The Gift of the Demons

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  I thought about that. If Mr. Barry hadn’t died, then there would still be a threat of demons around here. I guess I didn’t want that, either. He had died for a good reason, and I wouldn’t want his sacrifice to be in vain.

  “A part of me wants that, I guess. But not all of me,” I said. “I know I have to move on, and I’ll get there, eventually.” I stood up, to make sure she understood I was done talking to her.

  She stared at me as I walked back to my assigned seat. I felt a little of that creepy back of the neck feeling you get when people stare too long. I guess she thought I was a hard case. Whatever.

  She called up the next person on her list and I went back to the most boring homework page ever written.

  After school, I found Georgia and we talked for a while. I guess Ms. Forest must have gotten inside my head or something because I found myself asking Georgia the question she asked me.

  “If you could have anything you wanted, what would you want?”

  “You mean, if I was going to make a bargain with a demon, what would I ask for?”

  “I guess.” I hadn’t been thinking about demons right then.

  “That’s easy.”

  “It is?”

  “More money. Money buys everything. Power. Friends. A prettier face, if I wanted one. An unlimited supply of money. Yup, that would make me happy.”

  I stared at her, thinking that was possibly the shallowest answer I had ever heard. Was that really what Georgia thought?

  “Kidding!” she said, shaking her head. “Geez, you never get a joke. You’re way too serious, you know that?”

  “I guess I am. Maybe you should ask for me to be less serious if you make a bargain, then,” I said, trying to be light-hearted about this.

  “No way. If I make a bargain with a demon, I’m not going to waste it on you,” she said. “Maybe I’d ask to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Or possibly I’d ask to just have really great fingerails. Mine are horrible.” She held them up and showed me one of her hangnails.

  “Yeah, that’s definitely what you’d want to give up your life for.”

  “Hey, beauty is worth any sacrifice,” said Georgia.

  “So you’d trade your life for beauty?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. What are the other choices? Maybe I could just give up sleeping in or doing the Macarena.”

  I thought about what Rumpy said about whatever bargain you made eating at your soul. I guess you could call it what you wanted, but it wouldn’t be good. “Let’s stay away from demon bargains, shall we?”

  “You think we’re not smart enough?” said Georgia.

  “I don’t think anyone is smart enough,” I said. “The only smart ones are the ones who keep away from demons altogether.”

  “Amen to that,” said Georgia, and we headed home.

  Chapter 11

  Saturday morning, Mom was on her second off day, which meant she woke up at an almost normal time and made breakfast: scrambled eggs with cheese and homemade blueberry muffins.

  I should have known something was coming when I sat down to eat. I was horribly sore and my legs felt so heavy that I had to pick them up deliberately to move anywhere. But it was a good kind of pain. I knew why it was there and it had a purpose. I knew that it would go away in a few days, too. I’d be stronger then, when my torn muscles were repaired.

  The food was a good first step. Protein and carbs, the best recovery food.

  “How did you sleep?” asked Mom.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “You look—tired,” said Dad. A diplomatic way of putting it, I suppose.

  “Yeah, I am.” Was it too early for me to go back to bed to get a nap?

  “We thought it would be a good chance for us to have a family day together,” said Mom. “It’s the weekend. You’re out of school. I’m off work. Dad isn’t in session. What do you think?”

  I thought that she was doing this because of Mr. Barry’s funeral. But I didn’t want to bring it up to argue with her. So that meant I was going to have a family day.

  “How about something low key?” I said. I didn’t think I felt up to going on one of Mom’s marathon hikes or drives down to Southern Utah to see the National Parks in the area.

  “Your father just said the same thing,” said Mom.

  Good for Dad.

  “How about an excursion down to City Creek? It’s pretty there. Lots of shops.” Which Mom liked. “And good restaurants.” Which Dad and I would like.

  “OK,” I said. Now that she brought it up, it sounded like the perfect thing to get away from home for a while. No demons, no summoning spells, no people gone missing.

  “Is that face enthusiasm or resigned to your fate?” asked Mom.

  “A little bit of both,” I said honestly.

  Mom kissed me on the top of my head, which she does sometimes. “I think that’s going around.”

  “And is there a cure for it?” I asked.

  “Yes. In fact, a day doing nothing but spending money is the prescription. I asked the doctor. He wrote it down and insisted that it’s time to get it filled.”

  So we went to City Creek, which is the outdoor mall downtown in Salt Lake City. It was a gorgeous sunny day, not too warm yet. The fountain in the center court was doing its thing and we stopped and watched it for a while. We came to see it when it opened, but somehow I never get tired of the fountain. There’s this little river that runs through the mall on both sides of the street. It may seem a little cheesy, but that’s the reason for the name “City Creek.” I like the sound of the water being in the background anytime you step out of the shops, and the rocks that are set along the bed are pretty. I also like going on the upper level and looking down on the creek and the people below. It’s cool to walk over the cars on the street and feel like you’re on top of the world.

  We did plenty of shopping, Mom insisting on buying Dad some new shirts. He tends to wear white shirts under his suits all the time, but Mom wants to see him in yellow and light blue and a stripe. I had no idea if Dad would wear them, but it was fun to cajole him into trying them on. I also got to pick a funky tie for Dad, since Mom said he needed to show he had a bit of a sense of humor.

  Then it was my turn. Mom bought me a fancy new dress. “Every girl needs to have something that makes her feel like a princess.”

  I was acutely uncomfortable trying on princess dresses. I didn’t think of myself as that kind of girl. But then we found a dress that was sleek and black and made me look amazingly good. Most dresses seem to make my arms and shoulders look like they’re fat, but this one had no sleeves. The sheath effect showed off my torso and my shoulders were on display as strong, rather than unshapely.

  “It’s perfect,” said Mom. “You’re perfect, Fallin.”

  “I just need some shoes,” I said, so we went to get those, too. I am tall enough that I don’t often wear high heels, but this time Mom insisted that the dress wouldn’t work with anything else. After I tried on a couple of pairs, I found one with sparkly heels and they were actually comfortable.

  After all that, we finally went to lunch at The Cheesecake Factory. I ordered something moderately healthy for lunch, and then some cheesecake, of course. It’s always so hard to choose which one to have. I wanted to order about six of them, but settled on the Reese’s Peanut Butter, which I hadn’t had before. Dad ordered the plain cheesecake because he’s dad and he’s a purist when it comes to dessert. Mom ordered the Chocolate Tower Truffle cake because she’s a rebel.

  When it came she stared at it for a long time before daring to poke a fork in. “This is the size of my head. I’m pretty sure that eating a dessert the size of my head is not in my diet.”

  “You’re not a diet, Mom,” I pointed out.

  “Maybe I’ll have to be, after I eat this.”

  We all ended up getting half of our desserts put into boxes to bring home. We were standing at the counter in front, waiting for the boxes and the check when a guy who was in the w
aiting area looked up and stared at me. I figured it was the standard white Utahn surprise that there were actually black people who lived in the state.

  But then he shook his head, said the “n” word loud enough for everyone to hear, and stood up. He walked all the way to the other side of the waiting area, and sat back down with his back to me.

  Mom froze.

  “Don’t do anything,” I whispered to her. “Just let it go.” That was the only strategy I’d ever learned for this kind of crap.

  “No. Not this time,” said Mom. “It’s one thing when it’s a child. But when it’s an adult—no.”

  Dad looked over and me and took my hand.

  We watched as Mom marched over to the guy and gave him a piece of her mind. She didn’t try to keep it quiet, either.

  Every once in a while, I am surprised at how colorful Mom’s language can be. If I say so much as a “damn” or a “hell” in her hearing, she comes down on me hard. But she was all over this guy with cuss words I’d never even heard before. And they didn’t sound like ones you’d look up in a dictionary to practice. She sounded like she’d been using them all her life.

  I wanted to leave. The manager of the restaurant came over and tried to convince Mom to leave. He offered her a free gift card, and that set her off again about how people thought they could pay their way out of bad behavior and the manager was a disgrace to humanity.

  The guy who’d used the “n” word threatened to call the police, which Mom said was fine with her.

  Dad had taken the bag full of dessert boxes and signed the receipt.

  This was not a particularly glorious end to what had been a wonderful family day. I’d thought I had done a great job of forgetting about Mr. Barry and demons and death.

  But the compulsion to say the words of the demon summoning spell came back with a vengeance. I was so mad at this guy. I had had to endure things like this so many times in my life. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. Nothing seemed right in my life right now.

  If I could just make a bargain to make sure something like this never happened to me again, wouldn’t it be worth it? A little bit of soul gnawing—who cared about that? It wasn’t as if I’d ever noticed I had a soul before. I probably wouldn’t even notice the difference.

  This is what I told myself as I did nothing to stop the part of me that was speaking the words of the spell.

  “Fallin?” said Dad. “What are you doing?”

  There was smoke rising from the floor of the restaurant. Good, I thought. I wanted to see the demon. I wanted to dance with evil. I’d had to watch it all my life. Now was my chance to control it myself, and set off my own little bombs on the people who had hurt me in the past.

  “What is that?” said Dad, pointing.

  I turned to the left and saw an old man appear out of nowhere. Afterward, Dad said that he just came out from behind a plant. Mom said that he had just turned around and faced us. But I knew it was a demon who had come because I had summoned him.

  He looked harmless. He was shorter than I was, with white, bushy eyebrows that stuck up around his eyes. He had laugh lines around his mouth, wrinkly skin that looked like it would be soft to touch, jowls that hung off his chin a bit. He was older than Rumpy was, and he looked like age had been kind to him. It was only his eyes that were clearly demon. They were sharp and dark, nearly completely black, and they weren’t human. They moved too fast back and forth and they were too big. Not quite the right shape for a human, either, too round.

  I thought about the demon who had come for Carter. It was like the demons knew they had to put on a human skin, but maybe they all made different mistakes when creating it. I had no idea what the demon really looked like inside. It was probably pretty bad, since they took care not to let anyone see that. Or maybe it was just that once humans stopped believing in demons, they had to work out another way to make bargains with us.

  The man came toward me. “Fallin, so good to see you,” he said in German.

  “Do you know him?” asked Dad. “Fallin, who is that?”

  “He’s a friend,” I said.

  “A friend? You mean a teacher from school?”

  “Just give us a moment, Dad.” I could make the bargain quickly. Then life would be better. Sure, in a few weeks or months, I’d be dead or disappeared like the others, but it would be worth it.

  “What do you offer me?” asked the demon, this time in English.

  “Fallin, what is he talking about?” said Dad.

  Mom was staring at us, but she was too far away to see the demon’s face. She didn’t seem to know which threat to choose from, the guy who had insulted me or the demon.

  “I offer my soul,” I said. Let’s make it simple and to the point.

  “And what do you ask for?” asked the demon, again in English.

  “I ask for—” I stopped, trying to formulate it. There was this inchoate anger in me that wanted to be satiated. But how. I wanted the power to make thunder and lightning appear when I was angry. I wanted to put out my hand and stop the “n” word from the throat of anyone tempted to say it, to turn them choking into the dust. I wanted to be—

  “Fallin, don’t say anything!” said a new voice.

  I turned just a fraction and saw Rumpy walking into the restaurant.

  How had he known I was going to be here? We were thirty miles from home. Was it just a coincidence? Had he just happened to come here at the same time we had? It was a Saturday, after all, and even demon fighters had to have some time off.

  But I knew from the look on his face that he’d followed us. Followed me. He had come to protect me. What arrogance! As if I needed him to protect me. I was about to make a bargain with a demon and that would be my real protection, for as long as I lived. Which might not be too long.

  I was confused enough that I didn’t say anything to the demon, who turned and looked at Rumpy.

  This wasn’t a school gym. There were dozens of people around. If Rumpy did something here, it could cause a real problem for him.

  But that didn’t seem to phase him. He got out his knife.

  There were a few screams.

  People started diving away from him, out the door, or through the restaurant.

  The demon didn’t show any fear at all. He saw Rumpy, then turned back to me. “What is it you want?” he asked.

  But if Rumpy killed him, any bargain we made would be over, I thought. Why did he care if I said it?

  I felt cold as I realized that he wanted me to say it so that *I* knew what I wanted, so that it would burn inside me and I would try to make another bargain soon. He wasn’t interested in what he would gain from this. He just wanted to bring me down. He wanted me angry and full of hate. Like he was, probably. Like all demons were.

  I said nothing.

  Rumpy grabbed the demon by the shoulders and yanked him out of the restaurant by the front door. Some people watched him go. The restaurant manager called 911. But for most people, now that both of them were out of the restaurant, they were happy to go back to what they had been doing before. I don’t even know if Dad saw what happened next. There was glass in the door, but there were other things blocking the sight.

  Rumpy must have stabbed the demon, because he disappeared rather suddenly. Then Rumpy shrugged, glanced at me as if to warn me. Warn me not to do that again?

  Yeah, I got it.

  It had been stupid. Also, unavoidable.

  And next time, when I got angry again, I knew I would do the same thing.

  It was like an infection that was raging inside me, only I didn’t have any T-cells to fight the infection with. I had only my own will power, which as I had just proven, was not that powerful.

  I sunk onto Dad’s shoulder, not weeping, but shaking.

  “It’s OK, Fallin,” he said. “He’s gone now.”

  Yeah, gone now. But not gone forever.

  Mom came back, muttering curse words. “I’m so sorry, Fallin. I’m sorry that people like that exist
. And I’m sorry that you have to deal with them.”

  “Me, too,” I said. I was going to have to figure out a better way to deal with them. One that did not include a bargain with demons. But for now, we walked back to the parking garage and headed home.

  I thought about Rumpy and wondered if he was still following me. Maybe he was. I don’t know. We had the rest of our desserts for dinner that night, and spent some time talking about nothing in the living room. It was one of the few times in my life that I remember Dad did not turn on the news while we were in front of the TV at evening news time. He didn’t even seem to think about it.

  I went to bed and woke up on Sunday morning, not as sore as the day before, and still angry enough that I wanted to go to the gym and take out my frustration on some equipment. I figured that was safer that letting myself stew at home and call demons. The gym was open any day of the week, orders from the football coach who wanted to encourage his players to work out often. But there were no keys, so I could get in, too.

  I parked and got out of the car. And that was when I saw Rumpy.

  Chapter 12

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Waiting for you. I figured you’d be here this morning and it seemed a good place to meet.”

  “I should have expected you, I guess,” I said. After all, he’d just happened to be where I was most of the last week.

  “I don’t think you have any idea what you’ve gotten into here,” he said.

  “Um, I think I do. Demons, bargains, unnatural powers, and really, really bad stuff.”

  “Well, yes,” he said.

  “I didn’t want to read that demon summoning spell. I didn’t want to remember it, either. I’ve been trying to forget it for days.”

  “That only makes it stay in your mind. The more you focus on it, the more it sticks.”

  “So there’s nothing I can do now? I’m demon meat?”

  “Actually, there’s plenty you can do.”

  “What? Is there some erasing spell I can do? Or I can go back in time and not look at that paper, like in Harry Potter?” You know when you’re using references to Harry Potter in real life that things have gotten really weird.