A vague memory flitted through my head: spring break, leaving for Colorado with Mom and Dad, and Lisa telling me that she and Katie and Tess were going to get a feel for campus life while I was gone.
Her fists clenched at her side, gathered more air and clenched again. “I was too drunk to say no.”
Brandon’s careless shrug was another assault. “Not my fault you changed your mind.”
I took a furious step toward him, trembling with the temptation to do violence on him, to wipe that indifference off his face. “You unconscionable bastard.” Justin put out a hand, kept me from crossing the line. I glared at him, then turned my anger on Brian next. “You knew about this?”
He avoided my gaze, swaying on his feet. “I drove her home that night. I offered to take her to the police, but she didn’t want to.”
“Why not?” I looked at Lisa. Her whole countenance, her entire being rejected sympathy. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want anyone to know.” Her gaze flicked to Brian, and I glimpsed part of her unreasonable hatred of him. He’d witnessed her weakness.
I grabbed for Lisa’s hand, didn’t let her push me away. “He did wrong, not you.” Brandon snorted, and I ignored him.
Her chest heaved with the effort to control her emotion. “No, I was just stupid and naïve.” Two fates worse than death in Lisa’s book. She turned to Brandon. “All I wanted to do was punish you.”
Two burning yellow sparks flickered in the solidifying darkness. “Lisa,” I cautioned. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Something more stupid than summoning a demon, you mean?”
“No!” Stanley wrapped his arms around the brazier. “It was my idea. Mine. You just helped me, threw some ingredients in the pot.” He stared, transfixed, at the agglomeration of shadow. “And now it’s here, and you’ll see who is in charge.”
“You are
all
bat-shit crazy,” said Brandon with almost as
much horror as contempt. The only time I would ever agree with him. “I’m done listening to this crap.”
The darkness broke free from the corner and spread across the patio in a dank, hell-born fog. “Don’t move,” Justin ordered.
“You are not in charge here!” shrieked Stanley.
The Shadow chortled, less a sound of laughter and more the noise of bugs scuttling across rock.
“Christ on a crutch!” Brandon frantically searched the dark. “What was that?”
Lisa’s face shone white in the moonlight. “I came up with the formula to evoke it. I can control it.”
“I found the brazier.” Stanley backed away from the fog, pressing his back to the wall. “I gave it the list of names.”
“Shut up, Stanley.”
Brian collapsed without warning. Justin turned instinctively to break his fall, and Brandon took his chance. He stepped out of the circle. As soon as his foot broke the line, it happened, more quickly than my mind could completely process.
The haze wound together, spinning into a noxious cyclone that amassed into a malformed approximation of legs and arms and trunk, sulfurous orbs where eyes should be.
Stanley dropped the brazier, three millennia of burnished brass hitting the concrete with a clang that echoed all the way back to its forging. Brandon’s arm jerked suddenly up and back, like a police control hold, and kept going until I heard a crack and a wet pop and a tearing sound, then it fell to his side like a dead thing.
The pain reached his brain and he began to scream. His
other shoulder cracked, the joint splintering. Then the rib cage … Oh God, the sounds it made.
Do not pass out, Maggie. Think! I still clutched the shaker I’d taken from the table. My fingers lost precious time fumbling to unscrew the top. The metal cap bounced on the ground, and I poured the fine white crystals into my hand, until they ran through my fingers.
The screaming stopped.
Lisa fell to her knees, doubled over with horrified sobs. Stanley pressed himself to the wall as if he could crawl through it. Brian lay lax and still, but I could hear his breathing in the grisly silence.
Justin stood slowly. We watched as the Shadow dropped Brandon’s broken body over the terrace wall, like so much rubbish, then turned to face us. It looked almost the same, a mostly human shape with a miasma of smoke clinging to it, trailing as it moved.
“Now we meet in the real world, Magdalena,” said the demon Azmael. “At last face to face.”
i
t knew my name because Lisa did. I hadn’t quite wrapped my head around that, but I didn’t take the time to analyze it now.
I flung the handful of salt. It hissed and fizzled against the creature’s cloaking outer layer, and the acrid smell redoubled until I choked on the burning fumes, my eyes streaming until I couldn’t see to defend myself. That was some deflector shield.
“Don’t be rude,” he—it?—chided. “I’ve waited so long to meet you.”
“Sorry,” I wheezed. “I left my book of demon etiquette
at home.” I don’t know how I found the courage to quip. But I figured collapsing in a gibbering puddle of terror wouldn’t do anyone any good. Least of all me.
Justin’s hand slid into his pocket. I knew he was armed, too, and I drew the demon’s attention to me with another lame verbal sortie. “I gotta tell you, buddy”—Behind it, Justin silently opened his Ziploc bag—“now that you’ve got armpits, I suggest some deodorant. Because … damn.”
“This century is full of wonders.” A tendril of its smoky layer snaked toward me, winding as it came, twisting into a thin rope of shadow. I forced myself not to retreat. “The human capacity for false courage is just one of them.”
The cord snapped around like a bullwhip, and I flinched as it struck Justin’s hand, sending an arc of fine white crystals flying harmlessly across the paving stones. The tentacle lashed again and wrapped around Justin’s throat.
His fingers tore at the blackness without effect. The demon didn’t even look at him, but cocked its head at me. “Was that sporting, Magdalena? No. I think not.” It lifted Justin higher, until he was hanging from the smoky extension, his back bowed as he tried to find purchase. He couldn’t even draw enough breath to choke.
“Let him go!”
“Drop your weapon.” I tossed my carton to the ground, next to Lisa whose fingers twitched, just barely. Justin made tiny, gasping half-coughs, and his grip on the demon noose began to slide away. “Now ask
nicely
.”
Slowly, as if forcing my stubborn knees to bend, I took a supplicant’s position. I couldn’t read the creature’s expression—I could only see its eyes through the concealing black miasma—but I sensed its surprised pleasure.
Arrogant son of a bitch. “Please,” I said, my fingers creeping across the stone until they met cold brass. Lisa’s hand inched to the carton of salt. “Let … him … Go!”
On my word, Lisa and I moved together. She snapped the canister up, throwing the contents across Justin and the demon-tentacle that held him. I lurched to my feet with the brazier, and slammed the metal with all my might and momentum into the monster’s amorphous head.
Solid was a relative thing. The weapon clanged, I felt the impact up my arm. Acid yellow eyes dripped like the yokes of two rotten eggs, then congealed and rolled back up to where they belonged. Where the salt struck, its smoky extension sizzled and evaporated; Justin fell to the ground as the creature reeled back, making an animal squeal of pain.
“Close the circle,” I shouted at Lisa. The demon had stumbled backward into the broken ring. “Close it!”
Lisa jumped forward and poured salt over the gaps. I felt a strange subliminal buzz as the line became complete again, a scant instant before the demon collected itself.
I hurried to Justin, who pushed himself up, wheezing painfully. Pulling loose his tie and opening his collar, I saw his skin was blistered and bruised, but his breathing eased quickly. “You all right?”
“Yeah. Help me up.” He staggered to his feet, squaring his shoulders as we turned to face the trapped demon.
“Oh Lisa,” it said, disappointment in its tone. “You had such potential. That one”—it gestured to the unconscious Stanley—“was just a clown. I had high hopes for you.”
“That’s enough, Azmael.” I stepped forward, speaking the creature’s name aloud for the first time, bringing it into the open and reducing its psychological power.
It hissed at me, eyes burning brighter for a moment. “Your bravado annoys me. You will be very afraid before I’m done with you, Magdalena.”
The demon knew the power of a name, too. “You’re trapped, Ass-my-el. And I’m going to punch your return ticket.”
A tendril of its cloaking layer gestured carelessly to Lisa and Justin. “I will kill these two first, to give you great pain.”
I raised the brazier like a shield. “It would give you a lot of pain, too. I know you’re solid now.”
“Not that solid.” Its voice skittered with amusement, like dry, multilegged things in the dark.
The creature gave a heat-mirage shimmer. A layer of its swathing haze pulled away, like a wet peel of sunburned skin, and fell to the ground in a congealed lump. The blob twitched and writhed, as the demon shed another layer to plop beside the first. Clump after clump became semisolid until the imprisoning circle was filled with contorting masses of ectoplasm, heaving and struggling to be born into something vile.
I stepped instinctively back; beside me, Justin went taut with the same revulsion that held me transfixed. Stripped of his outer coating, Azmael looked as though someone with no real understanding of human form had tried to sculpt it out of dry and filthy earth. Eyes sat in sockets without lids and the nose recalled the vestige holes on a mummified corpse. And when the misshapen mouth moved to speak, my skin crawled at the
wrongness
of it.
“Do you not like my inner form, Maggie Quinn?” the demon taunted me. “Perhaps you liked me better as a shadow?”
“I certainly liked you better before you could talk.”
The pseudo-face showed little more emotion than the veiling layers of smoky ectoplasm, but it managed anger pretty well. “And I prefer you quivering with fear.”
The first Hell-blob leapt up. It wasn’t done cooking, but it had too many legs, too many eyes, and its gaping maw seemed impossibly large, impossibly full of ragged, sharklike rows of teeth. The jaws snapped; I stumbled back, even as the thing hit an invisible barrier at the circle’s limit.
“What are those things?” Lisa stood at one shoulder, Justin at the other.
“Trapped,” I said, relieved, but not entirely. The beasts pawed the ground, a distorted hunting pack, growling with foul, sooty breath.
Azmael stood in the center of its minions. “It has been a pleasure doing business with you, Lisa.” The beasts at its stubby feet snarled and sniffed the air. “I’m grateful to you for opening the door for me. The tasks you and the boy set before me allowed me to gain a liberty I haven’t had for centuries.”
“I never wanted—” Lisa began.
“I knew what you wanted better than you knew yourself.” It made a tsking noise, almost droll. “Yet you give me no thanks.”
I picked up one of the discarded cartons of salt. “I hope you enjoyed your leave, Smokey, because your pass is about to be revoked.”
A derisive, dismissive snort. “I think not.” The sulfurous eyes turned to me, anticipation making them swell. “You were right about this much, Maggie Quinn. I am
hungry after so long without a solid form. And your kind is a wealth of rampant emotion.”
With a certain drama, it crouched and brushed clear a section of the white line. Its hand smoked and blistered and stank, but remained intact. “Oh, that does sting.”
The pack of demon-spawn slipped their invisible leash, poured out of the gap. They scrabbled on phantom claws past our horrified eyes, buffeting us as they rounded the corner and headed for the smorgasbord of teenagers dancing in short-lived blissful ignorance.
“Oops!” said Lisa. At least, the voice was hers, but the tone was Azmael’s taunting humor. She turned, and I recoiled from the otherness in her eyes. “You’d better get going, Supergirl.” She reached out and took the salt that I cupped, forgotten, in my hand, and let it run out of her fingers. “I think you know where to find us, if you survive.”
Her body turned, walked away, stiff-jointed like a puppet. I took a step after her, but Justin caught my arm.
“Leave her.”
“But Lisa …”
“Is one person.” He pulled me insistently toward the front of the hotel. “We have to stop those things, or they’ll kill everyone inside.”
Stanley hadn’t roused from his faint, and Brian was still unconscious. I didn’t know if Brandon was even alive. But those demon-dogs were going to cut a swath through the senior class unless we stopped them.
I gave up arguing and ran, still clutching the brazier, leaving behind the fallen, and racing to save those I could.
i
wondered how the beasts would get inside, since they didn’t have arms to open the doors. As we rounded the corner, though, we saw the last two creatures squeezing through the crack between the doors.
“They’re not solid,” I said in relief. “They can’t really—”
The last Hell-dog launched itself at me with a cougar-like scream. Pure reflex jerked the brazier up as the quite solid weight of the monster sent me sprawling to the ground. I screamed, too, as razor teeth hammered at the brass, trying to get through to my throat.
Justin kicked the beast aside. It immediately flung itself back at us, but I whacked the snarling thing with the brazier
and it exploded in a cloud of infinitesimally small dropules of the primordial goo. Almost instantly they began to gloam together and rebuild themselves.
“Semisolid, I’d say.” Justin pulled me up from the ground and away from the quickly growing Hell-blob. “Keep that weapon handy.”
We each yanked open one of the glass doors. Terrified screams poured from the ballroom. By my quick and dirty reckoning, the monster-per-kid ratio lay in our favor; only it wasn’t how many people they killed, but how much terror and pain they inflicted, feeding Azmael’s hunger.
There was nothing to do but wade into the carnage. I swung my big brass bowl of kick-ass at a demon-dog that had pinned a boy from my chemistry class. The monster burst into a satisfying, if temporary, wet mist. Grabbing a napkin from the nearest table I handed it to the guy. “Keep pressure on the bleeding.”