Devilish (22 page)

I pulled the stopper from the bottle and removed the scrap. Right under my message, I saw the following words, scrawled in the familiar ornate, looping hand:

“Five minutes?” I said out loud. “How am I supposed to get there in five minutes?”

Pazuzu pulled his face out of his own feathers and cocked his head at me, as if puzzling this over himself. Then he blinked his yellow eyes and fixed them on a point just behind me.

I turned to see Mr. Fields standing on the very edge of the rooftop, his back facing the open sky and the moon.

“Nice to see you again, Jane!” he said, bowing low. “Come along. My car is waiting.”

He didn’t move from the roof edge. Instead, he slipped
off his glasses and replaced them with a pair of old-fashioned goggles—massive ones, like the kind people used to wear to go “motoring.”

“The stairs are this way,” I said, pointing to the door.

“No time.” He fussed with the goggles with one hand and waved me toward him with the other. “No need. Come along.”

“Come along where?”

“To Mistress!” he said brightly. “Come along now.”

He reached out to me. This could mean only one thing.

“No,” I said. “I’ll take the stairs.”

“If you want to talk to Mistress, this is the only way,” he said primly, as if he was admonishing a small child. “Come now.”

There was no going back. Only forward. I joined him on the edge.

“Now,” he said, “I should warn you that sometimes this hurts a bit.”

With the slightest of tugs, I felt my heels liberated from the surface.

Maybe you’ve wondered what it’s like to fall off a tall building. Well, let me fill you in.

The first second is really, really good. It’s surprisingly like the cartoons, where the fateful character hovers for a moment after running off the cliff. Everything is still. There’s no cold or restriction…. You’re just free. For just a second, you really feel like you’re standing on air.

And then you realize that you are not. This is not as fun.

The falling is pretty much what you might imagine. You fall. It happens very quickly and you have no real time to be scared because you are simply flattened by the force of falling until your face feels like a pancake.

What I didn’t expect was the fact that you flip over and go headfirst. Then you get this feeling like every single internal organ and bone in your body just slips out of place and lodges somewhere in your neck. The blood really does rush to your head, causing a sensation a little bit like drinking fifty cups of coffee in one second might feel if that was possible. My arms were flapping uselessly at my sides, rubbery as fish fins. I knew I had to be nauseous—it would come when my body understood gravity again. Next to me, Mr. Fields was in pretty much the same position, but he was holding his arms back gracefully and putting his smiling face against the wind. He was shouting something, but I couldn’t hear him.

There was ground coming up fast now. I was ten feet, five feet, four, knee-high distance. I could see the pattern of the concrete clearly. Then my legs bent around hard, arching my body completely. I tumbled in the air, turning the right way around. I landed heels first. The sidewalk was solid—it made my teeth chatter—but it didn’t kill me.

Mr. Fields was standing next to me. His little silver sports car was waiting, engine running, right next to where we had landed. I looked around, expecting to see crowds
of terrified Halloween revelers or at least a startled doorman. But there was no one. It was just an empty stretch of sidewalk. Not abandoned. There was just no one there at that second. I got the feeling this was not a coincidence.

Mr. Fields ushered me to the car and settled me into the front seat. My entire body, I noticed, was now shuddering with the most painful cold. Anticipating this need, he tucked a purple cashmere lap blanket over me.

“That happens,” he said. “That feeling of cold. It’s because you have a soul and a life force. When you do something like jump off a building, it starts to slip away. It’ll snap back into place in a moment.”

He hurried around and got in on the driver’s side. He fumbled with the stereo for a moment, then he was blasting Beethoven and the whole car was groaning with the heavy-belly sound of cellos. Then we were speeding off down the empty streets, with the other cars always just a block or two in the distance but never in our way.

The sports car loved the challenge of the Providence ski slope hills, and the engine purred happily as it pulled us up the streets. Maybe two minutes later, we were coming to a checkered-flag stop in front of Lanalee’s, right behind a line of silver cars.

“Houseful tonight,” Mr. Fields said pleasantly. “Well, here you are. Good luck, my dear. We’re all very happy to have you with us.”

It was cold now. For reasons I have never quite understood, cold always makes things louder. My shoe made a
definite crunch as it made contact with the pavement. Pazuzu was there already, sitting placidly on a yellow porch light, occasionally pecking at the bulb. I could hear a lot of noise coming from inside. It sounded like the party had simply moved here.

In case you’re thinking that I’m exceptionally brave—don’t be fooled. I wasn’t happy about any of this. I definitely wasn’t looking forward to going smack into a house full of demons. But there are times in life when only one path is presented to you. The path may be rocky, on fire, populated by poisonous cottonmouth snakes … but it’s your path.

The door wasn’t locked, so I just went in. The foyer was empty, but the Tremone living room was packed. The air was smoky, with a light touch of cloves. I recognized most of the people from the prom. David was stretched out on a sofa, looking elegant in a consumptive, low-red-blood-cell-count kind of way.

Allison stepped through the crowd, which parted graciously to make way for her. Some people reached out to stroke her red hair, to touch her dress.

“Hi, shortie,” she said. “Snack?”

“We need to talk,” I said.

“Food first,” she said. “I have things here tonight you wouldn’t believe. Sushi that Tokyo would die for. And these smoked almonds from Seville that would make any self-respecting Spaniard eat his own arm off in envy. Try.”

She popped a smoked almond in my mouth. I almost choked on it and started coughing. She slapped my back.

“Careful, Jane. Death by tapas sounds like a good way
to go, but not on my carpet. Now, what brings you here? Did my very generous offer tempt you?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve just come to tell you that you were wrong.”

A snicker spread across the room.

“Oh, Jane,” she said. “Please don’t. Don’t try to wheedle your way through by saying I didn’t give her what she really wanted or something lame like that. My contract is airtight. You won. She lost. End of Allison. Buh-bye and thanks for playing.”

“She came back to you to save me. She made sure she lost.”

“That,” Lanalee said, “is because she’s a
loser
. Seriously, Jane, you’re bringing the room down. Have something to eat. Have you ever had baby octopus? Looks scary, but you’ve never had anything like it. Or maybe …”

She reached her arm back. Through the crowd, a cup-cake was passed, hand over hand, to her. She held it in front of me. It was red velvet, with deep red icing to boot. I turned away from it.

“Your favorite. Go on.”

“All of you,” I said, turning to the crowd. “You all came here for something, right? You were all promised things. You’re all going to follow someone who can’t give you what you want?”

Lanalee smiled slowly, but there was no contentment in it.

“They know better,” she said.

“Do they? What did you give them? Poodle Prom? Free run of Rhode Island? What, was
Lichtenstein
already taken?”

This quieted the room.

“Are you expecting all of these people to follow you from now on?” I asked. “Because you gave them some Catholic school girls from Providence? Is that the best you can do, Miss I’m a Big Scary Demon?”

“Sorry,” she said, turning her attention to some cup-cakes on the table. “Kind of bored now, Jane. You can go.”

There was some mumbling now, and some in the crowd were looking at Lanalee with some uncertainty. Lanalee herself seemed quite sure of what she had just said.

“Not just yet,” I said, “there’s one more thing.”

“Oh?” she said, licking all the frosting from a cupcake and setting it back on the tray. “What’s that?”

“I …” I pulled the knife from my pocket. “Have the steak knife of righteousness.”

“The wha …”

It was the open-toed shoes that made it so easy—that and the knife itself—and maybe the fact that in the end it’s true … the stressed person can lift a car off a child or slice through human bone. The toes came right off. I dropped to my knees and took them all, all ten, as easy as slicing a pat of butter. I was trying for the big ones, but I ended up getting them all in one solid chop.

“How are you going to lead them now?” I said.

Lanalee looked down at in shock … and then, she
began to topple. She went backward onto one of the sofas and looked down at her mangled feet. There was a lot of blood—it ran out of her feet and right into the red carpet, where it left a darkened pool.

There was a lot of screaming and profanity from Lanalee for the next few minutes. I’ve heard some good profanity in my time, but you just can’t compare to a pissed-off demon for that.

I stood in the center of the room, surrounded by demons, holding a bloody knife—and I had just cut off all of Satan’s assistant’s toes, my best friend’s toes…. I had cut off ten toes, and no matter how you broke that down, it meant that I was
in it
now.

Lanalee managed to find the will to speak. She was out of breath, almost hissing.

“You think that’s going to do it?” she asked. “You think I’ll give her back just because you mangled her?”

Well, actually, I had wondered if that would work. A tiny part of me had hoped that Lanalee would lose her balance and say, “Now it’s useless! You broke it!” and fly out of Allison’s body in a puff of smoke. But no. I was going to have to go through with the whole plan.

“So, Jarvis the Genius,” she said, her voice wobbling, “what’s your next move?”

Lanalee was running pale right up through Allison’s forehead—I could see that through the red bangs. Poor Allison. What had I done to her? Why had she ended up like this?

The other guests moved quietly to the side of the room to watch this play out. They made no move toward me, toward Lanalee or Allison. They just watched as their hostess writhed in pain and then fell heaving against the back of the sofa.

“I’m going to let her die,” she said.

“She won’t die …” I said, looking at the still-bleeding wounds. “It’s just toes.”

“Oh, she will, though. She’ll bleed to death if I don’t do anything. And I’m not going to do anything. I’m going to sit here.”

She folded her arms over her chest and set her expression, like she was
concentrating
on bleeding.

“The human body goes into shock when it loses too much blood,” she went on. “The circulatory system collapses. It doesn’t take that much to kill a human. She’ll die. I’m going to make you a murderer—unless you want to save me? Want to save me, Jane? Want to keep me alive?”

She was getting pale now, her skin turning the familiar blue-bready color.

“So what’s it going to be?” she said. “You going to call an ambulance? Let me go on? Or are you going to let Allison bleed to death?”

“You’re not Allison,” I said in a low voice.

“But this is her body. And that’s her blood ruining my gorgeous carpet. They don’t make carpets like this anymore. What a shame.”

She managed to pull her lips into a grin. David came a little closer and peered down over my shoulder.

“I kind of want to follow you,” he said. “What do you do?”

“Get something to wrap her feet in,” I said. “We need to stop the bleeding.”

“You stabbed her, Mistress.”

“Yes, I
know
I stabbed her. Now get towels or something! And don’t call me Mistress.”

David seemed to be the type who liked commands, and he ran off eagerly and returned a moment later with a pile of luxurious amber-colored towels—heavy Egyptian cotton things, big as blankets.

“Oh,” Lanalee said, her strength wavering, “what a hero. Jane to the rescue … Jane the pure.”

“Grab her foot hard,” I said, ignoring her and grabbing a towel and hugging one of Al’s poor mangled feet. “Put pressure on the wound.”

The blood came fast, filling the towel. I pressed harder.

“What are you going to do?” David asked.

“I’m thinking,” I said.

Lanalee gave me one last look of total disdain, and then her head fell back against the sofa and her eyes shut.

The group around us had watched this with curiosity up to this point. But when Lanalee passed out, they must have gotten the idea that nothing would be forthcoming to them, and they began to drift off. There was a herd mentality—when one left, another would notice and decide to leave too. In only a few minutes, Lanalee’s
friends had left her, toeless and unconscious. Only David remained.

Allison’s toes were on the carpet. They were so small now that they were detached. They reminded me of mushrooms—little gray mushrooms. With red stuff on them. I reeled and grabbed the other foot from David.

“Plastic bag,” I said, turning away. “Ice. Pick those up. Put them in the bag. Put them in the refrigerator.”

“Are you going to eat them?” he said eagerly.

Now I could see why Lanalee stored this guy in the tub. I shot him a look, and he got moving.

“Okay, Lanalee,” I said, holding fast to her feet. “No more deals. No more souls on the line. All your friends have left you. But I’m going to get you help. I’m going to save you. I’m even going to save your stupid toes.”

I grabbed both feet in one hand. The phone was on the side table, next to the sofa, so I had to stand up carefully. As I leaned over Lanalee to get the phone and was talking to the operator, she opened her eyes, looked directly at me. I felt her hand on mine.