Not Quite Human

Chapter 28

Neil woke in Damien's arms, wincing immediately.
He took in the room slowly - a basement of some kind, damp and dim, no windows, sparse light. He looked at Damien, waiting for an explanation. Damien looked back at him with an expression that would have suited a funeral considerably better than it suited a face.
He couldn't bring himself to say it easily. It had been his decision to leave Neil behind. His decision that had put a mark on the boy's face, gotten Andrew killed, left Neil on a rune with his wrist open until help arrived. If they'd been any later - he didn't finish the thought. The mark on Neil's face was going to be there permanently, a reminder carved into someone he should have protected better.
Neil, apparently uninterested in waiting for an explanation, stood up on unsteady legs and headed for the door.
"I wouldn't," Nerezza said, not looking up. "Unless you'd like to present your head to one of the demons on a silver platter."
Neil stopped. His mother was out there. Spots was out there. He looked around the room and noticed, for the first time, that Hissana wasn't in it.
Abbadon flinched at the name when Neil said it aloud - the first movement his face had made since they'd arrived.
Nerezza chose her words with slightly more care than usual. "Not everyone outside is dead. A lot of people found shelter in time - places like this one. And many of those who were caught weren't killed. The demons appear to want subjects more than corpses - someone to rule over, someone to torment at leisure. So your mother is likely alive. Out there somewhere." She paused. "We can't go looking for her yet. Not without joining either the dead or the caged." Another pause, shorter. "Hissana is dead. One assumes he felt he had no other choice."
Her eyes moved to Abbadon.
Nothing. He continued staring at the floor as though the name hadn't reached him at all.
Neil sat with it quietly. The memories were coming back in pieces now, fitting together into something he almost didn't want to understand. Andrew, dead. Hissana, the reason for it, and then dead himself. The blank look on Abbadon's face suddenly made complete sense, and Neil found he couldn't look at him directly.
He thought about the humans - the ones outside, suddenly dropped without warning into a world they'd always thought was fiction, at the worst possible moment of it. He thought about what they would do. Probably what people always did when the impossible became unavoidable. Deal with it. Survive it. Pretend it wasn't happening until pretending stopped being an option.
He let out a long breath and sat down beside Damien, leaning carefully against his shoulder. The contact helped in a way he couldn't have explained. They were still here. All of them, still here. He held onto that.
He also knew, sitting there, that something had shifted in him. He was tired of being the one left behind, the one kept safe, the one who woke up after everything was already over. He wanted to be stronger - strong enough to stand beside them instead of being carried by them. He wanted to find a way back, back to before the gates had opened, back to something that didn't require hiding in a basement and hoping. He was willing to pay whatever that cost.
Nerezza caught his expression and felt something that might, in a different person, have been called warmth. Good. He hadn't given up. That was the only thing that mattered right now.
"Rest today," she said. "Tomorrow we start. This basement is as good a training ground as any, and I won't be going easy on you - not until the demons start going easy on theirs."
The wicked glint was back in her eye. It was, under the circumstances, reassuring.
Loki appeared from nowhere.
The floor around him was covered in stuffed animals. He was holding a stuffed bunny with the expression of someone who had just thought of something extremely funny. "Cuddles, anyone?" He threw the bunny at Nerezza. It bounced off her head.
What remained of it, thirty seconds later, was mostly stuffing.
"There's no rule that says you have to cuddle it," Loki said cheerfully, watching Nerezza's face cycle through several shades of red. "You can dismantle it if that's more your style. Remove its eyes, empty it of its cottony entrails - whatever helps you sleep."
Neil bit down very hard on a laugh.

Damien watched him do it - the way his cheeks puffed slightly when he was trying not to smile, the way his mind kept finding its way back to something lighter no matter how dark things got. He took in the mark on the boy's face, the slight fragility in how he was sitting, the fact that he'd chosen Damien's shoulder to lean on without appearing to think about it.
He didn't say anything. He just put an arm around the boy and kept it there.
Some things didn't need words yet.