Caffeinated Magic: Supernatural Barista Academy

by Rylee Sanibel

“Easy, human,” Radella said softly from beside her. “The witches’ brew can do funny things even to the spellcasting ability of those who can control their magic.”

  “I’ve got this,” Abby replied through gritted teeth, her eyes shining with a hard light.

  The obese, vile demon was standing in the middle of the road, slobbering and drooling over the puppy, which was regretting having a sense of smell two hundred thousand times more acute than that of a human.

  “Hey, fat-ass!” Abby yelled.

  The stout demon turned its big, fat head from its intended snack.

  “Yeah, you with the moobs, I’m talkin’ to you! Put the dog down!”

  “Moobs?” Radella hissed.

  “Man-boobs,” Abby whispered.

  The demon growled deep in its throat. Clearly, Abby had touched on a soft spot – a very soft spot, by the look of it.

  “Goddamn, you’re an ugly one, huh?” Abby said to the demon.

  The demon growled again.

  “Yeah, I’d be pissed off if I were you too,” Abby said, contempt saturating every syllable. “Look at the state of your giant, fat ass. I bet when my father told you that you had to haul ass to Ravencharm it took three trips.”

  The demon dropped the puppy and lumbered around to face Abby. It bared its teeth in a snarl of fury.

  “I’ve got to tell you,” Abby said, “with all those chins, I would’ve been surprised if you’d managed to find your mouth with that puppy the first time around. Do you normally stick a bookmark or something in it so that you can find it?”

  The demon was practically frothing at the mouth now, it was so angry.

  “Ah well,” Abby said, “let me solve all your problems for you. It’s not going to be so much a boob reduction as a full-body one.”

  She thrust her hands out and released the blinding ball of energy that had been building inside her, itching at her palms like something that wanted to break free. Lightning crackled from her fingertips.

  When the smoke cleared, however, the obese demon was still standing. It was, though, now wearing a rather pretty dress in pink with white polka dots, which somewhat emphasized and complemented its man-boobs.

  Abby looked at her hands and then at Radella. “What the hell was that?” she asked.

  “Witches’ brew,” Radella replied. “I did warn you.”

  The demon began to advance, a grim smile across its wide, flabby face, but then it stopped, staring over Abby’s and Radella’s shoulders. Abby turned and saw that Vassago and Casey had turned the corner and were walking down the road toward them.

  “– better call PETA,” Casey was saying, “and let them know that we’re going to be needing some more neglected animals.”

  Vassago, whose face was covered in blood, smirked at this remark from his demonic daughter.

  At that moment, Vassago looked up and saw Abby standing in the street. His smirk of satisfaction morphed instantly into a grimace of disgust.

  Off to one side, Radella moved slowly into the shadows of an alleyway, out of sight and out of mind. The demon that had unexpectedly found itself dressed so prettily turned on its heel and waddled off, clearly not wanting to be seen in drag by its lord and commander.

  “Well, well, well,” said Vassago in the time-honored tradition of villains through the ages, “look what the cat dragged into town – or at least would’ve dragged into town if we’d left any cats alive in this dump.”

  Abby stood rooted to the spot, the unexpected sight of her father and sister strolling side by side having had a profound, and unanticipated, effect on her. Strangely, part of her ached to join them, to be part of their little family dynamic. She swallowed and blinked away the urge to cry.

  “Gods, I had such high hopes for you, Abby,” Vassago said, “and you turned out to be so human, so disappointing.” He spat fire into the road in his disgust.

  Abby said nothing. She simply looked from her hellish father to her sister, who was standing and regarding Abby with cool eyes.

  “All those demons that I sent on the raid to the S.B.A. with you and your sister perished, you know,” Vassago said.

  “I didn’t kill them,” Abby retorted.

  “You say that as if it’s a good thing,” her father replied. “At least if you had killed them I would’ve known you were my daughter. I could have been proud of that. But, no, from what I can ascertain, that pathetic half-angel, Drake, was the one responsible, though I doubt he rigged the bomb. That would’ve been that blue-skinned freak, Hightide.”

  “Well, at least you have one daughter that didn’t let you down so much, huh?” Abby said, dashing away a tear that had escaped her lower lid and rolled down her face.

  “Casey?” Vassago said, glancing at the girl next to him. “She’ll do in a pinch, but she let me down too.” Vassago slapped Casey in the back of the head and sent her sprawling to the tarmac. “She let you escape. It seems that even she couldn’t help but fall short of my mark.”

  Vassago drew himself up to his full and impressive height. Casey got slowly to her feet, shooting her father a venomous glance.

  “Now it looks as if it is up to me to take care of you, to do what your mother should’ve done all those years ago – get rid of you. There’s no place for weakness and fear in the new world that I’m crafting, and you reek of both.”

  With a scream of fury, Abby fired a bolt of energy at her father. Vassago deflected it with a casual wave of his hand. She fired another and another, and both times the demon king refracted the bolts of blinding radiance with as much effort as he might expend in batting away a particularly persistent moth.

  Tears of frustrated anger tracked down Abby’s face as she fired yet another bolt at her father. He deflected it again, and it ricocheted into a glass bus-stop, turning the sheets of glass into molten puddles on the ground.

  Radella made a move to charge out of the alleyway she had been hiding in, but before she could she was seized by a wiry, sulfur-yellow demon that had snuck up behind her.

  Vassago towered over Abby, his fist raised above his head like a hammer of doom. “How I wish you’d never been born,” he spat, blue flame running across his brow. “What a waste of space you are.”

  Abby braced herself for the fatal blow that would snuff her life out like a candle flame in a gale. She refused to look away.

  This is why she was able to see the look of surprise in her father’s eyes, as the great, tall demon jerked and inhaled sharply. Slowly, he rotated on the spot, his massive raised arm dropping behind his back as if he was trying to scratch an unreachable itch.

  Abby’s mouth fell open, as she saw the huge wound that ran from the base of Vassago’s spine to his neck. There was a dagger protruding from the back of his neck, buried deep in the thick muscle. So vicious had been the slice that Abby could make out the white of the demon’s backbone, could see individual vertebrae from where they peeked out of the red skin. As Abby looked at the grotesque knife wound, black blood suddenly welled up and started pouring out of the demon king, hissing where it dripped onto the concrete of the road.

  Vassago gurgled in fury and disbelief when he saw his attacker.

  It was Casey.

  She stood behind him, watching the huge demonic form struggle to keep his feet as the lifeblood poured out of him.

  Vassago tried to speak, but more black blood flowed from his lips.

  Casey gave him a wide, cold smile. “I know what you’re thinking, Daddy,” she said. “You’re thinking, ‘Ah! The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree after all,’ aren’t you?”

  Vassago gurgled once more and then keeled forward, hitting the road with a ground-shaking thud, to lie in the oil slick of his black blood.

  Abby realized that there were numerous demons – drawn to the scene of impending slaughter like moths to a flame – standing around, upon the roofs and clustered in alleyways. They all looked completely shocked.

  Then Casey, in a voice that Abby had never heard before, a voice like
a funeral requiem, pronounced, “As the first daughter of the slain demon lord Vassago, I claim my right to rule as head of the demon hordes!”

  Demons, as a whole, are pack creatures; they need a leader. So it was with remarkable swiftness that they changed their allegiance to Casey. For them it was simple: they had followed Vassago, but Vassago was now dead. Casey was his daughter and she had killed him; therefore they could acknowledge her right to lead through her bloodline and the fact that she had killed the leader of their pack and taken his place.

  The smattering of demons that made up the throng on the street cheered raggedly. Their cheers and hoots of support drew others and soon there was a regular clamor echoing around the center of Ravencharm.

  Casey held her arms aloft for silence. The noise quieted.

  “And, as my first action as ruler,” she said, “I’ll do what all shrewd rulers do when they take office.” She turned to Abby, her smile shrinking slightly, tinged with sadness now. “I’ll get rid of the competition.”

  A ball of flickering purple flame appeared in Casey’s hand.

  At that precise moment, Auran popped into existence right next to her.

  He was holding a length of two-by-four.

  Before Casey, Abby – or anyone – could do anything, Auran swung the length of wood up and cracked Casey hard in the side of the head. She crumpled like a puppet with its strings cut.

  As if someone had pressed play on a paused bit of video, everything started happening at once. The demons screamed and roared with fury, the creatures on the roofs capering about like enraged monkeys as they started to fling bricks and other missiles down at Abby, Auran, and Radella. Radella was still in the clutches of the sulfur-yellow demon but, even as she squirmed in its grip, there was a flash of color and Spiridon rocketed into the demon, sending it crashing into the side of a parked car with such force that the car flipped over.

  And then all was madness as Miss Hightide appeared along with other members of the S.B.A, and the battle was joined.

  Abby, still standing like a statue in the middle of the tornado of violence that had suddenly erupted around her, felt a hand grip her upper arm. She started, but it was just Auran, still holding his trusty two-by-four which he had used to knock out Casey.

  “Couldn’t let you have all the fun, could we?” Auran grinned. He pushed Abby to the side and swung his crude club with the natural technique of the born baseball batter, cleaning out a demon as it rushed past with its eye fixed on Spiridon, who was battling another.

  Abby and Auran adopted a back-to-back position, Auran sporadically making both of them vanish when things got a little hot, much to the consternation and annoyance of the demons trying to get to them.

  Whether the stress and excitement of battle had focused Abby’s mind she couldn’t say. All she knew was that, all of a sudden, her caffeine-boosted magic came to her fingertips with the ease and naturalness of breathing. Crackling, silent lightning flashed from her fingertips, sending a demon juddering and scraping across the road as if he’d been flung by an invisible hand and wrapping him backward around a lamppost with an ugly crunching noise. Another howling beast was stopped in mid-air as if frozen and glowed, for the briefest of moments, a pretty neon blue. Then he dropped to the ground, smoking gently.

  As the crazy, balletic melee continued, Abby became unknowingly separated from Auran. She whirled at the sound of his cry, seeing him flapping at his sleeve, which was now on fire. Behind him, out of his line of sight, a couple of brutish, black-fanged demons were attacking him, flying low like a pair of fighter jets, only three feet or so off of the ground. In a sickening rush, Abby realized that she wasn’t going to be able to take them down in time. The duo, with claws outstretched and moving with the speed two falcons, would cut Auran apart.

  Drake smashed into the two closing demons like an express train. One moment they were there, the next he had cannoned into them, a beefy arm hooked around each of their necks, plowing them into a parked van, which crumpled like an empty can of lemonade.

  Abby suppressed a cheer and helped Auran with his burning sleeve, while off to her left Miss Hightide was battling it out with a trio of demons who were peppering her with balls of liquid fire. Radella had somehow found herself on a roof and was lobbing down cappuccino concussion grenades into the demons that, despite those that fell, seemed to be increasing in number.

  Abby turned at the sound of Drake’s voice.

  “Abby –” he started to say.

  A tongue of flame whipped out from the hand of a demon that’d been playing dead and struck Drake full in the face. The force of the blow catapulted him across the street, bouncing off the asphalt as if he were made of rubber.

  Abby screamed incoherently and dashed toward the big Guardian, who had come to rest right at the feet of Casey, know standing tall with blood running from her hairline.

  Abby threw herself next to Drake’s inert body, patting frantically at the little flames that were licking hungrily at his clothes. Looking down at the unconscious figure, Abby became very aware that Drake wasn’t breathing.

  “No,” she said. “No, no, no, no!” She started to pound on his chest, racking her brain for everything she had ever seen about resuscitation techniques on television. She put the heel of one hand in the middle of Drake’s huge muscular chest, her other hand on top and then began to pump firmly. Her mind was a pool of panic, but also oddly calm; the sounds of the fighting happening all around her seemed to have been muted. After she had done thirty chest pumps, she squeezed Drake’s nose shut, put her mouth over his and forced air into his lungs. She then repeated the process, and each time it failed to draw a response from the big man a chunk of ice dropped into her stomach. She did this four times before Drake suddenly inhaled sharply and started coughing and spluttering.

  Abby sobbed with relief and, as Drake started to breathe again, the din of the battle assaulted her ears once more.

  “Oh, well done,” came Casey’s voice from above her.

  Abby looked up and saw that her sister was clapping.

  “Amazing,” Casey said. “Boy, you must really like this one, Abs.”

  Abby said nothing, just looked back down at Drake, who was blinking up at her in a dazed fashion.

  “Yes, you must really be a fan of this one – and he’s an angel too! You always had good taste. Better than me, anyway. Remember Derek? Gods, there’s one screw I regret.” Casey peered curiously at the moaning figure of the Guardian at her feet. “So this is Drake,” she said and sniffed. “He’s the one that Father battled with over Rotwood Harbor all those years ago, the one being that Father almost – but not really – spoke of with a modicum of respect. He was supposed to be strong.” Casey dug at Drake with her toe, causing him to moan feebly.

  “Leave him alone!” Abby snarled.

  Casey rolled her eyes.

  “Whatever. Have you noticed how these strong, dangerous types with their big, bloated reputations always end up being – well, like dear old Dad? They talk such a good game and then end up drinking too deeply from the cup of their own legend. They get sloppy. Then they die with a knife in the back. The ones who preach and moan and threaten, they do it, Abby, because, secretly, they know that they’re weak.” She cocked her head and looked down at her sister. “You and I, though, Abs, we’re strong. Stronger than them. Stronger than anyone.” Casey laughed and looked around. “I mean, look at me! I’m the fucking head of a demon army, sister! Won’t you come and help me rule? We can be a team, order the world how we want. We could have everything we ever wanted.”

  Abby got to her feet and looked her sister squarely in the eye. “I liked you better when you were living in that shitbox apartment and boning guys like Derek,” she spat, scornfully.

  Casey sighed. It seemed to be a real, heartfelt sigh.

  “Fine,” she said. “Abs, you always were a fucking goody-two-shoes.” Casey squeezed Abby’s shoulder. “So, in the spirit of sisterly love and fairness and cute fluffy
unicorns that shit rainbows, here’s my deal for you. I’ll stop all of this.” She gestured around them, at the demons and Guardians lying dead, bleeding and wounded, at the fire and smoke and screams. “I’ll spare all these people’s lives on the proviso that you take this one.” She pointed down at Drake.

  “What?” Abby said.

  “Kill this big, handsome bastard,” Casey said, “and the rest of the S.B.A. may live. Otherwise…” Casey drew her finger across her throat.

  Abby looked down at Drake. He was in bad shape, but conscious. Alive.

  A dagger tinkled musically as it was dropped in the road next to her. All around the two sisters the fighting had died. Demons, Guardians and S.B.A. members all watched, aware that this was, literally, a life or death moment for all those concerned.

  Drake opened his eyes and looked up at Abby. Just above him, the clamshell necklace that Abby had been given by the mermaid dangled over his face. Drake reached up and pulled Abby to him. He whispered something in her ear.

  With tears streaming down her face, dripping unattractively off the end of her nose, Abby picked up the dagger. Drake nodded and tapped at his chest. The message was clear.

  Abby raised the dagger. She would need to be sure and swift if she was to do this right. Shaking hands would only make a mess of things. In her peripheral vision, she saw Miss Hightide grab hold of Radella as the witch attempted to bolt to Abby’s side.

  Casey smiled, knowing that once Abby had spilled the blood of an innocent, her demon proclivities would take over.

  The dagger came down, a blur of silver.

  Abby’s other hand ripped the necklace off her neck.

  Abby rammed the blade of the dagger into one of the clamshells, twisted it and popped the little mollusk open.

  Inside was a glowing, blue, super-caffeinated coffee bean.

  Before anyone could move, Abby tossed the bean into her mouth, crunched it and swallowed. Then she threw the dagger at her sister’s feet.

  “That,” Casey said, “was a fucking dumb move, Abs. Now you have to watch all your pals die.”

  Before Casey could give an order, though, Abby started to shriek in pain, her arms convulsing and her shoulders shaking. Casey took a step back, indecision and shock written across her features.