The First One's Free (The Summoner Sisters Book 0)

by Allison Hurd

  The devil growls.

  “Ach, that is what I’m talking about. No growling!” she says, shaking a tortoise shell rattle at it. “Bad devil.”

  I laugh at her antics and stand up, wiping away tears as the Nalusa Chito launches at her. The Nalusa Chito rakes its large claws at her. While we somewhat resemble each other, internally we are unique. Lia largely lacks the childhood traumas most of us accumulate thanks to that faerie, and despite her trials, is one of the most optimistic people I know. My sister is, for all intents and purposes, immune to the Nalusa Chito. She sidesteps it easily and tosses me another rattle and a bag containing some dried corn, a crystal, and what I believe is part of an anthill. I catch it, limping up to join her in the wide, somewhat-lit corridor.

  “Sorry I took so long. There were fewer ants in the area than I anticipated.” She eyes me carefully, but tactfully doesn’t mention my condition. We’ve learned that in a tight spot, it is easier to be strong when we don’t talk about the weaknesses right away. She begins the chant that will send the Nalusa Chito back to its home, playfully slapping it with her rattle as it runs past her.

  I smile feebly at her as I prepare my part of the ritual. “No worries.” I take a deep breath, shoving down the hurt so that I can focus on what needs to happen now. “This is a defective Nalusa Chito, anyways. Wasn’t able to find even my weak spots, and they’re like, miles wide.” I haltingly pick up the chant as Lia ducks the angry demon.

  “Oh, really?” she asks. “Man. It must be weaker than we thought, if that’s possible.” She ducks again, adding the next part of the chant to our ritual.

  “Totally. It didn’t say anything about my relationship with our parents, or mention my scars, or that time in elementary school I told a boy that I wanted to kiss him and he ran away.” It launches at me, sluggish as our spell begins to encircle it. I continue the next part of the ritual, offering a blessing to Hashtahli, the corn raised above my head. Unable to watch it as I work, the Nalusa Chito horse kicks me into the ceiling. Another burst of bright pain, paired with a sharp decrease in the amount of light around us tells me that my neck just crushed another bulb. I land hard, my right shoulder making a dull snap sound. I cry out again. Lia starts forward to help me, but I put up my left hand, telling her to keep going.

  “Really?” Lia asks, her mouth set in a grim line. “What a slacker. Those are the easy ones. Like its mom,” she continues. She shakes the rattle again, the devil bearing down on her quickly.

  “I hear that!” I say, willing myself to stand up again. My right shoulder is tender, and I gently feel the back of my neck, trying to gauge how bad it is. Survey says: mild-to-moderately bad. “It must be a worthless Nalusa Chito, which is why its mom sent it away,” I agree. We’re praying to the Choctaw being, Eskeilay, for her intervention. Much like in Christianity, the Choctaw believe in one God in heaven. But also like with Christianity, there are supporting characters in charge of various realms. Eskeilay rules over the realm where the not-yet-born live. As with ants that spill out of anthills, she contains the beings not yet ready for life, which pour like a stream from her home. As far as we know, there isn’t a way to send immortals to the realm that holds the human dead, so all we can do is send them home until Eskeilay gets irritated and boots them back to earth. That’s where the ant dirt comes in.

  “It is certainly not good enough to live,” Lia concurs, giving it a taste of its own medicine. “Look how easily we’re taking it down.” Our spell is growing steadily, creating a small whirlwind around the demon.

  Like an angry bull caught between two matadors, the Nalusa Chito charges between both of us, unable to decide which one of us is more deserving of its rage. With the return of my sister and a task to be completed, its power over me diminishes as well, so it is back to whispering the same tired thoughts it used on me before. This time, I can shrug them aside.

  “You can’t win,” it sneers at me, even as the ritual finally takes hold of it. “I will always come back.”

  “And like with all bad pennies, I will glue you to the floor,” I promise it.

  The thing is frozen in front of us, unable to escape the power of the ritual. My blood drips down the back of my neck and knees, and two dozen people require our attention. But in this moment, we’ve won.

  “Now that we’ve got you here,” Lia says conversationally, standing in front of it. “Why the flowers?”

  The first part of the spell we’ve used binds it, meaning that it must obey us.

  “I needed a way to find their shadows. There are many new ways humans protect themselves from me,” it says grudgingly. “I needed to learn how to dismantle them, so as to cull the herd.”

  “You needed them to tell you how to make them sad?” I demand. “Man, you really have lost your touch, haven’t you?” We all have those thoughts that make us cringe, even years later. But with the advent of better medicines, therapy, and general awareness, a lot of the pain becomes more manageable. So much so, apparently, that monsters whose nature it is to make us feel bad need to get by with a little help from their friends.

  “So, what, you got some people who had a weak moment, and got them to eat a flower?” Lia asks.

  “They thought it was a medicine, until my crop of sorrows was ripe for harvest. Then they no longer needed encouragement.”

  “Unbelievable. You’re a total pusher!” My sister turns to me indignantly. “Who taught it that the first one’s free?”

  “I blame the media,” I reply.

  “What a bad Nalusa Chito!” Lia says again. “Can you believe how squirrely it is?”

  “Pretty fucking squirrely,” I agree, grasping my injured shoulder.

  Ophelia huffs, obviously displeased that an innocent hallucinogenic flower was dragged into this mess. “Well. That’s enough, I think. You go think about what you’ve done,” Lia scolds. She finishes the crisp chant in the ancient language and we watch the Nalusa Chito turn to the same grainy sand as an ant hill. A small whirlpool opens at our feet and an elegant, half-human, half-grasshopper hops to the side of her subterranean cave to make room for the fallen demon. She rubs her forearms in exasperation and nods to us before turning her attention back to the trapped Nalusa Chito, now returned to its overworked mom. Neener, neener, booboo, motherfucker.

  “Getting people stoned so that they confide their sorrows. The very nerve,” Lia mutters as Eskeilay’s cave disappears. Her face is fierce and I try to smile sympathetically at her through the pain that assaults me now that the fight is done and the adrenaline recedes.

  “Hey, are you okay?” She moves forward to help me, concern on her face. “You don’t look so…”

  The words die on her lips, her eyes sliding off of mine to focus on the ceiling. I watch my sister’s face morph from worry to fear.

  “Hey, Summer? What do electrical fires look like?”

  I follow her gaze up to a long line of black char that emanates from the bulb I so expertly obliterated with my neck.

  “Basically like that,” I respond. “God, dammit,” I hiss. I shrug a little and get a piece of gauze from another of my many pockets to put over the wound on my neck. I’ll have to dig glass out later, I’m sure. My life is an unending sea of pleasantness. “Okay, let’s get them out of here. There are three rooms off the front hall that have at least a couple people in them, the first room has the attendant lady who’s unresponsive, and then there are about a dozen stoned people that I hope to God are still outside,” I rattle off even as I begin trotting down the dark hallway for the first unconscious human.

  “Got it,” Lia says, following me. Her headlamp shines over the limp forms of the people I knocked out. “What the hell happened here?” she asks, picking up one of the victims. It is good that the fireman’s carry does not require that one be big. The man she picks up is so tall that even across her shoulders, his feet bob just off the ground.

  “The Nalusa Chito set ‘em on me. I had to subdue them. They’re okay,” I finish hurriedly, picki
ng up another person. “They’re just not trying to kill me anymore, which I appreciate.”

  “I was gone for like twenty minutes. You yell at me for finding trouble, but the amount of shit you stumble into every time I disappear is bananas.” I can picture her shaking her head at me from under her load. “This way, I found a closer door,” she instructs.

  I jog after her, each step igniting an ache in my shoulder. I think something’s broken. Another fun problem for later! An open door stands before us and we run out into the twilight. About twenty feet away from the building, we drop our loads and turn to run back.

  “Call nine-one-one , Lia. It’s gonna take ‘em a minute to get out here and I’d be shocked if there was a water main nearby they could tap into.”

  “Right,” she replies. “Err…my phone seems to have…”

  I pass her back her cell phone and unzip my jacket. While she handles the authorities, I twist the piece of clothing around myself, making a makeshift sling to help support what is almost certainly a fractured collarbone, both of us still trotting back inside the building.

  “They’re on their way,” Lia says beside me. “You okay?”

  “Nothing fatal. Just, you know, nothing I’d wish on my enemies, either,” I tell her.

  “Well, as long as that’s all.”

  We make two more trips out. The ceiling is beginning to smoke and the walls are getting hot to the touch. The lights are all dead, except for our headlamps, and smoke fills the corridors. I pour water over our handkerchiefs and pass one to Lia. We tie them on over our faces and run to the front door this time. At least this part of the building isn’t burning yet.

  “Holy crap that’s scary,” Lia comments as she walks into the room with the word “shadows” scratched into the wall.

  “Right?” I reply. “Hey, buddy, you okay?” I gently kick the first person I see with my boot. He stirs and groans, shielding his eyes against my light.

  “Who are you?” he asks gruffly.

  “The person trying to save your life. Come on, this place is burning down.”

  “No thanks,” he says. “No solicitors.”

  Lia smacks her forehead. “Herding people on acid trips. One of the lesser known feats of Hercules.”

  “No, sir, not a solicitor,” I tell my quarrelsome rescuee. I need to hurry this up. Flames aside, my arm hurts like hell and is getting more difficult to move. “Come with us, there’s err…there’s something you really need to see outside! It’s incredible!”

  “Edible? I could go for a bite.” He starts to stand up and falls back over, landing heavily against me. Brother. This is going to take forever.

  “Mind if I carry you?” I ask him.

  “I can’t carry the ring, but I can carry you,” he replies, standing straight again. What a nerd! He throws me over his shoulder.

  “No, that’s not quite what I—” my head is dangling down his back and the man moves towards the door on unsteady feet. I don’t know what to do now. The only times I’ve been carried like this are when things have gone way south after the job is done. I’ve never been “rescued” by the person I’m trying to rescue. “Hey! Put me down!”

  “Oh, stop complaining, yours is moving,” Lia says, grappling with her own person. “Sure, lady. You’re a princess, and we’re fleeing a dragon,” my sister tells the woman in her arms. “It’s a decent metaphor, really.”

  We slowly move the eight people we find in the rooms off of the corridor back outside, the smoke stinging our eyes. By the last room, the fire is closing in fast. I break the window and lay one of the small mattresses across the jagged frame so that we can chuck people outside more quickly.

  “Lia, get ‘em out. I’m gonna go get the lady at the front desk.” My sister nods, soot streaked across her face. The door is hot to the touch, so I turn back and jump out of the open window, running back around to the front door. Smoke billows from it as well, so I break the other window into the room with the first lady we spoke to and get low under the smoke, looking for her. There. Fire illuminates the doorway and I drag the woman out by the shoulders as a beam falls down somewhere deep in the building. I heave the woman back to the others in time to see Lia climbing out of the window herself. I put down my charge and help my sister out of the room. She curses, wiping her streaming eyes clear of the burning smoke. I pass my water to her and she pours it on her face, trying to remove the charred chemicals.

  The building is burning briskly, a merry orange glow sweeping the upstairs. I hope no one is up there.

  “Ah, fuck! Burning buildings are the worst,” Lia mutters between hacking coughs. “That everyone?”

  I nod between my own coughing fit, trying to clear my lungs of the smoke.

  “Well then let’s get out of here,” she says, limping off towards our car parked nearby. We hear sirens and glance at each other, picking up the pace. Climbing in, we screech off into the night, the roar of the unchecked fire behind us. We pull onto the main drag and quickly back off into another hidden lane, the uneven ground jostling my shoulder as we roll along. I curse colorfully and grab it tight. Lia kills the lights and we wait for the fire trucks to pull up—we managed to get out of Dodge just in time. While we know that we didn’t do it, it usually takes more than our word to prove to the cops that burning buildings and half dead people are not our fault, and then they usually run our licenses, which brings up more questions…it’s better just to avoid the whole ordeal.

  “Whew! That was close,” Lia says, leaning back heavily in her seat. “How you doin’,” she asks me.

  “I’ve been better,” I grunt. “Think my clavicle is broken.”

  “Oh, is that what that snapping sound was when you got mule kicked into the ceiling?”

  “Yup.”

  “So, hospital?”

  I snort. “No, thanks. They’re gonna take an x-ray and go ‘oh uh yeah, that sure is broken. Here’s a sling.’ and then charge us a million dollars. I’ll skip all that and just take the sling, thanks.”

  “You’re going to end up calcified and crippled by forty,” she warns me, reaching back for our handy first aid kit.

  “Aw, you think I’ll make it to forty? That’s sweet.”

  She snorts and pulls out antiseptic, bandages and tweezers. “Okay. Let me see your neck.” I rotate in the seat as Lia turns on the overhead light and her lamp again, the better to see. I focus on deep breaths, trying to find a place to zen out that hasn’t been ransacked by the Nalusa Chito. My mind feels likes like a hurricane has come through it, and my emotions are all raw and bruised. I sniff, telling myself that it’s okay to feel pain when someone is extracting a lightbulb from your spine, but I know that’s just an excuse.

  “You know that all those things the Nalusa Chito said to you…you know they’re not true, right?” Lia asks gently.

  “Yeah,” I say confidently, though her words sting like peroxide. I sniff again, trying to push it all away. Because it’s not that simple, is it? If there wasn’t a seed of truth to what the monster said to me, I could ignore the words as lies. But they were mine. I did think those things, I did see them and I do carry them with me now. I know the things I felt are not true, in the grand sense. But they were also not false. That hurt is going to take longer to heal than my dumb clavicle.

  “Hand me your knife,” Lia says, breaking me out of my thoughts. “You’ve got a piece of the metal stuck here, looks like.”

  “Why mine?” I ask, loathe to show her what I did to my blade.

  “It’s sharper. I’m doing surgery on you in a car, and I feel that your knife will aid me in causing you the least pain. I don’t know why I need to explain myself.”

  “I had to use it on things, find another one.” I hiss as she nudges a piece of the glass.

  She looks at me in the side mirror. “What did you do to my knife?”

  “My knife, and don’t worry about it.”

  Ophelia finishes removing foreign objects from my back and adds a sling to my ensemble, a
long with some tape to help me keep from moving my right arm too much.

  “Blade, now,” Lia demands.

  Sheepishly, I hand the hilt of my abused work knife over to her.

  She squeaks in protest.

  “Really? You’re gonna pull a light bulb out of my back and then have something to say about the knife I used to rescue you?” I demand.

  “Summer! This is a powerful tool. We don’t smash things with it.”

  “I didn’t! I pried a window open with it. And some other stuff.”

  She squeaks again and waves the blade in my face. “This is why you can’t have nice things. I’m not going to take care of your stuff if you don’t.”

  “I’m sorry. I won’t do everything in my power next time you need rescuing. I’ll think first: is this how knives prefer to be used? And then act accordingly.”

  “Smartass.”

  “Nag.”

  Lia cleans up her medical station and stores it back in its box. “You ready to head to Florida?”

  I frown at my phone, checking my messages. My head is pounding and everything aches. A little R and R on the beach sounds great. “Yes, except we gotta just make a quick stop in Arkansas. Joon says there’s a djinni bottle that’s causing trouble. He wants to know if anyone is close enough to go pick it up.”

  “Summer, you’ve got a broken arm! You’re officially on leave.”

  “It’s just a cursed object, calm down. It’s not like we’re dumb enough to release it.”

  “Fine, but then you’re taking a vacation.”

  “Cross my heart and hope to—”

  “Don’t even joke like that,” Lia scolds.

  “Why, what’s the worst that can happen?”

  My sister starts the car. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

  I laugh at her, knocking on a wooden practice baton we have to ward off the jinx.

  The flames from the burning building cast a ruddy light over the dark dirt road we drive along. I lean back in the passenger seat and knock back a few Tylenol while I search the internet for a picture of the flower we saw, trying to keep my thoughts moving until I’m sure they’ll land somewhere soft.