“No. I can’t change what has already happened.”
“Then you can teach me how to have more self-control? Not start saying the spell when I get in a bad situation? Or maybe build a bubble around myself so that I’m never tempted by assholes again?”
“No, not that either.” His mouth was twitching with a smile, but he didn’t look very happy with me.
“Then what?”
“I was thinking maybe I could teach you how to fight demons. Kill them.”
“Like you did with the one last night?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought you didn’t want me to do that. Because I was a girl and too young and you wanted to protect me.”
“I wish I didn’t have to teach you that. I wish I could protect you all the time.”
“But wasn’t the plan to just hang around and follow me everywhere I go.”
“That plan has certain—limitations,” he admitted.
“Oh really? Like what?”
“Like the fact that at some point your father is going to notice the creepy older gentleman following you and ask me what I am doing. And I don’t think he’s going to like any answer I give him.” Rumpy’s face was sad. The smile had completely disappeared. I thought how expressive he was, and wondered how he had lived so long hunting demons without hiding his emotions more. I was glad he hadn’t.
“You can just throw one of your knives at my dad. Problem solved,” I said. My voice was a little breathless. I was staring around the parking lot, hoping that no one else showed up. But it was unlikely. It was four a.m. on a Monday morning. Who else was headed to the school gym then?
“I’d prefer not to,” said Rumpy.
“And why is that?”
“Well, for one thing, I like to avoid collateral damage when fighting demons. It sort of negates the whole saving humanity from death part of my contract.” A smile, but a very flat one, that didn’t reach his eyes. “And for another thing, it might end up with you being angry with me.”
“And that matters to you so much?” I said. I could feel the fear in my throat like a chip of ice that hadn’t melted and was threatening to cut off my air supply.
“It does matter, actually. Rather a lot.”
“Well, then.” I didn’t know what that meant. Was he trying to tell me something? Would he try to tell me why it wasn’t creepy? And what was I supposed to do then? Run away screaming?
“It seems like a good place for us to start. I can teach you some basic moves with a knife and show you the vulnerable spots on a demon.”
“So, we’re going to do sparring? In the gym?”
“Can you think of a better place?”
There were probably lots of better places. But this one had the advantage of being open, empty of other people, and where we both currently were. I lowered my head. “Let’s try it,” I said. I wasn’t committing to anything. I wasn’t saying we had anything between us. This was just me admitting that I could use some tips from someone who had spent a little longer fighting demons than I had.
We went inside. The janitors had just opened the main doors, and the gym was always open. I put a hand up to turn on the bank of lights, which blinded me for a second.
“Smells like a gym,” said Rumpy.
“Yeah. It does at that.” To me it also smelled of hard efforts, of success and failure, of friends who almost knew me, and exhaustion beyond anything I’d ever thought I could bring myself to. It was a place I knew well and was comfortable with. I’d seen my first demon here. It was sort of coming back full circle, and that seemed like a good thing.
“So what do we do first?”
“First, I give you a knife,” said Rumpy. He held out his hand, palm open. The knife in it had a blade about six inches long. It was well-used, too. I could see several large nicks along the edge, and it was discolored here and there, dark and mottled. The handle was a smooth white wood that had been polished by sweat and long use.
It fit Rumpy’s hand perfectly, I thought. I was surprised to find that it fit mine just as well. I’d always thought of myself as having unusually large hands for a girl, but now it seemed like that was a good thing. This knife would need those hands.
“Do I get to practice throwing it at you?” I asked, teasing.
“Do you want to?” he said, not teasing.
“Um, not really. Not now, anyway. If you’d asked me last night, you might have gotten a different answer.”
“Because you wanted to make that bargain with the demon?” he asked.
“That and because I was mad that you were following me.”
“Hmm,” he said, which meant something but I wasn’t sure what. “I brought a target for you to aim at.” He took out of his pocket a plastic thing which he unfolded. It was garish colors of blue and red and yellow, and when he had found the valve to blow it up, I realized it was a clown. It was nearly as tall as he was when he was finished. The bottom was wobbly, but he set it up about twenty feet from me.
“Now you try to hit it,” he said.
“That seems kind of easy. And when I hit it, then we don’t have a target left.”
“You’ll see,” he said.
So I shrugged and held out the knife. He stepped away from the inflated clown.
Then I pulled my hand back over my shoulder for the throw. And I felt a sudden sharp heat in my arm that ran all the way through my shoulder and down the back of my spine.
“Ouch!” I screamed and dropped the knife.
Rumpy came over and picked up the knife and handed it back to me. “Another try?”
I didn’t take the knife immediately this time. “What was that?” I asked.
“That was the knife telling you you weren’t aiming properly,” he said. “You need to get it right in the eye. Not the heart. Not the mouth. The eye.”
“And the knife knows whether I’m doing it right or not? How is that?”
“It’s a magic knife. Made specially for demon fighters.”
“So it’s alive or something?” I was still staring at it, afraid to pick it up.
“Not alive. Think of it like a computer. You’re playing a game and it’s the scope. If you don’t have the right aim, it won’t let you fire. Waste of energy.”
“That’s creepy,” I said.
“Lots of creepy thing about demons,” said Rumpy. “And that’s the one that bothers you.”
I took the knife back. It felt like a regular knife again. I stared down at it. It still looked normal.
“It will give you a bit of a cold, tingling sensation when it’s right,” said Rumpy.
“You didn’t tell me that before now?” I said.
“And miss all that fun?” he said, grinning like he was a kid again.
It made me smile back at him. Right. This was demons. This was life and death. But that didn’t mean we couldn’t have fun while we were at it.
I lifted the knife, held it back above my head, and then waited for the cool, tingling feeling. It took a few moments, and when I felt it, I threw immediately.
The inflated clown made a farting sound as it fell over and then sagged into plastic bits and pieces all over the floor.
“Well, that was messy.”
“Good job,” said Rumpy. He came up behind me and held up a hand to give me a high five. I guess he’d learned how to do that from other young demon fighters he’d trained.
Which made me wonder. “How many other demon fighters have you worked with?”
“Why do you ask?” he said.
“Trying to figure out long term odds here.”
“For survival at demon hunting?” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“You’re not telling me because it’s bad, right?” I said. I was trying to read his expression, but it had closed down suddenly.
“It isn’t good,” he said.
“How many?” My voice had gone hoarse.
He shook his head again. “I haven’t trained anyone else,” he said.
&
nbsp; I was so surprised at that answer I wasn’t sure I believed it. “No one? In all these years?”
He laughed a little bitterly at that. “No. Not in all these years.”
“But it has to have been a long time, right? I mean, why wouldn’t you train anyone else?”
“Maybe there wasn’t anyone else who wanted to be trained. Or who I thought was worth training,” he said.
“Maybe?”
He shrugged.
“You have any other tips? Besides just the knife?” I asked.
“Well, the knife is a good idea. But demons tend to disguise themselves. It can be hard to tell the difference between a demon and a regular human being. So if I were you, I’d be careful about making a bargain with anyone. Or taking something from someone, even if it seems innocuous. Demons lie. They do anything to make a bargain.” He looked away from me and went to pick up the knife. He wiped it on his leg even though it hadn’t gotten blood on it or anything. He was acting like it mattered, but I didn’t think that was what was going on with him.
“Is that how they did it to you?” I asked. “Lying?”
He let out a breath. “How did you guess?” he said.
“I don’t know. It just seemed like you knew a lot about what it was like to make a bargain with a demon. And being a demon fighter—what could be a better impetus for wanting to stop them than having been through it yourself.” I still didn’t know anything else about him, not really.
He sighed, and when he spoke, he still didn’t look me in the eye. He handed me the knife and looked just over my shoulder. “I won’t make excuses. I wanted what I wanted and I didn’t care what it cost me.”
I waited a moment, trying to decide if I could ask him such a personal question. Then I decided I was going to do it anyway. “What did you want?”
He hesitated and I thought he was going to tell me that it was none of my business, which maybe it wasn’t, or that I was impertinent and needed to learn better manners, which I probably did. Then he said, “Love.”
I laughed at that.
He winced and I realized he had been serious.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean that.”
He rubbed at his face. “You think I’m too old?” he asked. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Well, I know that you don’t have to be young to be in love. But I guess it’s sort of hard for me to imagine you being in love. Was it recent or a long time ago?”
“Sometimes it seems like it was a long time ago. But it wasn’t. Just a few months, really.”
“So what happened to her? Did she fall in love with you?”
He shook his head. “It isn’t like that. It wasn’t one particular girl I was in love with.”
“No?”
“I mean, I guess I thought it was. There were actually two girls I was thinking about. I dated them both, but it was so hard to choose between them. They both wanted to get more serious, and I knew I couldn’t have both of them. So I thought the bargain would help me figure things out. You know, show me which was the right one. It seems like a stupid reason to make a bargain with a demon, but I didn’t really understand the consequences.”
I tried to imagine how many years ago that would have been. “What happened?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It wasn’t either of them,” he said.
“So you fell in love with someone else?”
He looked at me for a long moment. “You could say that.”
“And what did you pay for it? Was it worth it?”
“What kind of a gentleman would I be if I said it wasn’t?” he asked wryly.
“Is she still alive?” I asked.
He gave a choked laugh. “Yes,” he said. “She’s still alive.”
“But she’s not with you, is she?”
He shook his head.
“Didn’t that break the bargain, then?” I asked. I was surprised that a guy would care about love that much. I thought it was usually girls who were the ones focused on dating and love in high school. But I guess he was in a different time. And the more I got to know him, the more I realized that Rumpy was not like other guys, no matter what time he was from.
“Well, the problem is that I didn’t phrase it the right way. I wanted to fall in love unmistakably with the right girl.”
“And you did, but she didn’t fall back in love with you?”
“Bingo,” he said.
“Was she mad about you dating two girls at once? Did she want revenge or something?” I asked. I was trying to think about how this would all work that long ago. Wasn’t that when the hippies were around and everyone was sort of loose about stuff like that? But maybe not everyone.
“It wasn’t like that. She wasn’t someone I’d known before. I mean, I knew her name, but not much else about her. I don’t know if she would even have recognized me in a lineup.”
“But you knew you were in love with her? Absolutely?” I wondered what that would feel like. I’d never really been sure about anything in my life before.
“She was the one. The only one. From the first moment I saw her.”
“Wow. So what happened after that? You gave it your all to get her to love you back, I assume. You took your chance. You can’t have any regrets.” It sounded exactly like the stupid stuff my parents would tell me after something terrible had happened, like how I had my whole life still ahead of me and they were sure there were lots of good things still ahead. I stared at him and realized that I wasn’t helping things.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not your fault. I’m the idiot,” he said. “It has nothing to do with you, really. It’s just about me and some girl from about a million years ago.”
“Not a million years ago,” I said. I’d thought he might feel something for me, but obviously I’d been misreading things.
“Yeah, well, I know how you think of me. I’m old. I’m grown up. All my feelings have shriveled up. Along with everything else.”
I flushed. I didn’t really want to think about it that carefully. “I know you’re a person. I know you still have feelings, no matter how old you are,” I said.
“You want to know something?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “It doesn’t feel like it was that long ago. It feels like I saw her for the first time yesterday. Like I was your age yesterday, too. And the pain is just the same as it was then.”
“But are you sure there’s really no hope anymore? I mean, if she’s still alive, then maybe you could somehow make it up to her. Whatever it is that you’ve done, you could apologize. Start over again. Isn’t that what grown-ups do? They figure stuff out. Even the hard stuff.”
He let out a breath. “Yeah. It would be nice if it worked that way.”
“What did you do to her? Something to ruin all your chances?”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t do anything. That’s half the problem.”
I was getting into this. “So, you could find her again. Let things move slowly. Don’t tell her you’re in love with her. Just let it happen. Or maybe you could just be friends,” I said. After thinking the wrong thing about him, I was suddenly very interested in making sure that I helped him somehow.
“Friends?” He winced. “There is nothing as painful as watching the person you love and knowing that you will never be anything but a friend to her.”
“Right,” I said. Romance had never been something I thought would happen for me in high school. I’d just sort of shelved it. And now that I was looking at Rumpy’s face, I wondered what I was missing out on. I’d sort of liked the idea of a weird romance with someone forbidden. I’d never gotten into reading those fantasy novels about romance, but somehow it seemed like now I was inside of one.
“You’re sure it will never happen, then?” I asked.
“Pretty sure.”
“And you can’t break the bargain now?”
He shook his head. “I got what I asked for. Now I pay the price.”
“And what is the price
?” I asked.
He stared at me for a long moment, and I really thought he was going to tell me. But he shook his head. “That’s not something I want to share. It’s not your burden.”
“But you still fight demons? Even though it doesn’t help you at all?”
“It makes me feel better, knowing I’m helping other people get away,” he said. “Maybe that’s just petty vengeance, but it’s all I have left. It must make me look pretty small to you.”
After a long moment, I said, “So when you say that they gnaw on your soul, you know what you’re talking about.”
But he shook his head. “It’s not my soul. Or at least, only indirectly.” He didn’t explain that. Just handed me the knife back. “Let’s do this again.”
“How? The inflatable clown is ruined.”
“I have another one,” he said, and pulled it out of his pocket, unfolding it, then blowing it up.
“How many of those do you have?” I asked.
“As many as we need,” he said.
We kept at it for another hour, and then we heard someone else walking down the hall. “Time to quit for now,” I said.
He nodded, took the ruined clowns with him and threw them in the trash can on the way out.
I was tired, my arms like jello and the rest of me full of nerves. But I stayed another hour to do lower body circuit training. I didn’t want it to look like I was taking it easy. And besides, it felt good to go back to what I was used to doing. The machines at the gym didn’t turn my arm to fire if I did something wrong, and that was comforting.
Chapter 13
After I showered and dressed, Georgia met me at my locker in the main hall. “You’re shiny,” she said, pointing to my nose.
I rubbed at it. I was still sweating from the double workout.
“I heard some really weird stuff about your new German teacher,” she said.
“Yeah? What did you hear?”
“Just that you don’t want to see her when she’s angry.”
“Who made her angry?” I asked.
Georgia shrugged. “One of the froshes in her first year German class kept mispronouncing the word for fox.”
The Gift of the Demons Page 10