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His wallet was an oubilette of paper products. Everything was old, or warn with edges that had been brushed over only when another piece of money or card was put into it. How it held all this without bulging ridiculously I didn't know. I had to work quickly though, it would only be minutes at best until he realized he'd left without it.

I stood in the darkened doorway between the front lobby and the office of my family friend's buisness. He'd told me before leaving: don't bother cleaning it up, he's dead anyway. Of course my friend was dead… so were a handful of others - carefully selected out of those who gave any kind of outcry. Did he think that just picking us off was going to stop the objections?

Demons were foolish, in ways. Arrogant, selfish, and proud things who didn't much care for the dealings of people unless it could give them a little laugh now and then. And by laugh, I mean allow them to kill something painfully.

The wallet was of yellow calfskin, durable, soft on the outside but probably magically protected not to fall to pieces. With the way that half the papers inside it were so delicate I wondered why bother protect the wallet itself, if all you're going to do is neglect to use it? It was typical and had a spot for bills, folded into two halves and each half then had a pocket for putting smaller card-shaped items. He had plastic cards, half a dozen of them, I didn't bother with them nor that side of the wallet. It was the area with the slips of paper and business cards that I searched quickly.

I pulled out the whole wad, and filtered through it without misplacing anything. I tried leaving everything as I'd found it, though there were probably some changes. It was when I reached about the last quarter of papers (all soft-edged and some quite yellowed, all the newest cards were in the front) between two reciepts and in front of a soft cardboard shred with a number written on it, that I discovered something worth stealing.

I was no thief. But after this monster did what he'd done to me just minutes before, I figured there would be hell to pay if I didn't pay him back in some small way. This item… it wasn't paper. It was a kind of semi-shiny piece of plastic, smaller than the surrounding papers by half, narrow and tall but not as tall as the whole reciept next to it. There were deep furrows in the softer material around it: this piece of plastic hadn't been removed in a very long time. It would not be missed.
It had something in it, or it was itself an object of magic. That I could tell immediately, nothing was just haphazardly placed in a demon's wallet that looked like this and wasn't magical. The whole thing was somewhat like a scientific microscope slide with a sample on it. A dimple round in the middle was the focus of my attention for a brief second: this was…

I put things back into order, checked very quickly through the money packet - he was so filthy rich he had all this money just in his pocket every day and never used it. There were reciepts stuffed between bills - he probably stole half the money anyway, coersing people into giving him 'change' from money he hadn't handed them. Why a demon was such a packrat, I couldn't guess. But perhaps that was the remnants of his human shell's personality.

I put the piece of plastic in the small bathroom nearby and shut the door, and then grabbed the cleaning supplies. Was it just plastic? Or enchanted glass? I couldn't really tell in this light, it was plastic-y in feel, but they could make anything look like anything else these days with both magic and technology. I put the wallet on the counter in the lobby for a moment while I donned a rubber glove, and took hold of the old broom. Then I walked to the front door of the small shop, shoved it open and looked around for the Mayor.

There he was, not quite frantic yet, it hadn't been more than a minute and a half, since he'd left the shop and me in it. He was a tall man, slender but not skinny, and held himself like no other man in the city. Like a peacock, head high. Everything about him was long and lean - his long face, long nose, handsome but intimidating. His hands and fingers were long, and strong enough to have held me down with ease. He had a grey-colored casual suit on, didn't look in the slightest rumpled now that he'd been wearing it.

Having spotted me because of the noise of the opening door, I leaned out just far enough to make it clear that I'd been 'cleaning', with broom handle in view and half my cleaning supplies behind me on the floor to see. "Hey, Demon, you dropped this," I yelled coldly, and threw his wallet at him in a quick underhand toss the likes of which the softball team at school might have appreciated. It landed perfectly in his hands, of course, but that was my magic - and I'd told him so just a little earlier. He stared at me while I recovered from the toss, moving my balance back and about to close the door.

"Where was this?" He asked, guarded, loud enough to be heard but not too loud to be alerting anyone who might be around. His golden colored eyes - small and sharp and angled very slightly like a fox's - squinted at me from his angle a few steps below and down in the courtyard. It was bright out, always a stark bright light from overhead but you could never see the sun if you looked for it in the sharp white sky. There were few shadows cast by people under the sky, ever, which was ironic given that the name of this town was Shadowmill. Plenty of them under awnings and trees - where they sometimes menaced.

"It was where you left it, behind the counter here, ass," I spat, and shut the door before he could reply. With luck he'd just take it and move on, even with the open insults I'd hurled in addion to the wallet. I figured correctly, that he'd know better than to think I was merely a thief in addition to everything else. I'd been cleaning, that was all… His wallet had fallen from his pants when he discarded them too-quickly: they'd fallen off the corner of the counter top, we both saw that happen. It was all logical of course.

The fact of the matter was, when he was still recovering from his pleasure that he'd inflicted on me, I was pulling clothing up and 'allowed' it to drop from the pocket. Okay, I had to encourage it to do so, but I didn't even know what I might find on doing so. And he might have seen me pick it up if I'd done that.

It was so strange, I pondered while actually cleaning up the shop's front area. He wasn't rough with me, he was actually quite delicate, strong in muscle but his body was old: he was perhaps sixty five, which was odd because his daughter was my age - seventeen - and that would have made him rather older than normal for a parent. He was not an ugly old man, either, by any length. The weight of the world might cause some wrinkling in his skin, but he still stood tall and proud afterwards. The lines on his face were dangerous, ones of sneering and sometimes of fury. But he wasn't inconsiderate - and I believed I knew why.

I wasn't all that reviled by his rape of me, in fact I used it for certain … effects. Let him think he had a hold over me, somehow. I was positive he'd raped many other women, and probably boys too given what else I knew, and did it with far less delicacy and tenderness. That might keep many of them silent and fearful. But this wasn't the case for me, I knew where he got his vitality from. The demon couldn't pull my soul from me, nor use my heart's beat to enhance his own. I was resistant to those things, and perhaps he felt that too. He had enough sway over my mind that I hadn't resisted when he came near, but that was about all he had.

While I was sweeping behind the little wooden counter, a drop of water hit me on the back of the head, and I looked down to see a smallish puddle that I'd been moving dust into. "Dammit," I muttered, cast about and found a small bucket. It wasn't a big leak, but I'd never gone on the roof of this little business area, and wasn't about to start now. I'd have to come back and dump the bucket, perhaps in a day or so. It wouldn't fill any time soon, the weather was still good even though it'd sprinkled the night before.

I was there to help my friend's business at least look like it was still open, like something was still being done here. He was a legal consultant, nothing tremendously important, he did things like help people fill out forms if they didn't understand them.

Oh, okay, I understood now what that meant to the Mayor… Atlaban wouldn't want anyone actually reading anything during his term…

After a good number of minutes, I looked out the door and noticed that even the Mayor's long convertible car was gone from the area. He drove himself, didn't bother with hiring anyone to do that for him. I relaxed a bit, and put away the cleaning supplies. Then, I went back into the bathroom. With my still-gloved hand, I picked up the 'slide' and reversed the glove over it as I took it off my hand. It wasn't dirty or wet, I just didn't much care for splinters, and Farham's old broom wasn't much for helping avoid those.

I checked myself in the darkened bathroom's mirror: I looked okay, hair was a bit mussy from having been bending over and standing up a lot. My hair was brown, a russet shade that some other girls actually complimented, it was short, I didn't much care for long hair. My face was flush and red, but that too was because I'd been stooping over and cutting off the circulation to my head. My clothes were fit for the Spring, a t-shirt and loose jeans over my fair skin, a hooded jacket with the school's emblem on it. They weren't all clean and neat like the Mayor's clothes - they were a bit wet from the water that'd dripped on me, and the jeans were ripped in the right places to show I wasn't a total slacker. A few guys - Alyx I supposed, and Barry and Dorky Dan - had told me they thought I was pretty, but I wasn't convinced, and I knew better than to think that I'd ever ply on makeup like the popular girls to make what little I had go farther. My nose was too short, my jaw was angled and came to a point at my chin. I had moles, not ugly ones, and freckles, and a couple scars like most kids had. My eyes, even in this light, looked as brightly grey-blue as the static of a television half-off a channel.

I didn't look like I'd just been forced to have sex with the demonically-driven Mayor of Shadowmill.

Good. With any luck, even if that happened again, I wouldn't ever have that haunted and distant fear in my eyes the way half the others from this little business quarter did.

Many of them had it because they'd probably watched loved ones be harmed, killed, or simply hadn't seen them come home in months. Farham was one of those: we didn't know whether he'd just wandered off (he wasn't known for that) or if he'd been killed, or abducted or what. There was never any ransom from any source when people went missing here: it was always just that they never came home. Apparently it actually was a death sentence to be abducted by the Mayor.
And I believed that he himself would do it too: he was a hands-on kind of man. Or demon, whichever. What he'd told me, at my prodding, earlier led me to believe that he really was more demon than man now. I'd heard the Demon talking, through his host - not just the man's voice. I knew that I could hear such things if they were magically protected or guarded, or even secret, but … this wasn't me overhearing something in the shadows. This was the Demon talking to me.

I wanted to feel sorry for his wife. But really, I wasn't sure whether she was a shell too, or if she was 'in on it', she might even have summoned the demon which inhabited her husband's body now. If that was the case, I thought, she probably regretted it now and then, by the looks on her face in public. She never smiled, not even once, not even when there was a simple celebration or festival going on. Her face was not a mask, it moved and showed other emotions, but she never, ever, smiled.

Their daughter on the other hand… Emily was a petulant, bitchy blonde. My now-ex-boyfriend's ex-girlfriend. She could have him back. Well, why would she want him back, she likely knew why he'd been involved with her anyway. Aside from the fact that she was pretty and sexy looking and very popular.

It was strange, I thought as I put the glove in my jacket pocket, and started walking into the darker part of the office, that the girl didn't actually have any of the bizarre quirks one might expect from growing up with a demonic father. She actually acted entirely normal for such a popular, pretty girl. She had to know that she was the daughter of a demon, surely.

She had to.

Her boyfriend's vital bits had been stolen by her father, anyway, at least their 'energy'. Which had been, of course, why they didn't quite work right with me and him together last week while my mother was out shopping…

The only way that Atlaban could have stolen those working bits would have been to be right there with them when they were in use. Yes, I was well aware of weird ritual magic like essence transferance and the like. I might not be the pretty girl, I might not be popular in school - but I was the best witch in the place, at my age, and those who knew it respected me for it. Their respect bled over into other people, and while I'd never be popular in the true sense I was also never an outcast or picked on by the bullies either. I had talents which had been seen early on, by the woman I was going to visit next.

In the back of Farham's office, in his private room which was cluttered and somewhat musty - and I realized he'd never come back to it now with a tinge of sadness - there was a trap door behind his desk. His chair sat on it, there was nothing for that but to slide it aside. However, it was a wholly clever arrangement of pullies and a slender nearly-invisible thread which would allow me to pull it right back on its wheels over the door once I'd gotten down into the tunnel below.

The wooden door was not easy to open, it never was, but it came up for me, and I made sure that everything else in the shop was okay with a glance before ducking down behind the desk once more. Once my feet impacted the hardened dirt below, I pulled the door shut, and then tugged on the strings to the sound of the creaky chair moving back into place where it looked like nothing out of the ordinary. Even the seams of the trap door would probably be hard to see, the grain of the wood around it lent to that camouflage.

It was completely dark in the tunnel, as always, but I knew my way around. It was smaller to me now, but I was still growing up. The first time I'd been here was a decade before, and everything was so big - I couldn't reach the sides of the tunnel with my arms outstretched. Now, my extended elbows would brush the walls here and there. I was a fair bit taller than Emily, I wondered where her father's height had gone: she got his pale hair, and his golden colored eyes. Her mother's dark hair and pale skin were hardly present at all, but I suppose that was where she got her frame from. Why I cared, not sure. Girls always compared themselves to each other though - I would be taller and stronger, she would always be lovely and well-rounded.

Shadowmill's population had slowly dropped, three or four reported major incidents a year, but everyone knew (well, I knew) that there were more like twenty or thirty people missing every month or so. Whole families went missing, and within a week or so, no one cared. No one was new, no one settled here now. Shadowmill was dying, from the inside out. Perhaps within another ten years, there would be no one living here, at all. Sure, there was a 'thriving' population of middle-class Americans here. Enough to have a high school and middle school and three churches and a hospital. But the place was small, even for a town that was old and well-established. Unlike nearby cities, there was no public transportation - no need for it. The communities where I grew up had slowly been abandoned, tract housing that in the Fifties perhaps were packed with families and children and dogs. Now, if you could find five streets in a row that actually had people living on them, you were lucky.

There was the Hill, where the Mayor and his family, and many other of the more upper-class families resided. My own home was hardly rich, but not quite poor, and we were among the last on our block to remain.

I wasn't at all sure whether any of the neighbors we used to have had moved or just … vanished.

But when I had asked, one day almost half a decade before, where people had gone, I got no reply. Either no one knew, or were too frightened to ask. We had daily shipments to the market, and Maman's store and others got arrivals from other places for their goods, it wasn't like the town was isolated exactly, but … No one stuck around very long, even as they had to visit for their deliveries.

Maman had told me once, that there used to be one or two or so regular delivery men that she and others would greet as they passed through getting their items into shops. But now, if it was the same delivery person every week she was surprised. Perhaps they were just normal that way - things moved at a more rapid pace outside of Shadowmill.

Or maybe they didn't, I didn't know. I had never been outside Shadowmill except for one school trip as a child, even before I met Maman. It was a big city, we went to their city hall and museums. I wondered now, where it had been, because I didn't have a clear memory of the name of that place.

"Maman, do you think this could show me a place that I can't recall clearly?" I asked, startling her out of her silence. She wiped away tears, straightened up.

"Perhaps it can, look through it, close one eye." She suggested, I obeyed.

I thought about that big marble staircase, I remember it because even if you slid down on it, it didn't hurt because it was so smooth and cool to the touch. I put the Lens up to my right eye, closed my left, and with a strange blink that felt like it wasn't my eye blinking, I saw the place.

It was busy today, people's feet shuffled around and there was a briefcase next to one woman's high-heeled expensive shoes. I couldn't hear anything, of course, but I looked closely. It was today, there was a kiosk nearby selling newspapers and I could easily move my perspective up to see the dates. When had the last newspaper been delivered to Shadowmill?

Didn't we have one of our own? The town was Greensboro, which itself wasn't a huge place, but it was a far cry bigger than Shadowmill. It was in another State, I knew that. I put the Lens down, and cleared my vision blinking hard and rubbing my eye a bit.

"Well that works," I said, trying hard to see here-and-now instead of far away. "And it makes me wonder… what I need to do next."

"I think you might start learning a little more patience," Maman chuckled.

"Patience is the last thing we need, Maman," I said, "we've been patient for a decade while a Demon took over our town and has been murdering people left and right."

That drew her back into the chair again, but this time with a scowl of introspection on her round, lumpy face.

"Maman, I need a plan," I said. "I need… I don't even know. Let me speak to you a bit, just let me talk, and tell me what you think when I'm done, okay?"

She nodded, mutely. She'd taken me in as a student of sorts, when I blurted out something that was magically true - but impossible to know without being gifted somehow, as a young child. So when I spoke, most often, Maman would listen and not interrupt anyway. But the things I had to say would probably disturb her greatly.

"He touched me but I was not afraid," I said, "and I knew where he'd gotten the vitality to take me from. I asked him why ne needed a fine, tight ass if he were interested in women, and he didn't want to hear it. But Alyx's … well, his failure with me made me worry what was going on anyway…" I spoke quickly, trying to sort my memories and words. What did I recall, versus what did I merely think?

"He took me but he kissed me, first," I continued, "I didn't understand that at first, but it wasn't a cold kiss, Maman, it was warm, and delicate and he was good at it." Maman looked away, looked down, fiddled with the frayed edges on a knit scarf. "And he let me undress, I know he was making me do it, but I was not afraid - and I still am not afraid of it. He treated me like… well, he did put my hands down to the counter, and I warned him that I had a pen in my hand that I didn't need my arm to throw at him. I told him my magic could spear his eye out if I wanted it to."

I drew a breath, remembering. His touch was firm, it was confident, but it was gentle at the same time. He didn't merely force himself into me, and he didn't merely take my body. He stared at me the whole time, and, I said to Maman, I stared right back. I wasn't angry, really, with him for doing so. It was a ritual like everything else in Shadowmill. But I wondered whether he thought he completed his ritual, and whether he understood that he hadn't stolen my virginity this way? If he'd merely wanted to harm me, he could have done so at any time, and far more brutally than he did an hour before. He'd cornered me while I was fixing the grout on the window of Farham's shop door, he'd come alone, knowing I was also alone here - his family and everyone else that mattered were all gathering at the High School football field. He knew he had time.

If he had time, he could have had anything he wanted from me, if he had merely taken it. I admitted, with a bit of a knot in my throat, that I enjoyed it enough that it wouldn't really bother me to do it again with him.

Maman's lips came together, she chewed her lower lip in silence, waiting for me to continue. "I know it's probably some of his own coersion magic, telling me that, but it did not stop me from performing my own ritual," I felt for the still-slightly-warm vials in my jacket pocket. I held one up, the look of distaste on Maman's face told me more than I needed.

She was not angry with me, she was disgusted that someone had attacked me. It could have been anyone else, though, that would make her worry for my safety. But it wasn't any one else. It was the demon, Atlaban, I knew that was his actual name and not the man's name now.

Only I'd ever called him that, too. And, to my knowledge, only I had ever called him 'demon' to his face - and lived. I spoke still in a hushed arrangement of hardly punctuated words, one of the books nearby had come to life of its own accord and Maman was actually recording them now. She was a great artificer, greater than she played herself up to be. She knew immediately what the Lens could do - she wanted me to find out what I could learn from it, myself, instead of merely telling me.

Maybe she would pore over the words that were left in magically dark imprints on the pages. I'd rarely seen her looking over something to research it, though - it was like everything she ever needed to know, she already had at her beck and call.

I wanted that, but I also … kept talking. Maybe I went into too much detail about the sex. Perhaps hearing it from the lips of a seventeen year old, perhaps hearing it as a woman who'd had three children grow and die during her long life, perhaps Maman had been raped before, and it wasn't like this. But it wasn't all I was talking about either. I was going back into my childhood trying vainly to remember things that had faded so much.

Faded like the bright sky, faded like the gold leaf on Farham's door sign, faded like the town itself had faded from memory outside itself.

There were so many old families here. But where were they now? They had no grandchildren in schools - none of the old families continued with fresh blood. I commented that that worried me, Maman nodded slowly. Were other cities infested with demons? Probably - life with magic like we had was always a bit dangerous, a bit topsy-turvy. There were places, I knew because I'd enjoyed my History and Social Sciences classes enough this year, that allowed no magic. And indeed, places which were filled almost entirely with mages and witches, and probably demons.

"I have to find out more about the Demon," I said finally, "I have to know how to defeat it."

"If it can be defeated," Maman sighed, "doing that is… something too hard for most of us even when we were young and healthy…"

"And I'm almost alone," I said, echoing her sigh with my own. "But … he's in a weaker spot than he thinks he is," I held up the vial of his seed again. It was shiny, almost like a gel frozen in ice. But that was my magic: it wouldn't move until I wanted it to move.

The only thing that I could have gotten which would yeild better results than this, would have been his blood. And I didn't really think trying to scratch him even in passion would have been a good idea. Enough to draw blood? That'd have gotten me killed for sure, I contented myself to know that I had the taste of his tongue and the seed from his loins with me.

And with those, I could find out a lot of things.

I needed privacy, security, and time.

I only had one of those - a good place that was secluded since it was in a part of town which no one went. I'd have to get wards from Maman and her friends, they would have to somehow make sure that I wasn't disturbed. I just didn't know about the third: whether I had a week or a year or tomorrow.

I don't know what the rush was about, but I suspected it had to do with my sudden reawakening. Like a heavy haze blown away by winds, I realized that we the good people of Shadowmill were being sucked of our lives, one by one, slowly but surely.

And most of us didn't even think twice about it. Maman cautioning me to exercise patience had actually snapped me into action. I knew that there would only be a slow, aching death for all of us here, unless I did something.

I was sure that he could be killed, or removed from his host. But by this time, the other shocking thing about the Mayor - I had asked and he'd told me, the Demon's voice spoke, that he'd been inhabiting that body for almost twenty years, nineteen at least.

Two years longer than his daughter had been alive. Thus, my surprise that Emily was so very… normal. She seemed it anyway. Spoiled by money, perhaps not by attention. I needed to know more about her too, and probably her mother. But Maman could provide that information for me - she was always puttering about with the books, people expected it of her. If it involved real, everyday things like marriage licences and city records, she had easy access to such things. Unlike her magical tomes and research, she did have to filter through page after page, book after book for those things. I had asked her to do so, before leaving for my own private walk in the dead town's outer neighborhoods.

I hardly slept, that night. It was hard, in general, for me to sleep when something magical had really been done around me - and yesterday was just all manner of 'magical'. Okay, anyone else and that would have read "I can't sleep because the Mayor wanted to hurt me", but thankfully, I wasn't anyone else.

Today would be busy. Tomorrow was a school day, but at least today… I could pack in as much as I could. I didn't mention to my mother that Farham had been killed, of course. She would have ticked her tongue and tried to keep me in the house or something similar, doing busy work and cleaning an already-spotless house.

I told her on my way out, that I'd pick up some groceries. What I didn't add was that I would be simply walking out of the store with them. And true to form: I did so, Phil didn't notice, he was just sitting there, and I … packed my own groceries.
I did get a couple odd looks from people, but they didn't challenge me. In a way, I felt faintly thankful for the Demon's interference with the way things were. People would have been spastic, they'd have frantically tried to escape - or worse and far more likely, they would have picked up their ages-old pitchforks and torches and burnt the Demon out of our town.

I wondered now more than ever, with a burning anticipation, where Atlaban was from and when he came to our town. Twenty years ago he'd inhabited the body of a forty-year old man, whose name I learned had been Leonard Voskowsky, eighteen years ago he'd impregnated Leonard's wife and shortly began bringing up a spoiled little girl. A little over ten years ago, he came to Shadowmill. Ten years ago, almost to the day, he was sworn in as our mayor.

I paced around the shop, Maman and her two 'grumpy old men' - two more of the old family lines which had died out before now - were busy chasing down records and putting important items in a pile for me to look at. They did this not because I'd begged them to, but because all three knew, they simply knew, that I'd be the one to put this information together and make it valuable.

"There are three others I want to bring here," I commented, while putting a paperweight on the corner of a city map. The map was badly out of date - the school's field hadn't even been put in, and that would complicate this. "And I need a newer map, or - maybe just make this one newer…"

One of the old men, Whitcliff (I don't know if even he remembered his first name, he was positively ancient, where Maman was merely 'elderly') the half-bent little man with the Scottish accent muttered something and the map moved around of its own accord. The lines changed, formed essentially what I'd seen from the Lens the night before: a much better view of the town as it existed right this moment.

"Thank you sir," I said, and he muttered more and limped off to complete his other tasks. Maman on the other hand was still trying to get her mind around what I'd said just before.

"Who are they, then?" She asked, since it was clear she'd have to be the one to find them. I described their appearances, and approximate locations.

"I'm sorry I didn't look for their names, I was actually not even sure how I was seeing them in particular. But I'm pretty sure they'll want to help."

She gathered her wits, chastised the men to continue their work and listen to me if I said something (casting a glance at her self-writing book, she nodded at it with a silent spell and I knew it would come to life if I did start talking weird), and exited the shop.

Everyone would be in church, any by everyone I meant 'everyone left'. I had the other Old Man, Jerald, looking up the Demon's appearances, those which he could locate among these limited tomes anyway. If he'd been slightly more resistant to the idea he'd have been stomping up to the pulpit himself - he was a preacher in another life, apparently. But now, demons ruled our town and he couldn't exactly start talking about brimstone and hellfire. So the best he could do was break out the magic and try to combat it at its source.

It struck some folks as odd, that magic and religion like that could be mixed or even cooperative. But it had been that way for … hundreds if not thousands of years. Culturally of course, it depended on whether there was a more religious, or more magical, person in charge. The States had gone through many fluctuations over time. I'd noted in a short paper that I did (and got an A for) in my History class just a few weeks back, that during times of peace it was often the Religious side that was in charge, and pursuit of 'witchery' went on the rise. While in times of war - oddly enough - there was most often a Mage in charge: not coorelating to being at war, but in times of it. Magic was of far more use than mute religion, during war times.

And this, apparently, was almost universal around the world. I'd wanted to study it a little more. I might yet get the chance.

It struck me - like a ton of bricks in fact - that even though I'd been loving my History class and all… I didn't even know who the President was right now.

That made me so angry I almost broke the pencil I held. I blurted out in fits and starts, how this had to end, how I would definitely be the one to end it, and how we all needed a good slap on the cheek to wake us the hell up from this stupor.
That was right about the time Maman and the others came to the door, looking a bit surprised and somewhat intimidated.

I laughed, "sorry, sorry…" I said, "come in, I wish I knew your names already!"

"I thought you would," said the young boy. It was clear that Maman had taken a shine to him, he was not going to be as strong as even me, but it was clear he wanted what she could teach him. The girl and I looked at one another evenly and smiled gently. The other was a young man a bit older than us, still in his twenties, who it turned out was one of the last families to actually settle in the town before it started dying off. He'd been born elsewhere, and arrived perhaps fifteen years ago.

While the two Old Men kept up their digging through books and charts, the rest of us explained who we were, why we were here.

Maman refreshed the protective spells on her shop, because this kind of talk was really, really dangerous. It occurred to her just as it had to me: we were it. And if we were cornered, what exactly could we do?

Well, it turned out that Gregg, the young man, was a fire-caster. It was no irony that his last name was Phoenix, this was magic that had been in his family for generations on end. He peered at us, with a mischief filled gleam in his dark blue eyes, and said, "I've even heard that it was my family that stole fire from the gods - how's that for a family history?"

Though it was obviously a story and nothing more, it was something that made all of us smile, and feel stronger. The boy, Corey Herald, had a less-forgiving family. However, Maman was easily able to overcome their mistrust of some complete stranger coming to their house to (in their words) steal their young. He'd brought a backpack with his own slightly-stolen books, none of which came from this shop. He wanted to help and wanted to be older - he wanted to be big enough to really do magic.

"You'll get your chance," I promised him. "This will keep us all on our toes, but you'll be able to swing a spell with the best of us when you're older, Corey."

Gabriella Danz rounded out our newcomers, and she, as I had seen her doing, was a specialist in protective and warding spells. That was good, because she also had a strong natural ability to break them. The way that I could see demons and affect motion, she saw the lines of force between things, able to distinguish dimly glowing wards and detmine their uses long before I could even say I saw them.

That left Maman, who as I'd said was an artificer of some renoun, her enchantments upon items were easily stronger than those found in some museums. Information was also a forte for her, she had a sharp memory even though any other woman her age would have trouble remembering last week's news. Plus, she had those knitting needles.

If anyone thought they were merely for knitting I'd say they were absolutely insane. Her fingers were gnarled, true, but between her enchantments and my aim? They would surely be deadly weapons.

Whitcliff was a numbers man: he'd made a fortune at gambling and during the War he broke and created codes using magic some of which were never decoded by the enemy. He truly was an unsung hero, I thought. Well now, he was able to find records and bring up correlations in dates and statistics. He had a time line that was updating itself while the others and I were talking. It slowly grew on the tacked-up board.

Jerald Pfaff… there was a man who lived up to every inch of his name. When Maman introduced him to me, it was after the Demon had begun his takeover of Shadowmill - and Jerald had to be continually reminded not to go preaching on the streetcorners lest people arrest him or have him thrown in a nut house. He was that kind of committed, that kind of crazy. But he was also right. He was probably the only person in the room whose convictions of faith and magic were strong enough to embue a symbol like a Cross with an actual effect detrimental to a demon.

Maman, always far more practical than anyone else around her, brought us drinks and had made sandwiches from the food that I'd swiped from the store - putting the rest in the fridge and scolding me for just leaving it all out on the counter upstairs.

"Well if ye'd told me that I would'a done it by now!" Whitcliff must have just learned of the demon seed I had. I bit my lip, and heard him stomping into the room. His presence, bent and withered, still scathed me. If he could see out of the bushy grey hair growing wild from his eyebrows and beard, I would be surprised.

His own thin, liver-spotted hand slightly trembled as he put it over my shoulder, palm up.

I let out a little breath. Staring at nothing, I said, "it's not safe here, and I'm planning on doing it myself, sir."

His hand stayed there a moment longer, and probably would have balled up into a fist. But instead, he turned it over and gripped my shoulder with his bony fingers. "At's a gel," he hissed.

Jerald promptly erupted with, "you'd kill yourself with a summoning anyway, Whit! Girl's got to do it because y'er too old!"

They went back and forth like a pair of hens, or more accurately like an old married couple. Whether they were more than friends I didn't really care, but they certainly acted like it at times. I'd never realized how funny it was, until that moment - they each would get their little digs in, at the most appropriate time. They weren't serious all the time. Plus, I think even they realized the seriousness of the situation would get to us all pretty quickly if we let it.

I suspected that they had both been vetrans in World War 2, or some kind of real action war time, because of that. Humor always made things a little more bearable for them then - and this… was war.

A tiny, isolated little war.

Turned out to be far simpler than I expected it to be: after her short, curt and blandly enlightening discussion with the Senior class about "how to raise funds with a limited audience", she headed directly to the restroom, where I was already standing.

There was no one else there, and I made sure the door stayed shut so no one could come in on us. I waited patiently, pretending to put on makeup. I didn't even own makeup. She flushed and stepped out of the stall, delicately started washing her hands in the tepid water.

"Your husband raped me last week, I thought you should know that," I said, staring at her in the mirror. Her plaster-pale face froze, even more so than it had been before. During her whole speech, though she had a good speaking voice and could probably rouse a cheer if she tried, still she never smiled. Still. Not even when her daughter introduced her to the smallish audience to a strong applause. A lot of girls were in the audience, I noticed. I would have to collect data about that too. I dragged my mind back to watching the woman next to me.

Hannah made no sound more than the halfhearted splashing of her wet fingers against the towel dispenser. But her eyes, cold and dark, now showed white around the iris. Normally even in photographs you'd never see that much of her eyes. She was spooked indeed. Good. I made sure she knew that I wasn't joking, adding, "I know what he is, I know his name, and I know that this town is dying because of him. And if it turns out that it's also because of you, you're going to have to meet the same fate as he does, do you understand that, Mrs. Voskowsky?"

With that, she turned and her eyes were even wider. "Are you threatening us?"

"I am," I said, darkly. "But in the interests of being fair to you and your daughter, I want to ask you one or two things - and I expect you to be honest with me about it."

"If I start screaming right now," she started but I cut her off with a motion. My magic - she could easily see it because she looked over my shoulder at the door - flared up and if she was smart at all, she knew what it meant. Not even sound was coming in or out of the bathroom now.

"If you start screaming now, you may give me good reason to threaten you." I spoke in a low voice, "Twenty years ago, explain what your role was, in bringing Atlaban to this world."

She froze, trembled at the sound of his name, and drew in her arms close to her body. Her hands balled up into fists, and she shrunk her neck down, shamefully. She turned away. Her hair was dark, but glossy and fine. She wore a pleasant business woman's skirted suit, simple dark sharply heeled shoes. She and her husband were so very different from their daughter.

"It isn't that easy," she whispered.

"I suspect not," I replied, more softly. "But I'd still like an answer. I need to know - did you expect to merely gain power? Or …"

"I expected to summon a demon, any demon, that could give me … money, power, yes." She was being honest, her voice flat. This was a long time in coming, I thought, she needed to say these things. She hadn't met my eyes again yet. "It … did not go as I planned, but it wasn't… it didn't go bad until later."

"Oh, I think you know that's full of shit," I muttered. She winced, it was the truth, she was just denying it herself. "Demons aren't lightly summoned. This one, I've done a bit of research. Did you do the same?"

Hannah steadied herself on the nearby sink, suddenly trembling almost bodily. "I was young," she said, "I was young and stupidly tried for something I didn't have the power to keep down."

"So you've gone along for the ride, never trying to stop him?" I had a knot in my throat, but I wasn't going to allow that to stop me from this course. "Any time you could have, you know."

Again she looked away, her lip trembled. "Never, child, there was never a time I could. And now he's grown too strong, too strong for anyone, especially a child like yourself-"

"That's not for you to decide, really," I said. "So… you did intend to summon a demon, if not Atlaban specifically, on purpose. Did you use yourself as bait, or was it Leonard?" She again winced, hearing the name. I pushed that angle. "What of your husband? Is he even in there at all any more?"

When the tears started streaming down her porcelain face, I instinctively reached for the towels and started patting at her cheeks. I don't even know why.

Yes, yes I did know why, half a moment later, "not for years, not for years… I'm so sorry," she sobbed. It was the last decade of icy chill coming out of her, she might have cried a glacier. "It was my fault, I'm so sorry…"

"And your daughter?" I said, "Emily is… well, such a blonde," I tried to break her stream of tears, and to a small extent succeeded. "I had thought that since the demon was summoned and then you had her, that it might be … a bit different. But if it took a long while for the demon to get ahold of him fully, I'm going to leave her out of it as much as I can. Unless you tell me otherwise. I can't look at her and think 'she's the child of a demon', honestly."

"She's innocent," Hannah said, and blubbered a bit before adding, "she knows now, but she's never been a bad girl, she doesn't even know magic, at all. No talent for it at all."

"I have other questions, Hannah, but … I think I would prefer you to volunteer the answers instead of me forcing them from you. If you see me again later, I'm going to want to speak honestly with you again."

She mutely nodded, tried pulling in a deep breath and failed, shuddering with another sob.

"I'm going to have to make you forget - or if you know how to do that to yourself, I'd like you to do that, if you would."

"What - oh, oh?" She stammered. I knelt down, and fished around by her foot. I tugged on her foot, putting her off balance and she exclaimed, "what are you doing!"

"I'm going to take your shoe," I said, and banged it against the hard floor grating until the heel broke off. "And I'm going to give you a good replacement memory for this last ten minutes. Your shoe heel broke and you fell down in here, and you've been trying to get your act together before leaving the school and getting another pair of shoes."

I forced that memory on her, my free hand working a subtle, tiny little mark in the air near her temple. She took the shoe, bit her lip, and asked, "you won't blame me if I don't remember you in a good way, will you?"
"I can't hope that you think kindly of me, after all I'm the girl your daughter's boyfriend took up with, right?"

With that, she almost started the spell of forgetfulness, but instead leaned up toward me and whispered, "I am sorry for what he did. I can't control him, any more. If I ever could. He's still hiding bodies, I don't know where, and I know he - he takes girls like you as often as he used to - to - I … I do love him, the body that still belongs to my husband. Please… be kind to him." She then let the incantation flow gently from her wet lips, and suddenly I was in the bathroom asking if she needed any help with that shoe and some more paper towels to clean up her makeup.

I looked at the sky, which was blue and spotted with delicate clouds. On thinking a bit, I went to the library. It would only be open for another couple hours, at most, so I had to make the most of it. I asked at the counter, mostly honestly, "I'm going to be eighteen in a couple months, and I'm going to need to register to vote - but I don't know a darn thing about the candidates. Do you think you could help me find anything on them? Locally and federally?"

To which the middle aged woman behind the counter smiled broadly and displayed half-clean teeth. She did help: she helped me establish that the current President was being challenged by an apparently "young" mage by the name of Piers Hoarfrost, and she was surprised I hadn't heard about him. "Oh he's a handsome man, and quite a mage!"

It turned out he was - and why I hadn't heard of him could have been because we hadn't really had television in a while. The back of my throat crawled with fear, with a mixture of anguish and anger. How much had been stifled in the last ten years? And even if I went back, what if I failed? What if …

The woman at the counter continued to rattle off state legislation, and I asked suddenly, "do you know anything about the mayoral elections in smaller towns? Are they just as … I don't know, corrupt as some big cities are?"

"Well, corrupt I don't know," she replied. "I'm sure that politics are politics just about everywhere, though dear. Sometimes, well I shouldn't say this to a fresh young girl who's actually looking forward to voting… But sometimes all you can do is 'vote for the lesser of two evils!'" She laughed at that, but it was true.

Only this time we didn't have a lesser evil. I wasn't sure how I could get records from here, that applied to my home: it was in another State. I'd have to go back across the border, head north. I didn't really feel like doing that. But I gazed at the computers lining one wall of the library's 'interactive' section. "Can I use a computer? I need to get information but I'm not even from here, I'm from north, Shadowmill."

The name didn't seem to ring any bells for her, but she waddled over to the computer and assisted me. "Now, it's got parental fiddlies that won't let you view those naughty places."

"Oh, don't worry, I'm not looking for anything like that. Thanks." I sat down and started typing. The internet came up, the idea of using magenet competed in my mind, but I didn't have access to it without a lot of hassles. In fact: I'd entirely forgotten it too. That there was a magical version of almost everything out there - healing, logistics, computers, information. The information would be the same, but finding it would depend on the person doing the search. A good information mage might wave her hand and have a tumbling scroll of changing text show what she wanted. A nice tech-savvy person could search anything online and find it - the magenet was a little more complicated, and I didn't use it enough. Maybe soon. Soon I would be able to.

I got only a few dozen hits on the town of Shadowmill, it wasn't even on the map. But it did have a list of school activities, someone had a web page for it. Eventually I found the City Hall site, it hadn't been updated for over two years. I figured out how to print this information out, and did so, collecting a small stack of single-sided papers with what little I could gather. There were records of 'elections' but no good solid evidence that there had even been anyone running against Voskowsky.

Tangentally, I ran his name, and got two solid hits: someone had scanned in the wedding photos from what, forty-odd years before, of Leonard and Hannah; and something vague about his early political career - which was more Hannah's doing than I'd thought, but that was again more than twenty years ago.

I didn't resist running 'Hannah Voskowsky'. She herself was almost fifteen years younger than her husband, but wasn't a gold digger nor anything more than complimentary to him. Those wedding photos showed a vibrant woman, smiling broadly, and her tall, athletically slender new husband whose hair was almost as yellow-gold as his daughter's was now.

I didn't discount that she might have lied to me, but I really didn't get that feeling about it all. She'd made a mistake, and I would put money on that same mistake having been made by someone else in the past, bringing Atlaban to them and not realizing what they'd done until it was too late.

I found essentially nothing when I ran a search for the Demon himself. There were a few texts that had been scanned in, Greek and Latin and I thought the third was in Korean but the computer lacked the capability to display that text - and even if it had, it was Korean, and I was pretty far from international that way.

And then I saw a clip sitting there waiting on the main search page: news about this Hoarfrost guy. Clicking on it, I saw a picture (he was a hottie, wow, I thought, and on a weird level, he and Voskowsky might have been cousins with the way they stood proudly and alert like that), and decided that some day I'd like to meet him. The article made it absolutely certain: in the process of his campaign he'd done something that now I really had to be thankful for the shield of magic over our little town.

He'd saved millions of children, magically breaking a horrifying spell that had been placed on them, by appearing on TV and having them encant with him. Now that was clever. On one hand, though, this curse that had been put on the kids might have reached Shadowmill, had the shield not been there. Again: two sides to every coin, every curse might have its … well, not every curse… I continued reading about it, what a horrible thing to do to children: forcing them to an oath that would kill them should they perform any magic! I hoped I didn't sound like a complete idiot when I blurted out my disgust about it - it'd been two weeks before now. Apparently though, not every town had been affected, and though it was a technicality that the existing President was running 'against' Hoarfrost, no one in their right mind would vote for him. He'd been manipulated by outside influences - admitting so in every interview.

It fleetingly crossed my mind to actually try and ask for help from Hoarfrost. Any mage that strong, and that … pure, someone who would literally have given his life for those kids he saved! But he hadn't been out of bed for a week, exhausted and damaged from the effort. So once more, on my own, but now bolstered by the facts, I collected my papers, and thanked the woman at the counter. I had ideas competing for space in my brain, and could hardly wait to get back on the road tomorrow so I could tell everyone.

I found a reasonably cheap hotel at the edge of town, paid with cash for the night. There were tourists sunburnt and snoozing in the afternoon shade sitting around their heated pool.
With the pall of forgetfulness no longer driving my brain into a corner, I gazed at the slowly setting sun. Compared to the magical overwhelming burn, I could almost stare at it forever. The sky turned colors I hadn't seen in almost my whole life.

A sunset.

As night fell, stars coming out and blinking friendly and alive, I wept and went hurriedly into my small room. I spoke quietly into my tape player, worried that people nearby would hear me. Realizing I had every option open to me now, I let a spell off that prevented sounds from wandering in or out, and went with my normal rapid noisesome pace.

I took a long, hot shower - the humidity stuck to the walls and the mirror, but it felt so good because it felt like water clean of Shadowmill's taint. With wet hair and the knowledge that sleeping that way always stuck me with a bad hair day, I flopped down on the wide springy bed.

Before I slept, though, I took the Lens out once more and sent my vision home. It was actually quite difficult to get in, much more so than the wavery but somewhat translucent glow around the Mayor's mansion, it was thick like hard candy. It had the same feel to it as the mansion's shield. But here, I could slip along with the view until I hit a small rift between the layers of spell, and then had to find another, slowly taking the view in like an ant would find its way through a maze. I hoped that I wasn't noticed, doing so. But then, my point of view was tiny, and having tried it out with the others earlier in the week, I knew that even talented mages with strong Vision didn't see or detect anything while being spied upon in this manner.

My town at night was simply black. There had been another local-on-local football game, so the stadium was letting out and lit. But like atrophied nerves, the only lights that were on outside of that were those few stringy bits leading to the still-living communities. I wanted to put names to all the empty homes. I wanted there to be records of everyone's deaths - just to prove that they'd been alive once.

I'd put Whit on that, when I got back, I thought. If he hadn't thought of it himself, really.

Thankfully, everyone in my little clique was alive and well. Corey was eating silently with his parents, as they gave him another lecture on those nasty magic words he kept whispering when he thought they couldn't hear him. I sent a little prayer his way - we were really going to have to pull him out of there, before they did the Demon's work for him.

Gabriella and Gregg - oooh! Let's not spy on them too long, shall we?

The Old Men bickered over dinner, Maman knitted. I swept down toward the Hill, eye now used to the effects enough that I could open my left eye and simulate a better view. Emily was partying again, but it was with a distressing burn in my stomach that I noticed one of her friends wandering outside and up into the mansion. I knew I couldn't track her there - and I knew what I'd find anyway. She was in a trance, and whether she would remember it was anyone's guess.

I wondered why a demon had something like this Lens at all - but thought harder: it was of use to humans, or demons whose power was limited here. So, perhaps it had gone to waste after these years, been forgotten with the packratted reciepts and worn business cards of people who had been murdered for the sake of keeping Atlaban alive and vital. He didn't need it now, that was certain. I had use for it, I'd keep it, maybe even thank him for it when next we met.

I put the Lens down, and stared with afterimages dancing over the garbled white lumps on the ceiling. Some day, soon perhaps, after this was done, would I have the … the urge? The desire? The will power to remove the memories I had of Atlaban's touch? As it was, I couldn't find it in me to be even repulsed by it: his touch was thousands of years of expertise. I wished that I could speak with Hannah again, about what she'd done to even find out about that demon. I guessed, again likely correctly since she hadn't really answered me about it, that she hadn't summoned him specifically - merely a demon who could help her attain power.

That's the one thing that I knew from any reading: when dealing with demons and their 'gifts', be specific.

You couldn't pick and choose from a list of unknown demonic entities, if you had only a vauge request. Whatever demon felt like it would come to your aid - if they wanted to. If you dangled a cookie or carrot or spread your legs or piled a bit of gold up, you might change the likelyhood of one or another coming to you. But unless you knew the name of the demon, and what it wanted in exchange? You were completely at their whim.

Hannah had been at the whim of a demon who didn't tell her what he'd wanted. Possibly ever, now that I thought about it. She wasn't precisely like an abused spouse: she knew perfectly well that she had brought this on herself. But she had also brought it on other people, and that was why I still held out a bit of contempt for her. Her arrogance but also her ignorance - she summoned some demon to her side. I was guessing that it wasn't cookies and carrots that she dangled for Atlaban.

And I thought about her husband Leonard. Could he even be alive in there? I really doubted it, after this much time and how badly his body had been abused. If the demon had to steal teenager's parts on the outside - what could be going on inside? Certainly over three thousand people had already given their lifeblood to keeping that man's body alive. The stress on it would probably kill him regardless of how we took out the demon.

It was weird, I knew death. I knew it simply because it'd been happening around me in Shadowmill for an entire generation, and it was unavoidable. But I'd never seen it. Not even once: there was hardly a snapped rat trap in the place, and as I'd observed weeks before, no larger animals or birds really. Had they also paid for the demon's avarice for life? Possibly, though I rather thought he preferred human spirits instead. The animals might just have had the good sense in their tiny little walnut-sized brains to get out while they still could.

The overwhelming sense of apathy had long gone from me, but out here, in a city filled with real life and sounds and people… I'd never wanted something so much in my life, than to live.
I gently cried, touching myself: I never wanted something so much than to be touched by Atlaban again.

I didn't actually locate my mother's body, in the house, anywhere. So whatever he was doing with them, it had to be strongly magical in nature, and there was probably a gigantic pile of bodies cluttering up the town. We just - thankfully - couldn't see them.

Or smell them.

It took me half an hour to rise from my position on the coffee table, the chill air from outside was finally what did it. The moment I stood up, I almost collapsed from the exhaustion and lack of food, my head buzzed. Literally, I could hardly hear from the memory of rasping breath and screaming. And the pounding blood. So much blood. I looked around, limply: that was mine there, that too, oh - wait, that stain's actually his. I shut the door, not even noticing whether there were people to watch me naked and battered as I collected my wits.

First things first, I found food and guzzled what was left of the milk down standing in the frigid kitchen. After a moment I felt a bit better - after another, I was vomiting into the sink and holding back mindless screaming.

It wasn't that I regretted - at all - what had just happened or that I was emotionally breaking down. It was that I seriously was injured, internally. There were only so many ways one body should bend, and I was positive that I'd been stuck into a dozen more. I might have had a broken rib, or two. The inside of my thighs were simply plastered with a mix of blood and come - both his and mine, and I wasn't sure whether I cared much about separating them out.

I did have the sense in my head to delicately dig out the now-dried blood from under my nails, putting the results into a small ziplock baggie and knowing that would come in far more handy than anything I could gather from the rest of my body. Too much mingled, and I'd never even bothered to think about blocking it this time.

That left me with a weird, sickening sensation. But it wasn't going to stop me from at least trying to clean up a bit. I stood in the shower until the water ran cold, too weak to really scrub, and too bruised to want to. The last thing I would do, however, was sleep here tonight. There was nothing left here for me, I didn't know whether I'd even return later.

It was after nine in the evening that I did finally walk back into the safe house where my friends waited on pins and needles for me. They saw my look, how tired I was, and how obviously injured I was, and left me standing with my hand up holding the baggie.

"I got some blood off him, we're going to need it."

I passed out, blissfully hitting the carpeted floor and not the corner of the table.

It was Gabriella that I woke to, sitting next to me gently muttering spells. She'd been speaking in very quiet tones for a long while, probably, her voice was hoarse. She was healing me, I felt tremendously better - but still so hungry. She took my hand and smiled broadly, interrupting herself when she saw I was awake.

"We were so worried," she said. "It's been days, Valeria," she glanced at the door, and whistled for attention from the others. Had they all been staying here? This wasn't the house we wanted to do the rituals in, but I hoped they had the sense - if I'd been out cold that long - to be doing their own work and not just fretting over me.

Maman would have scolded me had I said anything about it being more practical to get more done and not worry.

She might have had the chance, but I didn't mention it, I assumed it. "Did you get the candles and sand set up?" I asked, and Maman herself nodded. She was clearly overjoyed to see me, when she came into the bedroom. But she didn't dare hug me, not unless I could demonstrate that I was healed.

I urged myself into a seated position, and grunted something about food. Maman hurried into the kitchen to oblige me, and Gabriella had tears in her eyes.

"Valeria, you were so hurt," she whispered.

"Yeah, I know," I said, simply. I didn't add, and it was worth every moment, that would have really ruined the moment. I did however say a moment later, "you've healed me right up, thank you." She bit her lips together, nodded, and had to rush from the room - I hoped it wasn't because I was being a complete and total cold bitch.

When Maman brought a tray with eggs and toast, she sat down and closed the door behind her, looking at me as I ravenously forked the food into my mouth.

"You cooperated with him," she said, and I didn't bother pausing while I nodded. "That was extremely dangerous, Valeria."

I swallowed, took in a breath, and said, "I know. I didn't even see his car outside but it had to have been there. I should have been more careful. But he'd been there to kill my mother anyway, there was nothing I could do. I don't know if he'd been there all day, or what."

"You shouldn't have allowed him to do those things," Maman said. Her face bore a frown that said she'd spied on me, at least a little. "He would kill you just as soon as-"

"No, he wouldn't actually," I countered, finishing off the first piece of jam and toast and heading for the next. "He wants me alive, Maman, he still thinks he can twist me to his needs."

"And those weren't his needs?" She said, a little louder than necessary.

I put the fork down, and looked at her levelly. I knew that my neck had huge bruises left on it still, and that my shoulders had long finger-scrapes - other wounds had been more or less healed, I could feel that. "Not all of them, no. I will admit it to you, Maman, I wanted to be there, with him. I know that's some of his power, but it wasn't all his. I still needed to get more from him - and I did."

"And I won't fault you all day for that," Maman said, a bit chilly. "But you should not be proud of yourself for acting like that with him. He's a demon, Valeria. A demon."

I remembered the hot feeling of his tongue on my nipple, and I said, "I know." I returned to eating, and Maman left me to it. I hoped she would forgive me, when this was all over.

As I finished the food, drank juice and milk both, and hoped there was coffee in the kitchen too, I did steel myself to the group knowing that I was - what, how could it be said best? That I was a willing participant in my own rape? That I thrilled to it? They didn't need to know that, they could think it all they wanted.

But I also knew that their opinion of me would be tainted, perhaps strongly and perhaps permanently, by it. If not by them thinking I had met Atlaban halfway - by not being a complete wreck and a victim afterwards.

I didn't feel like a victim, except for the parts that were still a bit tender. Sure: he used me. But then, I used him. And only one of us would be alive come the end of this week. It couldn't be longer, it wouldn't be.

I stood unsteadily and dragged a robe over myself, picked up the food tray and fumbled with the doorknob. I staggered into the hall, hearing at least Gabriella and Maman suddenly hush themselves.

My hearing was shot, I hoped it would eventually come back. I put the tray into the sink, and flopped down ungracefully onto the couch. Someone else's couch. A dead family's couch.

"By the new moon, in ten days or so," I said, wearily, "this will be over. Over."

Both women stared at me, somewhat startled, but in agreement.

"I can't give you a rousing chorus of why I believe it, but I do, and I'm just so damn sick of it all that I want it over now. The sooner we can all put this behind us," I looked at Maman whose expression was a tad guilt-tinged, and at Gabriella who seemed to suffer the victim roll so I didn't have to, "now, I need about three more courses of breakfast, and I need to know that the guys are okay."

They obliged me quickly, and realized that all of our roles were more solidified than they had been before. I had to do this, and they had to follow me.

I knew that because I couldn't imagine any of them - the Old Men who were warriors of old and in their day would have been strapping men, but now they were hardly enough to sustain the demon for more than a moment; Corey … He would just break; only Gregg might withstand the burning of Atlaban's eyes upon him, and I could scarcely stop myself from imagining him doing so. Gabriella might be forced to dance and twist for a moment but she wasn't sturdy - her wards and protective spells were her sole defense, and if he'd gotten past those, she would be absolutely bare. Maman would put up a fight. She might even damage him.

But she'd fall.

And I had not fallen. I was weary, but far more confident in my own means, than even Maman could have been. I knew my enemy, I knew every inch of him, and I felt his taint inside me. It lingered there. It might even be his revenge, some day.

For now, all he had was the glimmering thought that he'd put me in my place. I would always have that advantage over him. Perhaps he didn't realize how much I knew about being a mage? Likely because he'd had all the magic-oriented classes and aid stripped from the schools. More likely, because he knew that only a small handful of old-family mages were all that was left of a once-thriving community, and finding one another could be more difficult than merely evading his eye.

I dressed after eating more, and we summoned the magic car to us. They didn't think I was in good enough shape to walk and I agreed fully.

"It's… Tuesday?" I asked, and Gabriella nodded. "Okay. By Friday, I will have the tracking spells placed on him. I need to research those, if the materials are ready."

"They're prepared, and we have the rest stored as well," Maman said. She was hesitating, and finally said, "I'm just so glad you're still with us, Valeria."

I gazed at her from the back seat, smiled weakly, and said, "I am too, Maman, I am too."