by Rachel Caine
She watched me with haunted eyes. “I will always be ‘this kid.’ ”
I leaned my forehead down onto hers, my hands cupping her jaw.
“And she grew up to be a fine woman, and my friend. Come back to me, Moo.”
My eyes welled over with hers, our tears mingling down her cheeks to pool on the hands that held her cheeks. Then she was changing, her child’s body elongating and growing heavy in my hands till she was Moo again. My tall, strong friend whom I could always count on.
My hands still rested on her cheeks. For a second she let the weight of her head fall against my touch before she stood up straight.
“I am assuming we ended up falling into the same trap that befell Vince’s sister. How do you plan to extricate us?”
That’s my Moo, I thought, love for her nearly overwhelming me for a moment. But I managed to pull it together, giving her a tight smile instead of the hug I craved.
“First we have to get you out of here. You ready?”
“Yes.” It was a short, sharp response. I can’t say I blamed her.
“Take my hand,” I said. When she did, I gave it a squeeze. Then I pulled her with me. But before we made it, another hand came out of the darkness, grabbing her wrist.
“Daughter, you’re mine” came a commanding voice that sent shivers down my spine. Moo cried out, an agonized shout like nothing I’d ever heard from her as the air around us began to swirl in sympathy to her agony.
“C’mon, Moo!” I shouted over the wind. “You’re not his, and you never were!”
I pulled on her hand, but the other hand pulled back. We played tug-of-war for what felt like an eternity, Moo nearly collapsed between us.
“Girl, you’ve got to help!” I shouted, squeezing her hand. “We’re getting out, but you gotta help!”
Her eyes flickered to mine, but her face was still collapsed with agony.
“C’mon! You got away from him before! Now, pull!”
I knew it was probably bad form to remind someone they’d committed patricide, but I was pretty sure the situation called for it. And it did the trick.
With a growl, Moo yanked her arm away from her father, plunging with me out and through. . . .
We found ourselves panting, crouched together. She was incorporeal, still, but she was Moo.
She met my eyes. “Thank you.”
I nodded, knowing she didn’t want to talk about what I’d seen. Maybe we never would.
Shar, meanwhile, watched us with worried eyes. When we stood, she threw herself at Moo. I noticed they had no problem embracing, but when Shar tried to hug me I was treated to another quick vision of nudie patooties.
“Oops, sorry,” she said, although she clearly wasn’t.
“No problem,” I said, my mind already going a hundred miles an hour. “Wait, you can touch each other?”
Moo and Shar reached out, touching fingertips. They nodded.
I looked around, locating the hulking football player whose winning play I’d witnessed earlier.
“We’re gonna have to channel the circus,” I said, seeing a plan forming in my brainpan. “Bring him.”
I waved them to follow and Moo and Shar manhandled the beefcake football player till we all stood directly beneath the shimmering mirror in the sky.
“That’s the exit. Moo, you need to climb on top of this guy. Shar, you have to climb on top of Moo and get out. Then pull Moo out.”
“Then what?” Shar asked. “We didn’t stand a chance last time.”
“Moo needs to keep our perp busy. You’re expecting him this time. Hopefully that will be enough.”
“But what about you?” Moo asked.
I thought of the mirror on its two spindly legs.
“Tip it,” I said. “Tip it and shake us out.”
“Is that going to work?” Shar asked, clearly skeptical.
“I have no idea,” I said. “But it’s all I’ve got.”
The girls frowned, but they did as I said. First they positioned the man mountain, then Moo climbed up him, Shar helping, after which Moo pulled Shar up. I gratefully remembered all the times we’d forced Moo to play cheerleader when we were little girls, the Alfar our grudging anchor, as she was already an adult then. Channeling those childhood games, Moo boosted Shar up, her feet on the flats of Moo’s palms. And just like that, Shar popped up and out of the mirror.
Then Shar’s ghostly hand reached down, clasping Moo’s. “Grab it! Grab it!” I shouted. A second later, both of my friends were free of the ghost world.
The next few minutes were torture. This plan was as crazy as anything we’d ever tried, and we tended to be successful. But we also sometimes failed miserably, and failing now meant I’d be trapped forever with these shadows. . . .
My negative ruminations were interrupted by the world tilting. I’d never felt anything weirder before or since, and I’d been through some weird shit. But to have the ground beneath you start tilting and never stop . . . My feet stuck on the ground, as if caught in the memory of gravity, but then the ghosts around me started to fall. I braced myself as I tumbled headfirst down toward the mirror. . . .
I managed to tuck and roll at the last second, but pain still flared in my shoulder as I landed hard on solid ground. Solid ground where there was an evil clown lurking, I reminded myself, struggling to my feet. I took a few stumbling steps as my head cleared. What I saw was pure chaos.
The orbs of light that had made such an orderly line when under the control of the clown were now whizzing around inside the tent. Some found their bodies, and a few humans were running around the tent, screaming, trying to find an exit.
Luckily, for our purposes, the tent seemed to be self-sealing, and neither humans nor orbs could escape. We didn’t want people getting out and calling the cops before we could glamour their memories away. But having them trapped also meant that there were a lot more lives at stake. At risk were also all the souls of the circus’s recent victims from other towns—there must have been thousands of orbs floating around the high, peaked top of the tent. They were so tightly packed as to make a near solid matting of light.
Even brighter, however, was the firefight happening between Moo and the clown. Good news: she was back in her own body. Bad news: she was losing.
The clown was pouring some kind of raw elemental magic at Moo, who looked like she was caught in a maelstrom despite the powerful shields she’d erected around herself. Buffeting magic picked her up, shields and all, shaking her like a maraca.
Shit, I thought, about to jump in to help her, although I wasn’t sure how I could.
Before I could move toward my friend, however, someone goosed me. I jumped, turning to find a reembodied Shar behind me.
“What do we do?” she shouted over the din of the flying magic. Around us milled the shadows, their corporeal counterparts still sitting in the risers, staring with unseeing eyes.
“No idea!” I said. “But it’s gotta be one of Moo’s soul suckers she talked about earlier.”
“So how do we kill it?”
“I don’t know! I can try jumping it, but I don’t know if killing it will hurt the souls it sucked out.” Watching my friend battling a creature of unknown origin, I pulled out the only other weapon, besides the gun, that I had with me.
My cell phone.
A few tippie taps later, and it was ringing on the other end of the line.
“Hello?” said a rough, deep voice.
“Hey, Uncle Anyan?” Anyan was an old family friend and one of the wisest men I knew. He was also old as dirt. Before he could say anything, I asked my question. “Do you know how to kill something that traps souls, then eats them by ingesting their memories bit by bit?”
A pause from the other end of the line. “What are you doing, Cap? Are you in trouble?”
“I’m in the middle of something, yes,” I said, keeping my voice calm. “So if you could hurry . . .”
“That’s some old magic right there,” he said, confirming
what I already knew from my earlier nonreaction to the clown’s call that had felled my friends. “It sounds like you’ve got a gaki on your hands. They were children of Air, but they’re supposed to be eradicated. They’re bad news.”
“Um, yeah, they are. How do I kill it?”
“Kill it? You can’t. They’re Air.”
I frowned. “This one looks pretty solid to me.”
“What?” I’d made Uncle Anyan squawk, something I’d tease him about later. “You’re with one?”
I watched as Moo rushed bodily at the clown, her shields so amped they were like a battering ram. But instead of its knocking him down, the clown’s arms swung forward, launching Moo at the ceiling. She did some Crouching Tiger maneuvers, all charged with enough mojo that the tent rattled, then swooped down at the clown like a falcon.
For a second I thought she was actually flying, but then I realized she was taking advantage of all the magic in the air by using her shields like a surfboard.
Anyan said “Hello!” into the phone, bringing me back to our conversation.
“Sorry. Yes, we’re with one, and it’s shaped like a clown.”
“It’s in a body,” he said, all business now that he knew what I was up against. “They enter a body and take possession of it. Take out the clown.”
“But . . .”
“Don’t worry about the person they possessed. They killed that soul already, to power the possession. Just get it out of the clown.”
“Then what?”
“Trap the gaki. Do you have a soul catcher?”
“What the fuck is that?”
“It’s a soul catcher,” he said unhelpfully.
I closed my eyes to count to ten, but when I opened them I found myself staring at the mirror.
Duh.
“Actually, I may have just that. So the plan is kill the clown and trap the gaki?”
“Yes. I can be there today.”
“It’s a little late for that,” I said, wincing as the clown stopped Moo’s airborne attack by swatting her into a tent pole. She hit hard, and she got up slow. “I gotta go, but I’ll let you know how we do.”
“Cap!” I heard Uncle Anyan shout as I ended the call.
“We have a plan,” I said to Shar as I pulled the gun still lodged in my jeans’ waistband at the base of my spine. “Can you lift that mirror?”
She went to it, avoiding the mirror’s smoky surface. She nodded as she manhandled it awkwardly.
“Good. Here goes nothing.”
And with that, I ran toward where the clown was advancing on my friend. He held his stolen arms out in front of him stiffly, magic crackling between his hands like one of those electricity globes from the eighties. As she was still trying to regain her feet, Moo’s eyes accidentally flicked to my darting form. The clown caught that slight movement even as she corrected herself, looking squarely at him, but it was too late. He whirled, power booming out at me.
The clown hit me with enough mojo to send any normal supe or human flying into the next county. Luckily, I wasn’t normal. His power fizzled when it should have hit me, not even slowing my forward motion. As his eyes widened in confusion, I lifted the gun and shot the clown in the forehead.
As his body crumpled to the ground, I dropped the gun to help Shar with the mirror. We lumbered forward just as an oily black smoke began to rise from the dead clown.
“Trap it!” I shouted, heaving the mirror, smoky surface first, onto the gaki. The black smoke disappeared under its square bulk as it slammed onto the floor of the tent. I panted, my arm muscles singing, as I stared in trepidation at the slick steel of the mirror’s back. Then I crouched on my hands and knees, pressing my cheek against the dirt as I carefully raised the mirror a crack.
Rather than merely squished under the mirror, as I’d feared, the oily smoke was inside of it. As it started to reach out, a tendril escaping the mirror, I let the heavy steel fall back onto the floor.
“Smash it, Moo!” I shouted at my tired friend. She struggled to her feet, raising her arm as if it weighed a ton. With one last burst of power, Moo destroyed the mirror. It broke with a resounding crack, shattering into hundreds of tiny pieces.
“Guys,” Shar said urgently, and we raised our eyes from the mirror to see the orbs around us dissolving. I swore, fearing the worst, till I saw that many of the bright lights were darting into the people still sitting in the risers. I heard various moans, coughs, and mumbles of “What the fuck?” and then they all started moving.
“Oh, thank God,” I said, relief flooding through me. I hoped their orbs had found the other people, from all the other towns.
I especially hoped Vince’s sister’s orb had found her, or he’d probably have us murdered in our beds. But we could worry about Vince later, as right now we had work to do. The humans whose orbs had hit them earlier were huddled in groups throughout the tent, peering at us like we were the monsters, and those only now coming to were quickly becoming agitated.
“Sit still!” Shar called out, her powerful glamour-skillz hitting the humans like a truck. They all sat back down quietly while we figured out what to do.
“We’ll have to wipe their memories,” Moo said. She sounded exhausted, and I knew only part of that was because of the firefight she’d had with the gaki.
“Yup,” I said. But first I gave the girls a fierce hug.
After that, we did what needed to be done, sending all the humans back home with a vague memory of a fun time at a local fair. They’d never remember the soul-eating clown or the women who’d saved them.
When they were all gone, and we’d set the circus tent alight with the body of the unfortunate possessed human inside of it, we stood to watch it blaze to the ground.
“You okay?” I asked Moo. Shar acted like she couldn’t hear our exchange, bless her.
“I’ll be all right,” she said, affecting Alfar coldness.
“I know you will. But if you ever want to talk . . .”
Moo shrugged.
“In the meantime,” I said, knowing I’d said enough, “I think I have something that will cheer you up. One of those guys we just set free is a rapist. I saw it in his memories.”
Moo turned to me, dark eyes flashing. “Really?”
“Yup. And I bet we can find him in a town this small.”
She grinned. It was a vicious, frightening grin.
“Excellent. Shall we?”
I nodded. “Shar?”
“You know I love a little vigilante justice,” Shar said, clapping Moo on the shoulder. We strolled off as the sun rose, arm in arm.
“A Chance in Hell”
Jackie Kessler
A demon was eating my face.
I had a moment of confusion—out of all the ways to wake up, this was nowhere in my Top Ten—and then it sank in that a demon was eating my face. I opened my mouth and screamed, “Don’t stop!”
Well, you have to understand that “face” in this context was actually my clit.
Between my legs, the demon chuckled. “So controlling, babes.”
Before I could reply, that wicked tongue was used for much better things than scolding me. Oh, the things that tongue could do! My hips bucked wildly and my fingers clenched. I might have torn the sheets. Or the mattress. It had been forever since I’d had sex—no, really, vibrators don’t count—and the former succubus in me was lapping up how I was being lapped up. My nostrils stung from the stench of brimstone and sweat; my heart danced inside my chest as my breathing quickened. A delicious heat was building inside of me, heating my core, promising to set my blood on fire. Yes, just a little more . . . almost there . . .
In my head, his voice murmured: Say my name.
The words hit me like holy water. Getting pleasured by a demon was one thing—one delicious, delectable, but not quite damning thing. But calling a demon’s name in the middle of that pleasure would cost a soul. Specifically, in this case, mine. My soul was practically fresh out of the box—in the cosmic scheme
of things, being mortal for ten months barely counted—and I wasn’t about to trade the essence of what made me human just for a quickie.
My eyes snapped open, and my sword, a Fury blade of magic and steel, appeared in my outstretched hand. My fingers curled around the hilt, and I aimed the weapon down my body until its tip hovered by the demon’s head.
I growled, “Bastard.”
The demon chuckled again, then looked up at me. My bedroom was shrouded in darkness, so I caught only glimpses of the long blond hair that framed his face, with tendrils cascading around two russet horns that sprouted from his brow. His turquoise skin gleamed in the neon of the alarm clock on my night-stand, and his amber eyes glinted with dark humor as he met my gaze.
He asked, “Problem, Jezzie?”
“With the cunnilingus? Never. With you trying to claim my soul? Yep.”
“Can’t blame an incubus for trying,” he said, kissing my inner thigh.
There must have been some mojo in that kiss, because it echoed in places much, much more sensitive than my thigh. Waves of pleasure hummed through me, making me feel so good that I almost dropped my sword.
Stupid demon mojo.
Gritting my teeth, I said, “What do you want, Daun?”
Daunuan, one of Hell’s kings and answerable only to the dread (and insane) ruler of the Pit, smiled lazily at me. “Want? Your soul, of course. An orgasm or two along the way would be nice.”
Never mind that I agreed about the orgasms. “You promised to serve me.”
“I’d much rather service you.”
I nudged the blade until its edge whispered against his throat. “Wrong answer.”
“So touchy. Yes, Jezebel, I still pledge my service and the service of all of the Kingdom of Lust to follow you when you finally challenge the Sovereign of Hell for His throne, blah blah.” Daun grinned. “But until that fateful day occurs, I’m going to focus on more enjoyable things. Like seducing you.”
His eyes gleamed, and I felt another lick of pleasure, hot and slick.
I glared at him. “Stop that!”
“Or what? Will you chop off my head with your pretty Fury sword? Maybe cut out my heart?”