by Kim Harrison
“No, no, no!” I raged as the rising imbalance ebbed to nothing and the surrounding demons laughed, thinking I was simply trying to scratch Ku’Sox’s eyes out. “Let me go, you idiots!” I’d done it wrong! I’d done something wrong or it would have worked and I would have had him!
Al had an arm around my middle, physically holding me against him as my feet slipped on the reed mats while I struggled for purchase. “No fighting in Dalliance, Rachel,” he crooned, and I shoved his hand off me as soon as I got my weight over my feet again.
“You see me!” I shouted at Ku’Sox, glad I’d finally gotten rid of that headdress thing, now broken on the floor. “If you ever touch me again, I’ll lay you out!” I threatened him, almost spitting in frustration.
They only laughed. Except for Al, standing nervously beside me, and Newt, who had felt what I had tried to do. Dali was at the outskirts, knowing something had happened but not what. And Ku’Sox, of course, who was sallow faced, clearly knowing how close it had been. Why hadn’t it worked?
Slowly Ku’Sox regained his pompous air as he shook off the good-natured offers of assistance, but he would meet my eyes only in quick glances, equal amounts of caution and loathing in him. But I’d seen him screaming like a little girl, and I knew he’d been terrified.
He ought to be afraid. I’d almost had the perv. Now it would be harder. He was warned, and I’d lost my easy chance. “You dare to call me less of a demon than you?” I exclaimed, pissed as I shook in anger with nothing between us but air. “I’m not the one doing the bidding of a lame-ass elf!” I said, pointing at him. “You owe your freedom to an elf! One that I let go!”
The surrounding jeers and calls from the watching demons rose high, and Ku’Sox frowned as the helping hands fell away. In the distance, I heard a fox bark, and the puddle of light grew when someone stilled the wildly swinging lamp and relit it with a tweak on a line.
“An elf?” Dali was leaning casually against a support pole. “Ku’Sox, you owe your freedom to Rachel’s castoffs?”
It wasn’t the angle I’d been going for, but it made Ku’Sox angry, his eyes squinting as he bent to beat the dust from his robes. “That thing is a witch,” he said, pointing at me. “A stunted double X that Algaliarept is dressing up like a demon to further his pathetic attempt at familiar procurement.”
“Pathetic?” Al drawled as he sat down, leaving me standing alone. “You’ve been gone too long, you little zit pus. I’m more of a snag artist than you’ll ever be, and I know talent when I see it. Rachel may be born from a witch, but she is a demon as much as you are a pain in the ass with the social skills of a dog. Still eating souls, Ku’Sox? That’s like eating God’s shit.”
“You know nothing!” Ku’Sox shouted, red faced as the surrounding demons laughed. “I’m stronger than all of you! I can take this world and destroy it! Open a hole to reality and drain this world to nothing until you’re bumping around in a universe the size of a closet and you all get sucked into oblivion!”
The conversations stilled, and Dali cleared his throat in the sudden silence. Ku’Sox stopped, the hem of his robe swinging as he dared anyone to comment, his chin high and a defiant gleam in his blue, goat-slitted eyes. Every demon in the place wore hatred and fear on his shadowed, candlelit, ruddy face. And that, of course, was why they didn’t kill him. If they tried and failed, he might destroy the ever-after, laughing all the way to the sunny side of reality and his survival. Their prodigal son was fucking insane.
“You’re not stronger than me,” Newt said into the quiet, and Ku’Sox’s eyes narrowed.
“Aren’t you dead yet, you old hag?” he grumbled.
The demons started to whisper, and Dali’s slippers were a soft hush on the reeds as he came forward. He was looking at me with speculation, and now I knew why. Is she the one? Is it her? What he meant was, am I a demon? Can I kill Ku’Sox?
“Test-tube brat,” Al said as he stood his empty wineglass upright with a thump. “DNA degenerate. Magical mistake. You’re picking on Rachel because she might be a better demon than you.”
“Her?” Ku’Sox exclaimed, and Al simpered at him. “I’m the way back to our rebirth, and you will respect that! Me! Not her! She’s born from a witch. A stunted, damaged witch!”
Newt shifted coyly on her cushion, the only one who hadn’t left her seat throughout the entire scene. “No, poor boy, you are a mistake we loved too much to put down. I still think you would have turned out fine if Dali hadn’t dropped you when you were but a blastocyst.”
“You are deluding yourselves,” Ku’Sox said, frowning. “I am your rebirth.”
“My dame’s ashes,” Al muttered. “The poor boy is going to go off now to brood about world domination.”
A few of the demons sliding back to their tables laughed, and Ku’Sox flushed in anger.
“Something is wrong with you, my lovely little boy,” Newt continued, the silver goblet of wine in her hand as demons drifted away and the tension eased. “In your head. Even demons do not eat souls. Is it because you’re worried that you don’t have one?”
“I have a soul,” Ku’Sox said with a scowl, but I wondered.
“Of course you do. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have an aura,” Newt said brightly. “Come sit with us.”
Oh, there’s a good idea, I thought, sitting down between Al and Newt, leaving Ku’Sox to stand by himself.
“That,” he said, pointing at me again, “isn’t a demon. I need proof. We all do.” He looked over the assembled demons. There were more people now than there were tables. They must have been coming in all this time, filling the Mesopotamian darkness with soft mutters and speculation. “It takes more than being able to invoke demon magic to be one,” Ku’Sox said. “Do something demonic.”
This last had been aimed at me, and my hands clenched in my lap. “Like rip your heart out? Come a little closer.”
“Rachel…,” Al said as he reached across the table and patted my shoulder a little too hard. God, I felt like I was one of two little kids on a playground.
From her cushion, Newt cleared her throat. “Rachel should make us a new memory.”
The surrounding demons exhaled, the sound rising like a sigh of excitement. I turned to her, surprised. You want me to do what?
“Be reasonable, Newt,” Al protested, his face suddenly pale. “She’s only a few hours old. I haven’t had time to teach her anything yet.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Newt said as she ate a grape with an odd precision. “If she’s a demon, she can do it.”
Al looked deathly worried, and I watched Dali energetically stride to the jukebox and press his hands to it, invoking who knew what as it glowed a hazed black. “Splendid idea,” he was muttering. “Rachel, what do you want to call it?”
“Call it?” At a loss, I looked around the table, seeing worry on Al’s face and satisfaction on Ku’Sox’s. “Call what?”
“Give us a memory,” Newt prompted, the beads in her hair clicking. “Only a demon has the mental fortitude to channel enough energy to make a tulpa construct this size. One that anyone can share.”
Oh. My. God. I looked at the fake restaurant, the fire, the stars, the smells. “You want me to make something like this?” I squeaked. “Are you nuts? I don’t know how to do that!”
“She admits she’s not a demon,” Ku’Sox proclaimed, and Al’s grip on his wineglass became white-knuckled as he hunched against the raised voices around us.
“Lacking a skill doesn’t translate into a lack of ability,” he growled, but the demons were rearranging the tables, making an open space of sorts, wanting me to try.
Newt’s eyes narrowed. “Only a demoness can make a free-existing tulpa, and only a male demon can fix it into reality. I say it’s a fair test. Al, put your money where your mouth is. Or should I say where your student is.”
I looked wildly from one end of the midnight Mesopotamia to the other, despairing as I realized why Newt had “apologized.” She had killed everyone who could
do this—except herself. I could not make this! It was immense!
“Of course you can,” Newt said as she leaned toward me, almost as if having read my mind. “Making a construct is easy. Every one in that box there was made by my sisters, and they weren’t nearly as clever as you.” Newt raised her goblet in salute. “That’s why I could kill them, you see.”
My heart pounded and I sat down before I passed out. “Uh, maybe I shouldn’t do it then.”
Ku’Sox laughed, but Newt poured her wine into my glass. “That’s not why I killed them. But that’s why Ku’Sox tricked me into it. To make a lasting tulpa, one that can be stored and lived in, one must have the ability to safely hold more than one’s own soul. Demons can’t do it. A demoness can. It’s on that little extra bit of X gene that they don’t have.”
I listened to crickets that had turned to dust thousands of years ago on a continent I’d never set foot on. “You’re able to hold a soul so you can gestate a baby,” I guessed, and she nodded, solemn.
“Ku’Sox is a fool, but he’s right. You need to prove yourself, and now is as good a time as any. I will not have your standing in doubt. Don’t you agree, Al?” she added lightly.
Al looked sick. “She’s rather stupid yet.”
“I am not!” I exclaimed, and he pointed at me.
“There, see? She is.”
Newt waved a hand at Dali, still standing by the jukebox. “Even a dunce can have a baby. All it needs is stamina and a little imagination. Rachel?”
“I am not stupid!” I said again.
“Shut up,” Al hissed as Ku’Sox gleefully ate someone else’s cheese. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“So teach me,” I hissed right back. “Thanks to you, I can’t be a witch anymore. I may as well be a demon.”
My heart was pounding. God, what was I doing? I only knew that I had to be somewhere, and right now, this was it.
Al stared at me, hope dying in his eyes. “I can’t teach you this.”
“I can,” Newt said, and my breath came fast.
Crap on toast.
“I will,” she added, and I swallowed hard. “I will teach you, you will make one, and Al will fix it to reality. I don’t have the balls to do that part. Literally.”
No one was even whispering. All eyes were on me, the tables full of demons in robes and a small crowd bunched outside, trying to listen in. I hadn’t counted on this. I mean, Al I sort of trusted. At least I trusted that he needed me alive and reasonably well. But Newt? She looked sane, and that was worrisome.
“Come here,” she prompted. “You want to do this, yes?”
Not really. Taking a slow breath, I stood, feeling weird in these clothes with the green rocks sewn into them. They clinked as I came around the table, Ku’Sox moving in agitation as he stood, looking young next to Dali’s tired jadedness. Al’s hands were in fists on the table. A bead of sweat trickled down his neck.
“Sit before me, Rachel,” Newt prompted, her voice oily, and I wondered if this was how she’d killed her sisters, lulling them. She shifted on her cushion to sit cross-legged, pointing for me to take the tiny bit of padding right in front of her. “Back to me.”
Better and better.
My gut was so tight I thought I was going to vomit, and my arms felt like sticks. Everyone was watching as I gingerly sat, pebbles clinking as I tugged a bit of cloth to cover my bare legs. “That’s a love,” she murmured, and I jumped when she touched my hair.
Someone laughed, and I whipped my head around to see who it had been, but Newt was there, rubbing my forehead from behind, trying to be soothing but only making it worse.
“She’s not even going to be able to make a picture on the wall,” Ku’Sox predicted.
Al stood, nervous. “Shut up, Ku’Sox, or I’ll close your throat for you.”
Ku’Sox grinned, pointing to the camels groaning at the outskirts. “Would you like to step outside, old man? I beat your sorry ass before, and I can do it again.”
“Ku’Sox, shut up,” I said, not liking anyone talking to Al that way, then wondered where my loyalty had come from. But a thread of fear was in Al’s motions, so subtle that I didn’t know if anyone but perhaps Newt and Dali had noticed.
“He has a right to be afraid,” Newt said, leaning forward to whisper in my ear, and I shivered, hardly breathing. “If you can’t do this, then you will be a familiar and I will buy you from Al. But I think you can.”
“No pressure,” I grumbled, and her fingers touching my forehead lifted briefly as she laughed. It sounded weird, her laugh, and I saw more than a few demons grimace.
“Close your eyes, tap a line, and find the collective,” Newt said gently.
I took a last look at the faces ringing me, Al with his false confidence, Dali busy calculating the odds, the expressions of hope and doubt on demons I’d never met. I didn’t know why they cared one way or the other. Maybe they had a bet going. Maybe they were bored.
“I said,” Newt prompted, mildly ticked, “close your eyes.”
I closed them, immediately feeling claustrophobic. I tapped a line, wondering what demon had made it, and if he was watching me or dead and turned to dust. I settled myself, plunging into the thick morass of collective thoughts, reeling when I found no one there.
Well, almost no one.
I kicked them out, Newt thought, and I gasped, almost flinging myself out again, but she grabbed my consciousness with a soft thought and hauled me back. You don’t want them here, seeing your soul, she explained, and I got the impression of her swimming naked in a sea of stars, enjoying the solitude of a moment alone in her infinity.
My soul? I mused, alarmed, but she only seemed to twine her consciousness around mine, keeping us separate but close, rubbing her energies across me, old and jumbled, like a West Coast ley line.
You don’t want the entire collective to see you helpless and vulnerable, she explained, giving me the impression of half-lidded eyes and a sultry whisper. Having Gally see you as such will be punishment enough for almost killing him, I imagine.
Whoa, Al? I thought, worried, and she swam closer, making me nervous as I remembered him pinning me to the bookcase and spilling ley-line energy into me. And then me, slamming his theoretical dick in a drawer. Why him?
Al, she reiterated, seeming bothered she’d forgotten his name again. You want Dali to peel the memory from your thoughts instead? He’s likely more skilled at it, and it’s often easier for strangers to see us naked than…just what is Gally to you, anyway?
I shook my head, or at least I would have if I had one. I don’t know.
Well, when you’re done, bring Gally in to separate your construct from your conscious thought. Let him in, Rachel. Ignore the fact that he will see everything. Moment by moment, every little desire and hate you have, your soul sifting through his fingers as he pulls the construct free. What he doesn’t see might be left here, so let him entirely in, she thought, and I had a moment of perfect panic. It’s rather more intimate than pinning you to the wall for a kiss, she mocked.
I didn’t like this, but what choice did I have? It wasn’t as if Al hadn’t been in my thoughts before. Wait! I don’t know what to do! I thought as I felt her start to distance herself.
Newt’s consciousness swooped and dipped about mine, making me dizzy. Creating a collective thought real enough to touch is to prove you have the ability to shelter another soul within yours without absorbing it or accidentally changing what should not be changed. I felt a wave of melancholy come from her, dimming the stars. Do you know why demons are born able to twist curses? Their mothers curse them while still in the womb so they can defend themselves from birth. But it takes finesse to lay a curse within another’s soul while you’re sheltering it within your own. Making a tulpa and allowing another to exist freely in it is the same. It’s also why Algaliarept can’t remember what he looks like under all that prettiness he shows the world. He can’t pick out what is rightfully his and what his mother added. Be
autiful, beautiful baby. I never had any, but if I had, I’d have made her look just like you.
It was starting to make sense. Making a construct would show I was fit to be a mother—a mother to demon children I would never have. So…what do I do? I asked, wondering if the demon who had helped Newt make that memory of an upscale bar was still alive, or if she’d killed him. Maybe it had been Minias.
Newt swam in circles around me, sending out ripples to the edge of the empty collective. I do so like it when no one is here. Quiet.
Newt? I prompted, and she returned.
Remember a place. Make it real in your mind. Fill the void here, and Al will separate it from you and make it real. That’s their part. All you have to do is let him in.
I had to trust him. Damn it! How did I get here? Just think of a place?
In my mind, it was as if I could see her bobbing in the water before me, silver stars running down her face like water drops. What do you miss the most? Now that you’re here forever?
What do I miss? I echoed, thinking immediately of Jenks, Ivy, and my church, but sharing that with the demons wasn’t going to happen. My garden in the sun. The sun I would never see again.
Heartache seemed to double me over. The sun. I was going to miss the sun. That was what I could show them. Not the sun in my garden, but somewhere else, where the sun ruled everything, not just now, but for all the past and all the future. I would give the demons a forest so old and dead that only stones remained. I’d give them that, and nothing more.
With a ping that hurt my soul, I felt the memory of the desert rise in me, carrying all the lonely, empty desperation I’d felt when I thought I’d lost Jenks. I hunched, my eyes pinched tightly shut as my heart ached, resonating with the reality that I’d lost everything. Empty. Everything was empty, and the echo of space washed through my skull.
Heat soaked into me like an internal blanket, first frightening, then soothing. The hint of the abandoned ley lines in the desert seemed to glow, dead and gone and useless. From the inside of my eyelids came a reflection of them, etching through the collective like girders bracketing time. And from there, everything built upon itself, the entire desert melting back into existence. The chirp of insects; the soft click of a beetle; the wind pushing against me, oily and slippery, not recognizing me as I stood in the middle of a lost field of power and begged for a miracle.