Demoneater

by Royce Buckingham

  Richie and Sandy arrived in the foyer to find Lilli sitting upright with Zoot at her side.

  “What happened?” Lilli groaned.

  Sandy knelt, staring into Lilli’s green eyes. “Her pupils are different sizes and unfocused. I think she’s got a concussion.”

  “Let’s drag her butt out of here,” Richie said, grabbing Lilli under the arms. “Nik, c’mon. Help me.”

  Sandy glanced up at the dented plaster where Lilli had hit and stopped him. “She could have broken bones,” she warned. “We shouldn’t move her.”

  “Newsflash, honey,” Richie snapped, “she shouldn’t stay here either. That thing upstairs . . .”

  Richie froze. The iron door across the foyer had been ripped from its hinges. It hung loose.

  “We have to go . . . now!” he whispered to Sandy. He directed her attention to the door. “The Beast,” he said, and he didn’t have to explain.

  Sandy grabbed Lilli roughly by the scruff of the neck and helped Richie and Nik yank her across the foyer and out the front door. They wrestled Lilli’s limp form to the bottom of the front steps just as the attic window burst out.

  Craaash!

  “Look!” Sandy gasped.

  Demons streamed from the broken window, flying, crawling, and cascading down around them.

  “Is Nat dead?” she cried, dodging a falling white blob of sulfurous-smelling goo, which splattered across the lawn and immediately ran into the ground and disappeared.

  “No,” Richie said. “He’s setting them free.”

  Demons flew and fell. Some lived. Some died. Most blended quickly with their surroundings and vanished from Sandy’s sight. It was hard for the animated furniture to hide, though, so it simply sat on the lawn camouflaging itself as furniture.

  Sandy and Richie instinctively tried to save the first few they saw. Sandy spread her jacket like a net to catch one of the wriggly little dust demons, which immediately shot up her nose to hide and sent her into a sneezing fit. Richie dove to save a salacious drool beast that tended to prey on dogs. But other fragile creatures shattered on the walk or bent into painful contortions on the lawn. A dining room chair broke a leg and squeaked in pain so loudly that Richie wondered if he should put it out of its misery—legs were as important to a chair as they were to a racehorse; once a leg was broken, the chair was never the same. Some of the demons simply couldn’t be handled by Sandy or Richie. When a set of kitchen knives with a tendency to cut its owner’s fingers came raining down, there was nothing to do but run, and the fact that they stabbed the grass in a pattern that spelled out N-A-T was a bit disturbing.

  Richie looked up at the window as more demons poured out. It was possible that Sandy was right, he thought. Nat could already be dead.

  As they dodged to and fro, Nik propped Lilli up against the VW Bug, and Zoot covered her again with his own body, morphing his pink self to look like part of the pink car and hide her from whatever craziness might spill from the huge broken window at the top of the house.

  When the Demoneater squeezed the last of its wormy self into the attic, Nat backed up, shooing a few more painfully slow demons out the window.

  “Move it! Move it!” he urged.

  The Demoneater writhed into the room like a fat snake, teetering on its distended belly, too bloated for its arms and legs to support it now. They hung from its segmented body like skinny sticks poked into a round snowman and didn’t even reach the floor.

  “You!” Nat yelled at the coat rack he’d used to break the window. “You’re the last. Go!” Nat watched sadly as it tumbled out. The rest of the demons were not going to make it.

  The curtains billowed out into the night as the the Demoneater coiled its elongated body beneath it across the room. Suddenly, it bellowed and exploded toward Nat like a sidewinder whipping across the desert sands. It charged through the remaining demons—the slow, the weak, and others that Nat didn’t have time to save—scooping them into its gaping maw.

  Nat leaped to the window and looked down. He saw, to his dismay, the shattered corpses of all the demons that hadn’t survived the thirty-foot fall. There was no way down for him either. Demonkeepers were not magicians—he’d always reminded Richie that. He was just a normal human being who could see the chaos as it truly existed among humans.

  “I can’t fly,” he told himself as the curtains whipped back and forth, panicked. They looked as eager to escape as he was.

  “Oh my gosh!” he gasped. He grabbed the curtain rod, wrenched it free, shoved it through the window, and leaped out after it.

  CHAPTER 27

  FLIGHT OR FIGHT

  Sandy and Richie heard the Demoneater’s roar and looked up. The massive creature was in the attic. The demons had stopped coming. The last was a coat rack that landed and wrestled briefly with Richie, trying to take his jacket. They held out little hope that anything lived up there now.

  A low growl from the front porch turned Richie’s head. His heart sank. A familiar nightmare loomed in the doorway—a slathering six-armed creature with black lips and long, curved fangs. The Demoneater’s rampage through the house had unhinged the basement door and released the Beast.

  “Oh no,” Richie moaned.

  The slobbering street demon fed primarily upon lost children, something Richie had been before Nat had taken him in. The Beast, however, was not above snacking on kids outside of its preferred diet who wandered into its path. Richie’s primary concern was for Lilli—her wandering ways put her squarely on its target menu. When he glanced over his shoulder and did not see her anywhere, he was relieved. He understood, however, that his own doom was near at hand as the Beast thumped down the porch steps at full strength and hungry, since it hadn’t eaten yet that morning. Richie glanced about. He didn’t have Nat to bail him out this time. He held up the snake staff but had no confidence that it would save him. He didn’t really even know how to use it. He was going to die a messy death, he decided, the same way his friends Gus and Sneakers had perished before Nat had captured the Beast.

  “Sandy, you have to run,” he urged. “Nat and I couldn’t handle it—the house, the demons, the Demoneater, all the responsibility. We’re just a couple of stupid kids in over our heads, but you’re not. You’re smart, and smart girls leave when bad boys get into trouble.”

  Sandy stepped up next to him, holding the chaotic sword before her. “You obviously don’t know anything about smart girls,” she said, “because…no, they don’t.”

  Richie nodded, relieved and saddened at the same time. Sandy had no business dying with him, but at least he would not die alone.

  “Try to cut off its left two arms with the first blow and the other two with your backswing!” he yelled as the Beast started toward them, flinging drool left and right from its thick head, which swung between its powerful shoulders.

  Sandy looked at Richie like he was crazy and then turned to face the furry mass of claws and fangs that came hurtling down from the porch at them. But she was not a Demonkeeper, and as soon as it left the house, it faded into the concrete path, and she simply could not see it.

  Suddenly, above them, Nat shot from the window holding the curtain rod in the center like a hang glider while the frightened curtains on each end billowed out like great wings. The contraption sent Nat soaring into the Seattle night. Sandy and Richie gasped. He was flying.

  Smaaash!

  Sandy and Richie had no time to catch their breath. The giant worm that had been Calamitous burst through the window after Nat, snapping with its great mouth. But it could not fly. Whereas Nat soared, the Demoneater plummeted. Sandy and Richie grabbed Nik and Pernicious and dove for cover.

  Ka-whoooom!

  The Demoneater hit the lawn hard, shaking the entire yard, and then went still. Sandy rolled up against the fence, smacking it with her head. Richie tumbled into the shrubs and leaped up immediately, fearing he’d fallen back into the homicidal blackberries and was relieved to find that he hadn’t.

  Nat circled a
nd drifted down on his curtain wings like an angel descending to land among the demons.

  “Nat!” Richie shouted as his mentor stumbled to a stop near the Demoneater’s motionless mass. “You’re alive!”

  “You two all right?” Nat asked. They looked for Sandy and saw her curled up at the base of the fence, holding her head.

  “She’s hurt,” Nat said.

  “I’m fine,” Sandy groaned. “Just give me a second.”

  Richie’s eyes went wide. “Nat, watch out!”

  The Beast leaped on Nat, knocking him to the ground, where it stood over him, salivating. A vicious slap from one of the Beast’s claws left four red gashes in his arm as Nat fought to protect his vulnerable neck. The curtain rod flew into the grass, and Nat’s arm fell limp, torn and useless.

  Richie saw that the Beast was going to kill his mentor. He threw the snake staff, but it fell harmlessly short of Nat, and though it slithered through the grass toward him to help, it was not going to make it in time.

  The Demoneater lay unmoving beside Nat, like a beached whale. Nat turned his head to take one last look at the incredible thing. He’d saved hundreds of manifestations of chaos from it, yet that same chaos he protected was about to kill him. The irony of it did not escape him, but he felt, in a sense, that he had at least done his job.

  The Beast roared and dove for Nat’s neck. But its fangs did not close. Instead, the huge mouth of the Demoneater rotated and caught the Beast’s head before it could snap forward and tear out Nat’s throat. The massive worm lurched sideways and clamped down on the furry horror, ripping it in half. The Beast’s lower torso fell away, flopping onto Nat’s chest, and the revived Demoneater snatched up the rest of it, gulping the large thing down as easily as an Orca whale might swallow a salmon.

  Nat still lay on his back as the Demoneater loomed over him, its mouth agape. He could see inside the monster. Half-digested chaos steamed in a foul stew in its throat, with parts of demons floating in it. It would scoop him up next, he thought, and suck him in. He was still going to die. In his last moments he saw that he would drown in muddled chaos, just as he should have done as a child with his parents.

  Just then, a horn sounded, and the Demoneater looked up. Nik and Pernicious stood at the nearby gate, drawn up to their full eighteen-inch heights, defiant and ready to leap in and help their Keeper. With its natural prey before it, the Demoneater swung its jaws away from Nat and opened them wide to devour his two minions instead. Without even a quick sniff, it hurled its vast bulk forward and shoveled them straight into its mouth. It was surprised when they vanished.

  Suddenly, a pink flash smashed through the gate and rocketed up the path. The Demoneater had a moment of wide-eyed realization, a second when it became clear that the stuttery man inside the monster was not completely gone, a semi-intelligent moment of “uh-oh.” Then Lilli’s VW Bug drove straight into its open mouth and tore its head in half.

  Spluuuuuuush!

  Stringy, slimy goo splattered the front porch and the shrubs where Richie was standing. He ducked, but it was no use. A wall of raw, stinking, half-digested liquid chaos flattened him.

  Zoot crouched on the path. His illusion of Nik and Pernicious had not been great, but it had been good enough. The excited Demoneater had gone right for it, giving Lilli a clean shot at its head with her car. Pernicious snickered from the safety of the fence nearby. Nikolai nodded and clapped. Zoot chuckled too, his fat belly jiggling with mirth and the love of a successful deception.

  Sandy stared as a dazed figure crawled out of the VW through the dripping muck. She grinned. It was Lilli.

  “You came back!” Sandy shouted.

  Lilli looked around, shaken from the collision. “I just went to get my car.” She stumbled and fell, and Sandy ran to help her.

  Richie wiped his eyes. At first he didn’t believe what he saw. A pink VW Bug hung from the destroyed jaws of the Demoneater. He shook his head. “Dude,” he said, “this is a new weirdest.”

  The girls found Nat nearby, dripping bug entrails and staring down Queen Anne Hill. In the distance, demons scattered through the city, tipping over garbage cans and setting off car alarms, each melting into the urban landscape to cause its own type of chaos.

  Sandy wiped slime from his face, and Lilli stood back to allow the young librarian to tend to her boyfriend.

  “I let them go,” Nat said.

  “Not all of them,” Richie blurted out. “Some got chowed, and there are a few dead ones lying around.”

  Sandy glared at Richie over Nat’s shoulder and motioned for him to shut up. “You saved all you could,” she whispered to Nat.

  “Oh. Yeah,” Richie said quickly. “Hey, Dhaliwahl would be proud, man.”

  Lilli stepped forward. “Nat, I want to say that you were so cool to give me a place to stay after that thing destroyed my life, but then I led it here and helped it destroy yours. I’m so sorry. You even warned me there were bad things out there, and I just couldn’t see the world your way.”

  “And I can’t see it yours.”

  Nat pushed past the others and walked to the house. He looked inside. It was demolished. He made his way through its empty rooms with their smashed walls to the obliterated study.

  “Oh, man,” Richie said, “there’s, like, nothing left.”

  Sandy slugged him. “Richie! Shhhh.”

  “No. He’s right,” Nat said. “There’s nothing left for me here.”

  “What are you sayin’, bro?” Richie asked.

  “You have the box?”

  “Yeah.” Richie handed it to Nat.

  Nat opened it and dumped Flappy out. “I can’t look after this one anymore,” Nat said. “Keep him for me, up in the attic where the worst he can do is chase the dust bunnies.”

  “What do we do now?” Richie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Nat said, turning in a slow circle as though looking for answers among the wreckage. “I need to talk to someone.”

  “Who?” Sandy interrupted.

  “My mentor.”

  “Dhaliwahl?” Sandy said, confused.

  “Dude,” Richie said, “I know you can do some freaky stuff, but I seriously doubt you can talk to a dead guy.”

  “Sandy,” Nat said, “I want you to find the place in Dhaliwahl’s Journal entries that talks about Flappy and translate it.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  Sandy retrieved her laptop and they sat in the middle of the study among the smashed furniture and scattered burial urns. Lilli and Richie stood nearby as she found and read Dhaliwahl’s passages aloud.

  “‘I have successfully captured the wind demon, but at an awful price. A young family fell victim to its tempest. Their vessel was smashed on the rocks at Deception Pass just after I passed them in the trawler, tracking my quarry. In that instant, I had a choice—an awful choice. I saw one chance to capture this magnificent deadly demon or one chance to help the family. I made the capture instead of helping them, and by the time I had secured the demon, they had been washed away by the demon I did not see.’”

  Sandy turned the page.

  “‘The storm died down once the demon had been caught, and I drifted back to discover only smashed remains of the other vessel. But there was something bobbing in the water—a small child in a life preserver. I helped him to shore.’”

  Nat sat rigid, staring across the room.

  “‘This boy will not remember me, but I will watch him as he grows and keep track of him. I am in need of a new apprentice, but I do not want to burden him further. I hope that he finds a normal family, a normal life, but if this boy—Nathaniel is his name—struggles, I will step in to care for him, because on that dark day, in my blind devotion to my calling, I allowed his parents to die.’”

  “He was there,” Nat whispered. His voice trailed off.

  “You okay?” Sandy asked.

  “Imagine his guilt,” Lilli said softly.

  Nat sat silent for a time, thinking.
“It was the demon he did not see,” he said finally, repeating Dhaliwahl’s words. He stood up. “I’m leaving,” he said.

  Nat summoned Nik and Pernicious to him. They leaped up and were sucked into the box. Nat put the box in his pocket, turned, and walked out, past his apprentice, past Sandy, and past Lilli.

  Sandy ran after him and grabbed him.

  “Where are you going?”

  “There’s one more elemental.”

  “Huh?” Richie said. “What do you mean?”

  Sandy thought hard and then uttered the answer: “Water.”

  Nat nodded. “The wind didn’t kill my parents by itself. I’m taking the Wanderer out to find the water demon.”

  “Out where?” Richie said.

  “The bay, the ocean . . . I don’t know. Wherever it takes me.”

  “What about the house?” Sandy asked.

  “It’s empty.”

  “What about Richie?” she said.

  “Will you be okay, kid?” Nat said to Richie.

  Nat watched Richie glance about at the destruction, debating. He was still a punk kid, and it would be hard for him. He needed guidance. But Nat could see that his apprentice wasn’t going to try to talk him into staying.

  “Seattle’s gonna be a pretty wild place for a while,” Richie said. “There are several centuries’ worth of demons running amok downtown. And this house is trashed.” Then he grinned. “But you gotta do what you gotta do, man.”

  Sandy stomped her foot. “But what about . . . me?”

  Nat took Sandy by the shoulders and looked her straight in the eyes. It froze her.

  “You’re a great woman,” he said. “You were great when I met you. You’re going to be great after I’m gone. But there’s nothing you can do to keep me here.”

  Then Sandy kissed him. It was a good one this time, and Nat found himself kissing back. Lilli grinned. Their auras were exactly the same color for a flickering moment—a vibrant red. Then Nat pulled away.