Necessary Evil

by Donald Hanley

  Melissa won the scuffle for the front seat this time and Daraxandriel and Olivia managed to snag the middle seats, so Susie was consigned to the back. She accepted her fate with her usual grace and poise, namely with a lot of glares and grumbles. I handed Melissa her wand, which she held carefully between her thumb and forefinger to protect her nails, and then I had to help her with her seatbelt. Any contact with her anatomy was purely accidental but that didn’t stop her from smirking knowingly at me.

  “Keep an eye out for any imps,” I cautioned. “Can they follow us?” I asked Daraxandriel.

  “Certes,” she said with a nod. “They are swift and canny trackers.”

  “Great. Let’s hope we got them all, then.”

  I backed out into the alley, scanning the fence tops on either side, but there were no cats, real or otherwise, anywhere to be seen. I drove down the alley as fast as I dared and pulled out into the street with a sigh of relief. “Okay, we’ll run over to Melissa’s house to get her stuff and then figure out where we go from there.”

  Melissa nodded and then frowned. “Peter,” she said uneasily, “do you feel that?”

  “Feel what?”

  “I feel it too,” Susie said, sitting up.

  “As do I,” Daraxandriel concurred as her tail reared up slowly. “Something approaches.”

  “What?” Olivia asked nervously. “What is it?”

  “Evil,” Melissa breathed, looking around with wide eyes. She gasped and pointed straight ahead. “There!”

  The van’s tires squealed as I jammed both feet on the brake pedal, bringing us to a shuddering halt. “Where?” I leaned forward, staring through the windshield, but all I saw was a small dog pattering towards us down the middle of the street. I sat back as I tried to convince my heart to slow down to a normal pace.

  “That’s just Morris,” I said in disgust. I started forward again but Morris plopped his butt down on the pavement and dared me to run him over. I was sorely tempted but Mrs. Hannity would probably complain. I honked the horn but he just bared his teeth at me.

  “Oh, come on.” I put the van in park and opened my door. “Shoo! Move, you stupid animal!” His beady little eyes narrowed at me but he stayed where he was. I sighed in resignation and got out.

  “Peter,” Melissa told me anxiously, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “He’s all talk,” I assured her. “He’ll run off as soon as I get close. Go on!” I urged him, waving my hands at him. “Go home!” He growled at me, a surprisingly deep-throated sound from something the size of a loaf of bread.

  “Peter!” Melissa’s voice had a note of panic in it. She was pointing at Morris and the others looked shocked. I turned back and my heart lodged in my throat.

  Morris was growing, his body swelling quickly and changing shape. His fur faded into bristly patches scattered over dark scaly hide, a row of bony hooks erupted down his spine, and his tail lengthened into a razor-tipped whip. His eyes glowed deep red and fangs like steak knives lined his slavering maw. His claws scored the pavement as he crouched on all fours, already the size of a small horse, and then he leapt right at me with an ear-scraping roar. I ducked and covered my head, cringing as I waited to be torn to shreds.

  When nothing happened, I looked up cautiously. The creature hung in mid-air not five feet from me, its mouth gaping wide and its front paws grasping for me. It was absolutely motionless.

  “Peter, Peter, Peter, it’s like you’re not even trying.” I whirled around. Amy stood beside the van, shaking her head dolefully. “I gave you all those wonderful powers and this is the best you can do? It’s embarrassing.”

  I carefully backed away from the creature, eyeing it for any sign of movement. “What is that?”

  “It’s just a hellhound,” she sniffed dismissively.

  “So it’s not a demon lord?” Amy made a scoffing sound. I wasn’t sure whether I should be relieved or worried. “Is it dangerous?”

  She rolled her eyes. “It’s from Hell, Peter, of course it’s dangerous. I mean, look at it. It’s about to chew you up and spit out your bones. What are you going to do about it?”

  “Me? Why don’t you just –?” I snapped my fingers.

  “I explained all this before,” she sighed. “You have to defeat the demon lords – and other things,” she amended, jerking her thumb at the hellhound hovering over me, “– so Lilixandriel keeps sending them after you. If I do it, she’ll just give up.”

  “But that’s not fair!” I protested. “My life’s at risk but you get the reward!”

  “Yeah, sucks to be you,” she agreed. “All right, enough chit-chat. Stand here.” She hauled me over about five feet. She was surprisingly strong for someone on the other side of puberty. “It’s going to land here.” She scraped an X on the pavement with her shoe. “Get ready.”

  “For what?”

  Amy slumped over in an exaggerated display of despair. “Prepare a spell to destroy the hellhound,” she explained slowly, like she was speaking to someone with an IQ in the single digits. “Preferably something that will one-shot it. You don’t want to give a hellhound a second chance if you can avoid it. Ready?” She held her hand up with her fingers poised to snap.

  “Wait! How am I supposed to explain this to them?” Everyone in the van was frozen in place, gaping at the hellhound. “They don’t know I have my powers back.”

  “All right, fine, you can tell them,” she said with ill grace. “But you still can’t talk about me.” She reached over and zapped my lips again.

  “Ow! Stop doing that!” I touched my lips gingerly, checking for blood.

  She ignored me. “Okay, here we go, on three. One.”

  “Wait, I’m not ready!” I hastily brought up my targeting reticle, outlining the hellhound, as I flipped back to my damage spells.

  “Two.”

  Flame Lance? Lightning Strike? Dark Nova? Whatever I picked had to be potent enough to kill the hellhound while minimizing collateral damage. The X was awfully close to the van.

  “Three.” I squeezed the reticle down to a few inches across and tapped Lightning Strike as Amy snapped her fingers.

  The hellhound landed on the X with a thump that I felt through the soles of my shoes. An instant later, an actinic bolt of lightning slammed down out of the clear blue sky and incinerated it. I staggered back, blinded, deafened, and gagging as the odor of charred, rotting meat wafted around me.

  “Peter!” Melissa’s voice sounded like it was coming from a mile away. I blinked away the spots and the tears and saw her running around the van, gaping at the roasted hellhound corpse lying in the middle of the street. “Oh my God, what was that?”

  “How did you do that?” Susie demanded, pushing her way through Olivia, who was a ghost again. “You don’t have any magic!”

  “This is a hellhound,” Daraxandriel said, looking puzzled. “Whyfor would Lilixandriel dispatch it against thee?”

  I edged closer to the body, cautiously tapping its outstretched paw with my toe to make sure it was actually dead, although it was hard to imagine how it could possibly have survived. I’d seen armadillos hit by 18-wheelers that were in better shape. “Maybe she couldn’t convince any demon lords to join the cause.”

  “Yet this avails her not,” Daraxandriel argued. “A hellhound is but a three upon the waif’s measure.” She held her hand at mid-thigh. “It poses but a minor threat to thee.”

  “Well, maybe it was handy.” I looked around anxiously, surprised that none of the neighbors came out to see what all the noise was. “We need to get rid of this before anyone sees it.”

  “But how did you kill it, Peter?” Susie persisted. “I’m supposed to be hunting demons, not you!”

  “My powers came back,” my mouth said. “I guess the shock of being attacked triggered them or something.”

  “Such should not be possible,” Daraxandriel insisted, shaking her head. “The terms of thy contract were met and thy powers were withdrawn. Unless thou hast swo
rn thy soul to another?” she asked suspiciously.

  “No, I haven’t,” I assured her. Amy’s one-sided deal didn’t count, hopefully. At least she wasn’t after my soul. “Come on, let’s sort this out later.” I flipped through my spells again. Fireball would cremate the remains but someone would probably call the fire department. Instead, I pulled up my support set.

  Most support spells, like Heal or Rush, provide some boost or benefit to the target. Others do the opposite. Wither drains the life energy of an enemy, weakening and eventually killing them. Decay does the same sort of thing for inanimate objects like weapons and armor, making them break down and lose their effectiveness, but it works pretty well on corpses too. I targeted the hellhound’s body and tapped the icon. The others stepped back in surprise as the hellhound’s corporeal remains abruptly slumped into dust. A brief burst of Whirlwind scattered them across the road in a thin layer of ash, leaving behind only a blackened scorch mark on top of Amy’s X.

  “Oh my God, Peter!” Melissa exclaimed. “You’re a wizard!”

  “Warlock,” Susie corrected her, glowering at me.

  “Enchanter,” I told them. “Come on, we need to get out of here.”

  I herded them back into the van and we sped off, alert for any more cats and hellhounds. I wondered if that thing just disguised itself as Morris to get close to us or somehow took over Morris’ body. Mrs. Hannity was going to be upset if Morris didn’t come home tonight but we had bigger problems at the moment than a missing ill-tempered chihuahua.

  “Peter,” Melissa asked anxiously, “what happened back there? One moment you’re about to get eaten by a monster and the next moment, boom! The wrath of Zeus or something.”

  “Lightning Strike, actually,” I shrugged.

  “Like in Lorecraft?”

  “Exactly like that. My powers are a copy of Coronox’s, remember. Come to think of it,” I suddenly realized, “it’s my current build.” I took my left hand off the wheel to flip through the sets. “I didn’t have Greater Reveal or Power Surge when I fought Dr. Bellowes. I went up a couple of levels since then.”

  “So if you swap out your spells in the game, do your powers change too?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to try that when we get the chance.” I had access to about fifty different spells but I could only equip thirty-six of them at a time.

  “It’s not fair,” Susie complained from the back seat. “I had to train and study and meditate and do boring stuff like that. You get kick-ass powers by getting attacked by a hellhound.”

  “That’s not what happened.”

  “Maybe I should play your stupid game too,” she groused.

  “Can I play too?” Olivia asked hopefully. “I’d like to have magic powers.”

  “That’s not what happened!”

  “You just said that, Peter,” Melissa told me, eyeing me uneasily.

  “I was talking to Olivia.”

  “Oh. Is she okay?” She glanced back at Olivia’s shift lying crumpled on her seat.

  “She’s fine. Are you going to join us back in the land of the living, Olivia?” I asked her.

  “Peter! I don’t have anywhere to change!”

  “We can wait until we get to Melissa’s,” I assured her, “unless we pass a phone booth on the way.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s a joke,” I sighed. “Superman used to change into his outfit in a phone booth.”

  “What’s a phone booth?”

  “Seriously? You’ve never seen a phone booth?” Olivia shrugged helplessly. “Kids these days,” I muttered.

  “I am concerned, Peter Simon Collins,” Daraxandriel interjected. “All is not as it seems.”

  Does she suspect I’m not telling the truth about what happened to me? I wondered hopefully. Maybe she can help me break Amy’s gag order. I wonder if she knows who Amy really is. I couldn’t ask her that, though, so all I said was, “What do you mean?”

  “I did not bind thy powers to Lorecraft when I granted them to thee. Even an they somehow remained latent within thee after thy defeat of Parathraxas, they should not have altered twixt then and now. Summat else has changed thee.” She fixed me with another suspicious glare. “Art thou certain thou has not consigned thy soul to another?”

  “I haven’t, I swear,” I told her, “unless Mrs. Burns stuck a contract into the middle of all that paperwork I went through yesterday at the police department. Even if she did, it still wouldn’t count because I didn’t sign them in blood.”

  Daraxandriel looked unconvinced. “Further,” she went on, “Lilixandriel would not trouble herself to summon a hellhound without purpose. She meant to test thee and us, away from the protection of Dame Kendricks and Sir Prescott, that she might know our strengths and plan accordingly.”

  “We killed it,” I argued. “How’s it supposed to tell her what happened?” She just cocked an eyebrow at me. “Lilith was there,” I realized in dismay. “She saw me kill it.” I hadn’t noticed her watching but I was a bit distracted at the time. I wondered if Amy sensed her presence. Probably, I thought sourly. Too bad she couldn’t be bothered to mention it to me.

  Daraxandriel nodded. “She did not expect it to succeed. But for thy foolhardy attempt to dispel it, I would have defeated it on thy behalf. Yet she now knows thou hast magic at thy command and the next opponent she dispatches will be all the more potent.”

  “Great. That’s just what I needed to hear.”

  “It is not to Lilixandriel’s advantage to extend our conflict needlessly,” she said. “She will seek the strongest champion she can tempt to her cause, that her victory over thee might be swift.”

  Daraxandriel probably meant that to be reassuring, although it came across as pretty much the exact opposite. The problem was, Amy wanted this whole thing to drag out for as long as possible. Between Lilixandriel escalating the threats she sent after us and Amy helping us beat them, we’d be facing a real honest-to-goodness Armageddon in fairly short order. We needed to stop Lilixandriel before anyone got hurt but I had absolutely no idea how to go about doing that.

  Maybe Agent Prescott and his Occult Investigations team have something up their sleeves, I wondered hopefully. We just need to stay out of trouble until tomorrow. How hard can that be? I didn’t bother asking that out loud. I already knew the answer.

  9

  Traditionally, the oldest child helps take care of the younger children, making sure they don’t poke forks into electrical outlets, wander off in the mall, or waste their allowances on inferior game sequels. I never really had to do that with Susie, mostly because she was never interested in doing anything. Even when she took up witchcraft a year or two ago, she focused mostly on herbs and crystals, which were basically harmless activities other than that one notable exception with the geode last month.

  I’ve never had people rely on me before. Sure, Mom and Dad ask me to run errands all the time and my boss at the DQ depended on me to keep the store clean and stocked, but those were all trivial tasks. No one’s life was in danger if I messed up. Before Daraxandriel arrived, the hardest decision I had to make was which elective to take last semester.

  How did I end up being responsible for the health and well-being of four girls? Daraxandriel is older than me by several centuries. Susie knows more about magic than I ever will. Melissa is smarter than the rest of us put together. Olivia is – well, never mind her. Is it just because I’m the only guy in the group? I’m perfectly willing to let a woman take the lead, especially if it means I won’t get blamed for whatever happens.

  “Are you sure he’s here?” I asked doubtfully. All of the windows in Melissa’s house were dark.

  “His bedroom and study are in the back,” she explained. She gingerly pressed the access code with the pad of her forefinger, keeping her other fingers well out of the way. The latch clicked and she bumped the door open with her hip. “Daddy!” she called. “I’m home!”

  We followed her into the entrance hall, gawking like t
ourists. I’d been here twice before but I spent most of that time up in Melissa’s bedroom keeping her from doing something she’d regret later. The lights were off but enough of sunlight leaked in from outside to reveal wealth incarnate, from the tiled floor to the vaulted ceiling to the wrought-iron stairs leading up to the second floor. The only way I’d ever be able to afford a place like this would be to win the lottery. Twice.

  “I want to live here,” Susie declared. “Can I have your room after you leave?”

  “Shh,” Melissa admonished her. “I just need to tell Daddy I’m heading out again and then I’ll pack a bag. Wait here and don’t touch anything.” Daraxandriel’s tail pulled back from the antique vase it was inspecting.

  “What about your stuff?” I held up the plastic bag holding her damp work clothes and her purse.

  “Hang on to that,” she instructed, pointing at the purse. “Put the rest in the kitchen.” She gestured down the hall. “I’ll toss it in the laundry room before we go. Daddy?”

  She climbed the steps as I continued on towards the back of the house, glancing curiously down the hallways I passed. The closed doors offered no hints as to what lay beyond.

  The kitchen opened up like a cavern at the end of a long tunnel. It was easily twice the size of ours, with enough counter space and appliances to feed a small army. It was also spotlessly clean and I wondered whether Melissa and her father took care of that themselves or had a service come in every week.

  I set Melissa’s bag and purse on the counter as the others trailed in after me. Susie started peeking in all the cabinets until I told her to stop, while Daraxandriel surveyed the back yard and pool through the windows. Olivia stood in the middle of the room and looked around uneasily with her hands clasped tightly together, as if she was afraid of touching anything. Not that she could, since she was still a ghost.