For A Few Demons More. Kim Harrison
Was she deaf? Maybe she hadn’t yet come in from her run with Jenks. She’d said they’d be late.
As if bothered by the cooperation, my attacker gripped harder, and I collapsed to the floor. My eyes were open, and the red sheet of my hair stood between me and the end of the dusky hallway. It had won. Whatever it was, it had won, and I panicked as I found myself sitting up with an eerie slowness. The thick scent of burnt amber hung in my nose, rising from my skin.
No! I cried in my thoughts—but I couldn’t even speak. I wanted to scream, but my possessor made me take a slow, sedate breath instead. “Malum,” I heard myself curse, my voice carrying an odd accent and a sophisticated lilt that had never been mine.
That was the last penny in the jar. Fear shifted to anger. I didn’t know who was in here with me, but whoever it was, was going to get out. Right now. Making me speak in tongues was just rude.
Falling into my thoughts, I felt the barest brush of someone else’s confusion. Fine. I could build on that. Before the intruder could figure out what I was doing, I tapped the ley line out back in the graveyard. Stark, foreign surprise filled me, and while my assailant struggled to break me from the line, I formed a protection circle in my thoughts.
Practice makes perfect, I thought smugly, then braced myself. This was going to hurt like hell.
I opened my thoughts to the ley line with an abandon I’d never dared before. And it came. Magic roared in. It overflowed my chi and poured into my body, burning my synapses and neurons. Tulpa, I thought in agony, the word opening the mental channels to spindle the energy. The rush would have killed me if I hadn’t already burned a trail of nerves from my chi to my mind. Groaning, I felt the power sear anew as it raced to the protection circle in my thoughts, expanding it like a balloon. It was how I spindled ley line energy to use later, but at this rate it was like diving into a vat of molten metal.
An internal yelp of pain resounded in me, and with a mental push that I mirrored with my hands, I shoved away from myself.
A snap reverberated through me, and I was free of the unknown presence. From the church’s belfry above came the sound of the bell tolling—an echo of my actions.
Something rolled and bumped down the corridor to crash into the wall at the end of the hall. I gasped and pulled my head up, then groaned in pain. Moving hurt. I held too much ley line power. It felt as if it had settled in my muscles, and using them squeezed the energy out.
“Ow,” I panted, very aware that something at the end of the hall was standing up. But at least now it wasn’t in my head. My heart beat, and that hurt, too. Oh God, I’d never held this much power before. And I stank. I reeked of burnt amber. What the Turn was going on?
With a pained determination, I squeezed the protection circle in my mind until the energy slipped back through my chi and into the ley line. It hurt almost as much as taking it in. But when I unspindled the ever-after from my thoughts to leave only that which my chi could hold, I looked up past the snarls of my hair, panting.
Oh, God. It was Newt.
“What are you doing here?” I said, feeling coated in ever-after slime.
The powerful demon looked confused, but I was still too out of things to appreciate its shocked expression: either a smooth-faced adolescent boy or a strong-featured female. Slender of build, it stood barefoot in my hallway between the kitchen and the living room. Squinting, I looked again—yeah, the demon was standing this time, not floating, its long, bony feet definitely pressing the floorboards—and I wondered how Newt had managed to attack me when I was on hallowed ground. The addition to the church, where it stood now, wasn’t sanctified, though, and it looked bewildered, wearing a dark red robe that looked somewhere between a kimono and what Lawrence of Arabia might wear on his day off.
There was a soft blurring of black ley line energy, and a slender obsidian staff as tall as I was melted into existence in Newt’s grasp, completing the vision I remembered from the time I had been trapped in the ever-after and had had to buy a trip home from Newt. The demon’s eyes were entirely black—even what should be the whites—but they were more alive than any I’d ever seen as they stared at me unblinking down the twenty feet that separated us—twenty tiny feet and a swath of hallowed ground. At least I hoped it was still hallowed ground.
“How did you learn how to do that?” it said, and I stiffened at the odd accent, the vowels that seemed to insert themselves into the folds of my brain.
“Al,” I whispered, and the demon’s almost-nonexistent eyebrows rose. Shoulder against the wall, I never took my eyes from it as I slid upward to stand. This was not the way I wanted to start my day. God help me, I’d only been asleep for an hour by the looks of the light.
“What’s the matter with you? You can’t just show up!” I exclaimed, trying to burn off some adrenaline as I stood in the hallway still in the skimpy shirt and shorts I wore to bed. “No one summoned you! And how could you stand on hallowed ground? Demons can’t stand on sacred ground. It’s in every book.”
“I do what I want.” Newt peered into the living room, poking the staff over the threshold as if looking for traps. “And assumptions like that will kill you,” the demon added, adjusting the strand of black gold that glinted dully against the midnight red of its robe. “I wasn’t standing on hallowed ground—you were. And Minias … Minias said I wrote most of those books, so who knows how right they are?”
Its smooth features melted into annoyance, at itself, not me. “Sometimes I don’t remember the past right,” Newt said, its voice distant. “Or maybe they simply change it and don’t tell me.”
My face went cold in the predawn chill. Newt was insane. I had an insane demon standing in my hallway and roommates coming home in about twenty minutes. How could something this powerful survive being this unbalanced? But unbalanced seldom equated with stupid, though powerful and unbalanced did. And clever. And ruthless. Demonic.
“What do you want?” I asked, wondering how long until the sun would rise.
With a troubled look, Newt exhaled. “I don’t remember,” it finally said. “But you have something of mine. I want it back.”
While unknown emotions flitted through and Newt’s thoughts cataloged themselves, I squinted down the shadowy hallway, trying to decide if it was male or female. Demons could look like anything they wanted to. Right now Newt had pale eyebrows and a light, absolutely even skin tone. I’d say it was feminine, but the jaw was strong and those bare feet were too bony to be pretty. Nail polish would look wrong on them.
It was wearing the same hat as before—round, with straight sides and a flat top made from a scrumptiously rich red fabric and gold braiding. The short, nondescript hair falling to just below the ear gave no clue to gender. The time I’d questioned what sex he or she was, Newt had asked me if it made a difference. And watching Newt struggle to place a thought, I had a feeling it wasn’t that the demon didn’t think it was important but that Newt didn’t remember what parts he or she had been born with. Maybe Minias did. Whoever Minias was.
“Newt,” I said, hoping my shaking voice wasn’t too obvious, “I demand you leave. Go directly to the ever-after from this place, and don’t return to bother me again.”
It was a good banishment—apart from my not having put it in a circle first—and Newt raised one eyebrow at me, its puzzlement set aside with an ease that spoke of much practice. “That’s not my summoning name.”
The demon jerked into motion. I shrank back to invoke a circle—paltry though it would be, undrawn and unscribed—but Newt stepped into the living room, the hem of its robe the last thing I saw slipping around the doorframe. From out of sight came the sound of nails being pulled from wood. There was a sharp crack of splintering paneling, and Newt swore colorfully in Latin.
Jenks’s cat Rex padded past me, curiosity doing its best to fulfill its promise. I lunged after the stupid animal, but she didn’t like me and so skittered away. The caramel-colored kitten paused at the threshold with her