“No one asked you to come. I was fine, doing this on my own.”
“You would have been knocked unconscious and drowned on your own,” I pointed out.
“Maybe. But look on the bright side. We’re in a funky toadstool world and we get to meet the Devil. Who else can say that?”
“Who else would want to?” I muttered.
“Children, it’s rude to make the Devil wait. Are you intentionally trying to anger me?”
I could tell he was getting pissed, because his voice had changed from the sound of guilty pleasures to the sound of painful torture, promising worlds of hurt if we didn’t conclude our business.
It made me cringe but at least it brought me back to my senses.
“Before we come out, we want some assurances,” I yelled.
“And what would that be?” The dark voice replied, back to its silky, cloying self.
“No soul-stealing, soul-contracts, soul anything,” I said. “No blood pacts, blood oaths, blood vows.”
There was a long pause.
“Fine,” the Devil said.
“Swear by the light of Lucifer,” Gus yelled.
“You do know how to ruin a fun time,” the Devil sighed. “All right, I swear by the light of the Morning Star, I won’t steal your souls—at least, not tonight. However, I reserve all future rights.”
I peeked around the base of the statue. “We’re not negotiating with you while you’re Jolly Green Giant-sized and we’re Munchkins,” I said. “You should at least give us an illusion of a level playing field. It’s only polite.”
The Devil roared with laughter. But a few minutes later, he was down to our size—almost. We came out from behind the base and we were at eye-to-nipple height with him, which was better than the eye-to-giant-disturbing-penis height we had been at before. Although it didn’t seem to make much of a difference, as far as Gus was concerned.
“Va-va-voom,” said Gus, staring at the Devil’s dark, muscular chest.
“Are you kidding me?” I smacked Gus’s arm. “That’s the Devil.”
“And yet, somehow, my libido doesn’t care. Penis and boobs? Total wet dream combo.”
“Excuse us for a sec,” I said, and dragged Gus back behind the statue, while the Devil chuckled, amused and flattered by Gus’s predicament.
“Don’t tell me you’re not thinking about having sex for days,” Gus said, dreamy-eyed.
“Of course I am,” I said, frustrated. “The Devil is every vice rolled into one convenient package. But you can’t get sucked into that, or you’ll be subjugated by him. Try focusing above his neck.”
Gus peered out from behind the statue. The Devil’s face wasn’t remotely human. More like a cross between a human and a bull, with fierce looking horns
“Holy fuck. Look at those awesome horns. And the wings. Is it wrong that I want him even more?”
“Seriously? He’s got the calves of an oversized goat!” I threw my hands up, frustrated. “Why do women even bother shaving? We should swap razors for strap-ons.”
The Devil laughed again, the sound reverberating in his chest. “You two are a hoot. It’ll be a shame if I have to kill you for your unbearable rudeness. No one’s amused me this much in aeons.”
“Let’s not be hasty.” I said, as we hurriedly emerged from behind the statue. “We have a lot of funny left.”
“And I’m looking forward to every minute.” The Devil turned to Gus. “I have a special place in my heart for you. You are my poster child for the seven deadly sins. Lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. I can’t wait to see what new and exciting thing you come up with next,” he said, his fiery red eyes glowing. “All you have to do is hand over the toad bone. I will return you to your world, and we can continue making memories together.”
Gus’s eyes narrowed and his grip on my shoulder tightened. “Wait just one toad-pickin’ minute, Mister. I don’t care how disturbingly hot you are, that bone is mine. My toad. My bone. I didn’t go through hell just to hand it over to the Devil.”
“Personally, I think the bone belongs to Grundleshanks,” I muttered.
Grundleshanks, who was chilling out by a tombstone, croaked his agreement.
The Devil narrowed his eyes. “My demon, my bone. Get yourself another toad.”
“Grundleshanks isn’t a demon,” I protested.
Both of them turned and looked at me, like I was an idiot. “What?” I asked, looking from one human face to one inhuman one.
“Lucien?” Gus reminded me.
“Oh. Of course.” Back when Paul and I had been possessed, we had to get Lucien out of Paul’s body, and we used Grundleshanks to do it. Obviously, the fact that Lucien and Grundleshanks had shared the same bones for a fraction of a moment must mean something.
While Gus and the Devil faced off, I heard a voice in my head.
Of course, it means something, you stupid girl. I told you to stop him.
Aunt Tillie! I thought, overjoyed.
Hush! Have you learned nothing?
I quickly stilled my thoughts, before they caught the Devil’s attention. But just that little interaction with her made me feel a lot better.
“You and I have been flirting for quite awhile,” the Devil said to Gus. “I particularly enjoyed how you went all out, and courted the wrath of the Winter Queen, to flip the seasons. I haven’t laughed so hard in centuries. I could use a talent like yours on my side. And I can make it worth your while.”
The Devil snapped his fingers and turned from a massive archetypal being into a hot rock-and-roll guy with flowing blond hair, dimples and muscles for days. I could practically feel Gus’s eyes pop out.
“So, what’ll it be?” asked the Devil. “Do you keep the bone and come work for me, in the Underworld? Or do you stay in your realm and make a trade for the bone? You can have whatever your heart desires. This is your chance to drastically change your life. Do you want to be a movie star? I can make that happen. All you have to do, is give me the bone.”
What’s going on? I asked Aunt Tillie. Why doesn’t he just take the bone?
Even the Devil has to play by the rules, Aunt Tillie responded. His game is persuasion, seduction, exploiting existing weaknesses to create new ones.
“Tillie!” The Devil roared. “Shut the hell up, before I roast you on a spit.”
Aunt Tillie immediately vanished. Crap. I hoped her spirit was safely in the Summerlands and out of reach of the Devil.
“So, handsome, what do you want, in your heart of hearts?” the Devil purred. “Fame? Fortune? Immortality? Unending pleasures of the flesh?”
“With you? The Devil’s gay?” I asked. “That’s not very P.C.”
He roared with laughter. “I’m the Devil. I am the original pansexual being. Men, women, transgenders, intergenders. Don’t try to pigeon-hole me, or limit my enjoyment of your species with your puny restrictions,” the Devil said. “Now, about this bone…”
“No…” Gus shook his head, his face wearing that stubborn look I knew all too well. “I appreciate your offer, but the bone’s mine.”
“Isn’t that adorable? You think you actually have a choice.”
“We do,” I said. “It’s called Free Will.”
“No, darlin’,” the Devil chuckled, returning to his original form. “Free will is an illusion.”
I frowned. “No, it isn’t.”
“Not only do we have free will, we are witches. We can change the hands of Fate and bend the future to our Will.” Gus said.
The Devil laughed. “Your will isn’t as free as you think. If it was, it wouldn’t be so easy to bend it in my direction.”
“I control my own destiny,” Gus said. “You may be able to toy with mere mortals, but I am Witch—hear me roar!”
The Devil chuckled and expanded out to his original size, which was scary as hell. “By the time I’m done with you, you’ll be begging me to take the bone, and you’ll get nothing in return but the mercy of death,” the Devil said. �
�The opportunity for you to make a trade is over.”
He snapped his fingers and zapped us with some kind of explosion that flung us, screaming, out into space and through a swirling portal.
Chapter 45
When I came to, I was in a field of toadstool mushrooms. I turned to Gus and shook him, until he sat up.
He looked around. “I love this place. Just being in proximity to the mushrooms, sent me flying. I had the best hallucination of all time.”
“Did it involve a weirdly sexy Devil, a large dog and a toadstool cottage?”
“How’d you know?”
“It wasn’t a hallucination. I was there too.” I showed him the bruise on my arm, from where he had smacked me with his walking stick. “I think we just did our first sabbatic ritual together.”
Sabbatic rituals were usually done in dreamscape. It was something Gus had been wanting us to try for awhile.
Gus whooped. “How freaking cool is that! It just goes to show you that what you do in the sabbatic landscape has consequences in this one.”
“That’s what makes me nervous.” I said and shivered, afraid of what potential consequences we had just let ourselves in for.
He unzipped the thigh pocket of his shorty wetsuit and pulled out a small bone. “Ha! I still have it. We went into the sabbatic landscape and bested the Devil.”
“Good for you,” I said. “We should start heading back to the house.”
“You don’t have to ask me twice. I’m freezing my garbanzo beans off out here. How about you?”
I nodded. It was cold—dang cold. And it was getting colder by the minute.
All of a sudden, I realized what was going on. “Gus! Winter’s returning! You did it. You completed the combined rituals.”
He grinned. “We did it together! How cool is that? So much for your Aunt Tillie’s ridiculous warnings. Dire fate my ass. Let’s go home and celebrate. I have a bottle of sparkling cider in the fridge.”
We had to walk slow, since Gus was still limping from his knee getting bashed around. As we neared the old cemetery, the wind picked up, clouds covered the moon, and in the dead of night, it started hailing. But it wasn’t hard, glowing white snowballs. It was more like big, wet, dark, squishy blobs that bounced off us and onto the ground.
Even after the weird hailstorm stopped, the footing was getting increasingly more treacherous. The ground was slippery with mud and weirdly squishy. With the moon obscured, it was difficult to see anything. I tried to pick my way through more solid spots, but the ground kept shifting on me.
When Gus slipped and landed facedown in a mud-puddle, we were finally able to see why. It wasn’t hail we were being bombarded with. It was toads. There were hundreds of toads throughout the cemetery, obscuring the ground.
I braced myself on tombstones and tiptoed over graves, trying not to squish any of the dazed amphibians. My dad would be flipping out—he believed that you never step on anyone’s grave. And here I was, trampling all over my ancestors, like they weren’t even here, so I wouldn’t squish random toads.
I expected Gus to make some kind of gleeful wisecrack or start pocketing toads, but instead, he grabbed my arm and sat down on a rounded tombstone, taking shallow, rapid breaths.
“Are you okay?”
He shook his head. “I can’t breathe.”
“What do you mean, you can’t breathe? Is it an asthma attack?”
“I don’t know,” Gus looked at me, helpless. “It’s like my mid-section is swollen and I can’t get air into the bottom of my lungs.”
“So you can still breathe, you just can’t breathe well?”
“I’m not turning blue and keeling over, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Could it be a panic attack?”
“I don’t know.” Gus said, aggravated. “I’ve never felt like this before. It’s freaking me out.”
“Can you stand up?” As I helped him to his feet, a swirling portal opened in the sky above us, and a murder of crows descended into our world.
One of the crows spotted a hopping toad. It dove down, piercing the amphibian hide with its beak, and emerged with a brown glob that it quickly swallowed. The toad puffed up and exploded, spraying its organs out into the sky.
“Did you see that?!” I yelled.
“Holy. Fuck.” Gus panted.
Now that one crow had shown the way, the others swooped down, digging toad livers out of their little bodies with surgical precision. Toad after toad exploded, making the ground even slipperier, covering it (and us) with blood and entrails.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I said.
A phalanx of crows peeled off the main group and came after us. They attacked Gus, tearing through his shirt and pecking bits of flesh off his mid-section, trying to dig into his organs.
I didn’t know if they could do the same thing to him that they were doing to the toads, and I didn’t want to find out. I didn’t want to see Gus explode.
I picked up a handful of stones and whipped them at the crows, trying to drive them away. “Leave him alone!”
It worked for a moment, although I accidentally hit Gus a few times. As we kept moving, I randomly continued throwing stones at the crows, backing them off. My aim was terrible, but avoiding my mini-missiles slowed them down a bit. Which was good, because between Gus’s precarious breathing, his limp, and how slippery the ground was, we were forced to go slow, making pretty easy targets.
When Gus stumbled and fell, a bird came diving down at him. Since I was out of stones, I dug into my pockets and started throwing loose change at it. A quarter hit it in the chest and it pulled up, squawking its displeasure as it flew away. We were clear for the moment.
I bent down to help Gus up and suddenly realized what we were standing in. J.J. had come very close to finding his stash—he just needed to go deeper into the cemetery. I almost laughed I was so relieved. I was going to put a new twist on stone the crows.
“Does your lighter still work?” I asked.
“It should,” Gus said, clutching his mid-section. “Shit, that hurts.”
“It’s going to hurt a lot more if we don’t get out of here. Hand me the lighter.”
He dug into his pocket and tossed it to me. “What are you going to do with it? Throw it at them?”
The black cloud returned as crows swooped in for another attack. Gus tried to hobble towards me and fell, hitting his bad knee on a tombstone. “Fuck!” he swore, hissing in pain. “Mara, run! Get out of here.”
“I’m not leaving you,” I said. “Protect your liver. I don’t want to see you suffer the same fate as the toads.”
Gus curled up in a ball, head tucked in, arms protecting the back of his neck, as the birds took turns dive-bombing him. “Whatever you’re doing, hurry!”
I flicked opened the top of the lighter and held the flame to one of J.J.’s missing marijuana plants, but the leaves just weakly smoldered. They were too wet. Shit.
I picked up some more small stones and whipped them at the crows. “Go away!” I screamed.
My efforts weren’t going to hold them off for long. There were more crows poised to attack, than I had stones. And with Gus not very mobile, we were going to be screwed.
“Remember, you’re a witch. Act like one.” Aunt Tillie’s voice said, inside my head.
Of course! Hekate’s fire!
I pulled dragon energy up from the earth, through my feet, into my body and into my lungs. I could feel astral wings form on my back, as my spirit started to expand. It was as if I was turning into a dragon.
Then I reached up to the sky, and focused on gathering whatever residual electrical energy I could. There wasn’t enough left to create a lightning strike, but there was enough that every hair on my body stood on end and every cell of my skin started vibrating.
I combined the dragon energy and the electrical energy within me, forcing the heated exchange through my blood and into my lungs, until I couldn’t hold it any longer. I exhaled with all
my might on the crops, sending a small heat wave searing through the pot plants, drying up the leaves.
I inhaled again, driving Hekate’s fire deep into my body. My temperature started to rise. I could feel heat searing the inside of my lungs when I exhaled.
I took another deep breath in and clicked open the lighter. When I exhaled into the flame, it shot forward like a blazing torch, over the entire spread of marijuana plants. This time, the leaves hungrily grabbed onto the flames. Soon, all the pot plants were burning, enveloping the birds in thick smoke, blocking their view.
The astral wings pulled back into my body and vanished. I was back to myself again. Just a normal witch girl.
I coughed and I could feel my lungs burning. That must be the residual after-effects of breathing dragon fire. Hopefully, I hadn’t done any permanent damage. But we needed to get out of here, while the crows were still disoriented and crashing into each other.
I hurried to help Gus up.
He was looking at me, awestruck. “Are you… getting the… Devil’s minions… high?” he asked, grinning. “That… was awesome. I didn’t… know you could… do that.”
“Neither did I,” I said, smiling. “It’s one way of stoning the crows. Now, let’s get out of here before they get the munchies.”
I helped him up. A crow dropped out of the sky in front of us, looking blissful and uncaring. Gus eyeballed him, and I could tell he was thinking about kicking the crow or taking it hostage, in revenge.
“Leave it be,” I said. “Don’t give the Devil another reason to come after you.”
I coughed again. The smoke was so thick, I couldn’t tell which way the cottage was. I wondered how high we were going to be from the pot cloud, by the time we got out of the cemetery. Then, the spirit of Grundleshanks appeared, looked at us, and started hopping away, like he was trying to lead us somewhere.
“Come on, Gus!” I coughed, and urged him along. “Follow that toad!”
Chapter 46
Somebody Tell Aunt Tillie We're In Trouble! (The Toad Witch Mysteries Book 2) Page 19