"I don't look good?" Al wiggled his fingers at his own scrying mirror, just out of reach, and I leaned over to get it, feeling a dizzying amount of other selves trying to get through to him as I handed it over. He wasn't wearing his usual gloves, and it made him look vulnerable.
Exhaling heavily, Al put his thick-fingered, shaking hand on the mirror and it fogged up. "You say I don't look good, but you're the one in trouble."
My gaze went from his foggy mirror to my crystalline one. "But I stopped him!"
"Not that," Al said, and he let his mirror slide to the bench. Sighing, he rubbed his forehead, leaving a smear of black ash. "I've temporally blocked the collective because I can't answer that many calls at once, but pretty soon, I'm going to be entertaining. Lots and lots of irate, angry demons in my tiny little living room. It will be embarrassing. My reputation will be utterly ruined. I don't have enough chairs," he finished lightly, turning his lip in and chewing on it.
"You mean Trent?" I said, standing up and distancing myself with the excuse of gathering bits of broken furniture. "I told you already, I didn't teach him anything." But a sliver of worry had started to wiggle in me. Trent had summoned a demon. I hadn't taught him that, but they wouldn't believe me.
Al chuckled, low and long, and I stifled a shiver. "If only it was that," he said wryly. "I know you're driving to your little witches' meeting. Tell me you weren't in St. Louis yesterday."
Oh God. I'm in trouble. "The arch falling was not my fault," I babbled, the broken chair leg in my hand clattering to the floor. "It was Trent! He did it, not me!"
"Damn my dame. It was you," Al said, grimacing as if he'd eaten something sour.
"It was Trent," I said, wondering how he knew the arch had fallen, but my voice lacked conviction, and I became more worried yet when Al wouldn't look at me. Nervous, I tucked my rank hair behind an ear and fidgeted.
"I don't know what kind of spin I can put on this," Al finally said, his eyes on his dirty fingers and his shoulders slumped.
"Al?" I said, really concerned. He looked up, and I blanched at his empty expression.
"And then this afternoon," he said, reaching out to rub my hair between his fingers. I didn't pull away, and he leaned forward to sniff it. "You were in the badlands of Arizona. Yes?" he asked, looking up at me from around his sweat-soaked bangs.
I didn't feel so good, and I sat down, a hand to my middle. "This is about Ku'Sox, isn't it," I said, more of a statement than a question.
He made a sighing groan, and I knew it was. "Then you've met," he said, his thoughts clearly on the day-walking demon. "Funny, you don't look dead." His hand touched my chin, shifting it so he could see where I'd been pixed, the blisters itchy and red. "I'm surprised you survived the little designer dump. I nearly didn't. At least he doesn't know who you are yet."
I winced, and Al's hand fell away. "He knows, doesn't he," Al said flatly, and I nodded, making the connection now between Ku'Sox and the shadowy figure I'd seen fighting Al before I'd come over and found Pierce ready to finish him off. Maybe I shouldn't have banished Ku'Sox to the ever-after.
"He lived my entire life in eight heartbeats," I admitted. I tried not to whine, but I knew by Al's "So what?" rise to his eyebrows that it was there.
"Bet that was fun," he said, and I wondered if Al could do the same and hadn't, knowing it for the gross violation of self that it was. Not rape, but worse almost. "That adds something a little unexpected to the mix," he said as an afterthought.
"Sorry," I said, and Al slumped, rubbing his forehead with his stubby fingers. From behind us, the tapestry finally became quiet, and the silence was almost creepier than the weird burbling sound it had been making. Licking my lips, I stood. "What is he?" I asked. A shiver went through me, and I wondered if it was the need to feel like I wasn't alone, that I wasn't a freak. "Is he like me?" I asked, lips barely moving.
Al's eyes were glowing in the light of the fire when I turned to him, the demon seeming to be gaining strength as the flames warmed him. Still he said nothing, and after dropping the broken seat of an upholstered chair on the fire, I stood next to the weary demon, seeing him slowly regain his strength and knowing that we were really, really in trouble. "Al?" I asked again.
"He's you."
Twin feelings of fear and excitement lit through me, but the fear won. If he was me and he was bad, then everyone would think I was bad by association.
"A link between demons and witches," Al continued, nodding to acknowledge that I realized what this meant. "But not made by Trent's father. Ku'Sox Sha-Ku'Ru was our attempt to bridge the gap when we found out what the elves had done. It didn't work," he said sourly, "and we decided not to do that...anymore. He's missing something."
"Yeah, he looks a little crazy," I said dryly.
"Crazy? Perhaps. He's missing something from his soul," Al said, and my lips parted.
"That might explain him eating pixies," I said, and Al cocked his head at me, the glimmer of his usual bluster returning.
"Ku'Sox was eating pixies?"
Cold, I wrapped my arms around myself and sat down while Al built the fire higher, his chairs burning with the smell of varnish and burnt amber. I shrugged, then scratched at a little welt under my shirt. "Trent thought we were in danger." My fingers slowed, and I tucked a foot under my leg as I gazed into the fire. "The idiot called Ku'Sox to get rid of the pixies. He showed up as a bird, and when Ku'Sox started eating them"-I looked up at Al-"I hit him with a curse. It sort of got his attention."
"You're a bright girl for someone so stupid," Al said, and I frowned, affronted, as he got to his feet and unsteadily went to his bookshelf, nudging the books scattered on the floor until finding the one he wanted and retrieving it. "I told you to take that elf firmly in hand, my itchy witch." Al sighed as he sat back down, closer to the fire than before. Square reading glasses had appeared on Al's nose, and he squinted through them as he turned the pages of the book on his lap. "That new mark of his makes him immune to everything." His eyes met mine, making me shiver despite my anger. "Everything, Rachel. He's probably the only person on the planet who could free Ku'Sox Sha-Ku'Ru without getting killed in the process."
"Free him?" I asked. Al made a questioning face at me, and I figured it out. The arch falling, the power I'd shoved back into someone. Ku'Sox saying he'd been gone for two thousand years, locked in the ground. "You mean Ku'Sox was imprisoned under the arch? Trent didn't summon him, he freed him?" I said, aghast.