To Be Human Among Demons

To Be Human Among Demons
>CHAPTER ONE
Never Have I Ever


Sitara picked her way through the ruined city. History books told her that this place once shone of silver and iron hues, and the streets were full of people. Now, Old New York was a ghost town, occupied only by rats, exiled demons, and humans that couldn't find a place in the demon world. Sitara was there partially because she was on a field trip with her contemporary history class, partly to collect samples of decay for her biology class. She was several blocks away from the main group because she hated everyone she knew. Most of them were mixbreeds, but they thought, as the purebloods did, that humans and the like should be annihilated. There were also a few snobbish pures in her class, and she couldn't stand their attitudes toward everyone. She herself was a pure, from one of the highest family bloodlines, but they hated her apparent indifference to the human population. So what if they were weaker, this was their planet first and they created all the technology that allowed the demons to be born.

Sitara crossed an ancient intersection, passing carefully under the sagging wire of the street lights while picking her way around the craters in the rotting concrete. The old street lights were shattered and dim; the electricity had long since been cut from dead areas like this. The ground was damaged from burst water mains and shockwaves from geoengineering. Sitara glanced at the broken glass in the shop windows around the intersection. The street was mostly empty but for road debris and the occasional trashed vehicle.

She reached the other side, the wooded side and glanced into the darkness within. Central Park, that was what it was called by the humans, but the demons called it the beauty of Old New York. They all thought that this was the only place in what had been a thriving metropolis that was truly beautiful and natural. Sitara knew otherwise, for this Central Park had been terraformed by the demons after a virus destroyed the old one. Still, parts of it were the same, things like the few pathways that traveled through it, and several playgrounds, left alone for their historical value.

Sitara glanced quickly over her shoulder to check if anyone would see her and ducked under the overgrown brush, venturing into the park along the nearest path, looking up at the dense tree coverage. The terraforming had been a little overdone and hadn't been halted as early as it should have been. Now the trees grew too close together and fought with each other for light and air. Sitara shook her head sadly. So much had been unnecessarily changed by the demons, things that could have been left alone, left to the humans. She passed by an old park map, decaying at the corners and covered with red X's, and followed the route to one of the still standing playgrounds.

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Ryan was perched, as he so often was, on the upturned merry-go-round in the playground on the edge of what had once been Central Park. It was one of his favorite spots, not too far from the half-demolished apartment building where he lived. He would rather have lived in the park itself, but he was held back from doing so by both his pretentious aunt and the fact that the park was a danger zone, a place where demon gangs would pass through. Awake, he could hide easily if any approached, but asleep, he was a sitting duck.

He adjusted the cigarette in his mouth, exhaling some of the smoke out his nose. He honestly didn't smoke, but sometimes he needed it for his nerves. Unable to get nicotine chews from a drugstore, since they were all closed down or run by demons, his only choice was the smokes. He didn't use to smoke, but that was before the demons started taking control.

"When are you gonna quit this stuff, huh?" Ryan muttered to himself, taking the cigarette out and looking at it. With a shake of his head, he took a quick drag on it and held it away, watching it burn itself out. He heard footsteps over by the entrance to the playground and glanced over, assuming it was a stray dog, judged by the light-footed padding sound. What he saw was quite the contrary.

He knew she was a demon upon seeing her. Demons, although they didn't look that different from humans, had pointed ears and claws, some even had tails or horns, though tails were more often the sign of a mixbreed. None of that would have helped Ryan know what she was, since she was a ways off, and she didn't have a tail. Demons also seemed more powerful in their aura if not their physique, and this is what tipped him off. The demon girl was emanating a certain something different in her aura, and if she were human, an aura wouldn't even show at all to the average person.

Her dark auburn-tinted brown hair was wound up under a large brooch-like gold clip at the upper back of her head, with a long thick braid hanging from it to her waist. Gold glinted a little from the choker around her neck and the small hoops in her ears. She wore a uniform, one from the high class private schools in New York City, a fitted white turtleneck with deep sleeves covered by a gold-trimmed red vest and an almost-black red skirt. She wore black stockings and black Mary Janes.

Ryan knew she had seen him when she came around the from behind the trees blocking the rest of the path, and it would be no good to try to hide from her. Female or not, there was no way she wouldn't find him if he did hide, and there was no way he could outrun her. Either way, he found himself totally unable to move.

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Sitara had smelled the human male several seconds before she saw him. Along with the human scent was one of the burning plant inside what must have been a cigarette. She didn't really like the scent of cigarettes, but it didn't bother her very much. She, and any other demon, was as unlikely to get lung cancer or any smoking related disease as a non-smoker living in a plastic bubble.

Coming clear of the trees between her and the playground, she saw him, sitting upon one of those spinning disks called a merry-go-round, although this one, being half turned over, probably wouldn't be looking at any more spinning days. He must have heard her approach, for he turned his head at the very moment she came within view. He looked rather stray, wearing a dark blue hoodie under a large grayish-beige jacket and a baggy pair of jeans. Worn dirty sneakers rested on one of the bars of the large recreational he sat on. The offending cigarette hung from pale fingers, as though about to fall from his hand. He had rather long dark brown hair, three or four inches, tossled, but trimmed to his chin and just below the nape of his neck.

Sitara looked at his face and met grey-green eyes, like the color of a storm cloud over the sea, or perhaps a stormy sea itself. Either way, the look on in his eyes gave her goose bumps, not in a nervous sense, more like anticipation. She shook herself a little and continued towards the playground gate, having previously stopped to stare at the boy.

Ryan watched her start walking again and dropped his cigarette into a puddle as she entered the 'ground. She almost seemed to be ignoring him, picking her way around the puddles and fallen branches, glancing about her at the recreationals. She passed by the old slide, one that had holes in the slope and rusted sides, running her hand carefully over it. She stopped at the swing set, putting a hand against the skeleton and tugging lightly at one of the chains. Seemingly having determined its structural integrity, she sat down on one of the swings, swinging herself a little with her foot.

"Do you come here often?" Sitara asked finally, after a few minutes of silence. She knew that he did, she could smell it everywhere about the place, he came there many times over many years. He looked up at her, ceasing his attentive observation of the foot she had pressing against the damp sand each time she swung back.

"Yes." His voice was baritone, resounding against the metal contruct he sat on. "Do you?"

"I haven't been here in ten years." She said softly, remembering the last time she'd been to this playground, back when she was seven years old and her grandmother would push her on the very swing upon which she currently sat. That was before the demons had declared Old New York a dead city and stopped the tedious work of caring for everything that was falling apart, which truly was everything. "It's changed."

"The hell it has." She glared up at him a little at his word choice, but he didn't see the look she gave him, for he had turned to survey the whole playground. He also remembered how it had been ten years ago, and even before that. But back then, few humans actually came anywhere near Central Park.

"Do you live nearby?" She asked, curious as to why a human adolescent would spend so much time in a place like this, somewhere quiet. If humans adolescents were anything like demon ones, then it could hardly be normal to do anything other than party around and be rebellious. Of course, it was always possible that he was being rebellious, skipping school perhaps, which, technically, is what she was doing at that moment.

"Near enough. But you don't, not if you go to one of those schools." He gestured at her uniform in emphasis. He expected that she would be from somewhere in uptown New York City, somewhere near her school. "Why are you here?"

"My class is taking a field trip to Old New York City. It is a contemporary history class." She gave him a bit of a nervous look. She had a slight feeling that he would be wondering now why she was here alone.

"So where is your class? Did they dare you to come talk to the human? Or do you just skip out on your classes?"

His tone made her want to snarl at him. He sounded so condescending. Who would ever think a human would have the courage to patronize a demon? She resisted the urge to throw something at him or to tackle him, making realistic use of her claws. Instead, she took a calming breath, reminding herself that what he said was a logical assumption and he should be entitled to assume. She looked down and answered quietly. "They don't know I'm here." They don't care either, she thought to herself.

"Do they matter?" He asked softly, hearing the slight loss in her voice. Clearly, she didn't think very much of her classmates, or they didn't think very much of her. Still, she didn't look like one to skip a class to go mess around, nor did she appear to be the popular sort, who hung through the class to look good. Perhaps an overzealous bookworm, one who had seen an oppurtunity to explore for her own academic benefit.

"Don't they?" She retorted in shock. Social order was a huge part of demon society, it was even a large part of human society, so she thought. That he would ask something like that meant that humans most not see importance in a social hierarchy. That, or this particular human didn't see any importance.

He gave her a strange sort of grin, as though he had just decided that she was interesting, or that he liked her. Sitara wasn't sure which was the worse of two evils. Humans and demons interracting was not at all helpful to social standing, especially not for someone like her. Still, that grin in itself seemed to hold a lot of meaning. Perhaps he had accepted her, where others had not. He hopped down from the merry-go-round and held out his hand towards her. "I'm Ryan."

"I have to go," she stood up from the swing and looked at his hand. Raising hers a little, she hesitated. What if someone saw her, being conversational with a human? It wasn't unheard of, proof enough in the existence of mixbreeds, and the fact that most mixbreeds were not love-children, nor the results of rapes or laboratory experiments. Deciding that none of that mattered much anyway, she lifted her hand the rest of the way and placed it in Ryan's, clasping a gentle handshake. "Sitara."


END CHAPTER ONE<