~ 8 ~

The skies above the Dregs offered little safety for Yuk. He was not so skilled a quasit that he could shapeshift and utilize his invisibility, which meant it would take only a single idle glance skyward (or outward, judging from the height of the elvish tree-city in the distance) for an imp-catcher to find him.

An imp-catcher or worse. Elves were not quite so deaf-blind to the ripples of magic as the lesser humans.

He flew low. Luckily, the few humans that did look skyward at his passing seemed to think little of the green-furred bat passing through their home. If anything worse took note of his passing, it was beyond Yuk’s notice.

At some point, either Dorst or his brutish new guard Fe Sun must have knocked Toren unconscious. The tether around Yuk’s mind withered from a chain thin and stretched with distance to a mere wire of obligation.

Yuk knew he could snap that connection altogether. He could leave the boy to his pathetic life.

The last time a mortal had summoned him had been over a century ago. Yuk had been a different quasit then. He’d been a “good” quasit, a loyal upstart with nothing better to do than please his true masters with offerings of corrupted souls. Slavery and toil, his mind bent toward nothing but promotion.

Things had gone wrong, and in the hundred years he’d spent locked away in the Abyss, he grew wiser. He saw the contempt his masters had for quasits—even the successful ones—and he saw the truth of the roles he’d been aspiring to. The roles all quasits aspired to.

Messengers. Errand-familiars. Janitors.

No matter how many mortals he corrupted or killed and dragged to the Abyss, he would always be at the mercy of a stronger demon. The most power he could hope to accrue was that of an advisor. A voice in the ear of a creature with real agency, to be ignored whenever convenient.

The old Yuk would have continued down that path with the Toren boy. He could have turned the human child toward destruction within days.

And then what? The boy’s soul was of little value. He’d haul it, kicking and screaming, back to the Abyss to be devoured or enslaved, and then he’d be back where he started. Re-summoned or re-assigned, immediately or in a decade, it didn’t matter—the cycle would continue the way it always had. Demonic masters came and went, but they were all the same.

Not this time. This time, he would break the yoke when the time was right, when he knew the consequence would not be an immediate return to the Abyss. He would serve nothing but himself and his whims. His goals would not come at the cost of watching another achieve them in his place.

This was Yuk’s chance to break free of the Abyss forever and enjoy a life of his own. He just needed to keep Toren alive long enough to gain his freedom. If Toren died, the spell broke, too, and Yuk would be banished in an instant.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

If Toren died, the spell broke. If Yuk snapped the chain himself, the spell broke. If Toren decided he no longer needed the services of a quasit and banished Yuk himself, the spell broke. It would be delicate work, but Yuk knew Lina was the key. She could help remove Yuk from Toren’s power and bargain on his behalf. Rescuing her burned two trees with one flame.

Yuk circled over one of the few two-story structures the Dregs could claim as its own. He had been flying aimlessly, letting his line to Toren dwindle further and further, but he had a strong feeling he was close to where the girl had been taken.

He twitched his ears about, searching for any sign of her. She was close. He could feel it, somehow. He dropped lower and cut between between two sagging hovels, and listened again. The sound had a peculiar reverberation, as though it were bouncing to his ears from the wrong angle.

He continued to the end of the alley—not that the slum was anything more than a fractal of alleys within alleys—and landed before shifting to the more seismically sensitive centipede form. His antennae played over the the walls, wriggled about the air, tapped the earth. His sensitive feet confirmed what his bat-ears had suspected. They had moved Lina underground.

The reverberations of Lina’s voice had stilled, but other voices took their place. The nervous guard, probably. He was speaking to someone. Yuk could “hear” much with his antennae, but words did not transmit the same through the sensory organs.

Yuk shifted again and moved forward on his native two legs, creeping along the wall of the building. The voices he had picked up with his antennae vanished with the transformation. There was no magic to sniff out, no wards or clever invisibility tricks to obscure the entrance to their makeshift prison, but the humans had done well with more conventional means.

A cracked window, crudely barred with rusted iron and smudged with something organic, offered Yuk a way in. He returned to his centipede form and crawled up, the claw-like points of his hundred legs finding purchase on the scuffed wood siding with ease.

The voices returned immediately. Yuk’s head dipped into the crack of the window, his rudimentary eyes sensing darkness and stillness but otherwise offering him nothing. Segment by segment, he moved his body through the slit of fractured glass, listening.

The voice wasn’t loud enough to do more than orient Yuk toward its origin like a compass. If it had been, Yuk might have been able to determine where they had hidden the door to the secret basement.

Yuk hissed in irritation. He was close. He all but smelled the girl. Her heartbeat thumped the air.

Frustration, though, was the alchemist of invention. Or at least it brewed bad ideas that got things moving.

Yuk shifted again to demon form and prowled about the room, searching for something heavy enough. The room was abandoned but for splintered, empty crates that had rotted long ago. Frayed linen tarps obscured mismatched furniture as though to keep the dented and chipped wood free from damage and grit. Yuk paused.

It was all a front. Sheltered, private space was too valuable to go unused in the slums. The humans had no magical giveaways that might have exposed them, but their efforts at disguising the room’s true purpose was still clumsy. Yuk knew without checking that a guard would be posted inconspicuously near the warehouse’s front entrance.

Yuk considered that for a moment as he perched atop a stack of discarded timber. His plans often tended to evolve on the fly, so the opportunity to develop it in advance made his brain buzz with delight.

He had intended only to knock something heavy to the floor and wait for someone to investigate and reveal the way into the basement. That could go one of two ways: Lina’s captors would see nobody was around and give up, trapping Yuk inside with the girl, or, the sentry outside would check and reveal nothing of the basement’s location.

If Yuk was to get Lina out, he would need to keep her captors occupied for as long as possible.

The quasit grinned and dropped a double-fistful of roiling flame into the cloth-draped pile of wooden refuse.