"Now serving number twenty-three. Number twenty-three." 

I stepped up to the deli counter with my ticket held close, eyeing the different cuts of meat and cheese laid out in their metal trays. There were decorative sprigs of parsley and a half dozen price tags that didn't seem to have any correlating products arrayed through the sweating ice. The longer I observed the selection, the more harassed the mustached employee standing behind the counter looked.

Having been content to buy and eat nothing but bulk-buy ramen and prepackaged meals for the duration of my single life, I turned to my companion and asked, "What would you like?" 

He glanced at the display, crimson eyes bright with regard. Jaw muscles tightened, then twitched as he lay one finger upon the glass and watched the steam rise at his touch. "All of it." 

I shouldn't be surprised. Darius was the Sin of Pride, an arch-demon of sorts, with whom I shared a....complicated history. He was dressed in black jeans and a red t-shirt, one hand shoved into his pockets as he bent nearer the counter's frosted glass, his strange eyes reflected as two blurred embers in a handsome visage. As an otherworldly authority, Darius was accustomed to getting his way, so when I muttered, "You can't have it all," from the corner of my mouth, he looked almost confused.

Darius's eyes narrowed and his lips tipped into a sneer. "Can't I?" 

"You can't," I said, tossing the butcher a placating smile. "Just pick one, Darius."

The Sin returned to his perusal, frowning, then jabbed his thumb as the stack of raw prime ribs. "Those, then."

The butcher sidled closer to Darius. "Which cuts, sir?" 

"All of them."

I sighed as I pinched the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger. I spared the growing line behind me a glance and decided it'd be simpler to not argue. Nodding at the employee to get on with it, I leaned on the shopping cart and crossed my arms.

Darius mimicked my posture as he watched the butcher with piercing attention. After his recent stint as a mortal, the Sin had become interested in even the most mundane aspects of Terrestrian living, determined to learn and study this realm with uncanny focus, as if scared to be so helpless again. Honestly, I found it difficult to imagine Darius could be helpless, even as a mortal. If anyone could survive this world with nothing but their fists and their mind, it was Darius. 

He made daily tasks...interesting. Going shopping for my car last week had been a nightmare, as Darius had explored every car, every inch of the lot, and had asked the salesman a half million questions concerning the sedan I'd chosen. After all that, he'd used his language, the Tongue of the Realm, to coerce the price down to something obscenely low. 

Darius then had the man strip to his underthings and run through traffic for calling me sweetheart. 

I peered at the creature, taking in the cant of his head, his untidy hair, and the rigidity of his posture. He turned to catch me staring and smirked.

I wondered why Darius was here today. I liked when he came places with me, but it couldn't be very interesting for him. The Sin had been many things over his long lifetime: lord, king, a demi-god worshiped by ancient humans, had partaken in numerous historical events, and even had his own Roman cult for a time—but it seemed the demon was adding "bored weekender" to his list of accomplishments. 

He could be so strange.

Watching the wrapped packages land in the crammed shopping cart one after the other, I grimaced and tried not to think about how I was going to afford all this. Did I have enough left in my debit account? I didn't have a clue. Payday was still a ways off and I had just bought a new car—and now I was apparently buying what amounted to two cows, a pig, three chickens, half a dairy farm, and enough dry goods to fill a silo.

The last package gathered, I shoved the overburdened cart forward and listened to the crooked wheels whine. Darius hooked one finger under the cart's lip and tugged, almost pulling it out from under me.

"You've a look," he said, reaching out to tap me between the eyes, right where my brows were furrowing. "I can sense the lecture building to magnificent proportions."

Scoffing, I batted his hand away and turned the cart toward the checkout registers. Afternoon sunlight poured through the front windows and shined upon what few cars dotted the parking lot outside. The clerk, bathed in that deluge of warm, golden light, was dozing at his station and only jumped to attention when I dropped a box of cereal onto the conveyor belt.

"You eat too much," I muttered as Darius shooed me aside and dumped the rest of the cart onto the belt. "I could feed half of Verweald with all this."

Straight, white teeth flashed in his answering smirk. "What's that ridiculous expression? 'I'm a growing boy?'"

"I'd say you were growing outward if I didn't know better." I came around the cart to approach the register, dipping my hand into the confines of my purse to find my wallet—weak, paltry thing that it was.

I didn't sense Darius until the clerk's blotchy eyes rounded and the Sin's heat fell across my back.

"Is that a joke at my expense, Sara?" he whispered in my ear, fingers tugging lightly at the ends of my unbound hair. An answering heat swelled in my veins—spurred by the presence of his hand suddenly on my waist, thumb sweeping along my blouse's hem—and I shivered, swallowing the sensation as I elbowed Darius in the middle. 

"Cash or card?" the clerk asked, looking anywhere but directly at me. 

"Card," I answered with false cheer.

After several minutes of patient waiting and fervent prayers, the groceries were bagged and my card was accepted. The cart was trundled to my four-door sedan, the bags stashed in the trunk before Darius and I slid into the front seats. The Sin wanted to drive but I had the keys in a death grip, refusing him, and eventually he settled with a disappointed grunt.

The engine revved and the radio played into the cracks of silence sown between us. Darius tipped his gaze out the window and watched the world pass us by.

This was exactly the kind of tiresome, typical routine I worried would bore Darius to frustration. I found it a dull but necessary chore, yet the Sin had insisted he come along.

"You know," I said as we entered the commercial district's traffic, clearing my throat. The sun was brighter here in Verweald's outskirts, where the shadows of the city's monoliths couldn't reach. I could spot Klau Tower in the rearview mirror, skewering the sky like a prong of the devil's pitchfork. "You don't have to come shopping with me."

The Sin turned his head just far enough to glance in my direction, and the light spilled across his face, setting his bright eyes aflame. They were always bright now. I hadn't seen them succumb to the black shadows of hunger in weeks.

"Do you wish for me to stay behind?" he asked, an indulgent quirk lifting one of his brows. That look said, "As if you could make me."

"That's not what I meant," I replied as I drummed my fingers on the wheel and watched the road. He knew that wasn't what I meant, irritating jerk. "I just wonder if you'd rather be doing something else." 

"Naturally." Darius's wrist twisted in his familiar circular gesture as he balanced an ankle on his opposing knee, sprawled in what space the seat allotted him. "Wouldn't you?" 

"Yeah, but I didn't ask about me." We came to a junction, the traffic at a standstill thanks to a broken streetlight, and I leaned on the steering wheel, my chin propped up on my bony hands. "I would've thought the great and mighty Sin of Pride would find grocery shopping beneath him."

Darius scoffed. "No creature is above procuring his own stocks, as I have learned. Not even the great, mighty, and fantastically arrogant Sin of Pride. You also forgot exceedingly charming."

I heard the sarcasm dripping from his tone and couldn't fight my grin. Darius stretched and caught a length of my dark hair, tucking it behind my ear after trailing his fingertips over my cheek. His touch left a residual heat, one that brought a blush to my skin. 

"It just doesn't seem very exciting," I said, my eyes still locked on the bumper of the minivan in front of us. "I'd thought you'd want to do more interesting things with your freedom."

I heard the seat adjust to his shifted weight as the Sin leaned nearer, hooking his fingers under the line of my jaw so I would face him. "I needn't journey so far to find something interesting," he said, something of a knowing smile on his lips as his thumb swept across my red cheek. I was surprised he'd say something so nice—but it was quickly followed with, "Life is never dull when you are around, as trouble trails your shadow like a child holding his mother's skirts. I expect a volcano to consume Verweald any day now."

I glowered and he chuckled, his amusement edged with the barest line of sinister intent as his thumb again crossed my cheek, fingers laced in my hair. "Jerk."

My gaze went past him, catching the motion of a bank's electronic marquee flickering with the time and date.

The date was what truly caught my attention. In my mind, it was still January, and I felt as if I had just left Crow's End, as if I'd just said goodbye to Peroth—Cuxiel—this morning. Davious's torture was days old, not weeks—and yet, it wasn't January. It was already mid-spring, and I couldn't recollect all those months in-between, as I'd been dead.

Sometimes, in random moments such as these, I was overcome by the darkness. I didn't know if it was simply an absence of thought or an actual memory of where I'd been, but the darkness bubbled from the cracks in my subconscious and flooded my thoughts. Where there should have been memories, images of color and light and inconsequential things, there was only darkness.

I had been dead.

"Sara?"

Darius's voice brought my attention back onto him, clearing the shadows that had stolen my vision. I had been staring past him for too long.

The Sin tipped his head, eyes on my own. "Are you well?"

"Yep," I responded shortly, whipping my head back to see the road and the creeping traffic. My knuckles shone white through the skin of my hands as I clutched at the steering wheel, willing the burble of panic ascending in my chest to slow and disperse. There was nothing to panic over. I was fine.

He studied my expression with something akin to worry in his gaze, but Darius wasn't one to worry. To worry implied a certain lack of capability that conflicted with Darius's prideful nature. He was curious, displeased at my apparent dishonesty, but not worried. As the cars before us finally began to move, the Sin allowed his eyes to wander away and silence again occupied the space between us.

I wondered what thoughts were going through his head to give him such a stern countenance. The color dimmed in his eyes, which served as the best indicator of his mood, considering how stiffly Darius always held his expressions. Trying to read him took a keen mind I didn't always possess, because there was always more beneath the indifference, the irritation, the aloof sneer, and sometimes I just wanted to flick him in the ear and demand he be forthcoming.

Now that would be an exercise in futility.

We drove past Verweald's limits into the lower foothills encumbering its northern border. Some of the hills had a dusting of drab, green sage from the rainfall earlier in the spring, while others were scorched black, having caught fire during Dalius's less than subtle raid of the city. Verweald was still reeling—the whole country was still in a state of shock, and the preternatural community was under quite a bit of pressure to keep their noses clean, lest the mortals become aware of their existence.

I let myself think about what it'd be like to live in a society that was aware of the terrors lurking beneath the meniscus crowning a very full glass of chaos and destruction. Human ignorance kept the ruinous tendencies of the others in check, and by keeping those tendencies in check, the others kept people like Dalius and the King freaking Below from coming to Terrestria and crushing it like a bothersome anthill. It was a balancing act, and thinking too long on how precarious that balance was after Dalius had slammed this world with his influence made me queasy.

We arrived at my house soon enough. I pulled the car into the driveway and turned off the engine. As I went to release my seatbelt, Darius finally spoke: "I need to go."

Lifting my head, I looked at him, then at the sun coasting toward the western horizon in smooth increments. The Sin was watching it as well, staring in a way that I couldn't, able to heal the damage burning his retinas almost as fast as it occurred. His hand twitched, a rapid fall of fingers against his thigh like an anxious teenager waiting for a test result—then the tick was gone, his body held rigid against whatever sudden need had him wanting to bolt from the vehicle.

Eyes narrowed, I grumbled, "I just bought half a supermarket. Where are you off to? What are you up to?"

Darius's lips curled into one of his not-quite authentic smiles as he turned and used my obvious awareness of his presence to put me off-balance. The man would never admit as much, since he always derided Lust when she did the same, hiking up her cleavage to turn stalwart businessmen into stuttering school boys—but Darius knew how to tweak a woman's libido, how to get a rise out of her if he really wanted to. He liked to pretend such a thing was beneath him.

Typically, he just resorted to punching people to get what he wanted. That didn't mean there wasn't charm in that ancient, silver-tongued creature.

He leaned into me, too close, lips hovering a bare inch from my own, the warmth of his breath fanning across my cheeks as my lashes flickered and the questions blurred in my thoughts. I couldn't forget that night a month ago, blood on my hands, anger in his eyes, and the taste of him—.

"That would be telling, now wouldn't it?" the Sin of Pride murmured. Devious creature. "And I won't be telling, my idiot girl. I will return for dinner. Tomorrow."

Then he was gone, vanishing without a whisper of effort into the Realm's embrace, and I took a breath of ashen air, my hand still on the seatbelt's clasp and unable to move. The barking of my neighbor's damn poodle finally jerked me from my thoughts and I growled, running a hand across my overheated face as I cursed my own stupidity. Darius had gotten away without answering any of my questions. Idiot.

Where did he go off to? What preoccupied Darius's mind?

I realized he had gotten away without helping cart the groceries inside and cursed again, louder, hoping he heard it somehow. "That jerk!"

A/N: I lied. This is why I don't have an update schedule. I'm either 3 weeks early or 3 weeks behind. There is no in-between.