A New Member of the Household
According to Rain's shocking report, the church had in fact been emotionally abusing a young demon night after night.
Once Evelyn and I understood the full extent of what the church had done, the shock hit us so hard that neither of us could manage a single word.
"To think something like that was happening at the church..."
The confusion still hadn't cleared. Evelyn couldn't seem to pull herself free of it.
Well, of course. She had spent her whole life unable even to imagine the church doing such a thing, so the blow had to land far harder on her than on me. It felt a little ugly to say so, but churches getting up to filthy business behind closed doors hadn't exactly been unheard of in the world I came from.
Were they treating Rain that way simply because she was a succubus-type demon? She might have been lying about the church, for all I knew. But if she would rather die than go back, then something at least that severe was clearly happening.
I tried putting myself in her place. After the shock of losing the Demon King—the pillar the demons had leaned on—if the very next thing she met was human malice of that kind... then it wasn't so impossible to understand how she had arrived at the horrific plan she'd first proposed to me. If I couldn't sleep night after night and had to endure that, I would have started thinking the same way.
"Hic... so I can't go to the church..."
I looked at the sniffling Rain with a pang of pity and patted her back. Her situation overlapped with mine in a way that sat strangely close to the bone.
Of course, my circumstances were nothing like this little demon's. I hadn't bought the place, but I did have a proper house to my name; after the festival I was no longer an outcast among the villagers; and thanks to my summons, I even had something resembling a livelihood. All of that, though, was only because my starting point had been good. Honestly, undead and demons alike were races humans had always rejected. In that sense, we weren't so different.
If I hadn't first opened my eyes here—if the church's people had found me instead...
Ugh. The thought alone was enough to turn my stomach. Then again, I wasn't a demon. I was undead. They might simply have purified me on the spot.
I was still comforting Rain when a tremendous noise suddenly filled the holding cell.
Grrrrgle...
The room was dead quiet and shut tight, so the sound seemed to boom even louder than it was.
"I-I'm sorry. The truth is, I haven't been able to eat anything..."
Embarrassed by how loud it had been, Rain flushed and looked away.
"Ah. Right. You must be starving."
Now that I thought about it, she had said she'd been going hungry this whole time. She had even drifted all the way to my mansion because the wolves kept failing at their hunts. I was the one in the wrong for not giving her a single thing until now. If I were making excuses, it was only that I could no longer feel hunger myself, and so I'd grown bad at noticing it in anyone else. Shut up inside the mansion, I barely even registered how much time was passing. If nobody said anything, there was no way I would know a mealtime had come and gone.
All right. First, I needed to get some food into her. Conveniently, I still had what the villagers had given me. It had come in last night, so it would be a little cold, but that hardly mattered. They'd also handed over some clothes, which meant I could do something about the filthy rags she was wearing.
"Unit 1, go upstairs and bring something for this kid to eat. Oh, and while you're at it, grab a change of clothes for her."
Unit 1 looked faintly unwilling, but she went to fetch what I'd asked without a word of protest. Not that she was the sort who could have argued anyway.
After that generous meal was done, Rain patted her rounded stomach, looking thoroughly blissful.
"Ah, that was so good...! How long has it been since I ate like that..."
In the end she had demolished every last thing Unit 1 brought down, not leaving so much as a breadcrumb. The sight was such a potent appetite stimulant that even I, who couldn't feel hunger, found my mouth watering a little. From what she told us, the church had never fed her until she was full, and the meals themselves had been far worse than this, day after day. Really, from first to last, they hadn't done a single likable thing.
We also got her out of the dirty, reeking scraps of cloth she'd been wearing. The villagers had given me plenty of clean clothes. Children grow quickly, so a lot of outfits must have been worn only a little while before being shoved to the back of a wardrobe. Rain's build was almost the same as mine, which meant most of them fit her without any trouble.
And yet, out of all those clothes, she deliberately chose something that looked like an old farmer's outfit. A shirt with a stretched-out collar, and loose, baggy trousers. They certainly looked comfortable... and they also looked exactly like what I myself had been wearing around the house until not long ago. In other words, classic shut-in hikikomori fashion.
"Are you sure you're all right in that? I'm giving them to you anyway, so you might as well wear something nicer."
Among the clothes the villagers had passed along, quite a few were far better than what she'd picked. They had all come out of ordinary village wardrobes, so none of them were especially fine, but there had been no need to choose the one that looked the worst. Dressed like that, she was hardly an improvement on the rags. Maybe free things felt like too much of a burden?
But what she said next left me with nothing I could add.
"I like these. Other clothes, the floaty kind... they bring back bad memories."
"Mm. All right... Then that's what we'll do."
If pretty clothes carried trauma, I couldn't force the issue. Ugh. The world really did have far too many awful people in it. Still, she seemed to like them, so that was a relief.
...The truth, though, was that those had been the clothes I'd had my eye on. Which meant the airy, fluffy-looking ones were now mine to wear. Damn it. I'd been planning to foist them off on her.
I quietly caught Evelyn's eye.
So what do we do with her now?
Honestly, this puts me in quite a bind as well...
Once we understood that Rain was a purer child than we'd thought, and not nearly as ill-intentioned, deciding what to do with her had become considerably difficult. After the Demon King was slain, every demon who failed to return to the demon realm fell under the church's jurisdiction. We had never even considered another way. Truly, once the church rotted, there was no answer left. From where I stood, it was about as hopeless as picking up a defecting child only to find that the intelligence service meant to take them in had completely lost its mind.
Evelyn turned to Rain and asked, quietly, "Rain, do you have anywhere else to go? Is there anyone you can rely on, besides the church?"
Rain shook her head. Of course she didn't. You didn't wander a forest alone and sneak, starving, all the way into someone's kitchen if you had anywhere else to be. She really had just run, with nowhere in mind, because she couldn't stand the church.
Even so, we couldn't simply turn a demon loose. However harmless she looked, she was still a demon. Rain might have been the church's victim, and she might never have meant to hurt anyone, but it was still true that she had used the wolves to throw the village into chaos. And that "conquest plan" she had laid out for me had come from inside her own head. We still had no idea how far the gap in common sense between demons and people actually stretched. If we let her go on nothing but our own judgment, and a second Demon King came of it? That was precisely why this wasn't a simple problem.
Ugh. This was genuinely complicated.
Evelyn and I worried over it a while longer, then exchanged a look and nodded. There was nothing else for it. This place at least had somewhere she could be confined, and it was somewhere the villagers weren't likely to notice. For the time being, we would keep her here and see how things went. If she really did turn out to be a good kid, it wouldn't be too late to decide then.
"You can stay here for a while. We'll figure out how to handle you after that."
"Really?! Wow! I'm so happy!"
At the news that she was allowed to stay, Rain was, quite literally, ready to jump for joy.
Once we'd agreed to take her in, the first thing we did was let her out of the cell. The questioning was finished, and there didn't seem to be any particular reason to keep her locked up. There was only one difference.
A shackle, fastened around Rain's ankle.
Taking in the full picture that completed, Evelyn scratched her head. "Um... I know I'm only saying this now, but should we look for something other than a shackle? This is a little..."
Threadbare clothes and a shackle. She had only traded the rags for something else; dressed like this, she looked exactly like a slave. It was a sight tailor-made for misunderstanding, so let me be clear: don't get the wrong idea. The shackle had been Rain's own suggestion, offered as the condition for leaving the cell. At first, both of us had found the idea perfectly reasonable and agreed. Innocent or not, she was still a demon. Letting her go completely still left too much room for trouble. A shackle at least eased the worry that she might run, and if anything did happen, Evelyn would have time enough to deal with it. Besides, wasn't it better for everyone to let her out and have her do laundry or sweep the floors than to leave her idle in a cell, doing nothing at all? Under the circumstances, Rain proposing the shackle herself had seemed like a rather sensible offer.
And yet this strange discomfort, pressing down on my chest—what was I supposed to do with that?
"I like it, though! If you really look, isn't it cute?"
Rain, for her part, seemed thoroughly pleased with the way she looked.
"...Cute? That?"
What she had on was an ordinary shackle: a heavy iron ball dangling from a chain. As far as I could see, there was nothing cute about it anywhere. The kid's tastes were already considerably bent. Was this another debt the church had left behind? Or was it simply how she was...? Still, she looked visibly brighter, so at least "I like it" didn't seem to be a lie. That much was a relief.
"Then what should I do now? Laundry? Cleaning? Or, if not that, the garden?"
Freed from the cell, Rain was brimming with enthusiasm, as if she wanted us to put her to work at once. Unfortunately, every job she had just named already had someone assigned to it.
"No. What you need to do isn't any of that."
It was something far more complicated, and far more difficult.