37. It hurt, it actually hurt.

Chapter 37: It hurt. It actually hurt.

Freya didn't sit. She stood in the middle of Elara's small room with dust from the cellar still clinging to her boots, arms crossed tight, and when she spoke her voice had none of the gentleness from a moment ago.

"Why didn't you tell anyone."

Elara lowered herself back into her chair, slow, the cane clattering against the hearthstone as she set it aside. "Tell who, exactly."

"The guard. Anyone. You knew, Elara, you've known enough to be creeping through your own halls in the dead of night following a boy you suspected wasn't a boy at all, and instead you kept it to yourself. Two people are hanging from a ceiling right now because of how long you sat on this."

"And what did you imagine would happen if I'd gone to the guardhouse with what I had?" Elara's voice hadn't risen, but something in it had gone sharp for the first time since either of them had known her. "An old woman from the slums, walking in and telling Captain Alaric that a fourteen year old boy turns into a demon at night and eats children's souls through their ears. Tell me, truly, how far do you think I'd have gotten before they laughed me back out onto the street. Or worse. Locked me up for madness and left this home with no one at all standing between those children and that thing in the cellar."

"You could have tried."

"I did try." The words cracked out of her sharper than anything before it, and for a moment the frail shake in her hands looked less like age and more like fury held on a very short leash. "Years ago, girl, long before any of this, when the first strange thing happened in this home and I went to the ward office asking for help, for more staff, for anyone to look twice at a building full of children nobody with coin cares about. I was turned away in less time than it took to state my name. This city does not listen to people like me. It never has. So no, I did not march into the guardhouse with a story that sounds like a fever dream. I watched. I waited. I gathered what proof I could with these useless legs and this old body, and I prayed someone would come along who might actually be believed."

The room went quiet, the fire popping low in the grate.

"And Kaplan's money," Freya said, quieter now, but not letting it go. "You kept taking that too. Even after."

"Even after I knew what was living beneath this house, yes, because six years of a good man's guilt money is still money, and these children still need to eat whether or not a demon walks their halls at night." Elara's eyes had gone glassy, though she didn't let the tears fall. "I am not proud of any of this. I have made my peace with being an old woman with no power and no voice who did the small, useless things she could while praying for someone bigger to come along. You may judge that however you like. I've judged it plenty myself."

Freya held her gaze a long moment, jaw working, and then some of the anger went out of her shoulders all at once, replaced by something closer to exhaustion. "I understand it. I don't like it, but I understand it." She turned to Mikaela. "We go to Alaric. Tonight. Whatever he thinks of us after, we make him listen."

"And if he doesn't."

"Then I stake my commission on it." Freya was already moving for the door. "Elara, stay here. Watch the children as close as you can tonight, don't let any of them wander, especially not near Finn if he shows his face again. We'll be back."

The streets at that hour sat empty and cold, torches guttering low along the guardhouse wall by the time they reached it, and the guard on the door tried twice to turn them away before Freya's rank finally shoved them through to Alaric's office, where the captain sat bleary eyed over a stack of parchment that hadn't gotten any shorter since morning.

"It's the middle of the night," he said, not looking up.

"There's a demon living under the children's home," Freya said. "A shapeshifter. It's been feeding on the children for weeks, and right now it's got Kael and Lyra hanging from its ceiling turning them into more of itself."

Alaric set his quill down slow and looked up at her like he was checking for the joke. "A demon."

"Out of Tartaros. It's wearing the shape of a fourteen year old boy named Finn."

"Lady Mikaelson." He rubbed a hand down his face. "I've had a man in my cells since this morning for murder, a knight vouching for him with a story about a monster on a rooftop, and now you're telling me the actual killer is a child who turns into a demon. I'd ask you to hear how that sounds coming out of your own mouth."

The passage here came from the author's official story page without permission. Reading it at the publication supports their work.

"I know how it sounds."

"It sounds like a desperate story to free a man you've taken a liking to."

Something in Freya's face went very still, very cold. "I am a Royal Knight of His Majesty's service. I have never once lied under my oath, and I am not about to start tonight. I saw it with my own eyes, not an hour past, floating in a cellar beneath that home with two living people cradled in its arms like it meant to make them its children too. I am telling you the truth, Captain, and I am staking my commission on it. Come see for yourself. If I'm wrong, arrest the lot of us on the spot and I'll resign my post before you've finished reading me my rights. If I'm right, you'll wish you'd believed me sooner."

Alaric looked at her for a long moment. Then at Mikaela, at the raw fear sitting undisguised on her face, fear that didn't look like performance no matter how he turned it over.

He swore under his breath and reached for his sword.

"This had better not be a waste of my night," he said, already moving for the door.

The home sat dark and silent when they reached it, and Elara met them at the door with her cane and a look that said she already knew, somehow, that the waiting was over.

They went down together, four of them now, torchlight throwing long shapes across the old carved stone, the cold of the passage sinking into all of them the same way it had before. The chamber opened up ahead, vast, and there in its center the creature still cradled Kael and Lyra against its narrow chest, that low keening moan still rolling soft off it into the dark.

Alaric stopped dead at the sight of it, sword coming up slow, and something in his face said he'd stopped disbelieving the second his eyes landed on the thing.

"By order of the Torak city guard," he said, voice cracking despite himself, "you are under arrest. Surrender the hostages and stand down."

It was, Mikaela thought even in that moment, possibly the stupidest sentence she had ever heard a man say.

The creature turned.

Its eyes opened for the first time since they'd seen it, and they weren't human eyes at all, green and slitted, snake-thin, ancient in a way that made the torchlight seem to bend around them. It looked at the four of them crowded in the mouth of the passage, and there was no anger in that look. No malice.

Just curiosity. And underneath it, something hungrier.

It attacked before anyone could move.

The sound came off it like a struck bell, a wall of pressure that took all four of them at once and threw them backward into stone, breath driven clean out of every chest in the room, and Mikaela hit the ground hard enough to see white before her vision cleared on Freya already dragging herself back up, sword in hand, blood running from a split lip.

"Freya, wait!"

Freya didn't wait. She charged, blade raised, and swung clean through the creature's chest.

The sword passed through it like smoke through fingers, no resistance at all, and the creature didn't so much as flinch, didn't even seem to register the blow had happened.

Alaric came in a half second later, faster, better trained, ducking low under a lash of black robe and driving his sword up in a clean arc, and it went through the same as Freya's had, useless, meaningless, steel meeting nothing at all.

The creature rose.

It drifted up through the chamber's ceiling like it wasn't even there, stone parting around it without so much as a crack, and was simply gone, taking Kael and Lyra with it, vanished into the dark above them.

Somewhere far above, muffled through all that stone, children began to scream.

Mikaela was moving before she'd decided to, up and running, back through the passage, up the narrow stairs, through the hidden door and into the halls of the home where the screaming was already tearing through every room, children spilling into corridors in their nightclothes, small hands grabbing at doorframes, at each other, panic thick enough to choke on.

She found them in the playroom.

The creature stood over Nora, tall and grey and terrible in the dark, one hand pressed flat to the girl's chest, and a faint light was passing between them, thin and pale, drawn out of Nora in slow unraveling threads while her eyes went glassy and her knees began to buckle.

Mikaela didn't think. She grabbed the nearest chair and swung it with everything she had.

It connected.

The creature staggered sideways, thrown clean off Nora and into the far wall with a crack of splintering wood, and for one stunned second Mikaela stood there with the broken chair still in her hands, disbelieving.

It hurt. It actually hurt.

The creature rose again, and this time there was nothing curious in its eyes at all, only fury, ancient and total, and it raised both hands together over its head.

The sound that came off it this time wasn't a wave. It was the whole world breaking.

The walls of the playroom buckled and split apart in the same instant, the ceiling coming down in great slabs of stone and timber, children thrown screaming in every direction as the building itself seemed to fold inward around them, dust and debris and splintered wood raining down through air gone thick with it, and Mikaela was thrown flat onto her back, the world gone white and roaring in her ears.

When it faded, the creature was gone.

She lay in the wreckage a long moment, coughing dust out of her lungs, blood running warm from somewhere along her scalp, and forced herself up onto her elbows to look around at what was left of the room.

Nora lay unmoving nearby, breathing, but out cold. Other children were crying, scattered, bleeding, but alive, all of them alive, and somewhere in the chaos Elara's voice was already calling out names, counting heads.

Finn was nowhere.

Mikaela sat there in the ruin of it, dust settling slow around her like snow, and whispered the only word that came.

"Eto."