Chapter 2
“Clarence,” Hazel said, while the deep-space cold of the room seemed to fill her mind. “There’s still time to take back whatever deal you made.”
The candles flickered around her, the demons’ presence devouring their protective radiance every second. She didn’t have long.
As Clarence hacked laughter, she subtly shifted her weight forward. “I don’t know what they’ve promised you,” she said. In a desperate burst of motion, she darted downward and scooped up the jar of oil. “But I promise it’s not worth the price.”
The candle behind her blinked out. Then the one to the west.
“Price?” Clarence snorted. “Stupid girl.”
The red demon leaned forward, both mouths gaping, its breath filling the room with the stench of rotten meat. One candle went out immediately, and the other wavered. Hazel clutched the jar, trying to mentally map the room without taking her eyes off either of the intruders.
“You’re the price,” said Clarence, and the last candle died.
* * *
The demon lunged first. Hazel hadn’t been expecting that—the cloaked figure was closest—and her dash backward was clumsier than she’d hoped.
Her aim was still decent. She flung the jar of banishing oil as hard as she could, not at the demon itself but at the wall, behind the new arrivals, calling on the very rusty skills she’d developed in junior varsity softball.
Hazel hadn’t lost them completely over fifteen years, and fear helped; the full jar hit the wall hard enough to shatter it, splashing the oil over the demon.
It roared, though she couldn’t tell whether that was pain or anger or both, and stopped in its tracks long enough for Hazel to keep scrambling away. The floor squelched beneath her, a new development that she would have liked to ignore if it hadn’t also clung to her feet.
Great. Two outsiders against one medium weren’t bad enough odds.
Hazel took another step back, holding her knife in front of her, and risked a glance over her shoulder as the demon barked words in a twisting, clotted language.
Sure enough, blood soaked the previously yellow carpet, and more hands pressed at the walls.
The TV made a weirdly modern touch in the middle of them, even though the frame had become leathery and stitched, and the door had turned into leather as well, with a wooden handle shaped like a curved human tongue.
It would still work, though, even if Hazel had to persuade it, and she had a clear path there. She turned to run.
A gloved hand grabbed her shoulder. Hazel tried to yank away, but the cloaked figure held on with impossible strength, turning her back around as the demon shambled toward her. Clarence started laughing again, wheezing, choking, but unmistakably gleeful.
She shrieked, forcing her lungs free of the terror that had half calcified them, and shoved herself at the figure knife-first. It was a totally clumsy blow, but the figure had been expecting her to throw her weight in the other direction.
The knife sank into its robes just about where the collarbone would be on a human, and the cloaked being hissed with pain. It almost sounded like a person.
Then it shoved Hazel away, eyes flaring beneath its cloak. The force sent her stumbling again, nearly tripping, until she smacked the back of her head into the TV, and the screen came to life as she shook herself. Light of a sort filled the room again, along with the crackling of static.
Hazel could only half see the TV in the mirror, which totally distorted whatever image might have appeared, and barely made out a brightly colored moving oval as the static resolved.
The others clearly saw more. Both the red demon and the hooded figure stopped, attention drawn to the picture on the screen, and Clarence’s laughter cut off abruptly.
The image shifted again and became falling white lines.
Footsteps on the soggy carpet gave Hazel a second of warning. She spun around, holding her knife out, and saw the demon lurching in her direction again. It was between Hazel and the door before she could take a step.
The creature in the hood stood behind her right side. It wasn’t moving yet, still staring at the TV, but running back in their direction didn’t seem like a bright idea. That left the other side of the bed and the narrow passage between the wall and the armchair.
Hazel leaped onto the bed like a ten-year-old in a hotel room.
The mattress bounced beneath her, and Clarence gave a faint, angry cry that didn’t inspire much sympathy under the circumstances.
She jumped off again onto the other side and grabbed the lamp from the bedside table in her free hand, then ran for the door, keeping the makeshift shield on her side.
Realizing what she was doing, the demon changed direction, but it was too large to really move fast. Hazel shoved the chair toward it as she dashed, hearing an impact but not looking to see how well she’d hit.
She knew that the door was in front of her, which was, to paraphrase Keats badly, all she needed to know.
Cold pain ripped upward from her left leg. A force with it jerked her to a stop, then yanked her back like she was a dog on a leash, pulling Hazel an inch or two before she could even look down to see what had gone wrong.
A barbed black tongue had flicked out of the demon’s upper mouth and wrapped around her upper thigh, cutting easily through her pants and deep into her flesh. As Hazel shrieked and tried to pull away, it tightened, keeping her firmly in place. The demon took a thudding step forward.
The hooded figure crashed into its side, shoving it off balance. With another roar, this one pure rage, the demon rounded on its servant. It left Hazel bleeding but free, knowing that she had a few precious seconds to save herself.
Her knife wouldn’t do the job. She doubted she could reach the door before the demon got to her again, not with her wounded leg.
Hazel scanned the room, frantically seeking a weapon, a shield, or an escape hatch, and noticed the TV.
The images on it were still shifting: A giant winged shadow morphed into a field of colored stars, which became an almost-human face with a third eye in the center of its forehead.
No earthly TV station had ever shown those pictures.
Hazel had no idea what they were or where they came from, but they’d stopped the demons for a moment.
She understood everything else in the room—the demons, the furniture, Clarence scrabbling at the covers and making gurgling noises deep in his throat.
The known either wouldn’t help her or was actively trying to kill her.
Time to take a chance on the unknown.
Bolting forward, she raised her knife above her head and plunged it into the TV.
For just a second, she saw a shifting silvery-blue landscape on the screen, full of shapes of different sizes with the continents and clouds of worlds seen from space. A rusty haze seemed to hang between the screen and the landscape.
Then the glass burst and the room shuddered.
Blue-white fire streamed out of the TV and along the walls in wide snakes, acting like no electricity Hazel had ever seen except for the way it made her hair stand on end and her fillings hurt.
Swaths of wall next to it shrank and grew with no relation to each other, stretching or crushing the reaching handlike shapes, and the energy’s crackling noise blended with the sound of popping bones.
It took only a moment for the electricity to make a full circle, just long enough for Clarence to let out a weak, choked howl of rage that sounded like his last noise on earth.
The electricity nearly drowned him out when the two strands met above his head.
The trophy animals’ eyes glowed blue-white then, and fire started dancing along the deer’s antlers.
When it reached the end, it started spinning itself out into tendrils.
Hazel dropped to the ground.
It was disgusting. Blood coated the front of her body, soaking through her clothes immediately and staining every inch of her skin, and it didn’t smell any better close up.
Her stomach flipped, but she held back the urge to puke or to throw herself upward in revulsion, just as she braced herself against the pain in her thigh.
Then the hum of electricity became a sharp crack, blending with a thunderous roar from the demon, and a new, different kind of pain arced through Hazel.
A shock wave threw her across the room, slamming her into the wall shoulder-first. When she pulled herself to her feet, the demon lay across the room in the ruins of the dresser, shards of mirror surrounding it.
The robed figure was against the far wall, trying to stand.
Static still danced across the shoulder Hazel had stabbed.
Hazel didn’t need to see any more. She ran to the door for the third time, closing the short distance without any trouble, and reached it just as Lee flung it open from the other side.
“What the hell—” he started to ask, indignant, and then his face paled. “What the hell?” he repeated, but in a gasp with barely more strength to it than Clarence’s last laugh.
A rust-colored void floated between Clarence’s room and the hallway, not very wide but unmistakably present. Shapes drifted up through it, translucent and blurry, and a few of them moved. One formed a face and stared back at Hazel, and its eyes flashed a bright sea-green for a moment.
Behind Hazel, glass and wood crunched. The demon was getting up.
She hurled herself across the gap, not caring how wide it actually might be.
Cold lashed at her bones as she hurtled through the passage.
Hazel heard sounds that might have been singing or sobbing, and didn’t think she could have told the difference if she’d had all day to listen.
She flew weightless across the threshold, then crashed into the floor and Lee as the material world’s gravity caught her, acquiring a whole new set of bruises and not caring.
Lee didn’t even object. He just stared, mouth hanging open, as the remaining maggot-thing scurried toward the door and the demon growled orders at the cloaked figure. Lee didn’t move as Hazel got off of him, or when she dashed forward and slammed the door.
Time was short, so Hazel didn’t bother talking until she’d grabbed his upper arm and started hauling him along. “Out,” she snapped at him then, digging her nails into the flesh beneath his button-down. “Now.”
She wasn’t strong, but she didn’t even feel the effort she was making as she towed Lee along behind her.
His legs seemed to move on autopilot as they stumbled down the hallway, a clumsy parade that crashed into the wall once before Hazel frantically righted them.
When the house started shaking, his eyes cleared a bit.
“What—”
“Nothing good. Run.”
And they did, racing into the boring living room and past the colorless sofas as the hallway groaned behind them.
The floor kept shaking. A chunk of the hallway ceiling thudded to the floor, sending up plaster dust in a harsh white cloud.
Something large growled beyond it. Hazel didn’t even try to see what it was.
Ten more feet—five—then she fumbled at the door latch with shaking hands, silently cursing all home decorators. Wind began to howl at her back. Lee turned his head once, then screamed, as Hazel dragged them both outside and slammed the door by throwing her hip against it.
She hit with her wounded leg, because it was closer and she absolutely could not catch a break, but pain couldn’t matter just yet.
The roof was caving in, gables folding up like badly made paper planes, as the gate drew itself closed and took bits of reality with it.
Hazel reached for Lee’s arm again, prepared to drag him, but he’d already started to run down the driveway, wailing up at the hazy-blue August sky.
Well, Hazel thought as she forced her legs to carry her another dozen feet away from the collapsing house, I bet he believes now.
Then it was safe to fall over and whimper, so she did.