Flytrap

by Stephanie Ahn

  “Why did you come?” I ask Lilith. “I thought you were done with me.”

  Lilith snorts lightly. “You really thought I would just let you die? After everything? I know I’m a demon, but I’m a possessive one and you’re still mine, damn it.” She looks at the woman beside me, a little nervously. “Besides, you’re my referral.”

  “Your what?”

  “I’m, um, interviewing for a job.”

  My head swivels as I stare at the woman, then at Gorgeous. “No shit? With the Typhon Group?”

  “Is that who they are? They didn’t really, um, tell me who they were when they picked me up. It was kind of a kidnapping sort of deal.”

  Boss-lady says something in Chinese. Lilith tucks some hair behind her ear, bobbing her head and smiling nervously as she replies.

  “What, what was that? What are you saying?” I ask.

  “Oh, she just outlined the nature of the job. The Group wants me on as an independent contractor—a ‘retrieval expert,’ is the official title. Kind of like a bounty hunter, but more versatile—retrieval of people, things, scraps of information, all sorts of stuff. Not so different from your job, actually.”

  I jab my finger at the Typhon woman, which looks way less impressive because she’s so close to me that I have to scrunch my arm like a T-rex. “You people are not trapping her in some kind of life contract.”

  Boss-lady rolls her eyes. “Relax, girl. She is more valuable to us than you are, and we would not treat her as callously.” She turns to Lilith, smiling much more kindly. “We offer full benefits.”

  “Ooh, benefits,” Lilith says.

  I lean forward and grab the seat in front of me, telling Gorgeous, “I need to get across town, to the Pitt Gallery.”

  “We’re not a taxi service,” Gorgeous snaps. “You’re only here by courtesy of—Lilith, right?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Lilith, that’s a sexy name.” He turns to wink—Lilith and I both scream as a car merges into the lane ahead of us, almost smashing into the Cadillac before Gorgeous casually twists the wheel with one hand.

  I have to shout to be heard over the traffic chaos. “I need to get to the gallery! I’m chasing a demon—monster—hybrid—thing!”

  “The one you failed to kill?”

  “I’m still working on it, okay? I survived, didn’t I?”

  Gorgeous, thankfully, keeps his eyes on the road this time. “I’ll give you props for that. Did you use my gun?”

  “Yes? Why?”

  “The bullets have trackers in them.”

  “The bullets have what?”

  “I didn’t think it’d be relevant to you, but yeah. We figured, whatever you’re going after, it’s a game changer of one kind of another. We wanted to keep tabs.”

  “You used me!”

  “You were going to fight the thing anyway. And I did arm you better, didn’t I? And now you have this.”

  He lifts his perfect ass from the seat to dig into his back pocket, and the car starts careening to the left—Lilith screams, “Stop, stop, oh my god please stop!” Gorgeous ignores her and tosses his mother a beat-up iPhone. She catches it, unlocks it, and opens up a map that’s updating live. I peer at the screen; there’s a red dot barreling across the map without heed for highways or traffic, moving at least as fast as the Cadillac.

  “Shit, is that Behemoth? Shit, shit, it’s almost there! Please, I’ll pay anything!” I fumble with my breast pocket, producing the unceremoniously corked syringe. “Here, look—I have the blood of Beelzebub, one of the Seven Princes of Hell!”

  She waves me off. “We don’t take that. We deal in weapons, and demon blood cannot be weaponized cost-effectively. You of all people should know this.”

  We’re in the wrong lane on the freeway—I scream, Lilith screams with me, and Gorgeous sideswipes the mirror off a truck as it goes zooming past. His boss just sniffs, nonchalantly.

  “Okay, okay, well—what about my blood? It’s corrupted, the Merestis took it the last time I tangled with them—”

  “Your blood is not in short supply. If we wanted it, we would just cut you open.”

  “Okay, then—the biological material of a new kind of demon. Not even really a demon at all.”

  Lilith’s head snaps toward me. Something in her eyes is panicked, a warning.

  I point to my bleeding thigh. “I have a claw stuck in here, from Behemoth. A one-of-a-kind, Beelzebub-engineered mutant you’ve already expressed interest in. Ate five people straight out of the womb. You want it?”

  Lilith breathes out in relief, then quickly averts her eyes from mine.

  The Typhon woman purses her lips and pushes her sunglasses a bit further up in her hair. “Good enough.” She produces a pair of pliers out of nowhere, making both Lilith and me leap back. “Hold still.”

  The next minute is a whole lot of screaming, Lilith holding my shoulders and coaching my breathing like a Lamaze instructor, all of us jostling every time Gorgeous runs over a speed bump, a piece of trash, or possibly even an errant pedestrian. When the claw is finally wrenched out, the relief is enormous. Lilith gives me her travel scarf, and I wrap it around my leg to hopefully stop the bleeding.

  “Bao bao. The Pitt gallery,” Boss-lady says, flapping out a satin pouch from her pocket and delicately placing the claw in.

  “Shi, mama. Uhh—where is that?”

  “Google engine it.”

  “Ma, I keep telling you, it’s just ‘Google’ it, not ‘Google engine’ it—”

  And then we swerve off the road altogether, Lilith and I screaming again. We rattle down a rocky slope to the dry bed of a stream; as my head bounces off the roof over and over again, Gorgeous’s mother slaps a piece of rice paper onto my chest and hands another to Lilith.

  “Keep those on you, especially when we cross the threshold.”

  “Threshold?” Lilith asks, as Gorgeous drives us through the arch under a stone bridge.

  My ears pop again, and we’ve emerged onto the sunken tracks of a dim subway station. “Ah, shit,” Gorgeous says. “Hate when this happens.” He shoves the gear into reverse, then sends us hurtling backward into the tunnel entrance we just came from.

  “Dude,” I say, my eyes glued to the windshield. A red light, and two yellow ones, are speeding toward us from the dark. He ignores me. “Dude!”

  “Don’t distract me while I’m backing up,” he snaps.

  “You’re going to kill us!” Lilith shrieks, the sound of the approaching subway train blasting our ears.

  “Dude!”

  “Shut up!”

  Impact throws everyone backward in their seats—and then I’m gasping, the car veering wildly to a stop with the hood facing the entrance to an old, abandoned train tunnel, the tracks in front of us rusted from disuse. The pressure in my ears blocks out the sound of Boss-lady leaning forward to smack her son on the shoulder. “Bao bao! What did I say about subways?”

  “It’s fine, it’s fine!” Gorgeous answers, opening the window to crane his neck around the side of the car. “We only lost the bumper!”

  He rolls forward again; I grab the roof, going, “No no no no no no—” but when we emerge from the darkness of the tunnel, we’ve been spit back onto a normal, actual road for cars, one that I recognize as the underpass in Battery Park. “We’re close!”

  “Hey, Harry? Harry,” Lilith says, sheepishly, tapping me to get my attention. “Think I could get that referral now? I don’t really need it, it’s just, it was my excuse for having them pick you up.”

  “Huh? Oh, right! Lilith’s real great at everything, she’s super punctual, an annoyingly good stalker, seasoned climber, great at avoiding bullets, more reliable than she wants you to believe, real cute when she does her hair up in a bun—”

  “Harry.”

  “Sorry, sorry. Anyway, she’s probably amazing for the job, if she wants it. Wait, do
you want it?”

  Lilith bites her lip and leans around me to address her potential boss. “If I say no, will you guys kill me or something?”

  The woman shakes her head. “We intend to respect your decision. We aren’t the Council, we don’t put on sham trials for appearance’s sake. We simply think you would be a valuable contributor. Otherwise, we would not even offer the illusion of choice.”

  “Alright, yeah, okay. Can I call you all back in a day or two?”

  “Take our business card,” Gorgeous chimes, nearly causing another accident as he leans to open the glove compartment. He hands her a business card made of dark, brushed metal with gold lettering. Lilith stares at it.

  “Cool… cool, okay. I think this is where I have to duck out.”

  “Huh?” I say, reaching for her. “Wait, Lilith—”

  She lets me catch her sleeve, but shakes her head. “Harry, your monster hunt is none of my business, and this backseat is getting real cramped. I did what I could to help you.”

  I let go. “You’re right, sorry, sorry—thank you. Thank you so much, Lilith.” I know I want to say something else before she leaves, but I grope for the words. “I—we—we could have had something.”

  She smiles, almost smirks. “We didn’t not have something. And hey, now I might have a new job. That’s a cool ‘something.’ ”

  “If I’m still alive after this—”

  She slaps her piece of rice paper over my mouth. “Don’t make any vows, Harry. That’s what got us into this mess.”

  “Okay, okay,” I say, muffled, taking the paper off my face. “All I’m saying is, I owe you. Twenty times over, fifty times over—I owe you.”

  “I know. I’ll call in the favor eventually.”

  “What if I go to Hell?”

  “I’ll still find you. I’m good at finding people in Hell. It’s… a bad habit of mine.”

  “And the reason we want you on our team,” Gorgeous calls from the driver’s seat. “Call us, yeah? It’s very, very important that you call us.”

  “We look forward to working with you,” his mother says. Lilith nods like a bobblehead, obviously still intimidated. She starts reaching for the door handle—

  —Both Gorgeous and Boss-lady scream, “Ai ya!”

  Gorgeous gestures violently, shouting “Don’t open the door while I’m driving, are you trying to kill us? Take the roof!”

  Lilith looks heavily scolded and maybe a bit traumatized by that. “ ‘Scuse me,” she says demurely, gathering up her parka as she opens the sunroof. And then she leaps out, light as a cat, and I can’t even see where she goes because I’m looking out the wrong window.

  “Now,” I say, “Please take me to the damn gallery.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Virginity is a Construct

  I slam the door of the Cadillac as I get out. People yell, waving, trying to get the driver’s attention, but Gorgeous zooms off. Asshats. I sprint through a hole in the gallery’s tall glass windows amidst people pouring out, dragging one another by the hand, getting caught on shards of glass on the bottom of the window frame. I elbow past all of them, fighting upstream, stumbling into the clean white space that isn’t so clean and white anymore.

  I race past walls with paintings that have come unmoored from the wires holding them up. Somewhere there’s an alarm beeping, one of those ones that alert you if you stand too close to an artwork. I figure if I find Behemoth, I can find Kate—there it is, at the end of the path of destruction, a massive bulk of drooping skin and muscle. It’s snuffling, squeezing up against a hole in the wall that I realize is the entrance to the men’s bathroom.

  Groaning, it slams against the wall over and over, more hairline cracks appearing each time, the edges of the doorway crumbling. It backs up, shaking its head, to slam into the doorframe again—I throw myself through the gap, ducking through a shower of rotting skin flakes and making it through just as the ground quakes again with impact.

  I race past the urinals and slam open a stall door, coming face to face with a trio of art students in skinny jeans and beanies. They scream into my face with wet, tear-streaked cheeks. Someone in a patterned blazer is passed out against the tile, and a waitress in a rumpled uniform sits next to them, drunkenly tossing cocktail glasses against the far wall. I leap over the broken glass, to the end of the bathroom—

  “Ah! Shit!” I yell as I nearly get taken out by a swinging pipe.

  “Oh my god!” Kate screams, her biceps bulging as she keeps her death-grip on the pipe. She has blood splattered on her face and on her sleeveless blouse, matting and dragging down the ends of her hair. Disbelief shines like moons in her eyes. “Harry?”

  I grab her hand. “You look ridiculously hot, and we have to get out of here.”

  She drops the pipe. “Yeah! Yeah, no shit!”

  “No, I mean—we have to get out, we have to, because that thing’s trying to kill you.”

  “What?”

  The whole building shakes on its foundations as part of the wall gives way. Behemoth’s alien face shows through the doorway, trying to squeeze its bulk in through the opening—the art students burst out of the bathroom stall, wailing, smashing against the far wall as they scrabble for windows that aren’t there. “Yooo, bro, that’s a fucked-up looking elephant,” the cocktail waitress drawls.

  I can’t let Behemoth get in here; the second it does, there’ll be no escape. This bathroom is a cramped dead end, and if it doesn’t manage to eat Kate, it’ll crush her. I need another option. I need magic. “Juice, I need juice,” I mutter.

  “What the fuck are you mumbling about?” Kate screams.

  I pace three steps back and forth, grabbing my hair. “I need—blood, maybe not even a lot of blood, just powerful blood—”

  I remember the syringe in my pocket, and I’m tempted. I still remember what it felt like to inject the demon blood that first time—that half-second rush, the power like I’d never felt before, like everything flesh and blood was putty for me to remake—no, you idiot, no. That would be giving Beelzebub what he wants, and isn’t the whole point of being here to find a different option?

  Contain it—if I can contain Behemoth for even a second, especially against the low ceiling where it’s already struggling to stand up, I could give Kate a chance to run. My telekinetic shield would be a joke against something this size. But Behemoth is all flesh, so I could stop it in its tracks just as easily with blood magic. With blood magic and enough power, I could make a bigger barrier, almost a wall, just enough to wedge between the ceiling and the floor.

  Virgin blood. Would that do it?

  “Kate,” I say, turning to her, reaching for her. “Kate, listen—I need your blood, I need virgin blood.”

  Kate’s eyes tell me I’m completely batshit. “What the—you know I'm not a virgin!”

  “No, wrong definition! I mean virgin blood, not blood of a virgin—blood untouched by magic or ritual! Did you ever fuck around with blood magic in college?”

  She’s starting to cry, hysterically, her face twisting in confusion and anger. “No! What the fuck, Harry?”

  Seeing her cry is making me cry too—I hiccup, trying to get the words out. “Kate, Kate, please—do you trust me?”

  “No! Yes! I don't know! Tell me what you're doing!”

  I pull a razor blade out of my coat—she stumbles away. I speak over her before she can start yelling at me again. “I can get us out of here if you give me some of your blood, okay? Just from your finger or something, I swear!”

  “You're insane!”

  “Kate, please please look at me—Kate!” I tuck the blade into my fist and clasp her cheek with my other hand. “Kate, I know everything is completely fucked right now—but I’m here, and I have a plan. I promise, my one goal in this is to get you out of here alive. Please—just give me a chance.”

  Kate is breathing hard, searching my ey
es for something. Finally, she huffs, “—I hate you.” She grabs the razor blade out of my hand and slices her palm open.

  I’m frozen a moment from sheer awe. Then I grab Kate’s hand in mine, pressing myself against her. The blood trickles down her forearm and mine in synchronized, thin streams, the fingers of her other hand digging into my shoulder, mine wrapped around her waist. If there was music, we could be waltzing.

  The wall bursts through. I think I hear Kate sob—I close my eyes. My heart is beating so hard it feels like the only thing keeping it inside me is the pressure of Kate's chest against mine. I take all the pain, the fear, the adrenalin, the feeling of her shaking against me, of me shaking against her, praying, just praying at some unspecified deity that I can do this—

  Behemoth SLAMS into my shield. I feel it in my bones, scream into the force of it. It’s not even a shield, really; it’s a patchwork of scarlet shards, held together only by the power of Kate’s blood, a mirror shattered and glued back together again. Behemoth scrabbles against the jagged, uneven surface, ripping a few pieces out. I let go of Kate and plant my hands against my side of the shield, reinforcing and directing it. It’s not quite big enough to cover the space between the ceiling and the floor, wall to wall—I have to juggle it, moving in time with Behemoth as it throws itself from side to side, trying to get around the edges.

  I hold the air in my lungs with difficulty as I strain, pushing against Behemoth. It pushes back, but it’s faltering, staggering, as clumps of flesh fall off its face where it keeps slamming against the shield. Parts of its feet slough off while it fights to find purchase on the polished floor, leaving slimy trails.

  This is near impossible. Even with Kate’s blood, there’s no way I could hold my own against a thing this size. What’s going on? I remember how brittle Behemoth’s claw was, how it shattered when I broke it off in my leg… the rest of it feels similarly fragile, like the chemical bonds between its molecules are just shredding like tissue paper.