Authors: Rain Oxford
“Shut it down,” I said.
Before the demon could catch on, Mordon shifted his
eyes, teeth, and nails back to normal. The dragon tattoo appeared over his
neck, just above the collar of his shirt. I tore into the void, just enough to
make a crack. Just a small opening into Hell. Small enough for a demon anyway…
“Kick him out, Rojan.”
The demon was expelled more simply than in the
movies, and thankfully nothing like in
The Exorcist
. It wasn’t really
visual. Fortunately, I had a god’s magic and training, because I would have
missed it otherwise. I would have been too slow… but I wasn’t.
In the instant that the demon was between my friend’s
body and the void, I created a negatively charged time field around the demon
and my friend. If anyone else were to stand beside me, anyone who did not
control Iadnah energy, they would not have seen those in the field. However,
for me, they slowed. That gave me the precious moment that I needed to close
the void, which was outside the field. I simultaneously collapsed the time
field and created a universal bubble around the demon. The bubble was exactly
the same as the bubble I had created around Mordon, Sammy, and myself to
transport us through the void, except this was a bubble of universe… inside the
universe. Built of raw Iadnah energy and meant to protect the occupants from
the destructive void, there was no shattering it.
The bubble filled with smoke and I could see the
face, the true form of the demon within. That was a face I would see in my
nightmares.
“Creative.” Regivus’s sudden appearance was
completely unexpected. The equally sudden appearance of Tiamat, Erono, Enki,
Madus, Araxi, and a god I had not yet met, was not. “I have to say you never
cease to astonish.”
I shrugged and went to help Mordon off of the ground.
He appeared to be in pretty good condition for someone who was just possessed
by a demon that burned bodies. If he were anything but a dragon, we would all
be dead. My best friend and his dragon would probably never understand just how
important they were.
“What do you plan to do with him?” Araxi asked me.
I considered the gods. “Why are you asking me? Isn’t
divine punishment better left to the divine?”
“You should probably start considering yourself one
of us,” Enki said. I gave him my best look of disbelief, and he smirked. “We
know you never wanted to be a god, but you have the power, so you might as well
have the guidance.”
“I think he may not need it,” Tiamat said, looking
worried over the demon-incasing bubble.
That was the last thing I wanted; for her to feel I
had become too powerful.
As the powerful energy stirred inside me, ready for
any command, I knew it was too late to restrict it. I was powerful. It was too
late to go back, but I would have done anything I could not to lose the goddess
that I loved.
I didn’t realize that my chest was hurting, or even
that I had turned away from her, until her arms wrapped around me. “I am not
upset with you, Dylan, or with how powerful you have become. I am only upset
that you were in so much danger.”
“You worried about me being too powerful before,” I
argued.
“My brothers didn’t know you and I was afraid they
would react worse to your power. I had no idea you could actually get through
their hard heads and stubborn stupidness.”
“Do you call everyone stupid?” I asked, shocked. “I
thought I was special.”
“You are, my love, in more ways than I can count…
unfortunately. I have realized that I cannot always be there to protect you, so
you need to be able to defend yourself. As much as I may dislike that you need
to be self-reliant, I am glad you can be, which you have proven many times over
the last week. Now, as you are the one who trapped the beast, you should decide
what to do with him.”
“I want to send him back to the void and make sure he
can never return. Is there a demon jail or something?” I asked.
“Not a jail, per se, but a warden. Janus is waiting
for your call. However, he cannot take the beast as it is now.”
“It needs a corporeal form,” I concluded.
“Yes, that would be the easiest method, and the one
with the least chance of escape. However, if we show you how to do it, you
would be able to create people. Can you handle that?” she asked.
It was magic I never intended to use. “Wouldn’t it be
better if
you
did it?”
“Our magic will not go through the barrier, so the
spell must be done at the exact instant that you drop it, or the beast will
escape,” she said.
“Okay. Tell me how to do it.”
She put her hands on my shoulders. “As a demon, he
will try to appear in the most terrifying form he can, so the last thing you
want to do is picture someone who terrified you before.” Even as she said it, I
pictured my second step-father. “You need to create the image of a new person.”
“I’m not that creative,” I said. She gave me a
disbelieving look. “Not with faces, because I don’t really notice faces that
much. I couldn’t actually describe Mordon to you without looking at him. I can
barely describe myself.”
“Then picture someone you feel deserves to die a
horrible and painful death,” she said. I looked over at Regivus, who still resembled
Alec, but it was my second step-father, again, that I thought of.
Alec, the first man my mother married, drank too
much, swore too much, and beat me too much. He was extremely suspicious and
easily angered. If that wasn’t enough, he was stealing from my mother. When I
tried to tell her that he was stealing, he shot me right in front of her. I
woke up in the hospital and was immediately sent to boarding school. She said
that she couldn’t look at me after what I accused her husband of doing.
When she found out that he was in fact, stealing from
her
and
cheating on her with a fifteen-year-old, she left him. Not a
month after the divorce was final, she married Harvey.
Harvey was my nightmare. I met him a few months after
their wedding for a visit because he said he had wanted to meet me. He didn’t
have a beer-belly, he spoke with class, and he wasn’t in a gang. Instead, it
was his smile that warned me away.
His smile was not fake… it was worse. My mother had
always been of mind that I was useless and dumb, but when he was around, she
seemed to despise me. That should have been my first clue, but I just thought
she was still mad about what happened with her ex-husband.
He made her bring me home and put me back into public
school. I wanted to believe I would finally have a real childhood, but even
when he tried to take me fishing or to football games, all that stuff other
kids’ parents were doing, it felt wrong. Harvey would stare at me hard enough
that I could sense it, even when I slept. He would hug me, not any differently
than another parent, but it gave me chills. One time he told me that my mother
treated me wrong and that he should take me somewhere away from her. I
convinced my mother to send me back to boarding school and I tried to find
somewhere else to be during holidays.
One day, after two years, I was called to the
headmaster’s office. Harvey was there. He told me he needed to take me home
and, having no proper excuse, I went with him. After he made me tell him all
about how I was doing in school, I finally got him to tell me what was going
on. He said we were moving to a better house in a small town, that I wouldn’t
have to be away at school anymore. He went on and on about how great the house
was and how many acres there were for hunting.
When we stopped for gas, I went into the bathroom,
borrowed a cell phone, and called my mother. It was my aunt who answered and
explained to me that my mother was in the hospital after her husband beat her
nearly to death and left her bleeding out on the kitchen floor.
I hitched a ride back to Houston and took buses back
home. When my mother came home, she was furious that I had managed to ruin two
of her marriages. She said I didn’t want her to be happy and she wished she had
dropped me off at an orphanage when I was a baby.
“Go with that,” Divina said, having read my mind.
“Sending the demon disguised as him to the void should be therapeutic.”
I didn’t actually want to face him again, though. He
had never hurt me. I never wanted to see him again, and I hated what he did to
my mother, but I didn’t feel the need to seek revenge. I would rather just
never see the man again.
Still, it was a face I could clearly picture in my
head, a face I watched out for in crowds. I turned back to the fog-filled
bubble of trapped demon and focused my mind on Harvey. “Okay, what now?” I
asked. I glanced back at her when she didn’t answer and she looked unsure.
“I have never described it before.”
Regivus sighed. “This is why we should all teach him,
not just you.”
He approached us and when I turned to him, he put his
hand on my forehead. I felt like I was shocked with a high dose of electricity,
a drearily familiar sensation. What was left when the feeling faded was new.
Divina caught me as I fell, then let me go gently when the static shocked her.
I pulled myself back to my feet before the new
knowledge could assimilate in my head, and I wished it never did. To know the
human body as a god did was… disappointing. It was so simple, so basic. There
was nothing special about it from a god’s view. I understood why Divina
couldn’t explain it; no living person should see the human race as the gods
did. They thought of humans like we thought of mice… disposable, a little
dirty, and good for experimentation.
Creating a human body was no more amazing than
picking out a breed of dog; each god had their preferences and needed one that
fit their lifestyle. There was nothing sophisticated about using the malleable
energy to create flesh and bone. No personal connection.
I collapsed the bubble and created the corporeal body
around the demon simultaneously. Instead of making it human-compatible, as
Regivus had taught me, I made it heat-resistant. The demon could have lived in
it just as long as if he had taken Sammy. And why did I give him everything he
wanted? Because I may have forgiven Harvey for causing me the fear he did, but
the demon hurt Mordon and scared Sammy. I wanted to hurt him back.
The demon breathed uneasily as he adapted to his new
flesh cage that looked so familiar to me. I realized that I had never really
gotten over what happened, because I never knew what would have happened when
Harvey got me to that house. Divina was right; one way or another, this would
be therapeutic.
Divina gaped at me with wide eyes. “What are you
trying to do?” she asked me.
I shrugged. “I don’t know yet, I’m just going to go
with it.”
“You do that a lot.”
“It always works out,” I answered honestly. More and
more since becoming a Guardian, I acted on my plans before I knew what the plan
was.
The demon was incredibly powerful, but in the
temporary bodies it had to use nominal energy, so I always had the advantage.
In this body, the demon was free to use its natural resources; it created
energy. It was not nominal or Iadnah energy, so I had to guess that it was
demon energy.
As the demon built its magic, I decided to find out
for sure; I reached into the demon with my Iadnah energy and forced the new
energy out. Stripping him of his power looked like it was extremely painful for
the demon. Too bad.
The energy reacted with my magic. While it was more
powerful than nominal energy, it was easily overpowered by Iadnah energy, but
only because my magic was so well-controlled. I could feel the stares from the
gods behind me. To strip any being of magic was a last resort. To actually give
the demon back his natural abilities, only to take it away immediately was
cruel and unusual punishment.
I helped Mordon to his feet for the second time and
pushed him behind Divina. The demon had hurt Mordon and dragged him into the
void. He would suffer more before I let him go.
“Why Sammy?” I asked the demon.
Finally he grinned. “He was powerful enough to live
in forever, but young enough that I could easily crush his soul. Then you took
him and ran and I enjoyed the chase.”
His answer was predictable and his words were steady,
but his eyes were lying. Harvey was impossible to read, but looking into the
demon’s light brown eyes, I could read him. I created this body just a little
less than perfect, and it was paying off.
“That’s not it. You spent weeks searching for him on
Earth. I know you said you could smell him, but then why did you not find him
sooner?”
His grin faltered. “I was just---”
“You could smell him, I know, and you could track him
after you found him. Someone led you to him, and it wasn’t us.” Staring right
into his eyes as I said it, I knew I was right. I could feel it. “Who told you
about Sammy? Who knew about his power and led you to him?” He turned his eyes
to one of the gods behind me and without moving, I sent out a lash of
electricity. It was not enough to injure him as a demon, just to regain his
attention. “I’m talking to you. Answer me.” I was purposely talking down to
him.
He was trying to divert attention, to cause doubt,
but the gods who stood behind me would not have led the beast to Sammy. I would
have known. If it felt good jerking around the demon who chased Mordon and I
across the universe, who looked like the man who beat my mother, I would never
say.
“You have to stop with these revelations, it’s making
my head hurt,” Divina said. “Nobody can keep anything from you because you will
figure it out at the worst possible time.”
“I know how we can both benefit from this.” The
demon’s eyes darted from me, to Divina, and back. “You could kill me, send me
back to the void, but you could also let me live. Open the gates between the
worlds. It is the natural way. The books are unnatural. Open the gates and
people could travel freely between the worlds.”