*FEATURED* Ao is a wrathful, ravenous former god trapped in a human body and sentenced to roam the Inner Empire for all eternity.
Eternity is rather dull, until she meets a green-eyed prince and his friends.
The prince offers her a deal; help him a...
"Kageyama?" she said, in her surprise forgetting to use the title that she usually so scornfully affixed to his name.
"Why the hell are you here?" Kageyama asked, his mind trying to make sense of the situation.
"I could ask the same thing. Shouldn't you be restocking your wine?" The girl's customary smirk returned.
Kageyama's lip twitched. She had changed clothes, but he could still smell his wine faintly on her breath. "Shouldn't you be passed out after drinking my damn wine? Which you will be—"
Suddenly the shop around them was illuminated with blaze of red light. Kageyama read the characters and realized they were a destruction seal, designed to destroy the shop in the case of a break in.
"Shi—" the girl started to curse, as she moved toward the door. She was too slow.
Kageyama dove forward, grabbing the girl and throwing the both of them through the shop's front window.
The store exploded while they were still mid air.
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The force of the explosion propelled their already airborne bodies forward. Kageyama hit the ground, hard, and bounced, hitting something else, then rolled to a stop. Somewhere in his roll, he lost hold of the girl.
He lay, stunned. There was a ringing in his ears, and the distant night sky spun above him, along with the eaves of the building he had rolled to a stop against. He blinked up at the moon, a disc of silver on the edge of his spinning vision.
He must have blacked out for a moment, because the next thing he knew the sky above him was moving again, but not in circles. He was being dragged by his arms by someone. He smelled smoke, and heard the roaring crackle of a great fire. He could feel heat on the bottom of his feet, even through his boots. Somewhere above him, someone cursed.
Kageyama blacked out again, and when he opened his eyes he was staring at the wall of an alley, propped up against the opposite wall behind him. The night seemed darker, and at first he thought his vision had been damaged in the explosion. Then he realized that the moon had gone behind the clouds for good, and a soft rain was falling, pattering on the stones. The smell of it, along with the burning smell of smoke and the copper tang of blood, filled his nose.
He heard cursing and turned his head to look. Beside him the girl was also propped against the wall, gritting her teeth as she tried to pull a shard of glass from her arm.
She succeeded, pulling out a thin, round saucer of glass that looked like a bloody fish scale. She threw the glass away with disgust, and it tinkled out of sight down the dark alley.
"Where are we?" Kageyama asked. Ao glanced up from binding her arm with a strip of her own ruined sleeve.
"Good," she said, pulling the knot of her makeshift bandage tight with her teeth. "I was getting tired of dragging you around."
