“Answers,” Silas said. “Complete ones.”
“Who are you?” The demon’s eyes glowed red, and then it frothed out of the old woman’s body, dropping her at the bottom of the stairs like a limp rag. Swelling, growing, its shape wavering in and out from something human to a many-tentacled monster, it pressed a dozen places along the containment wall, digging in thin tentacle-tips. Sparks and smoke rose from the contacts but the wall didn’t waver.
Silas sighed and raised a hand, closing his fist. The side walls of the circle sank into the house and vanished but Darien could feel the sides and back drawing in, sliding through wood and air and pipes and furniture as they passed, shrinking around the demon. “Demon, I banish you,” Silas said, sketching a rune with his other hand. “I don’t need your name. I have you trapped, I know your flavor, and you’re too weak to stand against me. I banish you. Shall it be for a thousand and one years?” He closed his hand further, and the curve of the circle shrank, the back side now visible behind the demon in the dim of the house, coming nearer, nearer. The far edge emerged from the doorway and approached to the top of the steps as the ring of power around the demon contracted.
The demon thinned and reformed into an odd, near-human figure with grotesquely long arms, its hands planted on each side of the circle.
Silas laughed and shrank the circle again, bending those arms. The demon growled and reformed, stockier, thicker-armed, but no more successful at holding off Silas’s magic. Silas flicked his fingers through a set of runes, and the rift to the hell began opening, tendrils of smoke and acrid heat building inside the flavor of the magic in Darien’s mind.
The demon roared and slammed hard against the green glimmer of the far wall, but the shudder of that impact barely rocked Darien, and Silas stood solid and immovable. “Last chance.”
“All right.” The demon turned back to stare at them, a third red eye opening in its almost-face, and then a fourth. “Two answers, and you set me no time limit. I’ve spent hundreds of years waiting for this chance. I’ve no taste for waiting a thousand more to be free again.”
Silas said, “First question then. Pledge the truth of your answer on your name. How did you cross the barrier to our world?”
The demon grinned, sharp black teeth showing below the double row of eyes. “I don’t know. And that’s the truth, pledged by my name.”
“Describe what happened, clearly.”
“That’s not a question.”
Silas closed his hand a fraction more and the flames inside the circle brightened. “A thousand years of imprisonment.”
“All right. But it counts as your second answer. We’re always waiting, ready, should a summons open near us and offer a way out of the fire and the fighting to the world of juicy, tasty humans with their powers and their fears waiting to be consumed. I have been summoned twice before, and I know the feeling, the pull and the warp of it. This time, there was just… a space, a hole in the world that I fell into, and when I emerged, the air was cool, the sky was blue, and a tasty human was running away behind her shields. Too bad.” The demon licked its dark lips with a narrow tongue. “She locked herself up, so I drifted, tracked down another human with power, and claimed this feeble host.”
“There was no other sorcerer there when you emerged? No circle or binding?”
“Would I have settled for this crone, if there had been?” The demon kicked at the old woman’s body with a clawed foot.
“Did you pass through the Veil, on the way here?”
“Three questions,” the demon said. “I promised two. I’ll not say a word more. But.” It reformed its face into something far more human, a male face, strong-jawed and craggy-cheeked, with a narrow, patrician nose. Handsome, even.
Like an older Henry Fonda. Darien wondered if that was what the demon thought would appeal to Silas in particular, or to humans in general. He likes younger guys now; you lose.
“I could give you so many answers,” it offered. “You’re an intelligent man, a curious man with a deep knowledge of my kind. But your understanding could become deeper, far more powerful. Don’t send me back. Let me stay. You can keep me imprisoned. You have all the power. Let me stay, and for every month, nay, every week of my time on Earth, I’ll answer another question.”
Silas’s lips thinned. “Not a chance.”
“What do you have to lose?” The demon pressed now-human hands against the circle lightly, barely changing its color. “You’re far more powerful than I. I’m no threat to you. You can do what you wish with me.”
“That’s how it starts,” Silas said. “But that’s never how it ends.” He sketched another rune and the rift began to widen. “I banish you, demon. Be gone from this world, now!” He closed his fist another inch.
In the circle, demonfire rose from the gate and the pull of the rift grew. Darien saw the old lady’s skirt ripple with the sucking force of the hell, watched her gray hair tug loose from its bun and her arms lift. An instant before Silas flashed a whip of the circle’s power at the old woman’s body to kill her and prevent her suffering, Darien threw his power and Silas’s into a bubble, a shield, wrapped around Granny Abels. The whip hit his shield and merged with it. He reinforced the shield, braced hard, as the heat and the force of the demon’s hell billowed across the circle, wall to wall. The hell-heat beat against Darien’s protection, like stepping into a blast furnace. Then the hell-gate sucked back like a riptide, pulling at the demon and at Darien’s bubble.
Foul fire scorched Darien’s mind, an acid burn biting along the outside of his shield, agonizing and bitter. But he held on and held on, keeping the gold-green wall intact, until Silas clenched his fist with a shout, the demon vanished into the flames, and the spell slammed shut and burst. The absence of heat was a pain in itself. Darien fell over, and the snow against his face might’ve been fire or stone, for all he could tell.
Pip and Silas appeared in his field of view, bending over him. Pip licked at his cheek between frantic questions of, “Darien, are you all right? Are you hurt? What happened?”
Silas ran rough hands over him. Darien’s skin felt scorched and raw under his touch. “What the hell did you do?”
Darien closed his eyes and tried to hold perfectly still, as if that might stop the burning fire through every vein. “I wanted to save her.” His voice cracked.
“Just like that? Without thinking about it?” Silas rubbed Darien’s back and the gesture was so comforting Darien didn’t mention how it hurt. “Without planning or warning me or, or…”
“Yeah. Stupid.”
“Except it worked,” Jasper said, from somewhere to his left.
“It what?” The surprise was enough to strengthen Darien’s arms, and he pushed up off the ground. Silas grabbed him, supporting his shoulders, and Darien blinked hard, the front of the house coming into view.
Jasper knelt at the base of the steps, bending over something. Someone.
Silas barked, “Is that the demon? Be careful.” Easing a hand from under Darien, he sketched a rune toward Jasper. The green slid up and around Jasper and faded, without sparks, without changing.