by A. L. Tyler
Gates didn’t look impressed. “Annie… just go.”
Shaking my head, I got out of the car and went up to the house, still an anxious ball of nerves. I kept to the side, with my heart nearly pounding out of my chest, and ducked next to a window, closing my eyes and ramping myself up for what I was about to do. What if someone was in there? What if they just happened to be looking right at that moment, and they caught me peering in? How was I going to explain that to my dad or Lyssa?
The Wilmot residence looked like a normal place. They had a large sectional couch that wrapped around a living space and an entertainment center; a large flatscreen television was attached to the wall.
I ducked down beneath the window when I saw two people walk into the room. Creeping to another window, I peeked up just a little this time. Jennifer, and her constant companion Carina, were laughing together in the kitchen at the far end of the living space.
They were wearing their white and blue school pride track clothes, but I couldn’t tell if they had been out running or not. Jennifer said something over her shoulder as she perused the pantry, emerging with a jar of peanut butter and then going to the refrigerator to get a loaf of bread.
And then Charlie walked out from a hallway. He stood directly between the two teen girls, looked over, and smiled at me.
My heart nearly leapt into my throat.
I went to stand up, to scream and bang on the window, but my legs and arms wouldn’t move. I couldn’t talk. I was happy I could still breathe, and Charlie stood there, smiling as he shook a finger.
I had told him to do this. We had a deal, and there was no stopping it. So he was stopping me.
He turned and walked into the kitchen as I silently begged any higher being that would hear me to make Jennifer or Carina turn around and see him. Carina finally looked up from her phone, shaking out her brown hair, but she didn’t say anything. Charlie was circling her, exploring the kitchen in detail. She sat on a bar stool at the island, and she didn’t seem to know that he was even there.
They can’t see him. He really is a demon, and they can’t see him.
Charlie was opening drawers and pawing through the contents, and Jennifer went on, talking about this and that—whatever popular girls talked about.
He picked up a knife. I closed my eyes, gasping in desperation as I tried to break his spell, but nothing happened. When I opened my eyes again, he had set the knife down, shaking his head as he looked instead at the massive metal structure that hung over the kitchen island. There were a dozen heavy pots and pans hanging from it. He climbed up to inspect the chain that suspended it just as Jennifer leaned on the island beneath it to reach for a banana.
Charlie looked at me, once again shaking his head, and jumped down.
He went on to pick up the power cord from the toaster, wrapping it around his hands.
I screamed silently, trapped in my own mind. She didn’t deserve this, even if she was a bully. No! Stop! Leave them alone!
Displeased with the short length of cord, Charlie frowned, sighing. He turned back to look at me, and then looked at Jennifer. She had just taken a bite of her peanut butter and banana sandwich, and laughed through it as Carina showed her a picture on her phone.
With a satisfied grin, Charlie raised one hand, looked at me, and snapped his fingers.
My heart stood still.
Jennifer kept chewing…chewing…chewing…and she swallowed.
She set the sandwich down with a strange look on her face, and then gasped for air and stumbled backward. Carina looked at her, bewildered, and then got up and rushed to help just as Jennifer fell to the floor scratching at her throat. She went back to her phone, screaming as she dialed. A man in jeans and a light button-down shirt came running into the room—it must have been her dad.
“We’d better get going,” Charlie whispered in my ear.
I jumped away in surprise. He was standing right next to me, and I was speechless. His spell to keep me still finally broken, I didn’t know what to do with my newfound freedom. Whatever he had done to her, I couldn’t help Jennifer now.
“The ambulance will be here soon,” he said idly, taking me by the arm and leading me back to my car. I could see Gates, still in the front passenger seat looking like a doe in the headlights as she watched Charlie forcefully escort me across the Wilmot’s lawn.
The second he shoved me back in, taking the driver’s seat for himself, my voice returned.
“I told you not to kill anyone!”
“What?!” Gates yelled. “What happened?”
“He made her choke on her sandwich.” I nearly choked on the words myself, and they left a bad taste in my mouth. This was all my fault.
Charlie scoffed as he started the car—without the keys, because they were still in my hand—and pulled the car out onto the street. “I didn’t make her choke.”
“I saw—”
“I gave her a peanut allergy.”
Gates’ jaw fell open. Neither of us spoke as Charlie continued to drive; his dark brown eyes were so serene, it was hard to reconcile the peaceful chauffeur in my car with the attempted murder I had just witnessed.
“That… is so much worse,” I finally said quietly.
Charlie waved me off. “You told me not to kill anyone, and I didn’t. She’ll have a hard time meddling in your affairs while she’s in a coma.”
Momentarily at a loss for words, Gates finally sat up, making herself look taller. “You have to undo it.”
“Oh, I don’t have to do anything,” Charlie said calmly. He pulled the car over next to a little park. It was empty, and the happy yellow swing set gave a sharp contrast to the subject of conversation.
“Annie, tell him he has to…” Gates looked back at me. “You summoned him, so he has to do what you tell him to.”
“She can’t make me,” Charlie supplied quickly. “Because you did it wrong. All it takes is a wish to summon a demon into your life, but it takes considerably more magic to bind one to your will, and it appears you either haven’t got the knowledge or the talent. Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to dabble in these things?”
He adjusted the rearview mirror to look at my miserable face.
“I was told these things were bull crap,” I muttered despondently.
“Touché.” With an appreciative nod, Charlie leaned back in his seat. “I cut you a break because you gave me my freedom, but the favor is done now. You will tell me where Kendra Hawthorn is hiding, or else suffer the consequences. She availed herself of my services once, and her tab has come due.”
Chapter 4
I looked at Gates. Gates looked back at me. Neither of us seemed to know where to start.
“She’s dead,” I said slowly, hoping that this time he would understand. “I saw her in the casket myself.”
“Kendra Hawthorn owed me my freedom, and she put up her soul as collateral,” Charlie said matter-of-factly. “Then she double-crossed me, banished me, and I have no soul of Kendra, so wherever she is, she is alive. Tell me where she is.”
“I don’t know,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “In her grave, last I knew.”
Charlie drummed the steering wheel in agitation.
“Don’t you know?” Gates accused. “You know how to drive. You knew where to find Jennifer… how do you know all this stuff and you don’t know where Kendra is?”
“It’s a spell,” he said lightly, raising on hand to his mouth in contemplation. “She’s hidden all information about herself from my view. I’m as worthless as a human on that front.”
Gates nodded sarcastically. “Worthless. Nice.”
Without moving any other part of his body, Charlie raised his hand and snapped. Where Gates had been, a sleek black cat sat. Then it leapt up in alarm, yowling, and flew into the trunk of the SUV, cowering in a corner. With eyes as big as saucers, I gasped.
“Change her back!”
“When you tell me where Kendra is,” he said. “That’s the deal. Bring me you
r aunt, and I’ll give you your friend back. I don’t see why, though… she’s more useful this way. To me, and to you. At least cats eat mice. I’ll even throw in your enemy, if you’re so inclined. Your aunt in exchange for two curses lifted. That’s a bargain.”
“That’s blackmail!” I accused.
“That’s coercion,” Charlie corrected. “Blackmail is when I tell you to give me Kendra, because I believe you know where she is, or I’ll find this Vince fellow and tell him how pathetic you really are. Resorting to the occult for your petty problems…”
I shook my head, nearly rattling my brain in the process. “I don’t know where she is!”
Gates hissed, and Charlie threatened to give her incurable fleas if she didn’t behave herself.
“We’re done here,” he said. “You know how to reach me.”
And he disappeared into the ether. Gates climbed back into the back seat next to me as an ambulance and a fire truck zoomed into the neighborhood to rescue Jennifer Wilmot. I didn’t want to believe everything that had just happened.
But my best friend, now sitting beside me and transformed into a cat, made it hard to deny.
~~~~~~~~~
Not knowing what to do, I went home and snuck Gates into my room, giving her a saucer of water and some deli sandwich meat as a snack. She was a cat, but at least she still appeared to have the brain of a human, and she knew to hide if anyone came in.
Then I went to research my problem in the only way I knew how.
The internet.
I started with a search on demons, and came up with so many hokey sites that didn’t have a clue that I had to refine my search to real life demon encounters. That led to a tangent on the existence of angels, which led me to some nutter’s webpage on the subspecies of the abominable children of angels and men and how they still walked among us.
I closed the browser, and went back to the stack of books my aunt, whose virtuous name had now been called into question, had left behind, hidden in a wall. I knew the answer wasn’t there.
The answer was in the leather grimoire. That’s why Charlie had taken it.
Gates didn’t seem impressed with my progress, and she kept coming over to head-butt me back into research. I couldn’t blame her; if I had been the one stuck as a cat…
The thought alone made me want to panic, because if I didn’t do something soon, I was going to have to lie about where Gates was. Her mother was going to flip out when she didn’t come home that night, and the next. Tomorrow was a school night, after all.
If I didn’t fix this by tomorrow night…
I didn’t want to think about it. Jennifer was in the hospital by now, and Gates would be declared a missing person. And it wasn’t like I could just go to my dad, or anyone else, and say a demon did it.
It sounded insane. It was insane. And I would be declared insane if I even tried to explain.
I turned back to my computer to try a different approach. Gates came to sit next to me, giving a low growl as she watched me type the words out.
“We have to do something,” I said, sounding much calmer than I felt. “We’re going to try stuff until something works.”
I must have read half the internet contents on Wicca, modern demonology, and magical spells that night. I picked up a few with general consistency on how to ward off demons, and a few more on demonic banishment. I found a handful that were supposed to make animals talk, and a few more on how to find lost people or things.
The phone call came just after ten, and my dad poked his head in, holding the phone into his shoulder as he asked if I had seen or spoken to Gates recently.
Gates, of course, was curled under my desk, safely out of site and not making a sound. We had already discussed it, or rather, I had discussed it out loud with myself. My story was bulletproof.
“No,” I said, trying my best to look bewildered. “She came to see me after work today, and then we went to do homework in the park. I left her there because I needed an internet connection to do some research for my book report.”
“You left her in the park?” my dad asked. “Which one?”
“The one by the preschool,” I said. “It’s only, like, five blocks from her house. She told me she walks it all the time.”
My dad pursed his lips and tilted his head.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Gates didn’t come home,” he said. “Did she say if she was going anywhere?”
I pretended to think for a minute, sitting back in my chair and sighing. “She might have gone over to see Dennis, because he was talking about selling his car to her, but I don’t think it was really serious. Or maybe she went to the coffee place, or that place over on tenth that sells used CDs and books. I bet that’s where she is—there’s a guy that works there that she likes to flirt with—”
I hardly contained the hiss of pain that tried to escape my lips as Gates sank her tiny, needle-like teeth into my ankle. I gave my father a weak smile as he lifted the phone back to his mouth and started to talk again.
“Hi, Shelby?” He turned away and closed my door, his voice fading down the hallway. “She hasn’t seen her, but she thinks she went to the…”
I ducked down beneath my desk, giving Gates a glare as she licked a paw, and I swear, lifted a single padded claw to flip me the bird.
“I had to make it sound real!” I insisted. “Or else they’re going to think I had something to do with it! You left your car in front of the greenhouse!”
Gates’ eyes narrowed as she tilted her head.
“Yeah, I know I had something to do with it…” I said defensively. “But we wouldn’t be in this situation now if you hadn’t insisted on magic as a therapy for bullying.”
She licked up that middle digit again, but seemed to accept my logic, and left me more or less alone for the rest of the night. I wrote down everything I could find in the back of my chemistry notebook.
Around midnight, my dad stuck his head in to check on me and remind me not to stay up too late. I said I wouldn’t—I was just on a roll with my English paper. He gave me a gentle, if somewhat disingenuous smile, and I went back to the glowing screen in front of me.
Three hours later, when my vision had started to warp and my eyes felt like tiny fuzzy tennis balls about to fall from their sockets and shrivel up, I found Gates curled into a tight ball on a pair of my discarded jeans, and went to bed.
I was too tired to even change my clothes. I put a sweater over Gates’ sleeping body, pulled back my comforter, and collapsed into sleep. In three hours, I was going to have to get up and pretend I didn’t know anything about my missing friend.
~~~~~~~~~
As it turned out, Sunday was easy, because my dad had to pack and then leave for a week-long business trip to China. I spent the day frantically trying to find a way to fix what I had done and waiting for Charlie to show up again. He didn’t, and anxiety nearly drove me insane.
I didn’t have much pretending to do at school the next day, either.
As I sucked down my third mocha frappacino, I listened to yet another grievous recounting of how a freak accident had put Jennifer Wilmot in the hospital. Popular kids got all the press, even when it was hospitalization vs. missing child.
Some people were saying that she had been poisoned, and that they had always known Carina was jealous of her. Some people said that she had choked on a pretzel, like the president, and it had somehow ripped her esophagus wide open. One kid in the lunch room was even telling, in great detail and with lots of hand gestures, how she had driven her car into the outdoor swimming pool at the local rec center, leading to a dramatic water rescue that had nearly come too late.
I sat listening and nodding, and trying not to correct anyone that it was a peanut allergy. No one would believe that a peanut allergy could put a person in a coma, anyway. Maybe they just didn’t want to believe, because it was pretty terrifying to think about.
Up until a few days before, I would have called it a frea
k accident, too. But that was before I had known that demons were so easy to summon, and that they could snap their fingers and give anyone a lethal nut allergy just because they felt like it. They could snap their fingers and turn people into cats. And God knew what else they were capable of.
Lifting those two curses, at least, I tried to remind myself. In the daylight hours, and hopped up on too much caffeine, I had come to realize that I was going to have to deal with Charlie if I ever wanted to right the wrongs I had caused. Spells for reversing peanut allergies and curing cathood were in short supply, even on the internet. And even if any of the banishment spells I had looked up worked, then Gates would still be a cat and Jennifer would still be hospitalized.
I needed to give Charlie what he wanted, and that was my aunt Kendra. My dead-to-my-knowledge, except apparently not, aunt Kendra.
Gates was still hanging out in my bedroom at home, hopefully pawing through some books or else ridding the place of spiders and mice. I regrouped in the library during my free period and nearly got kicked out by the ultra-conservative librarian for looking up “too much devil worship stuff.”
But I got what I was looking for, and I hoped it was going to work.
That afternoon I took my time as I watered all the plants for Lyssa and took stock of exactly which herbs and spices the greenhouse had in stock. I was going to need them later, and Lyssa didn’t need to know why.
She gave me a funny look as I passed the caladium for the fourth time, but I brushed her off and said I was worried about Gates.
That much, at least, was true.
“Hey,” I said, suddenly turning back to face her. “How do you burn sage? Do you put it in a dish like those scented wax things?”
Lyssa cocked her head and frowned, setting down the plastic watering can she had been using to hydrate the hanging baskets. “Well, no… I assume you would dry it before burning it, like a normal person. Why, what are you burning sage for?”
“Right,” I said, feeling my cheeks color. Of course the spell had meant dried sage. The lack of sleep was finally getting to me. “I just… it’s for Gates, that’s all.”
