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Rumi realized the haunted house contained actual demons approximately forty seconds after Jinu bought their tickets, which, in retrospect, was probably the most predictable thing that had happened to her all week.
The date had been Jinu’s idea, although he had presented it with the careful casualness of someone who had spent entirely too long pretending he did not care whether she accepted. There was a night market, terrible fried food, several carnival games he claimed were “obviously rigged” only after losing at them, and, at the very end of the row of neon attractions, an enormous haunted house covered in plastic skeletons and fake blood. Jinu had looked at it, then at Rumi, and smiled.
“Scared?”
Rumi had nearly laughed.
Instead, because she liked him and because being liked back had apparently destroyed several important parts of her judgment, she had lifted her chin. “Of that?”
Now, standing inside a corridor painted black while something with six eyes watched them from behind a papier-mâché coffin, Rumi reconsidered every decision that had brought her here.
Not because she was afraid.
Because Jinu was having fun.
That was the problem.
He was walking beside her with one hand brushing hers every few steps, pretending not to do it deliberately, his smile appearing whenever an actor jumped from behind a curtain. He looked relaxed. Happy. Normal, in the strange, fragile way normality sometimes felt to people who had spent too much of their lives surrounded by things with teeth.
And Rumi was absolutely not going to ruin that by saying, “By the way, half the employees are real demons.”
So when Jinu stopped to examine a grotesque figure hanging upside down from the ceiling and said, “That one’s actually pretty convincing,” Rumi smiled sweetly.
Then she looked directly into the creature’s three visible pupils.
The demon froze.
Rumi waited until Jinu turned toward the next room.
She raised two fingers, pointed at her own eyes, then at the demon, and mouthed, ‘Behave’.
The demon swallowed.
They continued.
The next one was worse.
It crawled across the ceiling with its limbs bent backward, drool hanging from its jaw, and Rumi recognized the species immediately. A minor flesh-eater. Fast, unpleasant, and apparently stupid enough to have found seasonal employment in entertainment.
It opened its mouth.
Rumi smiled.
Not her stage smile.
The other one.
The demon closed its mouth.
“Aw,” Jinu said. “It got shy.”
Rumi squeezed his hand before he could investigate further. “Maybe you intimidated it.”
“I usually do.”
“Of course you do.”
Behind him, Rumi drew one finger slowly across her throat.
The flesh-eater nodded so violently its neck cracked.
After that, word apparently spread.
The remaining demons became the most professional haunted-house employees Rumi had ever encountered.
One emerged from a wardrobe, screamed with admirable theatrical restraint, and immediately retreated. Another rattled chains from a safe distance. Something enormous and horned stepped into their path, looked at Rumi, visibly reconsidered its life choices, and produced such a timid “boo” that Jinu burst out laughing.
Rumi did too.
She could not help it.
By the final room, Jinu had an arm around her shoulders and Rumi was leaning against him, laughing hard enough that her cheeks hurt, while three genuine demons performed the least threatening ritual sacrifice in supernatural history.
Outside, Jinu looked back at the attraction.
“That was terrible.”
“Mm.”
“The monsters were scared of us.”
Rumi kept her expression perfectly innocent. “Maybe we’re intimidating.”
Jinu glanced at her.
For one dangerous second, she thought he knew.
Then his smile softened, becoming warmer and quieter than anything inside the haunted house had managed to frighten out of her.
“Maybe,” he said.
He laced their fingers together.
Behind them, through the open exit, Rumi saw six demonic faces watching cautiously.
She smiled at them.
All six disappeared.
Somewhere inside, something crashed, followed by what sounded suspiciously like a loud, relieved collective sigh.
Jinu laughed. “See? Definitely scared of us.”
Rumi leaned against his shoulder.
“Obviously,” she said.