Pale Demon

at him. “You owe your freedom to an elf! One that I let go!”

The surrounding jeers and calls from the watching demons rose high, and Ku’Sox frowned as the helping hands fell away. In the distance, I heard a fox bark, and the puddle of light grew when someone stilled the wildly swinging lamp and relit it with a tweak on a line.

“An elf?” Dali was leaning casually against a support pole. “Ku’Sox, you owe your freedom to Rachel’s castoffs?”

It wasn’t the angle I’d been going for, but it made Ku’Sox angry, his eyes squinting as he bent to beat the dust from his robes. “That thing is a witch,” he said, pointing at me. “A stunted double X that Algaliarept is dressing up like a demon to further his pathetic attempt at familiar procurement.”

“Pathetic?” Al drawled as he sat down, leaving me standing alone. “You’ve been gone too long, you little zit pus. I’m more of a snag artist than you’ll ever be, and I know talent when I see it. Rachel may be born from a witch, but she is a demon as much as you are a pain in the ass with the social skills of a dog. Still eating souls, Ku’Sox? That’s like eating God’s shit.”

“You know nothing!” Ku’Sox shouted, red faced as the surrounding demons laughed. “I’m stronger than all of you! I can take this world and destroy it! Open a hole to reality and drain this world to nothing until you’re bumping around in a universe the size of a closet and you all get sucked into oblivion!”

The conversations stilled, and Dali cleared his throat in the sudden silence. Ku’Sox stopped, the hem of his robe swinging as he dared anyone to comment, his chin high and a defiant gleam in his blue, goat-slitted eyes. Every demon in the place wore hatred and fear on his shadowed, candlelit, ruddy face. And that, of course, was why they didn’t kill him. If they tried and failed, he might destroy the ever-after, laughing all the way to the sunny side of reality and his survival. Their prodigal son was fucking insane.

“You’re not stronger than me,” Newt said into the quiet, and Ku’Sox’s eyes narrowed.

“Aren’t you dead yet, you old hag?” he grumbled.

The demons started to whisper, and Dali’s slippers were a soft hush on the reeds as he came forward. He was looking at me with speculation, and now I knew why. Is she the one? Is it her? What he meant was, am I a demon? Can I kill Ku’Sox?

“Test-tube brat,” Al said as he stood his empty wineglass upright with a thump. “DNA degenerate. Magical mistake. You’re picking on Rachel because she might be a better demon than you.”

“Her?” Ku’Sox exclaimed, and Al simpered at him. “I’m the way back to our rebirth, and you will respect that! Me! Not her! She’s born from a witch. A stunted, damaged witch!”

Newt shifted coyly on her cushion, the only one who hadn’t left her seat throughout the entire scene. “No, poor boy, you are a mistake we loved too much to put down. I still think you would have turned out fine if Dali hadn’t dropped you when you were but a blastocyst.”

“You are deluding yourselves,” Ku’Sox said, frowning. “I am your rebirth.”

“My dame’s ashes,” Al muttered. “The poor boy is going to go off now to brood about world domination.”

A few of the demons sliding back to their tables laughed, and Ku’Sox flushed in anger.

“Something is wrong with you, my lovely little boy,” Newt continued, the silver goblet of wine in her hand as demons drifted away and the tension eased. “In your head. Even demons do not eat souls. Is it because you’re worried that you don’t have one?”

“I have a soul,” Ku’Sox said with a scowl, but I wondered.

“Of course you do. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have an aura,” Newt said brightly. “Come sit with us.”

Oh, there’s a good idea, I thought, sitting down between Al and Newt, leaving Ku’Sox to stand by himself.

“That,” he said, pointing at me again, “isn’t a demon. I need proof. We all do.” He looked over the assembled demons. There were more people now than there were tables. They must have been coming in all this time, filling the Mesopotamian darkness with soft mutters and speculation. “It takes more than being able to invoke demon magic to be one,” Ku’Sox said. “Do something demonic.”

This last had been aimed at me, and my hands clenched in my lap. “Like rip your heart out? Come a little closer.”

“Rachel…,” Al said as he reached across the table and patted my shoulder a little too hard. God, I felt like I was one of two little kids on a playground.

From her cushion, Newt cleared her throat. “Rachel should make us a new memory.”

The surrounding demons exhaled, the sound rising like a sigh of excitement. I turned to her, surprised. You want me to do what?

“Be reasonable, Newt,” Al protested, his face suddenly pale. “She’s only a few hours old. I haven’t had time to teach her anything yet.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Newt said as she ate a grape with an odd precision. “If she’s a demon, she can do it.”

Al looked deathly worried, and I watched Dali energetically stride to the jukebox and press his hands to it, invoking who knew what as it glowed a hazed black. “Splendid idea,” he was muttering. “Rachel, what do you want to call it?”

“Call it?” At a loss, I looked around the table, seeing worry on Al’s face and satisfaction on Ku’Sox’s. “Call what?”

“Give us a memory,” Newt prompted, the beads in her hair clicking. “Only a demon has the mental fortitude to channel enough energy to make a tulpa construct this size. One that anyone can share.”

Oh. My. God. I looked at the fake restaurant, the fire, the stars, the smells. “You want me to make something like this?” I squeaked. “Are you nuts? I don’t know how to do that!”

“She admits she’s not a demon,” Ku’Sox proclaimed, and Al’s grip on his wineglass became white-knuckled as he hunched against the raised voices around us.

“Lacking a skill doesn’t translate into a lack of ability,” he growled, but the demons were rearranging the tables, making an open space of sorts, wanting me to try.

Newt’s eyes narrowed. “Only a demoness can make a free-existing tulpa, and only a male demon can fix it into reality. I say it’s a fair test. Al, put your money where your mouth is. Or should I say where your student is.”

I looked wildly from one end of the midnight Mesopotamia to the other, despairing as I realized why Newt had “apologized.” She had killed everyone who could do this—except herself. I could not make this! It was immense!

“Of course you can,” Newt said as she leaned toward me, almost as if having read my mind. “Making a construct is easy. Every one in that box there was made by my sisters, and they weren’t nearly as clever as you.” Newt raised her goblet in salute. “That’s why I could kill them, you see.”

My heart pounded and I sat down before I passed out. “Uh, maybe I shouldn’t do it then.”

Ku’Sox laughed, but Newt poured her wine into my glass. “That’s not why I killed them. But that’s why Ku’Sox tricked me into it. To make a lasting tulpa, one that can be stored and lived in, one must have the ability to safely hold more than one’s own soul. Demons can’t do it. A demoness can. It’s on that little extra bit of X gene that they don’t have.”

I listened to crickets that had turned to dust thousands of years ago on a continent I’d never set foot on. “You’re able to hold a soul so you can gestate a baby,” I guessed, and she nodded, solemn.

“Ku’Sox is a fool, but he’s right. You need to prove yourself, and now is as good a time as any. I will not have your standing in doubt. Don’t you agree, Al?” she added lightly.

Al looked sick. “She’s rather stupid yet.”

“I am not!” I exclaimed, and he pointed at me.

“There, see? She is.”

Newt waved a hand at Dali, still standing by the jukebox. “Even a dunce can have a baby. All it needs is stamina and a little imagination. Rachel?”

“I am not stupid!” I said again.

“Shut up,” Al hissed as Ku’Sox gleefully ate someone else’s cheese. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“So teach me,” I hissed right back. “Thanks to you, I can’t be a witch anymore. I may as well be a demon.”

My heart was pounding. God, what was I doing? I only knew that I had to be somewhere, and right now, this