Runaway slaves didn’t survive for long in Pylea if they weren’t perceptive and, despite being more than a little crazy, Fred was nothing if not perceptive. She was one of the few slaves who’d successfully escaped from their master and one of an even smaller number of people who had survived in the wilds of the demon dimension for more than a handful of days.
This city – it had been her city, once upon a time, before she realised that the monsters in the fairy tales were all too real – was impossibly loud. Machine noises and human noises and the voice that had been shouting at her earlier trying to shout at somebody else. Footsteps.
She curled up tighter, closing her eyes and pretending that the darkness behind her eyelids was the darkness of her cave.
The footsteps were getting closer.
Fred knew how to run. She’d been forced to run so many times. Through the fields, through the woods, through the towns. But she knew those places. She knew the places to wait and hide. She knew the crowded places were she could lose her pursuers. Los Angeles was different. She stood out like a drokken at the heart of the Covenant of Trombli.
She opened her eyes.
Still on her hands and knees, and keeping herself as small as possible, Fred slipped out from between the bins and crawled forward to peer around the corner.
A handsome man – handsome but dark in a way that reminded her inexorably of many demons that had chased her – was walking towards her. He couldn’t have been looking for her, though. Why would anyone look for a lost little slave like her? It wasn’t like in Pylea, when they’d had to hunt her. When they made examples of all the runaways to stop the other slaves from getting ideas. She was just another cow here.
No. Another human.
“I’m a human.”
She said the words aloud – she’d forgotten, almost forgotten, what it was like to talk properly – before catching herself and shooting back into the safety and shadows of the alleyway.