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Bassett left the Daemonologie shop, his head reeling. Stepping along the sidewalk, his shoes clicking softly to an uneven beat, Bassett stumbled along. He was shivering terribly, out in his winter cold without his jacket AND being a demon, and without his knowing it, his teeth chattered. He yanked his arms around him, his hat pulled tight around his head, and breathed into the cold air, freezing a little part of the afternoon atmosphere. His shoulders were slumping low, something that was odd for a war veteran who was trained to be straight-backed and straight-shouldered.

Behind him followed his demon, wearing his soldier's uniform and jacket, looking quite funny as a long red-haired monstrosity in curt clothing. The demon wasn't all too bothered by his summoner's cold, he made no motion to return the jacket or even comment on the shivering from the young man. He was bothered by something completely different.

Making the effort to step alongside the soldier, Pey bared his teeth wide in a growl, "So what did the fruity pussbag say?"

"Nothing really," Bassett replied, glancing away from his demon towards the street. The street was empty. And that side of the street was where...Well...Where...People would walk. "Nothing at all. Just talked to me about...Protecting the house from any more of those weird encounters. Really." He glanced over to his demon who was looking at him with a deadly amount of incredulous eyebrow furrow.

Bassett frowned and said again, more firmly this time, "Really."

Pey sniffed, unleashing his hands from his pockets. The answer was appeasing for him. Whatever pauses and obvious misbehavior exhibited by the young soldier was immediately forgotten and overlooked, "I can protect you, it's in my ******** contract to do so."

Being so close to his summoner like this...Oooh, he could smell him, smell his delicious blood, and it was boiling, despite the cold. Pey liked chilled blood, especially when spiked like this. He leaned in closer to Bassett, like a lover would try and lean when they were about to whisper an invitation to their hotel room, "Hey, Bassett...I was a good boy in the shop, wasn't I? I didn't cause a mess or anything! I was quiet and I did as I was told. Why don't you...Give me a little treat?"

Looking at his demon with a firm furrow of his brow, the young man shook his head, "No, not here. Pey, we're in the middle of the street. Anyone could see us. Well, me, at any rate. And I don't think being pressed up against a light pole, bleeding profusely from my neck, is going to be casual enough for people to let go."

Pey snarled. He hated it when his summoner made important observations like that. Dammit, he was HUNGRY. Then Pey saw it, a dark alleyway. His many teeth stretched seemingly from his mouth and an idea fluttered into his head. "How about the alley?"

"Pey, I said no, I mean, look. There's someone coming this way right n-" But before Bassett was able to finish his sentence, his demon grasped him by the shoulders, and, at the end of a short scuffle, he was dragged, more like "thrown", into the alley. His back slammed against the ground and the weight of his demon was immediately on top of him. His arms flailed and his legs kicked, but they were useless to the firm force that was his hungry Pey. He gave out a yelp as his head was stretched back by Pey's hand, and his neck was bitten into with the carelessness of a chainsaw.

"GRK! HULP!" the soldier choked.

"Oh shut up," Pey growled, a smile spreading onto his cheeks, "You know you like it rough."

Little did they know that Bassett's legs were still visible and kicking from the sidewalk.

At the first hint of someone around them, near them, tripping over Bassett's leg, Pey did...Absolutely nothing. He continued ripping into Bassett's jugular. He knew full well that there was another demon behind him, floating around, but he sensed no kind of danger in her. He didn't want to interrupt his meal until it was absolutely necessary that he break for breath. He slowly leaned up from the soldier when he was addressed and he turned slowly in such a way that wasn't normal to move, his body twisting to see Yuki-onna. A large grin met her, toothy and bloody. It was Bassett's life force smeared all over from cheek to cheek, even onto his forehead.

"I am in the privacy of an alleyway," the Pey corrected the icy demon, his smile somehow spreading wider as his jaws clicked together. "And this one is bound to me. He's my eternal source of blood. Like it? Clever plan, huh? I thought so. Means that he's all mine. You can't have him."

"Pey!" the soldier choked, still squirming underneath the body of the demon. He kicked at him, sending his knee into the demon's gut until he crawled up to his feet and let him free. Finally able to move, Bassett threw his hands to his head. First, he made sure his hat was on and affixed it into place before his demon horns could be seen. Then he slapped his hands to his neck, pressing the flaps of skin Pey had torn back to the muscle. In a way, he hated being a demon. It made him feel weird things like this all the time, especially now that Pey knew he could abuse him anyway he wanted without fear of breaking his mortal body. Bassett leaned himself up, blood pumping in between his fingers as he pressed his skin back together, willing it to heal faster.

There was a person there after all...Another summoner? Either way, he didn't want anyone to grow suspicious of him and his nature. It seemed like this situation would be hard for him to protect himself, but dammit, he would try anyway. If only his skin could heal so that it didn't look so terrible!

Bassett breathed heavily, "Hah...Ah, jeez...Hello."

"Ah!" Pey voiced as he eyed the young man on the sidewalk, quite struck with fear if not, Pey silently forgave himself for the pun, frozen in place by fear. He pulled a toothy, wet smile, his cheeks and teeth pink and red with his summoners blood. "So you have a young t**t, too, just like mine then! They're funny little buggers aren't they? They should have play dates or something. We could play mommy and daddy, you and me, babe." He gave his best wink to the other demon, his throat gurgling with laughter. He thought it was a joke, and a good joke at that. Pey didn't care for ranks, for he could tell that she was a Nameless, just as he was. It didn't matter to him whether or not he was higher or lower, he was going to act like he always acted, no manners involved.

Pey gave a mock tip of an invisible hat to Ein, "Nice to meet you, worm!" he crowed.

Lifting himself up onto his knees with only one hand, his other quite firmly pressed to his bleeding neck, Bassett watched as the other youth gestured weakly at his neck. He tried to feign his best "oh this happens all the time" smile, the edges tinted with anxiousness and worry. He was quite terrible at lying.

"I'll be fine," Bassett huffed, his fingers testing the area for healing. It was slowly healing up, and finally there weren'y flaps of skin hanging loose. He could take off his hand without his neck coming undone. "I'm used to it by now," he offered weakly, "That's my demon, my Pey. He was just thirsty, is all. It looks bad, but, I promise you, it's fine! He likes to make more of a show than he should."

Lifting up his hand from his neck to show that it was just a couple of incisions and bite marks, not torn chunks of muscle and skin like it was a few moments before, Bassett made the motion to wipe his blood covered hand on his jacket. But Pey, being a scavenger and savoring every drop of blood from the soldier, lurched forward, grabbed his hands, and licked at them, suckling at his fingers and skin until they were free of blood.

"Mmmmnh," Pey moaned, licking up the precious red, "Sweet nectar of life."

Yanking his arm free from his demon, Bassett shot a dreadful glance at the Pey, his eyes speaking of certain promises of drought and thirst to the other. He had tried his best to make this chance encounter as LEAST eventful as possible and here was Pey, licking at his fingers and practically doing a somersault for these other people. He wiped his slobber covered hand on his pants, already looking like quite a mess. Leaving his master's mansion today, he looked quite prim and proper despite his lack of sleep and wary gestures, but now he looked like that mad psychotic homeless man on street corners proclaiming the end of the world between slurs and gurgles. Attempting vainly to straighten his blood covered clothes, Bassett gave a few more frowns of disapproval to his demon as the other young man spoke an introduction.

Pey, licking his own fingers free of blood and running them through his long lengths of hair, did nothing less than puff his chest and make wide-mouthed grins at the female demon. He acted like quite the female-starved soldier at a bar, giving her a sultry smile, "How about the lady to my man?" he asked with the waggle of his brows.

"Yuki-onna?" he said, raising his brows beneath his tussled bangs, "Miss, you don't look like a demon at all. You look more like a princess." It was a half-hearted attempt to make her smile. He didn't want her to think of him as she did Pey, which was obviously not a high opinion.

Before he was able to say more, Ein brought up something that had brought Bassett to this area of town in the first place. His eyes widened and he nodded eagerly as each word spilled out, almost jumping at the end of his sentence. "Yes, yes! I have! There was a shadow in my room just two nights ago, muttering and swaying in the corner. I just recently visited Daemonologie, trying to figure it out. Edward saw the same thing, or so Tae-yul tells me. The most of what I've found out is that it's a warning of some sort...There's someone out there, trying to hurt summoners. Someone, a girl named Kyrie, was shot not too long ago."

Pey resigned from his outright flirtatious behavior with the ice demon. It seemed she wasn't having it. Pity, he thought, because she was quite the dame! But a dame with no sense of humor was no dame for Pey. He stuck his tongue out between his rows of sharp teeth at the icy demon, and settled beside his own summoner, mirroring her position. Leaning over and licking at the blood drying on Bassett's neck, the demon gave a haughty roll of his inverted eyes at Yuki-onna.

"I am no knight, gross! I would never want to be one of those, ew! ********' heroic know it alls, goody-two shoe jocks! GROSS!"

"Pey!" Basset snapped, pushing his demon away from his neck, "Stop it, I'm trying to have a serious conversation here." The demon gave a sneer and eventually backed down. Still covering his neck with his hand, the ex-soldier turned his attention back to Ein, giving him yet another apologetic smile. They needed to talk about these strange happenings, these warnings and these tragedies. It involved them as summoners and as summoners, they needed to share what information they had in order to protect themselves.

"It has to," Bassett said in reply, "When I spoke with Tae-Yul, he was quite firm on the idea that it's all connected somehow. It involves us." he lowered his voice, as if to protect the next words from being heard, "You have to be careful, Ein. The person who shot Kyrie is still out there. Tae-yul said that if you see a girl, kind of like a tom-boy he said, with short dark hair and wearing dark colors or green, that you should run. Run and get away as fast as possible. Whoever that person is, she's dangerous and she means to do us harm."

Wow, what was he talking about. What was even happening? The heaviness of the situation hit Bassett in the back of the head like a sixty pound sledge hammer, jostling him into a strand of dangerous thought he failed to think on before. This wasn't just news, idle prattle, or rumor. This was fact. What he was saying, the very girl that he was describing could very well be the end of his, and Ein's, as well as everyone else's, own lives. What he was saying to Ein, could very well save his life, or at least define the reason for his death. This was death.

Death.

The cold word, of which Bassett had so much fear, struck him into icy stiffness. It was the very thing he feared, the very reason he had made a contract with Pey. And here it was, prowling around the city in a girl's body searching with beady black eyes for those with binding ties to those of demonic stature.

Bassett could hardly help as his body choked up and froze, his throat and limbs struck with a bout of shell shock. He struggled vainly for a moment, his words clacking together as they fought for passage through his throat, and he pinched his eyes tightly shut. Grimacing, he took a few moments to breathe, his free hand curling into the folds of his pants, before he was finally able to open his eyes and affirm Ein's questions. "Y-gh...grk...Y...Yes. Yes, all of...us. All of us." The ex-soldier, glanced up them and smiled weakly, "Kyrie is alive. Recovering. Or so I've heard."

Pey rolled his eyes as his summoner lapsed into another small bout of shell shock. He knew full well what set off his guardian, loud sounds, gunshots, and mentions of death, and he had to sigh in irritation the moment his summoner began to choke on his own words. He leaned over his guardian and slung an arm around him, jostling him with his own warmth as he pressed to his side until he was able to speak again.

Then Yuki-onna leaned herself in, tight and stern, her icy breath freezing the peach fuzz on their faces.

"What else do you know of her?"

Pey listened as Bassett helplessly searched for words. He gave a sigh and spoke up for his guardian, "This girl's got dark eyes, black almost, a Hunter. She can teleport, I heard. Which means that she's a Hunter with a summoned demon of her own." He sneered his Cheshire grin at Yuki-onna, "It seems to me, princess, that we're both royally ********. A mortal would be easy to defend our summoners from. But a Hunter with a demon? We're strained to our limits, it seems. A call for a treaty, perhaps?"