Demon's Play

by David McBride

  He arched an eyebrow at me and grinned. “I’m glad to see they are still training our people well.” Gone were the spoken words he had used on the others. As a fellow psychic he expected more from me. I found myself hoping I didn’t disappoint him. “What you lack in raw power you make up for in discipline. This place you have crafted for us tells me as much, and your mental defenses against my probe are surprisingly strong. I am pleased to see that such a man represents our interests out in the field.”

  Inclining my head slightly to acknowledge the praise, I ordered my thoughts so that I could answer him. Telepathy was never one of my abilities, so I had only my instincts to fall back on. Jae provided the link; all I had to do was think. “Thank you, Councilman Kwon. It is an honor to finally meet you.”

  “No need to shout,” he said, his smile broadening. “You don’t need to push your thoughts at me. Just let them drift out. And please, save ‘councilman’ for the politicians. Jae is fine, Mr. Goldman.”

  “Please, call me Frank.”

  “As you wish.”

  He moved back a few steps so that he could address everyone. Looking down the line I saw Ben and Simon exchange a suspicious glance before resting their gazes on Jae. They probably didn’t like that they weren’t privy to our telepathic conversation. Inquisitors, as a general rule, were very paranoid and secretive…about everything. Simon would let it go; if it were anything important I would tell him later and he knew that. Ben, though, with the concerns he had raised about my judgment earlier wouldn’t be so quick to let it lie. It struck me then that even though I knew that Ben and Jae knew each other, I didn’t know how they felt about each other. They had seemed civil enough at first, but it had been almost a diplomatic level of pleasantry, all fake smiles and false courtesies. Could Jae’s private talk have been a slap in the face to Ben? It was possible, I concluded, and decided to keep a closer eye on the man who presented such a harmless image of an old hobbled man.

  Hell, if anyone should know about looks being deceiving it was me. I looked down to where Lily stood. Twirling one of the white ribbons in her hair thoughtlessly, she appeared to be four feet of cherubic innocence. Feeling my gaze upon her, the finger stopped twirling. She gave me a sidelong glance, smirked as if knowing what I was thinking, and then looked forward once more.

  “So you are the Duke?” Jae asked, looking at Lily. “It is an honor to meet you,” he said with false sincerity, and inclined his head towards her. It wasn’t lost on me that he never took his eyes off of her as he did it.

  “And you, Councilman Kwon.” She offered him a curtsy.

  They verbally danced around each other for a minute more with pleasant words and fake compliments before I couldn’t take it anymore. “Can we hurry this up?” I asked, pulling my sleeve up to look at an imaginary watch. “There are more important things we need to be doing.” I looked pointedly at Simon and Ben, who looked amused and angry respectively at my outburst. Ben was a stickler for decorum, even though he knew as well as any of us that the necromancer was still on the loose. He had insisted on doing this first, and patience was not one of my virtues. Beyond them, Terri still wouldn’t meet my eyes. She had been studiously avoiding me since our conversation.

  Lily clicked her tongue at me. “Mortals are always in such a hurry. Maybe if you stopped always looking forward to what to do next then you would see the hidden subtleties of the now.” I frowned at that. Was Lily trying to tell me something? Had I been so wrapped up with everything else that was happening that I was missing something? Something important enough that a Duke from the infernal realm would warn me about it? That was troubling on so many different levels.

  “Wise words, Duke, but the young Inquisitor does have a valid concern.” Jae settled dark eyes on me, wrinkles multiplying across his face as he squinted at me as if I had suddenly drifted far off into the distance. “You needn’t worry about wasted time here, though. This meeting is being held in your head,” he said, pointing to me. “It’s all happening at the speed of thought. For you it feels like the better part of an hour has passed, yes? But back in reality it has been probably closer to twenty seconds. So please forgive an old man his lingering pleasantries.” He smiled and for some reason it sent chills up my spine. “But yes, we should get down to business, as they say. First, Inquisitor General Jerrigan,” he said to Ben, using his full title. “I have heard much of this necromancer from our intelligence people, but I would like to hear what you know of him and how you plan to handle the situation.”

  As Ben recounted Simon’s story for him and filled him in our plan to track Christian’s familiars, something about Jae changed. His body remained the same but everything about his body language shifted. All signs of the amiable old man were gone now, replaced by an iron-hard commander who had fought too many battles. He nodded at certain parts of the story or scratched at his chin thoughtfully, but even when Ben told him how he had boiled stolen organs to create a black-magic summoning ritual, or the likely deaths of five Shadowcasters, Jae never flinched, never even so much as looked distraught. It made me damn uncomfortable. Mostly because I feared that I had shown people that same look whenever I felt the training creep back into my mind, when it took over and I felt my morality move ever-so-slightly out of the way so that I could do what had to be done.

  “Yes,” Jae said as Ben finished. “It seems to be as we feared. The Committee believes that the same Demon that is hunting Lily is the one granting this necromancer his powers.”

  “Why would it weaken itself by granting him powers when it may need them to attack her?” Terri asked.

  Ben answered. “To spread our forces. This way we not only have to protect Lily and banish her hunter, but we have an insane necromancer with untold powers running loose.” He looked up and down the line at our faces. “Because of the contract she agreed to, Lily can’t use her powers to harm a living being. She would be out of the fight because the Demon has possessed a person, so it falls to the four of us. We could stop either one of them if we pooled our abilities, but both of them at the same time?” He shrugged and let the question linger.

  “Which begs the question, how do you plan to stop it?” Jae asked.

  After a long moment of silence, Simon almost whispered, “We could use the Book.” The Book of Names. Just the mention of it made me break out in a cold sweat. The infernal tome that contained the summoning names of hundreds of Demons, and also the means to banish them, it was still a black pall that hung over my memories.

  Jae hissed through his teeth. “That is to be a last resort only. It is a cursed thing. Nothing good can ever come from something like that.”

  “Then you are a bigger fool than I thought,” Lily stated, anger lacing her words like venom. “Without something to even the odds these four stand no chance.” She waved her tiny arm to encompass Terri, Ben, Simon, and myself. “They will die and it will be your fault.” Her tone turned mocking. “You’re the psychic, go ahead and tell me that I’m wrong, that my hunter won’t rip them to pieces in order to get to me.”

  “You’re wrong,” Jae stated plainly, unmoved by her outburst. Lily looked ready to say something else, and then seeing the unwavering confidence of the man before her, she shut her mouth with an audible click. “The Committee and I have the utmost confidence in this group,” he said aloud to Lily. And then in a voice heard only in my head, he added, “But mostly I have faith in you, Inquisitor Goldman. I know you have the beginnings of a plan in this mind of yours. I can sense it just on the edge of conscious thought. You protect it well and this is why I know you will succeed where those before you have failed. I wish you luck.” All this was said in the space of a couple of heartbeats in which his eyes never left Lily’s. The sudden psychic intrusion and the resultant emptiness he left when his thoughts suddenly withdrew left me shaken. My head throbbed as if all my blood had attempted to go there and was now stuck as it looked for an escape route.

  “Moving on to equally important matters,” Jae said, onc
e again speaking aloud to the group. “The Council is impatient to come to a mutual agreement with you, Duke, in order to prevent further bloodshed.”

  Lily smiled at him. “All in good time, Councilman Kwan. For now my mere presence on this plane will keep the local tribes under control.”

  “But your influence does not reach worldwide,” Jae said, frowning.

  “Unfortunately, no, and with my hunter using my own powers to track me I cannot use them to attempt contact,” she replied, fussing with her green dress that was now dotted with gray dust. “But most still remember where they came from.” She gave a wistful smile, as if visualizing her home realm and finding comfort there. “They will feel my power on the wind and hide like the hunted animals they imagine themselves to be. The others, the ones in far off lands think they are safe from my wrath. And perhaps they are. Truth be told, I don’t give a leech’s sucker about any of their kind. They have become too soft living in this realm. They wouldn’t do me any good as warriors now.”

  “That’s what they were in your realm? They were all warriors?” Terri asked softly.

  “What else would we make them for?” Lily countered, clearly annoyed with Terri’s naiveté. “They escaped their service to us through portals leading to this world. If it were up to me alone I would bring them all back and make them suffer for their betrayal.” My mind flashed to the utter terror on the Nimak demon’s face as Lily held her stuffed bear out to him. Now I saw the reason for that utter desperation to escape written on the face of the little girl next to me. An evil glee at imagining the tortures she would bring to them crossed her features and made her eyes sink into black, the whites around the iris receding to nothing. It passed in a moment, and was replaced by the demeanor of a carefree little girl that the Demon liked to affect. “But it is not my decision alone, so I will subjugate myself to the lowly role of mediator. For the time being, anyway.”

  “Why haven’t you simply closed the portals?” Simon asked.

  Lily huffed. “There is always a price to pay for working magic that powerful, vampire. Few of my kind are willing to pay it.”

  Jae pounded his cane into the ground, gray dust shooting out from the impact and floating in the low gravity. “We can worry about the portals later. Right now I need to know that they will hold to the ceasefire. We cannot keep this out of the public eye much longer.”

  “While I am on this plane of existence nothing will happen, unless you break the agreement first, of course.”

  Seeming to ponder the veracity of her words, the elder Councilman stared at the top of his cane. “I assume the tribes want the same agreement the humans gave to the vampires and wolves?”

  Smiling innocently, Lily said, “That is what they wanted.” Reaching down, she grabbed up some of the loose dust, streamers of the gray silt sifting through her fingers. “I’m afraid their demands have grown recently. You see, they think that the Inquisition is mostly smoke and mirrors.” She tossed the dust away and watched it float slowly back to the surface. “They believe that if it came to an all-out war you would lose. So they have altered the price for peace, believing that they are negotiating from a place of strength.”

  I stepped forward so I could look at Lily. “They’re working together?” I asked.

  She nodded, her smile turning wicked. “They’ve created something much like your own Council. They call it the Coven of the Flame. A representative from each of the thirteen tribes is on it. It’s an interesting attempt at a democratic rule where the dissenters are usually eaten. Needless to say most of their votes are unanimous.” She fluttered a hand, dismissing her train of thought. “It was an interesting gambit they undertook in summoning me for this.”

  “Why would they do it?” I asked no one in particular. Then the answer struck me. “Unless the Coven’s control is far from total. They needed a show of power to cow those that would challenge their authority, so they summon a Duke, someone who is universally feared to be their negotiator. None of the tribes would stand against them then. And they knew we would go for it as long as we could place restraints on your powers and save a little girl’s life in the process, anything to avoid an all-out war.” I frowned at Lily. “But what do you get out of it?”

  “Just the pleasure of your company, Inquisitor,” she replied.

  Simon laughed bitterly at that, and then turned to me. “It disturbs me that you understand their motivations so clearly, little brother.”

  Jae began pacing before us, scratching behind an ear, lost in thought. “I need to go back to the Council and tell them about this. Ben,” he said, regaining his composure. “You are in charge of protecting Lily until proper negotiations can begin.”

  “I have chosen Inquisitor Goldman as my Guardian,” Lily announced.

  Jae’s pacing stopped. He looked from me to her. “That is your choice, of course, but the wizard would be better suited to the task.”

  “I have made my decision.”

  “Very well,” Jae said, looking perplexed and annoyed. “But he is also Oakland’s protector, and as such he may need to tend to other matters, in which case you may find yourself under the protection of any of these four.”

  Without hesitation she answered, “I agree to your terms.” It wasn’t like a Demon to agree to something so quickly.

  Suspicion made my stomach churn. Or maybe it wasn’t so much suspicion as the fact that I had just been labeled a Demon’s protector. I looked to the sky to see the earth, its colorful face dimming as night swallowed it.

  19

  We woke from our trances slowly, the aftereffects leaving us bleary and lightheaded. Standing with the grace of an arthritic eighty-year old, I made my way out of the circle and into the kitchen. The clock above the stove stated that it was quarter to midnight. Jae Kwon had been true to his word when he said that time worked differently on the mental plane. Only five minutes had passed in reality, while it had felt closer to two hours in that mental construct.

  My mental construct. The vast sprawling dead lands of the moon. Was Terri right about what that meant? Was I that far removed from the rest of the world that that was the only place where I felt truly at peace?

  A hand gently came to rest on my shoulder. “Are you alright?” Terri asked.

  I was still standing at the threshold of the kitchen. I couldn’t recall how long I had been there. My head felt like it was filled with jelly, every motion seeming too slow, every sound echoing too loudly and reverberating too long. The spell had taken a larger toll than I thought. I turned to face her. She stared up at me with those dark eyes the color of starlit amber. Compassion filled their depths while concern stretched her features taught.

  “I’m fine,” I said, forcing a reassuring smile. I glanced at her hand, still resting lightly on my shoulder. How I had longed for that touch, that casual contact and the feelings that came with it. It was a bizarre mixture of tranquility and nervousness that only the hopelessly adored could elicit. But now the only thing her closeness brought on was a deep shame that I couldn’t stamp out. She had seen into my soul and recoiled at what was there. How could I not feel like digging a hole and crawling into it?

  Sensing my unease, she pulled back, but those eyes never left mine. I relented first and looked away to the group behind her. Simon, Ben, and Lily were all stretching and moving about, working the numbness out of their limbs.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked Terri. I had returned to reality with an emptiness in my stomach, and suddenly food was the only thing I could think about.

  She blinked, seemingly caught off guard by the question. “Actually, yes, I’m famished.” A smile slowly spread across her face. I answered it with my own and this time didn’t have to fake it.

  “Hey,” I called out to the living room, “who else is hungry?”

  “I’m starving,” Ben replied, stretching his arms and gingerly rotating his back. “I’ll get the tracking spell ready while you prepare dinner.” He paused and gave me a curious glance. “Are you
ordering out or…trying to cook?”

  “I’ll whip something up.”

  “Torquemada preserve us,” he cursed.

  “I’ll pass,” Simon said grimacing. “That meal at Larry’s may have spoiled my appetite for years.”

  “Oh ye of little faith,” I said, shaking my head in disappointment. “What about you, Lily?” She said nothing. Sitting against the wall with her bear in her arms, she stared into space as if still in a trance. “Lily,” I said louder. Nothing. “Well I’m making you something whether you want it or not. Little girls need to keep their strength up, after all.”

  Blinking slowly, she turned to me and frowned. “So long as I am in this body it doesn’t need normal nourishment.”

  I shuddered inwardly at the inhumanity of her speech and movements. For a moment she had let the mask slip, letting me see the alien underneath. “Maybe not, but the less she takes from you the better as far as I’m concerned.”

  “As you wish.” With that she dismissed me and turned her attention to the bear in front of her.

  “She’s not at all what I expected of a Demon Lord,” Terri said from beside me.

  Moving further into the kitchen, I motioned Terri to follow. “She’ll show us whatever personality she thinks will accomplish her goal.”

  “And what goal is that, do you think?”

  A simple enough question, that. Or at least it should have been. “I have no idea,” I admitted as I opened the fridge and looked for our dinner. It was decidedly sparse of foodstuffs, but I thought I could scrounge something together. I wasn’t used to having guests, so having four in one night was going to stretch things to the limit. Pulling out a package of ground beef, I held it up for Terri to see. “Feel like tacos?”

  “Sure. I’ll make a salad.” She went to the fridge and pulled out a head of lettuce, some tomatoes, and a package of shredded cheese.

  “Ugh,” I complained, making a face. “How did fruits and vegetables get into my fridge?”