The Pleasures of Hell

Chapter 01.014

~~Mia~~

The buzz didn't go away. Adron and Hannah eventually left, leaving Mia with Kas, and the buzz continued. Whatever had been in the demon's heart, it settled her hunger and made her feel alive. It made her want to get more. It made her want to sink her teeth into more meat, more flesh, and this time drink down the blood.

"Can you feel that?" she asked. She sat on the giant table on the raised half of her bedroom, legs dangling off the side, and faced toward the other half of the room. Kas crouched on the floor below, beside her pile of leather blankets. Up here, she could look down at him, a vantage point she'd never really enjoyed before.

Kas pointed his eyeless shark head up at her, clicked once in his throat, a hard cluck sort of sound, and nodded.

"What's it feel like?"

After a few seconds pause, the shark dinosaur tapped a claw on the floor.

"Your aura is telling me to..." He paused again, and looked down. Embarrassed? "I don't know. I feel... energy." Okay not embarrassed, just confused, same as her.

"That's what I'm feeling, yeah. I feel like I could go run a mile, climb a tree, do a slam dunk, and do some parkour." And go a few rounds in the ring, sex or fighting.

Kas didn't respond.

"You don't watch scrying pools a lot like the others, do you?"

He slowly shook his head and clucked once in his throat.

That was it. Or at least, part of it, why he felt so different to Adron. Much as Adron was an eight-foot-tall demon, he talked a lot like a human. Did they have scrying pools down in the hatching pit? Probably, considering how smoothly he talked in human terms.

Kas wasn't like that. Kas was a demon, the kind stories about demons painted in her head, or at least one of the kinds. Violent, angry, full of rage. Maybe someone she could practice her psych skills on?

"Kas," she said. "I... noticed you don't really talk to the other demons, or hang out with them. The ones in the dens seemed to know you, but they were all scared of you." Awesome as it'd been seeing a bunch of demons afraid of her bodyguard, it also meant Kas didn't have many friends. Did demons even want friends? A good reason for the conversation, to learn more about demons, and her bodyguard.

"They are afraid of me."

"Oh. Because you're one of Zel's enforcers?"

He slowly nodded, and aimed his head toward her closed door. But he didn't say anything else. Getting him to open up about even the tiniest thing was going to be like pulling teeth.

Maybe it didn't have to be? Some therapists used soothing background music, specific colors for their walls, decor like plants, and even scents and incense, to create an environment where patients could open up. Therapy was always tough on the patient. It was like visiting a dentist and asking them to poke the painful cavity, with the eventual goal of fixing the cavity so they could chew food again. But dentists had local anesthetic to make that less painful. Therapists had nothing but the environment and their words.

She was different. She had this weird crazy aura thing. Not only that, Zel told her to practice it, too.

How to do this how to do this. The strange, tiny vibration in her heart almost felt like... like... a vibrating string? Or a vibrating instrument? She couldn't grab and force it to do what she wanted, like the demons did with their sin auras. So, run with the instrument analogy, then.

She visualized the strange sensation in her heart, and tried plucking it like a string, or blowing on it like a wind instrument. Nothing. But, maybe... if she could feel what she wanted to do, and not just visualize...