Page 91 of Mortis

Not truly.

They were.

Those who had captured me. Those who had bound me in chains and forced me into servitude. Those who had treated me as little more than a weapon they could point towards anything they wanted dead.

They had made Teddy cry.

And if I hadn’t already slaughtered them, I would’ve hunted down every last one for that offence alone.

Having someone care about me so deeply that my pain somehow became theirs was a novelty.

Empathy.

Teddy had explained the concept to me before. The ability to understand and share the feelings of another. I understood the definition, but experiencing it was considerably more confusing. Demons weren’t created to share the emotions of others. We recognised them, certainly, but only because they were useful. Fear made mortals obedient. Grief made them vulnerable. Desperation made them foolish. Joy had little purpose. Neither did affection.

Demons were not empathetic.

We were apathetic. Manipulative and predatory. Yet with each day I spent with Teddy, Arlo, and Maurice, those distinctions seemed a little less absolute.

I was learning what it meant to care whether another being was happy. What it meant to feel discomfort when they were sad. What it meant to hear Teddy laugh and immediately want to make him do it again.

Human emotions were terribly inconvenient.

I liked them very much.

A few days later, Teddy and I were walking to work, hand in hand. I had discovered I enjoyed holding his hand. There was no practical reason for it. It didn’t help either of us walk faster, and it offered no protection I couldn’t provide without it. But I simply liked having his fingers tangled with mine.

Things had been quiet since the strange incident with Mammon’s sigil appearing on Mr Simpson’s chest. I was grateful for that, and I knew Teddy felt the same. The door to Adler & Sons had remained locked overnight. No more coffins had mysteriously moved between the viewing rooms. The strange man Arlo had apparently seen lingering outside hadn’t returned.

Everything seemed normal again.

I should have found that comforting. Instead, I found myself tightening my fingers around Teddy’s. Because I had learned long ago that silence didn’t always mean the danger had passed.

Sometimes it meant the predator was waiting.

I wasn’t sure how or why Mammon’s sigil had appeared inside Adler & Sons, carved into the chest of an elderly gentleman. Nor did I know who’d put it there. That troubled me almost as much as the symbol itself.

Mammon’s sigil was not well known amongst mortals. It didn’t appear in the Ars Goetia, the section of an occult grimoire containing the names and seals mortals used to summon demons. Mammon had never possessed the same desire for recognition as some of his infernal brethren.

Lucifer, for example, was an insufferable attention seeker.

He’d allowed his sigil to spread far and wide amongst the humans, practically begging them to call upon him in the hopes of striking a bargain.

Mammon was far more selective. His mark wasn’t printed in books for any curious eyes to discover. It was whispered from one devotee to another. Passed between families and through generations, entrusted only to those considered worthy of recognising it. Which meant whoever had carved it into Mr Simpson’s chest hadn’t stumbled across it by chance.

They knew.

The Beast suspected our former jailors. He had been restless ever since seeing the mark. Pacing through the recesses of my mind, snarling that they’d found us. That they’d returned to reclaim what they believed belonged to them.

I did my best to ignore Him, because it couldn’t be them.

We’d slaughtered them.

Every last one.

We’d made certain of it before fleeing into the night and eventually making our home in Barrowfell Woods.

Hadn’t we?