Still, she was determined to finish her invention tonight. She’d be just as tired tomorrow, and exams were fast approaching. She waited by the door for a moment, listening for the familiar clacking of Mephisto’s claws, and hissed at it to move back so it wasn’t injured.
Inside, the laboratory was even messier than she remembered, with scraps of wire and discarded nuts and bolts littering old, moth-eaten throw rugs. On the wall, diagrams were scrawled on the back side of maps, which made for easy flipping when Uncle Leo visited. Dried herbs and flowers that Aurelie pretended were mere decoration hung from the ceiling, though she often used them in her experiments. A small wall cabinet intended for knickknacks held various specimens behind its doors, which she’d foolishly left ajar. Her job as a handyperson provided her with the perfect cover to keep a toolbox here, though all the tools inside were specialized for her inventing needs.
She was tempted to lie down for a brief nap, but odds were that she wouldn’t wake up until morning, and she was expected to eat dinner with her uncle every night at the cottage. She spent less and less time there lately, and though he pretended to understand, she could tell it hurt him. But no matter how hard she tried to stay away, she simply couldn’t help it. If she could be anywhere in the entire kingdom, she would choose to be in her laboratory.
Placing her kettle on a small gas stove she’d fashioned for herself—the first and last time Aurelie risked conjuring a fire demon—she prepared herself a pot of coffee and waited for it to boil while she tidied up. Aurelie had spent the last eleven years of her life at the university, and what had once been a dreary and forgotten classroom—back before the “new” annex had been built and classes were relocated aboveground, so students could see the sunlight every now and again—had become her haven when Uncle Leo took her in. At first, the room had hardly been habitable, and Uncle Leo hadn’t understood why Aurelie needed more than her perfectly nice bedroom in his cottage.
“It’s dingy,” he’d said, sniffing. “With a subtle hint of mildew.”
But her persistence had won him over, and she’d eventually acquired the discarded library sofa, a desk from another abandoned classroom, and a wardrobe procured from a consignment sale held by a retiring professor. Most importantly, Aurelie had begun to collect items for her laboratory.
Uncle Leo didn’t know about Aurelie’s inventing. As far as he was concerned, the wardrobe was filled with her spare dresses, shoes, and underthings, rather than beakers, vials, and experiments at various stages of completion. The desk, he no doubt assumed, was where Aurelie wrote correspondence or applied cosmetics, and the sofa... well, the sofa was for sitting, to be fair. But it made a surprisingly comfortable bed. Aurelie slept in this room most nights now that she was eighteen.
She poured her coffee into a chipped porcelain bowl and sat at her desk, alternating between inhaling the warm, roasty scent and blowing steam off the surface. Mephisto squeaked from the floor, its claws tangling in her skirt. “Oh dear, is it dinnertime already?”
After feeding it another cockroach, followed by a quick sweep of the few seeds Mephisto left in its wake, she took a sip of her rapidly cooling coffee and settled down again at her desk, where the Helping Hand waited for her.
Despite her excitement, a small worm of apprehension wriggled in her gut. She didn’t dread demons the way most Wisterians did—yes, demons could kill people, but those were the sorts of large demons that no one saw much anymore; any that did arise were taken care of by the Iron Guard—but she also didn’t like killing them. Mephisto was a demon, after all, and it had never done anything worse than nip her toes or leave seed droppings on her pillow. But even the most benign demons couldn’t be allowed to escape. Not if Aurelie wanted to keep inventing.
Perching her magnifying glasses on her nose, she peered down at the fiddly little wire she needed to bend just so in order to fit it into its mooring. One... final... twist.
“There!” she exclaimed, causing the demon to look up mid-cockroach, a spiny leg dangling from the corner of its mouth. “It’s ready, Mephisto. Let’s see how it works!”
Removing her glasses, Aurelie pulled the trigger on the device, causing the pincer at the end to open and close. She squealed with delight and reached for one of the books still sitting on her bed from this morning. It took a few tries to get the angle correct, but with a little finesse, the Helping Hand worked like a charm. She pressed the button next to her thumb and the fishing line inside spooled inward, bringing the telescoping arm in with it. And there it was, a book in her lap without her having to move from her desk.
Aurelie hardly had time to enjoy the fruits of her labor beforethere was a slight shimmer in the air beside her, followed by the smell of brimstone and smoke.
A second later, the demon was upon her.
The rapid appearance of the demon caught Aurelie off guard. Usually it was at least a minute before they came from whatever dimension they originated in, and it was only by luck that her iron dagger was close at hand now.
The demon was larger than she’d anticipated, with seven long arms ending in crablike pincers. Those, she’d been expecting, though perhaps not quite so many; demons always took a form related to the invention they sprang from. It was the fact that it went straight for her books that really threw Aurelie, cramming two into its fang-filled maw before she had even drawn her blade.
Aurelie leapt up, thrusting her chair at the demon and knocking it off-balance to draw its attention to her. As she knew it would, the demon abandoned the books in search of a hot-blooded meal, forcing her to dodge left and right to avoid its deadly pincers. Demons ate whatever living thing they could get their claws on, and some had been known to possess venom strong enough to paralyze or kill their prey.
Diminutive though it was, Mephisto darted between the demon’s pincers, confusing it long enough that Aurelie was able to grab the pot of coffee. She flung it at the demon while simultaneously slicing off an arm with her dagger, a claw only millimeters from her nose. Within seconds, the demon began to smoke and crackle, before bursting into green flames that burned out so quickly it was almost as if the creature had never been. All that was left behind were the confetti-like ribbons of pages the demon hadn’t yet consumed. That, and her beautiful, wasted coffee.
Aurelie inhaled shakily and dusted off her shoulders, making sure she still had all her appendages. Mephisto, too, seemed unharmed, and she patted its long, bristly tail in thanks. With a sigh, she bent down to retrieve what remained of one of the books. It was an old biology textbook that she would very much have liked to read, and now she’d have to reimburse the library for it.
As Mephisto returned to its unfinished meal, Aurelie picked up the Helping Hand and used it to grasp a glass of water on the side table that served as a nightstand. She drank it all in one long gulp, tidied her hair in the mirror, and mopped up the remaining mess. She was already going to be late for dinner, and as she calculated the cost for two old textbooks—their price inflated, of course, because no new books were being written—she wondered for the first time if this experiment had been worth it.
“Of course it is,” she whispered to herself as she locked the door behind her. She knew better than anyone that progress was not a straight path; it featured all the topography of an uncharted world, and all the promise.
And it required a person like Aurelie to brave it.
Chapter 2
Des
Keeping to the shadows as he stalked his prey, Destrier Whitlow wondered why people continued to procreate at all. It was a Monday night, and though he should have been in the barracks with his fellow guards, enjoying his only day of leisure, babies insisted on being born regardless.
The trouble with creating new life was that it also created demons, and particularly unpleasant ones to kill.Natia, or natal demons, took the form of young children, indistinguishable from their human counterparts except for the lingering smell of sulfur and ash and their crimson eyes. He gripped the hilt of the iron sword at his hip and continued to follow a girl with blond ringlets hanging to her shoulders, walking with an unnaturally self-assured gait for a child so young.
“Des,” his partner hissed from across the street, causing the demon to glance behind her and quicken her pace.
Des pressed a finger to his lips, urging the boy to be quiet before their quarry ran. Demons were fast, and Des was still tired from the two he’d killed yesterday. The commander should have known better than to give him such a green guard as a partner. Then again, Des was being trained for command himself one day, and this was likely a strategic move on Commander Yew’s part, not a coincidence.
The boy, Gareth, hurried across the street to where Des stood.