Defying Instinct (Demon Instinct Series) Page 2

  Bennett Cotton was mesmerized by demons. He didn’t know I was one.

  I shrugged, a human gesture that always felt just a little awkward when I did it.

  I considered mentioning one of the demons was a Royal advisor, but Benn’s head might explode if I did. And even with my homicidal thoughts and daydreams of destruction, I didn’t want to see any part of Benn explode.

  “They came in, looked around, and left,” I said, leaving out the incriminating parts, then felt guilty for lying.

  It wasn’t as though I didn’t think Benn could handle knowing what I was. Dad might have even been okay if I told him…maybe. Benn wasn’t scared of or hateful towards demons like some humans were. But we’d known each other since grade school. It was too late to tell him the truth.

  Benn had been an ugly kid too. Lumpy and clumsy with features too big for a child’s. But in high school, he grew into his looks. For him, it was possible to grow out of the awkwardness of preadolescence. Now he was absurdly attractive, with his dark skin and light eyes that spoke of his mixed heritage.

  I always liked that about Benn. He wasn’t from just one world either. His mom was Irish, born and raised in Dublin. His father had been Lakota Indian. The eclectic combo made for exotically handsome offspring.

  He would have understood I was a half-caste. Benn even would have been excited to learn more about the demon world. My bouts with smoke-and-fire would have captivated him beyond belief. Firsthand accounts of what went on inside a demon’s mind? He’d be thrilled.

  But I missed my chance.

  “I wanna hear all about it. Every move they made.” The awe in Benn’s tone and in his blue eyes brought me out of my thoughts once again.

  Checking the time, then peeking out the front door, I knew I could close at any moment. No one was rushing to beat the clock to our closing time, and the store had cleared out at some point during my internal battle with fire.

  One day a week, we closed early because Dad taught an evening class at Wash U and Benn and I had our bi-weekly Demon History and Defense class to attend. I could have hired someone to work while we were busy but I didn’t want to leave The Bookstore in anyone else’s hands.

  It was my sanctuary. And my apartment was upstairs. It felt wrong to have someone else responsible for what belonged to us. To me. Even though The Bookstore was technically half mine now, it still felt like Dad’s most of the time.

  “I’ll tell you all about it on the way,” I said, pulling the cash drawer from the register and flipping the Open sign to Closed.

  “After last week, I’m surprised you want to go back,” he said, an easy, joking smile on his lips.

  “I told you,” I grinned, feeling like laughing only because I felt so much at ease now that Benn was here. “It didn’t even really hurt.”

  “Dmitri pinned you to the mat, stood on your neck, and blasted you with some sort of ominous, glowy energy ball, which…I didn’t even know a Razer could do, did you? Anyway, if nothing else, your pride had to have been bruised.” He chuckled. “Your neck too.”

  “You know I have no shame.” I locked the full cash drawer in the safe in the back room, planning to count and sort it after class. “And I told you, the energy ball thing was just an illusion.”

  Another lie. It felt like fiery knives cutting into my brain stem. But I wasn’t about to tell anyone that. Dmitri shouldn’t have done what he did. If I blabbed, he’d be charged with demon cruelty by the Division of Human-Demon Relations. And in spite of his mild mistreatment of me, I liked him.

  I didn’t know why, but I did.

  “Did they look at any books?” he asked, returning the conversation to my three demon visitors, unable to let it go. “I wonder what a demon would consider interesting reading material.”

  Benn looked around the room as if he were imagining where the demons might have stood and I shook my head.

  “Could you tell what kind they were?”

  Flatly, I said, “They were wearing glamour.”

  “I know, I know,” he waved me off. “But Mischief demons always have that bright red hair. Hammers look like pretty-boy soldiers. Male Razers have that little ridge between the eyes like Dmitri…”

  He kept naming the well-established demon tells, but I had always been suspicious of the easy way demons were recognizable. Demons were supposed to have chosen their glamour. It was commonly assumed they could make their disguise anything they wanted, any time they wanted. If there were any similarities within castes, it could easily be to confuse humans into thinking they were one thing when they were another. It would be pretty smart for an Incubus to don red hair and mask his silver eyes. Mischief demons were harmless. No human would ever see him coming.

  “I think they were all Hammers,” I lied again, switching the store lights off and pulling out my keys to lock up behind us. “I didn’t even talk to them.” Which was kind of true.

  “Still,” Benn slid into step beside me as we left the store. “Wish I had been here ten minutes earlier.”

  Buttoning up my jacket and shivering through a gust of wind that blew my frizzy hair across my face, I realized I’d left the coffee Benn brought me on the counter. When I turned to go back for it, Benn handed the cup to me.

  “And what would you have done if you’d seen them here?” I taunted, taking the coffee with a demure nod. “Beg them for an autograph? Or cut right to it, and drool at their feet?’

  Punching toward my arm, but not making contact, Benn changed the subject. He told me about his classes, and I told him about the lady who snapped at me even though the demon smoke-and-fire was long gone, smothered for the time being thanks to Benn.

  As I clutched my coffee and shivered, breathing out a foggy puff of air, I couldn’t understand why so many demons—who notoriously hated the cold but were mysteriously unwilling to put on heavier clothing—would choose to leave California last year to come live in St. Louis of all places. Winters could get brutal.

  Once we spanned the short walk to the community center, Benn greeted some of our classmates with easy conversation as he and I stood outside the front door, finishing off our coffees. All I did was stand beside him. Benn was more than chatty for both of us, and their smiles and waves weren’t meant for me anyway.

  “Hey, Bennett,” one of the attractive, curvy girls from our class shrieked, her voice desperate with flirtation. Her ebony skin was so rich and soft, I indulged in an atypical moment of jealousy while she completely ignored me.

  “Hi, Camille,” Benn said, his voice showing no signs of interest.

  Camille was the type of girl who was used to getting a guy’s undivided attention. Since Benn looked at me instead of her, offended disbelief marred her pretty face. Every class, she looked just as upset.

  “Ready?” he asked me, turning his cup upside down as he gulped the last drop of coffee.

  I nodded, doing the same with mine. Benn took my empty cup and walked across the sidewalk to the trashcan, all the while with Camille looking insulted and wounded at the same time. I’d stopped expecting her to learn.

  Without another word, I followed Benn into the gymnasium where our class was held. Something was off. Usually, by the time we got to class, there were at least fifteen people warming up. The place was practically empty.

  “Today we’re satisfying the history requirement for this course,” I heard Dmitri’s gravelly voice call from the classroom on the other side of the gym. “Everyone, get in here and find a seat.”

  There was a collective groan from the students walking in around us. Everyone thought Demon History and Defense was just a title. All we ever did was spar and learn the tricks to closing off our minds to a Razer demon’s most well-known ability.

  Each caste of demon had a set of natural skills. Full-caste Razer demons, like our instructor Dmitri, could manipulate another’s thoughts and actions, could tunnel into their brains and turn it to pudding. Demonology books called it breaching.

  It was a thrill, each time
a student was able to keep Dmitri from influencing their actions. It happened once a class, with only one student.

  The class was a fantasy, but we ate it up.

  Dmitri only let us think we were succeeding, improving, when in reality, if a full-caste Razer wanted to burrow into our brains and make us rip ourselves apart with our own, bare hands, or simply disintegrate our cerebral cortex, we’d be powerless to stop them.

  When the room was filled with our classmates’ familiar faces, eyes expectantly and excitedly turned to Dmitri.

  “You all know of Lucifer, the first Royal, who likely spawned the Christian incarnation of Satan,” he dove right in without any further explanation. “A Sorcerer demon, or Devil as they were once called, ruled for millennia, having a ruthless blade and the gift of immortality. Both human and demonkind alike were terrorized by Lucifer, until Astor, the Devil Queen and her army destroyed Lucifer, taking over the Underrealm.”

  Three students’ hands shot up, but Dmitri didn’t slow down, or even blink.

  “Lucifer believed in purity, and despised other demon castes. Astor wasn’t so narrow-minded. She aligned with Warriors, now known as Hammer demons, which the Royal disregarded completely. As Astor ruled, human-demon relations began to improve. If Astor hadn’t taken over, if Lucifer still ruled, most scholars believe the human population would have been wiped out entirely by now.”

  Not just humans, I knew. Lucifer hated half-castes. Many full-castes still did, but not like the prejudice used to be if the demon history we knew was accurate. Though he disregarded other castes, Lucifer wouldn’t have committed genocide against them. But humans and half-castes? We would have been history.

  Dmitri continued. “In the early seventeen hundreds, the Human-Demon Treaty was created, binding both sides to a set of laws that have endured ever since.”

  My ears perked up at the mention of the Treaty, but Dmitri didn’t go into detail, didn’t mention the part that related to me. It stated that a half-caste had to be raised in the human world until their sixteenth birthday. The humans who wrote their names on the bottom of that Treaty thought it was only fair to give a half-caste the chance to be a good person. A good human. They believed that could never happen if they were raised among demons.

  The Human-Demon Treaty was why I’d never met my demon mother. And could be why I lived every day wearing an involuntary mask of mismatched features—so a complete stranger could get her way someday.

  I could only speculate about why my mother had a Sorcerer disguise my real appearance when I was born. I’d decided it was to get me to move to the Underrealm when I came of age. After all, what better way to make your half-caste kid choose the ‘realm than by making life Up Above as crappy as possible?

  She miscalculated though. Glancing at Benn, who beamed as he soaked in every word Dmitri spoke, I knew I’d never leave my life. On my birthday four years ago, I stayed.

  Half of the class went by without my knowledge as I reminisced. Dmitri wasn’t exactly saying anything I didn’t know, and I was anxious to get to the active part of the night.

  Benn loved this class because he was so interested in demons. But I kept coming because I needed the contact. I never sparred with anyone but Dmitri, never laid a finger on a human. Dmitri more often than not took me to the mat at some point during the evening class. I needed that.

  Maybe that was why I liked him.

  “All right, all right. That’s enough history for today. Get changed. We have sixty minutes left. Let’s spar before we run out of time,” Dmitri said, and the class cheered as people shot up from their seats and charged the doorway.

  I changed in a bathroom stall, tight quarters but I didn’t care. Many of the girls undressed openly in front of their friends, in front of the mirrors. No need to subject anyone to seeing me unclothed.

  “Do you see how he dotes on her?” I recognized Camille’s voice as a group entered the bathroom, no doubt to check their hair before sparring.

  “She’s the only one he lets call him Benn. Have you noticed?” Another girl asked.

  “No one else calls her Savvy either, I bet,” said a third.

  “Who else? Isn’t Bennett her only friend? She hardly speaks to anyone else.”

  “Can you blame her? If I had that face…”

  As Camille laughed and made fun of me with her friends, I knew I was supposed to feel angry or embarrassed. But my demon instinct was tucked away in the back of my thoughts, whispering ways to disfigure them but nothing I couldn’t ignore. All that was left was impatience for having to wait.

  I exited the bathroom stall when I was sure everyone else had gone and joined the class already in progress. We didn’t have enough time to do anything but go through the standard punches and kicks, blocks and dodges that we’d been taught. When I looked at Dmitri, regretful that there would be no demonstrations today, I saw his eyes on me.

  The full-caste never looked at me. Not directly. Not even when he was pummeling my face into the floor with the ease of a creature twice my height and three times my weight.

  So when he spoke to me after class, I nearly swallowed my tongue.

  “Savannah Cole,” Dmitri called as I was about to make a break for the door. “May I speak with you for a moment?”

  So polite. The demon wasn’t polite. Not with me.

  “Yes, Dmitri?”

  His eyes bored into mine, the widow’s peak of his black hair pointing down to the ridge between his eyes that he didn’t, or possibly couldn’t hide behind glamour. Up this close, his cobalt blue eyes were striking.

  In private? He asked, and it took a heartbeat to understand the words were inside my head.

  Twice in one day. Something bizarre was going on.

  And now I knew Dmitri knew all along what I was, even though I looked nothing like a half-caste Razer. I wondered how long he’d known.

  Opening the mental door as I had earlier with the Tempter, I replied, All right.

  I wanted to formally apologize for my display of misconduct last week. It never should have happened.

  Didn’t he think every other week when he did the same domineering things to me in front of the class warranted an apology? Though, I didn’t need one. I liked his harsh treatment, if only because he didn’t discriminate against an ugly half-caste.

  You didn’t hurt me.

  I could have.

  You could hurt any one of us.

  But I do single you out, and I shouldn’t.

  I thought for a moment, and didn’t feel singled out. He often demonstrated on me, but he didn’t make a spectacle of it. And it wasn’t like I was expected to withstand the power of his mind or muscles.

  Plus, I didn’t feel humiliation or wrestle with pride.

  You know what I am. You thought I could handle it.

  Nevertheless, he looked over my head and a strange expression—anxiety maybe—flashed across his face before the somber, classic Dmitri stoicism returned. Please accept my apology and know nothing was meant by my lack of decorum.

  Lifting his hands and putting the tips of his fingers to his forehead, shielding his cobalt eyes, Dmitri dipped his head so I knew he could no longer see me. It was the appeal for mercy shown to Royalty. He taught us about it an hour ago.

  When he lifted those striking, cobalt eyes, there was expectance in them. I didn’t know what to say, so I turned and left him without another word. He didn’t say anything more either.

  “What’d you do to poor Dmitri?” Benn asked when I crossed the length of the gym to where he’d been waiting for me.

  I knew he was kidding. It was silly to think that I, an invariable nothing could do anything to the formidability that was the Razer Dmitri.

  I wanted to look back at the demon, but resisted. Instead, I shrugged at Benn because he was surrounded by some of our classmates and didn’t want to say anything in front of an audience.

  Benn shook his head, and I knew we’d be talking about it in depth later.

  “Do you
want to come out with us tonight, Savannah?” Camille asked me, the fear that I might say yes gleaming from her human eyes.

  Benn knew what Camille thought of me, how she talked about me to her friends. That was why he had no interest in her. She was never going to get it.

  “I have things to do,” flashing my customer service smile. “But, thanks.”

  Yeah, big things. Huge plans. Counting the cash register, taking a shower, dusting. Get to bed early.

  “You’re sure?” Camille asked, sounding transparently relieved.

  Forcing another fake smile, I nodded and started for the door.

  “I’ll meet you guys there in…like…thirty,” Benn called over his shoulder, following me instantly. “I’m walkin’ Savvy home.”

  I might have told him he didn’t have to, but it was futile to argue. Benn never pushed me to go out with them, never tried to make me be someone I wasn’t.

  And I never walked home alone.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Weird class today,” Benn said, bouncing on the balls of his feet to keep warm. It was especially bone-chilling tonight, the air so frigid it made my eyes water.

  “Weird? Understatement,” I frowned, thinking about Dmitri’s behavior after class. He was only seeing if I’d been paying attention during his lecture with his appeal for mercy. That had to be the reason. The demon was worried I would turn him in.

  Didn’t explain the three demons in my bookstore earlier, but the two occurrences probably weren’t related anyway. Why would they be?

  “Dmitri seemed…off today.”

  Benn laughed. “How could you tell? He’s not the most expressive demon I’ve seen. Oh, that reminds me,” he jerked his elbow toward my arm, but didn’t come close to making contact since he knew I didn’t like to be touched. “I heard the Royal’s Tempter and his flunkies have been spotted in your neighborhood. How cool would it be to run into them one day?”

  Wiping my cold nose with the back of my glove, I stayed quiet.

  “I know what Grayson looks like. He’s always in Gateway.” Benn referenced the gossip magazine that sprung up last year when demons set up shop downtown. Well known photographers and journalists came from national publications around the country to report on the demon’s mundane, day to day lives around St. Louis. Benn had every issue.