Blessed By A Yandere Goddess

After Sarael finally grabbed a bite to eat, everything had gone completely off the rails for their date. The good food gave her enough energy to mask the nervousness of their impromptu, unplanned outing.

And this was exactly what Ronan had planned for them tonight, instead of the curated performance they had before.

"Ronan, look!"

Sarael ran through the empty midnight streets of the city when she spotted her first raccoon. She chased it across an entire block before stopping its retreat with a wall of darkness.

"Not so fast!"

She giggled and squatted down for a closer look at the animal, but not before binding its arms and legs to keep it from scratching.

Unlike foxes, raccoons, it seemed, didn’t have an instinctive urge to please Sarael.

Ronan caught up to her a few seconds later, hands in his pockets, watching his wife crouch on the sidewalk and examine a very confused, very restrained raccoon.

"It’s not going to worship you just because you tied it up."

"It might. The foxes came around."

Sarael poked the raccoon’s stomach with one finger. It chittered angrily and tried to bite her, but the shadow bindings held firm. She looked absolutely delighted.

"It’s so feisty. I like it."

"Of course you do."

Ronan crouched beside her, studying the animal with the flat expression of someone who’d seen far stranger things in the past few months. The raccoon glared at both of them with the particular fury of a creature who had been having a perfectly good evening before someone ruined it.

"Can we keep it?"

"No."

"Just one raccoon?"

"Where would we even put it? The foxes would eat it."

"The foxes would not eat it. I would tell them not to."

"They like biting furniture. I don’t trust their judgment."

Sarael considered this, then sighed and released the bindings. The raccoon scrambled backward, hissed at both of them with what Ronan could only describe as profound indignation, and disappeared into a storm drain.

"There. It’s free."

"I’m very proud of you. Most people don’t release their first raccoon."

She stood up and brushed off her dress, the movement unnecessary since nothing had touched the fabric. The street was quiet again, the raccoon’s angry chittering fading into the distance.

Above them, the moon was still bright.

"What now?" she asked.

Ronan looked around. The city at midnight was a different place than the one he’d grown up in. It was surprisingly quiet.

The streetlights cast long shadows across empty sidewalks, and the only movement was the occasional flicker of a late-night window or the distant headlights of a car.

He reached for her hand.

"Now we walk. See where we end up."

Sarael considered this, her head tilting slightly. Then she laced her fingers through his and nodded.

"Okay. No plan, then. Should we follow the raccoon?"

"Absolutely not."

✧ ✦ ✧

They walked for what felt like hours, though Ronan’s internal clock had stopped being reliable sometime around when he’d become a fugitive.

The city unfolded around them in quiet vignettes. A twenty-four-hour laundromat with a single old man reading a newspaper.

A rooftop garden visible between two buildings. A stray cat that regarded them with imperial disdain before vanishing into an alley.

Sarael pointed at everything. The cat, the garden, a neon sign that flickered in a pattern she found interesting, a vending machine that sold hot soup in cans.

Each observation was delivered with the same focused intensity she’d once reserved for studying his sleeping face.

One observation, however, was more interesting than the others.

It was Tristan and Yeula, sitting on a bench in the middle of the night, both smoking cigars and looking utterly exhausted.

"Look, it’s them!"

Sarael ran off again without waiting for Ronan. Her newfound strength had made both her and Ronan more comfortable with her running around now.

"Hey! You two!"

Sarael called out before Ronan could stop her, and both Tristan and Yeula nearly jumped out of their skins.

Yeula’s cigar fell from her lips and hit the pavement, while Tristan’s hand flew to his weapon before he registered who was approaching.

"Oh god, it’s her—"

Tristan’s voice cracked in a way that would have been funny if Ronan hadn’t seen the genuine fear flash across his face. Yeula recovered faster, stomping out her fallen cigar with more force than necessary.

"Relax."

Ronan said, catching up to Sarael.

"We’re not here for work."

Sarael had already planted herself in front of them, her eyes bright with curiosity. The raccoon had been interesting, but these two were apparently even more fascinating.

Ronan suspected it had something to do with the cigars.

"What are those?"

"Cigars."

Tristan said flatly.

"They’re bad for you."

"Then why are you using them?"

"Because we just finished a job your fixer gave us, and it was miserable."

Yeula pulled out a new cigar and lit it with a snap of her fingers, the flame flickering briefly in the darkness. She took a long drag and exhaled before continuing.

"Some idiot guild leader wanted us to retrieve a stolen artifact from a rival guild. Turns out it wasn’t stolen. He just wanted us to steal it for him and claim it was ’recovery.’ We found out halfway through."

"So what did you do?"

Tristan and Yeula exchanged a glance. The kind of glance that suggested the rest of the story wasn’t exactly heroic.

"We... negotiated."

Tristan said carefully.

"Sounds illegal," Sarael said.

"At least we’re sanctioned by the association to be criminals. So that’s a plus."

The four of them stood in awkward silence for a moment. Two wanted fugitives and two undercover investigators who were technically supposed to be hunting them, sharing a midnight sidewalk like old friends.

It was surreal.

"So, what—"

"So this is why you two were acting suspicious. I didn’t think you’d turn your backs on the association."

A man in a black hoodie emerged from the edge of the street, his hair as dark as night and his eyes a sickly green. From his tone, it was clear he’d been investigating them for a long time.

"I’m guessing this is the Shadow Porter, then?"

The man scowled. Whoever he was, it was clear he was a hunter on par with, or even stronger than, Tristan and Yeula.

"And I’m also guessing this is the woman whose voice I heard in the footage?"

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