written by ANHorton1227

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Vera Brod had disappeared five months ago and it hadn't stopped raining since.

No one, not even Rade Barthold, thought it was connected. Until the day the missing woman emerged from the woods beside his farm.

She emerged slowly from the treeline near his property. Her dress was rumpled and soiled so that the color was practically indiscernible. The mud that covered her gown covered her face and hands as well.

"Vera?" Rade called out because he wasn't sure. He raised a hand to hold above his eyes, to shield his vision from the steady downpour. "Vera? Is that you?"

She had the same vibrant red hair, the same figure, even the dress looked like the one she had been wearing the last time he saw her five months ago. But something was off. She was there but she wasn't. She seemed to solidify when he looked directly at her but she was hazy, as if when he looked away she would cease to exist altogether. And something about her skin seemed wrong. It sagged in places and tightened in others. Almost as if it didn't quite fit her.

"Vera, if that's you come up to the house. You need to get in out of this rain."

He turned and made his way back toward his family's ancestral home, assuming she would follow him. But he only took a few steps before he looked up and saw she was already waiting for him at the door, head cocked to the side and lips parted slightly. He jumped, frightened by her sudden appearance, and spun around to face the treeline where she had been moments before.

"How did you– well, it doesn't matter. Come inside, then."

Rade approached the door and pushed it open, entering first to light the matches in the lanterns hanging around the cottage. Vera hesitated at the threshold before entering. She watched him for a moment and then strode over to the window in the kitchen and stared outside. She stood there for so long and so silently that Rade was forced to clear his throat and begin the conversation himself.

"Where have you been, Vera?" he asked. "The whole town's been looking for you. Your dad sent out a search party and letters to your family in Lemarok to see if you went there. No one has even heard from you since you disappeared."

She looked away from the window and turned her vigilant stare upon him.

"Did someone hurt you?" he asked after an uncomfortable moment of silence. If she were too traumatized to speak, he would need help. Rade was a simple farmer. He wasn't equipped to counsel her through whatever had happened.

But still, she did not answer. She cocked her head to the side again. That was starting to become eerie.

"Can you speak?"

She frowned but did not answer. That was when he noticed her eyes.

Rade had never paid much attention to Vera Brod's eyes before but he knew they had never looked like this. Black and empty like a bottomless pit just begging him to fall into it. He backed away involuntarily and felt his backside collide with the kitchen table. She cocked her head to the opposite side and took a step forward.

"Vera," he said. "Stop."

She didn't. Still silent, she took another step forward, those soulless eyes planted firmly upon him.

"Vera, please."

Another step forward. She was close now. Very close. Only a few feet away. He could smell her. It was a familiar scent. The sour stench of rot. The smell of his crops after five months of this unrelenting rain. His eyes widened.

"Vera?" he croaked.

With a terrifying, lopsided grin, the thing shook her head, Vera's head, in one single gesture. No.

Rade let out a shriek and tore from his cottage, running for the only thing of value he still had on this farm. His horse. He mounted the beast and sent it galloping towards town as fast as it would go. When he finally got to the main road and away from his farm, he chanced a look back to find that thing standing in the doorway of his family cottage, smiling serenely as it watched him tear off toward the village.

He pushed his horse to the limit, listening to the sounds of the hoofbeats in the wet mud as he drove her onward. The rain was worsening. The wind had picked up. The clouds were growing thicker and the world was darkening. This wasn't happening. This wasn't possible.

He couldn't get the sight of Vera out of his mind. Those dark, empty eyes. That crooked, vacant smile. It wasn't her. Rade Barthold had known Vera Brod his whole life and that thing wasn't her.

He couldn't help but think of the last time he had seen Vera, the real Vera, just five months ago. He could remember the day clearly.

He had gone into town to sell what little he had been able to gather from his previous harvest and Vera Brod had been waiting for him. She had fanned herself despite the cool weather and pushed out her bosom with a wide grin. She propositioned him that day. He had been surprised. Vera always flirted with him. A lot of the girls in town did. But that was the first time any of them had outright propositioned him before. And the moment she did, the loudest crack of thunder Rade had ever heard tore through the village, sending the children scrambling inside and the adults running for shelter.

That's when the rain had started. And it hadn't stopped.

The old crones in town talked of witches and demons and accused anyone they didn't like of having offended God and brought this blight upon them all. Old family legends warned of a monster that would come in the night and steal the Bartholds from their beds. Rade had never believed in any of that before. But the past year hadn't been kind to him and it was becoming easier to believe a higher power had something against him than the more likely possibility that it was just a string of rotten luck.

First, his father died. Sure, the man was a drunk who went to the monthly card games at the local taverns and lost half the family's earnings from whatever they'd been able to scrape together since the last time he frittered it away. But he was still his father and he'd been too young to pass away peacefully in his sleep as he had.

After that, months later, his mother had gone too. First, she'd gotten sick. The healer in town had claimed the illness was brought on by her despair at having lost her husband. When the mind is weak, the body weakens also, or so she said. But Rade knew how little regard his mother held for his father, how the only emotion she had felt upon Rade Sr.'s passing was relief. Her death was less peaceful. He had found her with her eyes opened, her lips poised in a perfect O, her hands held up in surrender as if something had shocked her to death.

And now, when Rade was the last of his ilk, the only remaining Barthold to oversee the dreary family farm and the dwindling business, now the rain. Now, Vera.

"Help!" he screamed the moment he reached the village. "Help! It's Vera! It's–"

"You found her, boy?" Karl Brod came running from his home at the sound of his daughter's name.

"N-no, I–"

An enormous gust of wind blew from behind Rade, sweeping his coattail nearly over his head as it rushed into town, blowing the villagers that had emerged from their homes back inside and slamming their doors tightly shut behind them. Rade's jaw dropped in terror and he turned his horse around to find that the thing had followed him. It was right behind him now, standing where he had just entered moments ago.

"Wh-what are you?" Rade gasped, pulling back his horse's reins so that the creature took a few uneasy steps back.

The thing that looked like Vera opened its mouth as if it were going to speak but then its jaw simply... fell off. And finally, Rade understood why Vera's skin hadn't seemed right. It wasn't sagging. It was decaying. And now, it finally fell apart. What used to be Vera Brod's skin melted away, falling into a disgusting heap on the ground.

Rade watched in horror as something rose from the corpse. At first, it looked to be pure shadow but then it began to form and take shape and Rade could see that it was a woman, or something resembling a woman, made entirely of black smoke. She tossed her shadowy hair over her intangible shoulder and sighed, waved what looked like arms about her body as if she were brushing herself off, brushing Vera off of her.

"Ugh, they never fit," the thing spoke.

Rade turned a ghostly pale as the smoke creature looked up and right at him.

"This isn't exactly how I wanted us to meet," it said.

"M-meet?" Rade asked, unable to say much more than that.

Two shapes in the mist that looked like lips attached to what appeared to be a face quirked upward in a smile.

"I've been told your kind don't appreciate my true form," it told him, gesturing at its own smokiness. "But you're a bit limited on options out here in the mountains."

It looked down at the pile of human flesh and viscera that once was Vera Brod and wrinkled its nose in disgust.

"Why are you here?" Rade asked, confusion driving him to speak. "What do you want with me?"

"What do I want with you?" the thing asked, cocking its head to the side again, this time in apparent surprise. "Why, everything, of course. You do remember, don't you?"

Rade just stared back, dumbstruck. The thing leaned forward, squinting at him.

"You are Rade Barthold, are you not?" it asked.

He nodded.

"I am Ala. You remember me, surely?"

Rade shook his head. The thing sighed.

"I know humans have terrible memories but I would have thought you could manage to remember something like ridding the fire demon from your lands. I mean, Rahor was toasting your people. How could you forget that?"

"My people?" Rade asked.

"Yes. You, Lord Rade Barthold of Chepyel."

Rade blinked at the womanlike monster.

"There hasn't been a Lord Rade Barthold for centuries," he said.

At that, the thing leaned forward, tilting its head and examining Rade anew.

"Bah. I can never tell you humans apart. You look like Rade Barthold to me," it said.

"He is my ancestor," Rade explained, marveling at the casual conversation he seemed to be having with a monster straight out of a child's tale. "But he died three hundred years ago."

"Clever boy. Leaving his greatest grandchild to fulfill his oath. All the reward, none of the cost. Perhaps humans are wiser than I've given them credit for."

"Oath? What oath?"

The thing's smile stretched beyond the bounds of its shadowy cheeks.

"For helping you defeat the fire demon Rahor and save your pitiful town, you promised to help me return to the underworld," it explained, crossing its arms and nodding with finality.

"And how do I do that?"

"You marry me, of course."

"Marry you!"

The thing sighed.

"This was cumbersome enough to explain the first time but here we go again. I, Ala, shadow demon of the underworld, was banished by my father, you may know him as Death, for scheming to circumvent my own arranged marriage to Mora, demon of madness. My father stripped me of my natural form and sent me to your world where I'm to find a man to convince to become my mortal mate. Once we are married, a portal to the underworld will open and we will spend eternity among the damned. I struck a bargain with Lord Rade Barthold that he would come with me if I helped him rid his lands of Rahor. Once I did, he requested time to get his affairs in order before I came to collect upon his debt. Obviously, he used my lack of understanding of the human passage of time against me when he told me that three hundred years would suffice. So here I am to collect upon said debt and you are the only Rade Barthold to be found."

Rade blinked at the demon once she had finished. He waited for someone to run outside and start laughing, shouting for everyone else to emerge and tell him it was all a joke, that the whole town was in on it and this shadow demon was some impressive trick of the light. But that didn't happen. Instead, the demon raised its eyebrow expectantly, impatiently.

"So... Vera–" Rade started, glancing down at the discarded human remains below the monster.

"As it turns out, I'm the jealous type," Ala answered with a shrug.

"My parents–"

"The work of my father," she sighed and, at that, she seemed genuinely sorrowful. "I tried to delay it as much as possible. I begged your mother to fight it. But once Death gets his claws into you..."

"It was you my mother saw before she died?"

"I tried to tell her to hold on, that you needed her, that she wasn't done on this earth no matter what he was telling her. But, well, my father is very good at what he does."

She pouted, obviously upset by her own failure.

"Did you love him?" Rade asked then, unsure of why he even was. "Lord Barthold, I mean."

For the first time, the demon hesitated. There was something almost human about that.

"In a manner of speaking," she answered and Rade could swear he heard sorrow in her tone. "But he was a means to an end. And love works differently for my kind. In fact, love doesn't really work at all for us. It always ends up like, well, like this."

The shadow demon looked down in a way that reminded Rade of how all the girls in town had looked away from him, blushing and giggling behind their hands. He shook his head. This was a demon, not a girl from his village. This demon had killed a girl from his village.

"What if I refuse to go with you?" he asked, cautiously.

The thing frowned, clearly disappointed. It sighed again.

"Then Rahor would come back and your world would burn," she answered. "He is in a prison contingent upon you following through on our deal. Your ancestor was smart, Rade Barthold, but I'm smarter."

He gulped, glancing from the demon to the villagers he had known all his life now gathered in their windows, staring outside in awe at a personification of all of their worst nightmares. At least, Karl Brod wasn't watching. That was good. He didn't need to see his daughter the way she was now, in a heap underneath an ancient demon.

"So I have no choice," Rade said then, so quietly he wondered if anyone could even hear it. But, of course, Ala was no mere mortal.

"No," she replied. "But, if it's any consultation, I'll make your eternity as tolerable as I can."

And so a wedding was arranged. Ala let the villagers out of their homes and ordered them to get to work on a ceremony. Rade got down from his horse and let some of the men lead him into a tavern and fill him with ale. No one said congratulations. No one spoke at all. They all sat in the tavern and stared at the wall until the women came to tell them the ceremony had been prepared.

Rade walked to the chapel in a funeral march, villagers on either side of him silently trodding on.

Ala was waiting in the chapel, shattering any belief the villagers had previously had about demons being unable to enter religious establishments.

The ceremony was blissfully short and the moment Rade and Ala were announced as husband and wife, a blinding green light filled the room. Villagers gasped. Some ran, some sat frozen in their seats as the green light dimmed and revealed a door torn straight into the fabric of their world.

"This is it," Ala said, smiling happily at the portal. "Finally going home."

Some of the remaining villagers were muttering, gasping and pointing. Rade turned to see sunlight streaming through the stained glass windows. The first sunshine in weeks, a final end to the torrential downpour that had plagued them for months. He sighed, closing his eyes and feeling the warmth on his face for one final moment of humanity. But then Ala reached down to take his hand and he felt nothing but cold.

"Are you ready?" she asked.

Rade gulped and gave a firm nod.

Then they were stepping into the light.

Rade wasn't sure what he had expected but it wasn't anything like he had ever experienced before. It was like stepping into a wall of water but thicker. His whole body went rigid and so cold that he thought he might freeze to death in seconds. But then a weight was lifted off his shoulders and he felt his body melting away. It wasn't in the horrifying way that Vera's had done. This was lighter, easier. He looked down at his hands to see his flesh falling away, replaced with a shining charcoal material.

The light vanished again, dropping them into a darkened chamber. But he could see clearly despite the lack of light. Or whatever light had been. He couldn't remember now.

He looked up to see that Ala had changed as well. She looked more like a woman now. Although Rade's memory of what a human woman looked like was already rapidly fading away, he could tell, at least, that Ala would have been a very beautiful one back in his realm. Some might have considered that a perk. Spending an eternity in the underworld, mated to a demon he didn't know, might bea little less miserable if it was to a beautiful demon. But Rade wasn't thinking of that just yet. He had one thing on his mind and one thing only.

There was a certain ancestor somewhere down here that he wouldn't mind having a word with.

<<<<<FINIS>>>>>

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A. N. Horton is a two time Watty Winner for her books A Promise Kept and A is for Arson. She is a Wattpad Star and Creator, a 3 time Watty's shortlister, and Paid Stories program author. She is best known for her historical fiction romances and mysteries as well as dabbling in fantasy. She is an aspiring writer, an avid reader, and a lover of literature.