Storm Front

"I’m stuck in the skull," Bob said. "If you don’t let me out, I can’t do much of anything, Harry."

Susan stood up on tiptoe to gnaw at my ear, wrapped her shapely thigh around one of mine, and started whimpering and pulling me toward the floor. My balance wavered. A three-foot circle was not enough to perform wrestling or gymnastics or … anything else in, without leaving something sticking out for the waiting demon to chew on.

"Is the other potion still there?" I asked.

"Sure," Bob said. "I can see it where it fell on the floor. Could throw it to you, too."

"Okay," I said, growing excited – well. More excited. I might yet get out of this basement alive. "I’m going to let you out for five minutes. I want you to help me by throwing me the potion."

"No, boss," Bob said, his voice maddeningly cheerful.

"No? No?!"

"I get a twenty-four-hour leave, or nothing."

"Dammit, Bob! I’m responsible for what you do if I let you out! You know that!"

Susan whispered, into my ear, "I’m not wearing any underwear," and tried something approximating a pro-wrestling takedown to drop me to the floor. I wavered in balance and barely managed to stave her off. The demon’s frog-eyes narrowed, and it came to its feet, ready to leap on us.

"Bob!" I yelled. "You slimy jerk!"

"You try living in a bony old skull for a few hundred years, Harry! You’d want to get a night off once in a while, too!"

"Fine!" I shouted, my heart leaping into my throat as my balance wavered again. "Fine! Just make sure you get me the potion! You have twenty-four hours."

"Just make sure you catch it," Bob replied. And then a flood of orangish light flowed out of both of the skull’s eye sockets and into the room. The lights swooped down in an elongated cloud over the potion bottle that lay on the floor at the far side of the lab, gathered it up, and hurled it through the air toward me. I reached up with my spare hand and caught it, bobbled it for a minute, and then secured it again.

The orange lights that were Bob’s spirit-form danced a little jig, then whizzed up the ladder and out of the lab, vanishing.

"What’s that?" Susan murmured, eyes dazed.

"Another drink," I said. "Drink this with me. I think I can cover us both in the focus department, get us out of here."

"Harry," she said. "I’m not thirsty." Her eyes smoldered. "I’m hungry."

I hit upon an idea. "Once we drink this, I’ll be ready, and we can go to bed."

She looked up at me hazily and smiled, wicked and delighted. "Oh, Harry. Bottoms up." Her hands made a sort of silent commentary on her words, and I jumped, almost dropping the bottle. More shampoo from my hair trailed down my already burning eyes, and I squeezed them closed.

I slugged away about half the potion, trying to ignore the flat-cola taste, and quickly passed the rest to Susan. She smiled lazily and drank it down, licking her lips.

It started in my guts – a sort of fluttery, wobbly feeling that moved out, up through my lungs and out along my shoulders, down my arms. It also went down, over my hips and into my legs. I began to shake and quiver uncontrollably.

And then I just flew apart into a cloud of a million billion tiny pieces of Harry, each one with its own perspective and view. The room wasn’t just a square, cluttered basement to me, but a pattern of energies, grouped into specific shapes and uses. Even the demon was only a cloud of particles, slow and dense. I flowed around that cloud, up through the opening in the ceiling pattern, and outside of the apartment and into the raging nonpattern of the storm.

It took maybe five seconds, and then the power of the potion faded. I felt all the little pieces of me abruptly rush back together and slam into one another at unthinkable speed. It hurt, and made me nauseous, a sort of heavy-duty thump of impact that didn’t come from any one direction, but from every direction at once. I staggered, planted my staff on the ground, and felt the rain wash down over me.

Susan appeared next to me a heartbeat later, and promptly sat down on her butt on the ground, in the rain. "Oh, God. I feel terrible."

Inside the apartment, the demon screamed, a raging, voiceless hiss. I could hear it madly rampaging around inside. "Come on," I told her. "We’ve got to get out of here before it gets smart and starts looking outside for us."

"I’m sick," she said. "I’m not sure I can walk."

"The mixed potions," I said. "They can do that to you. But we have to go now. Come on, Susan. Up and at ’em." I bent down and got her up on her feet and moving away from my apartment.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"Do you have your car keys?"

She patted the dress, as if looking for pockets, and then shook her head dazedly. "They were in my coat pocket."

"We walk, then."

"Walk where?"

"Over to Reading Road. It always floods when there’s this much rain. It’ll be enough water to ground that thing if it tries to follow us." It was only a couple of blocks away. The cold rain came down in buckets. I was shaking, shivering, and naked, and more soap was getting into my eyes. But hey. At least I was clean.

"Wha?" she mumbled. "What will the rain do to it?"

"Not rain. Running water. It kills him if he tries to go over it after us," I explained to her, patiently. I hoped the potions mixing together in her stomach hadn’t done anything irreversible. There had been accidents before. We were moving at good speed, all things considered, and had covered maybe forty yards in the pouring rain. Not much farther to go.

"Oh. Oh, that’s good," she said. And then she convulsed and pitched to the ground. I tried to hold her, but I was just too tired, my arms too weak. I nearly went down with her. She rolled to her side and lay that way, retching horribly, vomiting herself empty.

Thunder and lightning raged around us again, and I heard the sharp crack of the storm’s power touching a tree nearby. I saw a bright flash of contact and then the subdued glow of burning branches. I looked in the direction we had been heading. The flooding Reading Road, safety from the demon, was still thirty yards away.

"I didn’t think you’d last this long," someone said.

I almost jumped out of my skin. I picked my staff up in both hands and turned in a slow circle, searching for the source of the voice. "Who’s there?" There, to one side, a spot of cold – not physical cold, but something deeper and darker that my other senses detected. A pooling of shadows, an illusion in the darkness between lights, gone when lightning flashed and back again when it had passed.