𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄'𝐒 𝐌𝐘 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄? (𝗵. 𝗮𝗸𝗶) ✓

11

Hanasaki woke up with a start.

She immediately sat bolt upright. The first thing she noticed after regaining consciousness was that her clothes were drenched in sweat. The collar and shoulders of her top were stuck firmly to her body, and she shivered. That wasn't the only reason she was cold; her actual clothes were just a baggy shirt and pair of shorts, despite it being freezing outside.

The second thing she noticed was that her heart was pounding at an alarmingly fast rate in her heaving chest. She tried to slow her breathing, although it felt like she was still suffocating under a cloak of dark fumes.

Fumes. Smoke fumes. Her half-lidded, bleary eyes widened as she recollected what had woken her so frightfully.

It all came back to her. The unmistakable stench of burning things, burning flesh, the roar of falling timbers as another section of the roof caved in on itself. And other memories, things she couldn't quite remember to have been in her dream, but related to it. The whooping shriek of police sirens, the roll of tyres on slippery mud, lights that were too bright. Too, too bright. A voice asking her if she was alright. If she was hurt. Many voices, in fact. But her own voice seemed to have deserted her, and she answered their questions in muted shakes and nods of her head. Everything had felt so distant then, and although there were so many people surrounding her, their words were always drowned out by the hungry crackle of fire.

A sort of sadness washed over her as she remembered this. Not a violent, overwhelming sadness, but more one that simply deepened the hollow feeling in her stomach. A sense of loss, quiet yet blunt.

One thing she had listened to, though. The private exchanges between these people, the ones spoken in scratchy, secretive whispers. The ones she wasn't supposed to overhear. The mentions of a name said in tones so hushed one would think it a curse to even breathe it. But young Hanasaki had heard it as loud and clear as if they had announced it with rowdy confidence.

'Fire Devil'.

Even if she hadn't eavesdropped, it wouldn't have taken some impossibly clever detective work for her to have found out by herself. The sheer destruction wreaked upon her house could not have been done by man, or man alone for that matter. Devilry was certainly responsible.

Because what Devil would refrain from taking the opportunity to raze a cottage to the ground, and dine on fresh blood, the owner of which being completely unable to fight back?

And there was another reason for the name being so memorable. It was almost humorous, actually; she had heard it, years back, when she was barely four years old, uttered in the same agitated way. Her mother had stood at the door, talking to a stranger, while Hanasaki peered round the bannisters, crouching on the bottom step of the stairs. She had to strain her ears to discern their urgent mumbling, and even then could only catch faint snatches of the conversation. 'Fire Devil' stood out to her the most, the fabled talk of Devils being a subject of interest to her because of her father's job.

She had often thought to herself in proud silence that her father was a Senior Public Safety Devil Hunter in Tokyo, such a title being like kingship in her small rural town. Hanasaki begged him to tell stories of his derring-do during his rare visits home, but her mother always interrupted him before he could get to any of the good bits. Maybe she feared that her child would follow in his footsteps. She didn't need another family member in a line of work as dangerous as being a Devil Hunter.

Another phrase she had noticed being said often during her mother and the stranger's exchange was her father's name. She rarely heard his full name being said, so it took a few repeats of it for her to catch on. And the more the two spoke, the more her confusion grew.