Childhood Demons Ch. 03

"I cannot be held like this forever," she moaned, "I will break free in time - if I am given enough. Give him to me, and I will spare you, Kari."

The statement had been intended for only Kari, but hearing it almost caused the other one to crash to the floor in stunned shock. As it was, he managed to settle down onto his clawed feet a little unsteadily and he stared openly.

"You will only spare me for a time," he nodded, "I did say that I know what you are. But I will do my best and have to hope that you can overcome your need."

He looked at one of her chains, fastened to the wall, "Stop pulling. You will pull the whole place down on us and I can't help if I am dead. You will both be stuck here and alone."

She looked down at his hand against her breast for a moment and when she looked up, he saw her confusion and her tears as well as her many sharp teeth. She had an inkling and it kept her in disbelief, so she asked what she thought that she needed to know, since... since it couldn't be what she'd... who she thought...

"Why? Why do you help me? You say you know what I am. Why would you want...?"

Kari shrugged, "Every living thing deserves a chance at a life. You are meat eaters when you are on this side of the curtain. I know this. There are birds here no different than you. There are fish here who do as you do. Many, many land creatures also. The only difference to me is that you can speak to me. Yet you are no less than they are and you are both far more lovely. You might not see it, but I don't belong here any more than you. I am far from my home and have no way or reason to go back now."

"I cannot go back," she said in several voices, her pain coming to him in ways that he could feel, "He has imprisoned me and taken my wings. Winged ones will not suffer a damaged one near to them. But for you he would have taken my tail and weakened me even more."

"Why?" he asked, "Was there a purpose that he told you?"

She nodded, "He sent for another, but I was pushed into his grasp by her. My brother saw it and rushed through to help me. That one," she pointed, "he seeks to control me by force. I am... I am to be sent out to kill men like you. If I go back as I am - with no wings anymore, I would be killed as soon as I am seen by others."

He nodded, understanding a little, "I would like to try to help there also. But first... hold still and try to trust me."

She nodded, but Kari saw the way that she felt her hunger as yet another pain, and a growing one, so he knew that he had only a little time.

He bent quickly, holding onto her shackles as he could and trying to work both a binding on one person and a release on another at the same time and he failed at it.

He turned from her and he strode right into the other circle to grasp the man by his throat, forcing the terrified fool forward. He looked at the chains and saw that they were old, corroded and weak, but he still didn't know if he could manage things. The only thing that he could see in his favor was that what held her was not by the strength of the chains and the shackles. It was that they were made out of iron and they held her by their nature and hers - though only for a time.

He also knew that they were another source of pain to her by that same nature.

So he drew the man forward against his will, knowing that the demon would do her best to reach him. Maintaining his hold, he searched the man, looking for talismans and anything which might be used as a ward against her.

"Around his neck!" she hissed, "And one around each limb. I cannot abide his touch so long as they are on him. I have little strength against him too."

Kari drew his knife and had the thongs off in seconds.

"You want to use an imprisoned creature to do your will?" He asked in Arabic, "You need to test the quality of your plan."

He smiled coldly, "Look a little closer."

He held the man in his fetter forward and left him standing there as he moved to the wall and found a bar to use as a lever. Looking over, he pointed to the other one and told him to come and pull on the chain evenly and in a moment, he had first one of her leg restraints pulled out of the stonework and then the other. With that small increase in her freedom, the demon found that by moving a little, she could grab her tormentor and pull him to her.

He stood shrieking as she began to devour his face. He thrashed and flailed, but she snapped his arms easily, tearing one of them clean off. Well, not cleanly. That arm lay on the floor and the long tendons which had until then operated his fingers hung like cables from his ruined and empty shoulder socket.

When Kari had the last of her chains worked loose from the masonry, he began to work at the hinges of the shackle closures with his mind. Before he had the first one open, he looked back at the male, who stood near him, almost quivering for several reasons. Those eyes in that dark skin were striking to Kari, but the way that they squeezed shut as the man screamed told him of something more urgent. They felt it when a human screamed in agony and it drove them.

"Go to your sister and ask if she will share. I can't get her free if I have to fight you."

Before he looked back at the task of opening the shackles, Kari saw the thin male ask and she nodded. Before he died the man who had thought to summon a demon to serve him found himself being devoured alive by two flesh-eaters.

The man was almost dead a minute later and the demonic pair sank to the floor to eat what they needed. Kari came nearer carefully, telling her that he would not take her meal from her and asking her to allow him to remove her shackles for her. She said nothing since she was gorging. She only nodded to let him see that she was listening to him.

By the time that the last of the shackles fell from her, she was feeling much better for the moment.

She didn't turn around out of a little respect for Kari, who knew what she was doing all the while. He just didn't want to watch and she knew it. In the case of the other one, he was not so fortunate, having to watch at least a little as the male knelt covered in gore and looking back thoughtfully as he gnawed.

"Where did I fail?" she asked quietly. "I have been brought here before and I never failed to convince a human then, other than one perhaps, and he needed no convincing."

"A subtlety, perhaps," Kari replied as he examined the ruined wings on the floor and then the stumps on her back. When he looked at her from behind now, she didn't look anything like Thrud in her build. She was taller than Thrud had been and she was much thinner.

He stepped over and began to remove the markings on the floor to obliterate at least a wide part of the circle which had caused much of her agony. He knew that he'd succeeded when he heard her sigh of relief. The male stopped eating and moved to hug her, glad that something was better. When he opened his eyes, he was looking at the one who had saved his sister. His voice carried some sound of quiet wonder to it as he whispered, "Kar-i?"

Kari looked over and nodded, since there was no point in denying anything from this sort of demon. One glance from them and there were no secrets to withhold.

"You couldn't know of it," Kari said to the female, "but my dead wife and I were from different groups. There were differences in the way that we spoke. I am Skolt and she was Inari. The two groups live not far apart and even so, there are little things in the ways that we both speak. The illusion which you showed to me spoke Skoltish as I never heard my wife speak it. Also, I think that I would never be able to forget the way that she smelled, for each woman's scent is different."

"I am sorry," she said, still not turning around, "I see it now. I was not trying to insult you. I was... desperate then."

"I knew that as well, "Kari replied, "and it needs no apology. That was why I mentioned it, so that I could begin without... the distraction. You have a gift to know the speech of a person in an instant, yet I think it fails a little at other times. Just something that I notice, nothing more."

He saw her nod her horned head, a little taken with the way that she looked. "A different thing to us to know the way to... attract a human closer than it is to speak only for talk. I know the speech all at once, but most of what I do lies in the acting. To speak... properly takes some... thought."

She didn't have the classical horns to her. Her larger ones were a little rearward-facing and they curled back and down to end not far from her pointed ears. In the front, she wore a smaller pair, much like what one might see on a young goat. He'd seen her kind before, a few times even, but he found that there was something about her which seemed familiar in a way, where all of the others hadn't.

She looked something like one... that he'd known as a child.

"You may not believe me," he said, "but I do like the way that you look naturally, both of you."

She turned her head to look back over her shoulder with her green eyes gleaming once more, "You joke with me."

That was one thing right there, he thought. He'd only seen yellow eyes on all of the rest. Theirs were green.

Kari shook his head, "No, I was being sincere.

I am faced with a problem here," he said, "I have the choice before me to either clean and bind the stumps of your wings or to try to bind them back onto you. If I do one, you would probably heal but not have them any longer. If I do the other, you would not be free to move much until we saw that they were mended together again and healing."

She shook her head sadly, "Then let me make it... simpler for you. They are lost to me now. I have seen others like this before they were killed. They cannot heal, so... in order to go on living, I must remain here. Feed often. There are many of us who like nothing better. I am not one of them. I can do it, but this is not how I wish... to live." She held her face in her hands and began to weep and since their kind possessed multi-layered vocal chords, the sound of it was all the more heart-rending for the way that it sounded like a choir crying softly in unison

Kari disagreed as he slowly moved around to face her a little better. "That was there, though I know that your kind only has that hunger on this side. Here, I think that all of the same rules do not apply, necessarily. Or at least - that is what I have learned." He said the rest of the thought quietly, "that is my hope."

He carefully cut a small piece of each wing near to where the damage had been done and he poured a little of his water bottle's contents over them before holding them against the ends of the stumps as he wrapped them in some battle dressings that he carried in his trouser pockets.

"The fact that you - or any one of your kind is even here alive shows me that the laws are immutable only in the place where each of us belongs," he said as he worked, "And they are different sets of laws.

By any physical law which binds me, you should not be able to breathe or walk or talk at all in this place. You should not even exist here. Yet you are here and you do those things. Let us see if I am right." He tore off a section of his shirt and carefully bound the pieces against the stumps over the wrappings. "If I fail, we will know it in only a little time and then it is still not the end.

Please, if I can ask it of you, tell me something honestly.

You both know my name," he said. "Is that only a part of the powers that you wreak to entice your meals to you? That you can play the part of a lost love and even know the hapless one's name? Or is it... something else?"

"I have this ability," she said quietly, "though I did not need it for you. I have seen you before, long ago. I was only not sure for a time. I knew your name as soon as I saw you, Kari Fornjót. I just could not help but try to get you to help me by believing that I was the one that I saw in there in your heart. The way that you held to your intent to help, even though I did not stop in my desperation told me as surely as anything that it was you.

What man would want to help one of us?"

She turned her head away fully as she began to mutter to herself. The words weren't meant for him to hear, but Kari heard them anyway and after a moment, he remembered why.

"What do you mean, 'after all of this time'?" he asked.

He watched as she pulled some of the more unsoiled of the dead man's garments to her and tore off a piece large enough to wipe her gore-covered face. She handed it to the other one and he wiped his own face with it carefully.

Her voice was distant and soft when she replied.

"We knew you once.

We were all small, us more so than you."

He stepped forward then, coming around to put his hands onto her shoulders. He gently moved her to turn away from the half-devoured ruin there in front of her. She looked up and into his pale blue eyes as her mouth opened a little and she stared because she had no choice.

"Ahnyazh?" he whispered, "Ahnyazh, is... it you?" He snapped his head around, "Felldis?"

The male almost burst into tears as he nodded and drew a little closer, sniffling.

She nodded and allowed him to gently pull her arm a little, turning it over to look for and then see the lines of some old scars on her wrist, long healed and forgotten by anyone but her - and him. They were little more than thin ridges of skin, but he knew them.

She turned her other hand to take his arm and she turned it over to see the same pale old scars on him. As they both looked, Felldis slid his arm into view and Kari saw the lines there too.

Kari looked up into their eyes then, peering for a moment and then he had the answer to something which had troubled him earlier. "Not green," he sighed and they shook their heads.

Kari saw it clearly from this close up. Her pupils were black and larger than what was normal for humans in this light. But that wasn't what he was looking at now. Outside of those pupils, he saw the yellow that was supposed to be present in all of her kind, since no natural variation was possible to them genetically unless it came from someplace or someone else. He also saw a second ring, for her kind possessed double irises and the outer one in her case - was pale blue as were her brother's.

The net effect from a distance was that their eyes looked green.

"The yellow is what we were born with," she whispered, "the blue I... we got from you. You have... a tail now?"

Kari nodded, feeling strangely at ease to make the admission to perhaps the only ones who could understand.

"Then know that we cannot do to you what we did to this one," she said, "Why would we want to?"

The male nodded, "We cannot eat others... like... us."

When he'd been a boy, Kari looked as though he'd grow large like his father, yet he tended to be sickly and his growth suffered for it. His mother knew that his weakness would probably send her son to an early grave, for life where his people lived spared only those which were hale enough to laugh at most ailments.

Between them, over many nights, the two completely dissimilar women spoke of it in their way, once they found that they could and after that, one time when Kari lay ill, held in the throes of another high fever which kept him not very far from death's door...

The two females, each so different from the other, worked together to weaken the boundary enough so that two beings could pass through - the smallest ones.

For seven nights and eight days, Kari drifted near to dying as the wind screamed outside of the door and the snow flew hard enough to feel like a lash against any unprotected skin. He lay in bed burning up with fever and just barely able to only sit up to sip the broth that his mother held to his lips.

He knew little of it at the time, other than some small glimpses as he faded in and out, but he had not been alone there in the bed. The young demons were with him, holding him when he needed holding, supplying the heat to a degree that his own body never could to kill off the viruses within him so that his already overtaxed system didn't need to, and lying beside him while they drew his sickness from him for three nights.

They stopped only when he slept deeply and rested. At those times, they crawled out of the bed on weakened legs and Kari's mother wrapped their small, sweat-soaked bodies in warm blankets before she sat the little ones down near the portal where their mother waited to heal them. When they felt better, Kari's mother offered them fresh, slightly cooked meat carved in hunks right off the bone, telling herself that she'd find a way to explain the loss of an extra head of livestock to her husband somehow when he returned.

Once Kari had turned the corner, still so terribly weak and frail, those little demons had still lain there in his bed as Ahnyazh tried to teach him a little of the things that she barely knew herself of her own tongue and how to protect himself against things for which men have no natural defense - things that came from her side of the fence now and then. Mostly, the knowledge was passed by their thoughts. As they did that, Kari's mother had boiled her thin skinning knives and with them, she'd opened up small cuts on them all, one each, though in her son's case she opened two.

The demons placed their open cuts against his and held them there for a time before they drew their arms back and all of the cuts were bandaged.

Then for a time, there were three sick young ones, burning with a different sort of fever.

The demons recovered first, not long after being handed back through the portal. Then both of the mothers had bent their hopes and wills upon the sick boy.

When he'd sat up, feeling better for the first time in so long and complaining that he was hungry, both of them wept and as Kari's mother set about feeding her son so that he could finally grow strong for what had been done, both of the females nodded, feeling pleased over their bargain as the little demons looked at Kari through the membrane.

Her question tore him out of his uncertain memories. "What do you remember of us?"

Kari focused on her eyes and nodded as his eyes stung him, warning of his own tears approaching, "I owe you my life, for you saved mine when I was so sick. It has been so long. I thought you were dead."

She nodded, trying hard to find a smile that would stay a little and not be distorted by the emotion that she felt, "The debt is repaid, Kari. You saved mine this night. Whether now or some other night, I would have died sooner or later, doing as I could to kill the one who pulled me here."

They all stood up together, still holding on in light touches, almost as though they didn't believe. Finally they just held on to each other, stopping to draw back now and then to look again.

"We watched when we could," she said in their demonic speech, "though it was not often enough for us. Most times, we just stood alone where the portal would have been if it were opened. We were never so happy as when we could see you."

"I also," he nodded, "At least we could talk to each other then, before we were parted."

Kari had gone to go to school because his father had found a way to be home much more and by then, his mother had grown to resent his presence even more than she'd resented his absence for years. No option had been given him. When he came home during the summer recess, he found that his childhood home had turned into two armed camps. Kari had his head filled with the teachings of his professors later on and gradually - since he never saw the demons again and didn't dare to mention it to his mother for fear that his tyrannical father might overhear, he was able to set them aside in his mind for a time. But he never forgot them.