Demonic Po*nstar System Chapter 912: Pet Merch

The third name on the shortlist was House Veyrand, a lifestyle and merchandising empire occupying six floors of glass and Italian marble, and after twenty minutes, the girls believed they’d found the one.

The creative director, a silver-templed man named Foss, shook their hands, looked precisely nobody below the chin, and walked them through a licensing structure that made Nyx sit up straighter within the first five minutes.

Real numbers. Honest margins. A merchandising machine that had dressed three top-tier guilds and knew exactly what it was doing.

"Their apparel division is legitimate," Nyx murmured to Aria behind the rim of her glass, cautious optimism creeping into her voice.

Aria nodded, hopeful. Even Bastet had settled into her chair with the boneless ease she reserved for rooms she approved of, listening to Foss with her tail curled comfortably around the armrest.

"Which brings us," Foss said, his own enthusiasm visibly cresting, "to what we believe will be the crown of the whole partnership. Our design team has been dying to show you this."

He clicked to the next slide.

The concept art was, on a technical level, gorgeous. The rendering, the color work, the composition. Money had been spent, and talent had been paid for.

It was Calypso. Red skin gleaming, tail curled high, kneeling on a velvet cushion in a studded black collar with a leash pooling beside her, one clawed finger hooked in the collar’s ring, winking at the viewer. Stamped across the bottom in letters of molten crimson ran the campaign title.

THE PET DEMON.

Merchandise mockups fanned out along the slide’s edge. Collar-themed jewelry. A leash keychain. A body pillow, at which point the mockups stopped mattering, because the room had begun to change.

It started with the water glasses.

The surface of every drink on the table shivered, rings spreading from the center outward, and the air acquired weight the way a beach acquires weight when the tide comes in over it. The junior designer who’d half-risen to present the merchandise line sat back down without being asked. His chair creaked under a pressure that had nothing to do with him.

Nyx felt it against her shoulders like a hand pressing down, and her first startled glance went to Aria, who had already turned to look at the same person she had.

Bastet had not moved. She sat exactly where she’d been lounging a moment ago, golden eyes fixed on the screen, and the eyes were the only thing about her that had changed. The lazy warmth in them had gone out like a doused lamp, and what remained was dark, molten, and murderously still.

The Manifestation of Dominion, the woman who called Calypso a crude barbarian a minimum of once per day and sighed at her across every dinner table they shared, was outraged.

Deeply, tectonically outraged, on the barbarian’s behalf, and the sixth floor of House Veyrand was only beginning to learn what that meant.

A hairline crack wandered up the side of Foss’s glass with a sound like a knuckle popping.

"Lady Bastet..." he began.

"Do you know what you had?"

Her voice stayed quiet. That was the terrifying part, Nyx would later report to the tent, the fact that the marble under the table was spider-webbing while Bastet’s voice never left its sunbathing register.

The surprise on Nyx’s face lasted one more heartbeat. Then it melted into open delight, and she leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs, giving the felinid the floor. Aria settled beside her with her chin on her palm, openly delighted by her front-row seat.

"You had the fiercest of warriors." Bastet rose from her chair, unhurried, and the pressure in the room rose with her. "The Manifestation of Carnage. A badass demoness who wades into a horde laughing, swinging an axe taller than your art director, and comes out the other side asking if anyone else wants to go again. That poster designs itself. Boys and girls both would hang it above their beds and dream of being brave."

Foss opened his mouth. The floor groaned, and he thought better of it.

"You had the funniest disaster on the planet." She stood and walked, around the table and toward the screen, gold anklets chiming into the silence, each footfall landing with far more weight than any barefoot woman should own. "A demon queen who eats like a glutton at every table she graces and has been defeated, in living memory, by a television remote. The whole world watches her fail at being human every other day and loves her more for every failure. You could have sold plush toys of her holding that damned remote upside down until your warehouses wept."

"We..." the junior designer tried, heroically. "She’s known to be an-"

"And you had a friend." Bastet came to a stop in front of the screen, standing where Foss had held his presentation, and the lights overhead flickered as the pressure crested, pinning every executive gently and absolutely into their seats. "My best friend..."

Her eyes burned with fury as she observed the hideous art on the monitor. "A woman whose mere smile would’ve sold millions of your overpriced trash. That is what was in your hands when your design team sat down. A warrior, a joy, and a friend. And out of all of it, the only thing your artists found worth rendering..."

"Miss Bastet, we meant-"

"I know." Nobody in the room was breathing especially well by this point, which made it merciful that she wasn’t finished with them anyway.

"She would laugh at your collar. She is a pet already, his pet, and she would delightedly put that toy in her room."

"But me... Turning all that she is into such a thing... I hate it more than I can voice."

Then she raised one hand toward the screen, palm open, and closed her fingers.

The monitor crumpled inward with a shriek of folding metal, the concept art swallowing itself mid-glow, frame and panel and mounting bracket collapsing toward a single point as her dominion wrung the machine like wet cloth. Two seconds later, everything the design team had prepared existed as a ball of compressed metal the size of an orange, hovering politely at her eye level.

She plucked it from the air and set it on the table, where it dented the wood.

The pressure lifted from the room all at once, and six executives sagged in their chairs like puppets whose strings had been cut. Foss made a sound that never became a word.

While they stared, Bastet drew a fold of banknotes from somewhere in her layered silks and fanned them open with one thumb. She laid the spread beside the metal ball with full royal ceremony. Enough to replace the screen several times over.

"For the damages," she informed the room.

Then she left without one word more, silk trailing, chin held high, the disgust coming off her in waves the whole way out. She padded across the cracked marble without a single glance back, and Aria rose and followed.

Nyx lingered long enough to close her laptop and tuck it under her arm.

"It appears we have a long day ahead."

"Looks like it," Aria smiled softly.

...

Nyx had prepared a reserve list, because Nyx always had a reserve list. The reserve list did not fare better.

Kessler & Wrenn lasted eleven minutes. "Arbitration in a private court your senior partner’s brother presides over," she read aloud, tapping the paragraph. "Why did you show us page one first? It wasted everyone’s morning."

The next one lasted eight minutes, most of which was the elevator. Bastet stopped dead in the fortieth-floor corridor, nose wrinkling at the executive advancing on them with his hand already extended, and turned to leave without breaking stride.

"If he cannot be bothered to wash before meeting us," she declared to the corridor at large, "he does not deserve to stand at Master’s side."

They never even sat down.

Six minutes went to the one after that, which was how long its CEO managed to keep his eyes above Aria’s collarbone. Nobody announced anything this time. The three of them simply stood in the same breath, choreography without rehearsal, and were gone before he finished his sentence.

And just like that, these three young and inexperienced women, whom the professional world had expected to be easy prey, began terrorizing the privileged class of America.

So much so that soon, they’d be wishing it was the Shadow Monarch who sat across from them.

While the trio was wreaking havoc in board rooms, Kaiden and co also began making their move!