Ким Харрисон - The Outlaw Demon Wails

My face screwed up at the memory. "I hated it," I said, and a small noise slipped from him, rising up from someplace deep inside him where only he knew his thoughts. "It was degrading—infuriating that a worm like Tom had control of me. I wanted to…scare him so bad he wouldn't ever do it again."

Al's expression shifted when what I had said hit me and I put a hand to my chest. Damn it back to the Turn, I understood him. He hadn't asked because he hadn't known how I felt. He asked so I would see we were the same. God, help me. Please.

"Don't do that to me again," he said. "Ever."

My stomach cramped. He was asking for me to trust him out of a circle, and it was the scariest thing I'd ever had to do. "Okay," I whispered. "You got it."

Al looked at the bubble of ever-after over his head and tugged the lace of his cuffs down. "Come here."

At that instant, light spilled over the rim of earth surrounding Cincinnati. My scratched circle was still there, but Al no longer was. Shaking, I dropped the barrier of ever-after and brought my second sight into focus. Taking a breath, I stepped into the line to find him standing right where I'd left him, smiling with his hand extended. Around him, or us, rather, slumped the broken city, grass-choked chunks of pavement standing at odd angles thrusting upward from the earth. There was no bridge or ponds. Just dead grass and a red haze. I didn't look behind me to the Hollows as the wind blew grit into my face.

I was standing in a line, balanced between reality and the ever-after. I could go either way. I wasn't his yet. "One day a week," I said, knees wobbling.

"I give you Newt's mark, you give me my name," Al said, then wiggled his fingers as if he needed me to take them to finish the deal. I reached for it, and at the last moment, Al's glove melted away, and I found myself gripping his hand. I stifled my first impulse to jerk away, feeling the hard calluses and the warmth. It was done. Now I only had to roll with the surprises.

"Rachel!" came a call with the slamming of a car door. "God, no!"

It had been my mom's voice, and my hand still in Al's, I turned, unable to see anything.

Al pulled me into him, and numb, I felt his arm curve possessively about my waist. "Too late," he whispered, his breath shifting the hair about my ear, and we jumped.

The jump through the line hit me like a bucket of ice water, an uncomfortable slap right from the start with the shock turning into the sensation of being wet where you don't want to be and left dripping. I felt my body shatter—that was the shock—and then my thoughts tightened into a ball around my soul to hold it together—that was the miserable, dripping-wet part. That I was holding my soul together and not Al was a surprise to both of us.

Good, came Al's grudging, almost worried thought rippling over the protective bubble I had somehow made about my psyche. And then came the push back into existence.

Again the bucket of ice water hit my thoughts as he shoved me out of the line. I tried to see how he did it, coming away without a clue. But at least I had managed to keep from spreading my thoughts over the entire continent crisscrossed with ley lines—the stretchy stuff that kept the ever-after from vanishing, if Jenks was right.

I gasped as I felt my lungs form. Dizzy, I fell to my hands and knees. "Ow," I said as I looked at the dirty white tile, then brought my head up at the hammering of noise. We were in a large room. Men in suits were everywhere standing or sitting in orange chairs—waiting.

"Get up," Al grumbled, bending to bodily yank me upright.

I rose, arms and legs flopping until I found my feet. Wide-eyed, I stared at the irate people dressed in a vast array of styles. Al jerked me into motion, and my mouth dropped as I realized we had popped into existence upon what looked like an FIB emblem. Holy crap, it even looked like the FIB reception room. Minus the demons, of course.

Feeling displaced and unreal, I turned to where the doors to the street would have been, seeing only a blank wall and more waiting demons. "Is this the FIB?" I stammered.

"It's someone's idea of a joke," Al said, his voice tight and his accent impeccable. "Get off the pad unless you want someone's elbow in your ear."

"God, it stinks," I said, hand over my nose as he pulled me into a long step.

Al strode forward, head high. "It's the stench of bureaucracy, my itchy-witch, and why I chose to go into human resources when but a wee lad."

We'd come up to a set of imposing wooden doors. There were two uniformed men beside it—demons, by their eyes—looking bored and stupid. They probably had stupid denizens in the ever-after just like everywhere else. Behind us was a rising angry mutter that I recognized from when I tried to sneak thirteen items into a twelve-item-only line.

"Docket number?" the more brilliant of the two asked, and Al reached for the door.

"Hey," the other said, coming to life. "You're supposed to be in jail."

Al grinned at him, his white-gloved grip tightening on the wooden handle, which was intricately carved in the shape of a naked, writhing woman. Nice. "And your momma wanted you to have a brain," he said, yanking the door open and slamming it into the guy's face.

I danced backward at the ensuing uproar, but Al took my upper arm and strode forward, nose in the air, buckled shoes snapping, and velveteen coattails swaying. "You, ah, have a way with civil servants," I said, almost panting to keep up. I wasn't about to drag my feet. I'd stormed a few offices myself; you had to move quickly to get past the red-tape-loving idiots and find someone intelligent enough to appreciate the nerve of barging in. Someone dying for an interruption and the chance to procrastinate. Someone like…I peered at the nameplate on the door Al stopped before. Someone like Dallkarackint. Jeez, what was it with demon names?

Wait a sec. Dali, Dallkarackint…Was this the guy Al had wanted to throw my dead body in front of?

Al opened the door, shoved me in, then back-kicked the door shut to block out the uproar storming up the hall behind us. I felt a tweak on my awareness and wondered if he'd locked it. It was a thought that grew more plausible when the pounding on the door stayed pounding and didn't turn into a big ugly demon with a broken nose.

Squinting, I caught my balance in the…sand? Shocked, I looked up as what had to be a fake breeze smelling of seaweed and burnt amber shifted my hair. I was standing in hot sand in the sun. The door had become a small changing hut, and a boardwalk ran from right to left to the surf-soaked horizon. Stretching into the almost green water was a canopy-covered dock. At the end was a large platform on which a man sat behind a desk. Okay, he was a demon, but he looked like an attractive fifty-something CEO who had brought his desk with him on vacation instead of his laptop. Before him in an upright deck chair was a woman in a purple sari. The scrying mirror on her lap flashed in the sun angling under the canopy that shaded the desk. His familiar?

"Wow," I said, unable to look at everything at once. "This isn't real, is it?"

Al straightened his crushed velvet and pulled me onto the boardwalk. "No," he said as our heels clunked on the wood. "It's casual Friday."

My God, the sun sliding under the awning is even warm, I thought as we found the dock and started down it. I suppose if one was a demon and had unlimited power, why not put the illusion of the Bahamas around you at the office? Al yanked me forward when I lagged to see if there were fish in the water, and I yelped when I felt a cascading shimmer cross over me.

"There," Al soothed, and I shoved his hand off me. "Now don't you look proper? Must wear our best when before the court."