The storm raged through the night, never letting up once.

That was fine with Ellie. She had books and simple food and enough apothecary work to keep her busy, and if she got bored with that, she could always go back to her sewing for a while. She could buy clothes in town, sure, but going to town was a hassle, and when you spent your life in the woods, there was almost always mending to do.

Her new demon... friend... sat in the single old armchair by the front window. Ellie didn't have guests often, so she didn't have much need of extra seating. In fact, she didn't have much need of extra anything.

The little two room house was a standard kind of space for Witches living in her small community. Most families expanded on the house when they had children or just moved to a bigger home if it became available, but Ellie had never expected to need more than this.

Well... Only once had she expected to need something more. Those hopes were gone now.

The two rooms in the house were a kitchen space and a space for everything else, plus a bathroom off the back of the house that operated from well water. Though, calling the place two rooms was a bit of a stretch. It was more like two distinctly decorated spaces with an iron stove in the middle dividing them up, but it was really just one large room.

Upon entering, the right half was the kitchen. There was a plain wooden table with two chairs, the basic iron stove for heat, a gas stove and oven combination for cooking, a sink, and counter with storage underneath, and a small cabinet with dishes. The far right wall, however, held shelves absolutely packed with baskets, bottles, bags, and jars of dried herbs. Bundles of drying plants hung from the ceiling rafters, from strings attached to hooks on the wooden walls, even above the doorway... though, Ellie kept those there for a little protective boost.

The left half was... everything else.

The house was designed so one stove could heat the entire space, so the full bed was tucked into the far left corner to save space, a woven rug covering the brick floor near it. A trunk at the foot of the bed held most of Ellie's clothes, a cabinet by the door held her outdoor supplies, and one armchair sat by the window next to a small table. That was the chair that Kaz now occupied, the oil lamp on the table burning bright. Beside the table, an overflowing bookshelf held Ellie's favorite volumes.

"Rafayelle, was it?" Kaz asked softly as he riffled through a book on medicinal herbs. It wasn't the most interesting reading on her shelf, but it was certainly informative and would acquaint him with plants of the area.

"It's Ellie. Unless you want me to go around calling you Kazerin, that is."

"Why the distaste? I would think you'd like being named after a powerful angel."

Ellie just snorted as she pulled extra blankets out of the closet.

"It's a little early for backstories, ain't it?"

"Humor me."

"Okay, short version: my momma was a pastor's daughter from down the mountain."

"And?"

"And that's all you get," Ellie said with a smile. "I told you it was the short version."

If that bothered him, he didn't show it. Everything seemed to roll off his back like the rain rolled off the windowpanes of the house. Kaz stretched his arms dramatically and shrugged off his leather coat, laying it over the back of one of the two kitchen chairs.

Then, without preamble, he crossed the room and flopped his entire body across Ellie's bed.

Feet dangling, Kaz toed off his shoes and let them fall to the floor before he crossed his legs, looking for all the world like he wasn't planning on moving. His eyes closed and he rested his head against one of the pillows

"Uh... that's my bed," Ellie said slowly.

"Well, there's only one and you promised me food and lodging, so I suppose it's our bed for the foreseeable future."

Something felt like it cracked open inside Ellie as she processed that statement, like a lightning bolt straight to the skull or a cold chill you couldn't shake.

"Wait— here? You're staying here? I thought you meant at a local boarding house or something." She was floundering and she knew it, but she didn't care.

"Do you really want to go through the questions that would cause?" He didn't even glance at her, eyes still closed as he lounged against the pillows.

Ellie opened her mouth, already poised to argue, shoulders tense and finger pointing.

Then she closed it.

She lowered her hand.

She let her shoulders slump.

As much as she was loathe to admit it, he was right. A demon in a witch community was one thing, but a demon staying in town, especially one with visible horns, had the potential to draw too many questions or even cause outright panic among the locals.

For the most part, Others were tolerated in and around Boone. Accepted would be an overstatement, but generally the residents left Others well enough alone so long as they didn't cause any trouble. Demons were an exception in many ways. In a town deep in the Bible belt, suspicions and superstitions ran deep. Even Ellie didn't quite trust Kaz, and she was the reason he was here in the first place.

"... No," Ellie grumbled, pursing her lips.

"Good, then that's settled."

"I'm sleeping on the floor," Ellie grumbled.

"Your choice. The bed's big enough for two."

"I know it is." Ellie sighed and started unlacing her boots. "The least you could do is turn around while I change."

Kaz responded by placing a pillow over his face, eyes still closed. "Will this work?"

Ellie bit back a laugh. "That works."

She probably shouldn't find it funny. In fact, she really shouldn't. This was a serious situation, and she'd be in serious shit if anyone found out what she was investigating.

As quickly as possible, Ellie unbuttoned her shirt, slipped on her nightgown, and then wiggled out of her pants while she was still fully covered. She looked over her shoulder at Kaz the whole time, and he didn't even twitch. It was weirdly comforting, in a way, though she was still self-conscious enough to cross her arms over her chest over the thin nightgown as she finally spoke.

"Okay. You're in the clear."

Kaz removed the pillow, opened his eyes, and gasped dramatically. "How scandalous! A calf-length nightgown. How will I survive the shock?" he sighed.

Ellie just rolled her eyes. "I've known you for an hour and you're asking me to get into bed with you. Give me just a little bit of wiggle room here."

"I've known people for less time that asked me to get into bed with them," he pointed out, and she had no doubt that was true. 

"I'm not those people, but thanks anyways." She wanted there to be a bite to it, but there was none. She just sounded tired, even to herself. The exhaustion was creeping into her bones, and sleep would likely take her soon.

Ellie had no problem with the concept of one-night stands, and that wasn't the issue here. Truly, she didn't even care that he kept implying he expected her to want sex— that seemed like more of a personal thing for him, and she wasn't about to press him on it.

The issue was that the only person she'd ever shared a bed with for any length of time was dead, and she didn't even know who killed him, and she couldn't bring herself to even think about sharing a bed with somebody else that wasn't him. It made her chest tight just to think about it, not to mention that she didn't trust Kaz. They were allies, yes, but also strangers. Sleeping next to a stranger was not something she wanted to do.

"You need sleep. Conjuring is draining."

"I know." The basic principle of conjuring was that, once answered, the spell drew on both parties to guide the conjured spirit to the conjurer. In truth, now that the adrenaline had worn off, she was completely sapped.

That didn't mean she'd sleep in a room with someone she didn't trust, though. Swear or no swear. Ellie was used to keeping her guard up, and a little fatigue was something she could deal with. Even drained and walking on shaking legs, she refused to compromise if she could push through.

Instead of continuing the conversation, she brushed out her hair and re-braided it for bed.

"Why did you call a demon if you don't plan to trust me?" Kaz asked. She turned towards him to find his eyes wide open, staring at her like a puzzle he couldn't solve.

"Does a blood bargain require trust as a spell component?"

"Not strictly, no," Kaz mused, "but you're asking for a prolonged investigation. We're going to be together for a while."

"It's not because you're a demon. Well, not entirely," she said, nose scrunching a little. "I admit I don't know anyone who's had a good experience with a demon, but I know a couple of people who've pissed off some fae and a couple more who claim to have had their own scrapes with angelics. I'm as suspicious of you as I would be of any stranger whose help I needed."

"... Reasonable," he said softly. "Quite reasonable."

"I'm not asking you to trust me, either, for the record." She grabbed a blanket from the trunk at the end of the bed and threw it around her shoulders. "Do people usually trust you?"

"I haven't yet found a middle ground between humans who are overconfident in their ability to control me and humans who are far too trusting for their own good. Though... I do find those areas have quite a bit of overlap. Maybe there isn't a middle ground at all."

"Shit on a stick..." Ellie muttered, taking a deep breath through her nose.

Kaz tilted his head slightly, watching her every movement as she took a pillow from the bed and started to calculate the least terrible place to sleep on the brick floor. It was probably on the rug, but she'd risk getting stepped on that way, and it would be warmer next to the stove. She could move the rug, though. That could be an option.

"... Hey," he said softly, just as she was turning all this over in her head.

"Yes?"

"I meant it when I said I'm not going to do anything to you that you don't consent to. We're bound by a blood bargain. Even if I wanted to hurt you, I couldn't until the terms are fulfilled."

That should probably make her feel better, but she wasn't convinced. Just because he couldn't do her purposeful harm didn't mean a damn thing, and she knew enough about wiggle room in wording to know he could probably find ways around it if he really wanted to. She could, too, for that matter. However, there was one phrase in particular that made her pause.

"Even if you wanted to?" She echoed. At the very least, it implied that he wasn't interested in harming her, and wouldn't have been in the first place. That was... Well, not all Others were interested in harming or subjugating humans. That was just prejudice and horror stories and a few real stories that were particularly bad.

She certainly did have someone interesting in her home, though, and for the smallest moment, Ellie allowed herself to believe that some form of good luck had finally come back around to her.

"What can I say? It's the most interesting job I've been offered in a long time. I don't plan to let it slip away so easily." He sounded nonchalant, but so had almost everything else he'd said that evening. Just as Ellie thought about questioning it, Kaz groaned, stretched, and stood from the bed, stalking back across the room to the armchair.

"You staying up?" she asked, brow furrowing.

"I was engrossed in that book before you started talking my ear off. Think I'll go back to it."

Kaz plopped down in the chair sideways with his long legs draped over the arm and the lantern at his back, shining light on the worn, yellow pages of The Flora of Appalachia.

She wondered for a moment if he was... being nice.

A nice demon. That sounded opposite to everything she'd ever heard and read about demons. Yet... here he was, sitting in the armchair by the lamp, book in his lap. As though he felt her staring, he looked up.

"Are you planning to sleep or stare at me all night?"

Without a word, Ellie snuggled down under the comforter, throwing the blanket that had once been around her shoulders on top of the others for a comforting, warm weight. She turned so her back was to him, less as a show of trust and more because she really did not think she could sleep if she was facing someone else.

"Put out the lamps before you sleep, please," she said softly. "Blankets are in the trunk if you get cold."

"Mm."

"... Thanks," Ellie whispered after a long moment.

There was no response, and she wasn't about to say it again.

He hadn't planned to spend the night in the armchair, he really hadn't. Kazerin couldn't remember a single time when someone had actively refused to let him into their bed, especially a human interested in bargaining. That was outside his experience, but he was truly serious about what he told Ellie: he would not do anything without her consent, including sleeping in the bed.

It was stupid of him to answer another bargain, but he was looking for an excuse to get out of town, to find a new life for a while, anything that would distract him. Anything that would break up the monotony. Accepting bargains was almost like a drug addition. It gave him a little distraction for a little while, just long enough to make him feel better before he jolted back to reality.

And then, after a while of sitting in that reality, you came to want the distraction again. It didn't even matter how shitty the recovery period might be.

Bargains were funny things. Conjurings in general were funny things. For a summons, you had to have someone specific in mind, and those usually went to higher-tier demons with more famous histories, often Abrahamic ones. Summoning would get you exactly who you wanted, but there wasn't a guarantee they'd do what you wanted.

Conjuring, on the other hand, was like sending out a little lure out into the universe and hoping someone took the bait. It wasn't a guarantee that you'd get any response at all, but it did widen your net drastically, and if you got a bite, there was a better chance it was the bite you needed to get the job done.

On his end of the process, it felt like... a ringing in his ear. A pungent herbal scent that wasn't coming from anywhere around him. A tingle on his skin, a taste on his tongue like blood and grief and salt. The blood was par for the course. Blood sacrifices were standard. The grief was not uncommon, though plenty of people conjured from anger, sorrow, lust, greed, or guilt. Kaz didn't have a preference for emotions most of the time, though with the number of calls he'd answered in the last fifty years, the taste of lust and greed on his tongue made him want to retch. Those were the ones he tasted the most right before answering, the ones that wanted to bargain for power or love, the ones that would pay the highest price for what they wanted.

This one was... different. It was the salt that tipped him off, at first. Iron was one thing, the tang of human blood having its own specific taste, but salt was not normal for a sacrifice. And he only ever tasted the sacrifice— that was the point of the taste to a conjuring call, he'd learned over time. Smells were specific to the conjurer, but the taste... why was there salt, he'd wondered?

It took him a moment to discern that it was from tears. It took him a moment to discern that there was blood, yes, but the majority of it wasn't potent. It was numb, offered by rote. But the tears... the blood wiped off a self-inflicted wound not made by a knife... Something about that called out in a way that twisted in his chest.

Loss.

It sang a song of loss.

So he reached out with his mind and his magic, pulled on that invisible thread, and tugged as hard as he could.

The next thing he knew, he was standing in a tiny kitchen, staring back at a woman whose grief was plain on her face. That was fine. The grief wasn't new. Dealing in heartbreak was practically a specialty for incubi, considering they often possessed powers that humans at least assumed would solve their problems. This, though... this was strange.

This was off.

She wasn't responding to his flirting and bit back at his jibes, and that was strange. He could tell if someone was playing hard to get or ignoring their own body— he could smell arousal like a perfume on them. This woman genuinely wasn't interested. She was afraid, to an extent, or perhaps it was better to call it distrustful, and that seemed to feed into her biting remarks, but he didn't mind. It was better than simpering for power.

As far as Kaz was aware, he'd been looking over a dry but informative botanical text, turning all of this over in his mind, and then suddenly he was sitting in a chair by a long-extinguished oil lamp, listening to a rooster announce the morning and attempting to move his stiff and sore neck.

It was the smell that really woke him, though. He could hear something sizzling softly, and though it took him a moment to remember where he was, his nose and his stomach seemed to be far ahead of his conscious mind.

Ellie was already awake, dressed in long pants and a simple shirt as she stood in the kitchen. There was a canvas bag on the table with jars and boxes stacked around it, ready for packing, and a few jars of canned goods out with the breakfast materials.

"Why are you up so early?"

"Checking the brews. I've got stuff to take to town when we go today." More glass jars clanked, and then he heard sizzling. "That, and breakfast. We're gonna need a good meal if we're walking to town."

He hadn't taken note of the little stove and oven combination before, but now it was at the forefront of his mind as the smell of frying meat wafted towards his nose. His stomach audibly growled, but Ellie barely seemed to react.

"You want bacon?" she asked, throwing another piece of salted pork into the pan. "I went and checked the hens while you were asleep. We've got bacon, eggs, canned fruit, bread— what'cha want?"

Kaz just opened and closed his mouth like a fish, trying to process both how she could be so chipper so early in the morning and how he'd managed to sleep that deeply in an old armchair in a house he'd never been in before. Finally, he shook his head like it might clear the morning fog from his brain, stood, and painfully rolled his shoulders.

God, that's a terrible plan, I'm never sleeping there again.

He tried to ignore the subtle cracks and creaks of his bones as he walked towards the kitchen table, continuing to stretch as he went. Ellie, seemingly unperturbed, continued cooking breakfast. She grabbed a jar from one of the shelves seemingly at random. They all looked the same to him, and he thought it might have something to do with the food, but he was wrong.

"Here," Ellie said, plonking a mason jar with a tied-on label down on the table in front of him.

"What's this?" Kaz picked up the jar and squinted at the thick, slightly oily substance inside as he sat in one of the wooden chairs.

"My guess is you've got a crick in your neck from sleeping in that chair. This should help. Put a little on your fingertips and massage it in."

"What's in it?" He opened the lid, popped the seal off, and sniffed at it. The stuff was pungent, but it didn't smell bad.

"Nothin' that's gonna poison ya," Ellie said with a snort. "People always think I'm using some kinda black magic because my recipes work so well, but I'm just learning from the folks around us. Usin' things other people wouldn't use."

"Like what?" Almost against his better instinct, he dipped his fingertip into the substance in the jar and began to rub it on the back of his neck. She was right, his muscles were screaming, and he was willing to take a chance on a remedy rather than be in pain all day.

"The Cherokee know a lot more about working with mountain plants than we do, even after my family's been in these woods for generations. You always want to listen to 'em when they pass through. We trade recipes sometimes," she said with a shrug. "There's a few Black families up in Fancy Gap that know African plants real well. They visited here when I was a teenager and I got to know their daughter pretty good. Name's Miriam. We sent letters back and forth for years, and now we send plants back and forth, too. She's got a knack for makin' things grow here that nobody else can, and she's plannin' to pass that on to her kids."

"What about you?" Kaz asked carefully. Bargain or not, he barely knew anything about this woman, and it would be in his best interest to find out anything he could. Just in case.

"What about me what?" Ellie asked around a mouthful of bacon and eggs.

"Kids? Things to pass on?" he asked casually. As he spoke, he noticed a slight warming sensation on the back of his neck, where he'd rubbed Ellie's balm into his skin. Though he was well aware of witch abilities and limitations, he... hadn't truly expected it to work quite so well. There was a pleasant heat to it and the pain slowly faded as he once again rolled his shoulders, and Ellie smirked like she knew exactly what he was thinking.

Blessedly, she didn't comment, though. she just took the jar, put the lid back on, and placed it on the shelf it came from.

"You see any babies running around this house?" She gestured broadly to the open space. "You think I'm hidin' kids in the walls?"

"Could be grown by now," he suggested. He didn't know how old she was and he wasn't about to hazard a guess. Witch aging had gone haywire in unpredictable ways since the Appearances began and their Other blood activated.

"You think I look old enough to have grown kids?" Ellie spluttered.

"Your... hair?" Kaz gestured to her long braid with his free hand. It was completely silver from root to tip, and her hair went easily down to her hips, even braided.

"Oh." Ellie paused, like she'd forgotten her hair color was even odd. "My hair's been growing this color since I was born."

"How long ago was that?" He briefly caught her eye as he put the lid back on the glass jar, looking for any tiny ticks or tells on her face, but he couldn't catch any at all in the dim morning light.

Ellie smirked. "Wouldn't you like to know?"

He let the subject drop, watching as she grabbed a few ingredients from the shelf and mixed them into a bowl. Moving back and forth between taking strips of sizzling bacon out of the pan and mixing something in the bowl, Ellie hummed absently as she worked. It wasn't any specific tune, just humming, and Kaz found it oddly peaceful.

When a loose dough had formed in the bowl, she carefully portioned it out, put a little extra oil in the pan, and began to cook it.

"You want fry bread?"

"Fry... what?"

"Told you we got a lot to learn. It's good, trust me. It's a Native tradition, and I can't make it as nice as they do, but I like it for mornings." The oil in the pan sizzled as she dropped the dough in, and a mouthwatering smell wafted through the air as it cooked. "There's a Seminole version with squash, too. It's a good way to spice up your canned veggies when you're damn sick of whatever you canned by spring."

"Simple living..." Kaz said slowly, not quite conscious he was speaking aloud.

"Again, you got a problem with it?" Ellie asked, obviously bristling. "We're way outside town, and the only way to get to the town with any kind of ease is one train line. It's a new one, too. We do what we can out here. We grow as much food as we're able, installed a water pump and pipe system, and we look after each other."

"I certainly understand the need for self-sufficiency, trust me, but... why not make your own town elsewhere, somewhere with better amenities? Or move in with other witches closer to cities?"

Ellie scrunched up her nose. "That's something only a city slicker would ask," she said with a sigh, but there was no malice in her tone. "If we had more people, maybe we could make our own town, but it's not practical right now. And this is home, anyhow. I won't leave the woods and the mountain just to have a little bit of an easier walk to the general store.

"Not wanting to leave your home is something I can certainly understand."

Ellie paused, eyes narrowing slightly as she peered at him, like she might be able to see into his very soul if she stared hard enough.

"Care to elaborate?" she asked carefully.

Kaz just shrugged. "It's a little early for backstories."