There’s a window on one wall, and I wander over to see what it looks out on. We’re several floors up, and I can see a lot of the surrounding . . . countryside? Cityscape? Random demony environment? The shiftiness is still visible to me from here (my understanding is that it’s not really shifting; that’s just my human brain’s attempt to reconcile the impossible physical dimensions of the demon world with images it can comprehend), and so it’s not a very comfortable view. I turn away before it starts to make me queasy.
But just as I’m turning away, I see something out of the corner of my eye that makes me turn back.
Several large dark shapes are approaching the window.
This is alarming for many reasons.
For one thing, as previously stated, we are several floors up. Which means the fact that these shapes appear to have head-parts that are roughly on the same level as the window indicates that they are of a very gigantic stature.
For another thing, the shapes, as they come closer, which they are doing very rapidly, are made up of scary demon body pieces, like wings and tentacles and horns and claws and teeth. So many, many teeth. Large, pointy teeth, which I can see clearly even from here.
Also, it soon becomes evident that they are not just coming in the general direction of the window; they are coming at the window. Directly at it. And did I mention very rapidly?
See? Corner-of-the-eye things are never any good at all.
“Hey, Aaron?” I call, not moving my gaze from the approaching figures. “Could you, um, come back, please? Right now?”
“Just a sec!” His voice calls from somewhere down the hall.
“Now, please!” I say with a bit more urgency. “Some . . . things . . . are coming.”
“What?” His voice doesn’t sound any closer. I begin to feel angry impatience. But mostly horror and terror.
“Aaron! Get back here right now, dammit! Big scary monsters coming this way! Really fast!”
Before he has a chance to respond, one of the approaching demon-parts (a furry hand-shaped appendage dangling at the end of a long translucent tentacle-arm) slaps itself against the window. The sound makes me yelp and jump back, but the window holds. I start to relax, thinking that of course the demoness would have good strong demon-resistant windows in her uneasy-throne-containing castle home.
Then another of the shapes slams full force into the center of the window, and tiny cracks begin to form, spidering out from the point of impact.
“Aaron!” I am kind of screaming now, because it seems entirely appropriate at this time.
The window shatters, and I fly backward to slam against the wall. Several of the unpleasant pictures drop to the floor around me, their frames breaking in small-scale imitation of the window’s destruction a moment before. As I slide to the ground beside them, the first of the creatures (not the one with the furry hands) begins to pull itself forward into the room. This one has long, red, crunchy-looking limbs, sort of like an Alaskan king crab. They taper to long, sharp, terrible hooked points. It swivels its enormous dog-bear sort of head until its bright, beady eyes land on mine.
Then it smiles, and I start screaming in earnest.
Dimly, I am aware of Aaron finally deciding to come see what all the fuss is about.
“What the hell?” his voice says from somewhere to my right.
“Aaron!” I scream again. The dog-bear-Alaskan-king-crab monster is still pulling itself into the room. It has a lot of those red arms. Armlike things, anyway. Maybe they are legs. Whatever they are, they puncture the walls and floor and ceiling as the demon flings them forward and then inches itself farther through the window, ignoring the jagged bits of glass that pierce and tear its skin.
It is still smiling. It looks very, very happy to see me.
Its crazy eyes start to go big and black and swirly, and I jerk my gaze away before I can be sucked into any kind of paralyzing mesmo-glare, which I’m probably entirely susceptible to at the moment. I am newly aware of how much it sucks to have given away my defensive power while stuck in the demon world.
Also, I take back everything I said about this visit being so awesome compared with last time.
Aaron is frozen in the doorway. I’m not sure exactly what I expected him to do, but I vaguely assumed the demoness had left him here to protect me from any sort of bad things that might happen.
“What did you do?” Aaron shouts at me.
“I didn’t do anything! These . . . things came out of nowhere and broke through the window! Do something!”
“Like what?”
“Like some kind of demony magic or something! Or humany anti-demon magic! Or throw a fucking chair at it, I don’t know! Don’t just stand there!”
But he does just stand there, and I realize he might be considering whether to just run away.
Fucking Aaron.
I push myself back to my feet and try to lift one of the chairs myself, but it’s too heavy. So I go for the coffee table instead. I can’t lift that enough to throw it, but I can at least push it over onto its side and get behind it. Not that I imagine it will prove much of a defense against the dog-bear-crab, but at least it might slow the thing down a tiny bit before it reaches me.
Suddenly the monster flinches, and I see that Aaron is throwing things at it. Throwing . . . books. And small objets d’art. And whatever else he can get his hands on. The creature roars and blinks to avoid having its eyes poked out by flying tomes and vases. I am grateful and relieved until I notice another demon squeezing past the first one now that there is enough room for it to fit. This one is more snakelike in body and has a more humanlike head (a long and horribly stretched human head, though). It doesn’t have any arms, but it opens its mouth to reveal a very long tongue that immediately shoots toward me.
I scream and duck behind my table. This is not good. This is so not good. I want to go home. Right now.
Also, I suspect Aaron will be out of things to throw very soon.
I wait until the new snake demon has just thrown its tongue against the table again and then I fling myself forward and make a run for the door. I nearly knock over Aaron in the doorway, but he barely seems to notice. He is two steps behind me as we race toward the stairs and down and down and down.
There are angry, screaming, crashing sounds above and behind us. Sounds that include, perhaps, the door frame breaking apart as a giant dog-bear-crab monster forces its enormous bulk through the doorway. We reach the bottom of the last flight and look up to see its furiously smiling face staring down at us. The snake demon’s tongue flails wildly, apparently caught between the other demon and the banister.
“Crap,” Aaron says. We start running again.
“Where are we going?” I ask between breaths.
“Away from them! After that . . . I have no idea. I thought we’d be safe inside the house.”
I want to be amused that he calls this enormous castle structure the house, but there’s really no time for that now.
We race toward the large front room just inside the entryway. I can’t imagine that going outside is really a smart move, but obviously staying inside is not such a smart move, either, given the sounds and screams still coming from behind us.
Aaron throws open the door and abruptly slams it shut again. I catch only a glimpse of a giant toothy mouth before he does.
“Um,” I say helpfully. This is really, really not good at all.
“This way,” he says, darting down a side passage. I follow at his heels.
We keep running, but it’s no use. The demons continue to pursue us. Eventually we are going to run out of house.
It happens even sooner than I expect. I don’t know if Aaron just panicked or had some plan that didn’t work out, but we end up at the end of a long hall that has no exit other than a door to the courtyard. We go through it because that seems better than just standing still and waiting to die.
So we go outside, and then we stand still and wait to die.
The snake demo
n reaches the courtyard first, having apparently slipped past the dog-bear-crab monster at some point during the chase. But the latter is not far behind, and it bursts through the doorway a second later. A few smaller but still pretty frightening demons appear next and fan out behind the first two until we are effectively surrounded. Courtyard wall behind us, monsters everywhere else.
Aaron decides the time has come to try diplomacy.
“What do you want?” he asks in an impressively level voice. “You must know whose home this is that you’ve wrecked with your giant selves. She’s going to be severely pissed. But if we can resolve this before she comes back and has to deal with it, you can spare yourselves a lot of pain.”
I’m not completely certain the demons can understand him. They give no sign of comprehension, anyway. But then one of the smaller demons toward the back — it’s the one with the furry hands from earlier — says in a scratchy rasp, “You know what we want. Hand over the roach girl.”
I wait, but Aaron does not immediately respond with “Never, demon scum!” or any such comforting refusal.
A thought occurs to me. What happens if I die while I’m down here? Does the demoness somehow get to keep my gift? Or will it die with me? I want to believe it will die with me. That kind of makes more sense, really. Also, if it’s the other option, then I have to suspect the demoness of setting all this up in order to keep my strength forever. But no; if she can do that, she would have done it the first time. She must need me alive in order for it to work.
So, if that’s true . . . Aaron won’t want to hand me over, since that would mean his beloved mistress would lose her current advantage, wherever she is and whatever she’s doing. Which must be something pretty terrible and dangerous for her to have called me, despite her apparently blasé attitude earlier. If she thought she needed my extra protection enough to use up one of her two remaining borrowing chances, then she probably really did. Aaron is probably just stalling for time.
I tell myself this to counteract the uneasy feelings that are happening because of the very convincing way Aaron seems to be considering the demon’s demand.
“Aaron, you can’t,” I tell him firmly through clenched teeth. Crap, I really hope he’s thought things through like I have.
“What will you give me if I do?” he asks the demons finally.
Stalling, I remind myself somewhat desperately. He’s just stalling. I know we’ve already established that I can’t trust him, and I don’t . . . but I do trust him to look out for his own interests, and I know that keeping the demoness happy is at the very top of that list.
It’s the snake demon who answers, somehow speaking around that impossibly long tongue. “Let you live,” he says gruffly.
Aaron rolls his eyes at this. “Even you are not stupid enough to kill me, Argzyrl.” (The word he says is not exactly Argzyrl; it’s one of those harsh demon words that hurt my ears. But it’s close enough.)
I turn fully around to stare at Aaron. “You know him?”
Aaron shrugs. “We’ve met. His even more horrible friend is . . .” (He says another name here, but I can’t even try to come close to a phonetic representation of this one, sorry.)
The even more horrible friend lifts an arm-leg-claw thing in what might be a friendly wave.
I keep operating under the assumption that there will eventually be a limit to the insanity and horror, that at some point we will reach the end and things will not get any more horrible or insane. I suppose that could still be a valid assumption; it’s just that we don’t seem to be anywhere close to that outer boundary yet. Things just keep getting more crazy and awful.
I really, really hate it here.
“Look,” Aaron says, “if it were up to me, you could have her, and good riddance. But you know it’s not up to me. So I think you should all go home before we all end up in really big trouble here, okay?”
He’s talking to them like they are children. Or mentally deficient in some way. Or both. I guess maybe they could be; even in my somewhat limited experience, there are definitely some demons that seem more like animals than intelligent beings.
“We have our instructions,” Argzyrl says.
“Instructions from whom?” Aaron says, sounding genuinely curious.
I’m curious, too. Obviously. The only demon who has a personal vendetta against me is dead. What new enemies do I have that I don’t know about?
Even-More-Horrible-Friend knocks Argzyrl across the courtyard with one of its arm/legs, and I get the sense that perhaps the snake demon has said too much. We are all at a standstill, watching one another and waiting for someone to make the first move. I’m not really sure why the demons are waiting; now that we have no place left to run, they could kill us in seconds, easy. My only guess is that they don’t really want to hurt Aaron, since that would incur the wrath of the demon queen, which cannot possibly be a good thing.
Slowly, the demons start toward us. Now I think they are drawing out the killing process just for the pure pleasure of it. Aaron and I back up until we are pressed against the courtyard wall, trying to watch all the approaching appendages at once, as if we have the slightest hope of dodging them long enough to stay alive.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask desperately.
They don’t bother to answer. They just take a few steps closer.
Suddenly there is a displacement of air in the courtyard, and everyone freezes, confused. The colors of the ground and walls and sky swirl angrily around for a few seconds, and the demoness’s voice calls out, “What is the meaning of this?”
I am overwhelmed with relief. She is still my favorite demon ever, evil or not.
When the colors resettle, I see that she is more than a little the worse for wear. She’s clearly been in some kind of massive brawl. I guess it’s a you-should-see-the-other-guy type of situation, since she’s still here and alive, after all. It must have been some fight, though, if she was that badly damaged even with my roachy resistance.
“You will all leave my house. Now.”
I breathe out slowly and wait for them to leave.
But they don’t.
They had turned at the demoness’s appearance, but now they turn back to me and Aaron.
“Last chance, Aaron,” Argzyrl says. “Stand aside or die.”
“Are you seriously threatening my consort and my guest in my own house?” The demoness sounds utterly amazed. “You know you will not commit such an insult and live.”
“Our lives are forfeit,” one of the other demons says, and that sends a chill right through me. Evil creatures willing to die for an evil cause are very, very scary.
The world slides suddenly around me, and then Aaron and I are standing at the demoness’s side, behind the demons who were facing us a second before. They whirl around to relocate us, but in the meantime the demoness has opened a giant hole in the air.
“Go,” she says to me. “Right now.”
“Wait,” Aaron says. He pushes something into my pocket.
Then the demoness shoves me through. I feel my roach power return as she does so, and the feeling of being at full strength again is the most welcome thing I can possibly imagine right now.
I look back and see the opening begin to close behind me.
But not before one of the demons hurls itself forward and clutches at me with its long horrible spidery legs.
Then the portal winks closed and I’m alone in the swirly darkness. With the demon.
I fight it the whole way back. It may only be a matter of seconds, but it feels much longer when you are grappling blindly with a disgusting monster intent on trying to kill you. The feel of its limbs is indescribably awful. I want to scrape off every part of my skin that it manages to touch.
When the world opens again and we tumble forward onto . . . concrete? . . . the demon’s grip fails. I hear a collective gasp as I scuttle back along the ground as fast as I can, away from the creature, and try to get my bearings.
The demon he
ars it, too, and rears up on several hind legs, glaring around with its misshapen bull/bug-like head. It hisses like a scorpion or a really, really pissed-off cat and then bounds off into the darkness.
Finally, I start to take in where I am and what’s around me.
I’m sitting backstage in the set-construction area of Blake Theater. Peter is there. So is Ryan. And Hector. And . . . Jules.
Everyone is staring in the direction the demon disappeared.
Then Hector suddenly takes off after it.
Then, slowly, the rest of them turn back to look at me.
“Hey, guys,” I say when I can’t stand the awkward silence one more second. “What’s going on?”
Ryan looks like he wants to kill me.
Also — I blink to make sure I have this right — he appears to be holding hands with Jules.
“I can’t believe you,” he says in a quiet voice. “I’m glad you made it back alive, but . . . I just can’t believe you, Cyn.”
Jules looks at him in a concerned, sympathetic way that makes me want to scratch her eyes out.
Revenge of the Evil Librarian Page 11
