“We’ll get rid of them tomorrow. Besides, like I told you, they don’t bother me that much. They bother my mama, though, so as long as you eradicate them before she gets here, I’m happy.”
“I will try,” he said with such pained seriousness that she put down her fork and knife to stare at him. “I’ll do everything I can, lass. Everything. Until then, you must promise me never to be alone with them. Never fight them without me at your side.”
“They’re not monsters, Damon,” she said with a laugh. “They’re rats!”
He laughed weakly.
“And I know you’ll slay them for me, brave knight, right?”
“Aye, fair maiden,” he said with more vehemence than what seemed to fit the task. “’Tis my job to slay the beasties.”
Nevertheless, through the rest of the supper, Damon acted edgy. Peering around the kitchen as he ate, he squinted at the corners, studied crevices, kept watch on the dog door she’d blocked.
When they’d finished, they didn’t linger over conversation. Damon appeared too distracted. Harmony walked him to the back door. The air was warm for nighttime in these parts. Distant thunder echoed from somewhere over the Rockies. “It’s going to be a hot one tomorrow,” she observed, trying to act casual though she was acutely aware of his body so close to hers.
He turned to her. “Thank you for tonight.”
“My pleasure.”
“Aye, your pleasure will always be mine, lass.”
Harmony gulped. Sigh. He had no idea. . . .
He stood there for a moment, studying her with a look that pingponged between desire and regret, then, chanting “Good, good, good” under his breath, he bid her good night as any respectable gentleman would a nun and walked away.
It was all she could do not to follow him back to the hayloft.
Pressing a cool glass of water against her cheek, she watched him go, wondering just what it was going to take to bring out the devil in Damon.
Ten
The next Sunday the men began trickling into church to see where the women were going. With every passing week more townsfolk came, until Harmony had to ask Damon to build her some more pews.
He did so gladly, though it took him away from his pet project, the installation of an expansive automatic sprinkler system surrounding the church. “The beasties don’t like the water,” he’d explained.
He must be right: ever since the water had been coming on every night, there hadn’t been any more problems with rodents in the house. And as a side benefit, the lawn looked great, too. Unfortunately, they now had a glut of water-loving garden slugs to deal with. But at least those hadn’t tried crashing dinner. Yet.
It was Sunday, T-minus one week and a day until her family invaded Mysteria, and Harmony was in the midst of delivering her sermon to a full house. Standing a few careful steps outside the halfopen door, her loyal knight Damon stood guard, his arms folded over the end of a pitchfork as he leaned against the outside wall. Although he never stepped foot inside the church—“’tis not right,” he’d insist so mournfully—he always listened carefully to her weekly message. Often she’d work in little things she hoped might help him escape his dark, mysterious past, something he remained reluctant to share. “I wasna good,” he’d say in his brogue. Yet, without a criminal record anyone could unearth—and Jeanie had never stopped trying—how bad could he have been?
No sooner than Harmony conjured the thought than an unseasonably cold breeze whooshed inside the church. “Bad, bad,” the wind seemed to whisper, a crackly, desiccated noise like the scratch of crinkled brown leaves on the sidewalk in autumn. With one hand fisted in the fabric of her cotton skirt to keep it from flying up, she tried to snatch back her papers from the whirlwind, but it only blew harder, whipping her hair around her face. “Evil,” it hissed, drawing out the word. “Evil demon, baaaaad.”
Then the wind surged in velocity, gushing between the pews, tossing off hats and whipping hair, until it hit Harmony full on and whirled around her like her own personal tornado, scattering the pages of her sermon. “Bad . . . bad . . . bad . . .”
Something pressed in on her mind, bitter, distasteful, like a taste of bile. She mentally flung it away. “The basement’s unlocked,” she shouted to her dispersing flock. “It may be a tornado. Get inside, take shelter!” But the wind erased her words.
“Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad,” it rasped.
“Reverend!” Jeanie Tortellini tried to assist her but the wind blew the woman backward.
“I’m okay!” But was she? She had to squint against the whistling gale in order to see. Damon was no longer at the door. Knowing him, he was outside helping others. “Find Damon. You two make sure everyone’s okay. Get them in the basement if you have to.” Barking the orders, the blind trust, it reminded her of when a missile had struck outside the field hospital in Iraq and she and the doctors were trapped inside. “Go, Jeanie! You know what to do. I’ll be right there.”
Jeanie ran off. As Harmony struggled as if swimming upstream to follow, she glimpsed Dr. Fogg, as calm as could be, observing the scene like the scientist-physician he was, jotting down notes on his Blackberry as he evacuated the building along with the rest of the townspeople.
Finally, Harmony fought her way outside to the porch. Outside, shadows arced and swooped. Birds. First a rodent invasion, now a bird invasion?
The wind subsided the moment Harmony exited the church, as if it had tried at first to keep her from doing so before giving up.
“I’m sane,” she muttered. “Really I am. I just live in Mysteria, that’s all—” She froze on the top step, her mouth falling open. The scene before her was so inexplicably impossible that her mind almost couldn’t process it.
What at first glance she thought were birds weren’t. “Flying monkeys?” she whispered. Good heaven, they were! From their little gold-trimmed suits to their Dixie-cup hats, they were replicas of the winged assistants from the movie
As if that weren’t bad enough, Damon stood in the eye of the furry hurricane, fighting back as if the whole thing were personal.
Eleven
Damon swung his pitchfork at the flock of subdemons. “Be gone! Back to your Hell hole!” But with his powers reduced to what he could conjure as a mortal man, he could do little more than issue threats.
The subdemons had started emerging from a Hell hole in Harmony’s vegetable garden while she was preaching. More and more of them. Damon had tried to get them all stuffed neatly back down the pit before church was over. He could turn on the sprinklers, aye, and wash them all away, but what a muddle it would make, melting, sizzling subdemons everywhere. And how would he explain the little articles of clothing left behind? Nay, ’twas better to scoop them up by the pitchforkful and shove them back to Hell before Harmony emerged from the church.
He’d actually gotten ahead of the game when the winds began. Filled with dread, Damon turned around, a wriggling subdemon, caught by the collar, still dangling from his pitchfork as townspeople poured out of the church.
