Mysteria Nights

by P. C. Cast

“Underground? What are they—part gopher?”

  From outside, Bubba yipped in frustration. Apparently, the rodent had indeed disappeared down its hole.

  Harmony tugged on the hem of her blouse to recover some of the modesty she’d thrown to the wind. To forestall any further interruptions of dinner, of kisses, or of anything else, she shoved an empty chair in front of the dog door. Then she plopped down in her chair, clasped her hands under her chin, and whispered a quick and silent prayer to compose herself before saying grace. “Thank you, Lord, for the bounty we are about to eat. Thank you for bringing Damon here to help me.” And thank you for making him the most amazing kisser in the whole wide world! “Amen.”

  For the first time in her presence, Damon murmured “amen,” too. It sounded rusty on his lips, as if he’d not had much practice with prayer. It didn’t trouble her; she’d seen inside his soul. He was cleaner and purer inside, where it counted, than some pastors she’d run across.

  “Sometimes, lass, I dinna know if I have brought you help or harm.”

  She shook her head in confusion.

  “Your thanks to God,” he explained. “You gave thanks for my help, such as it is.” He waved at the chair blocking the dog door. “It seems I have brought you more harm than good.”

  “You mean the rats? You can’t blame yourself for that. We probably stirred them up when we cleaned out the hayloft.”

  He made a scoffing, grumbling sound in his throat.

  “We’ll get rid of them tomorrow. Besides, like I told you, they don’t bother me that much. They bother my mama, though, so as long as you eradicate them before she gets here, I’m happy.”

  “I will try,” he said with such pained seriousness that she put down her fork and knife to stare at him. “I’ll do everything I can, lass. Everything. Until then, you must promise me never to be alone with them. Never fight them without me at your side.”

  “They’re not monsters, Damon,” she said with a laugh. “They’re rats!”

  He laughed weakly.

  “And I know you’ll slay them for me, brave knight, right?”

  “Aye, fair maiden,” he said with more vehemence than what seemed to fit the task. “’Tis my job to slay the beasties.”

  Nevertheless, through the rest of the supper, Damon acted edgy. Peering around the kitchen as he ate, he squinted at the corners, studied crevices, kept watch on the dog door she’d blocked.

  When they’d finished, they didn’t linger over conversation. Damon appeared too distracted. Harmony walked him to the back door. The air was warm for nighttime in these parts. Distant thunder echoed from somewhere over the Rockies. “It’s going to be a hot one tomorrow,” she observed, trying to act casual though she was acutely aware of his body so close to hers.

  He turned to her. “Thank you for tonight.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Aye, your pleasure will always be mine, lass.”

  Harmony gulped. Sigh. He had no idea. . . .

  He stood there for a moment, studying her with a look that pingponged between desire and regret, then, chanting “Good, good, good” under his breath, he bid her good night as any respectable gentleman would a nun and walked away.

  It was all she could do not to follow him back to the hayloft.

  Behave, Harmony. Although she wasn’t sure how much longer she’d be able to do so.

  Pressing a cool glass of water against her cheek, she watched him go, wondering just what it was going to take to bring out the devil in Damon.

  Ten

  The next Sunday the men began trickling into church to see where the women were going. With every passing week more townsfolk came, until Harmony had to ask Damon to build her some more pews.

  He did so gladly, though it took him away from his pet project, the installation of an expansive automatic sprinkler system surrounding the church. “The beasties don’t like the water,” he’d explained.

  He must be right: ever since the water had been coming on every night, there hadn’t been any more problems with rodents in the house. And as a side benefit, the lawn looked great, too. Unfortunately, they now had a glut of water-loving garden slugs to deal with. But at least those hadn’t tried crashing dinner. Yet.

  It was Sunday, T-minus one week and a day until her family invaded Mysteria, and Harmony was in the midst of delivering her sermon to a full house. Standing a few careful steps outside the halfopen door, her loyal knight Damon stood guard, his arms folded over the end of a pitchfork as he leaned against the outside wall. Although he never stepped foot inside the church—“’tis not right,” he’d insist so mournfully—he always listened carefully to her weekly message. Often she’d work in little things she hoped might help him escape his dark, mysterious past, something he remained reluctant to share. “I wasna good,” he’d say in his brogue. Yet, without a criminal record anyone could unearth—and Jeanie had never stopped trying—how bad could he have been?

  No sooner than Harmony conjured the thought than an unseasonably cold breeze whooshed inside the church. “Bad, bad,” the wind seemed to whisper, a crackly, desiccated noise like the scratch of crinkled brown leaves on the sidewalk in autumn. With one hand fisted in the fabric of her cotton skirt to keep it from flying up, she tried to snatch back her papers from the whirlwind, but it only blew harder, whipping her hair around her face. “Evil,” it hissed, drawing out the word. “Evil demon, baaaaad.”

  Then the wind surged in velocity, gushing between the pews, tossing off hats and whipping hair, until it hit Harmony full on and whirled around her like her own personal tornado, scattering the pages of her sermon. “Bad . . . bad . . . bad . . .”

  Something pressed in on her mind, bitter, distasteful, like a taste of bile. She mentally flung it away. “The basement’s unlocked,” she shouted to her dispersing flock. “It may be a tornado. Get inside, take shelter!” But the wind erased her words.

  “Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad,” it rasped.

  Stay away. Harmony shut her eyes and shoved. She didn’t know what it was that she heard in the wind, only that whenever it touched her mind, she shuddered, repulsed.

  “Reverend!” Jeanie Tortellini tried to assist her but the wind blew the woman backward.

  “I’m okay!” But was she? She had to squint against the whistling gale in order to see. Damon was no longer at the door. Knowing him, he was outside helping others. “Find Damon. You two make sure everyone’s okay. Get them in the basement if you have to.” Barking the orders, the blind trust, it reminded her of when a missile had struck outside the field hospital in Iraq and she and the doctors were trapped inside. “Go, Jeanie! You know what to do. I’ll be right there.”

  Jeanie ran off. As Harmony struggled as if swimming upstream to follow, she glimpsed Dr. Fogg, as calm as could be, observing the scene like the scientist-physician he was, jotting down notes on his Blackberry as he evacuated the building along with the rest of the townspeople.

  Finally, Harmony fought her way outside to the porch. Outside, shadows arced and swooped. Birds. First a rodent invasion, now a bird invasion?

  The wind subsided the moment Harmony exited the church, as if it had tried at first to keep her from doing so before giving up.

  That’s a weirder thought than the talking wind. No more of that, okay?

  “I’m sane,” she muttered. “Really I am. I just live in Mysteria, that’s all—” She froze on the top step, her mouth falling open. The scene before her was so inexplicably impossible that her mind almost couldn’t process it.

  What at first glance she thought were birds weren’t. “Flying monkeys?” she whispered. Good heaven, they were! From their little gold-trimmed suits to their Dixie-cup hats, they were replicas of the winged assistants from the movie The Wizard of Oz.

  As if that weren’t bad enough, Damon stood in the eye of the furry hurricane, fighting back as if the whole thing were personal.

  Eleven

  Damon swung his pitchfork at the flock of subdemons. “Be gone! Back
to your Hell hole!” But with his powers reduced to what he could conjure as a mortal man, he could do little more than issue threats.

  The subdemons had started emerging from a Hell hole in Harmony’s vegetable garden while she was preaching. More and more of them. Damon had tried to get them all stuffed neatly back down the pit before church was over. He could turn on the sprinklers, aye, and wash them all away, but what a muddle it would make, melting, sizzling subdemons everywhere. And how would he explain the little articles of clothing left behind? Nay, ’twas better to scoop them up by the pitchforkful and shove them back to Hell before Harmony emerged from the church.

  He’d actually gotten ahead of the game when the winds began. Filled with dread, Damon turned around, a wriggling subdemon, caught by the collar, still dangling from his pitchfork as townspeople poured out of the church.

  Hell’s bells. He should have known Lucifer would not let him win, would keep trying to sabotage the trust Damon had built in Harmony. For if Damon were to win over Harmony Faithfull, Lucifer would lose. Over the past few weeks, the Devil had shown no signs of giving up on his quest to assure the defeat of his ex–demon high lord.

  How many incidents such as this had there been over the past months? Too many to count. First there’d been the goblin in the barn, then the minitrolls in Harmony’s kitchen. Now this, a flock of subdemons in the middle of the lawn in broad daylight on a Sunday morning, the most brazen violation yet! Well, except for the naked incubus he’d found sneaking through Harmony’s bedroom window one night, but that may have been only a coincidence, the wrong window on the wrong night for the unfortunate dark creature.

  Damon redoubled his efforts to get rid of the subdemons, but they swarmed. He’d seen a lot of scenes during his long years working for the Devil, but few as chaotic as this one unfolding on the front lawn of Mysteria Community Church. Townsfolk ran every which way, complicating his efforts to chase the beasties from the churchyard. Damon attended to the subdemons while simultaneously trying to joke about the infestation to impart calm to the crowd. Even for Mysteria, this was a strange happening, although many of the locals took it in stride. It would not be so in any other town.

  Competing with the subdemons’ raucous noise were the howls of the O’Cleary great-grandchildren, who ran wild like little demons themselves. Damon fancied that he’d like a family of his own someday, but two minutes spent with the O’Cleary offspring was almost enough to convince a man to drop all thoughts of procreation.

  And then there was Dr. Fogg. His hair windblown, his tie whipping in the breeze, he pushed spectacles up the bridge of his elegant nose with one hand as he crouched down low, attempting to entice a subdemon with a broken Saltine cracker. Consorts with elves, that one does, Damon thought. The same with the sheriff. Damon could smell an elf a mile away, and even with his demon’s senses almost gone, he knew well what the doctor and especially Harmony’s friend Jeanie did in their spare time. Elves, too sexy for their pointy ears, they were. The town jail stank of them.

  Damon knocked several more subdemons unconscious and dragged them to the Hell hole, shoving them back into the earth. “Tell your master his efforts are in vain. He’ll never destroy me. He’ll never turn me back the way I was before!” A derisive sound came up through the Hell hole, like a deep belch. The warm, moist breeze ruffled Damon’s hair. ’Twas Lucifer himself answering him.

  Damon’s lips pulled back over his teeth. “Are you such a coward that you send your minions to do your dirty work? Why don’t you come out and fight me yourself?” Damon raised the pitchfork. “Come on. Come up here and fight like a man. I may be mortal, but I’m ready for ye.”

  “Damon, who are you talking to?”

  At the sound of the familiar voice, Damon’s heart plunged into his stomach.

  Harmony sounded poised at the razor’s edge of hysteria.

  “Dinna be afraid, lass!” With a sweep of the pitchfork, he took out several of the more brazen of the subdemons before her eyes, her wide, brown, disbelieving eyes. Some of the creatures lay dazed on the ground. A few crawled, pulling their broken bodies toward the Hell hole in the garden. Damon puffed up his chest and assured her, “They’ll soon be gone.”

  “Gone . . .”

  “Aye.” That’s when he noticed how brightly her eyes glowed, how her lips were so pale and tight, contrasting with her flushed cheeks. But what he noticed most of all was the shovel gripped in her white-knuckled hands, as if she meant to clang it against the side of his head. Nay, she was not frightened, not at all; she was as furious as the wind that had whipped her long hair and skirt only moments before.

  Harmony’s glare intensified. “Gone, like those so-called rats you found in my kitchen?”

  Instinct told him no answer he gave would be the right one.

  “Gone where, Damon? To the south, maybe? Isn’t that where you told me you were from, Damon? Farther south than I’ve ever been? You weren’t talking about Mexico, were you?” Harmony ducked as a subdemon swooped low overhead. Then she advanced on him, her nostrils flaring. “Were you!”

  Damon hesitated, the pitchfork raised in midair as his heart sank. A thousand alternate explanations came to mind, but with those excuses, would he not be slipping back into the lies that so characterized his previous life?

  “Nay,” he said gently. “I was not talking about Mexico. But I can explain. I . . .” Say it. He jerked his pitchfork at the sky. “I was one of them.”

  Harmony’s eyes went wide. “A flying monkey?”

  “Nay, lass! I was a demon.”

  Twelve

  There was a terrible pause. Then Harmony asked, “A demon demon?”

  “Aye, a demon demon.”

  “This is the truth, Damon. You swear?”

  “I do.”

  Harmony made a strangled sound and raised her shovel high. For a moment, Damon was sure she’d whack him in the head, but she struck at a low-flying subdemon instead, and then another as they wheeled overhead, taunting him.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Clang. A subdemon fell to earth, another victim of Harmony’s vicious swing. “Why didn’t you?”

  “I did! That very first day. In the kitchen. Ye thought I was lying.” As she stared at him, he saw her gaze turn inward and knew she remembered. “But ye took me in all the same. Deny it you might, lass, but ye are as close to an angel as I’ve ever encountered.”

  She snorted. “What do you know about angels? You’re a demon.”

  “Was a demon, lass. I was fired. Terminated without benefits.” Crash. Thwap. A little red hat sailed down to the grass. “Benefits. Oh, please. Hell has a retirement plan?”

  “They did, once,” he muttered. “No longer, it seems.”

  “Is nothing sacred anymore?” Her sarcasm was as sharp as a blade. “Well, there’s always social security.” Thump. Another subdemon dropped from the sky.

  Water erupted from the grass, engulfing them in a drenching cold spray. Shrieking accompanied the deluge, but human shrieking this time. Semihuman, Damon qualified. Mrs. O’Cleary’s great-grandchildren had somehow turned on the sprinklers. Any subdemon unlucky enough to be hit hissed and sizzled, screaming as they dissolved into little piles of doll-sized clothing.

  “Who turned the sprinklers on?” Jeanie Tortellini ran across the churchyard, yelling, trying to regain control. The preteen Desdaine triplets, Withering, Scornful, and Derisive, whooped in delight. “How come no one’s watching these kids?” she demanded of the parents who were wisely hiding behind some lawn chairs.

  “Wait!” Harmony yelled to the woman. “Leave the water on! It’s . . . it’s killing them.” She swung her glare around to Damon. “Just like what happened to the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz. She melted. You knew this all along; you prepared for it by installing these sprinklers. And here I thought you were just a fan of irrigation!”

  At that moment, Damon again understood that the best answer was no answer.

  The lawn turned into a sea of mud. Childr
en squealed with laughter as they grabbed the sprinkler heads and aimed water at the subdemons. Harmony’s pumps made sucking noises. She snarled and threw her shoes one at a time at the creatures, striking one and knocking off its little red-and-gold hat. A jet of water clanged off the handle of Damon’s pitchfork. He lost his balance. Harmony tried to steady him, but she slipped. They went down hard in the mud.

  He turned to find her lips an inch away from his. His body was wrapped around hers as they lay sprawled on the ground, the same body that now reacted rather briskly to that pleasant discovery. He’d come to enjoy the sensations of his new body—advantages to being mortal that he’d never realized. But also disadvantages, one of which was poor timing, he decided quite quickly upon noting the fury contorting Harmony’s face. “I should have been happy talking to the dog!”

  Damon shook his head. “I dinna follow, lass . . .”

  “I should have been satisfied with the simple things, the solitude, but no, I had to want more. A full house on Sundays.” She gulped several breaths. “But what did I get? Demons and flying monkeys!” She threw down the shovel.

  Her face was streaked with mud. He reached up to wipe her cheek with his thumb, but she recoiled as if she feared him. Feared what he was. He couldn’t blame her.

  “I kissed you, Damon!” she accused. “I kissed you!”

  Aye, and he’d not stopped thinking about it, either.

  “I cooked for you. I bought you underwear. I . . . I wanted to make love with you!”

  You could have heard a pin drop in the sudden silence. Damon wasn’t sure which one of them looked more shocked by her confession.

  Then there was a loud whoosh. Water gushed out of a hijacked sprinkler and, aimed by mischievous little hands, ricocheted off a metal fence post, zinged overhead, and clipped off one of the chains holding the Mysteria Community Church banner over the church door. As if in surrender, the banner slid off the wall.

  A fitting end to a terrible day.

  Harmony watched the sign fall. Looking as if she were about to cry, she stopped herself and dashed the heel of her palm across her eyes. Muddy water streamed from her hair and dribbled down her ruined dress.