EIGHTEEN AND UP CONTENT WARNING: THIS STORY CONTAINS MATURE THEMES SUCH AS SEX, FETISHISM AND STRONG LANGAUGE
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When Demons Dream
By Jenny Iroh
One
Oh my fucking shit.
I must have screamed, or yelled, or moaned or something because Wiki was already in my room.
“What’s wrong, Nat?” she asked. “Ew, never mind, you have dream residue all over this place.”
Dream residue. Sure. She’d call it that. I was more inclined to call it a dick-kick straight to the heart.
Phelps leaned on the door frame, his tall and magically-delicious body silhouetted by the pale light from the hall.
“Are you OK?” he asked.
“I had a dream,” I said. “It was pretty rough.”
“So, you good?” Wiki asked.
“I’m good,” I replied.
It was a lie, but she didn’t catch it. Wiki was a 14-year-old Einstein, who also hosted a shadow person. She could know what shadows knew, and we learned she could manipulate people’s emotions through their shadows. The kid was hard to lie to.
Some days it was harder to tell which aspect of the kid was more terrifying: A hormonal teenager with a driving permit, or limited-omniscient living nightmare.
Phelps walked in and sat at the edge of the bed. My face felt hot, tight, and my eyes were itchy. My chest ached, and I couldn’t meet Phelps’ eyes.
“Old people, I am going back to bed, I have pumpkins to sell tomorrow,” Wiki announced. “I trust you to behave yourselves. Do not disappoint me”
I laughed. She really was the most ridiculous kid on the planet. I loved her more than anything. Her garden club was having a fall fundraiser. At Christmas they’d sell poinsettias, but in October they sold pumpkins and donated the money to the local teen center.
Wiki left the room, pausing in the hall to yell over her shoulder, “The door stays open.”
Phelps leaned over, kissed my forehead, then opened the covers and slid in beside me. I rolled over so my back was to him, and he pulled me close, spooning me from behind. I was a pretty tall girl, but Phelps was a Sasquatch – a member of the Goliath tribe, descended from angels and all. So he was really, really tall. My head tucked under his chin and he wrapped his arms around me.
Hot tears trickled down my face, and each place he touched me burned.
In shame.
“It was bad?” he whispered.
I nodded.
He knew I didn’t dream, demons as a species can’t. Since I’m one quarter demon, I’ve had a few nightmares in my life, all of which left me unsettled and paranoid. But this one left me utterly shattered.
So shattered that I didn’t turn around to breathe in the divine creature that held me.
Didn’t cop a feel on his delicious abdominals. Or try to get his pajama bottoms off. Phelps in his underpants was a thing of might and beauty.
I didn’t even try to initiate a make-out session. Things had been getting hotter and heavier between us, and things were harder and harder to stop lately.
Which was fine with me, but Phelps was maintaining his celibacy-until-marriage thing. We had no wedding plans, so I kind of got an evil pleasure from tormenting the shit out of him. I mean, he’s the one choosing to not put out, and while I respect that, I want him to know what he’s holding out on.
Evil?
Why yes. But hey, I’m a demi-demon.
Also we were not-really-but-actually-yes engaged. I felt like premarital nooky was appropriate.
Phelps proposed to me during the Daytona Interspecies Battle last summer in a sort of callous and shit-baggy way, and I turned it down.
But I also didn’t really turn it down, because I moved in with him, co-parented his kid with him, kissed him good morning in the kitchen, stole cuddles, and worked on giving him the biggest set of blue balls on the planet, when not fiercely chaperoned by the 14-year-old wunderkind.
For flying fuck’s sake, I gave up eating meat, mostly, for this guy. I didn’t consider bacon to be meat, so I snuck bacon whenever I was in town. And burgers. Burgers aren’t made of meat, they’re made of deliciousness. But the rest of the time I gave up meat for Phelps.
Give up meat for a man and that’s pretty much married. How much more committed can you get?
We were locked into this life, I just had to say the words and we’d be at City Hall signing a marriage license in the morning, and destroying a bed at the Hilton Express by noon.
Phelps was maintaining his vow of chastity until then.
I thought that was a dick move.
Literally, no pun there.
This was my life now. I read books, I did some volunteer work, I cooked dinner, and I gave the kiddo driving lessons. How damn perfect is that?
We had a picket fence and a pet fae.
OK, so Carly wasn’t a pet, sort of like a piranha in a fishbowl isn’t a pet, but she was in this house and I fed her. I felt like that met the basic standards of pet ownership. She was some sort of lost unseelie princess, but she was also my best frenemy. I often hoped if I fed her enough she’d get a fat ass, but no. She remained fucking perfect.
Phelps and I were really right together. Things worked. He calmed my chaos and I shook his perfection up. Just a little. Just the right amount.
He was important to me. And every day he became a little more important. Every minute I fell a little harder for this life. I was pretty sure I’d fallen for Phelps, too, not just a life with him. I was pretty sure love crept up when I wasn’t looking, but his hesitancy messed with my head, and my head is a scary fucking place.
How could I be sure about him if he wasn’t sure about me?
After losing everything in my life, I needed to know I was loved in return.
When he knew he loved me, I’d drop everything and put a ring on it.
Rephrase: When he told me he loved me, I’d ruin him for other women.
Phelps sighed and kissed the back of my neck. I shivered and cried harder.
“It’s OK, Natalie,” he said. “Let it go, it was just a dream. It can’t hurt you.”
My chest was hitching at this point, trying to hold it in.
He was so damn good. Phelps was the closest to perfect I’d ever find on this world. He was comforting me with everything he was. And he had no idea how bad it really was.
“It’s not real,” Phelps said.
But it was.
It was real.
It did hurt.
Tonight I dreamed of blood, and death, and Xavier.
Tonight everything Xavier ever said came back and overlapped in my head, like a bunch of recordings all playing at once. All of the times Xavier told me we’d always known each other, every time he hit on me, or said something strange and inappropriate, which was all the damn time, clicked into place.
I remembered.
No… I fucking remembered everything.
Tonight I remembered that I always dreamed of blood, and death, and Xavier.
Phelps continued to whisper soothing things to me while I flashed through a lifetime of new-old memories and hated myself.
I loved him. I loved him without reason, without reservation, without doubt. I loved him enough to take on hell. I remember tonight that I have loved him through all of time. I remembered that I always would.
Not Phelps.
Xavier.
I cried, and sank back into Phelps’ warm arms, guilt eating me like a tapeworm. I drifted back to sleep, all kinds of fucked up over this, because I couldn’t tell anymore.
I couldn’t tell which man I was actually betraying.
Two
Her eyes flashed green as the crash scene shifted to a moonlit beach. The bloody footprints gently shushed away against the lapping ocean.
Natalie shimmered into something that was half prom dress and half stripper outfit. The back of it was cut so low Xavier could see the top of her ass; the front of it lunged down in a sharp V to her belly button. He stared at her navel.
“Did you get a belly ring?” Xavier asked
“I’m 18 and dad couldn’t say no,” she grinned. “But it closes up completely every time I take it out to clean it.”
Xavier touched the little sunburst charm.
“Demons heal fast,” he said. “The same thing happened when you pierced your ears, remember, babe?”
Her long brown hair was twisted into an up-do, with little wispy pieces artfully framing her face. Emeralds hung on her ears and at her neck. Her makeup was heavy and flawless.
“Don’t call me babe,” she said, putting her arms on his shoulders and pulling him close. “I hate it.”
Xavier’s shorts and t-shirt melted into a suit. He had an orange blossom tucked in the boutonniere. He smiled.
“OK, Natalie,” he said. His hands settled on her hips.
They slow danced to some otherworld music as the sun set, eyes for no one else
Three
Where the actual fuck was he?
Xavier was told to go and find the demon. He wasn’t told where or why. But there wasn’t a demon here, hell, there wasn’t even a here. He was nowhere, when 10 minutes earlier he’d been about to score a Mormon.
Xavier was a casting agent for porn in Sacramento, California, and he lured desperate actors-and-actresses-to-be to the studio. It was the most fun he had since those Ponzi scams a few years earlier. Now that had garnered him a lot of human soul-damage.
“It’s just once, you have to get your name out there, it’s the business,” he’d say to his potential porno victims when he handed his card over. “And it’s easy money.”
Desperate, alone, often broke, and afraid, young men and women would take the bait, make the choice.
The guilt and shame threw them into downward spirals, and Xavier lapped up those little bits of soul they gave away.
Xavier had 50 human years to exploit souls on Upperworld North America. It was supposed to be a sort of educational vacation, and now he had to stop everything to go hunt down some asshole’s lost spawn.
Who the hell loses a spawn?
On Earth?
And where the fuck was he?
A Muscovy duck passed by Xavier with a seemingly endless line of fuzzy yellow babies. There was a pond with a grassy ring around it, right next to a street.
That was it. That was the space. A pond, a street, some grass, and the rest was a black canvas. He was nowhere, trapped in some sort of psychic void.
A void with a duck pond.
This was not better than auditioning guilty kids for porn.
Xavier reached out with his senses to find the demon, and was instantly irritated. There was no demon.
He left casting Poondogs from Outer Space for this. Xavier had booked a 19-year-old Mormon to audition for the part of Poondog 1. Just walking in the studio would wound the kid’s soul like a javelin. It was going to be magic.
But instead, he was here.
There was absolutely no hint of another demon here.
Tiny sobs echoed in his head, and he saw a little creature in the middle of the road.
Huh.
The void changed.
He approached the thing. It appeared to be a human spawn.
“Ew,” he said.
Xavier was not a fan of the squishy little creatures humans made. They were like larvae; you could probably eat one if you had to survive, but it would be disgusting.
Also, children’s souls couldn’t be leached out, so they had no value to him.
The child had skinny, scraped-up knees and long lopsided pigtails. She had been sobbing for quite a while, judging by her blotchy face, and disgusting nose.
“They’re dead,” the child said. “It all keeps getting dead, and then it does it again.”
‘You are kidding me, sire,’ Xavier thought. ‘This is a human spawn. What the hell does it need me here for?’
He didn’t sense any acknowledgement from his sire. Stranger and stranger.
The child screamed, and everything went into slow motion. Her slanted brown eyes flashed pupil-less green. Green lightning crashed into the water and pixilated everything.
The scene was reset. The child was clean. She was standing.
She was a demon.
“Can you make it stop?” she asked pitifully.
She was a demon that wasn’t a demon.
“Who are you?” Xavier asked.
“Natalie Ann Gray,” Natalie said. “It’s going to get dead.”
The latter was whispered with dread.
Xavier glared at the child, and then his eyes rose to where she pointed.
The mother duck, and her endless line of babies, started to cross the two-lane street. As the mother duck crossed the second lane, a car whizzed by, and clipped the duck. Natalie wailed as duck blood spattered against her face. The car drove through Natalie’s small body, as if she were the ghost of Christmas past.
The duck jumped and twitched in the road as the flock of babies peeped, and surrounded their spasming, but dead, momma.
“No. No. No. Noooooo,” Natalie cried.
Xavier was not interested in the ducks. This human child was a demon, or at least part demon, but a dormant demon. This was not Upperworld. Where the hell was this?
Natalie sat on the ground as the chicks, attracted to the warm nest of feathers, burrowed around their momma’s carcass. Some of the babies nested on her twitching body.
Natalie hugged her knees and rocked back and forth, as two headlights lit up the dark. She keened as another car came over the hill, heading directly for the pile of babies nestling in the dead momma duck.
“Stop that,” Xavier said. “Kid, that noise is terrible, you have to stop.”
Natalie was so shocked that she did stop. And the car stopped. And the baby ducks stopped.
“My name is Natalie Ann Gray, and you’re a stranger,” she said belligerently. “So I’m not talking to you!”
“My name is Xavier, and I’m like,” he floundered. How the hell did you communicate with human spawn? He lifted thoughts from her, looking for ties that she considered trustworthy. This thing was obviously part human, part demon. So was he. “I’m like your… cousin?”
“Zavy-er?” she said nodding.
“Xavier.”
“Oh, OK, Zavy-er” Natalie said. She walked over, put her hand in his and smiled up at him. He resisted the urge to pull his hand away and wipe it on his trousers.
Her eyes flashed green, and the hair on the back of his neck stood up.
The duck pond was gone, replaced by a large field with a swing set.
“Zavy-er, will you swing me with me?”
Four
Natalie had just moved into the mother-in-law apartment on Daytona’s beachside. She didn’t have much in the way of furniture, but she was so damn proud of herself.
She’d done the human things – gone to college, graduated, got a great job, and then moved out of her parents' house. This tiny dump on the beach side was close to work and her family, and she loved it.
Tonight she cried herself to sleep. Again.
She had almost everything going for her in life, but her relationships just crashed and burned.
He didn’t care. He really didn’t. She was an assignment, and if she ever broke free of her humanity, he’d take her home. Until then, he didn’t give a flying ball of bat-shit that she gave every asshole that came along everything she had.
Of course he didn’t care. Demons don’t care.
But tonight she hurt, and if he’d learned anything about her, it was that when she hurt badly, she sometimes dreamed. When she dreamed, she called him, and it was his job to respond.
Xavier peeled open the covers and slid in behind her, his movements like a whisper, so as not to wake her.
He grinned, imagining how pissed she’d be if she knew he was here. She was magic when she was pissed.
But the grin faded. If she knew she was here, she wouldn’t be pissed, she’d be scared out of her fucking mind. Xavier was a daytime stranger.
Fuck it.
Natalie probably wouldn’t dream tonight, she didn’t most nights.
But just in case.
He spooned around her, and gently draped his top arm over her. He could smell the tears and the vodka.
Xavier propped up on the other arm and watched her sleep, her breath hitching occasionally with a belated sob.
He rubbed his lips against her hair, and felt the rush of oceans and oranges.
She wouldn’t dream.
Getting dumped wasn’t a big enough trauma.
She wouldn’t dream.
But he’d stay here tonight.
Again. Just in case.
Five
“Can’t it just be simple, Xavier?” Natalie asked. Her eyes flashed.
They were off the beach on the side of a highway.
Her eyes flashed green again, and she was in jeans and a T-shirt. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail. The prom dress was gone. The belly jewelry, hidden. She was wringing her hands and hyperventilating as she tried to get herself out of the dream loop.
Her eyes flashed and she was in the dress again on the side of the highway. She was missing a shoe, and her perfect up-do was bedraggled and plastered to her face. Wet metal gleamed in the ambulance's strobe lights.
She was getting pulled back into her dream loop. She couldn’t stop it.
“I don’t want to see that fucking car accident again,” Natalie said, voice breaking. “It was our prom.”
She was in his arms crying on his shoulder.
“Xavier, help me. I need you. Please. Can you just keep it simple, for me? Can’t you do that?”
“Babe,” he said, still in the prom suit.
“Don’t call me babe,” she said. “I don’t want to see it again.”
Her voice broke and she cried.
“And again. And again,” she looked up at him, her eyes brimming with tears. “I can’t make this stop. I tried and can’t. I need you.”
He dropped his head down, and kissed her.
The worlds stopped.
Six
Natalie’s alarm startled her.
She left her eyes closed for another moment. The neighbors must have had a fire in their backyard, she could still smell a little whisky and woodsmoke in the air.
Natalie stretched her arms up and grinned.
Gene Fielding, her boss at Royal Insurance, gave her a new assignment about six months ago. She was working with Detective Jim Martin from the Bureau of Human Statistics. The detective’s ass was nice.
Maybe today would be the day she’d ask him to get a drink after work one day. Or maybe, since he worked night shift she’d offer breakfast. In bed.
Natalie grinned and imagined the detective in his underpants and then got dressed. She had a big batch of in-house DNA tests coming in from an audit, and she’d be busy this afternoon.
She jumped out of bed and hummed a little song as she grabbed a skirt and blouse from the closet.
Natalie made the bed, barely noticing the second indentation.
Today was going to be a great day.
Seven
Xavier was at a blackjack table in Vegas, helping the dealer coax this month’s rent out of a man who couldn’t afford it. His cuffs were rolled up, and his tie was loosened.
“One more hand,” Xavier said.
“I can’t, Karen said I couldn’t do this anymore,” the other man said.
Xavier smiled. These humans made it too easy.
Corrupting souls, taking energy, it wasn’t all pagan sacrifice and tax evasion. Corruption was like rust, or cancer, you just needed a little bit to start, and it grew.
“Why is it always about what she wants, Jack? You’re not hurting anyone. You do everything she wants, and just need to blow off a little steam. You deserve it. And really, how can you go home until you win your losses back?” Xavier said.
Jack nodded emphatically.
“One more hand. Lady Luck has to smile on each of us eventually,” Jack said. “Deal me in.”
Xavier closed his eyes to hide the small flash of green. A little more power in his bank. A little more cancer on Jack’s soul.
“Xavier!”
Xavier jumped. It was her. The child.
She was calling him.
“I have to go,” Xavier said. “Take my chips and play them for me. We can work it out another day.”
He put on his aviator sunglasses as his eyes burst again. Jack would take that giant pile of chips and burn through it. The guilt and shame would advance Jack’s downward spiral and all of that soul-cancer would fuel Xavier.
Xavier walked through the lobby and mid-step, he disappeared.
He instantly reappeared in the child’s dream loop.
The child was larger this time. It wasn’t the tiny larvae that chattered random banalities to him on a swing set.
It must have been in the pupa stage, by now. It, she, was almost to his chin.
Human progression was strange candy. It seemed just a short time ago she was a slobbering little larvae. More time must have passed than he thought.
This version of Natalie had bangs, and lots of black eyeliner. She wore all black with fake silver jewelry and dark blue lipstick.
Her eyes were bleeding.
“Xavier!” Natalie yelled and threw herself against him. “Help me! I need you!”
“I can’t make it stop,” she cried.
Natalie closed her eyes, getting red eye-blood all over his white shirt, as Xavier dispassionately watched her dreamscape.
Herds of humans her size were eating at a large building – she shuddered and he grabbed the thought from her mind – a school cafeteria. Someone screamed. The screams turned into a harmony as the children were mowed down, and the bullets that were rapid fired into the crowd turned into a drum beat.
She watched it on the internet. It wasn’t her school. It didn’t matter, her brain festered in the horror.
“Stop.” Xavier said.
The dreamscape stopped. She looked up and smiled.
“I knew you could save me,” Natalie said.
“Now what? We just stand here?” he asked, irritated. “I was in the middle of something.”
A thought flashed in her head, and he could pick it up as easily as he could read his own thoughts.
Natalie smiled, and she may have been a middle-school punk, and she may have too much gunk on her face, but it still was absolutely something pure and good.
He couldn’t help himself. He smiled back.
Damn. He meant to not do that. She’d trapped him with that shit last time.
“Can you read my brain?” she asked.
He nodded.
“I can mostly read yours too.”
That was pretty fucking unexpected.
“Can I see your other you?” Natalie asked. “I saw it in your thoughts, and I want to see it. Then we can go ride go-karts? I always wanted to do that. Amy Kim went go-karting for her birthday, and she got to pick two friends, and she picked Alix and Jael. So I’m going to go go-karting tonight, and I pick you. I mean, we’re here, we might as well!”
Xavier was a demon. A pretty badass one, if he said so himself. He had full demon strength, but being half human made him able to access the Upperworld surface at any time. His job was to fuck up lives, stir the shit pot, and steal souls, and he loved his job.
He was not expecting this little pile of mascara and angst to leave him utterly dumbstruck.
Without words, he phased into his demon. He rolled his neck as 200 pounds of mass piled on, and he exhaled sweet relief as his vision cleared. It always felt good to be back in his skin.
He stood before the Natalie-pupa at his full eight feet. His body was green, scaled, sculpted like a pagan god’s, and his head was crocodilian. Xavier unfolded his wings. They touched the sides of her dreamscape. He towered over the landscape, and blocked out her pretend sun. Xavier was a breathing nightmare.
Natalie’s eyes flashed green and she froze in place. Power pulsed through her and the veins on her pale arms throbbed green through her skin. The dreamscape surged green and pixalated into demon vision.
This was it. The child would phase today.
She was being called by his demon form.
The demon in her would become dominant.
He could then take the child Underworld, dump it with Lilitu, and get on with the business of fucking around.
But she didn’t phase.
She exhaled and patted his scaly arm like he was a puppy.
“That’s nice, and I like it” she said. “But you won’t fit in the go-kart, so be a person again. Also, I think I don’t look like that in my other me.”
“What the fuck is a go-kart?” Xavier asked. He obeyed and transformed into a human.
“Aw man, it’s the most fun ever,” she said. “At least it will be the most fun ever. I’ve never really done it before”
She took his hand, and he saw the echo of the tiny child taking his hand. “It’s going to be the most fun because I picked you.”
“What do you mean you won’t look like me?” he aside as he begrudgingly closed his hand around hers.
“My other me is just me,” she said. “I wish I was like you, it feels like I have something glorious like that in me, but I’m just plain.”
She sagged for a minute and looked lost. Then her eyes flashed green and a Go-Karts-R-Us formed around them. Whatever momentary funk she’d been in was gone.
“After I kick your ass you have to buy ice cream. Because I don’t have a job,” Natalie said.
“You are weird, kid. I mean that.” Xavier muttered.
“Don’t call me kid!” she yelled. “Hey, can I tell you something?”
Xavier nodded. “You can tell me anything,” he said.
Something panged through his guts when he said it. It felt like what the humans called Norovirus, and he wasn’t sure if he was going to vomit or shit.
Since he didn’t do either it of those things, it would certainly be novel.
He told her the truth. He made an oath. Natalie could tell him anything.
And fuck if that little larvae didn’t do just that.
“I farted in pre-algebra yesterday and I have to move now,” she whispered.
“Like I said, kid, you are weird as shit,” Xavier said.
“Don’t call me kid,” she said. Natalie peeked up at him through her bangs, and asked, “Will you stay? For go-karts?”
“Sure kid.” Xavier said. “I’ll stay.
Eight
Xavier was lying next to her, listening to her breathe when she called for him. He was in her dream before his name was out of her dreamscape mouth.
The dreamscape was black. He couldn’t see through it. There was no spark of light.
He flipped over to demon-vision, and couldn’t have seen Natalie if she was doing the hokey-pokey two feet in front of him.
“Babe?”
“I’m here,” she said from somewhere in the middle.
Fuck.
She answered to babe. Something stunk.
“I can’t see you,” he said.
“I know,” she said.
This was weird, even for Natalie. Blood, chaos, guilt, horror. Those triggered the dreamscapes. She’d get trapped in her own loop, and call for help.
That’s how the demon queen discovered the girl. The psychic calls for help radiated demon wavelengths.
Xavier was her lifeline out of the gore.
He’d kept track of her human life, and these pockets of terror were the only place she exhibited any demon qualities. It was unfortunate. Should she have the ability to change, to be everything she was meant to be, she would be the most spectacular animal on either side of the Upperworld Gate.
If Natalie changed, she’d be a day-walking demon. His equal.
His.
She’d called for him.
There was no blood here, no violence. She wasn’t weeping, or begging for it to stop.
She also wasn’t dragging him off to some candy-assed human fantasy date.
It was a void with no repeating loop. Just a void, filled with nothing.
“Natalie?” he said, taking careful steps forward.
The tip of his shoe touched something. He squatted down and felt for her. He patted her head and face and sat on the ground.
“Hey, what’s going on?” he said.
The black pooled in closer.
“There’s something really wrong with me,” she said. Her voice was dull, and lifeless.
“Babe, there isn’t anything wrong with you,” Xavier said.
It lightened the smallest bit. He could make out her outline. Xavier scooped Natalie into his lap and cuddled her to his chest.
Fucking shit, she was trapped in the nightmare of her own self-loathing, her own defeat, her own failure. She was alone and she was her nightmare in the dark.
“Babe, that’s stupid. You are the most perfect creature on this wretched planet,” he said.
It lightened a little more.
“Then why don’t they stay?” Natalie asked quietly. “Why can’t anyone love me?”
His heart beat against her cheek so hard he was afraid he’d leave a bruise on her. The fucker who broke her heart this time was about to discover his love of cocaine and hookers. When Xavier was done getting Natalie out of her nightmare, that human’s ass was grass.
“Fuck them, babe, I stay,” he said. “I always stay.”
The space around them lightened to a morning sky. Natalie looked up, meeting his eyes.
“I know. Xavier, I need you. I always need you to always stay. Swear it to me,” she begged. “Swear to me that you’ll always stay.”
Xavier closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. Not hesitating. Resigning to the truth.
Oaths were unbreakable to demons. So they didn’t make them.
He opened his eyes, moved her back on his lap, and gently placed his hands on either side of her face, fingers winding in her hair. Xavier put his face right in front of hers.
“Natalie Ann Gray, I will stay, always. There is no place on any world you can go that I will not find you, and I will always, always stay. I will stay through all of time, and when the worlds end, and we’re all lost in the vast void of nothing, I will be there.”
Their breaths were held, their eyes flashed green, and locked. She was freed from her personal hell of being alone.
They exhaled together.
“Will you love me?” she whispered as her lips touched his.
Nine
“It’s a human child, sire,” Xavier said. “I believe it is spawned, but it’s just a human.”
“You witnessed it try to change,” Liliu replied.
Liltu’s crayon-red hair fell to her ass, and her skin glowed under the twin red moons. She was motionless, her eyes glowing soft red. Xavier at eight feet was dwarfed by the queen of demons.
They stood on the tallest cliff of her manor, and watched the moons illuminate the endless, craggy scape of the Underworld. Everything in sight was Lilitu’s domain. She inhaled deeply, not needing to breathe, but finding dry interest in the humanlike motion she’d found in his mind.
Xavier relaxed and watched a small pale demon scamper across the landscape, chased by two larger demons. It was not pleasant to have Lilitu sift through his every thought, but it was a constant. He was her favored spawn, and she found it entertaining to feel his flawed human interactions.
Every moment with the child was extracted and reflected upon.
“You enjoy this spawn,” Lilitu she murmured.
He did not react.
“Watch over it,” she said. “Watch the human child. When it shows power, come to me. If it changes, bring it home.”
Xavier bowed low.
“If she changes, I will.”
“She,” Lilitu said.
Lilitu turned to face Xavier.
“The human child is female,” Xavier replied.
“She. How interesting,” Lilitu replied.
Ten
She might as well just die, because her damn parents wouldn’t move.
Natalie’s entire life was over, and seventh grade was her ultimate downfall.
James Greeson called her “The Fartinator”
Alix Judden called her “Nata-queef.”
The fart had literally ruined everything.
And her damn parents refused to move to a different state. Or even enter witness protection. Did they actually care about her? She believed this lack of action was proof that they did not.
She walked home, alone, and wondered what she must have done in a past life to deserve this hellish existence.
Natalie wasn’t paying attention to where she was going, and she ran into a grown up on the sidewalk.
“Sorry! I’m sorry,” she said, as the bottom of her backpack ripped.
It wasn’t really a backpack, so much as it was a Dumpster with a Hello Kitty design. Gum wrappers, old history worksheets, a random sock – one that did not belong to her – two lost lunch boxes, dirt, change, some sour candies, and a moldy apple hit the ground. There wasn’t a textbook in sight.
“Oh, fuck-shit!” she said, momentarily forgetting the grown-up. She squatted on the ground to collect her heap of stuff.
“Hey, Natalie, sorry, didn’t mean to startle you, I just wanted to talk about the go-karts,” the man said.
Cold fear sliced into her belly, and she wasn’t sure she could move her legs.
“How do you know my name?”
“It’s me, Xavier,” he said, helping her pick up the garbage strewn on the sidewalk. “The go-kart dream last night. Natalie I just thought I’d…”
Natalie fell on her butt, backpedaling in fear, her backpack junk pile forgotten.
“How do you know my name?” she whispered.
Xavier stopped. He knelt on the ground next to the child that was scooting away from him.
“Natalie, you know me.”
She shook her head, half crab walking away from him and screamed, “You aren’t my dad! No! Don’t take me! This isn’t my dad! Help me! Help me! Help me!”
Everything slowed down and got silent for Xavier.
The humans moved in soundless slow-motion. A car pulled up and a woman got out and yelled at Xavier. Another car stopped, and its occupants shielded Natalie.
People screamed in his face, and he just wanted to see if Natalie was OK. Their noise was inconsequential.
What the blue fuck was going on?
“Natalie?” he said quietly.
Men were attempting to hit him, or hold him. Xavier was a statue, their hands and words leaving no impact.
Xavier brushed them off his body and walked in the opposite direction.
People yelled “stop” behind him.
When he reached the corner, he looked back.
Natalie met his eyes briefly, and burst into tears, her heavy eyeliner making tracks down her face.
She didn’t remember.
He phased out.
Eleven
She kissed his chest, and then flopped on him.
“I have no bones,” she said.
“Well I can help you with that, because I seem to have…”
“Ohmuhgawd, Xavier, you are not going to make that shitty joke after ...”
“After what?” he prompted. She had them under a sheet, her hair still plastered to her face. He grinned and brushed a damp piece of her hair out of her eyes. “What?”
She rolled over and buried her face in the pillow next to him.
“You are so human,” he said, half turning so that he was propped on one arm. He gently bit her shoulder. “It’s adorable how squeamish you are.”
“Murmph!”
“You know, babe, I could find you in the real world,” he said, as he gently tickled her back. “I could come to your house and we could work on your other form.”
“Don’t call me….” She said muffled.
“… babe, I got that.”
She scooted back around so that she looked up at him.
“I don’t think I can shift,” she said. “I don’t think I’m what you think I am. I know I’m nowhere close to what you are.”
Natalie’s eyes broke contact.
“What if I’m just a human?” she asked softly.
“Just a human,” Xavier mocked. “Just a human who has a pet demon on an eternal leash. Just a human, who fucks…”
“Don’t you dare say that” she screeched, covering his mouth with both hands. “Besides, it’s just a dream.”
“An erotic dream…”
“Stop it! It’s just a damn dream, and I’m not special like you are,” Natalie said. “I’m not special at all.”
“Natalie, you have never, ever, told a lie that big,” Xavier said. “There is nothing about you that isn’t special.”
They were lost in the quiet moment, between breaths.
Natalie touched his face.
He’d saved her from the black void, the dream loop that was just depression, loneliness, endless self-loathing. She’d follow him to the ends of the earth, and beyond, if she could.
But they both knew when she woke up this would be just a dream.
“Are we real?” she asked.
“I think we may be the only things that are real,” he said.
“Did you mean it, did you mean what you said… before… or were you just saying it to save me from my darkness?”
Xavier moved over her, leaned in and whispered against her lips, “Yes.”
Twelve
It was the Interspecies Battle of Daytona. The demons were freed. Her mom and grandpa weren’t dead yet.
The dream loop started.
“Xavier, take my Natalie and go enjoy. Those are delightful souls they’re wasting,” Lilitu purred. “Now where is the daughter I owe favor? The child?”
There were only minutes before they found the bodies.
Her mom’s body. Her grandpa’s body. Right now her grandpa was bleeding out with his dead daughter in his arms.
Natalie didn’t want to see it. Again.
She didn’t want to see her mom and grandpa in the body bags, peaceful, cold, dead.
Xavier pulled her through the throngs of monsters and humans churning out death. She shuddered. He pulled her closer and the dream loop ran its course, endlessly repeating the darkest moment in her life.
“If I had obeyed her to begin with, you wouldn’t hate me,” he muttered.
Natalie stopped, and nearly wrenched her arm out of the socket with the motion.
“I don’t hate you,” she said.
“Well you sure treat me like shit,” he said, not looking back.
“I didn’t think you could care,” Natalie yelled.
He stopped, turned around, and typical Xavier, grabbed Natalie and planted one her lips.
“I fucking care! I have cared every moment of your life!” he yelled. “First time I ever cared about anything and it’s you. You. And you’re head-over-ass for someone not worthy of the ground you walk on. I hate caring.”
The world stopped.
The battle wasn’t replaying. That moment wasn’t replaying. The dreamscape was locked.
Xavier was there. He was motionless, still, quiet, watching her watch him.
This was real.
Natalie was dreaming.
A hundred moments piled in on themselves, as if time were a funnel and every moment of their duel lives were part of her at the same time. She made a sorrowful sound in her throat.
Xavier didn’t move. He couldn’t breathe.
There were no tears. Natalie couldn’t cry. This was a hurt so deep it felt like a rotten tooth in her heart.
He had never lied to her.
He had never left her.
She could never choose him. But she already had.
“Say something,” Natalie begged him.
“I didn’t try to kidnap you after the Great Fart Scandal of 7th grade,” he said.
She made another noise, like she’d just been kicked in the gut.
Xavier’s feet had grown roots. This fucking time he was not closing the distance. This time he needed her to make the choice.
She took a step forward.
“I wasn’t a random creeper in Publix trying to get your number, I just wanted to see if you remembered that night we spent after… the darkness,” Xavier said. “I loved your prom dress, it was the hottest thing this shit town ever saw.”
Natalie took another step. Then another.
“You made a card about me when you were in first grade and your mom put it in the fridge as ‘A is for alligator.’ Your mom was a little worried about your overactive imagination because all of your alligators had wings.”
Natalie stood in front of him, so close they inhaled each other’s exhales.
“Go-karts are still the most fun I ever had in a human body,” Xavier said.
“You stayed with me,” she said.
“Until the worlds end,” he said.
Their breath increased as the last two lines of that vow branded them from across time.
This time she kissed him. This time she let go of a thousand lifetimes, and a million reasons to say no. She tore into him with rage and regret, and lifetimes lived in little sips of passion. Her hearing and vision flared, and her body was on fire.
Literally. Green fire.
But so was his.
They ignited the void as they branded each other with need. They were nowhere, and everywhere, and in the moment, they were completely who they were supposed to be.
“I need you, Xavier,” she said, and it echoed through every dreamscape she’d ever had.
She pulled off his shirt.
“I need you.”
The nowhere exploded. The battle was gone, and it was just them, stripped down to what they were.
With lips and caresses, and claws and teeth, the universe recreated itself one breath, one whisper at a time.
The sound of the ocean lapped in their galaxy.
Thirteen
Her eyes opened. She had turned over and was cuddled up against Phelps’ chest. She inhaled. He smelled like cut grass and laundry. Clean. She felt OK.
He had that effect.
The covers were twisted around her and Phelps. He still had her tucked under his chin, and he’d thrown one massive leg over her, like she was a body pillow. Phelps was way too big for her bed.
Natalie wasn’t ready to get up, so she wiggled around so that she was facing away from him.
Xavier was in the corner of her room, an implacable look on his face.
She had a dream last night, and he was here in the morning. He always stayed the night when she had nightmares. Just to be sure she was OK.
She remembered now.
She remembered everything now.
He had always been the one.
Phelps stirred, probably disturbed a little by her movement, and he probably sensed the intruder.
Their eyes locked, and fat tears immediately tracked sideways down her face, wetting the pillow.
She stared at Xavier after last night, after a lifetime, from Phelps arms.
Xavier’s eyes flashed green, and he phased out.
The last piece of their conversation echoed across time as he left.
“Will you love me?”
Fourteen
The larvae had picked every dandelion in the fucking dreamscape three times, and they still hadn’t gotten to the swing.
And, he thought, it never shut up. The child never stopped talking.
“Casper is my gerbil and his poops are like little cereals, but you can’t eat them because it’s poop,” little Natalie said. “I picked these for you!”
She presented the wilted, squished bundle of weeds to him.
“What do I do with them?” he asked.
“Put them in a coffee cup with water,” Natalie replied sagely.
“I don’t have a coffee cup,” he replied.
“Oh, then we should put them back,” Natalie said.
She threw the dandelions in the air and giggled.
“Cornfeffi!”
“Confetti.”
“Yay!”
The larvae tucked her tiny little hand back into Xavier’s and looked up at him. She smiled, and it was so sickly sweet and wholesome that he smiled back.
“I’m not alone when you’re here Zavy-er,” she said grinning. “I need you.”
“What age do humans start speaking in coherent sentences?” he asked.
“It’s time to swing,” she said.
“Obviously this is not the age,” he said.
Natalie struggled to get on the swing, so Xavier held the seat steady. She beamed at him again. He smiled back again. He decided he wasn’t going to fall for that trap anymore. The larvae was cute in a gross way, and it was using that to gain power over him.
No more smiling at the small human.
“Now push me!”
Xavier pushed her off the seat. She flopped in the dirt and looked at him, her little brow wrinkled up. She pointed at him and yelled.
“No!” she yelled. “Listen to my thinks.”
“What?” Xavier yelled back.
“My thinks! My head-pictures, listen!” she yelled again, standing and walking to the swing.
He lifted the image from her mind of a playground with large humans gently pushing little humans on swings.
They repeated the process of getting her on the swing.
“Push, gentle, Xavier!” Natalie said. There was a warning in her voice, that he’d better, or else.
He pushed her and she rocked forward in a bundle of squealing delight and pigtails. She pumped her little legs and took off, swinging herself back and forth.
Xavier walked around to the front of the swingset to watch her.
Small humans were strange. This entire process was strange.
She laughed, and he smiled. Damn. More smiles.
This creature was either an amusing idiot or a devilish mastermind.
The sun of her dream warmed his back and she yelled, “Wheeee!”
Xavier was amused. A little. He had to stop himself from smiling at her.
“You swing!” she gleefully hollered. “You swing too!”
Fucking hell.
Xavier sat on the swing and mimicked her movements. It was awkward, and would have been embarrassing if Xavier had any feelings.
Little Natalie cheered him on as he gained momentum. He had to tuck his feet way under in order to clear the ground when he swung back.
They sawed through the daylight, in a halo of her pure joy.
“Will you stay a long time so I can swing a lot?” Natalie asked, leaning back and looking over at Xavier, her pigtails floating in the breeze.
“Will you stay with me?”
“Yeah, kid,” Xavier said. “Yeah, I’ll stay with you.”
The End
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