She opened her eyes, suppressing the urge to sit up with a start. Instead, she took some time to think things through. She had been trying to get away from what must have been an awful fight. Deciding just to move as fast as she could, she'd guessed that she could always figure out where she was afterward, though she'd known that her general direction was toward the plane where she'd just come from not long before. Then something had hit her, hard. It had caused her to black out, and then all that she remembered was that she was cold. She didn't think that the projectile had injured her in any way, but she still had no idea what it had been.
She wasn't very cold anymore. She remembered being picked up, but being too cold and weak to do anything about it. She also had a vague recollection of being carried very carefully and not being alarmed over it, and then she felt warmth and comfort. She moved her hand to her chest, and felt something soft and a bit heavy there. It was almost hot against her but it felt good to be warming up. She guessed that another of the things was at her feet. That was about all that she could get from lying here, other than that all of her joints ached for some reason.
There was something else, something that felt new to her. It was a gentle sense, a presence within her that she felt from her core to all of her extremities. It was almost like feeling a piece of knowledge. Like knowing a thing without knowing what it was. She had awareness before, but this was a different kind of awareness. She had always been aware that she was alive. For some reason that she couldn't get a handle on, she now felt ... as though she was living. It made no sense to her, so she shelved it. She would examine it later. She felt that she wasn't alone, and that took precedence for the moment.
She opened her eyes slowly. Since there was a man sitting there, she deduced that she was back on Earth now, though couldn't remember how she got here to her present location – lying on a piece of furniture. She smelled the air tentatively. There was a food smell, but not much else. Vaguely male smells came to her, but she smelled nothing of a female human here. A few more moments, and she knew that they were alone, there was nothing else living in the building, aside from plants.
She congratulated herself for her self-control. Normally, she thought that under the circumstances, any other of her kind would have leaped at him and killed him out of hand before sorting out what to do next. But as far as she could tell, he hadn't harmed her. It even looked to her, the more that she thought about it, that he'd tried to be kind to her – and that was remarkable, if nothing else. Why would anybody show her kind any kindness? It hadn't ever happened before, as far as she knew.
She studied him for a few moments. Not young, but handsome to the females here, no doubt. That thought made her go back to sniffing. No, there was no female here, other than herself. There were no residual female smells either, so she knew that he wasn't living with one. He didn't look too tall; she liked that, not being large herself, though she could make herself that way if she wanted. He wasn't fat, not thin either - more in good trim, she thought. He had kind of a stern face – no, it was because he concentrated on the light square in front of him. She'd seen many of the things lately here. People spent long periods of time staring at them.
She wondered about her own thoughts just now – since when had she cared what the males here looked like? She'd never cared what anybody looked like. What was the matter with her?
He turned to look at her. The stern look vanished and was replaced with a warm smile and ... concern, maybe. She wondered what he would do now. She could always kill him and had no fear of him. She decided that it was up to him what she would do next. The thought suddenly crossed her mind that she didn't necessarily want to kill him, but it was up to him, really.
Tobias was stunned. He thought she was drop-dead gorgeous. If it weren't for one little detail here, he'd have thought that now they'd have the embarrassing few minutes where he'd tell of finding her and she'd explain about the impossible way that she'd ended up where he'd found her. Then he'd lend her something to wear and as soon as she could arrange for a cab or a ride, she'd be gone.
He could overlook maybe seeing her tail move by itself – he could even tell himself that he'd imagined that. He could tell himself a lot of things about how there was nowhere for her to have flown FROM out there before she'd crash landed. He knew that county road like the back of his hand. There was nothing but some distant woods in that direction, maybe half a mile away. At her angle of flight, she'd have been far over them that far back. They must make some dependable professional-grade actor's adhesive for her horns, he supposed. He might have been wrong in his observation about her contact lenses – it was snowing like a bastard and getting worse.
But those really nice, odd-looking eyes there regarding him coolly told a different story. Contact lenses or not, they were glowing faintly. He was about to make up another general rule of thumb, but rules of thumb were for recurring situations in life. Naked flying women in blizzards were about as far as he was prepared to go.
There were no rules of thumb for this. Anybody with a working brain would be pissing themselves in their fear, or trying desperately to get to their feet and run or perform some sort of semi-intelligent action that lent itself to a situation such as this. Not Tobias. His brain wasn't even locked up in fear. If he'd had the time to analyze it, he'd have made the obvious self-depreciating remark in his mind about needing to be bright enough for that. He didn't know at all what he was looking at, other than one thing – one word that he had no follow-up for.
He was looking at wonderful.
It came to him that if there was going to be some passage of information between them, then he'd better get his jaw up off the floor sooner rather than later. He considered what he ought to say. Half a dozen things came to mind that he imagined a fairly bright man would be able to manage. He summoned up all of the fairly brightness that he had within him and proceeded to attempt something reasonably intelligent here.
With the most important decision out of the way, what came out of his mouth showed about as much grace and articulation as any dog might demonstrate while trying to fuck a football.
"Well, you're awake. I found you in the snow. I didn't know what to do, but I couldn't just leave you there, so I brought you here. Let me know if you're hurt or anything." He thought that was a pretty good way to open the conversation – for an idiot. He'd have preferred to keep his mouth shut, but you have to say something to a woman who wakes up naked on your couch, don't you? He wasn't certain, but he thought it was likely considered bad form not to.
From his speech, she figured roughly where she was on this world. She was a bit troubled that he wasn't losing his mind in fear. Why had he done this?
She cleared her throat, "You should have left me in the snow."
He thought that she sounded like a portable cement mixer full of wet gravel.
To her amazement, he smiled!
"Why do you smile?" She demanded.
He held his hand out in a placating manner, "I'm sorry," he chuckled, "I've never seen anything like the things I've seen tonight. I saw you land in a field of snow. I don't even know how I saw you in this storm. I figured out that I couldn't just take you to the hospital, not after I saw your horns and your tail. While you were lying here, I looked at you and I guess I had some idea about how you would sound if you spoke – and I was obviously wrong. Please forgive me. Now, are you injured? I did my best to see, but we were in a snowstorm, and it's dark outside. I might have missed something."
She moved her limbs experimentally, "I hurt from my joints, but I do not know why. I do not think ... I don't think I'm hurt other than that. I don't speak to people here. How should I sound?"
He noticed the shift in her speech as though she was seeking commonly used speech patterns from him and trying to match them. "If I had landed like you did, I'd have more broken bones than not. If your joints hurt, that's probably why, and I'd say you were pretty lucky. You sound fine to me now that I've gotten used to it, but women usually have slightly higher voices than men."
"I don't understand something," she said, shifting her voice upward a little at a time, "Why did you help me? Do you know what I am?"
He shook his head, "No. I kind of figured out that you might not be human before I drove home with you. But I kept trying to think of explanations for how you look. Just now, I came to the obvious conclusion that you are indeed not human. But I don't know what you are. Did I do something wrong? I wanted to help you. I didn't think that you were in any condition to lie in a field without clothes in a snow storm."
She spoke quietly and looked down in some thought, "This is strange. I have to think about it all," she looked up at him. She noticed that she was beginning to like him, and it made her a little nervous. She neither liked nor disliked humans. She'd never thought much about them, other than they housed the souls that she was sent to fetch. She didn't care before she took their souls, and certainly had never given them a thought after. She thought that perhaps it had something to do with that other strange feeling that she'd been having.
Well, if it had happened the way that he said, she guessed that she could have certainly done worse than him. She liked his face, though she wasn't crazy about his short hair. He'd look better if he grew it out a bit, she thought, though there was nothing wrong with it, really. She'd seen that a lot of the males here seemed to lose it somehow and ...
She shook her head as she realized the kind of thoughts that she'd been having. Who cares whether he has hair or not, she thought, why am I even thinking this?
"What are you? ... And, what's your name?" he asked. He found himself enthralled here. The thought crossed his mind that his normal vaguely lonely weekend was looking a bit different now for as long as it lasted. She was fascinating, he thought.
She sighed, thinking that this man had done something for her out of kindness; it was a completely new experience for her, but it was going to come to an end now. She didn't move outwardly, but under the blankets she prepared herself to spring at him, bunching the muscles that she'd need to lunge.
"I have many names, but I won't tell you my real one, for to know it would give you power over me," she said, looking to see if he would come to some realization. But he didn't. "And anyway, you couldn't say it."
"Then don't tell me, if it's a problem for you." He looked disappointed somehow, "But please don't force me to guess or come up with one myself. I'd probably call you 'Snake Eyes' or something asinine like that."
"Call me Maezou," she said, "and I am a demon." She looked at him searchingly, but if there was a reaction there, he didn't show it and she felt none of the ripples of shock that she'd often felt from humans who suddenly put things together in their minds. "Does this not frighten you?"
She watched him shrug at her, "Maybe I'm just stupid, Maezou, but I'm not frightened, at least not yet. If you're a demon, I suppose that you can kill me, and worse?"
She nodded slowly, "Much worse. Whatever terrors your mind holds, I can make you live them a thousand-fold until you beg for a release which would never come. Your death would only serve as a marker between the pages of your torment then. Human death is no barrier to me." She shrugged a little herself then, partly to express it and partly in imitation of him. "But I have no reason to do that to you."
She hadn't meant to, but she found herself looking into him to see what terrors there were there. She found only one sad fear and knew that he had resigned himself to it already. The single quiet fear that she read in him was that he would die unloved. She found herself wanting more than anything now to be faced with one thing that made sense to her, since nothing here so far showed her any of what she'd have thought was logical. All humans carry terrors within them. It was just another thing to be used by her kind. He had only the one thing – and he had already accepted it.
"What is your name? How should I call you?"
