I AM THE MONSTER UNDER YOUR BED

The closet in June’s room had always been cold.

She’d mentioned it once, when she was six, and her mother had checked and found nothing and said something about the pipes. June had nodded and decided her mother was wrong and never brought it up again. She wasn’t scared of it. If something had wanted to hurt her it would have done it by now. Whatever lived in the cold at the back of the closet was either shy or patient, and she could work with either.

She’d started leaving it things. A button here, a small coin there. Half a biscuit once, though she’d felt a bit silly about the biscuit.

On the night she found him she hadn’t even been looking.

Her hand patted along the back of the closet floor, reaching for her other shoe, and her fingers closed around something that was warm and cool at the same time: a small gem. Purple. So dark it was nearly black.

She held it up to the window.

Inside the stone, something three thousand years old went very still.

It had swallowed armies, and moved through the dark below mountains and the dark below cities, and consumed kings and gods and the terrible silence that falls ever after.

His name was Vorrath.

He had never been caught before. Never been held.

Certainly never been held up to a window by a nine year old in fox pajamas.

“You’re pretty,” she said.

She tucked him under her arm and fell asleep.

He spent the next forty seconds trying to kill her. This was not personal. It was logical. Bond breaks when the bonded dies. He had no feelings about it whatsoever.

But nothing worked. Every application of power simply stopped, politely and completely. The universe had looked at what he was doing and said no, quietly, without explanation, and that was that.

He had brought kingdoms to silence once. Kingdoms, plural, over three thousand years, and the silence after each of them had been enormous and total and exactly what he intended. She snored. Small and intermittent and entirely undignified.

He sat in her fist on her pillow and did not examine how he felt about any of this.

He had a plan. He would have the plan until something better presented itself. He was very old and very patient and he had been in worse positions.

He could not, specifically, remember one, but he had definitely been in worse positions.