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Ayame made an unconscious gesture, and the preternatural being she battled disappeared in a relatively pathetic puff of smoke. She merely noted that after the monster's earlier bragging, he disappeared into nothing more significant than...nothing.

Her daemon dog Dusky gaped at her. "Wow, you really must still be mad. You've never dispatched anything that fast before."

Ayame stalked down the boulevard, uncannily navigating the dark street despite her four eyes. If she'd relied on her poor eyesight, she'd be stumbling every now and then. But since she had other special talents, avoiding the occasional pothole even in total darkness was peanuts.

Half-husky, half-ether, Dusky merely floated after her. Anybody still up in this ungodly - pardon the term - hour, would only see a tall girl in pastel green button-up jacket and blue jeans walking down the street. The daemon dog they'd ignore - aside from being invisible to normal sight, Dusky was harder to detect, even by other slayers like Ayame.

She was still quiet, knowing full well that the daemon dog can read her thoughts. If he chose to. Among his kind, Dusky had the distinction of being an anomaly - no daemon dog was ever good. Nor chosen to be a slayer's animal familiar. Which implied Ayame was an anomaly herself as far as the Society was concerned.

"Mind turning into a real dog for now?" she asked. She could talk to him while still being the daemon dog but those watching would consider her weird, talking to the air.

Without missing a beat, Dusky turned corporeal, turning to a full husky in white and grey fur. He used to cringe being a white and grey rather than the usual black but ever since he worked for the Society, he was okay with his fur coloring. It was a useful disguise, being assigned to a human in downtown Augure.

"Shouldn't I be mad?" she finally asked, tucking her hands into her jacket pocket as the cold wind blew. He wagged his tail, looking back and up at her, teeth bared in a canine smile.

"Was that a joke? If getting mad makes you do the job in half the time, we should work it into our strategy." He padded ahead before Ayame could think of putting a foot onto his backside.

She should have realized that talking to Dusky always didn't give her what she wanted. They've both established a working relationship since they teamed up six years ago. Six years since she officially became a slayer and didn't know any better.

It was a comedy of errors, their meeting during her final exam. She wasn't supposed to summon him - he wasn't supposed to end up in the Great Hall. She'd been taught that the spirit familiar is chosen, and she had her heart long set for either a dragon or a phoenix. So when he puffed into existence in the Great Hall, a normal-looking husky, and a frightened and bedraggled one at that,  it was enough to disappoint her, along with a string of disappointments that plagued her the whole time she was in the slayer academy, not to mention a recent unmentionable. Enough a disappointment for her to blurt out. "Crap! A dog for a spirit familiar!"

Then her eyes widened seeing the dog bare its teeth at her - before she detected the malevolent spirit that tried to follow the dog through the crack from the spirit world that the dog left open in its apparent flight. Only quick thinking and unerring instinct had her sealing the crack in a triple bind, repairing the wall between the Society and the spirit world. She'd sealed it too good that the dog hurtled and thudded against it, knocking him breathless.

It had all happened in seconds but Ayame got the shock of her life coming from two fronts - the dog shouting at her to undo whatever she did - and all the top ranked slayers pouring into the Great Hall, weapons at a ready. Even her evaluators moved aside when Master Verlaine moved down to the pit where she and the dog were faced off.

"What is the meaning of this?" The Master's voice was deceptively benign but everybody knew that he did not concern himself with matters as trivial as a student exam. Even the dog recognized that because its hackles were still raised, and bared its teeth more fully at the Master. Master Verlaine kept an eye on it but he was waiting for an answer from Ayame.

"You do realize it was the first time my powers didn't work - and my first time to be in your world?" Dusky spoke up in the present time, having apparently picked up on her thoughts about that day. It had been a desperate move on his part, to momentarily escape into Society as hell's hounds pursued him. He just didn't expect to end up where no daemon dog was supposed to go, and then be rendered helpless when the slayer had sealed the wall too good that he couldn't crack it again before the other slayers converged on him.

"Yeah, and then I had to tell the Master you were my spirit familiar - which rendered the Society unable to kick you out. And tied you to me - which you've told me had not happened to any daemon dog ever." Girl and dog continue walking, two beings who were traditional enemies. It had been a harrowing month, while she waited for news of her eventual graduation, and he for the fate of his existence. The council eventually ruled in her favor, granting her slayer status and formally assigning Dusky to her. She noted wryly that while the spirit familiar is chosen by the slayer, the council had veto power over the final assignment. But they could not rule against the assignment without just cause - all the probing merely cemented the fact that she had passed her final exam by summoning a spirit familiar.

Six years later, it was still a puzzle for the council how she could summon a daemon dog for a spirit familiar. She rated a B+ where slayer ranks were concerned. And daemon dogs were not an option for a spirit familiar - only an A-ranked slayer could subdue the low-level daemon dogs. People gave them a wide berth wherever they went in Society - and it wasn't just the slayers who avoided them. Even the other spirit familiars had a comment or two for Dusky. But since Ayame didn't know any better, she was convinced Dusky was her animal spirit and proceeded as such, visiting him at the temporary kennel he was housed in and starting training. He did look like a normal dog - when she later learned of his true form, it was only to improve on the arsenal of strategies they've been training on. They also both knew that at that time, she needed distraction from the unmentionable.

The aforementioned unmentionable that was now plaguing her again. In the normal world, Ayame did normal things along with slayer training, having gone to university for her degree, holding day jobs while she patrolled Augure at night with Dusky to battle monsters as the city sleeps. And she had normal personal relationships.

"So, why, after all these years, does seeing your ex make you mad?" Dusky asked. It was an inside joke between them, that Ayame was only able to summon Dusky because she had her first breakup on the same day of her final slayer exam. Considering summoning spirit familiars were in part influenced by the slayer's current mood, it wasn't a far-off supposition that summoning a daemon dog was reflective of Ayame's mood at the time.

"Why shouldn't I be?!" She finally whined, apparently frustrated, breaking the usually stoic mien she adopted during patrol. "Because I've been made to look stupid! With the apparent arsenal I have at my beck and call, how did I end up working in the same company as the ex?!" It was true: she had the shock of her life earlier in the day coming face-to-face with him when she went out of the meeting room. And sporting the same lanyard that declared them to be employees of the same company. What set her off more than seeing him was seeing him unsurprised - apparently he knew. But she didn't.

Dusky laughed. "Because you don't make a habit of tracking ex-boyfriends! I'd have to say that was a good sign, that you don't obsess over his whereabouts. But it's still funny though!" He continued laughing.

Ayame flashed the dog a disgruntled look. She sometimes lapsed into treating Dusky as a pet rather than a fully functional, thinking entity. He'd saved her more times than she could count during their foray in the dark and dealing with monsters that go bump in the night. And despite the council's fears of him reverting to his true nature, she had yet to see it happen. If truth be told, she had darker moods than the supposed daemon dog - he had a too cheerful spirit to be one.

She should have known he wasn't done yet. "And in all the six years I've known you, you never had another boyfriend. You'd have the occasional boy you'd like, but that's it. And whenever somebody gets interested, you brush them off. What was so great about that ex, anyway?"

"Did you conveniently forget that those interested had a mind to be killing me?" she shot back, knowing he meant those monsters disguised as humans whom they eventually vanquished - there were still a lot of those. But yeah, she thought, what was so great about that guy anyway. She'd learned to stop questioning why after her first relationship, she didn't get into another one. There really was no choice - she wasn't around guys she could potentially be in a relationship with while she was around guys she'd definitely not consider to be in a relationship with. Having two jobs that required total focus also wasn't helping.

She did consider looking into Society members - but aside from them not interested in her being unconventional, slayers were also naturally dour.

She sighed. It would be dangerous to be this distracted while on patrol. She also knew it wasn't about the person, but the situation. "It just feels like I keep getting the short end of the stick, you know," she said aloud, hurrying after Dusky who loped to a run. "Like the world keeps laughing at my expense..."

Then she had to stop as Dusky headed to an alley, already changing into his ether form. It meant that he found a monster again. So she drew out her spirit weapon - and was relieved to see a Sig Sauer. Gun in hand, she carefully went around the corner to join Dusky.

The familiar nom nom sound greeted her from the dumpster in the alley. Even Dusky had stopped, merely hovering at a distance from the creature who currently occupied the dump.

"Oh Nom, not you again," she let out an expletive. The one-eyed, green blob looked up at her, portions of a cadaver cat hanging from its huge maw. It was apparently offended with the way she sounded. But it continued to nom its way to dinner.

Dusky had taught her the daemon classes, but Ayame preferred to name the individuals she met on patrol. The council had frowned upon the relatively high number of monsters still in existence in Augure. But Ayame had never taken to dispatching relatively harmless monsters, only the dangerous ones. So her and Nom had a silent agreement - it stuck to dining on dead meat, she didn't send it back to hell. There was only one thing that bothered Ayame with Nom's existence - its specific diet constituted of dead cats.

"Looks like the cat killer is at it again," Dusky commented, coughing over "cat killer". Still a dog, he had no fondness for the feline kind, but he also knew cats were important allies of the witching world, not to mention there existed a specific daemon class who abhorred the creatures. Yet they were nowhere near to finding out who inadvertently supplied Nom's meals. The patterns Dusky got from Nom's mind revealed that all city dumpsters had dead cats at one time or another, and there was no distinction between naturally dead cats, and cadaver cats.

Distracted and frustrated, Ayame muttered. "Yep, somebody named curiosity."

Dusky gaped at her again, knowing it was a bad time to be making jokes. True enough, a horrific howl echoed into the night, unheard of but by the strongest psychics in the neighborhood. It was eerie enough to make green-blob Nom scamper as fast as its form would allow.

"Hey, snap out of it, will you?" Dusky snarled at Ayame. "Looks like were chasing another one tonight."

"I'll be fine," she replied. But she was still wondering if there was a truth to a slayer's current mood being responsible for the kind of spirit familiar she could summon.

"You're still wondering why I'm a grey," Dusky said even as they ran in the direction of the monster howl. There were two of Dusky's kind - the whites which stay up in Paradise, and the blacks which stay in hell. To be a grey is to be an impossibility, but Dusky existed, never mind if he didn't know who his parents were.

"Yeah, I'm thinking that you did represent how I felt that day - confused, in turmoil, unaware of where my future will take me," she remarked as they loped past the children's playground.

"If I did, then you also felt the will to live. I wouldn't have ended up where you were if I wasn't keen on staying alive," Dusky replied, half-concentrating on Ayame, half-focusing on determining the kind of monster they would be facing based on the spirit waves the creature gave off.

"So it's a blur between two extremes, neither good or bad, neither right or wrong, not even either or but all the shades of grey that come between," she mused.

"Yep. But don't get me to thinking about why I'm grey - I just know I'm one." Then Dusky paused. "Heads up, it's a class-C."

Ayame merely nodded. She figured they had it right about love and daemon dogs.
 

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