“Sandra Smith.” Emilia felt like a rube handing out such an obvious fake name. Sure, there had to be a real Sandra Smith out there. In fact, there were probably thousands. When they told people their names, they didn’t have to hand over a blank piece of paper and trust to the enchantment in the fibers to ensure people believed them. They probably just used their IDs.

Cary walked behind Emilia down the tunnel to the airplane. Watching Cary struggle to decide whether walking in front of or behind of Emilia protected her more amused Emilia endlessly. The demon’s foibles took Emilia’s mind off of Georgia Kennedy’s memories as they swirled about Emilia’s mind.

As soon as she thought about it, Emilia cursed herself. For all the good crying and kissing Cary in the bathroom had done, Emilia had reinvoked the cause of her distress all over again. She grabbed Cary’s hand before her and found the small contact profoundly reassuring. Before the presence of another woman’s thoughts overwhelmed Emilia and drove her into a new panic, Cary’s warm skin provided a shield against the dark thoughts.

At least we didn’t kill them.

It was a small comfort. Neither Samantha nor Cynthia had killed their victims. And in a sad way, Emilia wished they had. Dead, Emilia wouldn’t be standing there broken, regretting taking away another woman’s free will.

She shook herself at the blast of air from further down the tunnel blew away not just the dried sweat from trekking over the airport all afternoon but the encounter in the guard offices as well. All that remained was the low beat of Georgia’s concern for her son Timothy.

Emilia squeezed Cary’s hand as they headed into First Class. This was her only time on an airplane and she’d finagled her way into First Class. If the shows were to be believed, this part of the plane would be filled with strippers and candy. According to Betsy, Max, and Regina the First Class cabins were not nearly as extravagant as television made them out to be. But there might be alcohol and the food was supposed to be better.

Flashing her blank sheet of paper again at a flight attendant, Emilia was directed over to a set of stairs. The idea that planes had two levels blew Emilia’s mind for a moment. This was something the shows never depicted. Her friends had left this part out too.

Cary and Emilia passed a full bar, with tall bottles of liquor standing behind little cases, prepared for liftoff. The attendant flashed them a wide grin as he motioned to their seats.

The seats were ridiculous. These were larger than the bed Emilia slept in most of her life. Aside from Cary, who sat on the aisle seat, their nearest neighbor was situated far enough away that the chairs could lay all of the way down.

“This is…. Nuts!” Once again, shock drove all thought of Georgia out of Emilia’s mind until she’d sat down and remarked on the absence. In time with her outburst, she lowered her head and stared at the ground. They had an amazing amount of leg room.

“I have never been aboard a plane, so I do not have a yardstick against which to measure this experience.” Cary tapped at the armrest separating their seats, as if the object’s mere existence offended her.

Emilia felt around the rest and pulled it up. Once it was out of the way, she flopped her head down into Cary’s lap. “How do you deal with it?”

Cary tilted her head. “After time, the new experiences… merge together. It becomes harder and harder for the novel to shock me.”

“No,” Emilia waved her hands. “I mean the intrusion of other people’s thoughts in your head. The knowledge you can… do things to them.”

Stilling her whole body except for the fingers stroking Emilia’s head, Cary stared down at Emilia as if looking through her. “Some demons react with disdain for all life that is not theirs.” Waving her hand, Cary clarified. “I do not mean their own lives, or rather not merely their own lives. But their property as well. And some demons find a principle to which they devote themselves. Others lose themselves in their jobs, their assigned tasks.”

Wistful, that described how Cary said the last sentence. “That’s what you did, right?”

Cary nodded. “Indeed. I devoted myself to become a perfect little recording device for my master. My mind became a stone tablet and my senses the chisel. In part this was a survival mechanism, in part it was the result of my master’s training. I did not wish to offend him in the slightest.

“I am sorry. My problems must seem…”

Cary laid a gentle finger on Emilia’s lips. “Your problems have become among the most important things in the world to me. Perhaps the most important consideration in my life. Do not apologize for that.” Not removing her finger, Cary continued after a pause. “You are still upset about the guards. Have you tried the mental exercises… Papa Butch taught you?”

The way she said it, Cary didn’t say ‘the ones I taught you,’ which Emilia appreciated. Knowing she ignored part of Cary’s lessons made her feel guilty enough. Wallowing in a problem that those lessons could aid with would have made it ten times worse. “No.”

“Then you should.” Cary looked around the cabin to see that only one other person occupied First Class with them. “You are as safe here as you could possibly be.”

“Because you’re watching over me.” It wasn’t a question. Emilia believed it now with her whole heart. Cary had come for her after Emilia had done everything she could to ruin whatever spark had grown between them. Over the last four weeks, Cary had devoted herself to demonstrating her feelings to Emilia, and Emilia had committed herself to accepting Cary’s affection. It had worked, though Emilia had set firm boundaries for them both.

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“Okay. But you can’t keep petting my head.”

Cary sighed and held her hand still on Emilia’s head for a moment. Her jaw wiggled back and forth as if she conducted an argument with herself. It made her look adorable to Emilia. Clenching her jaw, the battle field closed itself off and Cary nodded. “Okay, but I would like to leave my hand in place, may I?”

Emilia nodded. She had a feeling that the servant-demon relationship did not work this way for other humans who’d bound themselves to demons. If not for Cary’s former master, maybe Cary would have been some kind of ruthless tyrant. Occasionally that side of Cary came out, but always directed to people who threatened or endangered Emilia. Which could include Emilia herself. “Thank you, please.”

Cary’s whole body relaxed, letting out a tension Emilia hadn’t noticed until then.

Closing her eyes, Emilia relaxed into Cary’s lap and enjoyed the spicy scent of the demoness. The warmth of her wrapped itself around Emilia like a blanket and she shut out her thoughts. Emilia banished each idea as it presented itself, using the silly rhyme Papa Butch had taught her, “hey there thought, you are for naught!” It was dumb and childlike, but it worked. Mundane and meta-thoughts vanished under the storybook words until Emilia faced off with the memory of stealing the wills from the three guards.

The first two, Mack and Noah, had been simple. Her instructions to them were the same and as non-intrusive as they could be. Dismissing the recollection of those two took two repetitions of her magic charm.

But with Georgia, Emilia found someone who possessed a seed of her magic, magic Georgia didn’t realized she had. With so little experience in these matters, Emilia could not say which of the various talents Georgia possessed, but it imparted a resistance to mental manipulation onto the woman.

As a result, Emilia had to invoke her own natural ability, one she’d struggled to gain the least control over in the last four weeks. If not for Papa Butch and Cary’s constant drilling, Emilia would not have been able to use her mind manipulation magic on Georgia. But the side effect was that Emilia absorbed a portion of Georgia’s life essence. It left an aftertaste on Emilia’s tongue: linden and boysenberries. As a result of suffering under Emilia’s power, poor Georgia might grow ill or feel fatigued for a few days. The fact left Emilia with a sour feeling in her stomach.

No matter how many times she directed Papa Butch’s dismissal chant at Georgia and her memories, Emilia could not quite drive them all off. Different parts lingered: Timothy’s troubles, the way his body twitched and he moaned when he tried to communicate. The sight tore at Emilia’s heart, rending it with vicarious sympathy.

Georgia’s boyfriend was another, the way he’d looked offended when Georgia had offered him an out over Timothy’s condition. Her husband had fled over it, the weak bastard. But Leonard had stayed. He helped clean Timothy up when his body failed him, he bussed him back and forth between school and the clinic. Georgia loved that man with her whole soul, almost as much as her son. And like the former, she’d lost sleep, staying up at night in livid terror that he might leave her.

No matter how hard she concentrated, no matter how many times Emilia chanted her words at the memories, she couldn’t banish the sensations and experiences of Georgia. Tears gathered in the corners of Emilia’s eyes as a few more people entered the First Class cabin. She tracked them with her hearing, listening to those people move, shift their luggage, and buckle their seatbelts gave Emilia a blessed distraction from the foreign impressions which invaded her mind.

One of the people who walked into the cabin had an obvious breathing problem. They wheezed as they walked about trying to find their seat and place their carry on in the overhead rack. Another person… Emilia gasped. For a second, she’d heard one of their heartbeats. Maybe she’d imagined it. Stilling her breath, Emilia strained her ears and definitely picked out a rhythmic thumping from one of the passengers. Then she heard a similar beat from the two nearest passengers, including the wheezing man, who’d taken a puff of some kind of medicine as he’d say down. As a result, his heartbeat shot up, almost half again as quick as when it started.

Oddly, no such beat echoed from the center of Cary’s chest. For a moment, Emilia considered the fact and decided that Cary’s lack of a heartbeat was actually totally normal.

“Are you okay, Emilia?” Cary raced her hand and Emilia looked up at her. Had the demoness been reading her mind? In a way, Emilia liked the thought. In a way, it worried her.

“I… think I can hear the heartbeats of the people around us.” Emilia let her voice go soft. “Am I going insane?”

“No, but this is sooner than I would have expected.” Cary tapped her nose. “Or your power compliments or synergies with my own and you’ve developed quicker than anticipated. My hearing is excellent. I can track heartbeats in a place like this where there is very little ambient noise.”

“And I can too?”

Cary licked her lips and tilted her head side to side. “It’s too early to say whether the effect is permanent or a result of our proximity. But considering how closely we are bonded, I would be surprised to learn you did not develop some of my natural abilities.”

Emilia sniffed at the air, trying to find the complexity Cary often reported to the air. All she picked up was a bit of rank, reprocess mold and nothing else. Apparently the effect only extended to her hearing. When Emilia looked over at Cary, she’d raised her eyebrow at Emilia. “I was trying to sniff out people like you do.”

“You are absolutely adorable!” That earned Emilia one of Cary’s rare outburst of laughter. The way she tilted her head back and gave a throaty burst of joy warmed Emilia’s chest. Cary shook her head for a moment and said, “but do not let my amusement or embarrassment stop you from experimentation. There are other abilities you could gain from our link. As time goes on, I expect the variety and power to grow.”

“I’m surprised demons would be so willing to share their power like this.”

“Indeed. Many demons are not so willing to share their abilities with even the greatest of their servants. If I exerted my will or attempted to block off aspects of my power from you, you would not gain them.” Cary answered as if what she’d done were nothing but the rational course of action.

“Does it weaken you?”

“Not really.” Cary waggled her finger back and forth. “Or perhaps I should say no. While I might experience an infinitesimal loss of power, what I gain from the link more than makes up for it. Especially with someone like you who brings her own power to the bond.”

“There’s so much to learn! I feel like I won’t have time for it.”

Cary grinned and tapped Emilia’s nose in triumph. “Now that is where the bond comes in especially handy. You will not age from now on and you will not die from natural causes. Barring misadventure we have limitless time to explore and grow. That is a part of the bond that even the most avaricious demons cannot deny their servants.”

Cary flushed at the word, which only made Emilia grin back at her. Emilia didn’t feel like Cary’s servant, because Cary never ordered her around or treated her like her servant. Maybe someone else would have been waiting for the other shoe to drop, but in Emilia’s case, she worried more over Cary leaving than over her changing her treatment of Cary.

A flight attendant interrupted Emilia’s further auditory explorations of the plane. She could hear the woman’s approach from the soft thump of her heels against the thing carpet of the plane’s interior. She made them both buckle their seatbelts and then led the cabin in an elaborate pantomime of the safety process. Since she couldn’t rest her head on Cary’s lap, Emilia leaned over and planted herself firmly on Cary’s shoulder.

Emilia fell asleep before the safety demonstration ended.