by P. R. Frost
“I bet you boys don’t have food this good where you come from,” I said, offhandedly, as I drowned my third piece of pizza with my second beer.
Kaylor stilled and stared at me with a what-do-you-know-about-that expression. He wasn’t the brightest bulb in the pack.
“Hey, I’m a Warrior of the Celestial Blade. It’s my job to know where you boys come from.”
“We aren’t ‘boys,’ ” Gregor said. He sounded very offended.
“No, you’re not.” I’d seen their like at hundreds of cons over the years, too old to have a parent in tow, too young to truly be ready to face the world on their own.
But they had enough experience to think they knew everything there was to know.
They all looked smug and satisfied, and ever so macho.
“You’re demons, halflings, really.”
“Don’t call me that!” Kaylor screamed. He crouched, ready to spring at me, paws and talons at the ready.
Gregor had to hold Kaylor with both hands to keep him from climbing over the pile of pizza boxes to rip my throat out. He hadn’t managed to morph his hands/paws completely. His fingers looked preternaturally long, tipped with talons as long as my hand.
“Writer lady, we don’t like being called ‘halflings,’ ”
Gregor warned. His canine teeth elongated, hanging down below his lip.“We eat humans for lesser offenses.”
None of these guys had a lot of control over their morphing.
“Well, I don’t like being called ‘writer lady.’ ” I stood up, hands on hips, glowering at the contingent of young demons. “And I thought you kidnapped humans for breeding purposes, not food.”
They all exchanged uneasy glances.
Gregor’s eyes slitted vertically and turned yellow before he regained control over himself. “We are Kajiri. What are you?” he finally spat. His saliva was still green, but his eyes and hands returned to a more human appearance.
My heart flipped and beat a few extra beats. Kajiri?
Could that be just the name demons gave to halfbreeds?
“I’m Tess. A writer by profession.” And a Warrior of the Celestial Blade by a fate I didn’t choose.
I sat down again on a fuchsia-and-pea-green blanket on the cement floor, feigning casualness.
Gregor reached for another piece of pizza. His eyes dropped out of confrontational mode. “Pizza and beer are better than human blood,” he muttered. “Most of the time.”
Kaylor still looked ready to pounce and eat me.
“So, Donovan is also Kajiri?” I might as well make use of my time here.
“Yeah, Kajiri, like us. But he ain’t Sasquatch. He’s Damiri. They’re pansies. Disdain eating humans, pride themselves on their ability to maintain a human form and get educated in your universities. They like blending in with the enemy. Some even try to forget where they really come from,” a shorter and lanky fellow from the back of the pack said with derision. “And they’re all richer than Bill Gates.”
“No one is richer than Bill Gates. How would an ignorant human tell the difference?”
“The Damiri are tallish by your standards, about six foot, and darker. They tend to go to fat if they don’t watch it. But they are more deadly in a fight.” Gregor seemed truly interested in educating me. “Their natural form is similar to your bats.”
I blanched and lost my appetite.
“Donovan is tall and dark, but he certainly hasn’t gone to fat,” I choked out. But he liked bat costumes at cons. Was it all a costume?
“He works out,” the short and lanky one said.
“They get those silver wings of hair at about age thirty, but the rest of their hair never goes gray.”
“Their names always start with a D and end with an N.”
In less time than it took me to inhale, an image of Dillwyn flashed before my mind’s eye. He’d just turned twenty-eight, a year older than me, when I met him, and lost him three months later. He had about two gray white hairs on each side of his full head of dark hair. Right at his temples. The same place Donovan had silver wings of hair.
He’d been about an inch taller than Donovan, too.
I’d fallen for him within minutes of meeting him.
No.
Impossible.
My imagination running overtime. I am a science fiction/fantasy writer after all.
“Where’d the pizza and beer come from?” I asked rather than think those horrible thoughts. They had a microwave and mini fridge plugged into the wall.
“Come to think of it, where is the electricity coming from?”
The first thing the Marines and SWAT teams outside would do is cut off electricity and water.
“We’ve got our own sources,” Kaylor said smugly. His eyes dropped to the floor.
“From underground. You’re bringing up resources from the underworld.”
Silence.
I’d hit the nail on the head.
“I don’t remember seeing any pizza parlors or bars the one time I ventured into the underworld.”
“You only made it as far as the chat room. That’s a scary place if you aren’t used to it,” Gregor said.
“Chat room?” I raised both eyebrows in astonishment.
I’d heard Scrap use that term before.
“That’s what we call it,” the short and lanky one said.
Short being relative. These guys were big. Sasquatch. All of them well over six feet. I wondered if full-blooded Sasquatch were in the eight-foot range as legend suggested.
“It’s the room just beyond the portal where you get to choose which dimension to go to. Anybody can get into the chat room. Getting into a dimension not your own takes real talent. Never known a human to manage it,” Gregor said. He seemed to be warming up to me.
I wanted to ask if this chat room was where demons seduced their breeding partners. That might explain the Beauty and the Beast legend. But I didn’t want these angry young men to think I was coming on to them by asking too many questions about breeding.
“Time to set the watch,” Gregor changed the subject. Then he switched to that strange clicking and hissing language as he pointed to six of his fellow demons.
Those six rose reluctantly, each grabbing another piece of pizza and an extra beer. They disappeared into the shadows. Within a few moments, six different demons reappeared, all carrying new stores. They settled in to eat with only a quick glance and dismissal of my presence.
They all wore jeans, western-cut shirts, belts with big buckles and boots, much like the Indians I had seen in town. They all had dark hair, but not the jet black I expected of Indian genetics. And they all smelled of the oily, mineral-laden water, including the ancient fish oil, from the lake.
“Mind if I go off into a corner and sit by myself for a while?” I asked.
Gregor waved me off to the left, away from the microwave and fridge.
I took the bright pink blanket and a pillow with me.
That cement floor was cold. Once I’d made myself comfortable, I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. Maybe, with luck, and a lot of concentration I could reach out with my mind and find… “Sister Serena?”
The fuzzy image of my friend and doctor at the Citadel appeared before my closed eyes. The image came and went sporadically, like a hologram shorting out in an SF movie.
“What ails you, child?” she asked into my mind.
“I am a hostage of two dozen Kajiri demons. They have strung imp’s bane around so Scrap cannot find me. I need help getting out of here.”
“Kajiri demons!” She sounded alarmed, looking about frantically. “How did two dozen Kajiri slip past the portal?”
“I think they came through a long time ago. They are very familiar with this world, very comfortable here. They admit to being half-breeds.”
“Impossible. Demons cannot breed with humans. Your information is faulty. Perhaps they are Kmera demons. Our brothers to the east have been lax in guarding their portal. They age and do not recruit new
members.”
“No. They definitely said Kajiri.”
“I have to go. There’s more activity around the portal.”
She snapped out of my awareness so fast I thought she might have panicked.
That was a concept I had trouble getting my imagination around. Sister Serena never panicked. She was always calm, always clear-headed, always willing to answer my questions.
Now what did I do?
Wheee! Tessie, look at me.
I swung merrily from rafter to rafter. Lighter than air. Hardly any wing needed at all. Whee!
Hey, babe, you aren’t looking at me.
Oops, forgot. She can’t see me through the miasma of imp’s bane.
I jumped onto a rafter beside a bat. A big fella. We stared at each other for a while. Kinda hard since he was upside down.
So I went upside down, too, clinging with my toes. What a rush. Blood in my head and in my eyes. Everything looking weird and wonderful.
Bat got bored. I think he said his name was Morris or was that Morrissette and a she? Anyway, he went back to sleep. Too bad. He was kinda cute. So I tried watching my babe for a while. She wasn’t doing much, meditating. How boring.
Time to slide down the walls and give those Kajiri a scare.
A tweak to their ears here, a pinch to a bottom there.
But they don’t scare easily.
So I hang in front of one of the guards and make ugly faces at him. He can’t see me either. He’s got a braid of mistletoe, holly, and ivy around his neck.
Weird. None of those plants ever put a foggy wall between my babe and me before. She’s a nut at Christmas and drapes the whole house in greenery. Must be the way they braid and knot the stuff.
Who cares. I’m going back to the rafters. I can see the world from here. The world could come to an end—and I wouldn’t care!
Interlude
SOON AFTER I’D begun training seriously, a night of a waxing quarter moon came around. The Sisters all gathered in the courtyard for their ritual. I stood aside with a new initiate, Alunda, still recovering from her fever. We wouldn’t be allowed to participate until we finished our training and went through some kind of ritual blessing from the Goddess.
This night the Goddess did not appear. The portal had not been breached.
I helped Alunda back to her infirmary bed. Her black skin glistened with sweat from the effort of standing.
Sister S hastened in and fussed around her, taking her temperature and blood pressure, clucking her tongue, and showing her best bedside manner.
The warm, cozy, charming atmosphere Sister S created tugged at me. I wanted to linger, be one of her patients again. Not because I was sick. Because I was lonely. And bored. I needed mental stimulation, a book to write, animated discussion on hot topics. Even the evening news on TV would help.
None of that happened at the Citadel. Here, life revolved around training, recounting past battles, working in the garden, and sleeping.
Reluctantly I retired to my solitary cell in the dormitory. No books. No radio. No CDs. No TV. Nothing but myself and my purloined notebook and pencil.
Trouble was, I had no idea where the story was going. I needed an ending to drive the story forward.
So I played with words and graphs and character development until loud voices and laughter drew my attention.
A party seemed to be growing in the common room.
I slunk out of my cell and down the hall to the big room where twenty women lounged about on sofas, overstuffed chairs, and big cushy pillows. A keg of beer stood in the corner. Sister Paige played bartender, drawing glass after glass.
I joined the line for this rare treat. Sister Gert probably allowed the keg in this one dorm because the Goddess had not appeared. The rest of the dorms were on watch. I wondered if the single keg just wandered from dorm to dorm each month.
The beer tasted funny, too heavy and yeasty for me with bits of floating vegetation. Homemade with a crude filter. Maybe they’d used the recipe found in the Hammurabi Code. Maybe the Sisterhood had written the code for the ancient king of Babylon who codified every aspect of life he could think of, including how to make beer.
Don’t you like beer, babe? Scrap looked at me wistfully.
He snuggled next to me in the armless chair I found off to the side.
“Sure I like beer. Just not this beer.” I didn’t have to whisper to keep this conversation private. The stories and songs in the center of the party had become rather raucous. No one could overhear us unless they sat in the narrow chair with us.
Can I drink it? He looked hopefully lavender.
I held the glass for him. The liquid disappeared at an alarming rate.
I wondered if there was a limit on refills. Then I noticed a lot of the Sisters fed beer to their imps.
More, Scrap demanded.
“Say please.”
He stared at me malevolently. None of the other imps have to be polite.
“But you’re my imp, and I like to live life in a somewhat civilized manner. That requires a degree of politeness just to get along.”
Scrap fumed in silence a moment.
Oh, okay. May I please have some more beer?
“Sure, pal. I’ll get it for you.”
I had to duck beneath swooping imps to get back to the keg. Sister Electra had taken over at the tap. Her flushed face matched her flame-colored hair, and her eyes glazed over a bit. Her imp hung from a drawing of dry falls on the wall by one elbow talon. Electra and the imp swayed in rhythm to a discordant tune the imp sang.
I looked back at Scrap. He perched on my chair, hands crossed over his pot belly and tiny wings folded neatly against his back. He swiveled his bat-wing ears, catching every nuance of the conversations. Oh, well, if he got drunk and had a hangover in the morning, maybe he’d learn not to indulge. I let Electra refill my glass.
The party went on and on. I told story after story, each more fantastic than the last, fishing for the right ending for the book I wrote. Nothing worked for me. My audience seemed to appreciate them, though, singing battle songs in the right places and dirges in others.
Scrap drank glass after glass of beer, keeping pace with the other imps.
“Why aren’t you as drunk as those idiots?” I asked, leaning back to avoid two imps fighting a mock battle using plastic straws for swords. (Some modern conveniences made their way into the Citadel. Sister Gert made a trip into the nearest town once a month in an unobtrusive four-by-four pickup. I had no idea where the money came from.)
Because you aren’t.
Interesting. “So if I’m hungry, so are you. If I’m tired, so are you. If I get drunk, so will you.”
Yeah, something like that. He belched and let out a huge yawn.
I couldn’t help but echo that.
We retired long before the party even began to wind down. I was still bored to tears. And I hadn’t learned anything new. The Sisters drunk told the same stories they told sober. And frankly, I could write more exciting stuff with one hand tied behind my back. If I could just find the right ending.
Chapter 33
Some bats can live up to thirty years. Even small bats live considerably longer than other small mammals.
SITTING IN THAT DRAFTY warehouse in the middle of abandoned Fort Snoqualmie, I’d give my eyeteeth for a cell phone. Or my laptop. Or even a PDA. But the Marines were probably jamming cell phone signals, my laptop was back at the lodge, and my PDA was in my purse, which Gollum had, along with my cell phone.
How many minutes was he running up explaining the unexplainable to my mother and my agent.
“Close the door, dammit,” I snarled at the young Sasquatch who escorted me to the restroom.
He snarled back, showing his teeth.
“At least turn your back. Don’t you guys have any sense of privacy?”
“Can’t have you climbing out the window, writer lady.”
“Fine,” I growled back at him. I stomped into the middle stall whi
ch had no window above it and slammed the door. The catch was broken. Somehow I managed to hold the thing shut with one hand as I crouched over the throne, not letting my butt touch the stained and broken seat.
My headache throbbed, worse than any hangover I could imagine. What do you expect? All they had to drink around here was beer. And the fumes from the joints they smoked were thick enough to swim through.
No wonder I was cranky.
And I hadn’t seen Scrap for hours. I missed him. Part of me wanted to wither up and cry from missing him.
My mind began to spin with new ideas for my book.
My fingers wanted to beat on the keys of the computer.
I needed to get this down before I lost it.
The adrenaline rush from new ideas cleared my head some.
That made me want to write even more.
“Gregor, I don’t suppose on your next trip out for supplies you could slip into the Mowath Lodge and liberate my laptop? Or a pad of paper and a pen.” I asked as nicely as I knew how. All those years of Mom beating good manners into me must account for something.
“I’ll try.” He shrugged and curled up on his pillow and promptly went to sleep.
They all went to sleep.
I paced, trying to keep the words and images in my head. As I paced, I managed to kick a couple of the braids of imp’s bane into the fire they kept burning in the middle of the warehouse. The smoke vented naturally through the original heating ducts.
Autumn had settled in, and the desert air grew cold at night. The cement floor and vast open spaces held the cold. I hated to think how hot and stifling this place would be in summer.
My head cleared a little. I tossed another bunch of mistletoe, holly, and ivy into the fire, curious at how they’d bound the three plants together.
My head cleared a little more. I caught a glimpse of movement in the rafters. Scrap.
Plans flashed in and out of my head.
After about an hour I decided I should sleep, too. I might never know when I’d need to be rested and ready to roll.
“Tess, you have to help me,” Dill whispered in the dead of the night.