Billy turned the cold tap and bent over the sink, splashing water across his face, letting it run down his neck and jaw.
He cupped some and drank from his palm. It tasted faintly metallic the way tap water always did.
And looked at himself in the mirror
Charcoal black eyes, rinsed clean now. Black hair, damp and pushed back from his face, almost long enough to fall across his eyes when left alone.
A jawline that had been filling out quietly over the last year without him noticing. He looked older than seventeen, or maybe just tired in a way that read as older.
He studied his reflection, though he wasn't sure what he was looking for. Some evidence of yesterday. Some visible mark that said something had changed.
Nothing obvious. Just him.
Then a voice slipped in his mind without warning, clear and unhurried. "What are you looking at?"
He remained silent for a while, then finally said.
"Don't know."
He woke to the television. Turned it on.
"— in other news, the casino Liberty Case was attacked last night by a demon. Fourteen people were injured, but no fatalities were reported. This marks the seventh demon attack this month, raising concerns among residents and prompting renewed calls for the Oder to increase patrols—"
Billy silenced it in his head and got up.
He made instant ramen and ate it standing at the counter, staring at nothing.
"Huh... Demons." He sat his bowel. "What do they actually want?" h
Blood. Other devour humans as a source of food. The only one keeping them from leaving.
"I know that." He wiped a noodle from his chin. "But it's still strange."
It had been a few years since demons had started appearing on Earth. Nobody knew exactly why. Some said Hell's gates were weakening, others blamed dark rituals gone wrong. Either way, an organization had been created to hunt them down.
Since then, everybody's safety was never quite certain.
What you say you drive my car. Get some air. Forget about it for a while.
He allowed himself to smile.
"Yeah." He picked up the keys off the desk. "That sounds exactly right."
----
The elevator took its time, as always.
Billy found the grey sedan in its spot. Eva's car. His now, technically, but it still felt like hers.
He slid into the driver's seat. The leather was warm from the morning heat.
He inserted the key. The engine turned over with a low, satisfying growl.
"Okay," he said, and he couldn't keep the smile off his face. "Let's ride this thing.
"He hit the gas."
He drove with no direction.
That was the point. Through Shibuya's mid-morning traffic first. Crowds crossing intersections. Bikes weaving through cars. The noise of thousands of lives moving at once.
Then gradually, toward quieter streets.
The buildings thinned. The roads opened.
He passed the warehouse district without meaning to, but recognized it anyway. The light hitting old metal. Weeds breaking through concrete.
He had woken up in one of those buildings months ago, ash still clinging to him, a crystal pendant in his hand, and no sign of Eva anywhere in the physical world.
He kept driving.
Eventually he found what he'd been moving toward without knowing it: the abandoned industrial stretch in the far east of the ward, where the old factories had been sealed off years ago and the cameras stopped and the only things that came through were lost delivery trucks and the occasional person with the same idea he had.
Space.
He lined the car up along the empty service road. Long and straight and nobody on it in either direction.
He put his foot down.
The engine opened up. The speedometer climbed — sixty, eighty, a hundred. The warehouses blurring on either side into long grey smears, the road becoming a single line he was threading down the centre of, the wind noise rising to a frequency that seemed to press against the inside of his skull.
One-twenty. One-forty.
This was what he'd needed. Not the running, not the forms, not the careful deliberate discipline of the Binding. Just speed. Just the uncomplicated fact of moving through space faster than the world could quite keep up with.
He felt something tighten in his chest.
The ground exploded.
Concrete burst upward in front of him.
He had no time to react.
The car hit it at full speed. The front lifted. The world flipped.
and Billy, who had not been wearing his seatbelt, did not stay with the car.
The windshield shattered into a flat burst of white. Then—air.
For a second, everything slowed. He felt it—the height, the strange, almost peaceful weightlessness of being thrown into open space.
Below him, the car kept flipping, the grey sedan turning over itself in a violent spin, metal and glass scattering in every direction.
He had one moment of clarity in the air.
He looked down.
The thing below wasn't a bear, but it had the shape of one. Massive. Heavy. Wrong.
A Demon
Its fur was black as burned wood. Its skin cracked like cooling lava. Too many limbs dragged along the ground behind it.
And its face—
Immediately the wall arrived.
He hit the wall shoulder-first.
Brick cracked. Plaster gave way. Then darkness as he burst into the building, shelves collapsing around him, something metal clanging hard against the floor.
Then he stopped.
He lay in the rubble. Above him, the hole he'd made in the wall let in a column of grey morning light.
Everything hurt with the specific, clarifying totality of serious injury.
Ribs. He could feel them, or rather he could feel it in the way breathing no longer worked properly. His leg was worse. Bent in a way it shouldn't be.
He coughed.
Blood on his shirt. A thin bright scatter of it.
Damnit! Billy cried inwardly. It hurts. It fucking hurts.
He gave a weak smile. "Figures...," he said, barely voice. "It's like death follows me wherever I go."
He lay still. Above him, through the broken wall, he could hear it. The demon, moving through the wreckage of the road, the low irregular sound it made that wasn't a growl and wasn't a breath but was something between the two. A frequency more felt than heard.
He thought about the violet mist. The parking lot. His lungs filling with something that wanted to replace air. How close it had been.
"Hey, Eva." He coughed again. Blood, again. "You said where I go, you go. That we strive through this world together."
He closed his eyes.
"Hopefully we die together."
Silence.
His breathing slowed. The pain was enormous and distant at the same time, the way extreme cold eventually stops feeling like cold and starts feeling like nothing at all. He could hear the demon outside still. Could feel the vibration of it through the floor.
His eyes closed the rest of the way.
When I said we die together — I didn't mean it like this.
The words came from somewhere below the darkness. Not sound. Not exactly. Something registered further down than hearing.
Too early. And not a good one. Not a memorable one.
And then he felt it.
Not heard. Felt.
The same thing he'd found a day ago in the living room with the mat under, and his eyes closed.
The rhythm. Two pulses, simultaneous, layered one atop the other inside his chest. His, the larger one, irregular from damage, struggling. Hers smaller, steady, unwavering.
Together they made something that was neither.
Warmth spread through him.
He became aware of everything. What state was he in. His injuries. The damage. The blood. Every part of his body.
And then—
His body lifted.
Just slightly.
Off the ground.