“There are two,” I mumbled, almost to myself, as the shapes separated for a split second then flew back together like magnets.

  I didn’t want to get closer, but somehow, I did. The features of the imps came into sharp focus as I did, and I bit my lip to keep in my gasp at what I was seeing. These creatures had wings, tails, talons and horns. Horns with the same stone-like texture as mine, but proportionately bigger and in different shapes. The pale one had six horns running in two lines from the front of his skull to the back, like a double mohawk, whilst the shadowy one only had two which curled dramatically in spirals on the sides of its head.

  They were about five inches tall and vaguely humanoid. Their heads were almost perfect spheres, drawing out their features far wider than normal and their wings were larger than they were, making their bodies appear smaller. On their fingers were wicked, curved talons, which extended their fingers to inhuman lengths. As I looked, the shadowy one opened its mouth and bared a too-wide grin, full of needle-like teeth, at its luminescent opponent.

  “Correct, Miss Carazor!” Maddox’s smile grew impossibly wider. “The ability to see realm creatures is a very rare talent, we only have one other student who can. I would be amazed if you can find more than a handful of people on campus who can describe what’s in that cage.”

  “I see them too,” Rina claimed. “Why are they fighting?”

  “Those with a seer’s gift can also often see past the barrier.” Maddox was practically glowing. “Two in one class, why you lot are a special bunch!”

  “They’re going to kill one another.” I watched, horrified as they started trying to tear into each other with those teeth, huge wings flapping around as they fought. They were hard to look at, with the pale one emitting light like a miniature sun and the dark one seeming to suck it up like a void, but I couldn’t tear my eyes from them.

  As if in a dream, I watched my hand raise upwards, my index finger reaching out to pass through the bars.

  The cage stopped rattling, and two sets of bright red eyes stared at my finger, their flat nostrils flaring upwards rather than outwards.

  “Lilith, back away,” Maddox instructed, his voice muted and distant to my ears.

  “No.” I retorted, without meaning to.

  Both imps looked at one another, and they seemed to converse in some kind of silent language before they looked back at me.

  I was dimly aware of Rina pulling at my arm, trying to remove my finger from between the bars but some unknowable, captivating force kept me in place as if my body was made of stone. Somehow my finger moved further past the bars, even though I didn’t want to. It was just like in the temple, when the Strange God had taken my voice and spoken through me, only this time I hadn’t drunk anything beforehand.

  Both imps moved towards me, wings fluttering as they prowled closer, walking using a combination of their tiny clawed hands and feet in a way that was reminiscent of primates. As one, they both bit into opposite sides of my finger, just below my knuckle, and I felt liquid agony pump through my veins for the briefest second before a strange numbness took hold.

  When their teeth released me, they moved back to opposite sides of the cage, staring at one another with barely disguised hatred. My hand moved back out of the cage, and I felt the same strange weakness as I regained control of my own body.

  “Class, back to your desks,” Maddox ordered. “Lilith, are you alright?”

  It was all I could do to stay upright, but the moment he moved to cover the cage with a heavy cloth that had hung over his chairs both imps sprang up and pressed themselves against the bars, their tiny hands reaching out for me, eyes wide with fright. I gasped as the oddest thing happened.

  I felt their fear.

  “Professor, may I… Sorry. Would it be possible to leave them uncovered so I can study them some more?” I asked, making eye contact with Maddox as I said the lame excuse, reaching up to my horns to try and signal to him that I thought there was something more going on here than either of us understood.

  He stilled, returning the cloth to the chair and looking pointedly at me. “Don’t get distracted,” he instructed. “As you can see from those bites, they’re quite nasty little critters.”

  I nodded, hurrying back to my desk with the rest of the class and pulling out my books from my bags. On Maddox’s desk, the imps sat in their cage, watching every move I made like tiny hawks.

  “What happened?” Daron whispered to me.

  “I didn’t do that,” I whispered back. “I had no control.”

  “Typical Carazor, always trying to get more attention.” Abrosiax’s voice drifted from the back of the class. “Did you hear, she made up an assassination attempt at the end of year ball? Now she’s faking the ability to see imps.”

  I tuned her out, focusing instead on the bite marks on my finger. They hadn’t bled at all, and as I watched the one on the left began to turn pearly white, like an old scar, whilst the one on the left darkened to a matte black. Because of their wide jaws and strange teeth, each bite was a perfect circle the size of a coin. They wrapped around the sides of my finger and almost touched at the top and bottom. It looked like I was wearing a strange ring.

  “As I was saying, imps are creatures of the shadow realm,” Maddox began again, with a long look at me. “They are our primordial cousins, much in the way humans and neanderthals are. They share a significant portion of your DNA, and for those of you who cannot see them, this is a sketch done by a seer a few years ago.” He flipped the blackboard around to show a large poster pinned to the other side. “There are two varieties of imp, light and dark, and their dislike of one another is legendary though they share no differences besides the colour of their skin and their temperament. Alone in this realm, any imp could cause any number of disasters, but thankfully they tend not to come here much.” He coughed, looking down at the cage uneasily. “Now if you’ll all open your textbooks… you will see a diagram of the shadow realm, and the blanket it forms around our realm. We know very little about it, though we have enough evidence that its existence has never been in question. There are a small group of scholars who argue that demons are the result of the shadow realm’s effects on humans, although their evidence to support their theory is non-existent.”

  Maddox’s lesson was interesting, but the imps in the cage distracted me from a lot of what he was saying. They’d stopped rattling, and the white one sat on the floor of the cage, watching me as though he was meditating, whilst the black one paced back and forth like a lion, never letting his gaze stray from my face. The two-page essay on imp behaviour Maddox set us at the end had us all groaning, and I couldn’t help but think that he’d set it because of my noticeable distracted gaze. When the rest of the class packed away, I made a show of taking a long time with my books, but Daron, Bane and Rina weren’t falling for it. The moment we were alone Rina stood up and grabbed my hand, turning it over in hers.

  “What the hell was that?” she demanded, examining the tiny rings on my finger with squinted eyes. “You saw the way those things were fighting, and you decided to stick your finger in? Are you crazy?”

  “I didn’t decide to do anything,” I protested. “It was weird, like I couldn’t control my own body. I didn’t want to get bitten!”

  Maddox approached me, eyeing the bite warily. “Lilith, imps don’t usually let people live long enough to turn a bite into a bond… They’ve claimed you as their mistress.”

  “Mistress?” I asked, studying the creatures in the cage. “Maddox, I don’t have time for pets.”

  “Perhaps the choice was never yours, if you claim you had no control over the bonding in the first place.” He raised an eyebrow. “Did you know that there is an argument that the reason you have horns that look similar to theirs is that the Strange God himself is a creature of the shadow realm, and that when he selects his champion, he imbues them with part of his own nature?” Maddox continued. “Perhaps, that is why he thought it fitting for you and the imps to be bonded.”

  “What even is this bond?” I asked, pulling my bag onto my shoulder and approaching the cage. “It’s not like my mating bonds, is it?”

  Maddox shrugged, withdrew the key from his pocket and handed it to me. “It’s a vastly different type of bond. Imps form a psychic bond that’s much more rudimentary than a mating bond. They’re fierce little protectors, excellent lock pickers and very useful spies.” He ran his eyes over the cage despite admitting he couldn’t see the imps inside. “Bonds with other demons in the past have often been mutually beneficial. One of the Gluttony elders currently has one. They can never turn on you, and your bond with them will provide them with enough mental stability to resist the compulsion to fight one another.”

  “And if I let them out, they won’t hurt anyone else?”

  “Only if you’re threatened,” Maddox assured me. “But first, you should seal the bond by naming them.”

  “Naming them?”

  Maddox pointed to my finger. “Those marks are actually tiny letters, they’ve named you in their language already. Names are very powerful things, Lilith.”

  “But are they boys or…?” They didn’t have breasts, but neither did they have any other sexual organs that I could see. They looked male, but only because they had wide shoulders and narrow hips.

  “Imps are a single sex species,” Maddox said, the air of irritation I picked up from him giving me the impression that he’d mentioned it in class and I hadn’t paid attention. “They are born from the energy of the shadow realm and so have no need of females. You can pick whatever name strikes your fancy, but I would do it soon because you have a lesson to get to after lunch.”

  I cast my eyes over the imps, then turned to Bane and Daron who shrugged.

  “We can’t even see them,” Daron reminded me.

  “Great,” I muttered. “Rina, suggestions?”

  “Lassie and Spike?” She rolled her eyes. “Nope, you got yourself into this funny bond thing, I don’t want any part of it. Those creatures are creepy,”

  “Onyx, for the black one, and Ivory for the white,” I said.

  I knew the names were unimaginative but at that point in time I was stuck for ideas.

  The moment I said the names, the marks on my finger warmed slightly, and I watched as a small replica appeared around their necks, their names written in tiny English letters like a collar. They both looked at me with burning red eyes, and I wondered if they liked their names, or if they even understood what they were, seeing as I had no clue what names they’d given me.

  I pressed the key into the lock, and both swooped out, Onyx stopping on his way to kick the metal device and stick his incredibly long tongue out at it. Ivory took a perch on my shoulder, sat down and started braiding the hair just below my ear, whilst Onyx landed on my head, taking hold of my horn. Through our bond, I could sense him staring around the room as if he was surveying the world from the crow’s nest of a great ship.

  “I’m getting them some clothes,” Rina grumbled. “You can have naked imps crawling all over you if you like, but if I have to watch them then they’re getting clothes.”

  “Will they behave if I take them to lessons with me?” I asked Maddox.

  “Who will notice if they don’t?” Bane asked. “No one can see the creatures to blame them.”

  “Correct. Professor Saxon is the only member of staff with the ability to see imps.” Maddox replied, giving me a speculative a once over. “I’m not certain what the protocol is here… The school rules specify no pets, but then again, if a rule is broken and no one can see it… Did it really get broken at all?”

  He winked as he left the classroom, whistling to himself. Leaving me with two imps clinging to me, and more questions than answers.

  Daron was frowning at the piece of my hair that was braiding itself. “Are they really naked?”

  “You realise that the essay should be easy as hell for all of us now, right?” Bane grinned in anticipation. “We have two living examples.”

  “Two newly-domesticated, invisible examples,” Daron corrected him. “Maddox never said we were supposed to be writing a report on bonded imps.”

  His words didn’t dim Bane’s grin. “He never said we weren’t!”

  “Come on, I’m starving.” Rina cut through their idle chatter like a blunt knife. “I don’t suppose anyone bothered to check what these things eat?”

  I shrugged, carefully beginning to walk towards the door, worried that one of them would fall off if I went too fast. “Maybe they like sandwiches, like us? I can’t imagine Doughnut will be happy if he has to share his raisins.”

  Chapter 6

  “Lilith, they have wings so please stop walking like a prat. If they fall off your shoulders they’ll just fly back up again,” Rina complained as we entered the hall and joined the lunch queue.

  At the sight of all the food both imps had perked up and watched as I collected a tray and started putting my usual sandwich on it. I’d just stuck my cup under the tap for boiling water and started unwrapping my teabag when Ivory made straight for the fruit bowl. I watched as he sniffed a few things, then beat his wings furiously, trying to lift a banana.

  I took the hint and picked it up for him, putting it on my tray and watching as he returned to pick up two grapes, placing them on the tray next to it. Onyx, however, ignored the fruit and headed straight for the salad bar, grabbing a chunk of chicken and starting to flap his way over to me. Before he could dump it onto my tray, I quickly grabbed an extra saucer for him, smothering a giggle when he took two more trips, filling his little plate with the chicken and bacon pieces whilst ignoring all the healthy parts.

  When my tea was done, I grabbed a glass of water, a bag of crisps and a small slice of cake before heading over to my table, forcing Onyx to abandon his quest for a fourth piece of chicken and fly back to my shoulder. When I reached our table and sat down between Bane and Jin, Kain was watching me from across the table.

  “Lilith, why do you have imps on your shoulders?” His usual, easy-going demeanour was completely gone as he glared at Ivory and Onyx.

  “They bonded me, not my fault,” I protested, around a large bite of food.

  “She got possessed again,” Bane explained, as though I wasn’t right there and capable of doing so myself. “We were studying them in Maddox’s lesson and the Strange God forced her to stick her finger into the cage. Now, she has imps.”

  Onyx hopped down onto the tray and started demolishing the chicken and bacon bits on his plate, whilst Ivory used his talons to cut away pieces of grape and nibble delicately at them. Jin watched the whole process in fascination, though I could tell he couldn’t see either of the imps from the way he was straining his eyes and following each piece of floating food until it was eaten. When Onyx finished all his chicken, Jin deftly swiped a piece which was hanging out of Aeron’s sandwich and held it out.

  Onyx didn’t even bother taking it, and just started eating straight from Jin’s hands. Pieces of chicken went flying everywhere, but the imp didn’t care. Rina and Ivory, however, looked on in complete disgust.

  “That is the weirdest thing I have ever seen,” Aeron commented.

  “You can’t even see them.” Rina rolled her eyes. “It’s weird as hell watching two little naked men climb all over Lilith.”

  “That sounds wrong.” Nelly appeared at the table wearing a slightly frazzled expression. “I am famished, Acolyte Ezra made us miss breakfast on the grounds that fasting is good for clearing the mind.” Lulu joined her, both of them digging into their food as Aeron got them both up to speed.

  “Where are they going to sleep?” I wondered. “Do they even sleep?”

  “Never trust anything that doesn’t sleep,” Jin muttered, though he was clearly enthralled by them.

  “Lilith, they’re not pets,” Kain objected. “One of them almost took my head off in the shadow realm once.”

  “Wait, you’ve been to the shadow realm?” I asked, amazed that he’d never mentioned it before.

  He just shrugged, reluctantly answering, “I’m photokinetic, remember?”

  “But I thought only umbrakinetics…”

  “It takes light and dark to make a shadow.” He focused on his food. “I went once, and I’m not going back again. I’ll leave that realm to your assassin.”

  I was quiet for a while. “Maddox said they’d bonded to me and wouldn’t hurt anyone unless I was threatened.” I picked up Ivory, who had just finished his fruit, and held him out to Kain. “He’s not so bad.”

  Ivory seemed to sense my intention and scurried over to my fingertips, looking at Kain curiously. When Kain held out a carrot stick, dipped in hummus, Ivory took it and ate it delicately.

  “I guess he’s a vegetarian, like you.” I smiled.

  “Hmm.” Kain didn’t seem entirely convinced, but held out a second carrot stick anyway.

  Demonic language that afternoon was a strange experience. Every now and again, Ivory or Onyx would do something that made people stare, like move things around on my desk, or flap their wings hard enough to make my hair fly around a little bit. But none of those looks were as unexpected as the impassive stare Professor Saxon had on her face as Ivory and Onyx stole bites of my food at dinner that night.