The Gift of the Demons

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  Nick brought Mrs. Feinstein to the car and opened the door. She sat right down in the seat next to the door, and there I was, in the middle, sitting closer to Nick than she was. That was awkward.

  “Thanks,” said Nick.

  “For what?” I asked.

  “For letting her sit in front.”

  I watched Mrs. Feinstein as Nick drove to pick up Georgia. She was nice-looking. She didn’t really look old enough to be retired. She kept in shape, obviously, and she was wearing a nice dress. Not slinky or anything, but a good black dress that showed off some nice legs. She had on high heels and black nylons. She didn’t have many wrinkles. Her hair didn’t look like it was going gray, but that might have been dye. She was just the right age for Nick.

  I should have been pleased as punch for him, but I wasn’t. I kept think how wrong she was for him. She didn’t have any spark. She didn’t laugh at his jokes. She didn’t tease him the way he deserved to be teased about his driving.

  I told myself it was because she wasn’t going to have a chance to get him to stop thinking about the real woman he loved. He needed someone with a big personality, maybe a little younger than he was. Someone who would understand about demon fighing. I couldn’t imagine that Nick could ever tell Mrs. Feinstein the truth about it. It was just too far out of her world. She taught sewing, and the biggest adventure she had probably ever had was to a fabric store. Now, maybe that wasn’t fair, but that was what I thought.

  Georgia got in back with Jayden and teased him a little about not sitting by me. Nick drove over to pick up Rory, and then the car was full. Georgia chatted alternately with Rory and Jayden in the back seat. The front seat was pretty quiet.

  Finally, Mrs. Feinstein asked me how school was going for me.

  “Fine,” I said. “Thanks for coming to the dance with us.”

  “Oh, it’s no problem. I was thrilled when Nick called to ask me. He said we knew each other from school, but I couldn’t remember him at all.”

  I glanced at Nick and he shrugged. “The memory is the first thing to go,” he whispered to me.

  Or maybe, I thought, Mrs. Feinstein didn’t remember him because they hadn’t known each other at school?

  Chapter 21

  At the dance, Nick and Mrs. Feinstein took their places at the sides, talking to the other chaperones and watching us. It had never felt so odd to me before to see people on the sidelines, I guess because I had never even noticed the chaperones before. They were so invisible to me, almost like they weren’t real people.

  “Come on, let’s dance,” said Jayden eagerly, and held my hand to pull me to the middle of the dance floor. He kept staring at me through the whole dance, smiling widely and getting sweatier and sweatier.

  “You excited for the season’s opener this year?” I asked. It was supposed to be against our arch rivals from across town, ironically enough called The Demons.

  “Huh?” said Jayden. “What?”

  I asked him twice more, but he still couldn’t hear me until I practically shouted in his ear. Then he nodded and said, “Yeah.”

  I tried to start a conversation a few more times, but nothing ever came of it. I shouldn’t have expected him to be much of a talker. He never had been. He was a good dancer, though. I could see girls staring at him jealously, and there were some guys looking at me the same way. It wasn’t as nice as I thought it would be.

  After two dances, I poked Jayden in the shoulder and motioned him off the dance floor. When we were away from the speakers, I told him I wanted to get something to drink. So he came with me and we both got some of the sparkle punch that was available. It wasn’t called sparkle because it was spiked. It was called sparkle because it had carbonation in it.

  Jayden hiccupped. “Sorry. I always get the hiccups when I drink carbonation,” he said.

  “That must be a pain,” I said.

  He grimaced. “Yeah. I always think it won’t happen this time, and it always does.” He hiccupped again. He kept hiccupping. Which made it difficult to keep up a conversation with him. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t much of a loss.

  After a while, Georgia and Rory came over to stand by us. “Hey, look,” said Georgia, and she pointed to Nick on the dance floor with Mrs. Feinstein. “They look good together, don’t they?”

  “Sure,” I said unenthusiastically.

  “Come on. She’s the right age for him. She’s good looking. What’s wrong with them together?” Georgia asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “She’s just not—special. He needs someone special to get over the other woman he was in love with.”

  “Maybe not,” said Georgia. “Maybe he needs someone perfectly ordinary, to remind him how good life is, even when it’s ordinary. It doesn’t always have to be slaying demons, you know. Don’t you want him to retire, too, and settle down? They could play shuffle board together and go on cruises.”

  “He’s old, but he’s not dead,” I said. And I didn’t want him to stop hunting demons, not while he still had things to teach me.

  “Hey, you know—there’s something about that guy that’s familiar,” said Jayden suddenly, squinting at Nick.

  I felt a lurch in my chest. Had he seen Nick dressed up as a janitor? Or at the school the day he’d acted like a substitute when Mr. Barry was dead?

  “He just looks kind of bland. Like a thousand other people, I think. At least, a thousand other old guys that age. You know, with gray hair, and a paunch,” I said. Only Nick didn’t really have a paunch.

  “I don’t know,” said Jayden. He was staring at Nick harder and harder.

  I tried to nudge him away. “I don’t want you to look at him. Why don’t you pay attention to me?” How’s that for sounding needy? When he didn’t respond immediately, I stepped right in front of him and pulled his face down so he had to look at me. “I asked you out. This is supposed to be our special date.” I hated the way “special” came out, husky and like I meant it to sound sexy.

  “Right, of course,” said Jayden. He put his sticky hands around my waist and breathed on me for three dances. Then I dared to get away again and find Georgia by the concessions stand. I bought myself some candy and started to pop it into my mouth without even looking at the wrapper.

  Nick and Mrs. Feinstein were dancing really close. He was laughing and then I saw him lean in and kiss her on the lips. I should have been grossed out by it, or thought it was funny. Instead, I stared, a burning sensation in my heart.

  “You’re jealous,” said Georgia, close enough to my ear that I jumped.

  “I’m not,” I said hotly.

  “Then why do you look so angry? And why are you trying to get away from your date long enough so you can stare longingly at someone else’s?”

  “I just—Jayden is boring,” I said.

  “And that makes you angry?”

  “I have to spend the rest of the night with him,” I pointed out. “I hate being bored. More than anything else. It’s torture.”

  “It’s not that bad,” said Georgia.

  “You’re right. It’s worse. I’d rather be tortured. That would be interesting, at least.”

  “You like Nick. Admit it. You have a crush on him. You wish he was dancing with you instead of with Mrs. Feinstein.” Georgia gestured and I looked. Nick and Mrs. Feinstein were waltzing. Nick looked really nice. He looked strong and in control and he was staring at me and not at Mrs. Feinstein.

  I looked away and wondered what in the world I was doing. This was wrong on every level. He was a nice, old guy. He was also someone who was totally in love with someone else. And he was teaching me how to do demon fighting. Maybe I was confusing my admiration for him about that for something more. Yes, that had to be it. I liked fighting demons. I liked the hot feelings that gave me, and the sweaty palms, the sense of excitement. It was almost like being in love. But it really had nothing to do with Nick. He might have a great personality and all that, but we were not a match. Never in a million years.

&nbs
p; Well, all right, maybe in a million years. Because then I would be a million and sixteen years old and he would be a million and sixty—or whatever. And When you’re that old, probably forty or fifty years between you doesn’t matter so much anymore.

  “What do you think she’s going to do when she figures out that the only reason Nick brought her was so that he had an excuse to be with you?” asked Georgia.

  “That’s not—” I started to say. And then all hell broke loose. Literally.

  Mrs. Feinstein screamed as one of the other chaperones screamed and started clawing at a knife in the eye.

  What had Nick done?

  Then the woman began smoking and soon there were flames everywhere as she melted into a puddle of bits and pieces of demon skin. Still, the flames had touched the curtains near the stage and they were soon high enough that they went through the roof.

  People kept dancing for a couple of seconds, until they realized what was going on, and then everyone was screaming at the same time, rushing for the doors. The music screeched and then there was a terrible, loud honking noise that made me put my hands over my ears to protect them.

  “We’ve got to get out of here!” shouted Georgia.

  I noticed that she was hanging onto Rory’s arms.

  “Where’s Jayden?” I asked.

  Rory pointed to the doors, where I could see that Jayden had already started making his exit. That was the polite way of putting it. In fact, he was pushing and shoving people out of the way, and bellowing like a wounded animal.

  “Boy, he’s a winner,” said Georgia.

  “You’re the one who encouraged me to invite him,” I pointed out to her.

  “But you’re the one who actually did it. I didn’t know him that well,” she said. She hung more tightly to Rory’s arm. I wasn’t sure if that was because she was trying to make sure he wasn’t going to run away, too, or if it was because she actually thought he would protect her from something.

  The fire alarms were going off and overhead we soon felt the sprinklers. But that wasn’t going to be enough. The flames were not normal flames. I could smell the brimstone in them. I didn’t know if the chaperone had been trying to get one of the students to make a bargain or someone else at the dance. I guess it didn’t matter anymore now. Maybe if I hadn’t been so distracted by Nick and Jayden, I’d have noticed something was wrong. Obviously, Nick had come because he’d had a feeling this would go down here. I wish he’d have given me a hint about it, though.

  “Where’s Nick?” I asked, but Georgia was already gone. “Nick!” I shouted. “Nick!” I finally found him next to Mrs. Feinstein, who had fainted in his arms. He was trying to slap her back to consciousness. She didn’t look as good now as she had before. But then again, probably none of us did.

  Except for Nick, that is, who looked better than ever. His face glowed in the light of the demon fire and he seemed to get taller somehow, stronger. This was his element. He wasn’t afraid here. In fact, he looked like he belonged for the first time since I’d seen him in the car this evening. He had seemed a little faded on the dance floor, a little old mann-ish. But when there was a supernatural threat to your life, boy, he was the man.

  It sucked if you were going to spend your life doing ordinary things. But I guess that wasn’t what Nick had decided to do with his life. And I didn’t think that was how I wanted to spend mine, either. I’d said Jayden was boring. But it wasn’t him, really. It was just regular life. When Nick wasn’t around, I felt nothing.

  Maybe I liked the demons, as horrible as they were. They made my life interesting. And as I’d said to Georgia, boring was about the worst thing I could imagine.

  “Nick!” I shouted, waving at him.

  He saw me, nodded, and picked Mrs. Feinstein up in his arms, then headed toward us. “You need to get out of here,” he said as we caught up to Georgia and Rory.

  “Good plan. Let’s us all get out,” said Rory. He pulled Georgia by the arm toward the door.

  It was getting hard to see anything. There was smoke everywhere and the water falling from above didn’t help. My dress was ruined, and it was dragging on the floor. If I’d cared more about how I looked, I guess I wouldn’t have reached down and had a Buffy moment. I yanked on the dress and cut it off mid-thigh so I could get around better.

  Georgia stared at me and then at Nick, who was not looking discreetly away as a gentleman would have, I must say. It gave me a tiny bit of satisfaction to see that.

  “No way am I leaving if they’re not,” Georgia said, pointing at Nick and me.

  “We’ll come out as soon as we can,” said Nick, glancing at me.

  “Good enough for me,” said Rory. He pulled on Georgia again.

  She pulled away from him. “I’m not leaving if they’re not leaving,” she said stubbornly.

  Rory looked confused. He glanced at the doors, and then at the flames of the fire, which were getting to be epic in proportion.

  I wanted to ask Nick what was going on, where the demons were, and who had made a bargain with them. But I didn’t want to do it while Rory was around.

  There was a cry from the doors and we could see one of the chaperones getting trampled on.

  “Can you and Rory handle that?” asked Nick, looking into Georgia’s eyes in that way that made it impossible to ignore him.

  She put up her hands. “Fine. Kill yourselves, then.” And she and Rory headed for the doors to help.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Nick, not so much in a whisper as a hoarse roar. I still wasn’t sure he heard it, though.

  He nodded to Mrs. Feinstein. “It was her bargain, I think.”

  “What in the world did she make a bargain with a demon for?” I asked, staring at Mrs. Feinstein, who was definitely worse for wear.

  “For a last date with a handsome man,” said Nick. “She whispered it to me just before the fire started. She felt guilty. She wasn’t sure she deserved me. And I think she might have gotten some help in the looks department. I don’t think she looked this good last year when I saw her last.”

  He saw her last year? I wondered what the circumstances were, but I didn’t have time to ask him now. “So what do we do? What did she trade?”

  “A fiery death, she said.”

  “Why in the world would she trade that?” I said.

  “I guess she was in a dramatic mood,” said Nick.

  “She might have thought about the rest of us around her when she was dying her fiery death,” I said.

  “They never do,” said Nick.

  “And you—did you know this was going to happen when you asked her out?”

  “I might have had an inkling,” said Nick cryptically.

  “And you asked her anyway? I thought you were going to ask someone you really wanted to go out with,” I said

  “There’s only one person I really want to go out with,” said Nick sadly.

  Right. He’d said that before. I seemed to be a little dense about that. Is this the way that unrequited love always worked? One person was in love with one person who was in love with someone else. And the person who was in love with the wrong person also had someone in love with him whom he couldn’t love and on and on, back to forever? Who needed demons? It seemed like humans were perfectly capable of making our own lives miserable. The demons were just there to end it more quickly. We should probably thank them for that.

  “So now what do we do?”

  “We could leave her to die in here. Then the demons will be satisfied and they won’t come after her—or anyone else—for their bargain.”

  “Any other choice?” I asked. I didn’t like Mrs. Feinstein, but I didn’t think she believed that.

  “We could challenge them to a duel,” said Nick. “If they win, they get us and her. If we win, they relinquish their hold on her and her bargain.”

  “Why do I get the feeling you’ve done this before?”

  “I have,” said Nick with a twinkle in his eyes. Or maybe that was bits of
ash. It was hard to tell.

  “And have you always won before?”

  He didn’t answer that part.

  I followed him while he called out the demon for a duel. The creature appeared in the form it had been in when we first arrived, which was a skinny, ratty looking DJ. Nick promised the demon that he’d have both Mrs. Feinstein and himself if he lost.

  “What about her?” said the DJ, pointing at me. “Do I get her, too?”

  “I said you get me, and that should be plenty,” said Nick. He was a big, bad demon fighter, after all.

  “I don’t know,” said the DJ, looking me up and down even in my wet, ruined gown. “I like her better.”

  “No—” Nick began.

  But I didn’t let him finish.

  “Duel on, then,” I said, and ran at the demon. My knife was stashed in the bra of my dress. I grabbed it out and then I ran at the demon. I got him right in the eye the first try. It wasn’t as hard as you might think, since he was surprised and I think he was busy sort of staring down my dress where the knife had come from. Like Jayden had done.

  But somehow, another demon appeared after he was gone. And Nick had to go for him. By the time we were finished, we were both covered in wet ash, streaked with fire, and not a little blood. The demon was a puddle on the ground.

  Nick spat on it, then looked up at me and started to laugh.

  We laughed together until we heard the fire engines.

  “Time to get out of here,” he said.

  I nodded and followed him outside, where Georgia and Rory were waiting for us.

  Georgia threw her arms around me. “You idiot!” she shouted at me.

  Nick, apparently, did not deserve the same treatment, because she left him alone. Rory gave Nick a fist bump. “Cool, dude,” he said.

  Nick bumped him right back without any problem. Then he glanced up at me.

  I reached forward and brushed some blood off his forehead. “I think that’s mine,” I said.

  “And here I was going to treasure it for the rest of my life,” said Nick. He put on a fake sad face.

  The fire department came and checked us out. They bandaged my hand, where I had a couple of bad cuts. Nick had to take his shirt off and get bandaged across his chest. I stared the whole time, despite the fact that Jayden had come back up next to me.