Sins & Sinners

Orisha. 2

The place where I usually got breakfast was a cozy, dimly lit hole-in-the-wall nestled between an apothecary and a jewelry shop. It also happened to be in Underworld.

The entrance to Underworld is as you would expect it to look.

On the outskirts of town, in relative distance to both the woods and the beach is where a squat, square building sits. It's old and dilapidated, paint chipping off the once-white bricks, some of which have fallen away long ago to reveal the wooden skeleton underneath. Vines crawl up the sides of the wall, snaking through windows long since busted and tarnished with spray paint.

It was meant to look as unappealing as possible while still being somewhat believable to ward off any humans. And it worked.

For the most part, at least.

I found a certain solace in abandoned buildings and Belladonna had led me here on the first day of middle school after I got bullied by three girls in the bathroom that called me a hoodrat and said my dreads looked like worms coming out of my head.

I'd been shocked to see that the inside of the building was actually a low-ceiling hangout with dim red lighting for strangely ethereal not-people with strange markings, red eyes, and extra appendages, like tails or horns, and at the back of the building was a low archway. When you stepped through the dark, writhing purple that filled the arch, you came out in a market place full of daemon.

As always, even though I was a human, there wasn't a daemon who made too much of a fuss about it. The fact that I could even see them in the first place always seemed to be enough for daemon to welcome me as one of their own.

"Ori!"I looked up upon hearing Daire's voice and smiling as he waved me toward the booth we always sat in with him and my other friends, Kazimir and Raelinn.

Daire and Kazimir sat with their hands intertwined casually, the light glinting off the shimmery holographic scales adorning the deep bronze of Kazimir's skin, hard as marble and tough enough that special metal had to be used in even the slightest hope of piercing it. While Kaz was reminiscent of a lizard or snake person to me, Raelinn was like a strange human-wildcat hybrid, her long, lithe human body decorated with large, ultra-sensitive triangular ears atop her head that twisted and twitched at even the slightest sound. She had these sort of hand-paws with a long fluffy tail and thick stark white fur that shed absolutely everywhere and covered her entire body even though she had wild vivid orange curls hanging down to the middle of her back.

Like all female daemon, she possessed iron teeth that could rip you to shreds.

Daire was closest to resembling a human, silver hair flopping in his face and metallic silver designs swirling beautifully over his long, tanned frame, ram's horns protruding from his head and claws from his hands.

Raelinn and Daire grinned, fist-bumping me while Kazimir reached over and mussed my wild, wavy dreads. "How's my favorite human?"

I scoffed as I sat next to Raelin, Asphodel slowly uncoiling from around my arm and slithering over to Kaz while Belladonna rested atop Raelin's bushy tail, her own flicking with interest as she surveyed her surroundings.

They always seemed to be partial to daemon that were closest to their species.

"Shut up, Kaz, I'm the only human you know."

"Yeah, and you're already one too many."

"Can you two at least wait until I get more stonefish before you start arguing?" Daire drawled lazily as Alaric, the restaurant's owner, waiter, bartender, and cook appeared in a cloud of dark purple smoke.

Two of his arms took Daire and I's order while one pet Belladonna, another tosses Asphodel a baked mouse, two more took a couple's order a few tables away, one mopped a spill in the corner of the room, and a few reached far in the back where I presume they were cooking.