The Demon's Librarian

by Lilith Saintcrow

  They came, a solid pack of twelve. Twelve black-smoke spider shapes flitting through the streetlamp-scarred dark, followed by a slightly slower, more solid-looking humanoid that moved from shadow to shadow. There was a flash of red eyes, and Ryan’s hand curled around a knifehilt. Karhanic and a group of twelve, a full hunting pack. Goddammit.

  They called kaharnac “squeezers,” because of their preferred method of taking prey. They weren’t as loathsome as the skornac, most squeezers looked like very tall, very pale humans with long, soft, grasping fingers and oddly smooth noseless faces. But they were very, very good hunters, and even with the rain blurring Chess’s trail they still might catch onto her. She wasn’t exactly inconspicuous.

  He watched, barely breathing, his attention taut and focused, as the pack swirled down the street, taking no more notice of the high-rise than of any other building. Unfortunately, that meant nothing; they could be on an errand or simply out nosing around. On the other hand, the low, fluid, smoky shapes of the demon hounds weren’t sparking or fizzing with excitement, and that was something.

  The group vanished down the street, and Ryan strained his preternatural senses. They kept moving; he heard the faint chilling silver stroke of an ultrasonic hunting cry. Whatever prey they were after tonight, it wasn’t his Golden.

  The flare of possessiveness no longer surprised him. My Golden. As if I have any right to think that. Water fell from the skies, steady weeping that had probably saved them all by erasing the smell of a potential from the air.

  “Squeezer. And a pack. Was it a full pack?” Paul sounded calm, but a stray breath of wind brought the smell of adrenaline through the rain. The sound of Paul’s pulse thudding frantically reminded him of Chess. Ryan’s nose wrinkled slightly.

  “It was a full pack,” he confirmed. I hope you’re sleeping, Chess. I hope you’re oblivious to all this.

  “Christ.” Paul shifted, the click of a hammer easing down audible under the sound of the wind. “Jesus Christ. We can’t wait for reinforcements, we have to get her out of here.”

  “She won’t leave.”

  “Goddammit, Drakul, don’t be an idiot. If there are packs scouring the street and skornac taking humans, this is worse than we ever dreamed, and we have got to get her out of town. Two of us against all of them? She’ll die. They’ll take her, and use her for the Rite. You know they will.”

  The fact that he was right didn’t help. But still, it would be easier to catch them in transit, Paul wasn’t thinking clearly. “So we hit her over the head and carry her off? Great. That will really gain her trust.”

  “If they use her for the Rite, we’ll lose this city and the two to the north, probably the ones to the east too. They’ll be able to bring another mass of them through, the High Ones. We can’t fight that. Jesus Christ, Ryan, use your head. We’ve got to get her out of here.”

  “You’re right.” Shut up. That’s rabbit-talk.

  “If you don’t, I will.”

  Like hell you will. I’ll find some way to make her listen. I have to. She’s safer staying in a bolthole than trying to escape the city. They’ve probably got this place cordoned off tighter than a Grand Master’s asshole. Ryan’s hand tightened on the knifehilt. He said nothing, hunching his shoulders against the rain as the turn-aside charm thickened, trying to cope with all the water from the sky. He wondered if he’d ever dry out. Sleep well, sweetheart. I’m standing watch.

  Paul didn’t say anything else either. He didn’t have to. Two more hunting groups, both with a higher-class demon to keep the hounds in check, swept the street before dawn.

  Fifteen

  She didn’t go straight home like she promised Charlie she would. Instead, she took another long shower, ate two whole-wheat muffins, got back into her clothes from last night and brushed her teeth with Charlie’s toothbrush. It was a Saturday morning and her sister was already at work, leaving a twenty for cab fare on the kitchen counter, as if Chess didn’t have her own job, thank you very much.

  Charlie’s apartment was sleek chrome and clean glass, pale linen pillows and bookshelves full of frowning, fat leather-bound law books. Her stash of sci-fi and fantasy was in the bedroom, ranked neatly on stripped-pine shelves, Chess took a moment and went through the familiar titles, soothed by so many old friends. There was Tolkien and Peter Beagle, Tanith Lee and Robert Heinlein, Asimov and Gaiman . . . all the greats. Chess frowned, seeing a new Gabaldon paperback. I didn’t think Charlie went in for time-travel. Wait ‘til I tease her about this. Scottish time travel, no less. Mom will have a fit. Still thinks anything romance is porn, but de Sade is okay ‘cause he’s dead. Got to love you, Mom.

  As usual, the books made her feel steadier, more alert. More like she actually had a clue about what was going on. She picked out the copy of Joan Vinge’s Psion and opened it, her fingers finding the gap. There, between the pages, was the flat spare key.

  Oh, baby. Come to Mama.

  She tried not to feel guilty—after all, she’d paid for the bike too, and Charlie had it all the time because parking was hell around Chess’s building. Chess even kicked in for the horrendous insurance, and that was a strain on a librarian’s salary. But on the infrequent occasions when she needed transportation she couldn’t get by cab, bus, or her own two feet, the bike was a welcome luxury. Even if it did rain more in Jericho than it should.

  She shoved the key in her pocket and left a short note on the counter, sweetly informing her sister she’d taken the bike and borrowed the helmet. Ten minutes later she was in the underground parking level, fluorescent lights buzzing and reflecting off the smooth concrete. She penetrated to a far, dark corner, little-used and stocked with a Viper and a few slim leaning shapes under tarps. One tarp she twitched aside.

  The sleek, gleaming Ducati 999 leaned slightly on its spring-loaded kickstand. Chess’s heart began to pound. The bike was beautiful, a little prissy in its lines, but capable of amazing things once you got it out on the open road. It wasn’t really a town bike. For one thing, it pulled too hard and you really didn’t get the full effect until you were well above a normal speed limit.

  But damn, it was beautiful. And the library had a few standing subscriptions to some of the better cycle mags. The only thing better than looking at pictures of the bike was riding it.

  It’s going to be cold. But I’ll get there quick. She was able to fiddle with her purse strap to lengthen it so she could settle the strap across her body under her coat. I’m going to get drenched. At least if anything demon shows up I’ll be able to outrun it. God, Charlie’s just going to die. Well, too bad, it’s my bike too, dammit.

  She straddled the bike, popped the stand, and eased the helmet over her hair. The world immediately took on a distant wavering sound. The sudden claustrophobia of the helmet was soothed when she clicked the key over and pressed the button, hearing the engine rouse itself. It wasn’t a Harley’s growl, but then again, nothing was.

  I haven’t been riding in months. She grimaced at the odometer; Charlie had been taking the baby out on walks again. Sneaky older sister, always lecturing Chess on being cautious and law-abiding. Come on, baby bike. Be nice to Mama. Let’s go to the library, shall we?

  It wasn’t as wet as she feared, since the storm was taking a brief break. But it was cold, and she was shivering by the time she’d gone half a mile. Traffic was the lightest it ever got on the fringes of downtown. Chess penetrated the tangle of one-way streets, taking a looping circuitous route that nevertheless got her near the library in a shorter amount of time than if she’d gone the direct way. There was even—hallelujah—a parking spot in the far corner of the pay-for lot on Vox Street, under the drooping, dripping branches of a cedar tree whose roots were beginning to crack the pavement on the other side of the chain-link fence. It was a miracle the tree had survived, but the lot was dotted with small islands of greenery, and the owners made more in parking fees than they could leasing the plot for development. Unfortunately, they didn’t believe in giving the
library employees a break, a fact bemoaned regularly at staff meetings.

  She paid the pimpled, greasy attendant, who barely looked up from his skin mag. The windows of his little hut were clouded with condensation, and Chess grimaced as she walked away, swinging her helmet. If she went in through the side door nobody would see her. Everyone would be too busy dealing with the regular Saturday circus. Tomorrow would have been better; the library was closed on Sundays and she could have walked right in the front door singing a few Gilbert & Sullivans at the top of her lungs and nobody would have been the wiser.

  Needs must when the devil drives, she thought, fishing her keys out of her pocket. Rain began to flirt down, kissing already wet pavement. Chess glanced nervously over her shoulder, seeing only the blank back wall of the bank and an alley holding Dumpsters. She normally didn’t work Saturdays, taking a few hours on Sunday to come in and deal with the ever-increasing reams of paperwork her job required. Still, she felt guilty, and the back of her neck crawled as if she were being watched.

  Ridiculous. You sound like a Looney Tunes cartoon. Any moment now Bugs is going to pop out and say “Eh, what’s up, Doc?” And you’ll scream like a girl. Where’s the tough Francesca Barnes, demon hunter extraordinaire?

  Unfortunately, the tough Chessie had taken a powder. Maybe it was the sound of bones creaking and crackling that had pervaded her uneasy dreams and made her thrash Charlie’s spare futon out of all recognition. Or the horrible, chilling sounds of gunfire as Ryan was left to deal with more of those things alone.

  Or maybe it was the vision of the dead man’s eyes, staring into Chess’s own with wide, horrible calm. Of the woman’s slumped, half-naked body, her hair clotted with drying blood.

  Stop it, Chess. You knew what you were doing when you went out to hunt the skornac. Deal with it, dammit. Just deal with it.

  The trouble was, she didn’t want to deal with dead people. Dead demons, certainly; sometimes she could even pretend she was a character in a movie, watching particularly gruesome special effects. But a dead body she just couldn’t pretend her way around. She stepped gratefully through the door and pulled it shut. It locked automatically as she slid her keys back in her pocket.

  A short, dim hall turned into stairs at the end, the broom closet was to her left and the stairs going up to a back hall on the main floor slanted up on her right. She heard the drone of a weekend at the library, the indistinct noise of people speaking softly and pages turning, not to mention computers humming, and relief wrapped her in a warm blanket even as she sniffed back a sneeze. She was so cold she’d stopped shivering, and damn near soaked through. It was a blessing to be out of the wind.

  She edged down the hall, grabbed the banister, and descended into the cavern of the basement. Shelves full of boxed files and other supplies jumbled together, the old boiler crouching far back and seeming to glower even though it was dead and dusty, turned off. Chess moved to her right, penetrating the tangle of odds and ends, sloping metal bookcases and boxes of decorations.

  Along the far back wall, two bookcases leaned crazily next to a blank space of wall. The first time she’d found the library, she’d been feeling around in total darkness, muttering imprecations against anyone who had voted down the last bond issue and their families unto the seventh generation, when her hand had closed around a chill, carved iron doorknob.

  Now she simply strode for the blank piece of wall. It looked just like a bit of wasted space, the bookcases on either side arching over to slump against each other higher up, both twice as tall as Chess, the top shelves reachable only with the help of an ancient stepstool. Her wet sneakers squeaked and probably left prints on the dusty floor, but it was such a jumble down here nobody would notice. She sniffed, getting a good lungful of dust and the unpleasant smell of a cellar, before reaching out toward the blank wall and confidently closing her fingers.

  The knob was there, cool and hard and solid even if she couldn’t see it. Chess twisted it and stepped through the door, keeping her eyes closed against the sudden vertigo that would happen when her eyes tried to convince her brain this was a solid wall, and dammit, you can’t walk through it!

  Just as she swept the door closed from the other side she thought she heard something, a soft footstep or a sigh. But she sneezed immediately, destroying all hope for getting through the beginning of winter without a cold. Dammit. I knew I should have taken some zinc.

  She snapped her fingers twice. “Fiat lux.” Her voice fell flat and chill, as if she had suddenly closed herself in a windowless space. Well, she had. “Light.”

  And the silver trickle of light bloomed. Chess heaved a relieved sigh. Nobody knew about this place, which made it the safest damn place for her in the whole damn city.

  Time to do some research, she thought, and sneezed again, miserably. How about we make a hot cuppa tea and dry off a bit first, though? Don’t want to drip on the books.

  * * * *

  The room was long and rectangular, with a vaulted ceiling that was much higher than it should have been. It appeared to be walled in solid stone, with flagstones that seemed oddly like the ones in the troll tunnels under Jericho, fitted together with such precision the floor was a little slippery if you weren’t careful. Long butcher-block tables almost black with glossy varnish marched down the middle, and along all three walls were high bookshelves full of leather spines. Dust never seemed to settle here, and the light came from silvery crystal globes hanging from the ceiling, brightening in response to need—soft and luminous when she was mixing up the salve or experimenting with the jars of herbs and other substances from the cabinet in the far left corner, bright and clear when she needed to read. She’d given up wondering how the lights seemed to know what she was doing.

  The only thing wrong with this library was that it had no electric plug-ins. The bathroom was a small closet off to the side, with a sink and an antique commode, but no mirror. And forget hot water. She suspected the plumbing in here used a well or something, since the water had a flat mineral taste different than city water. Just to be safe, she’d brought down water-purification pills and a rack of bottled water.

  On the furthest table were beakers and pristine antique spirit lamps, racks for holding glass jars, candles, and other assorted objects. It had looked, when she’d first stumbled into the room, as if the owner had just stepped away for a moment, a book open on the table to the recipe for the salve, and a capped jar of the stuff next to it, amid a jumble of assorted minutiae. She’d cleaned everything up, over the six months of study, and wondered about the anonymous owner who wrote his small crab-cramped words in the diaries.

  Now she knew.

  A stack of towels and a spare pair of jeans, not to mention a dry shirt, worked wonders; keeping a spare set of clothes at work was second-nature to her. After boiling some water for tea with the same trick she’d used to convince Charlie, she went straight for the back wall, where on the third bookcase bottom shelf was a long row of antique composition books, each written in with a firm, clear hand. She’d only worked her way through three of them, they were closely written and hard to decipher as well as rambling, a nameless narrator that she now suspected was Melwyn Halston giving advice on the books in the library, shortcuts for killing or repelling demons, recipes, and other useful information.

  She took the last book on the far right, gently, and carried it back to one of the tables. Hopped up on the varnished wood surface, sitting cross-legged and setting her tea mug aside. She sneezed, twice, lightly, and touched her hair, wrapped up in a towel. Yet more laundry. Nobody told me the cleanup is worse than the demon hunting itself.

  She opened up the diary, flipping through it until she came to the blank pages at the back and then backing up a few more pages. Bingo. And I thought I was just being systematic when I started from the earliest ones. I should have started with the latest.

  For there on the page, written in the spidery, clear, small hand of whoever had built this room, was the word Drakulein, re
peated several times through the text. She paged back even further, found that the whole book had references to them salted through. The Inkani were also mentioned, and once or twice she saw the word Malik.

  Perfect. She opened to the first page, settled down, and began to skim, paying special attention whenever the Drakul were mentioned. The Golden usually have one or two Drakul bodyguards. It’s not as bad as it seems. I’ll be careful, I just need you to understand a few things. Ryan’s voice floated through her head.

  I wonder if he’s still back in my apartment. If he knows what’s good for him, he is. She scanned a few more pages, came across a drawing of a human hand, beautifully executed, a man’s hand with a heavy, square antique ring. The caption read, Samuel’s hand.

  She began to get the idea that Melwyn had been a little closer to Samuel than she’d suspected. A few passages were almost blushworthy in a repressed, Victorian fashion. And the drawings were something else. Looks like ol’ Mel had his artistic side freed. I’ve heard May-December relationships can do that. Her own sniggering giggle made her feel a little dirty.

  Ryan had told her the truth. He just hadn’t told her how serious the situation was. Once a Drakul got “attached” they didn’t live without the object of their “affections.” Mel mentioned that same-sex pairings were rare; and he didn’t have the angst she would have associated with a nineteenth-century homosexual relationship. Then again, if Mel was as old as Ryan said, he might have a whole different view of that sort of thing.

  She also began to suspect that Ryan had deliberately not shown her just how strong and quick he really was. Some of the terms Melwyn used were thought-provoking, to say the least.

  It was a constant battle for Mel to keep his “territory” clean of Inkani and other demons, and she had a hazy sense that he was talking about a much larger piece of land than just Jericho City. Then again, this was in the age of carriages and bad roads, distances might have seemed larger then. There were other Drakul, mostly identified with a first initial; Samuel was the only one who rated a whole name. And Melwyn constantly bemoaned the lack of “potentials” to help him out. Sam suspected that the Inkani had found some way of killing them before they “awakened,” but Mel pooh-poohed that idea, saying that people simply weren’t as smart or as good as they used to be.