “I am my own master! My soul is my own!”
That may be, the demon said. But that doesn’t mean you’re still human. The voice paused. Do you know how new demons are made, Nico?
Nico clamped her mouth shut, but the demon went on anyway.
I can replicate myself forever through seeds, it said. Over and over, always the same, little shoots of myself growing in fertile soil. But sometimes, through extraordinary pressure, a seed changes. It ceases to be a part of me and becomes something new. A new demon, a true demon, with its own ambitions and drives. If this was the world that was, the world before, I would now try to kill you. Predators can’t abide competition, after all. But this isn’t our world, is it? It’s her world, and so I think I’ll let you be.
“Her who?” Nico snapped.
The demon laughed. Our darling jailor, of course. You’ll know her when she comes, but by then it will be too late. Maybe she’ll actually manage to destroy you rather than just locking you under a corpse, as she did me. But trust me when I say this, little daughter, whatever plans Benehime has for you, the day will come when you would give anything to go back to the time when I was the biggest thing you had to worry about.
“I doubt that,” Nico muttered, pushing the demon’s voice down, down, down until it was little more than a whisper.
You’ll see, the demon said as he faded. Talk to you soon.
Nico slammed the boulder down with a rage she’d never felt before. She was standing in the field, panting as the cool air blew over her face. But even as she realized where she was, she knew something was wrong. Her field, the high golden field of her soul with its rolling hills and enormous sky, was dark. It was night, a cool, still night. Nico looked around in confusion and pictured the sun, the bright noon day that she’d created when she’d made this place.
No sun came. When she looked up at the sky, all she saw was darkness. Endless, endless darkness, and something else. She squinted. High overhead, something was moving against the black sky. A hand, she realized as her blood went cold. A clawed hand, scraping at the sky. From the second she saw it, she could not look away. The hand clenched in the dark above her, clawing faster, harder, until at last it grabbed a great fistful of the sky and, with a horrible, twisting motion, ripped it away.
Harsh, blinding light burned her to ash. Nico fell with a scream, eyes slamming open. She was back on the beach, lying in the sand with Eli standing over her. He was panting like he’d just run a marathon and his hands were gripping the black cloth of her coat, which he’d just torn down.
She blinked at him, confused. “What happened?”
Eli glanced at something beside her. “Looks like you won.”
Slowly, painfully, Nico turned her head. Den’s face lay a foot from her own, his dead eyes open and staring into hers.
“I won,” she whispered.
“You did,” Eli said, reaching toward her with her coat. “Now let’s try to help you survive it.”
Nico looked at him in confusion, and then, hesitantly, she glanced down at her body. Her eyes widened. She was covered in a slick, black liquid. The stuff oozed like hot tar, but it smelled coppery, and it was oozing out of her. Nico’s breath caught in what was left of her chest. It was blood, black blood. Her black blood.
With a choked scream, Nico started to scramble away on instinct only to find she couldn’t. Beneath the tarry slick of her blood, her arms were twisted and broken. So were her legs. She looked like a little ink-filled doll dropped from a great height and shattered on the stone. She didn’t even feel pain as she stared at what the demon transformation had left of her body, not at first, and not for the next several seconds. But once it came, it consumed her. Shaking uncontrollably, she fell into the sand, gasping against her panic-frozen lungs as Eli knelt beside her.
She tried to say something, but her mouth wouldn’t work. Eli wouldn’t have heard her anyway; he was focused on her limbs. A blinding crack of pain hit her as he pulled them straight, wrapping each one as fast as he could with her coat. She focused on his face as she fought to stay conscious, trying not to think about why he looked so pale and scared.