“I feel,” the demon said, “that you may not be taking this as seriously as you should.”

I looked up from where I had been sketching leaves and flowers around the bottom of the contract. “Is that a problem?”

The demon leaned over the table, pushing its reading glasses a bit further up its nose. “There… shouldn’t be? But why the me are you…?”

I shrugged. “I dunno, call me excited. You’re planning on having this thing for the next century and some, right?”

“I… suppose so?”

“So why wouldn’t I want it embellished? It’s my soul, after all. Most precious thing I’ll ever sell off.”

The demon squinted at me.

“Weren’t you bored of misers and backstabbing viziers? Surely somebody who wants to be here is more interesting.”

“And suspicious.” The demon said. “If I thought you had friends, I’d probably think you were stalling.”

I started doodling a bird into the knot of a tree on the right side of the paper. “Why don’t you think I have friends?”

“People with those don’t end up here.” The demon said, simply.

“Ouch!” I added a crest to the bird’s head. “Brutal, truly! What if I’d made my way out here because I wanted some help with my papers so I could commit more of my energy to throwing massive raves? Finish all my lab coursework so I could put my hands to better use on some wonderously attractive strangers instead of chemicals?”

A single eyebrow quirked up.

“You would’ve been being horribly rude to a paying client, I’m just saying!”

“I get the impression you’d survive a bit of ribbing.”

“I’m afraid you’ll find me rather fragile, actually…” I sighed. A skull was nestled into the root of the tree with a few quick strokes. “Very easy to bruise. It’s awful.”

“I see that subtlety is not your strongest point. You sound like a peddlar.”

I looked up to meet its eyes. “Is it not working?”

It stilled, in the way that things tend to when they’re very carefully not reacting. Then it covered the entire back of my head with a clawed hand and forced my gaze back down to the paper. “Just finish signing, would you?”

It was, by most reasonable metrics, an incredibly bad contract, and through my own skill at arguing and the demon itself’s own amusement had contrived to make it almost equally bad for both parties. A thrall with full run of its master’s house, keys hidden beneath its fingertips, and no power save for what would torment its host most creatively, would not make for any particularly useful tool or accomplish any particularly interesting goals.

I pushed up into the touch. “It’s nice to be making a friend.”

The demon opened its mouth to reply, but the words were swallowed in the scratching of a pen, and I was, abruptly, thinking of nothing at all.