Now there was nothing but Nyx, Spencer, and the sounds of the forest. The brief fracas with the fachans and the stench of the blood still trickling from their corpses kept animals and monsters at bay for now.

Spencer walked in a slow circle around Nyx. Nyx did the same. The demon lord was getting used to feeling their boots on the real, gnarled, wild earth again. They began to hope they’d be feeling it again every day, from hereon out.

So they wouldn’t let Spencer cut that short.

“Okay,” said Nyx, twirling their dagger in one hand. (Another dubious skill Nyx had—fiddling with a dagger and making it look casual.) “You’re not who you say you are. You’re not a human-turned-demon Spencer.”

Spencer said, “Could be a ghost.”

“Nah. Ghosts aren’t real.”

“Not on Gaia.”

Nyx stopped in their tracks. So did Spencer. They sized him up. He quirked an eyebrow.

Nyx snorted out a sigh. “Just shut up, Spence,” they said like an exasperated father.

“Hey, I had a point.”

With their non-daggered hand, Nyx fumbled around their belt. Slowly, and without any sleight-of-hand. Letting Spencer see everything. Then they took out a tiny vial with a barely visible, whitish-grey miasma floating inside of it. They uncorked it with their thumb. The mist wafted out.

“I’m surprised you let me do this,” said Nyx.

Spencer shrugged. “Trust,” he said.

As the miasma spread in the air, it acted like ultraviolet light on an old wall, revealing some strange magical marks in the air. Between Nyx and Spencer’s heads were several stringy lines that gyrated like sound waves. They were moving noiselessly from Nyx’s head into Spencer’s.

Stealing info. Nyx knew this type of spell. It wasn’t benign, obviously, but it was a simple trick. They almost wanted to breathe a sigh of relief. Spencer could have been siphoning off anything—their shadow, their energy, their soul...

“Bet that’s how you know I haven’t been up to much,” said Nyx. “And now you can gossip about me. Damn...just please don’t tell people what I do in the basement.”

Spencer chuckled. “Please! I already gossip about you.”

Nyx’s heart pounded hard—a single pound, a pang of realization.

They tried to keep their composure, but they’d never been nearly as good at controlling their expressions and mannerisms as the typical demon. Either that stuff came easy to the natural-born demons, or it took time...centuries of it.

In that moment, that heartbeat, they knew exactly who they were talking to.

And they felt like the biggest idiot on Gaia. In all this time lazing around, they’d been hoping in the back of their mind, in this utter backwater demons surveilled so rarely, that the whole underworld had stopped caring about them. Left for dead—or, at least, yesterday’s news. Why hadn’t they figured that at least one demon from their old life would come knocking? Why hadn’t they realized that even though they were unaccomplished and weak as sin, the sheer novelty of their existence—of a human who’d died on another planet, come back to life, almost died again by becoming a demon, and lived long enough after that to tell the tale—would be, for certain enthusiasts, quite enticing?

They knew why. It was because they didn’t have the soul of a demon lord, of a master strategist...the kind of soul any servant wanted to see in her commander. They hadn’t planned ahead, and they hadn’t chosen to. They'd wanted to ignore it all and shut it all out. To move away from that world. Whether or not that world moved with them.

Maybe getting the hired help set off the alarm that sent “Spencer” to Nyx’s door. Whatever. Didn’t matter. The way Nyx saw it now, he would’ve come eventually. And worse was on the horizon.

All this passed through Nyx’s head like a moment of wind. They narrowed their eyes at Spencer as it passed. It was their way of saying, “I assure you I didn’t just have a startling, bone-chilling realization.”

“I’m still seeing right through you, Nyx,” said the visitor. “Whenever your heart beats, I feel the whole reverberation. Our kind is just more sensitive than you. We have senses you can’t even dream of, things that I’m sure you won’t develop for another thousand years—if you even live that long.”

Nyx hooked their thumbs in their beltloops and urged their body to relax.

“Your nervous system...that’s what it’s called, right? The fight-or-flight response?” He grinned, although Nyx’s brain reminded them that it was just like pulling a canvas of skin across a frame. “I chose not to probe your whole memory. I just wanted the Spencer part, to make sure you had some wits about you. Finding out the rest, the stuff about you, is part of the game. The human body will reveal what the mind doesn’t!”

“Do you think I ran away from you?” said Nyx.

He cackled. Nyx flinched. It was a bad move to ask him any questions. He’d just find the fact that Nyx couldn’t guess the answers funny.

“That’s adorable,” he said.

Nyx’s arm twitched involuntarily.

“I see that,” said the visitor. “Here, let me help you.”

He walked closer to Nyx. Extremely close. Nyx was taller than him, in his Spencer form at least, but it still petrified them to feel his breath against their chin and neck. He put his hand around Nyx’s. First he felt the sweaty palm of it. Then he set his own palm firmly on the back of their hand. He guided their hand over the dagger, getting them to grip it. To take it out from the belt. Now Nyx’s dagger-wielding hand was captive in his.

A thousand thoughts ran through Nyx’s head. Simple strategies and counters for their own immediate escape. Get slashed in the stomach, just hop back. In the throat, duck. Shadow magic. Shadow control. Blind him.

Instead, he aimed the dagger at his own heart. “I’ll take care of that,” he said.

He stabbed himself. Just one time. There wasn’t any hellsmoke. Just centipedes, mound upon mound of them.

One moment the visitor was in a human shape. The next, he was a dull-purple mass of centipedes and the slightest trickle of their blood. They scuttled and ran across each other to escape, slipping away under leaves and stone and eventually disappearing from view.

Nyx hadn’t dared kill any of those bugs.

They watched the spot where the visitor had been, giving themself time to pant and permission to relax.

He was gone for now, but it was a warning.

The demon who’d turned them had an eye on them.