Caffeinated Magic: Supernatural Barista Academy

by Rylee Sanibel

  Abby made good time, thanks to the lack of traffic. Before she knew it, she’d rounded a corner and was facing the neglected Rotwood Park, the public green that sat a street away from the wharves, and where kids had been conducting minor drug deals and engaging in their first awkward sexual encounters ever since it had been constructed thirty years previously. In the middle of this park, next to a dilapidated playground, stood an ancient lacewood tree. It was perfectly round and squat and had a flat top of thick branches. The inside of the lacewood was mostly hollow, except for the trunk and the branches that radiated out from it like the spokes of a wheel.

  It was into one of these branches that Abby had stuffed the gold foil packet of highly caffeinated beans. Having spent time at the Academy, Abby knew that the Mount Hypo coffee fields were a real place. That was where the potent beans that fuelled the Supernatural Barista Academy were.

  Abby reached into the crack and extracted the foil packet. It appeared to have been untouched. She opened it and stared into it. The brown beans looked as unassuming as they ever had, and she wondered how she was supposed to use them to attract the demons. Last time one of the big brutes had smashed the door within ten minutes of them being brewed.

  Perhaps that’s the key, she thought. Maybe they have to be brewed before they attract those hellish pricks.

  But how was she going to brew them? Maybe if she just crushed them? Abby and her class had been taught the process involved in making a cup of coffee, of course. She recalled that, when the roasted beans were ground, they released oils that gave the coffee its particular flavor. If she could just release the oils – and with them, the aroma – then maybe that would be enough to attract the demons.

  The park was still deserted when Abby emerged from out of the lacewood. She walked over to a hedgerow, the golden foil packet clasped in her hand that was thrust inside her pocket. She crouched down in the shelter bushes, found a big, flat rock and another heavy stone. She poured the illegal beans onto the flat rock and, using the other stone, pulverized them as well as she was able. Despite everything that had happened to her over the past few days, Abby grinned. She imagined that this was how the first evolved human might’ve gone about making the first cup of joe, had they known about such things.

  When she had ground the beans to a fine paste, she scooped up the mess and then paused.

  Now what? she asked herself.

  Abby looked out across the park to the sea. She noticed a fishing boat chugging its way back into the docks with its early morning catch.

  Bait the hook, her brain told her.

  Not stopping to consider how odd it would look, she rubbed the gritty paste through her still slightly damp hair, massaging it into her scalp. Then she wiped the strong-smelling stuff over her arms and put the last of it in her pockets.

  “Okay,” she said to herself, “now that I’ve done my fucking weird-ass thing for the day, I guess I should take a walk.”

  So she did. Abby spent the next few hours wandering aimlessly around Rotwood Harbor. She cruised past every disreputable and shady nest of vice that she could think of, hanging around the corners that attracted the worst kinds of people and the best kinds of criminals. Rotwood Harbor was comprised of obscure bars in which drinking was the secondary activity to making deals of one sort or another, and she had a plethora of options to choose from in which demons might be welcomed if they had the money.

  When the sun had reached its noonday height and all she had managed to attract was a host of strange looks from people who wanted to know why this lone girl stank like the inside of an espresso machine that hadn’t been cleaned in months, Abby sat down on a pile of sacks at the docks and watched the greasy water lap against the pilings.

  Where the hell are you, Drake? she thought, fingering the necklace given her by the mermaid. Where are you when I need you, for raven’s sake?

  Abby was sure that the big Guardian would know what to do in a situation like this. No doubt he had a host of ways in which he could get in touch with the demon scum who had taken her sister.

  Abby kicked a stone off the jetty and into the water. It was just typical! When you didn’t want them you had demons coming out of your ears. Then, when you wanted to get in touch with the slimy a-holes, they weren’t around.

  A shadow fell across her.

  Abby looked up. Towering over her were two enormous red-eye demons, their eyes glowing like coals in their rough-hewn, ugly faces. One of them wore an orange T-shirt that had a couple of cups of coffee in the place of breasts and a caption underneath that read, ‘Nice Mugs.’ The other one’s shirt, straining a chest like a barrel, was purple, had a coffee pot with a jolly little face on it, and read ‘It’s a Brew-tiful Day.’

  Abby gulped. Only the most diseased of minds would go in for shirts of that insane level of corniness.

  “Oh, hi,” she said, trying to inject a bit of iron and venom into her voice. “I was wondering when you raven-fucks were going to show up.”

  The barrel-chested demon growled threateningly.

  “How do you like my new perfume?” Abby asked, trying to master the sensation that her skin was attempting to creep off her body in an attempt to get away from the two imposing figures.

  The red-eye demon in the orange shirt bent down and stuck his enormous, broad slab of a face against her hair and inhaled deeply.

  “Oh, gods,” she said, jerking away, “that was fucking creepy.”

  The demon straightened up and grunted something in a guttural language to his fellow—a language that sounded as if the words were chiseled from bone and gargled with broken glass before being spoken.

  To her horror and disgust, the bigger red-eye demon crouched down and licked a pale, rasping tongue up her cheek and over her hair.

  Abby had to fight down the urge to vomit.

  Apparently satisfied, the red-eye demon started grunting and snuffling excitedly to his compatriot, who replied in kind. They gestured a few times at Abby, and then one of them pulled out a small black sack from his pocket.

  “Are you dickless wonders going to take me to my father, Vassago, or aren’t you?” Abby snarled. She could feel the saliva of the red-eye demon dripping down the side of her neck and into her shirt.

  At the sound of the word ‘Vassago,’ the two demons stopped talking and glowered down at the girl in front of them. Then, without ceremony, the black bag was pulled roughly over her head.

  “Hey, what the –” Abby began, but then her words were lost as the bottom dropped out of her stomach and the air started rushing past her ears. She was flying.

  Again.

  And, once more, she had no idea where she was heading.

  ***

  Abby was released without warning and fell to the deck hard. She managed to swallow back the cry that was scrabbling to get up the back of her throat, but bit her tongue when she landed like a sack of spuds on the rocky ground.

  The first thing she noticed – before she even managed to rip the black sack off her head – was how hot it suddenly was. The air was tingling with warmth. Even the surface she lay on was baking, as if she’d been dropped on a giant hot-water bottle.

  Abby pulled the black bag off her head, blinking in the sudden harsh, flickering light, and feeling the sweat trickle down her spine. It was an uncomfortable feeling. But what was more uncomfortable was the vision that greeted her eyes once they adjusted to the light.

  An enormous demon, seemingly three times the size of the red-eye demons that had brought her to wherever she was, was lounging on a gaudy golden throne.

  He was big, this demon. He was really big. That was the thing that resonated most strongly with Abby. He was fucking massive. At least twelve feet tall and as well-muscled and thickly built as a cart-horse. Even if he hadn’t been sitting on the throne – which looked like it had been designed by a child asked to construct a chair that personified bad taste – Abby would have known this demon was in charge. Something about the way that he sat slouched in h
is tacky chair, something in the pitiless eyes, betrayed that he was the worst of a bad bunch.

  Incongruously, the demon king was surrounded by a bunch of puppies and little kittens that gamboled around his feet and chased each other through his huge legs.

  Okay, I guess that’s pretty weird, but I guess even demons probably get sick of looking at hideous shit all day long, Abby thought. Besides, villains are known to go in for a fluffy white cat now and again.

  The giant demon paid her no attention at first. Instead, he plucked a puppy from the throng around him – a shaggy little brown fellow with a white face and whippy tail – and held it up to his face in one gigantic hand. The demon king tickled the dog under its chin with a long, black claw. This elicited some little whines of delight from the animal, which then licked the demon’s nose enthusiastically.

  Without warning, the demon’s big head lunged forward, its jaws snapped downwards and it severed the puppy’s head as neatly as a man snipping off the end of a cigar. Blood sprayed outwards in a crimson shower and Abby almost hurled as she heard the demon king crunch down onto the poor creature’s head as if it were a pistachio. He chewed a few times, swallowed and then tossed the puppy’s carcass to a couple of cronies that were hanging out behind the throne. They whooped with delight, ripped the body in two and both wolfed it down.

  “Hello, daughter!” the demon said, finally bothering to look down into Abby’s disgusted and horrified face. “How nice of you to join us! It’s been too long. Far too long.”

  Abby said nothing. She was hypnotized by the sight of one of the demons using the dead puppy’s tail to floss its teeth.

  “Ah, I see you haven’t had much to do with royalty,” the demon king said. “You do not yet know the customs.” He gestured to someone standing behind Abby, and Abby fell to her knees with a cry as she was struck in the back of the legs with the haft of a spear.

  “That’s better,” the hellish being on the throne said, smiling a bloody smile, his fangs a nasty yellow color. “It’s pleasing to see a daughter that respects her elders. Good manners are important, after all.”

  There was some sniggering from the ranks of gathered demons.

  “You’re – you’re my father?” Abby managed from her position on her knees.

  The demon king spread his hands. “Guilty as charged.”

  “Vassago?”

  “That’s right. My, my, that blue bitch, Miss Hightide, must have filled you in on our family history. Welcome home, by the way.”

  Vassago spread his hands wide and Abby took a brief look around her. The reason for the heat became immediately apparent, as it seemed that the demons had made their home in the cozy interior of an active volcano. All around them were fire and steam and heat, and there were also a couple of glutinous, brown rivers flowing through the heart of this demon realm. Abby had been expecting lava flows, but not rivers of mud.

  “Ah,” Vassago said, noticing how she was looking at the bubbling, slow-moving streams, “I see that your eyes linger on our power-giving rivers. We use the heat from down below, you see, to boil up and brew this sludgy infusion.”

  “You mean it’s coffee?” Abby asked.

  “Well, what in the hell else would it be? Gravy?”

  The crowd of demons surrounding Abby and her father chuckled sycophantically.

  “You have come of age, daughter,” Vassago continued. “I have waited a long time for it. Now you are here of your own free will – more or less – it is time for you to pledge your undying allegiance to me, and then to the rest of your demon brethren!”

  Cheers rose from all sides of the circle that hemmed Abby in. She wiped the sweat from her forehead, smelling the coffee oil as it dripped out of her hair.

  “You must be out of your fucking mind,” she said in answer.

  The demons’ cheers died.

  “What am I talking about?” Abby said. “You’re clearly one raven short of an unkindness – you’re chewing the heads of puppies, for fuck sake!”

  “You will not join us?” Vassago asked quietly. “You will not embrace what you are?”

  “You may be my father,” Abby replied, “but I’m not like you. I don’t have the appetite for raw pets, for one thing.”

  Vassago considered her for a moment and then made a gesture to one of his demon guards. The hulking form disappeared into the crowd and then reappeared a moment later, dragging Casey with him.

  “Casey!” Abby cried.

  Casey looked up at her through red, swollen eyes, evidence that she had been crying copiously. “Abby,” she said, “help me!”

  Vassago looked at Abby and said, “You’re fond of your sister, are you not?”

  “Of course, I am,” Abby said through her clenched jaw.

  “Very good. What a model sister you are. Now, tell me where those fools at the Supernatural Barista Academy get their supply of potent beans from, or I am going to pop your sister’s eyeballs like a couple of poached eggs. Then I’m going to crush her head like a pea. How does that sound?”

  Casey started crying again, hanging hopelessly in the grip of her guard.

  “You won’t do it,” Abby ventured. “She’s my sister, yes, but she’s also your daughter.”

  “True, true,” Vassago conceded. “But I also have you, and Casey doesn’t have your latent power. Now, where are the S.B.A’s coffee fields?”

  Abby looked from Vassago’s repugnant face to her sister.

  Vassago rested one of his long, black claws on Casey’s cheek. She flinched and tried to pull away.

  “Have you ever seen an eyeball in its natural state, as it were?” the demon king asked Abby. “I think you’d be quite astounded by how easy the things are to pop out of someone’s head.” His claw circled Casey’s eye, leaving a thin trail of blood behind it. “All you need,” Vassago crooned, “is the right hooking technique.”

  “All right!” Abby yelled. “All right! I’ll tell you.”

  Vassago leaned back from Abby’s trembling sister. “Tell away,” he said.

  “It’s on Mount Hypo – I don’t know where, but up there somewhere. Mount Hypo.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not lying?”

  “No. What would be the point?”

  “You’re willing to gamble your sister’s pretty eyes on it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Very good.” Vassago gestured to someone in the crowd and a demon approached and knelt in front of the demon king. It was a fierce-looking thug, all knotted muscle and rangy sinew, whose hide was so rough and pitted and scarred that it looked as if he’d tried to wash with a cheese grater. Vassago whispered something to this dangerous and unsavory-looking individual, handed him a huge pot of bubbling, molten coffee, which the other drank in one long draught, and then sent him away with a word.

  Abby’s musings as to what that ominously scarred demon could be up to were suddenly cut short when a familiar voice spoke.

  “Nice one, Abs. I’m glad you didn’t try and play the staunch heroine. There’s only so much fake crying that a girl can do.”

  Abby’s head whipped back toward the throne and saw Casey sitting casually on one arm of the terrible, golden chair.

  “Casey? What’re you doing?” Abby asked.

  Casey lounged back against the chair, leaning her head against the great arm of Vassago. “What does it look like, Abs? I’m taking my rightful place by the side of the king.”

  “But – but you were captured. You’re a prisoner…”

  “Oh, come on, Abby,” Casey snorted. “He’s our father. Just because he’s a demon doesn’t mean that he’s a monster.” She looked down at the kittens and puppies and the blood splatters. “Well, not a complete monster, anyway.”

  “I don’t understand,” Abby said, looking from Vassago – who was watching her intently – to Casey and waiting for someone to admit that this was some sort of elaborate gag.

  “What’s not to understand, si
s?” Casey asked. “You and me, we’re like fucking royalty!” Casey held up her hand, palm outwards, and Abby saw that she had a red brand seared into the flesh – a coffee cup with the words ‘Brewed by Demons’ underneath it.

  “But they’re the bad guys, Casey,” she stammered.

  Casey waved her hand. “Bad guys, good guys, what the hell difference does it make who’s in charge, huh?” She picked up a tabby kitten and stroked it. “The only thing that should concern us is that with Dad we get to live a life that we could never have if the S.B.A. got to rule. We’d – I mean, I would’ve been stuck in Rotwood for the rest of my life. But with the demons, we get to be princesses! If we help him slaughter the S.B.A. it means that we can rule Ravencharm completely unopposed and do whatever we want!” With a great wrenching tug, Casey pulled the fragile little kitten’s front legs apart so that the tiny animal’s ribs burst out of its chest and its heart popped out into her lap. Casey tossed away the body, picked up the little heart and put it into her mouth with the same relish as she might a chocolate truffle.

  “It just takes a bit of getting used to,” she said, and around her the demons howled with glee.

  Abby did vomit then, as much over her sister’s insane change as the poor kitten’s gruesome death.

  Despite the chaos in her head, Abby heard her father say, “We will have time to feast later. Right now, though, let’s go and enjoy the next stage of our plan in action. My dear daughter, Abby, will get a front-row seat to the show.”

  Dimly Abby was aware of Vassago pulling her easily up and setting her on her feet. Then Casey took her companionably around the waist – as if they were going to the movies or something, and she hadn’t just eaten a kitten’s heart – and they walked with the rest of the demon company to a loop in one of the coffee rivers. There, Abby saw that the bend in the wide, viscous stream formed a pool of sorts.

  “It’s probably not going to be too pleasant watching this next part, sis,” Casey said, “but once you get used to the way of the demons you won’t want to have turned down a front-row seat to the start of the apocalypse.”

  Abby looked into her sister’s eyes for any sign that the little girl that used to play with her when they were kids, making bracelets out of flowers and running around Rotwood, was still there. But there was nothing that reminded her of that girl in the young woman’s eyes.