Pale Demon

was it.

Al stared at me, hope dying in his eyes. “I can’t teach you this.”

“I can,” Newt said, and my breath came fast.

Crap on toast.

“I will,” she added, and I swallowed hard. “I will teach you, you will make one, and Al will fix it to reality. I don’t have the balls to do that part. Literally.”

No one was even whispering. All eyes were on me, the tables full of demons in robes and a small crowd bunched outside, trying to listen in. I hadn’t counted on this. I mean, Al I sort of trusted. At least I trusted that he needed me alive and reasonably well. But Newt? She looked sane, and that was worrisome.

“Come here,” she prompted. “You want to do this, yes?”

Not really. Taking a slow breath, I stood, feeling weird in these clothes with the green rocks sewn into them. They clinked as I came around the table, Ku’Sox moving in agitation as he stood, looking young next to Dali’s tired jadedness. Al’s hands were in fists on the table. A bead of sweat trickled down his neck.

“Sit before me, Rachel,” Newt prompted, her voice oily, and I wondered if this was how she’d killed her sisters, lulling them. She shifted on her cushion to sit cross-legged, pointing for me to take the tiny bit of padding right in front of her. “Back to me.”

Better and better.

My gut was so tight I thought I was going to vomit, and my arms felt like sticks. Everyone was watching as I gingerly sat, pebbles clinking as I tugged a bit of cloth to cover my bare legs. “That’s a love,” she murmured, and I jumped when she touched my hair.

Someone laughed, and I whipped my head around to see who it had been, but Newt was there, rubbing my forehead from behind, trying to be soothing but only making it worse.

“She’s not even going to be able to make a picture on the wall,” Ku’Sox predicted.

Al stood, nervous. “Shut up, Ku’Sox, or I’ll close your throat for you.”

Ku’Sox grinned, pointing to the camels groaning at the outskirts. “Would you like to step outside, old man? I beat your sorry ass before, and I can do it again.”

“Ku’Sox, shut up,” I said, not liking anyone talking to Al that way, then wondered where my loyalty had come from. But a thread of fear was in Al’s motions, so subtle that I didn’t know if anyone but perhaps Newt and Dali had noticed.

“He has a right to be afraid,” Newt said, leaning forward to whisper in my ear, and I shivered, hardly breathing. “If you can’t do this, then you will be a familiar and I will buy you from Al. But I think you can.”

“No pressure,” I grumbled, and her fingers touching my forehead lifted briefly as she laughed. It sounded weird, her laugh, and I saw more than a few demons grimace.

“Close your eyes, tap a line, and find the collective,” Newt said gently.

I took a last look at the faces ringing me, Al with his false confidence, Dali busy calculating the odds, the expressions of hope and doubt on demons I’d never met. I didn’t know why they cared one way or the other. Maybe they had a bet going. Maybe they were bored.

“I said,” Newt prompted, mildly ticked, “close your eyes.”

I closed them, immediately feeling claustrophobic. I tapped a line, wondering what demon had made it, and if he was watching me or dead and turned to dust. I settled myself, plunging into the thick morass of collective thoughts, reeling when I found no one there.

Well, almost no one.

I kicked them out, Newt thought, and I gasped, almost flinging myself out again, but she grabbed my consciousness with a soft thought and hauled me back. You don’t want them here, seeing your soul, she explained, and I got the impression of her swimming naked in a sea of stars, enjoying the solitude of a moment alone in her infinity.

My soul? I mused, alarmed, but she only seemed to twine her consciousness around mine, keeping us separate but close, rubbing her energies across me, old and jumbled, like a West Coast ley line.

You don’t want the entire collective to see you helpless and vulnerable, she explained, giving me the impression of half-lidded eyes and a sultry whisper. Having Gally see you as such will be punishment enough for almost killing him, I imagine.

Whoa, Al? I thought, worried, and she swam closer, making me nervous as I remembered him pinning me to the bookcase and spilling ley-line energy into me. And then me, slamming his theoretical dick in a drawer. Why him?

Al, she reiterated, seeming bothered she’d forgotten his name again. You want Dali to peel the memory from your thoughts instead? He’s likely more skilled at it, and it’s often easier for strangers to see us naked than…just what is Gally to you, anyway?

I shook my head, or at least I would have if I had one. I don’t know.

Well, when you’re done, bring Gally in to separate your construct from your conscious thought. Let him in, Rachel. Ignore the fact that he will see everything. Moment by moment, every little desire and hate you have, your soul sifting through his fingers as he pulls the construct free. What he doesn’t see might be left here, so let him entirely in, she thought, and I had a moment of perfect panic. It’s rather more intimate than pinning you to the wall for a kiss, she mocked.

I didn’t like this, but what choice did I have? It wasn’t as if Al hadn’t been in my thoughts before. Wait! I don’t know what to do! I thought as I felt her start to distance herself.

Newt’s consciousness swooped and dipped about mine, making me dizzy. Creating a collective thought real enough to touch is to prove you have the ability to shelter another soul within yours without absorbing it or accidentally changing what should not be changed. I felt a wave of melancholy come from her, dimming the stars. Do you know why demons are born able to twist curses? Their mothers curse them while still in the womb so they can defend themselves from birth. But it takes finesse to lay a curse within another’s soul while you’re sheltering it within your own. Making a tulpa and allowing another to exist freely in it is the same. It’s also why Algaliarept can’t remember what he looks like under all that prettiness he shows the world. He can’t pick out what is rightfully his and what his mother added. Beautiful, beautiful baby. I never had any, but if I had, I’d have made her look just like you.

It was starting to make sense. Making a construct would show I was fit to be a mother—a mother to demon children I would never have. So…what do I do? I asked, wondering if the demon who had helped Newt make that memory of an upscale bar was still alive, or if she’d killed him. Maybe it had been Minias.

Newt swam in circles around me, sending out ripples to the edge of the empty collective. I do so like it when no one is here. Quiet.

Newt? I prompted, and she returned.

Remember a place. Make it real in your mind. Fill the void here, and Al will separate it from you and make it real. That’s their part. All you have to do is let him in.

I had to trust him. Damn it! How did I get here? Just think of a place?

In my mind, it was as if I could see her bobbing in the water before me, silver stars running down her face like water drops. What do you miss the most? Now that you’re here forever?

What do I miss? I echoed, thinking immediately of Jenks, Ivy, and my church, but sharing that with the demons wasn’t going to happen. My garden in the sun. The sun I would never see again.

Heartache seemed to double me over. The sun. I was going to miss the sun. That was what I could show them. Not the sun in my garden, but somewhere else, where the sun ruled everything, not just now, but for all the past and all the future. I would give the demons a forest so old and dead that only stones remained. I’d give them that, and nothing more.

With a ping that hurt my soul, I felt the memory of the desert rise in me, carrying all the lonely, empty desperation I’d felt when I thought I’d lost Jenks. I hunched, my eyes pinched tightly shut as my heart ached, resonating with the reality that I’d lost everything. Empty. Everything was empty, and the echo of space washed through my skull.

Heat soaked into me like an internal blanket, first frightening, then soothing. The hint of the abandoned ley