Chapter 51 - Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

Following the demon’s trail with sympathetic magic to help her went much faster than tracking Maxwell had. Casper hurried after the darkness with no hesitation, and Hazel’s certainty meant she barely had to stretch herself to keep up. The strand from Chapman’s jar almost pulled her after it like the world’s creepiest towline.

The ethereal flashed by around her, a patchwork of blue-lit places that obeyed no reasonable geographic order. One moment Hazel followed Casper down a narrow city alley with broken neon signs blinking above them, the next they emerged into a cornfield straight out of Nebraska, and then they flashed through the cobalt-colored mist of an unformed patch. She saw a vast body of water off to one side and couldn’t look for long enough to know whether it was a lake or an ocean before they sped onward and into a village square in the middle of a festival.

Casper never even turned his head; the changing scenery might have been completely blank as far as he was concerned. He had a trail to follow, and that was all he seemed interested in, as awful as he clearly found the smell or the feel of it. Hazel admired his priorities.

She herself could only spare a few thoughts for the landscapes they traveled through, though normally she would have wanted to spend hours investigating each one. Most of her attention went to maintaining the dark line guiding her—and to the name that the ghosts had told her, the name that Chapman had invoked while he was murdering them.

Perthrux.

It hammered through her mind with the beat of her heart. Each step and each breath fell into its rhythm, louder and closer as Hazel went on.

Perthrux. Perthrux.

Perthrux Perthrux Perthrux Perthrux.

She didn’t know whether that was proximity or preoccupation, but she sensed its domain even before the ethereal ahead of her turned ash-dark and the temperature dropped again, turning her fingers numb.

Casper lifted his head and howled. The forlorn sound echoed around them even though there were no real acoustics to make it do so.

“I know,” said Hazel, ruffling the dog’s spectral ears. “I’m here too, if that helps any.” He didn’t unclench his tail or relax his ears, but he turned his head and licked her hand. Hazel swallowed past a lump in her throat and stared ahead at what she knew to be her destination.

Maxwell had given her as much physical description as he could, but Hazel thought she could have recognized the place even without it. Suggestions of mountains like teeth rose up against a sky barely a shade lighter. The ground was dark gray, mostly formless but uneven with boulders like giant deformed skulls, and movement to either side didn’t seem to belong to any one entity. It might have been the wind, or whatever passed for wind there.

When Hazel crossed the border, her footsteps rasped like she was walking on insect shells, making her freeze in confusion and alarm before she realized where the sound was coming from. Then she just felt mildly disgusted. She breathed in and smelled a cross between old blood and burning rubber.

God, Maxwell, how long did you have to spend here?

She checked her supplies before she went on. There weren’t many—her knife and a radio that she’d engraved with runes—but the contact made her feel more stable, and the items were connections to a less horrible world. Hazel touched each of them briefly, making sure they were there and secure. Then she started walking again.

The screaming started before she’d gone a long way in—far off but constant and from all around her. She couldn’t tell if it was one voice or a thousand, just like she couldn’t quite figure out whether the shapes by the side of the road were or ever had been human. They flickered at the side of her vision, some with limbs, some all limbs, some simply giant distorted faces.

She didn’t want to look, and she couldn’t help looking. She went on, one skittering step at a time, hand on Casper’s neck for both of their comfort, or the nearest approximation available in a place like that.

Up ahead of her, finally and also too soon, the landscape coalesced into a more solid form. A dark metal gate barred the entrance to a cave. Several of Perthrux’s maggot servants moved behind it, white flesh startlingly pallid in the middle of the world’s shades of gray and black, making phlegmy burbling sounds that might have been speech.

“Here we are,” Hazel muttered to Casper, turning to the side and guiding him along. She released her hold on the magic that had brought her here, allowing the connection between Chapman and Perthrux to fade back into the jar, and looked for a hiding place that would let her watch the road.

Because she’d evidently been an absolutely wretched person in a previous life, the best spot was behind one of the fleshy shapes. It was fairly abstract as the…items…went, mostly an oblong square of mottled tissue, and it wasn’t moving, all very small mercies. As Hazel crouched behind it, her skin crawled strongly enough to make her think it wanted to run away and find a body that didn’t get into these situations. She couldn’t argue.

The smell got stronger both when she was close to the ground and when she was close to the flesh-thing, and the combination made her stomach clench. Casper whimpered.

“Shhh,” Hazel whispered, petting his muzzle. “I know.”

They didn’t have to wait very long—not that Hazel had much way of telling the time in the ethereal, but her legs hadn’t begun to get cramped when the gate swung open, its shriek cutting through the constant screaming. Peering around the edge of her horrible cover, she saw the scraggy, headless red shape from her nightmares stalk out along the road, a column of the maggot-things in its wake.

Perthrux hadn’t gotten any better looking since Hazel had fought it. On its home turf, it looked even taller than it had in Clarence’s room, and its arms hung almost down to its toes. Each talon on its hands could have been a baling hook.

Subjective perception, she told herself, as she ducked hastily back behind the flesh rectangle. You’re seeing it larger because you’re scared.

She was scared, yes, absolutely. Her throat was dry with terror. That might have been all the reason for Perthrux’s apparent growth, but Hazel couldn’t think of any source saying demons couldn’t change their size.

Its echoing footsteps came closer, with a chorus of squelching right behind them. Hazel didn’t dare look out from her shelter. She held perfectly still, trying even to breathe as little as possible, hearing her own heartbeat thunder in her ears. Perthrux could probably hear that if it was close enough and thought to listen. Maybe it didn’t need to. Maybe it could smell mortals.

Fee, fi, fo, fum…

Hazel’s stomach clenched.

The sounds of marching demons reached the other side of the flesh. Hazel clutched the hilt of her knife, knowing it would be useless if Perthrux or one of its servants found her. She’d won against Perthrux and a few of its servants in the mortal world by luck and using the environment. Facing it with a small army, in a part of the ethereal that it had marked deeply for its own…

…she’d be lucky if she died fast.

She waited for the footsteps to stop or for one of the demons to call out to its fellows, letting them all know that she was there. Casper shook as he huddled against her.

The demons kept going. Hazel wet her dry lips with a tongue that didn’t feel any moister. The footsteps passed her hiding place, booming first and then squashing, gradually becoming quieter as the demons went on. Hazel didn’t let herself relax a single muscle, not until she could barely hear the procession in the distance.

When she got up the nerve for another quick peek, she saw the backs of the maggots moving off down the road, leaving a dark slime on the surface where they’d passed. It sizzled under Hazel’s boots when she darted out of cover, but she ignored it and bolted up toward the gate. She had no time to wait for the demons’ trail to settle; Perthrux could decide to turn back at any moment. Even once it had covered some distance, it could return almost instantly if it left its minions behind. Hazel’s chance lay in acting before it figured out that she was alive.

Metal spikes loomed over her at the gate, encircled by thick chains that constantly writhed like they were in pain. All five of the locks holding them closed glared at Hazel with a spite she’d rarely seen on people and never on inanimate objects; if they’d been animals, they’d have leaped for her throat.

That was fine. They could hate her all they wanted.

Slipping a hand into one of the many pockets on her cargo pants, Hazel drew out one of the gifts Maxwell had been able to give her: five small bits of metal, stained with her own blood. This is going to come as a surprise, she told the locks silently and smiled.

---

* * *

“She was a tougher morsel than I’d foreseen,” said Perthrux, tongue swiping around its second mouth as it watched Maxwell. “It’s almost sad to spend a resource like that. Too late now, I suppose.”

It stood at the head of its servants, barely on the other side of the ethereal. The larvae shifted restlessly at its back. Perthrux ignored them. All of the lesser demons hated it, and all knew the folly of moving against it under any circumstances.

So did Maxwell. He paced westward, squinted off into the middle distance, and then clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth with irritation. “There’s a ward here too.”

That was true. He couldn’t directly lie to Perthrux. It was also an excellent ward; Maxwell was generally adept with them.

Perthrux hissed. “Take it down, don’t just gawk at it. Did she suffer?”

“Yes,” said Maxwell, staring at the pattern he was very slowly tracing and remembering the way Hazel’s hands had splayed against her thighs. “She did.”

“A pity I couldn’t bear witness.”

“I can tell you about it, if you’d like,” said Maxwell, pausing.

“Later,” the demon spat. “Have you lost all your wits? Get on with your work.”

The irritating part about undoing his own wards, Maxwell found, was that there was only so long he could fake struggling with them before it became a blatant performance. He grasped a line of energy, turned it, and dismantled half of the pattern he’d constructed earlier. Perthrux’s grunt of satisfaction just made the whole experience worse.

“Chapman,” the demon said, “has failed us at the last minute. Perhaps you were right about him.”

“Did the medium drive him away?” asked Maxwell, as casually as he could manage.

“Possibly. I don’t care,” Perthrux added petulantly. “He served his purpose in the end, didn’t he? If he reappears, though, I’ll need to have words with him.”

“Justifiably, my lord.” The ward flared up and vanished. Maxwell let his breath out and purposefully slumped his shoulders. “I need a moment before I handle the last one.”

He sensed, with no need for mental magic, Perthrux’s brief dilemma. It would normally refuse out of habit and spite, but its plans were too advanced to risk its servant blowing himself up or burning his mind out, thus leaving it and its minions trapped. “Take it, then,” it snarled.

Energy ebbed and surged all around them, the remnants of the vortex that had incubated in Hazel. So far, as he and Hazel had hoped, it seemed to have kept Perthrux from sensing any intrusion into its domain—if Hazel had made it that far without getting lost or waylaid.

Nothing good came from pursuing that train of thought. Maxwell pulled a question from the frantic fragments of his mind. “Should I follow you once the barrier is down? Or would you prefer I stay behind as a guard?”

The dead white eyes blinked. “A stupid question. What would you have to guard?”

“Will the rift close, then?”

“Does it matter? Nothing that comes out will threaten us.” Perthrux’s tongue licked out of its second mouth, struck the barrier between worlds, then retracted. “You’ll come along. It’ll be an experience for you.”

“Ah,” said Maxwell.

The demon’s voice came from behind him, soft and full of menace. “You sound like you object, bondsman.”

“I wouldn’t dare, my lord.”

“No? Do you mean to say that I’m unreasonable?”

“Simply that it isn’t my place.”

“How perceptive,” said Perthrux. “I believe you’ve had plenty of rest now.”

“Of course, my lord,” said Maxwell, his stomach sinking. He wiped his palms on his robes, then took a small step in the direction of the final ward. “I should investigate further before starting, though. There might be traps that go off when the protections sink low enough.”

Perthrux didn’t respond. Maxwell stared around him, frowning as though he were checking the forest carefully.

“Are you stalling?” the demon asked.

The world turned to ice inside Maxwell’s head. “I want to be sure that nothing goes wrong,” said Maxwell. It was technically true. It had worked before.

“Turn around,” said Perthrux, and he did. The air around them became heavy, gravid with a burden he knew too well. The demon’s will fell on Maxwell with its full force. “Are you stalling?” it repeated.

He closed his eyes. “Yes,” he said, not fighting in the hopes that Perthrux would be satisfied. “I’m worried.”

Perthrux’s regard skewered Maxwell like a butterfly on a pin. “Is the medium dead?” it asked, enunciating every word with terrible precision. Magic tightened around Maxwell’s soul, barbed and inescapable.

None of Maxwell’s skill could help him in that moment. No trick he’d learned in Perthrux’s service or his own explorations let him resist or evade the question. “I don’t know,” he said, fighting hard enough to limit his response that much.

“You don’t know?” The demon’s voice rose, and behind it the mass of maggot soldiers cringed. Perthrux lunged forward toward Maxwell. While the barrier still held it back, keeping it outside the physical world, no such obstacle kept Maxwell on the other side. As its arms shot forward, its power yanked Maxwell toward it. Talons sank into his shoulders. “You don’t KNOW ?”

After his brief freedom, compulsion was agony. “I don’t know,” Maxwell repeated. It was all he could do just then.

Perthrux dragged him close to it, close enough for Maxwell to begin going numb from the chill it exuded. “Did you give her the potion?” it demanded.

“Yes.”

The flesh around its face rippled, wrinkled, as it thought. It was not a stupid creature when it didn’t want to be. “All the potion?”

Maxwell bit down on his tongue, but Perthrux’s magic pried his jaws apart and forced the answer from his bleeding mouth. “No.”

Its claws tightened, piercing Maxwell’s flesh. “Traitor,” it snarled. “Why? ”

“I love her,” he said, unwillingly but all the more sincere for it. “I hate you. I want you gone.”

“Then how—” Perthrux stopped. Both of its mouths gaped open while Maxwell’s heart stopped, and the revelation that crossed its misplaced face confirmed his worst fear. “Ah. Clever. Not clever enough.”

“My lord—”

“You’ve forgotten that,” said the demon, over his feeble protest. “I’ll remind you. Come.”

Before he could cry out, before he could even mouth some protest, useless as he knew it would be, the ethereal had become a blur around them. Maxwell couldn’t tell if the maggots were following, but he knew where they were going.