Vermilion

Chapter 30

"Do you have regrets?" Zachary asked Miranda who gazed silently on the ring on the left hand. She slowly looked up to him with a smile painted on her face. It relieved him from the anxiety he felt upon seeing her quiet on the bed. He thought that she did not like the inn.

"I don't have any. I'm just very happy. I don't know what to say or how to look like it," she said sheepishly.

Smiling, he moved toward the bed then knelt before her. He took her hands and brushed a kiss across them then he looked levelly on her eyes. "You can start by being yourself," he said then planted a languid kiss on her lips. His arms encircled her waist and hers went around his neck.

"I think this inn is a bit deserted. I can count the guests on my fingers," she said without withdrawing from the closeness of their breaths.

"I like it that way," he whispered then rejoined his lips on hers and it was a little longer.

"That's it?" she teased when he broke from her.

"It just so happen that I don't do any good while kneeling," he said as he rose from his knees and gently eased her back on the bed. She giggled and he suppressed her with his mouth.

That night while the world was dead, Zachary and Miranda, as newlyweds, shared their matrimonial bed.

At dawn, Zachary awoke with the feeling of someone watching them from one of the corners of the dim room. He did not move but also did not feel a trifle of fear about it.

"If she waked up without me, it meant that a piece of you is living in her and it shall support her life from that moment," Pelferous' voice said, a shade tart, from one of the dark corners. Then the curtain of the only window swung sharply. It indicated that Pelferous went out of the room already. He turned and snuggled himself beside his sound wife with a silent prayer that she would wake up without the red demon in her.

Pelferous flew out of the window after telling the half what should happen. The sight of his pet sleeping beside another being made the inn a suffocating place for him and he swore to burn it down when the truce is done. When his feet touched the ground, he looked for an elm far enough for him not to see his pet with the half but close enough to guard them. He found one then cut through the wind and landed on its highest branch.

The light started to line the horizon and Pelferous' eyes stared at the sky as it lightened up. Equetaph appeared beside him. He noticed the sudden disappearance of the red demon's vivacity and half-wondered what caused it.

"Do you have regrets?" Equetaph asked the melancholic demon beside him.

"Do I look like one who have any? I do not think so my friend. You cannot even kill me," he answered with feigned arrogance but the sad eyes belied his tone.

"Indeed, you are ascetic," Equetaph opined.

"I will end my contract when this armistice ends."

"But as long as it exists, neither of us can do anything to harm another."

Pelferous sighed then rose from the branch. "I have to go, my master calls." Then he disappeared in the thin air of the morning. Equetaph smiled to himself and to Pelferous' behavior but the threat he promised was not to be ignored. He glanced down to the quaint inn.

***

"You called," Pelferous greeted placidly as he appeared in his master's study short after he left Equetaph. Unlike the previous days that he saw his master, the mortal seemed to be calmer and more resolved. Somehow, he was not used to see him and it disconcerted him.