Sweet Romance15 min read
A Tail in My Palm — The Demon Daughter and the White-Furred Protector
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The first thing I felt in the dark was fur. Thick, warm, and ridiculously soft, a great plume landed in the hollow of my palm and made me grin in the half-light.
"Hey," a muffled male voice groaned. "Please—let go…"
I sat bolt upright and swept back the heavy blanket. The little row of night pearls at my bedside flared to life and turned my room into noon. On the bed a young man lay curled, fair as porcelain, with an impatient little mole of red under one eye that gave his face a wicked streak. But the most impossible parts were the knitted ears growing atop his head and the enormous white tail that had just been in my hand.
"You are…?" I blinked, thumb still pressing where the fur met skin.
He hunched, letting his ears slant flatter, and his voice was suddenly small: "I'm Soft-Soft."
"Soft-Soft?" I said. "You can take human form?"
He tugged so that his tail twitched beneath the covers. "Please—don't squeeze. I don't like it."
"All right." I let my hand fall open. The tail disappeared like a wave being called back by wind. He burrowed deeper under the quilt and only the little pair of upturned phoenix eyes watched me, wary.
Not that I had any plan of running. Ten years ago a novel had cut me into being: I awoke in the body of the so-called villainess, the Demon Lord's only daughter, written to love the main hero and be slapped into oblivion. That was the plot line I had woken into, and the ending had been exactly as advertised—my prototype self died and the heavens and demons had a war. I had read the entire thing, memorized the armies, and then fled before the war could ever start.
I spent a decade in the mortal world to avoid the fatal script. I cooked, I opened shops, I lost money and regained it. I pretended to be dull, but I fed myself and grew comfortable. Then one rainy dawn near a mountain trail I found a white fluffy thing bleeding and near death. I nursed it with the last of my pills and gave it the only name I could think of: Soft-Soft.
"You're mine now," I had declared, plucking its two fat paws. "And I will be your owner. No one will hurt you."
"You're my owner?" the creature had blinked.
It never warmed up to that name. It would turn its butt toward me and press there as if that settled the score. It never talked unless it wanted something, and it never liked being held for long, unless it was when the household was quiet and I would lay it on my chest and murmur at the rhythm of its breath. It would yield eventually to the soft pat on the forehead I'd give it to make it sleep.
I certainly did not bargain for it to become a man.
"Soft-Soft?" I asked again, and then my mind pinched. The red mole, the upturned eyes—these were the same marks the novel's hero had. Had I really fled my fate only to stumble into the story some other way?
He peeped out from the blankets and reached for a cup of tea I set down for him. He swallowed, looked at the table, and told me his name in an ordinary voice: "Lu Youzhi."
My cup clattered to the floor. Lu Youzhi—my book's hero.
"This can't be right," I whispered. Ten years of evasion and now the man-myth from my old reading list sat across my modest table letting his ears twitch and his tail flick shyly. "Are you certain of your name? Who are you, really?"
He huddled, confessing in a voice almost childlike. "My people were wiped out. I escaped. I—I've been alone. Sister—are you really going to keep me?"
I had rescued him years ago from being bitten by mountain wolves. I had fed him my rare pills and he had healed. He had become my companion, a living warmth in these borrowed years. He had never been affectionate in the typical way cats were; he bristled and ran if I tried to play with his tail. He had only ever trusted me at night, curling into my arm. I had thought perhaps he had an injured tail, but the day he vanished for three days taught me that he had a secret, and that secret turned out to be—he could become a man.
"People won't understand," I muttered. "This story… in the verse, your fate ties to a woman of sword and honor."
"I don't remember that," he said, soft. "I only remember you."
"Don't call me that," I told him, but then my voice softened. "Call me sister."
"Okay. Sister." He put a small hand on the tea cup as if it were a talisman. There was something fierce about his reliance, and also something fragile. I told him we'd leave the next morning for a place where his talents might be measured: the Mount Heng Sword Sect.
"If you mean take him to that sect," I heard myself say, and it felt like an ancient bargain unrolling. "He'll have to go through the disciples' selection. If he succeeds—"
"He will," he said.
The next day he took my hand like a child and walked behind me, eyes wide as the market traffic. He had become taller over the year, but his tail would shove against things like a living banner. He favored quiet white robes and would inspect any cloth he could touch as if texture were a grammar.
"Are you hungry?" I asked, and he shook his head. "I'll feed you, then."
"Don't need to," he said, but when I stuffed a steamed bun into his mouth he chewed with enormous pleasure. He declared after half a dozen buns, his voice muffled, "I like the way you eat."
"Don't flatter yourself." I told him, hands busy binding his new pale robes.
When the selection started and he pressed his palm to the sunstone, the entire field breathed—he had a heaven-root, an extraordinary spirit foundation. I could have shrieked. The book had not told me this part; in the manuscript he had always been the undefeatable sword genius. I had kept him from this life for ten years and now here he was, birthed into his destiny because of my own hand.
He clung to my sleeve, white lashes down, and I gave him a small satchel of comforts and a kiss on the top of his head. "I'll come for you," I lied with the lightest of promises. I could not know whether the promise would pull a blade to the ribs years later, but I said it as though to soothe both of us.
He left for Mount Heng with an anxious pride. I rode back to the demon realm to learn who had slaughtered his kin and to finally ready the skill I'd put off for the sake of a quieter mortal life. My father, the Demon Lord Graydon Brooks, received me like all fathers who have missed the sight of their daughter: scolding first, relief second.
"You went out of the world and hid?" he said when I came in. "You stop the communication and you're gone for ten years—did you think I'd forget you?"
"I thought you would," I said mildly.
He fussed and then patted me with a prideful approval when I told him I had been training. "Good. At least one thing of us is not wasted."
I trained like a woman with a secret to keep. When my pearls of power coalesced into the right shapes, I could call myself whole again. I could feel the plot's edges like a map I'd tried to avoid, and now the map insisted: the human hero's wound, the burned villages, the war music at the horizon. I did not want my hands stained in the old way—but I did want the truth about who had killed Gabriel's people.
My father tolerated my travel and gave me a token to command magi in brief. A few months later a summons from the bitter city of Po-Wang arrived. Heavily guarded and smelling of iron, the war-city had dark statues and banners that made the hair on my arms stand up. There I met a man called Claus Chapman, dwarf-haired and broad-shouldered, who bowed like a servant and spoke with a double tongue. I had the sense of a toad; he appeared pleasant and then put a hand to the throat of every plan.
"You will come with me," he said that evening, voice oily. "There is trouble along the western hollow."
I took him at his word and found that half the hole in my heart was already returned by the smell of danger. I flew on black wind to a hollow. The open air was stale with rot. Below, a pool moved and a young man—my Lu Youzhi—floated with a chain binding his limbs.
I dove through the air like a falling star and plunged into the fetid pool. The world narrowed to one aim: pull Lu out. I tasted rust and grief. Magic etched at his core. I pressed my lips to his mouth and pulled the dark breath out of him and into me.
"Move!" I grabbed his shoulders and he coughed; his eyes came open and he looked like he had drunk away a year.
We escaped the pool with bodies that trembled from the poison. My father had meant to present me as a noble invader, but the sect saw things differently. News of my black magic and demonic signature unfurled like a flag. Mount Heng's elders came to the border, swords in hands and celestial robes smoothing with righteous pride.
"Monster," an old judge in white said. "You brought corruption."
"She saved my life," Lu said, impossibly. "She—"
"Monster," another elder said, and every sword pointed at me.
"Wait." My voice was flat with tiredness. "I saved him from a trap."
"Magical trap," one of the elders snapped. "How can we trust you?"
They had seen my marks before. I watched a young woman stand to the side with the look novel lovers wore—the smile of one who had chosen the hero in the story. She wore delicate fabrics and frost-pale cheeks. When she stepped forward to place her hand in the air and bow, Mount Heng buzzed like a hive.
"Marina Ashford," she said, with a bow that split the air. "I am Ivanna Barron. Lu is my disciple. He belongs to our sect."
"If he is your disciple," I said, "he also belongs to his own choice. He was trapped and I retrieved him."
Ivanna inhaled sharply. Her eyes had that warm sheen the book had promised the heroine would possess. I could see it now: that heroine was as written. She was lovely and white and righteous, and she wanted him.
"Stay away," Ivanna said softly to me, but there was steel at the edge.
The elder Walter Meier advanced and his sword sang—this was judgment as politics. I shook my head and let a trickle of black smoke curl from my palm. "I will leave my name and my reasons. But know this: I saved him."
Swords were lowered, but the hostile eyes remained. The world had at last folded itself into the exact lines the manuscript once had. I thought of leaving again. Then Lu's fingers closed around mine like a promise.
"He is my family," I said. "If you touch him, you touch me."
They did not touch him then, only glared. Mount Heng took him; I left with the chaos sewn into my chest. I had hoped to stay silent. But fate, it seems, takes special delight in noise.
Months passed like sharpened knives. I found myself visiting Mount Heng in fragments of time, just to see the boy who sometimes became a man and sometimes a lavish fur. He was so completely himself around me—mischievous, hungry, loyal. He was also the thing every schemeer wanted.
And the schemes were many. The truth came on one windless day when the sky itself was edged with swords: the whole of the heavens responded and the heavens sent soldiers. Walter Meier had his reason for hi s sword, and Claus Chapman had reasons for his smile. The armies unfolded. I found myself at the center again.
"Why are they attacking the Demon Realm?" I asked my father that night as the air grew red.
"Because someone pointed a long finger," he said. "Someone sharp loves to whisper."
When the battle came to our threshold, it became a play of generals. Walter Meier led the heavenly strike. He and his clan had reasons; the novel had given him an old death, and he was pragmatic about learning it ahead of schedule. Ivanna wept before the banners of her sect and took up blade in public, an emblem of moral duty. But the real twist was Claus Chapman.
He revealed traitorous marks I had seen on those men at the pool—strange runes blended with hunger. He had been feeding men with a mythic item called a Soul-Eater. With it he leeched strength from others and sold the result to the highest bidders. His private fortune came from such greed. He used the lie of an "anti-demon" campaign to do worse.
"He sold the town's safety for a blade of gold," I hissed when Graydon Brooks told me.
"Then we must break him," my father said quietly.
The field of battle became a theater. Soldiers watched. The commanders watched. The ministers and the common folk drew like the sea to a cliff. I had to move fast. I had to pull things into the light.
We framed a meeting in a neutral plain. The storm of war made the audience swell: emissaries, soldier-sons, elder priests, and even vendors that came to sell battle comforts. I told them I would prove my debtor's guilt.
"You will not force truth with tricks," Walter Meier said.
"I will show them," I insisted. "If he is guilty, then the heavens will hold him accountable."
We arranged a public arbitration at dawn exactly on the field of the city. The steps and courts were full. I had with me a handful of those who had seen his runes at the pool and the pool's survivors—men who smelled like smoke and fear. Claus Chapman stood proud and himself with his crew at his side.
"Claus Chapman," I announced to the gathered crowd, using the same warmth I'd used in other years. "You have bled others for your wealth. Tell us why the Soul-Eater is sewn in your cloak. Tell us why homes were razed."
He scoffed at me. "You are a demon. You cannot judge me fairly."
"Then judge yourself," I said. "Tell us why you took the runes. Tell us why you had Lu Youzhi shackled and poisoned."
He laughed at that and for a moment the crowd surged with amusement. The clever son-sellers and money-takers thought it a jest. He had offered arms to the righteous before. He had the craft to play either party.
But one after another the survivors stepped forward. A stupefied one fingered the carved rune on his neck and proved by scar that Claus had branded men; a farmer produced a satchel of reaped gold with a note in Claus's handwriting; a soldier produced the anchor of a chain used to bind Lu—made in the exact smithy whose ledgers Claus had bought. People murmur, the noise growing into a tide.
Claus's face hardened. "Lies," he said. "All lies."
"Then explain this," I demanded, and produced a bone-white pendant. It was Soul-Eater's shard—an object of black glass that throbbed in the sun like a heartbeat. I had found it in his tent.
He paled for the first time, the color draining and a flicker of panic cracking his practiced mask. "You—how did you obtain that?"
My father raised his voice to be heard above the rising roar. "We found it near Chapman's lair. This item leeches the life of those it touches. Its markings match the wounds on the villagers. You are culpable."
At first the crowd hummed in disbelief. Then finger by finger, witness by witness, the evidence braided into a rope. The smith produced invoices showing Claus's manipulations. The merchants produced receipts and a ledger in his own hand showed the Soul-Eater's coins. The old woman who had lived through the raids showed her child's name carved into a board brokered by Claus's men.
Claus's expression versus the crowd began to change. He shifted from smug to incredulous. "You twist everything," he spat. "You demons! You witchcraft!"
"You sold their blood," I said. "You sold strength to the highest bidder. You murdered their houses to make profit on their rebuilding."
"That's not true," he said. "I earned my fortune."
He still held the hope of bluster. But the crowd had moved beyond listening. The market traders at the back were taking out their phones—no, not phones, but little recording beetles that captured sound—and the clerks were scribbling down every word. I could see the old judgment lines in Walter Meier's face turning from suspicion to fury.
Claus's bravado cracked as the crowd turned. "This is—this assembly is a stage for your revenge," he barked.
"Why would I do such a thing?" I asked softly. "Because I was wronged? No. Because I saved the man you enslaved. You shrank a world to profit, and now you stand in front of everyone asking for squeals about injustice."
"You're a demon. Who will believe a demon?" he tried again. The old chestnut.
"What do they see?" I said, pointing to the ledger and the necklace. "They see proof. Hear them."
The crowd began to chant for condemnation. The elders demanded justice. Even some of Claus's henchmen staggered back, settling in with shame or greed. The human faces in the assembly leaned forward; a few of my father's men fanned the crowd, showing the list of victims. People began to weep openly.
At last, the final proof arrived in the shape of a soldier—a man who had once worked for Claus and whose conscience finally snapped. He dragged forth a child-sized wooden box filled with scraps of cloth and a list: names of people sold into indenture. "We sold them to his buyers," the man said. "We forced them. We took coin. I am a coward and I confess."
Claus lost color. He attempted to retreat, to dance away, but all the exits were filled. Murmurs rose to a chant.
His reaction, as the crowd bore down, was a study in collapse. First, he sneered and declared they were peasants lying. Then he reached mania, shouting that everyone was conspiring against him. He called out names; that was denial. He tried to bribe an elder. That failed. Then his voice fell thinner. He tried to plead his innocence and produce fake receipts, then snatched up a young messenger to use as shield. The spectators hissed and some men in the crowd grabbed his arm; the messenger was freed.
He nearly screamed when the town guard took him by the collar and pushed him down on a block in the center of the field. The elders convened that Claus Chapman would be punished not behind closed doors but in front of the people he'd harmed. They demanded he be stripped of his titles and publicly shamed before being bound.
Claus's face moved again—from arrogance to stunned incomprehension to denial to a raw, animal panic. He clawed at the rope and his wrists bled. People in the crowd took out scraps of the ledger and began to read aloud the names of those who had died because of him. Mothers who had lost sons—thin and pale and clutching their bundles—spat in his direction. A peddler who had been fleeced belted out a song of outrage. A child who had seen her father sold coughed and pointed.
"Shame!" the crowd cried. "Shame upon your name!"
Claus's last petitions fell flat. He begged for mercy, promised retribution, promised to vanish into exile and never return. A merchant woman held up a knife and cut a lock of his hair, which the town clerk then pinned next to his ledger for all to see. A soldier took his boots away and right there in the square they poured a mixture of honey and soot down his collar—a mocking of the luxury he had purchased and the sting of being made small. Women spat. Men hurled mud. His coat, once immaculate, was dragged through the dust.
What people most remembered was not the mud or the hair or the loss of coin. It was his face when he realized that no promise would buy back the lives he'd bartered. That look changed from anger to cold calculation to a thin, human sob. He tried to bargain once more for freedom; an old man in the crowd—someone his victims would have trusted—poked him in the chest and called him a "conversion of coin into marrow." Claus folded inward like a cell dividing and then shut up.
When the elders pronounced final judgment, they sentenced him to be bound in the market square for three cycles and to listen to the testimonies of each of his victims being read aloud every dawn. They left him in that ritual humiliation where everyone could walk past and spit and point and not be threatened by the blade of secrecy. The punishment had a particular cruelty: he was compelled to see the faces he'd used and to hear the names of the dead repeated until the names meant something to him beyond a line on a ledger.
His reaction through the whole slow ritual was a study: first outrage, then denial, then humiliation, then the slow drunk of shame. Around him people cried, photographed (with tiny crystal birds), recorded, and cataloged. Children cheered. Victims spat and laughed. A few in the crowd clasped hands and decided that if justice meant a change in the law—if nothing else it would change the balance between weapon and greed. His henchmen fled.
It was a public spectacle—and a moral point. He had to show the shame in his own eyes. He had to watch his empire crumble before the people he had hurt. His punishment was different from being dragged behind a cart or burned in secret: he had to be seen and made to see.
When it ended he was a shell, and for the first time his eyes were empty. He had no dignity left. The market folk chewed their stew in triumph, as if a household rat had finally been caught.
I stood in the crowd as the sun climbed and thought of how small redemption can be in comparison to the ruin we make. I thought of Lu—his hands slick with battle—and of the way he looked at me when he thought nobody watched. The world had found a way to unfold the truth in the public square and we had let it. We had taken a man who trafficked in people's suffering and made him watch the weight of that suffering collected every morning in a voice.
Afterward the war abated. The foolishness that had made the skies turn against our realm—the lies and bribes and the Soul-Eater—had been exposed. My father healed and demanded the war's end. Mount Heng was chastened. Ivanna's face, which had been righteous and then vulnerable, turned upon those who had used her for the sake of the main canon. She and I did not reconcile in whispers; we met on a plain and let the swords speak.
There were losses: great sacrifices. When the elder Walter Meier struck, a blade left a hole in the world and I took a risk that would bury me. I used the darkest form of binding to stop a weapon from being used to escalate the Soul-Eater's destruction, and when I did the wound of it burned my father's flesh and cost him more than a few heartbeats. The sky answered with snow—the omen of great death. In the end I learned the cost of the device that Clause Chapman had pushed toward calamity: a whole of life erased for a single pulse of power. The killing was ugly and public and necessary.
In the quiet after the chaos, when we were cleaning what remained of the field, Lu leaned into me. "Sister," he said, breath ragged. "I thought I'd lost you this time."
"You never will," I told him, and for perhaps the first time the word "will" felt blessed rather than like an incantation.
We went away for a while. The war had settled, and the demons, once accused and nearly annihilated, had an uneasy truce with the world. My father, who had always been a self-centered terror with a soft underbelly, kept a toehold on the realm. Graydon Brooks was both a ruler and a father; he scolded and then made soup with too much chili. He was the kind of man who could keep a grudge and make you tea.
Lu—Gabriel Ellison—grew under a sun he had not chosen. The sect bestowed upon him honors but also expectations and unwanted questions. He would catch himself sometimes staring at me across the hall of the demons and whisper, in human and cat form: "Sister, are you sure you are mine?"
"Yes," I said on nights when he crawled into bed and became small in my arms—a cat once more—and I would stroke his tail until the sound of his purr was like a chant. "Yes, forever."
We married in a quiet room beyond the markets, not for the book's sake but for our own. The binding was simple: a red cord—ternary knots of fate—and a promise whispered into the knot. It was small, but to us it meant that if anything in the future broke something we loved, we had made a thing in the present to protect it.
On our wedding night I lay in his arms and listened to the steady flutter of his breathing. "Will we be together forever?" he whispered with a child's urgency.
"Forever," I promised, and the word did not feel like destiny but a choice heavy and true.
That night I thought of the way the market had shown Claus Chapman to the world. I thought of how justice can be loud and messy and human. I thought of the white tail that had once fallen into my hand, and how many times I'd had to save it, to keep it out of danger, to put it to sleep with a chant when the dreamers came.
Before I closed my eyes I pressed my palm against his hair where the mole and the relic of his old life lived and whispered, "You are mine."
He chuckled like a boy. "You are mine too, sister."
We slept wrapped in a world we had fought to keep. Outside the window a small wind tugged at the flag that once announced war. Above it the constellations went about their slow business. Below our bed was the satchel where I'd hidden the pair of swords—my black one and his pale one—the twinned blades I had purchased once at an auction because they were a matched pair. One day, perhaps, I'd tell him why they mattered; for now they lay under the mattress like sleeping animals.
And when I woke the morning after, I found a strand of white fur tucked beneath my palm—a small, soft reminder of everything that had almost been lost and everything I had chosen to save.
The End
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