Defection - (ON HOLD)

3. Asmodeus

|| Dedicated to JillyBean30: My Master Shifu now and forever! Thank you for believing in me <3 ||

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3. Asmodeus

Arsinoe woke up with an excruciating headache. She opened her eyes and shut them quickly, sluggishly moving her hands to cover her eyes from the lights that shone too bright despite her hazy vision.

She tried shifting so that the glare was not directly within her field of vision, but any movement on her part only seemed to intensify the ache at the base of her skull and she gave up making any movement.

When she felt sure that moving her head would not trigger the ache again Arsinoe looked around at the place she was prisoner in. All she could infer in her drowsy state was that it seemed like she was in one of those moving vehicular contraptions that humans used for swift travel.

Moving her hands, she felt soft cloth beneath her fingers and discovered that she was lying on a bed. Decorated luxuriously despite being narrow, a single matching chair was the only furniture in the appropriately tiny room.

Arsinoe took a deep breath and steadied herself. Only when sure that the haziness had subsided enough, she caught her head in her hands and carefully manoeuvred herself in to sitting position.

Looking out of the huge curtained glass window, she noticed that the ‘vehicle’ was swaying gently as it swiftly passed through the countryside, though she could not hear any sounds. She made her way to the window and tried to find the mechanism that would snap it open. She knew from her few brief visits to earth that the contraptions had mechanisms that did that, but try as she might this one seemed to be sealed shut.

Giving up when her struggles intensified the headache, Arsinoe banged uselessly on the window before his voice startled her.

“I see you’re awake.”

Her head snapped toward the voice with a speed that sent a throbbing ache splitting through her skull, “Bloody Hell!”

“You got that one right, babe.” Hale chuckled, and leaned against the door of the compartment as he observed the woman. She looked almost fragile, which was hilarious considering what he said next. “But you do seem to have recovered pretty quickly... that dosage I gave you knocks out a demon for the entire train journey.”

 “I’m no puny demon. And you are gravely mistaken if you think that you can control a Valkyrie!”

He noticed that her eyes flashed to icy blue when she was angry, like a blazing blue flame. The words had elicited exactly the response he was looking for, and that made him feel almost alien inside, the warmth in his chest was once an unfathomable expression.

“Well, not mistaken. I am simply a deliveryman. You need your ‘Horn’, and my Master needs something from you in return.”

When she did not say anything, he slid the door to the compartment closed and pulled the chair toward him setting it right in front of the door, swinging it so that the back faced her; he sat and leaned on it.

“One piece of advice for you babe; just do as he asks of you... He is known to be a teensy bit temperamental.”

“How do you know about my horn?”

Hale could see that she was looking for escape routes, the only one currently being the doorway he was blocking. He needed to distract her, but he also knew if he opened his mouth and gave her even an inch, Asmodeus would have his head, and so he tried to deflect her.