I kept my demon-summoning career secret from my girlfriend through six months of dating. But one week after I moved in with Diana, the fiction that I was just some goth chick with a job at the Wiccan bookstore went up in flames (along with five of her blouses) when an imp got loose in the bedroom.
I never would have guessed that dating a lawyer was a path to success in demonology, but it made sense. Demonology is basically just contract law with a way cooler aesthetic. Years of programming experience helped me craft spell-agreements with few loopholes, but Diana was a partner at the best contract law firm in Seattle, so when we started collaborating, it was a significant boost.
We got married after Diana’s first breast cancer relapse. We almost divorced after her second. She came into the basement when I thought she was at work and saw me sobbing, crouching over a mouth in the floor ringed with tiny, sharp teeth. The mouth cooed until I lowered my hand again. It made wet grinding noises while it gnawed off the final centimeter of my right pinky.
Diana had been puzzled for weeks by my habitual glove-wearing and my newfound insistence on absolute darkness in the bedroom. During the fight that followed her discovery, I correctly pointed out that our wedding vows not only allowed, but arguably encouraged this kind of sacrifice, that she would have died weeks ago without it. I showed her the drawer filled with wooden prosthetics I’d carved in advance, proof that I intended to keep my left ring finger with our wedding band, along with my index fingers and thumbs.
My arguments were not as ironclad as I had thought they would be.
I shouted through my tears that she was worth more to me than a few fingers, and she shouted through hers that it was unacceptable for me to feed myself to demons to extend her life without consulting her.
She died six months later.
###
I never knew eliminating cancer from the world would involve so much cardio.
I tried to catch my breath in the hallway outside the dining chamber, leaning my head against the rough-hewn granite. I’d just finished carting a thousand buckets of water up a hundred flights of stairs in one long, magically time-dilated morning to prove my “ability to perform onerous and unnecessary tasks in order to receive faint praise from an authority figure.”
Godsdamnit, I got into demon summoning to avoid this Mickey fucking Mouse wizard servant bullshit. It was supposed to be a shortcut. A shortcut that required a decade of research and experimentation…okay, maybe not a shortcut. When I summoned a demon strong enough to end cancer, I’d been ready for him to ask for my soul–I’d even prepared a right-to-use, points-based soul timeshare agreement! But no, this demon needed me to infiltrate the tower of an agoraphobic wizard so I could jailbreak his golem boyfriend.
Jennifer, please stop believing incorrect things to antagonize me. You are auditioning to be Manha’s apprentice, not her servant, we use the term partner, not boyfriend, and I am an ante-divine, trans-dimensional concept-construct held captive inside a small wooden carving of a finger, not a demon, said the demon straight into my brain.
“Sorry, Satan, but anything that’s summoned using a pentagram, a shitload of black candles, a…” My eyes began to water, and my throat caught. No. I cannot have this right now. “…a bloody obsidian dagger, and thirty minutes of screaming ‘Mephistopheles’ over and over until my throat gave out is close enough to a demon to make the distinction pretty pointless.”
…you are one of the most grandiose? Idealistic, maybe? Definitely one of the biggest prats I’ve ever worked with. Curing cancer? The ’90s called, it wants its pointless feel-good causes back. The world is made of compressed horse shit, you realize? Pounded down until it’s nearly a mineral, then layered and painted and perfumed. The entire planet. This is literally true…
At least I summoned a demon as unnecessarily mean as I was.
I sighed. I wasn’t actually angry at him or Manha. I was angry that Diana was gone.
I was angry that I remained.
…the larger issue is your unwillingness to accept that doing anything that matters mandates the sacrifice of innocent life. The universe is trolley problems all the way down. I realize this, Manha realizes this. Even Diana…
I shut out the demon’s voice.
I peeked through the door. The dining chamber was an orgy of black granite: all the surfaces, even the table and chairs. Manha sat at the table, cloaked, her dark brown skin nearly invisible in the shadow of her hood. Her eyes were almost pure silver, interrupted by thin streaks of violet.
Anything less than perfection would lead to immediate dismissal, Manha had said, which would mean no reunion between demon and his golem…partner, which would mean cancer would survive to murder millions more. At least this afternoon’s task should be less strenuous than this morning’s.
All I had to do was wait on Manha while she ate the sun.
“Which place setting would you like, mistress?” I asked, laying the new edition of the Times onto the black granite slab of the dining table.
She licked the tip of her left index finger and paused. “The empyrean.” She waved her wet finger and the newspaper silently exploded, its component pages arrayed in a half-globe around her head, slowly rotating and reshuffling. Between two sheets, I saw her silver eyes flash from article to article.
I reached inside the dining cabinet, not looking, shouting empyrean, empyrean, EMPYREAN in my mind.
First came a glass made of time-frozen rainwater, filled with…rainwater? Small flecks of dirt floated within it. It smelled of a lull between thunderstorms.
Then a plate of swirling wind, quivering counter-clockwise in my hands, until I set it down, at which point it flipped directions. A fork and a knife of twined lightning to either side, (blade facing the plate, I knew my etiquette). There was no spoon. A napkin of fine-brushed cloud above the plate. Finally, the cabinet produced a pair of tongs shaped like quotation marks, black and sharp.
I approached the larder gate that crouched against the back wall of the room, two massive doors constructed of a blood red metal I could not identify. I snaked my hand through the rusted chains wrapped loosely around it and opened it–just a crack.
Soon, my love, soon, the demon whispered out of nowhere.
My love? I had not gotten the impression that the demon loved–
I wasn’t talking to you, the demon snapped back.
I shook my head and snuck my hand inside…the tongs found nothing. Desperately, I waved them around. As instructed, I visualized the sun, that unimaginably enormous fusion reaction around which I and everything I’d ever known revolved. I hoped it wouldn’t be life-sized–
No! You are hooking into the wrong causal reference chain! Think of…damn, how to explain…think of your personal relationship with the sun, the demon said.
My personal relationship with the sun? Who the hell has a personal relationship with the sun? I imagined nuclear fusion, photons streaming through space, the tug of its massive gravitational well…
Too late now…, the demon said.
I heard a soft clink, as if the tongs had collided with a small marble. I gripped it carefully, afraid it would slip, but more afraid to look.
Behind my back, the tongs stayed until I reached her. Slowly, fingers trembling, I maneuvered them in front of me. With a gasp I released a tiny, bright ball of white light onto the center of her plate of wind. The gentle ruffling of the newspaper pages ceased.
“No. This is wrong.”
Manha speaking was never a good thing.
I squinted at the ball. It was the sun, our sun, in the center of our solar system, hovering in front of her.
“But…”
“This is Sol,” she said.
“What’s the difference?” I hardly believed I was questioning her.
“What is the difference?” Manha quivered. “I want Apollo and Ra and the source of all creation, Jennifer. I want the light of inspiration and the glint in humanity’s collective eye. What I want is the compounded emotional weight of three billion dawns since we first lifted our gaze from the mud to the sky. Not–” She sniffed. “A boiling ball of hydrogen.”
“But you said your meals were metaphorical–” I gulped out.
“Of course they are, I want the symbol of the symbol, not just the damn symbol! How you manage existence with a mind so shallow…beyond imagining…” her voice collapsed into grumbling.
I’m practically inside of your mind, and even I have trouble imagining how shallow it is. The demon’s voice was low and angry. Sweet, noble Jennifer, he snarled, I am no demon, but please do not let that fact allow you to engage in any naive fantasies. The web of ancient magicks and logicks of which I am composed is more complex and intricate than the cumulative intellectual product of your entire species, yet there is not a single strand of me that contains the barest shred of what you call mercy.
If I am not reunited with my love, then there is no chance in hell I will lift a finger to help you honor yours.
It felt like the molten core of the Earth had dropped into my stomach. After everything, how could I fail her like this? I could have done it if either of them had explained it properly. I could have eliminated cancer. I gave Manha the sun on a platte,r and it still wasn’t enough. This was all horseshit–
Yes, finally, you are beginning to understand, the demon said.
There was sorrow in Manha’s silver eyes. “Jennifer, I must ask you–” No. My wife did not spend the last moments of her life bleeding out inside my pentagram for it to end like this. Manha would eat the sun, the demon would reunite with his godforsaken golem lover, and Diana’s death would mean something.
I closed my eyes and slammed my left hand onto the ball of light on Manha’s plate. I visualized the sun shining through Diana’s auburn curls while bright pain lanced up my arm. I filtered out Manha’s shouts. All I could hear was a gentle crackling as the emotional weight of three billion dawns charred my palm to a crisp.
###
I had hoped that the chemo might work, that the weeks of life I’d bought for Diana with my fingers would give the doctors the edge they needed. But it was only a few months before they sent her home to me with a hospital bed and enough morphine to go quietly.
Diana made it clear that if I fed any additional fingers (or any other appendage) to the mouth in the basement, she would leave me. She told me that she would not allow her cancer to destroy both of us. I didn’t tell her that her death would destroy me more thoroughly than any demon ever could.
I didn’t tell her about the ritual I was preparing in the basement.
In demon summoning, the “lure” has two components. First is the opening of the bargain. It could be as simple as a single shouted wish or as intricate as my black leather briefcase, stuffed to the brim with hundreds of A4 pages covered on both sides with ten-point sans-serif text.
Second was the sacrifice.
Some on the forums thought it was a gift to draw their attention, a demonstration of seriousness. Others believed that the life force of the sacrifice animated the contract between summoner and summoned, inhabiting it and enforcing it. Maybe it was both.
For the imp that burned up Diana’s blouses, I’d used a drop of blood. For the demon that gave her weeks of life in exchange for my fingers, I’d carved a square inch of skin from my calf and fried it with a pat of butter and a dribble of rum. But the demons powerful enough to cure cancer were traditionalists. A mere fraction of a life would not suffice.
And Diana had only explicitly forbidden me from sacrificing fractions of my life.
When she confronted me about how much time I was spending in the basement, I lied. I didn’t tell her about the circle I’d labored over for weeks, about the drawing and redrawing of the pentagram in pomegranate juice and my own blood, the chants I’d recited for each phase of the moon, or thirty minutes of screaming ‘Mephistopheles.’ I didn’t tell her that it was ready, that all it needed was one obsidian dagger smeared with the last beat of blood from a dying heart.
I didn’t tell her that when she slept, I stared into it for hours, working up my courage to the sticking point.
Instead, I mumbled that I’d been meditating. She laughed.
Diana spoke around the question yawning between us. “You could never murder someone to save my life,” she said, shaking her head at me.
I frowned. “I’d never spend a human life that cheap.”
She raised an eyebrow. My eyes watered as I imagined never seeing her skeptical glances again, goddamnit, she wasn’t dead yet, it wasn’t fair that I was mourning her already, and why the fuck was I mourning an arched eyebrow, of all the silly bullshit.
I shook the tears away. “If someone has to die, I’m not stopping with you. I’ll cure all of it, forever. No more cancer. We already have the clauses prepped.”
After summoning came negotiation. The briefcase was filled with alternatives and counter-proposals, all the ingredients of an ironclad agreement. A plain manila folder held prepared clauses for “big ticket” requests. Curing cancer. Solving world hunger. Ending bigotry. Reversing climate change. We did not lack ambition.
”But…I can’t do that. You don’t have to worry that your demon-summoning wife is going to murder someone. Even if, even if–”
She hugged me, and I sobbed into her chest.
I didn’t tell her that once I’d stretched our time together to the breaking point, I’d bury the knife in my own chest and leave her to complete the bargain. I didn’t have to. Just like she didn’t try to argue me into letting her sacrifice the short remainder of her life. She’d say that I should be the one to negotiate with the demon, I wasn’t dying of cancer, the demon couldn’t try to use that as leverage. I’d say that she was the lawyer, that she was better prepared to carry out the negotiations.
I should have been suspicious that she didn’t force the argument. I told myself that she’d given in so that we wouldn’t spend our last days together fighting. I thought that letting me die for her was her last gift to me.
I wasn’t an idiot. I hadn’t put the finishing touches on the circle until she was too weak to get up from bed alone. My obsidian dagger was on top of a tall shelf. I locked my ritual room and kept both of the keys on a chain around my neck.
She was stronger than she’d let on.
In the morning after our conversation, the chain was gone from my neck. I ran to the hospital bed, breathless, but a plain manila envelope rested on the pillow in place of my wife.
My eyes turned to the basement door, hanging open by an inch.
There were traces of blood on the stairwell, she must have fallen. The door to my ritual room was open. The mouth was awake and murmuring, flecks of blood and gristle caught in its teeth. There was blood on the shelf too, from the stub of the finger she’d given up for the strength to climb it.
Most of the blood was inside the ritual circle, where her corpse clutched the obsidian dagger and my wooden prosthetic pinkie tight to her chest, clutched the demon she had caught for me.
###
I clutched the bandage to my palm and tried to ignore the throbbing pain. No longer did a white star hover over Manha’s plate. Instead, there was a flaming ball of yellow-orange, somehow made of faith and children’s pastels rather than gas and photons.
Manha carved off a slice and placed it between her thin lips. A line of liquid fire dribbled down her chin, leaving her skin bubbled and charred. She grunted and wiped it clean with the cloud napkin, burns completely erased by the swipe of condensed water vapor.
Five minutes earlier, while she bandaged me, Manha had told me that it would be a disservice to heal it entirely, that I needed a physical reminder of how idiotic I’d been. But she did apologize for not explaining the task better. She admitted that she wasn’t ready for a new apprentice, and she’d hoped that I’d fail out quickly and leave her alone. She promised to be a better teacher in the future.
It had been a strange speech, halting and awkward. I’d asked her how a metaphor could burn halfway through my palm, and she said that the real sun would’ve done a lot worse.
The newspaper stopped whirling.
“Damn,” Manha growled. All but one page from the science section vanished in a burst of flame, which blasted heated air into my face.
Her eyes snapped to mine.
“Pluto. I need you there the day before yesterday.” She glanced at a clock on the wall that I was certain hadn’t existed a moment ago. Its hands spun backwards. In the center was a date captured in rotary dials. As the clock reversed, the date shifted from the 24th of August, 2006 to the 23rd and then the 22nd.
“Pluto, but…” I stuttered out, until the demon shouted me to silence. I could feel tense excitement leaking from his presence in my mind. He had said that Manha was agoraphobic. Did Manha keep the demon’s partner on Pluto?
Manha slapped a red permanent marker and a small scroll in my right hand. “Follow these instructions to repair my golem.”
Then she shoved me towards the larder gate, now open on a vista of white ice and a black sky filled with stars. I stumbled helplessly onto the surface of the ninth planet from the sun.
###
The manila envelope on Diana’s hospital bed had the handwritten label “Last Will and Testament.” It wasn’t her official, legal one. A year ago, we drew that up, notarized it, and locked it up inside the small fireproof lockbox we’d picked up after the imp incident.
This document concerned matters that the mundane governments of Earth did not care to involve themselves in.
The words wandered drunkenly over the page, not at all like Diana’s usual tiny, precise script. She had barely been able to write, how had she taken my keys, how had she gotten to the basement?
The words within the envelope swam through me as I returned to the circle and the demon and the blood on her bare scalp where her auburn curls should have been.
“Use my death to cure cancer for everyone, not just for me. If it works, you can try to bring me back afterwards. I’m sorr,y and I love you. -D”
I couldn’t stop myself.
“Can…can we do both? Cure cancer and resurrect her?” I whispered at the demon, pointing to Diana’s corpse without allowing myself to look. “Or…” I swallowed, guilt strangling me. Her will did not forbid me from asking, I told myself. I was only asking. “If that’s not possible, could we only resurrect her? I can offer a soul time-share. I can offer anything you–”
Oh, her? No, out of the question, were the first words the demon ever said to me. It would contradict the energetic foundation of the contract. Until our agreement is terminated, her soul powers the interpretation and enforcement…
I tuned out his words and tried to hold the broken pieces of myself together. I laughed and cried, and every part of myself clenched until I saw that I was crumpling her will, her last words to me. I smoothed the page and slid it back into the envelope. She spent most of her last words to me telling me what I should have known already, telling me not to go against her wishes again. She didn’t trust me.
Her lack of trust was not unjustified.
I took a deep breath. I would get through this. All I had to do was negotiate the agreement, pay the price the demon required, cure cancer, then run off to start some hare-brained scheme to get her back without hurting anyone or sacrificing more of myself. Easiest thing in the world.
…and I don’t want to lease pieces of your silly little soul, I have an entirely different task in mind for you, for I have a lover of my own whom I must be reunited with. Have you ever considered a career as a wizard’s apprentice?
I stared at the demon in silence.
Resurrection is a specialty of mine, though. I could get you literally anyone else. Want to have lunch with George Washington? Everyone wants to have lunch with George Washington–
I did not want to have lunch with George Washington.
###
I held the sharpie in my right fist as I approached the cave opening in the distance, as instructed by Manha’s scroll. Nitrogen ice crunched just like real ice under my feet.
“How did a bunch of scientists in a conference room changing the technical definition of an astronomical term screw up Manha’s magic so badly she needed to send me to Pluto?”
Manha has a network of spells installed here that…well, they act as a spam filter for fan mail from alien wizards. The spell-network refers to Pluto as the ninth planet. The declaration won’t make the meaning shift instantly; the masses are too stubbornly attached to their mnemonic devices and their papier mache planet dioramas from elementary school. But it will shift eventually.
It took a lot of whiskey, cocaine, bribery, and general chaos mongering to get a bunch of stuck-up astronomers to dethrone everyone’s favorite planet. I had to deputize dozens of lesser demons. I’m surprised no one died.
“And this network of spells is…your partner?” I tried to keep the doubt out of my voice but failed, for which I felt guilty.
Our love is made of pure will and starlight, far superior to the stew of hormone-soaked meat with a shim of shared cultural programming that passes for romance among your kind.
We descended into the cave, which was made entirely of gears. Thousands of them, some smaller than my pinky and others larger than a skyscraper. The sound of them grinding against each other was deafening.
Eventually, we reached a pedestal topped with a single small gear. It had the English word “planet” engraved upon it. Manha’s scroll instructed me to draw an editor’s insertion mark on the gear with the Sharpie, and then, above that, to write “dwarf.”
“Really,” I said. The word was swallowed by the cacophony.
Remove the gear and put the wooden finger in its place said the demon. His voice trembled with excitement.
I yanked far harder than I needed to–it slid out with a gentle pop. The socket wasn’t the correct shape, but I pushed the finger in anyway, and it locked into place with a thud. Instantaneously, the gears stopped, and the cave was swallowed by silence.
I waited for the demon to speak. I wondered what the equivalent of reunion sex for a concept-construct and a spell network was? Was it any fun?
It takes ten thousand years, yes, it is a great deal of fun, and no, we have not started yet. The demon’s voice was calmer than I’d ever heard it.
“So. Is there anything else? Or did you already do it?” My voice echoed in the empty cave. “Cure cancer, I mean.”
Actually…about that… The demon’s voice was…strange. Apologetic. Weasely. My anger began to smolder.
“About what? That’s the deal.”
Well…cancer is more complex than you suspect. The biological mechanisms are linked to longevity; any permanent cure would either lead to humans living for far longer or far shorter than they should, which has all kinds of repercussions. Also, a steadily increasing amount of cancer-related suffering is owed to a cabal of evil gods as a part of an ancient peace treaty. The suffering must increase until it reaches an annual cap of fifteen million anti-utiles, but at a slower rate than the suffering from other causes decreases. Overall, it’s a great deal.
The flames of my anger licked merrily up through my chest and into my throat.
Furthermore, cancer increases the mortality of the wealthy and powerful, increasing their mean humility, which has second-order effects on the soul salvation rate. Cancer gets a lot of humans into heaven who would otherwise…not go to heaven.
My anger was a forest fire, wild and uncontrolled.
And there are dozens of other considerations. Curing cancer would upset a variety of entities who would take out their justifiable anger on me. But! I can replace the existing disease with a species of nano-demons that pretend to be abnormal cells. “Cancer” is defined as uncontrollable cell division so this will satisfy the terms of our contract. I’ll also throw in a billion dollars’ worth of diamonds. You can make a foundation in Diana’s name!
My anger burned hotter than Sol. My anger was as bright as the Sun.
“Our contract has ten pages describing the criteria for what curing cancer means and another fifteen discussing general edge cases and disqualifying conditions. Your proposal would not lead to an overall decrease in human suffering and thus violates several of the anti-monkey’s paw clauses including 5.4.2, 5.5.1, and 5.5.2, as well as the entirety of sub-section 7.2,” I spat through gritted teeth.
The demon was silent for three long seconds. The impossibility doctrine–
“Would apply if it were impossible, but none of what you mentioned is impossible. You just have to redesign longevity. Renegotiate the peace treaty. Throw open the gates of heaven. Whatever it takes.”
Impracticability then–
“Would apply if there was an occurrence of a condition whose nonoccurrence was a basic assumption of the contract, which isn’t the case here. Also it has to be unforeseen by both parties and this condition was foreseen by you. Do you think I didn’t prepare for this?”
The demon mumbled obscenities. I felt him scrabbling and struggling against the contract within my mind, like a fly caught in a spider’s web.
Just need to apply the right pressure, find the clause that the sacrifice doesn’t quite understand…wait. She was a lawyer? You sacrificed a thrice-damned contract lawyer to animate our agreement! That is a foul trick.
“Diana doubted me, you know. My theory was that demonologists always fail so spectacularly, not because demons are evil geniuses but because most demonologists are short-sighted, greedy assholes.
“You’re not the first demon to offer me diamonds. Do you fuckers have a De Beers sponsorship or something? The one I summoned last year gave us enough to pay for six months from the entire staff of the three best contract law firms in the world. We hired hackers to target the serious members of the demonologist darknet forums until we assembled a complete copy of your legal codes. That contract is valid in fifteen infernal jurisdictions and most human ones. And it is bulletproof.”
Do you think you are the first to try this? I have lost count of how many times the true power brokers have rebuilt the universe stone by stone. Every shining city that has ever existed has had a starving child in its basement. It is the unavoidable shape of any sufficiently complex reality.
I shrugged. “It is only unavoidable until we succeed in avoiding it.”
I can bring her back.
The rage that streamed through me vanished. “What? You lied? You said–”
I didn’t lie. Not exactly. I couldn’t resurrect her then, before you reunited me with my true love. If I resurrect her, the contract terminates immediately, but if you allow me to replace cancer with nano-demons, our obligations to each other will be complete. And it is a major violation of the guild bylaws, very bad form to refund the initial investment, encourages frivolous summoning. I’d require you to sign a non-disclosure agreement, of course…
The first chuckle was voluntary. The gales of laughter which followed…less so. I fell onto the floor of the cave and cried onto its silver surface.
Even if I succeeded in meeting the terms of your ridiculous contract, which is far from certain, it would take centuries. Probably millennia. You would die long before the task was finished and her soul was freed.
I realized the floor I lay upon was yet another gear, a small piece of an enormous wheel which had turned so slowly I hadn’t noticed the motion.
He could bring her back, I could have my life back. I’d be the weird witchy wife to her hot-shot lawyer, summoning imps in the basement of our Capitol Hill cottage while she won cases for her clients. We would bicker about whether it was wise to grow tomatoes in the Pacific Northwest and cuddle up in bed to watch true crime documentaries until we fell asleep in each other’s arms.
Her last words to me didn’t have twenty pages of clauses defining cancer like the contract did. I wouldn’t be going against her–No, I couldn’t keep playing those games, playing his games. I’d be going against her wishes. But I would have her back.
Or I could force him to spend thousands of years trying to cure cancer while I grew old and died alone. He might not even succeed.
Godsdamnit. I wiped the tears from my face and stood.
“She nearly divorced me for giving up some fingers for her, what do you think she’d do to me if I ignored her last words and gave up a chance to save millions of lives? And even if she forgave me…” I swallowed back more tears. “Even if she forgave me, I wouldn’t forgive myself for betraying her trust again.” I lifted my eyes to the wooden finger embedded in the pedestal. “Nice try, fucker.”
The wooden finger quivered. The scrabbling sensation within my mind faded. He had lost, and he knew it.
This is not my first crusade. This is not the first time a client has tried to corral me into pursuing their valorous delusions, the demon’s voice trembled with rage.
I rose, facing the wooden finger implanted in the gear socket. I’d have to watch him closely in the decades that I had. Make sure he didn’t find a way to weasel out of the deal. Find a way to keep him on track after I died.
Find a way to live without her.
Every single time someone like you gets power over someone like me, they reshuffle everything and change nothing. Every time I’ve been part of an effort to save the world in a deep way, in a way that matters, it has failed!
“TRY AGAIN”
