Sweet Romance12 min read
I Woke Up in a Ghost Story — and the Demon King Kept Me
ButterPicks14 views
"I don't understand," I said, squinting at the open coffin. "Why is it empty?"
"It was supposed to have a body," whispered the maid I used to be. "They paid to bury her."
"I won't be anyone's bait," I snapped back before I thought. "You die, you stay dead. Not on my watch."
He laughed then — a soft, wrong laugh in the moonlit trees. "Twenty taels," the student said. "Do this and you will be set for life."
"You wanted money for murder," I said to the two of them. "You're disgusting."
"You—all of you—" I spat. "If you want to die, go do it yourself."
The student in the dark took two hurried steps backward. He didn't expect me to shout. He didn't expect anyone to refuse. He certainly didn't expect me to run.
I ran.
"Stop!" he cried. "If the dead rises, you'll have me to answer for!"
I didn't look back. I didn't need to. The forest swallowed him and his two shadows whole.
When I reached the graveyard, I dug like a madwoman. My arms ached. My legs trembled. I thought of my one life: a city office job back when I belonged to another world, a bad elevator, an allergic reaction to stairs, a thousand tiny humiliations stacked like coins in a jar. I never imagined I'd be strong enough to pry open a coffin.
"It’s empty," I breathed again, hands on the lid. "Impossible."
"Looking for food?" a clear voice said behind me.
I turned and saw him by the moonlight: a boy in black, pale as moon flesh, chains dangling from his wrists and ankles like jewelry. He had eyes that were too warm for the dark, and a face that made me dizzy the first time I saw it.
"What do you eat?" I asked because I had to ask something sensible and not scream.
"Corpse," he said as if asking me if I wanted tea. "Want some?"
I pushed a bun into his hand and ran. I was ashamed even as I ran—ashamed I gave him food because he was pretty. I was ashamed I thought, for one stupid second, I might be better off with a lover from a novel than a life of servitude.
"Don't move," I told him. "I'll come back."
He blinked once. A tiny nod. A tiny acceptance.
I should never have left him. I walked into the Li household and said what had to be said, and the old man raged like a stove being poked. He brought men with him, and we returned with a carriage. The fainted girl—Aiko O'Brien, the mistress—was pulled from the carriage and laid on the bed. I let myself breathe. For one night, it felt like the script might change.
But the girl didn't wake.
"She is bound," said Logan Koehler when he came. "Her soul is caught in a marriage to the dead. We must go to the other side."
"Go to the underworld?" I said. "Right now? Like a market trip?"
"Yes," he said. "We must open the gate and find the link."
I wanted to refuse. "No," I said. "I'm a housemaid. I can't—"
"You are not suited." Logan's eyes flicked to me, assessing. "But you are the one the fates have marked. If you do not go... she will not return."
"Why me?" I demanded.
Logan's mouth tightened. "Because you are tied to a strange fate. Also because you dug up the grave and did not die. That is unusual."
I was pulled through a smoky iron gate that had the word "UNDERWORLD" carved above it. I touched the letters; they were colder than death and greener than jealousy. I expected bones and bleakness. Instead, I stepped into a market that smelled of noodles and iron and old regrets.
"Follow the red thread," Logan told me and burned a paper talisman on my forehead. A thin red line appeared above my head like a guiding string.
"Don't speak," he said. "Your voice leaks light. Be still."
"Okay," I mouthed and promptly ruined it at the sight of a booth frying eyeballs.
"Shh," Logan hissed. Two little nose demons sniffed the air and came barrelling toward us.
Before Logan could move, a warm arm wrapped around me from behind and a voice said, "Stay with me."
"Who—" I whispered, and found myself pressed to the chest of Canyon Alvarado, the boy from the graveyard. His chains clinked. His palm was cool.
"He's with me," Canyon said as if that was explanation enough. The little demons sniffed and frowned and left.
I had no right to be startled by kindness. I had never expected it from the story's villain.
"You should not be near her," Logan said, thin and perfectly calm.
Canyon leaned in and put a hand on my shoulder like a ribbon. "I will protect her."
"Keep your hands to yourself," Logan said.
"Why?" Canyon said slowly. "Do you object?"
For a minute I thought the underworld had become a staged battle between two men in perfect coats. They stared like fighters, and I tried to be invisible and fail.
We found Li Weimeng—Aiko—at a lit room where a scholar in white combed her hair and whispered by her side. He was gentle. He was the kind of person whose smile could weld broken things. He introduced himself: Gerald Chang.
"I beg compromise," Gerald said. "Let me keep her for forty-two days. She is mine by vow."
"Impossible," Logan said. "She belongs to the living."
"I will battle you for the right!" Gerald drew a sword that sang like an old lullaby.
We argued. Then a judge came: a giant in flame-marked robes. He pointed at Canyon and shrieked, "You harbor a swallow-bait inside! Chains, punish!"
Canyon's chains rattled and he stepped forward to slash at the judge's rope. Logan met him with steel. The judge struck at Logan with iron laws. It looked like a war for an hour.
"Do you want me to save him?" I whispered to Canyon.
"If you want your hero to live," Canyon said, like a dare. "Offer me something."
"Like what?"
He named a price and I hesitated. He laughed and asked for my presence in his house—his prison—as a guarantee.
"I'll do that," I breathed before I could think. Logan's eyes were ice.
Canyon fought with the flame-judge. He wasn't as cold as he looked. He fought like someone who had learned to survive on edges, not honor.
"We'll take her back," Logan said later, carrying Aiko's body like a fragile jar. "She will wake soon."
And she did. The next morning, breathing and blinking: Aiko O'Brien came back to the world, pale but alive. The house smelled of hope and mud.
I had been promised to Canyon. "You are now of Canyon's house," he told me as if naming a debt. He lifted me in his arms like a loaf of bread and left.
"Wait!" I cried. "My contract—"
"No contract needed," Canyon said. "You're both mine and not."
He took me to a mansion where iron chains clinked at his wrists and ankles like stars. He called it home. I called it a gilded cage.
"You're staying?" Canyon asked, amused.
"Only because the alternative is being tied to a fate I don't understand," I admitted.
"Good," he said. "Stay with me."
Days passed with small rules. He kept my hours. He brought me food I didn't like and books I didn't understand. He polished his chains like a man who talks to scars. He poured poison like it was his perfume and pretended not to love me.
Then one night everything blew apart.
A wind tore at the windows. The candles stuttered. My chest hammered in a way that had nothing to do with romance. Someone threw a shadow into the room and it screamed my name in a voice that used to be human.
"Open the door," a voice said. "Little swallow, come out."
My heart kicked the inside of my chest. I could not move. The shadow moved like black oil and spilled across the floor. I fainted.
When I woke, I choked on glass. The chairs were broken. The bookcases had been toppled. My mouth tasted like copper.
"She is gone," Canyon said. His voice had torn a notch into the night.
"Taken?" I whispered. "By who?"
"Caught by the old student," Canyon said. "Buck Elliott. He is a ghost, a wraft. He used tricks to get in."
We chased him to the west—mountains smelling of iron—where Buck held me like a trophy. He thought I was Canyon's lover. He thought he could bargain.
"She's useful," Buck said. "Give her up and I will promise not to hurt the lord."
"You're a liar," Canyon said and took me back.
But Buck's eyes had a ring of torment. He wanted revenge for a life undone. When Canyon saw it, something in him twisted; he struck Buck until the air bled.
We broke into a cave with circles of black on the floor. I woke there. Buck's voice told the "master" about me. The "master" was a hollow throat and the max of cruelty. They spoke about a plan of nets and bones to turn living hearts into tools. They wanted me to be a mindless feeder of some cruel chessboard. The thought made bile grow in my throat.
My head split. Pain like a blade. My lids opened and something new was in me.
"Your vision is different now," Buck said. "You can see their knots."
I did. I saw flows of frost and darkness inside the world—threads and bright coins of power. I could see what they had hidden: the bones of their tricks, the soft hums of toxins in people's hearts. Someone had given me a skill: the Sight and the Hand of Clouds.
"You can take their dark bead," Buck laughed. He showed me a black bead inside a man's chest—an egg of malice. I touched it with my eyes and the world screamed. That night I learned to pick out the rot and to pluck it.
They bound Buck with a cruel net and went to wage the ultimate trap: the Great Rot-Net, an old, slow snare that uses the area's bitterness to make monsters immortal. They wanted more power. They wanted to bind souls like flags.
I reached out and grabbed the black bead from Buck before anyone noticed. Buck howled and his dark fog wrote curse after curse, then shrieked and vanished.
"Stop!" I cried, and without thinking I jumped into the snare to follow Canyon, Logan, and Gerald into the center.
The net closed like a fist.
We should have died. Instead, something happened: I felt every dark needle into my bones, then a warm hand pulled them away.
Canyon grabbed me and leaned over me like a shepherd over a wounded lamb. He let his hunger for damage take the blow. He let the poison sink into him.
"Don't," I said. "No."
"Shut up," he muttered but he held me.
The snare forced bits of us to burn, but Canyon did something wild: he allowed the dark to flood him, then turned it into a wall for me. He bled night and gave me warmth. I had never felt so stupidly tender and terrified.
When the net broke, we were alive. But Canyon had black lines under his skin. He coughed them out like a man who had swallowed a week of nights.
We ran and we found the one thing of light in that valley: a black-flowered lotus. It could heal or kill depending on how it was used. It hummed like a river stone.
I thought of the girl who had been buried and of the master who wanted my head. I thought of debt and of loyalty. I thought of how small I was and how I had learned to pick beads of rot.
"Take the flower," I told Canyon. "You can fix this."
He refused. He refused with his teeth. He would not let me do this with my hands untested.
So he took the flower and it exploded into power and shadow and painfully, miraculously healed Logan. The flower's petals unwound the darkness like small breaths.
We came back to find Buck in chains.
He was dragged to the market by the men of the town and the Li household. A great crowd had gathered: women with hairnets, men with leaning shoulders, children with sticky hands. They wanted a show.
"He killed," Buck spat when he saw us. "He—"
"You destroyed a family's honor," Logan said. He kept his face cold and unerring. "You helped bury a living woman. You sold her to death for silver."
Buck pulled his collar and laughed grossly. "It was money. I am only one in a thousand who took it."
"Then the thousand will see," Logan said.
They dragged Buck to the center square where a stage had been made with lanterns puffing orange as dusk bled to night. The Li family stood there, pale and angry. Aiko's father watched with a grief like weather behind his eyes. Canyon stood beside me, and the crowd's murmurs muttered like summertime insects.
"Tell him," Logan said to me softly.
I stepped forward. The square smelled of fried bread and iron. I had been a nobody who spilled coffee in an office. Here I was about to talk to a man who had taken a life.
"You told him to do this," I said to Buck. "You paid him and joked and knew it would mean a girl's face basement in glass."
He laughed and spat at my shoes. "You were always a servant," he sneered. "I did what I had to do."
"Stand him up," said a thin man with a parchment. He was the magistrate. The crowd leaned forward like a tree leaning toward sun.
"Bring the banners," the Li elder said. He was not the crude old man from earlier; he was a patriarchy with a voice too used to being answered.
They made Buck stand on a crate. The magistrate read the accusations in a voice that rolled over the square.
"You colluded to end a human life for gold," he read. "You led her to an early grave. You tried to erase people who stood in your way. What do you say?"
Buck began with denials. "I didn't! They forced me. You all are overreacting."
A woman in the crowd spit. "You sold our dignity."
Another man took out a small wooden whistle. He blew it and a child snapped fingers. Phones—no, small mirror stones—were lifted. People recorded with their palms. The crowd’s murmurs grew into a thunder.
Then the public wall opened.
They set him in the center, and a bucket of mud was poured over his feet. "You will apologize and clean every home you wronged," someone demanded. "You will wear a placard for a month that says 'I sold death for coin.'"
Buck smiled like a coiled trap.
"Take off his boots," commanded Logan.
They did. Buck's socks were ripped off in front of the market. He was forced to kneel on the ground. "Say it," roared a woman who'd lost a child to an earlier crime. "Say you are a murderer."
"I—" Buck tried and his voice cracked. He tried to grin and failed. "I plead... not guilty."
"Not guilty?" someone in the crowd cried. "You want to see the deed you wrote?" A young woman with a lantern stepped forward with papers from Buck's hand. They read the bargains aloud: times, amounts, names. The market gasped. Someone started to clap, then others joined. Shame was a visible thing—like steam.
"Confess," the magistrate said.
Buck's jaw trembled. His bravado, once elastic, snapped. He looked up at the people who came to see justice and saw his life reflected: disgusted faces, children whose mouths were open like question marks, a merchant who had once laughed with him now stepping back.
"I didn't mean—" he whispered.
"Don't mean?" yelled the Li elder. "You didn't mean? She is dead."
He fell apart. He dropped his eyes. His hands began to shake as the crowd's attention sharpened into knives. First he laughed, then he tried to stand tall, then he began to deny it, then his voice failed. He clutched the crate like a raft.
"Please," he said, a broken tone bleeding from him. "Please—"
A child boomed, "Shame!"
Then, the cruel part: his name was read, and a ring of townsfolk took off their hats and placed them on the ground. Men with braids raised their hands and began to list the wrongs—long and patient as winter. Buck had no story to answer them with. His old bravado dissolved into whimpers.
The magistrate ordered him to wash the steps of the Li house each dawn for a year and to publicly admit his crime at the gates each month. They would brand him—not with metal, but with memory. People would point and not forget. They would take his money until all the silver he'd hoarded to buy a quiet life was gone. They would humiliate him until he became a lesson.
Buck slid from the crate and fell to his knees. "Please," he sobbed. "Please."
"No one answered him," the crowd said. They began to chant a single name: "Shame. Shame. Shame." People recorded his face on devices and shared it; hands reached out to slap his shoulders; a woman spit on the ground near him. He slumped, trying to hold dignity, and failed.
He begged. He crawled. He tried to barf up his courage. He crawled to the Li elder's feet with clotted tears. "Please forgive me," he said.
"A life does not return," the elder said, stone-cold. "You will live with this."
Buck put his head in his hands. He wept until he had nothing left but the sound of someone who once thought money bought mercy.
The crowd didn't beat him. They did something worse: they refused to let him be invisible. They forced him to own his crime in front of everyone. He tried to spin and lie and fold his shoulders back, but the square kept his shame in the sun.
The records mean he could not clear his name. It was a public fall. His own face would haunt his sleep with the faces of those he'd hurt.
I stood beside Canyon. He put his hand on my back and didn't say much. Logan watched the crowd. He looked as if the town's verdict had not touched him, but his jaw trembled with a quiet I could see.
"Canyon," I whispered.
He lifted his chin and looked at me with wetness behind his eyes. "You stayed," he said.
"Because I can," I said.
We walked away together. The city had decided: the man who sold life had to live with the memory of it.
Days later, the world moved on. The Li house mended its curtains. Aiko O'Brien thanked us with a hand that trembled like a reed. Logan continued to be that steady thing with a blade and poetry. Gerald Chang faded like a sorrowful wind back toward his books.
Canyon and I returned to his home where the chains jingled like tiny clocks counting out the future. He would pull at them like a man testing whether he was still rooted to what he feared. Some nights he slept and didn't wake until I pressed his wrist and found his pulse. I learned the small ways to set a man at ease: make tea, steal the newspaper, tie his shoelaces just so.
"Do you really mean it?" I asked him once in the garden while the moon hung like a coin.
"What?" he said without looking up.
"About me staying. About you wanting me."
He turned and caught me between the chains and the stars. "I didn't mean to." He didn't say it like an apology. He said it like confession. "But I do."
I thought about the market's eyes and the way shame had smoked Buck out. I thought about how fragile people could be and how much ugly power money buys.
"I like cooking," I said. "I can boil rice."
"Good." He smiled. "You will cook for me."
"I will," I said. We leaned into each other and the wind felt like forgiveness.
But even as we laughed, the world kept its other plans: a mountain called the Black Abyss, a ghost who was not truly dead, a magic that ate memory and grew teeth.
"Next we go to the mountain," Logan said one morning, "to find where they hid Aiko's soul-bead."
"We will go as a group," Canyon said, and lifted me like a shielded thing.
I learned then that being swept into a book's story is like being pushed into a river: the current will take you whether you want it or not. But with hands to hold and a fierce man at your back, even a river can be navigated.
And so we set out: me, Dana Stevens; Logan Koehler, steady as a vault; Canyon Alvarado, full of dark laughter and chains; Gerald Chang, ghostly scholar who wanted a life to fix. We walked toward a place called Ink-Deep Mountain, where legends said a witch of old stitched her life to stones and left the world bloody. We went to find answers, and I prayed not to be the answer anyone wanted to erase.
The End
— Thank you for reading —