Storm Front

Well, no. There probably weren’t any women incredible enough to make me keep my mind on them through all of that. But all the same, it seemed a little rude of me.

"Hi, Susan," I said, lamely. I peered past her. When had Susan said she was going to show up? Nine? And when had Linda said? Eight – no, wait. She’d said eight o’clock at first, and then said she’d be by in another hour after that. At nine. Hooboy. This was not going to be pretty.

Susan read me like a book and glanced back behind her in the rain, before looking back up at me. "Expecting someone, Harry?"

"Not exactly," I told her. "Uh, well. Maybe. Look, come on in. You’re getting drenched." Which wasn’t exactly true. I was getting drenched, my bare feet soaked, standing there in the open door, the wind blowing rain down the stairway at me.

Susan’s mouth quirked in a malicious, predatory little smile, and she came in, folding down her umbrella and brushing past me. "This is your apartment?"

"Nah," I told her. "This is my summer home in Zurich." She eyed me as I closed the door, took her coat, and hung it up on a tall old wooden hat stand near the doorway.

Susan turned away from me as I hung up her coat. Her dress showed her back, the long curve of her spine, all the way down to her waist. It had a fairly tame hemline, and long, tight sleeves. I liked it. A lot. She let me see her back for a while as she walked away from me, toward the fireplace, then slowly turned to face me, smirking, leaning one smooth hip on the couch. Her midnight hair was bound up on top of her head, displaying a long and slender neck, her skin an advertisement for something smooth and wonderful. Her lips quirked up at the corners, and she narrowed her dark, flashing eyes at me. "The police having you put in overtime, Harry?" she drawled. "The killings must be sensational. Major crime figure, murdered with magic. Care to make a statement?"

I winced. She was still hunting for an angle for the Arcane. "Sure," I told her. Her eyes widened in surprise. "I need a shower," I said. "I’ll be right back. Mister, keep an eye on the lady, eh?"

Susan gave me a little roll of her eyes, then glanced up and studied Mister on his perch on the bookcase. Mister, for his part, flicked an ear and continued staring at the door.

More thunder rumbled overhead.

I lit a few candles for her, then took one with me into the bathroom. Think, Harry. Get awake, and get your head clear. What to do?

Get clean, I told myself. You smell like a horse. Get some cool water over your head and work this out. Linda Randall is going to be here in a minute, and you need to figure out how to keep Susan from prying her nose into the murders.

So advised, I agreed with myself and hurriedly got undressed and into the shower. I don’t use a water heater, and consequently I am more than used to cold showers. Actually, given how often I, and wizards in general, get to date actual real women, maybe that’s just as well.

I was just lathering up with shampoo when the lightning got a lot worse, the thunder a lot louder, the rain a lot harder. The height of the storm had hit the old house and hit it hard. It was almost possible to see clearly in the violent electrical discharge. Almost impossible to hear over the thunder. But I caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of my eye, a shadow that moved across the sunken window (covered by modest curtains) in the bathroom. Someone was moving toward the stairs down to my apartment.

Did I mention how I haven’t had a ton of success with women? Nights like this are one reason why. I panicked, hard. I leapt out of the shower, my head all a-sudsy, wrapped a towel around my waist, and headed out into the front room.

I couldn’t let Linda just come to the door and have Susan answer it. That would be the cattiest thing you’ve ever seen, and I would be the one to get all the scratches and bites, too.

I rounded the corner from my bedroom into the main room and saw Susan reaching for the doorknob. Lightning flashed again, and thunder kept me from hearing the knob’s click-clack. I heard something else, though, a snarling, spitting sound, and saw Mister, on his feet now, his back arched up and all his fur fluffed out, teeth bared, his no-longer-sleepy eyes fastened on the door.

The thunder passed as Susan swung the door open. I could see her face in profile. One hand was on her hip, and there was an amused, dangerous little smile on her pretty mouth.

As the door opened, I felt it, the cloud of energies that accompanies a spirit-being when it comes into the mortal world, disguised until now by the background clutter of the storm. A figure stood in the doorway, rather squat, less than five feet tall, dressed in a plain brown trench coat, illuminated by blue lightning overhead. There was something wrong to the shape, something that just wasn’t a part of good old Mother Earth. It’s «head» turned to look at me, and sudden twin points of fire, as blue as the lightning dancing above, flared up, illuminating the leathery, inhuman curves of a face that most closely resembled that of a large and warty toad.

Susan got a good look at the demon’s eyes and face from two feet away and screamed.

"Susan!" I shouted, already moving toward the couch. "Get out of the way!" I threw myself to the floor behind the couch, landed with a whumph of hard floor hitting my ribs.

The demon’s jaws parted in a silent hiss, and its throat constricted weirdly as I vanished behind the couch. There was a hissing sound, and a heart-sized section of the couch just dissolved in a cloud of mist and foul stench. Droplets of liquid spattered through, onto the floor near me, and where they touched little holes corroded outward in the space of two seconds. I rolled away from the couch and the demon’s acid.

"Susan!" I shouted. "Get back toward the kitchen! Don’t get between it and me!"

"What is it?" she screamed back at me.

"A bad guy." I poked my head up and peered through the smoking hole in the couch, ready to duck back down at a moment’s notice. The demon, squat and bulkier than a human, was standing in the doorway, both long-fingered, pad-tipped hands leaning forward toward the inside of the house. It paused as though resting against a light screen.

"Why isn’t it coming in?" Susan asked from the far corner, near the door. Her back was pressed to the wall, and her eyes were wide and terrified. My God, I thought, just don’t pass out on me, Susan.

"Homestead laws," I said. "It isn’t a mortal creature. It has to gather its energy to push through the barrier around a home."

"Can it get in?" she said. Her voice was thin, reedy. She was asking questions, gathering information, data, falling back on her ingrained career instincts – because, I suspected, her rational brain had short-circuited. That happens to people who get a good hard look at a demon for the first time.