by H. D. Gordon
“You,” I mumbled, the single word sending me into a coughing fit that sprayed scarlet onto the dusty brown dirt, turning it black wherever it fell.
Muriel—or rather, the Demon riding within Muriel—grinned down at me with all the glee of a mischievous child.
“Me,” it agreed. It crouched beside me, cocked its gray-haired head. “It’s so nice to finally meet you, Halfling. I’m the one they call Saleos, honored Duke of Hell. And we’re going to have some fun, you and I.”
CHAPTER 27
“Um…no thank you,” I said, speaking the words using sheer will power, clinging to consciousness with a shaky grip.
Saleos sat back on his heels, as agile as a cat, and laughed. The visual world blinked in and out, and I wondered if maybe I wasn’t hallucinating. Then, I slapped that dangerous thought away. This was no dream. It was a real life nightmare. I tried to call up the things the Brokers had taught me about Demons, but the effort was in vain. It was too hard to stay awake at the moment, let alone think.
Saleos stroked my cheek with a hand as smooth and cold as marble, red eyes unblinking as they stared down at me. “You should know better than to wander off on your own like you did.” He clucked his tongue. “Especially in your condition.”
A sharp pain from a slap across my face brought me back to attention. In a voice that was as weak as it was defiant, I said, “Stuff it, you soulless son of a bitch.”
This received more laughter. I heard a shuffling and kicked my leg out as Saleos grabbed me by the ankle and began dragging me toward a line of trees. Horribly, I could not free myself, my struggles as effective as absorbing the tide with a towel. I grappled at the dirt, dug in my fingers, coughed up more scarlet, and choked on the cloud of dust that plumed in our wake.
I groped in my pockets, still fighting and kicking, and Saleos looked back at me with mild amusement. He held up my cellphone. “Looking for this?” He replaced it in his pocket and kept walking. “Relax, dear. You’re much too tense. Makes the meat more gamey.”
This woke me up in a hurry. I lifted my head and renewed my struggling efforts. “You’re going to eat me?” I said.
Saleos grinned back at me with his deceiving old lady vessel. “You’re a delicacy, dear. A Halfling Fae unclaimed by those ridiculous Peace Brokers? When that meat sack Leonard Boyce brought you to my attention, and I found out what you were… Well, you can’t imagine how excited I was. I was all too happy to make a deal.”
Saleos stopped, glanced around, making sure we were alone in the forest. “This should do just fine,” he said, more to himself than me, and dropped the vice grip on my ankle. I was in so much agony by this point that the cuts and scrapes from being dragged on the hard earth hardly even registered.
“But if you made a deal with Boyce, you can’t eat me,” I said, knowing that my very life depended on me thinking and acting quickly. Oh, and likely divine intervention. “Don’t you have to let him torture me, or something?”
Saleos clucked his tongue. “I’ve held up my end of the deal. Boyce wanted the power to make you suffer the way he had suffered, as well as defaming you in the eyes of the public. Check and check.”
“What?”
The Demon sighed. “Taking away the power in Grant City and having a madman blame the Masked Maiden on a Jumbotron has swayed the public’s opinion of you, believe it or not.” He cackled. “That was Boyce’s imagination, and it turned out better than I’d hoped. Humans are little more than animals without their precious amenities, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching them self-destruct while you ran around trying to help them. Besides that, you’ve suffered in the same manner Boyce did. So, you see? He and I are square. I’ve upheld my end. Now, I get his soul and you as a snack. Win-win!”
I could think of nothing to say to this, could hardly even process it. I spoke, but my voice must’ve been too weak, too low for the Demon to hear. Saleos leaned in closer, until his red eyes and old lady face was almost close enough to kiss.
“What was that, dear?” Saleos asked. “I’m afraid you’ll have to speak up.”
“The power,” I repeated, lending the words the last of my reserves. “Will the power be returned to the city?”
Saleos nodded in understanding, a grandmotherly smile coming to his face. “A hero to the very end, eh?” he said. “Not to worry, dear. Yes, of course, the power will be returned upon my claiming of Boyce’s soul. Your beloved city will be restored to order, and life there will go on as usual… And if it’s any consolation, my devouring of your form will be much more merciful than my rein over Boyce’s soul. You see? Not so bad on your end of things. Not so bad at all. That is, unless, of course…”
I sputtered out a mouthful of blood. “Unless, of course, what?”
Saleos cocked his head. “Unless you’d like to make a trade for your own soul.”
My last words to him were what I like to think of as Aria-typical.
“Bite me, you red-eyed bastard,” I said, and gripped the magical staff that was poking its hard edge into my ribs.
***
Saleos hovered over me as still as a snake poised to strike. I understood that my chances of surviving here were at best slim to none, but when a Demon is getting ready to eat you, the urge to at least try stopping it is surprisingly strong.
I waited for the most opportune moment, watched through hazy eyes as the Demon opened it’s mouth wide enough to split poor old Muriel’s cheeks right in half—like a seam splitting cleanly across. In the back of that gaping mouth, a forked tongue lolled hungrily. I couldn’t be positive, but I thought I heard the screaming of souls deep down in that dark pit of a mouth, as if there were legions trapped inside and burning.
There was no time to reconsider the action, no goodbye moments to be spared. As Saleos peeled back his lips and spread his gaping jaws, I removed my magical staff from the inner pocket of my jacket, whispered the incantation that accompanied it, and slammed it between the Demon’s open jaws.
Surprise flooded its distorted features, followed quickly by panic as the staff grew to its full size. The sight was gruesome, and as such, left me completely unable to turn away. I watched as Muriel’s head stretched, twisting and bulging in a horrific display of the macabre. A sound issued from the gaping throat that was something like that of a large bird of prey in agony. It was a half squawk, half screech that set my teeth on edge.
The staff continued to grow, something I’d watched it do a million times before, but never like this—jammed between the jaws of a creature within a creature. At last, when the sight could grow no more frightful, Muriel/Saleos’ head exploded in a rain of black and red blood that splattered me from head-to-toe. Where there had been a gray-haired head a moment before, now there was a steaming stump of a neck, below which was a floral print blouse and white Velcro orthopedic soft-soled shoes.
The body toppled to the side as a cloud of black, buzzing insects swarmed out of it from every orifice. This was the essence of the Demon itself, without a vessel like Muriel to carry it, and it hovered angrily around me. For the first time since I’d learned what Saleos was, it was my turn to grin.
With strength I didn’t have, I reached up and pulled the collar of my shirt to the side, revealing the skin just below my neck. In an ink invisible to most mortal eyes, I knew there to be a special tattoo there that prevented my body from ever being possessed, courtesy of my pals at the Peace Brokers.
With no vessel to carry it, Saleos the Demon hissed away in a black cloud of loud buzzing insects, disappearing into the sky between the trees, leaving me in peace at last beside the headless body of an innocent old woman named Muriel and the poison of a Demon’s Curse still coursing through my veins.
Finally at my destination and no longer in immediate danger of being eaten, I closed my eyes and sank into the cushion of the earth, my last thought that someday we all must return to it.
I supposed this was as good a day to do so as any of the rest.
CHAPTER 28
“You’re still in the forest, dear child,” came a soft, sweet voice, like the tolling of a small bell. “But not a part of the forest that any human would ever find,” continued the voice. “This is a part that belongs to the forest people.”
I glanced around, taking in the small space where someone must’ve stored me. Thick, brown roots were curled around me to enclose a makeshift bed of leaves, and the close walls looked as though they were made of tree bark. The air had an earthy quality, and the light by which I saw seemed to come from no where in particular, but rather to hang independently in the air.
I saw all this, but no speaker to which could belong the sweet voice. “Where are you?” I said. “Show yourself.”
There was a tinkling sound, like the clink of fine glassware touching together. I spotted movement to my right and turned to see a tiny lady with skin the color of moss and hair that rose up off her head like a flame. Her eyes were slanted, marking her a cousin to the Fae race. I stared, aware that it was rude and unable to stop myself. Her aura was also unmistakably akin to Fae—I knew this the way a scientist can look at a great ape and a Neanderthal and intuit a connection—but with more earth tones than even those found in the Fae Forest. She wore clothing composed of weeds and moss, roots and nutshells, and her entire form was no larger than a half foot.
As I took her in, she stared back at me, slanted eyes unblinking. At last, I came to my senses. I said, “What happened?”
She shrugged, small shoulders rising once and falling. “You were dying,” she said. “Now, you’re not.”
I nodded. “Who are you?”
“I am a forest person,” she answered, as if this explained everything. “And you? Who are you?”
“I’m Aria.”
Her head cocked to the side in a birdlike manner that reminded me of my mother.
“Aria,” she repeated. “I’ve never heard of an Aria. You are Fae, yes? Otherwise you would not be able to understand me.”
“My name is Aria,” I said. “And I’m half Fae.”
“Name,” she repeated.
“Um…yes, it’s what people call me. How they refer to me.”
The tiny Fae took a moment to absorb this, head tilting this way and that.
“What is your other half?” she asked.
I swallowed, somehow sensing the answer would displease her. She was Fae, though, and despite having never encountered her particular subspecies before, that likely meant lying to her was pointless.
“Human,” I answered. “I’m half Fae and half human. We’re called Halflings.”
As I’d suspected, her nose twisted up in distaste. “Human,” she repeated.
There wasn’t much to say to this response, so I said nothing.
Before I could blink, she leapt to the other side of the small space we were sharing, trailing a comet of aura behind her as she moved. She landed as lithely as a leaping insect and examined me from behind.
“You have no wings,” she said.
I turned my head to look at her, uncomfortable with having her at my back. My next words came out harsher than intended, but she had touched a sore spot.
“Neither do you,” I snapped.
Her aura revealed that this made no difference to her, that she did not share my misgivings. She flitted back to her original position, eyed me a bit longer, and then finally took a seat on a mushroom growing out of the wall, looking unwittingly like a figurine on a shelf.
“Humans are terrible,” she said, folding her arms over her chest and narrowing her yellow eyes, as if expecting me to break into immediate, passionate argument to defend my lineage.
What I said was, “Some of them,” and shrugged.
“They destroy everything,” she continued. “Everywhere they go, they bring death.”
If you had told me yesterday I’d be discussing the humanity of humanity in what looked the inside of a tree with a tiny Fae person, I might’ve laughed. At this point in life, however, I’d learned to roll with the punches.
“Just like all Fae don’t have wings,” I said, “not all humans are evil… Where am I?”
The Fae unfolded her arms. “The forest, of course.”
I glanced around. “You said I was dying and now I’m not. What’d you do to save me?”
She shrugged, shook her head. “I didn’t.”
“You didn’t.”
Another shake.
“Okay, then, who did?”
She gave me a look like I was incredibly daft. “The forest, of course.”
“The forest?”
She sighed and waved a hand. “When creatures die, it’s the earth that collects their bodies, you understand? Their deaths work to feed the life that follows, like a circle… Get it?”
She paused, head tilting toward me. I nodded for her to continue, like a child in a classroom learning the most elementary of truths.
“You were dying, right here in the forest, and it was going to collect you, recycle you,” she said. “But you are Fae—or half, anyway, and so it did for you what it does for all its Fae children. It healed you.” She shrugged at the end of this, as if it were no spectacular revelation.
“But…why?”
“What have those humans been teaching you?” she asked, pity taking the place of distrust in her aura. “As Fae we are the closest to Mother Earth. Our kind—even you, with your diluted blood—were the first born of her. She will always care for us like her most favored of children.”
I let this ruminate in my mind for a handful of moments, taking in the implications of what this tiny Fae was telling me. Could it be that I had untapped power and resources the Peace Brokers had never cared to foster? Had they kept me so detached from that part of me that my understanding of my own kind was terribly limited, at best?
These were big, intimidating questions, and at the moment, I hadn’t the time for them.
“How do I get back?” I asked.
“Get back where?”
I waved a hand, suddenly impatient and wanting for a familiar world. “To where the humans are…the part of the forest I was in before…before the forest swallowed me, or whatever.”
“Topside?” she asked. “Why would you want to do that? Everything you need to live is here. Up there, there’s nothing but struggle.”
How she knew this, when she’d likely spent most of her existence in this place—wherever this place was, anyway—I didn’t know. But she was right. There was nothing but struggle waiting topside. And yet…
“I need to get back,” I said. I’d come for a healing, and that was exactly what I’d received. Now, it was time to go face my demons, both literally and metaphorically.
The tiny Fae shrugged. “Okay,” she said, “but you should know that what was ailing you before Mother took you in will be ailing you again once you go topside.”
I swallowed. “Are you saying I’m only healed while I stay here?”
The Fae nodded. “There was terrible poison flooding through your veins, and your colors were wreathed in shadows. Those things can’t sustain here, for this place is purified by the Mother, but once you go topside, your disease will return after a short while, and when it does, it will likely be worse than before.” She shrugged again.
“A short while? How long is that?”
Another lift and drop of her shoulders. It was oddly annoying. “A rise and fall of the sun. Maybe two.”
A day. Maybe two. My heart sank at the whole situation.
“Well, that sucks large butts,” I sighed.
Her face twisted up as if this was particularly vulgar, and I supposed it might appear so to an unfamiliar ear.
“So you still want to go?” she asked. “To return?”
I nodded, though I wasn’t sure what I wanted mattered in the least. “I have to,” I said.
She considered this, as if it were most cu
rious. “That must be your human half,” she replied.
“What?”
“Your deliberate suffering. The feeding of yourself to the pain.”
I had never heard anyone phrase it this way, but I allowed that it wasn’t entirely misguided. I held up my hands in the universal I-don’t-know-what-to-tell-you gesture. The little Fae shook her head as if to say, It’s your funeral.
“I’ll show you how,” she said. “But you’ll have to trust me.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that, but didn’t have much choice otherwise.
“Okay,” I agreed.
“Place your hands on the ceiling,” she said, “dig your fingers in and ask to go. Mother will take care of the rest.”
I looked up at what she called the ceiling. It appeared to be packed earth, molded dirt held in place by roots and rocks. Taking a deep breath, I reached up. Then, I paused and looked back at the little Fae.
“It doesn’t bother you,” I said. “Not having wings. You’re Fae… Why doesn’t it bother you?”
She waved her hand as if to brush the question away. “Wings are for flying, Aria,” she told me, and to my utter amazement, her body lifted off the mushroom and hovered in the air. “But one doesn’t need wings to fly.” She settled back down on the mushroom shelf. “Understand?”
I nodded, though I wasn’t sure I understood at all.
“Thank you,” I said.
The Fae shrugged as if she had no idea what this meant, so I dug my fingers into the ceiling as she’d told me, and hitched the most unusual ride home.
***
Panic stopped the air up in my chest. Claustrophobia rolled in like a wave. Some invisible force lifted me, pulling me up into the earthy ceiling like a ghost floating through a wall. I told myself to remain calm, but couldn’t help but squirm under the alien sensation. I squeezed my eyes closed before my body was swallowed up whole.
If I could’ve opened my mouth without sucking in a lungful of dirt, I likely would’ve screamed. Just as I was beginning to think I was going to freak the heck out, I found myself on the floor of the forest. The familiar glow of the sun kissed my cheeks, making me squint against its brilliance. Around me were the tall pines and various plants that I knew to be native to New Jersey.