knocking me to the ground. Even without a body, it felt as if the creature was crouched over me, pinning me to the cold hard stones.
Not hers! Demon, not monster, it snarled.
I flinched, feeling as if the thing was grinding my brain cells between its molars. “Fine! Sorry! Demon. Not monster,” I shouted, ready to concede anything so it would give me a little more breathing room.
The demon’s anger receded with my words and it retreated. I was slow to get to my feet. My knees were jelly and couldn’t hold me. Sadly, I think the demon had also fried my common sense, because I still couldn’t keep my mouth shut. “Fine, Demon Not Monster. You’re following Lilith’s suggestion, but she doesn’t control you. Why bother listening to her request?”
If it was going to give me a free pass at breathing, I wanted to know why. The hope was that if I knew the real reason, then I was likely to find the boundaries of its good will. A stupid hope, I was sure, but I was afraid of running into the situation where if it thought too much about its decision to let me live, it might discover that its reasons weren’t all that good after all.
Why would I kill the one who lets me out to play?
A chill ran down my spine, raising the hairs on my arms. I opened my mouth to argue that I had no dealings with demons but something shifted slightly in the creature as it drew away from me and it suddenly felt . . . familiar. The same feeling that had hit me when I first stepped into the room.
“Shit,” I hissed, stumbling backward. The demon moved, closing the distance between us to push against my back to keep me from falling on my ass. I jerked away from it, but didn’t take any additional steps. My head was spinning. The protection spell in the basement of Asylum, the energy I set loose to attack anyone that entered my private domain, was a demon.
I cursed myself and my stupidity for ever trusting a powerful protection spell I copied off of Simon. It should have been no surprise that the warlock has been messing with things no sane person would have used. Everyone said demons couldn’t be controlled. They’d tear your heart out just for laughs and slurp up your soul as a cocktail. All they knew was pain and destruction.
Pushing back the panic, I tried to focus on the fact that the demon that was guarding my basement as also guarding Simon’s rooms, which meant that I could actually put it back into lockdown mode. It would take a whole hell of a lot more energy than I normally needed to use, because it had consumed not only Simon’s rooms, but its energy was also starting to leak out into the hall.
“It’s the symbol,” I murmured, not sure if I was talking to the demon or myself. Any fear I had felt instantly disappeared as a rush of understanding swept through me. Adrenaline pumped through my veins and I nearly laughed. “It’s the symbol. It’s not so much a spell as it is a doorway for you. The only reason you listen to me is because I control whether the door is open or closed.”
True . . . partially.
“And the reason your powers are leaking into the hall?”
The one that lived here, the one that you killed . . . the door has been left open for too long. It has allowed me to push against the boundaries he set for me.
“And if I lock the doorway again?”
I would not be pleased.
Yeah, I could have guessed, I thought but kept my mouth shut. The key was that the demon didn’t say that I couldn’t close the doorway again. Sure, I certainly didn’t want to piss off a demon, but it wasn’t like I could leave it running around loose in Simon’s rooms.
Or maybe I could . . .
“If I leave this doorway open, will you allow me to come and go in this room unharmed?”
You control my door. I must.
I frowned. That was only partially true. It was hard to believe, but demons couldn’t lie. They could bend the truth. They could tell you partial truths, leaving out key information that would get you killed later. But they couldn’t say “no” when the truth was clearly “yes.” Funny enough, there were also stories that angels could lie to you and did frequently