~1~

The creature arrived with a stinking, fizzling pop, sprawled in the soot and grime of the cellar floor. It had scarcely managed to try out its new eyelids when it heard a high, weak voice speak nearby.

“Yuck.”

The demon barely heard the word over the rush of air into its newly formed lungs. It sucked at the stale air like one resuscitated. It hadn’t owned a physical body in centuries, but the muscles, the stretching of its skin, the functions of its limbs… it all felt familiar, if not immediately comfortable. As its dizziness ebbed, the voice spoke again, and the demon twisted about in its mottled, dim green skin in search of the speaker.

“You’re sure it’s confined to the circle, right?”

This time the creature snapped its gaze to the speaker. Two humans squatted in the dim, candlelit shadows just beyond a circle of chalk.

It knew these words. It was the tongue of humans, returning like memories of food poisoning. “Yuk,” then, must be their word for the demon. Their word for quasits, or, perhaps, a name they had given to it. To him.

“If you didn’t mess up the chalk, then yes,” spoke the second of the pair, a little deeper than the first.

Yuk hopped up on scaled, digitigrade legs to better size up the pair of humans. These were the sniveling mortals that had become so prevalent in recent centuries?

That would not do at all.

He leapt at the two humans—they were so small, so weak—with hands ending in black claws to rip and tear and poison, and—

An unseen energy ripped through Yuk, stopping him mid-lunge. He fell backward onto the damp stone. His body tingled as though his soul had been set aflame and promptly extinguished. Immolated, but only briefly, as if in warning. The air before him shimmered where he had collided with the invisible barrier.

“There, see?” sneered the deeper voice. The older voice.

“But if it’s stuck in there, how are we going to get it to… to… you know…”

Yuk paused in his throes of frustration. The two humans were using him. Great. Nothing new for a quasit such as he, no matter the realm. But if they were weak enough, perhaps…

“Shh, it’s listening. Lina, the less you speak, the better.”

“Why—”

“You, demon,” said the bigger human, regarding Yuk with contempt. “We have a task for you. If you succeed, I will release you back to whatever hell you came from. As your master, you will obey me without question, and take no actions that would harm me, Lina, or that which is ours. Failure will result in great physical pain. Do you understand?”

Yuk narrowed his eyes at the human and opened his tiny mouth to a dozen needle-like teeth. Yes, he thought, I understand.

The human master flinched as Yuk’s voice garbled, hissed, and screeched through their mental link. The one called Lina looked nervously at her older counterpart, oblivious to the silent reply. Yuk imagined the way her long, wheat-stalk-colored hair would crinkle and stink if he set it burning.

“Toren? Did it say something to you?” Lina asked. “I didn’t hear anything.”

“It’s under my control, so it can only speak to me.”

“With words? Does it speak like us? What does it sound like?”

“Quiet,” Toren snapped. “Help me take down the wards.”

“What if it gets away?”

“Then it will curdle Aberbarley’s milk, make Letty’s pathetic radishes wilt even further, and put burn-holes through both your dresses,” said Toren.

Toren reached toward the white chalk wards surrounding Yuk. He paused, locking eyes with the demon, then projected a stern command to “stay” before wiping away the runic circle.

Yuk sensed, rather than saw, the barrier’s disintegration. The material plane was open to him, now. He was the dog in the kennel, and the gate had just been opened. Anticipation crawled across his scales like a brushfire. Burn-holes through dresses, the Toren-boy said. Yes, arson would be an excellent start to a vacation away from the Abyss.

But something stopped Yuk from taking his first step toward freedom. He growled, straining as if against a chain to move his legs forward. He could not lift a foot.

“It’s so… obedient. I thought it would be, I don’t know, more demonic,” Lina said. She inched closer, a small, sun-darkened hand reaching to scuff out more of the chalk. She stopped just outside of Yuk’s reach. “It won’t bite?”

“Promise.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Yuk sneered as he imagined the way his fangs would pierce that thin layer of skin between her thumb and forefinger. How it would sink into the soft muscle beneath and bore into bone. Humans came in so many shades of brown and beige, he thought, but they all had that same red, iron-rich blood.

Again, he stopped short. The muscles in his neck flexed and bulged against the magic of Toren’s hold over Yuk. His jaw chittered, but opened no further.

Anger flooded Yuk’s veins like magma through a pressurized chamber. He pulled at the thin horns on his head and screamed at the girl, black eyes wide and furious.

Lina ripped her hand back to her chest. “Why did it do that!?”

“Because it knows it cannot move against me,” Toren said, “and I told it to stay put. It must be so, so mad to know I have it in my thrall. Now, come. We’re going to set it loose.”

~2~

Invisible, Yuk followed the pair of humans out of the darkness of the cellar and into a place far worse. He wanted to resist, of course, to remain in that musty, dim room of stone—anywhere but at their heel—but the bond between him and his new master was as inescapable as a rope around his neck. If the connection had been physical, Yuk would have made the young Toren drag him up the slime-slick steps, but to Yuk’s infinite dissatisfaction, his bonds were nothing so simple as that.

Yuk was compelled to walk, with his own clawed feet, into the light.

Ugly, silver moonlight squeezed itself through hovels stacked as crudely as rocks balanced in a cairn. The only thing worse than the light was the smell. The odor of dozens of humans—hundreds—smacked him in the face as surely as if he had walked into a wall. The air tasted of ruined meat, the aromatic smoke of burning torches, and sewage.

Yuk squinted, hissing at the assault on his senses. Human filth was everywhere, ruining even the homey smells of fire and disease. Yet the humans seemed unbothered, sleeping pressed against their shacks or ambling barefoot through the dirty street.

No, Yuk realized, Toren seemed unbothered. The other, bigger humans looked completely apathetic. The younger female, meanwhile, glanced furtively at passersby, unease written in the dance of her fidgeting fingers. She couldn’t keep pace with her male counterpart, so she darted forward in little bursts of speed like an underling following a pit boss. She wouldn’t stop looking at Yuk, either.

“Won’t somebody see us?” she finally whispered.

“They will if we all walked as slowly as you.”

“Maybe we could go some back way, or—”

“This whole dump is a ‘back way,’ idiot.”

Lina didn’t say anything else, but she didn’t relax, either. Yuk did not care what happened to them either way, so he continued to skitter after Toren like the obedient little demon he was. If his presence brought wrath upon them, his only regret would be that he couldn’t partake in it himself until the mob had torn the boy to pieces.

Toren led them through a walk between two buildings so piled with refuse that not even the truly desperate would find room to sleep. The far end of the urban fen opened toward a structure that looked at least somewhat permanent compared to the rest of the shantytown. Dozens of tents clustered about its base, and Yuk noted two humans standing guard outside the structure’s barricaded doorway.

“Alright,” Toren said, peeking out of the alley. “Time to show us what you can do, little scamp.”

Lina, normally no more equanimous than a flea, puffed up with determination. A hunger sparked in her eyes, Yuk noticed, and he recognized it instantly. That was the hunger for revenge.

“Your job is simple,” Toren said, looking down at Yuk. “You’re not going to be seen. You’re going to go in that structure across the road by all the tents. You’re going to search for a necklace, you understand? It has a pearl in it, a big one, and it’s set in silver. You’re going to bring that back to us.”

Yuk growled in affirmative and waited for more. The boy had not yet mentioned setting any fires, so he assumed there was still more to be discussed.

“Wait, Toren. If it only takes mom’s necklace, won’t Dorst know it was us that robbed him?”

Toren’s face pinched together, ready to spit derision at the younger girl, then abruptly relaxed. “You’re right,” he said.

“If we tell the demon to break a bunch of things, or maybe steal some extra stuff, maybe—”

“Shut up for a second and let me think,” Toren hissed.

Yuk watched the spark of revenge flicker in Lina’s eyes. He liked that fire; Toren had no such flame within him, only hatred and cruelty. Power did not come from such traits, but weakness, stupidity. Toren was like so many millions of bigger fiends in the Abyss: mean and brutish without wit or guile.

Bullies.

“Alright, demon. The plan stays the same. But I want you to steal any other jewels, lockboxes, or precious items you can before you leave. Gold. Gemstones. Whatever Dorst has. Scatter them about the Dregs, leave them in tents and pockets and beggar’s hats. Then bring me the pearl necklace.”

“No, wait, what if Dorst sees someone wearing or selling something of his because they found it under their pillow?” Lina interrupted her own train of thought with a giggle and turned to Yuk. “You’re like a nasty little tooth fairy.”

“So what?” Toren asked.

“So, Dorst’ll hurt them, won’t he? He’ll make them tell him where they found it, and they won’t know, and so he’ll hurt them.”

“Again, so? Not our problem if they can’t lay low. Go, quasit.”

Yuk scurried into the street, invisible once more. He could not refuse the boy’s orders, but his thoughts were his own, and they were busy plotting ways to sabotage Toren’s plans. Yuk couldn’t hurt Toren directly nor free himself from Toren’s grip, but there were always ways to rebel.

Unfortunately, he might hurt Lina, too, if he wasn’t careful.

Yuk paused in the middle of the road. A passing food-animal, dull-eyed and emaciated, sensed his presence and, panicking, nearly pulled free of its owner's surprised hands, but Yuk barely noticed.

Why was he worrying about Lina? He shook his head, shaking the odd thought from his skull. Toren’s rules included Lina’s safety, he remembered. One more pitfall to be wary of, nothing more. When people messed with demons, they got hurt.

Yuk stepped over a clogged gutter and into the mass of makeshift tents. The pair of sentinels standing watch over the street and the encroaching shelters looked to Yuk like ancient titans peering over multicolored mountains, but even that brief likeness lost its grandeur. These creatures were nothing so magnificent.

And, apparently, they were laughably bad at detecting magic. He didn’t even need to try to slip beneath their notice. Hadn’t Yuk heard that humans were so prevalent now because they were such adept magicians? Pfft.

Yuk walked right between the pair of men. Their species’ proliferation had to be from some other reason—invisible or not, this was just pathetic. Humans probably couldn’t sniff out a spell until it blew up in their face.

Amused at the thought, Yuk sent a cramp into the calf muscle of one of the guards as he passed. The human buckled in sudden pain, drawing his companion’s attention and allowing Yuk to hop up and try the doorknob behind them. Distracted as they were, they did not notice the door crack open, then quietly shut.