Jasmine Hall had been a criminal for eight months.
Eight months since she'd walked into that strange-ass job interview. Eight months since a not-so-handsome young man named Ethan had given them the opportunity of a lifetime. Eight months since she'd learned that opportunity meant armed robbery, extortion, and working alongside creatures that wanted to eat her face. Eight months since she'd gotten the best damn job she'd ever had.
Funny how life could change so fast. Now she was sitting in a warehouse mess hall, eating scrambled eggs across from a creature that could rip her spine out through her throat without breaking a sweat.
"You gonna finish that bacon?" Skitter asked, his too-many eyes blinking in an unsettling wave pattern.
"Help yourself." Jasmine slid the plate across the table.
The daemon's mandibles clicked appreciatively as he scooped up the bacon with one clawed hand. Skitter was one of the smaller daemons in Poison's army, barely five feet tall, with a body that looked like someone had tried to make a spider into a person and given up halfway through. Eight limbs, compound eyes, skin that shifted between gray and black depending on his mood. Absolutely fucking terrifying to look at. Also, weirdly enough, one of the funniest people Jasmine had ever met. And she'd raised two kids, so she knew funny.
"You humans and your cooked meat," Skitter said between bites, his voice a strange clicking rasp that Jasmine had learned to understand over the past few months. "So much effort for so little improvement. Raw is perfectly fine."
"Raw bacon is disgusting."
"Human tastebuds are so strange." Skitter's mandibles spread in what Jasmine had learned was the daemon equivalent of a grin. "Although I admit, the breakfast options here are impressive. For humans, anyway."
"The food's good," Jasmine agreed, glancing around the mess hall. Three hot meals a day, all free. Fresh ingredients, actual variety, none of that processed garbage she used to feed herself and her kids when money was tight. "Better than anything I ever got working retail."
"You mentioned that job once. The one where they made you wear a red shirt?"
"Bullseye." Jasmine snorted. "Eight years. Eight years of busting my ass, working holidays, covering other people's shifts. You know what I got for it? A fifteen-cent raise and a pink slip when they decided to 'restructure.'" She took a sip of her coffee, grimacing at the taste. Whoever was in charge of supplies had gotten the cheap stuff again. If she was running things, that would be the first thing to change. "No severance. No warning. Just 'thanks for your service, here's a box for your desk shit, security will escort you out.'"
"And here?"
"Here?" Jasmine laughed, a genuine laugh, not the bitter thing that usually came out when she talked about her past. "Skitter, you know what my benefits package looks like? Full health insurance. Not that garbage high-deductible plan where you still go bankrupt if you actually get sick. Real insurance. Zero deductible. Zero copay. Covers everything."
"I don't fully understand human society," Skitter admitted.
"Nobody does. That's the scam." Jasmine leaned back in her chair. "But here's the thing: I also get dental. Free dental. You know how long it had been since I could afford to take my kids to the dentist before this job? Three years. Three years of praying nobody got a cavity because I couldn't afford to fix it."
"And now?"
"Now Imani's got braces. Nice ones, too. The invisible kind that don't make kids look like they got a mouth full of metal." Jasmine shook her head slowly. "My daughter has braces because I work with literal monsters. Let that sink in."
Skitter's mandibles clicked thoughtfully. "The boss believes in compensation. She was told humans work better when they're not worried about survival."
"She's not wrong." Jasmine thought about her first paycheck from Poison's organization. She'd stared at the number for a full five minutes, convinced there had been a mistake. It was more than she'd made in three months at Bullseye. More than she'd made in three months working two jobs. "You know what else I get? Paid time off. Actual paid time off, not that 'unlimited PTO' bullshit where you're too scared to ever use it. Thirty days a year, and Webb practically forces people to take it."
"Rested bodies perform better," Skitter observed.
"See, that's the thing. It all makes sense when you hear the reasoning. But I spent my whole life being told that companies couldn't afford to treat workers like humans. That benefits were too expensive, that wages had to stay low, that we should be grateful just to have jobs." Jasmine's voice hardened. "Then I come here, and a demon army, an actual army of monsters planning to overthrow some magical establishment, somehow manages to offer better compensation than every Fortune 500 company in Amerika combined."
"What are the requirements? For employment?"
"That's the crazy part. No degree. No experience. No references." Jasmine ticked off the points on her fingers. "They don't care if you dropped out of high school. Don't care if you've got a record. Don't care if the only job you've ever had was flipping burgers or selling drugs. All they want to know is: can you follow orders, can you keep your mouth shut, and are you willing to work?"
"And the... downsides?"
Jasmine met Skitter's compound eyes directly. "You mean besides the NDA that probably means I disappear if I ever talk? Besides the fact that I might die on any given Tuesday? Besides sitting across from someone who has to actively fight the urge to eat me every time we have breakfast together?"
Skitter's mandibles spread in that unsettling grin. "I haven't wanted to eat you in at least three weeks."
"I guess I'll take it." Jasmine raised her coffee cup in a mock toast. "But yeah. Those are the downsides. And you know what? They're still better than the downsides of being poor in Amerika."
…
The mess hall bustled around them as other humans and daemons finished their meals. Jasmine watched a young man, couldn't be older than twenty, chatting with a daemon that looked like someone had crossbred a wolf with a nightmare. The kid was laughing. Actually laughing, relaxed, like he wasn't sitting three feet from something that could disembowel him before he finished his sentence. Eight months ago, she would have said that she was dreaming. Now it was just Tuesday.
"Night shift again?" Skitter asked, pulling her attention back.
"Patrol escort. Webb wants humans paired with daemons for the outer perimeter runs." Jasmine finished her coffee. "Apparently it makes us look more 'unified' if any higher-ups are watching."
"It also makes tactical sense. Your people have your human technology. My people have the senses and the magji." Skitter's eyes shifted, tracking something across the mess hall that Jasmine couldn't see. "Complementary skill sets. The boss is smart about things like that."
"Yeah." Jasmine stared into her empty cup, thinking about how strange her life had become. "She is."
…
Jasmine still remembered the day she'd learned the truth. It had been about five months into her criminal career. By then, she'd gotten used to the heists, the smash-and-grabs, the carefully orchestrated crime that put food on her table and kept her kids in a safe apartment. She'd even gotten used to Ethan's awkward energy and the weird little fox that followed him everywhere.
What she hadn't gotten used to was the green-haired woman who ran everything from the shadows. Poison had always been a mystery. Jasmine had seen her maybe twice in those early months: a distant figure with emerald hair and glasses, giving orders through Ethan. The other criminals whispered about her in fearful tones. Said she was dangerous. Said she could kill a man with a touch. Jasmine had assumed it was just street legend. The kind of bullshit criminals told each other to make their boss seem scarier than they were.
Then the magjistars showed up. The job that night had been simple: warehouse security for a weapons shipment. Stand around, look intimidating, make sure nobody tried anything stupid. Jasmine had done a dozen jobs like it. Then people in strange outfits started throwing actual fucking magic. Jasmine had seen a lot of shit in her life. Growing up where she grew up, you learned quick that the world wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. But she'd never seen a man conjure lightning from his fingertips and use it to explode another creature's head.
The fight lasted maybe ninety seconds. Three of their crew went down in the first volley. Two more tried to run and got cut down by something that moved too fast to see. Jasmine herself had ended up pinned behind a shipping container, clutching her pistol like it meant something, absolutely certain she was about to die. And then Poison arrived. She'd come through a swirling portal of green light, flanked by things that couldn't possibly be real. Monsters. Creatures from nightmares. Daemons, she would later learn, though at the time, she'd just called them demons in her head and prayed to God to keep her babies safe if she didn't make it home.
The magjistars hadn't stood a chance. Jasmine had watched from her hiding spot as the green-haired woman tore through them with claws that extended from her fingers, moving with a speed and grace that no human could match. Her daemon allies had been even worse: a tide of fangs and claws and impossible anatomies that reduced trained magic-users to screaming meat in seconds. When it was over, Poison had walked through the carnage to where Jasmine was hiding. Her glasses had been slightly askew, her business-casual outfit splattered with blood that wasn't hers. She'd looked at Jasmine with those emerald eyes, eyes that she now knew marked her as something other than human, and said six words.
"You saw nothing. Are we clear?"
Jasmine had nodded. What else could she do?
"Good." Poison had turned to leave, then paused. "You have children. Two of them. Imani and Malik."
Jasmine's blood had run cold. "How do you—"
"I know everything about everyone who works for me." Poison's voice was flat, neither threatening nor reassuring. Just stating facts. "They need their mother. Don't give me a reason to take her from them."
And that had been Jasmine's introduction to the truth: magic was real, monsters were real, and her boss was one of them. The next day, HR (yes, they had HR, yes, it was run by something with tentacles) had called her in for "updated onboarding." That was when she'd learned about the real benefits package. Life insurance that would actually pay out. A college fund for Imani and Malik that the organization contributed to automatically. Housing assistance. Childcare subsidies.
"Why?" Jasmine had asked, staring at the paperwork in disbelief.
The tentacled HR representative had blinked at her with eyes that were almost human. "The Lady was told that by investing in her people. Loyalty was earned."
Jasmine had signed everything they put in front of her.
…
"You're thinking about that night again."
Jasmine looked up from her memories. Skitter's compound eyes were fixed on her, unreadable as always.
"How can you tell?"
"Your heartbeat changes. Gets faster, more irregular. Your scent shifts: cortisol, adrenaline. Fear chemicals." Skitter's mandibles clicked softly. "I can always tell when humans are afraid."
"That doesn't freak you out? Being able to smell fear?"
"Does it freak you out that you can see colors? It's just a sense." Skitter tilted his head, a disturbingly human gesture on his inhuman face. "What I find interesting is that you're still here. Some humans who learn the truth run. Or try to run, anyway."
"Where would I go?" Jasmine shrugged. "Back to the regular world, pretending I didn't see what I saw? Waiting for some magjistar to track me down because I know too much?" She gestured around the mess hall. "At least here, I know what's real. And my kids are protected."
Protected. That was the word that kept her here more than anything else. Not just the money, not just the benefits, though God knew those helped. It was knowing that Imani and Malik were safe. That if anything happened to her, they'd be taken care of. That no magjistar or daemon would ever touch them because they were under Poison's protection. That was worth more than any paycheck.
"That's logical reasoning," Skitter said. "But it's not the whole truth." He leaned forward, his many eyes glittering. "I've watched you, Jasmine. You're not just staying because it's safe. You believe in what we're building."
Jasmine was quiet for a long moment.
"You know what I used to do?" she said finally. "Before I started working for Ethan?"
"Customer service. Retail management. Single mother working two jobs to keep her children fed and housed."
"Yeah. And you know what I learned in all those years of busting my ass? The system doesn't give a damn about people like me. I worked myself to the bone, did everything right, and still couldn't get ahead." Her voice was bitter but controlled. "I was drowning. Bills piling up, landlord breathing down my neck, food stamps running out. And nobody, nobody, was willing to help. Not the government, not the charities, not the church. Nobody." She gestured around the mess hall.
"Then I come here, and you know what I find? Monsters. Actual, literal monsters who eat people for breakfast. And they treat me better than any employer I ever had. They pay me what I'm worth. They give me benefits that would make a senator jealous. They don't pretend to care about me while screwing me over behind my back."
"Many of us struggle with the arrangement," Skitter admitted. "The desire never goes away. Every human I see, every heartbeat I hear, some part of me whispers that I should hunt. Should feed. Should grow stronger the way my instincts demand."
"But you don't."
"But I don't." Skitter's mandibles spread in that strange grin again. "Because the boss showed me something better. A future where I don't have to hide in shadows and pick off isolated victims. A future where daemons aren't just monsters to be exterminated by magistars." He paused. "A future where I can sit across from a human and have breakfast without either of us expecting violence."
Jasmine found herself smiling despite everything. "Pretty low bar for utopia."
"You'd be surprised how high that bar is for most of my kind." Skitter stood, his eight limbs unfolding in a way that Jasmine's brain still insisted was wrong. "Come on. Shift starts in twenty minutes, and Webb gets annoying when people are late."
"Webb's always annoying."
"True. But he's less pissy when people are on time."
…
Jasmine drained the last of her terrible coffee and followed the daemon out of the mess hall. Around them, other humans and daemons were finishing their own meals, heading to their own assignments, living their own impossible lives. The perimeter patrol took them through the industrial district surrounding the warehouse complex: abandoned factories, empty lots, the kind of urban decay that made perfect cover for an operation that couldn't afford to be seen. Jasmine walked with her pistol holstered at her hip, eyes scanning the shadows out of habit even though she knew Skitter's senses would catch any threat long before she did.
She'd come a long way from the woman who clutched a baseball bat and wore a pink ski mask. Now she had real training, real weapons, and real experience. Poison's organization had invested in her, not just money, but time. Combat instructors. Tactical training. Weapons certification. All free, all part of the "professional development package" that HR had explained with a straight face. Professional development. For criminals and killers. God, her life was weird. Speaking of God, was she going to Hell for working alongside demons? She decided to stop thinking about that. God wouldn't have wanted her and her children to suffer when there was an option not to, right…? She sure hoped so.
The daemon moved beside her with an unsettling fluidity, his many limbs carrying him across broken concrete and rusted debris without a sound.
"Prey," Skitter said suddenly, freezing mid-step. "Two hundred meters east. Human. Alone."
Jasmine's hand went to her pistol. "Magjistar?"
"No mahna signature. Non-magji human, probably. Homeless, based on the smell." Skitter's eyes swiveled to track something Jasmine couldn't see. "Should I handle it?"
"Handle it how?"
"Scare them off. Make them think they saw something that'll keep them away from this area." Skitter's mandibles clicked. "Non-lethally, obviously. Boss's rules."
Jasmine hesitated. A year ago, "handle it" from a daemon would have meant something very different. Now it meant creative intimidation: appearing from the shadows, letting the civilian get a glimpse of something monstrous, sending them running with a story no one would believe. It worked, too. The homeless population in this district had dropped significantly since Poison's organization moved in. Not because daemons were hunting them, but because word had spread that this was a bad place to be. Haunted, some said. Cursed.
"Do it," Jasmine said. "I'll cover you."
Skitter vanished into the shadows with a speed that still made Jasmine's brain hurt. One moment he was there, the next he was gone, leaving only a faint rustle of movement to mark his passage. Jasmine waited, pistol ready, ears straining for any sound of trouble. The night was quiet except for the distant hum of the city and the occasional creak of settling metal from the abandoned buildings around her.
Three minutes later, a scream echoed across the industrial district: high-pitched, terrified, the sound of someone who had just seen something their mind couldn't process. Jasmine heard running footsteps, fading rapidly into the distance. Skitter reappeared beside her, mandibles spread in satisfaction. "Handled."
"What did you show them?"
"Just my face." The daemon's compound eyes glittered with amusement.
"Yep, that'll do it." Jasmine chuckled.
They continued their patrol, moving through the shadows together. Daemon and human, predator and prey, walking side by side through the darkness.
"Can I ask you something?" Jasmine said after a while.
"You just did."
"Smartass. I mean a real question."
"Go ahead."
"Does it get easier? Fighting your instincts, I mean. Being around humans without wanting to…" She trailed off, unsure how to finish the sentence without being insulting.
"Without wanting to hunt you?" Skitter finished for her. "Kind of." He paused, seeming to consider his next words. "But I've learned to listen to other things too. The satisfaction of working toward something meaningful. The… friendship, I suppose you'd call it, of the humans and daemons I serve alongside. These things don't silence the hunger, but they give me reasons to resist it."
"That sounds exhausting."
"It is." Skitter's voice was matter-of-fact. "But so is hiding. So is running. So is spending every moment of your existence looking over your shoulder for the magjistar or daemon who's going to end you." He turned to look at Jasmine, his many eyes catching the faint light from distant streetlamps. "The boss offered me something different. A chance to be more than just a predator waiting to be hunted down. I decided that chance was worth the exhaustion."
Jasmine nodded slowly. She understood that, on some level. Her whole life had been about survival: doing whatever it took to stay afloat, keep her kids fed, stay one step ahead of eviction. But survival wasn't the same as living. And what Poison was building here, as crazy and impossible as it was… It felt like living.
"Someone's coming," Skitter said suddenly, his whole body going tense. "Multiple prey, moving fast. Mahna signatures."
Jasmine's pistol was in her hand before she finished processing the words. "Magjistars?"
"Unknown. Different feel." Skitter's eyes were scanning the darkness, tracking something Jasmine couldn't perceive. "Wait. It's… it's ours. Krath's group, coming in hot. Something's wrong."
A portal ripped open twenty meters ahead of them, and daemons began pouring through: Krath's people, moving with the panic of soldiers under fire. Several of them were carrying wounded, and Jasmine spotted at least one human among the injured.
"What happened?" Skitter called out.
"Patrol capture went bad," one of the daemons, a massive thing with scales and too many teeth, growled back. "Magjistars had backup. A lot of backup. We got most of our people out, but…"
Behind them, through the still-open portal, Jasmine could see flashes of light and hear the sounds of combat. Someone was still fighting back there, buying time for the evacuation. She thought about Imani and Malik. Thought about everything she'd promised herself about keeping her head down, staying safe, making it home to her babies every night.
Then she thought about the benefits package. The life insurance that would actually pay out. The college fund that would keep growing even if she wasn't there to contribute. The protection that would extend to her children no matter what. She thought about the daemon she'd just shared breakfast with. About the humans fighting alongside monsters because they believed in something bigger than themselves. About what it meant to be part of something real. She didn't think. She just moved.
"Jasmine, wait..." Skitter's voice cut off as she sprinted toward the portal.
…
The portal was already starting to shrink; whoever was holding it open was running out of power or focus. Jasmine dove through. The other side was chaos. A warehouse, different from theirs, somewhere in the industrial outskirts of the city. Spells flew through the air, lighting up the darkness with colors that hurt to look at. Jasmine saw Peacekeepers, at least eight of them, pressing an attack against a defensive position where three daemons and two humans were making a desperate stand.
One of the humans was Ricky. Jasmine didn't have magic. Didn't have superhuman strength or speed or any of the abilities that made magjistars and daemons so dangerous. What she had was eight months of training, a pistol loaded with armor-piercing rounds, and the element of surprise. She opened fire. The first magjistar went down before anyone realized she was there. The second turned, raising a hand to cast something, and Jasmine put three rounds in his chest before he could finish the gesture.
The third… The third hit her with something that felt like being punched by lightning. Jasmine flew backward, her pistol spinning away into the darkness, her body screaming with pain. She hit the ground hard, sliding across concrete, every nerve on fire.
"JASMINE!" Ricky's voice, somewhere in the chaos.
She tried to get up. Couldn't. Her muscles weren't responding, still twitching from whatever spell had hit her. A magjistar loomed over her, face twisted with fury, hands glowing with gathered power. "Fucking gully," he spat. "You have no idea what you've gotten involved in."
"Fuck you," Jasmine managed through gritted teeth. "I know exactly what I signed up for. Do you?"
The magjistar blinked, confused by the response. Skitter hit him from the side like a freight train. What followed was brief and brutal. The daemon's eight limbs wrapped around the magjistar, mandibles finding throat, claws finding soft tissue. The man didn't even have time to scream as he was devoured.
"Can you move?" Skitter demanded, already turning to face the remaining threats.
"Give me a second." Jasmine forced herself up, pain radiating through her entire body. Her pistol was gone, but she spotted another one on the ground, dropped by one of the wounded. She grabbed it with shaking hands. "How many left?"
"Four magjistars. All occupied with our people." Skitter's eyes scanned the battlefield with predatory intensity. "The portal's down. Jinx must have lost focus when you came through."
"So we're stuck here until she can reopen it."
"Correct."
Jasmine looked at the daemon, this creature that could have eaten her a hundred times over, that struggled every day against instincts that demanded human flesh. This creature that had just saved her life without hesitation.
"Well," she said, raising her pistol, "guess we better make ourselves useful. I didn't sit through all those training sessions for nothing."
Skitter's mandibles spread wide. "That's the spirit."
They charged into the fight together.