Robin entered his house with teeth clenched, struggling to retain control. He turned his head slightly, and stared at the box. The piece of crystal inside wasn't large enough to contain any kind of real power, he was sure. It was just a symbol of the demon inside him, and a symbol that he still had some power over it.

With one glance, he urged the creature out.

"No!" his own mouth shaped the words, "How dare you?"

"What? Not wanting you to fight with my body again?"

"You promised me that you would fight when it came to it. That was our bargain. I can use your body, and you can use mine. So why did you not call for my body? If we had joined the battle..."

"It would have made no difference! You saw the power of those two girls. The same powers you keep denying me." He tried not to sound angry, but there wasn't much point. He was an amazing actor, it was one of the qualities that had let him retrieve a precious treasure from the basement of a girls' school in the first place. But the demon was inside his body, inside his mind. He couldn't keep any secrets now.

"With my powers, you could have finished the battle in an instant. And you know I want to talk to those girls. They might be connected to the Council of the Spirit Rainbow. One of those was Urdia, I am almost certain."

"Urdia?"

"Lord of the Open Paths. One of the seven. If you just forced them to speak, then..."

"They're kids. You already tried talking to one of them, right? And where did that get you? If they don't want to talk to you, then I'm not forcing them. That's just making more trouble for my body. And for me. Yeah, maybe I'll fight for you. But I want a chance to test out those powers first. A little monster, maybe, without those girls or any knights or army around. Just a chance to find what I'm capable of, before you throw me in at the deep end."

"You think it's a game? Let me tell you –"

"Yeah, yeah. I heard it all before. Manifest destiny. World conquest. Fate of humanity. Princess. The fate they deserve. Blah blah blah. Well, you want to help me with that, you better start offering something for real. Not all empty promises. Or give me a chance to understand your powers. Because we want to get back in control, something tells me those kids aren't going to be happy with that. I need to know I can fight before I walk into a meeting with someone I don't even know about. But most of all, you need to stop screwing around with the monsters, right?"

"I will have you know I –"

"Yeah. Just every time you take over, supposedly to walk the streets looking for someone you like, and I'm not even going to say what I think of that, but every time you take over my body, I come back to find out we've been in a city where there's a monster attack on the news, or unexplained explosions, or hundreds of soldiers running around and nobody knows why. Twice you've tried to drag me overseas, and there's been a monster there as well. If you want to tell me that's a coincidence, I don't buy it."

For once, the invasive presence in his heart was silent. He'd caught it in a lie, and that was something it couldn't accept. There were supposed to be special rules, it wasn't supposed to even be capable of dishonesty. But when he didn't sign away his soul without reading the contract, this one had started trying to learn from him. In exactly the wrong, least beneficial ways.

"Don't do that. Do you understand me? I don't want to be caught by the law, and I don't even want to be in the same city as a monster. Not until I know what's going on, and not until I know how to make them do what I want. I don't care what games you think you can play, trying to confuse matters by talking about me being you and vice versa, I just don't care. Right? You want me to play with monsters, that's your sacrifice, regardless of whose body and whose soul is out there. And if I'm doing things for you, that means I get compensation. Every minute I spend on the streets, watching some nightmare creation rob a bank or whatever, that's a minute you owe me. That's a minute I get your body, and your powers, to do whatever I want with. How's that for terms?"

A sigh. And then the response he knew was coming.

"Very well."

"And we don't touch those kids. That's not something I'm looking forward to. You want to see them, you can send them a letter or something. And then back off, let me talk to them first, and you don't so much as look at them until they say it's okay, right? I want to hear from them what the situation is, and then I decide if I can trust all the things you've told me. You understand? You're a has-been, brought back from the dead by that totem thing. I'm alive now, so this is my world. I'm the one in charge this time, and there's nothing in the contract that changes that.

He shook his head, and forced his passenger back into the box. He shouldn't have been able to, the demon was so much stronger. But just now, she was scared to fight him. She'd tried to take control, to leap into the middle of a battle when it seemed to be going the wrong way. That wasn't Robin's idea of a good time, and while the contract said that was his choice, the demon had still used all of her power to try to force him to comply. That must have been tiring, and still he'd held out. So now, it was the last gasp of a rival in surrender.

Robin's body was his own, for tonight at least.

Author's Note: I'm not really sure what to do here. I could probably add a chapter here to wrap up the story; make this a kind of "end of book one", but writing that extra chapter seems harder than I expected. The next chapter is certainly the start of "book 2", with enough opening exposition so that you can start there without reading the first one. So, should I add a chapter here to wrap up the first book, or try cutting out some of the fluff in the following chapters?