Four: Demon Catcher

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"Jordan."

He woke to Grace shaking him. Consciousness came back to him reluctantly, in bits and pieces. For a moment, all he was aware of was her shaking him and his irritation at the shaking, but then he noticed more. Remembered more. And wished he could turn straight back over and fall asleep again.

But once one was painfully aware of the hard stone floor underneath them and the pervading smell of mildew and shit, it was quite hard to do that.

"Whaissit," he mumbled, squeezing his eyes shut tighter. It would all go away if he squeezed hard enough. He took in a sharp breath.

It still stank of shit.

He opened his eyes. Grace sat beside him, looming over his head in the semi-gloom. "There's someone coming."

He listened as he sat up, fighting the fog in his brain. He heard talking at the end of the corridor, but no footsteps. He pulled Grace closer. The walls of their cell glistened in the light of the single torch they'd been given, sitting in a bracket beyond the bars, and he didn't let himself contemplate what they glistened with. He hadn't let himself contemplate very much since the portal had spit them out, for fear that he'd lose what remained of his sense. One moment he had been drawing his sister shuffling through grave remains on a deserted island, and then he had been chased by a monster, and then he was falling through the roof of a market stall in what had at first seemed like Middle Ages Britain until he'd got a better look at the place. All of it combined made for a confusing puzzle at best, and a horrific waking nightmare at worst. When the guards had come for them and it had tipped further towards 'nightmare', he'd stopped thinking about anything much at all except keeping them alive.

Almost the worst part about it was that he had been allowed to sleep for so long that he was alert enough to have to face it now.

When the footsteps came, he half-expected the man from the day before. The Lord of the Reach had cut a terrifying figure at nearly seven feet tall, unnaturally pale with a cruel face and eyes that burned brilliant orange. Just the memory made his bladder twitch, but it was not the Lord who stopped outside the cell.

It was Yddris.

Before this moment Jordan had only been in Yddris's immediate presence for all of five minutes, and had only needed that five minutes to realise there was something very off about him. It wasn't that he was dressed head to toe in a thick black cloak with a deep cowl and not an inch of skin showing, though that didn't help. The air around him seemed charged, crackling and restless, and the only other time Jordan had ever felt that was right before his sister almost got eaten by a demon.

So when the man turned up outside his prison cell, he was decidedly nervous.

He made an effort not to show it. There was some degree of respect someone who had saved them from being crushed by a fanatical crowd deserved, and while it had all ended in this freezing, stinking cell, it was a relief from the staring and the requests for blessing strangers' new-born babies. Quite what kind of blessing they thought resided in Jordan's fingers he had no idea, but he hadn't been made aware of it.

"Evening," the man said. His voice was rough with a smoker's rasp and an accent Jordan couldn't place. "How are you finding the accommodation?"

Grace made a strangled noise beside him. Jordan forced a laugh.

"Is that a serious question?"

"Not at all." The man chuckled and moved closer, raising the hairs on Jordan's neck. Even Grace shuddered. "It smells like shit in here."

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