“What game plan were you thinking of?” Rose asked.
“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” I said.
“What makes you think I have a plan?”
“I don’t think. I hope. Because my plan sucks moose balls.”
“What we saw, before she took over the factory… she didn’t touch the plants. She stays to the shadows, as a rule. Plants in places where the sunlight usually reaches were mostly okay. Patchy in other places. She’s staying in this building, when she could roam. She needs a den,” Rose said.
“A den.”
“A hiding spot. Probably the darkest place in the factory. If we can find and penetrate that place, maybe we could find the demon itself. Its heart, its head, its source. I dunno. It’s a gut feeling, I guess?”
“It’s a good plan,” I said. “Better than mine.”
“What’s your plan?”
“Get over there, to where the roof fell in, and get to the wood. Use it for a longer-burning fire, if we make it.”
“And then?”
“I didn’t get that far. But maybe you could ask for a name a couple more times? Speaking of?”
“Yeah,” Rose said. “Demon! This will be the fifth time now I’ve asked for a name. Five times, you’ve proven the coward. Name yourself, or-”
The demon rumbled. A groaning sound, as if the entire building were straining with the demon’s mass.
“Urrrrrr-” it whispered, a sound from very far away, off to one side.
I wasn’t sure, but I suspected maybe the ‘head’ was there. Be it the many-limbed head I’d seen earlier, or the actual source of the thing.
The guillotine teeth slammed shut, cutting off the prolonged syllable.
“Name thyself!” Rose called out.
“Urrrr-”
Again, the guillotine teeth.
“It’s name is Ur?” I asked.
“Too short,” Rose said.
The teeth, slamming together…
I shifted the mirror to my other hand. I almost, trusting my body’s demands, sat down. I remembered I couldn’t, and shifted my weight instead.
“He’s eating it,” I said.
“Eating what?”
“He’s giving the name, and he’s eating most of it before it can reach us,” I said. “He’s technically obeying. It’s not going to work.”
“I guess that decides what our plan is going to be,” Rose said. “Your plan, it would only buy time. My plan, it’s a possible win.”
“Getting to the heart of the demon,” I said. “Probably that way, if it isn’t tricking us.”
“There’s a door and a stairwell leading down. Maybe a boiler room or something?”
I nodded.
“I don’t think you can keep that mirror clear of the demon when you leave this circle,” Rose said. “If you get me to the window, though, I can slip outside. Two paces out of your way, but it’s safer for all of us.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said. The window wasn’t far.
Looking at the window, my eyes fell on Evan. He was there, perched on the far side, his wings spread.
A shadow had fallen over the window earlier. It had been my familiar.
“It sounds like a plan… but I think Evan has the better plan.”
“What’s that?”
“Forfeit. Like you said, we’re in over our heads. We run.”
“Run?”
“It’s… we can’t beat this. Not here, not on its turf, not in its medium. In the dark.”
“We burn the place down,” she said.
“Concrete and brick?” I asked. “I dunno. Maybe it could slip away in the darkness of the smoke. It’s not going to work.”
“Guess not,” Rose said.
I searched my pockets for matches, for a lighter…
A kind of horror hit me.
“I forgot to bring something to light the torch with,” I said.
“No,” Rose said. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“I don’t have anything.”
“You lit the circle.”
“I-” I stopped.
“She ate it,” Rose said.
I sighed.
The thirty or forty feet to the door seemed far too far away.
“I can’t run,” I said.
“I know.”
“That’s… that looks like the longest walk I’ve ever had to make.”
“I know,” Rose said.
I closed my eyes, and turned to look to the window. I saluted Evan, who still remained there, perched on the snow that had accumulated on the window ledge, his small wings outstretched high and wide. The moon was above and behind him. He wasn’t so big that it mattered that much, but I respected the idea and the effort.
I bent down and ignited the torch by touching it to the flames below me.
I strode away from the door.
“Blake! Don’t be dumb!”
Torch slashing low, close to the ground.
Claws grasped at me, only to let go as the torch got closer to them.
Hands gripped at my ankles. I used gasoline to splash at the circle, eliciting flares of light and fire, and they let go.
Most did.
Only a short distance to the nearest window.
“They’re in here!” Rose screamed. Then, “In the Thorburn name, I compel you to leave!”
I had no idea if it worked.
The main body of the demon was drawing closer, if my peripheral vision wasn’t lying to me. Flanking me. The head, complete with a mess of grasping limbs around it.
I grabbed the can of sealant and heaved it through the window. I was weak enough I thought it might bounce off. I had bad luck with breaking glass.
Glass shattered all the same, and without the grime obscuring it, it made the interior brighter.
I threw Rose’s mirror through the gap.
Hopefully she had a safe escape to Grandmother’s house, from the factory outskirts on. Nothing barring her path.
The demon’s proper body lunged, and its body constricted around me. I held up the torch and it fell back a fraction.
I nearly threw myself through the window, but I remembered the tendril that had hidden themselves in the space between windows, only to jump into my field of vision. If the panes of glass there were two feet by two feet across, was there something lurking in the meager space between?
I waved the shoddily-made torch around, coals falling off, and the constricting body fell back. I turned around. I now had a fifty foot trudge to the front door.
I started, pulling against claws and other limbs that scratched at my feet. Some weren’t shying away from the torch. I didn’t want to chance a look, out of fear that I’d blind myself permanently this time.
Evan used his trick, closing his wings, moving. The meager amount of moonlight that he’d been blocking flooded into the factory, and limbs and body all pulled away, overreacting.
The demon got its bearings. It closed the distance, moving faster than I could move my arm and the torch.
Evan came through the hole in the window, and tendrils and cords snapped shut just behind him, as though the window had hidden a net. He darted close to the demon, and the demon grasped for him. Dumbly pursuing the closest available target.
It bought me time. As the demon moved in pursuit of my familiar, the coils and limbs that moved and constricted around me weren’t moving with me as the target. They got in my way, but I could stagger over them, stumble through, and use the torch to scare away the worst of them.