Demons and Druids Read online

  The two of us sat down on the bed. Dana looked at me expectantly.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well, what?” I said stupidly.

  “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Um… how about alien hunting?” I offered. “Same old, same old?”

  “It’s different this time,” Dana insisted. “I remember what happened in the van, Daniel. The walls were crushing us; I couldn’t breathe. I was in pain, the worst I’ve ever felt. All I could do was stare at you, knowing we were going to die. We were all going to die. And then you saved us.”

  She lowered her voice a little, as if the rest of our friends were in the next room, listening. “I don’t think the others know about the time travel. Or why you’re a little shaky right now.”

  “Well, frankly I’d rather they didn’t.”

  Her voice was gentle. “Daniel, it’s all right. It’s all part of what you have to do. What you were born to do, I suppose. We’re just along for the ride. Right?”

  “Dana, there’s something else… something else that’s been getting to me.” I was definitely in spilling-your-guts mode. I knew I would have to watch myself, or I might just get all gooey on her about how crazy I really was about her.

  “You…” I swallowed nervously, unable to speak for a moment. Then I regained my voice. “You were real. Back on my—our—homeworld, Alpar Nok. You, Joe, Willy, Emma. You were all real.”

  Her expression went from surprised to baffled to horrified.

  I went on. “When I visited there I saw images, like telepathic snapshots. My relatives showed me. We were all kids who hung out together, before I left for Earth. Then the Vermgypians came, invaded. They called it FirstStrike. You were all… killed at your school…”

  The silence seemed to fill up the room, till I thought we would both drown in it. Then Dana’s voice, shaking a little, pulled me back to the surface. She spoke slowly, like she was trying to solve a tough math problem.

  “So we were real, then we died. I don’t remember any of it. What does that make us? Ghosts?”

  “I don’t know, Dana. All I do know is, I’ll never, ever let any of you die again.” I had to fight to keep my eyes from tearing up. “I swear, on the Bible, on The List, on the house where I grew up—except I can’t because it’s burned down. But never, never again will my friends be hurt.” Then I looked up into her perfect blue eyes. “Especially not you, Dana.”

  She stared right back at me with the softest smile in the history of this planet.

  “Thank you, Daniel. I’ll try to do the same for you. I would die for you. Again.”

  Chapter 12

  I LAY BY MYSELF on the bed for a while, staring like a zombie at the wood-beamed ceiling. A million thoughts raced through my head, way too fast for me to comprehend. I’d dropped a little bit of a bomb on Dana, and she’d needed some alone time, so I made her disappear.

  But after that convo, I still needed someone to talk to, worse than ever.

  Then I felt a reassuringly familiar hand on my shoulder. “Daniel?”

  “Mom?”

  I hadn’t intentionally created her, but there she was. She was wearing a purple knit cardigan with yellow puppies on it, one of her favorites. Sometimes, when I needed her most, she would just appear. I’d created her and my father so many times that it had become reflexive.

  “Feeling down? You shouldn’t be. You know that you have friends and family who love you very much. Even if they are imaginary.”

  I couldn’t help smiling. For people who had been killed almost thirteen years ago, my parents had a lighthearted view of the world.

  “Thanks, Mom. Hey, did you know I can time-travel?”

  “You were the last one to figure that one out, sweetie. It’s okay. I always told your father you were a late bloomer.” She gave a little giggle, and then suddenly got serious. “But that’s not the reason I’m here, is it?”

  She was my mother, all right. Her mind-reading abilities weren’t really fair play, though—she was my creation, after all. I could never really know for sure, but I suspected she might have access to parts of my brain, my memory, my subconscious, that even I didn’t know about.

  “It’s just… when Dana, and the others, almost died back there, things changed somehow. I’d never felt like that about my friends before. Losing them would be… almost as bad as losing you and Dad all over again.”

  “You could just conjure them up again, Daniel. They’re already dead.”

  “No. You don’t get it, Mom. It’s about doing the wrong thing. It’s about hurting them. It’s just… I don’t ever want to put them in danger again.”

  “You know I love your friends, Daniel. But you can’t let yourself be distracted. Number 3, Beta, he’s the real deal. You’ve never faced a power quite like his.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been studying him.”

  “Well, your father did too,” she said. “He’s been an infestation in this country and on this planet for far too long.”

  I was intrigued. “But The List dates his history back only about fifty years. He came to Terra Firma before that?”

  “You’ll have to figure that one out yourself. Just remember, if you want to play with fire you have to accept the consequences. You will get burned. Trust me on that.”

  I nodded. I could take getting burned if it meant keeping my friends safe.

  She gave a wry smile. “Daniel, you’re quite the Alien Hunter already, but I don’t know if you’re ready for Beta. Your father and I met him once. Think of a million or so angry, hungry wolves—on fire. That’s a pretty good approximation of Number 3.”

  And on that scary note—she was gone again.

  Chapter 13

  I BARELY SLEPT all night. I couldn’t shake my mom’s words. Instead, I went into an almost obsessive trance, reading links off Google News—anything that had to do with fire. I wondered just how often Beta was at the center of any and all destructive fires around the world. And there were a lot of them…. Wildfires, worse than ever in recorded history. Factory fires, mine fires, apartment building fires, churches and clinics and homes set on fire by missing arsonists…

  Feeling totally overwhelmed, I reread The List description again. It placed Beta in the British Isles only. So why would he stay here? Most aliens I knew couldn’t wait to get their slimy little hands all over the globe.

  I asked my friends the same question over a breakfast of cold pizza the next morning. No offense to the Brits, but their pizza sometimes leaves a bit to be desired. Willy had already tossed his slice in the garbage and instead was jury-rigging a TV set to work on the kitchen counter.

  “Maybe Beta has a personal thing against England,” Dana said as a joke.

  “Maybe he had a French relative,” Willy suggested. Not the most culturally sensitive comment.

  “Or got bad gas from some blood pudding,” Joe offered.

  “I’m serious, guys. Why not go burn down the whole Amazon rain forest, for Pete’s sake? Kill the world’s oxygen supply? Or go to one of the poles and start melting the ice caps faster than they’re already going? He could do some real damage.”

  “Speaking of real damage… ,” Emma began, and her brother finished:

  “Maybe he is. Check this out.” The picture had just flicked on to BBC News. And it was big, bad news.

  Within the past hour or so there had been a giant explosion at a factory outside London. The flaming debris had scattered across a wide area and set fire to dozens of workers’ homes that were clustered nearby… and a school and day-care center.

  That part drew gasps from all of us.

  So far all that was known was that there were likely hundreds of victims, and it was too early to determine just how many of those were children. But the news was expected to be grim. And of course there was no indication of a cause yet.

  A highly dramatic shot of billowing flames and smoke that reminded me of the aftermath of a volcanic eruption was replayed over and over, and helicopt
ers in the area showed the guts of the factory spewed across a vast radius. It was truly a horrific sight.

  On a hunch, I dashed over to The List computer and tried to find the image of massive smoke and flame on the BBC website.

  As you might imagine, my high-tech alien brainbox had extraordinary resolution and magnification capabilities, and I clicked fast to zoom in as much as possible to ground zero of the explosion.

  “Oh my goodness,” Emma whispered when she saw a peculiar black shape take form.

  “More like, oh my evilness,” Joe corrected, shaking his head in disbelief as we all saw the suggestion of eyes, and teeth.

  “Not funny,” I said. “At all.”

  “What is it?” Dana asked, leaning over me to peer at the screen and putting her hands on my shoulder. I took a wild guess.

  “The Dark Heart.”

  Chapter 14

  WE DISCUSSED heading to the site of the explosion for clues on Beta but, after some discussion, decided that it wasn’t the right thing to do. The entire area would be teeming with police investigators, medical professionals, and grieving families. And if we’d seen what we thought we’d seen, we knew the “perpetrator” would already have left the scene of the crime.

  So where would a Phosphorian hang out?

  That’s how I decided we would split up to investigate different “hot spots”—literally—in the city. Factories that needed flame in their processing, for instance. And if Beta had servants—locals to help with the parts of his fuel-harvesting operation not involving, you know, burning things up—they’d probably be the kind of folks who were used to working with fire.

  Emma and I went to a metal workshop in the south part of London. I’d brought Emma with me instead of Dana this time since I sensed she was feeling a little left out of my inner circle of one. She’d figured out that the night before I hadn’t “disappeared” Dana at the same time as I’d gotten rid of the rest of them.

  My face broke into a smile when we arrived. The sign outside this workshop read B. FAUST AND COMPANY, LTD., the inscription under a picture of a jolly-looking blacksmith with his arms crossed. I had a good feeling about this: Having read most of the great European classics at least once by now, I gathered that there was a real devil running this place. (Look up “Faust” on Wikipedia if you want to know more.)

  Emma and I peeked in through a paned window in the front door. The place was incredible: a cavernous, dark room lit only by giant furnaces along two walls. The air inside was alive with sparks and the crackle of arc welders.

  A nearby figure lifted its welding mask. I was surprised to see a lean, grizzled middle-aged woman’s face looking out at us. Grimacing, actually.

  “Oi, no kids in here!” she shouted in a gravelly voice, opening the door and giving us a fiery glare. “Go ’way.”

  I put on my innocent wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly face. “Sorry, ma’am, we’re just doing a school report on—”

  “Something wrong with your hearing, sonny? I said get out! Now, if you know what’s good for ya—go!”

  We blinked our way back out into the sunlight a few paces from the workshop.

  “Well, that seemed promising,” remarked Emma. “She had a sort of, um, alienesque rudeness about her.”

  I shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe she’s just a garden-variety humanoid jerk.”

  I hated to admit it, but I wasn’t sure exactly what we were looking for. Ashes? Burn marks? Overdone steaks? This may not be what you want to hear from the Alien-Hunter-slash-Guardian-of-Earth, but sometimes it’s the bad guys who find me.

  Like that stupid van, I chided myself for the thousandth time, still feeling dumb about the careless move. I couldn’t get it out of my head.

  “Everything all right?” asked Emma solicitously, putting her hand on my shoulder.

  I pulled away, then immediately felt bad as I saw her mouth and eyes droop at the corners. “Yeah, I’m just fine, Em. Come on, let’s see if there’s a back door,” I said, trying to inject some softness into my voice.

  But then Emma suddenly grabbed my arm, her hand as tight as a pincer.

  “What—?” I started to say, but she cut me off.

  “Don’t turn around, Daniel,” she said softly but urgently. “We’re being watched. And the creep watching us is definitely no ‘garden-variety jerk.’”

  Chapter 15

  WHATEVER MINOR COMPLAINTS I might have about Emma—likes animals more than people, overly optimistic to the point of drowning us all in sunbeams—there was one thing for sure: that girl has a bloodhound’s nose when it comes to sniffing out bad guys.

  Unfortunately, even though I’m an alien, I don’t have eyes in the back of my head. One time in Texas I had to fight an Argusian, a slimy fish-reptile with giant eyes not just on the back of its head, but also on its knees and elbows and on each of its enormous teeth. That was not an easy beast to sneak up on.

  Now I turned a little to face the wall behind us, casually leaning against it with one hand. Then I focused all my energies into the wall’s surface. This was a relatively easy one: clay to silicate. As soon as I had the thought, one of the bricks, up at my eye level, shimmered and became a rectangular mirror.

  I scanned the mirror’s reflection of the street behind me. “Aviator sunglasses? Cancer stick?” I said.

  “That’s the creep itself,” Emma whispered back.

  The guy was sitting on a bench across the street from the foundry, smoking a cigarette. He was throwing us the most casual glances, but when I paid attention, well, even behind the shades, those glances were as piercing as a switchblade.

  “Now that looks like a man who works with fire,” Emma said, referring to the man’s barrel-like arms, scarred and pitted with burns.

  I nodded. “But maybe he’s just an employee taking a smoke break,” I suggested, even though I’d already convinced myself that he was one of Beta’s followers. It’s an alien-radar thing I’ve got going on. Somehow, the cretin had already found me.

  I heard a familiar roar in my ears, the sound made by the engine of one of those double-decker buses. A lucky break for a getaway. I cocked my head toward Emma. “Hop on my back.”

  As the bus passed between us and the man with the Popeye arms, Em jumped up onto my back and I sprinted out behind the bus, using it for cover. I kept up a comfy thirty miles per hour or so until the double-decker rounded the corner. Then I skidded to a stop.

  I peeked back toward the metal workshop. The guy was looking around, perplexed by our sudden disappearance. Maybe he was only human after all.

  He shook his head, stood up, tossed his filthy cigarette butt away, grinding it out with a thick boot heel, and pulled a fresh one out of the pack in his breast pocket. I hate littering almost as much as smoking, but in the next moment I forgot about the crudhead’s misdemeanor.

  Casually glancing around him, he cupped an empty hand. Then he bent his head down and lit his cigarette off a small red flame the size of a strawberry.

  The fire was coming right out of his palm.

  Did I say he was human? Whoops.

  Chapter 16

  “FOLLOW THAT CAD,” said Em with a wink, and I did. But we stayed well back from Mr. Handfire as he strode away from his post on the bench. He was grumbling to himself, looking around, it seemed, for a stray dog or cat to kick.

  “He let us get away. Now he’s in tro-u-ble,” I whispered in a singsong voice.

  After a few blocks, he turned down a cobblestoned alley, tossing his still-lit cigarette into a trash barrel. What a genius. I blinked a few handfuls of water into existence and stopped for a moment to dump it on the trash fire he’d started.

  Emma and I got to the alley mouth just in time to see him going through a dingy green door at the far end. After a couple of minutes a shadow flickered in the window of a third-floor apartment. The rusted fire escape that climbed the side of the building was only nine feet or so off the ground, so I jumped up to grab the bottom rung. Michael Jordan’s got nothin’ on me.
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  I looked down at Emma as I started to climb. “I’ll be right back.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You afraid it’s too dangerous for me?”

  “No. If I lose my grip you’re going to break my fall.” Fortunately, she chuckled. She knew I wouldn’t let her get hurt. I could whip up a trampoline or something to fall onto if I needed to.

  The ladder was rickety, and the balconies above it looked like they were cobbled together from coat hangers and pipe cleaners. This place was in dire need of a visit from Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

  Somehow, I made it to the third floor without getting speared by one of the rusted, broken balcony rails and contracting tetanus. I edged along the wall and looked into the lit window.

  The glass was encrusted with grime and cracked in several places, so I had to put my face right up to the window to see through it. Yowza! Now we’re making progress.

  Inside was a kitchen, the messiest I’d ever seen on Earth. Everything was covered with at least an inch of dirt, mildew, garbage, and rotting food. He stood at the stove, wearing a stained apron that read I GRILLING as he stirred something thick, dark, and lumpy in a saucepan.

  I thought I knew every travesty the Brits had unleashed on the culinary world—haggis, spotted dick, good old-fashioned mincemeat—but this didn’t even look like food. Unless it was food that had been already eaten, if you know what I mean.

  He grabbed a bottle from the counter and poured half of the contents into the pan. Then he lifted the bottle to his mouth and took a swig. Did that label say CASTOR OIL? No, wait. I blinked.

  That wasn’t right.

  I squinted through the glass and put my hands up by the sides of my face to get a better look.

  Yup. The bottle’s label said CASTROL. He was drinking motor oil.

  And that’s when—in the middle of another swig—he turned and saw me crouching on the fire escape.