Axton smiled. “Didn’t see them coming, did you?”
“I did not,” Amber said, feeling the air on her skin as more scales retracted. The small of her back was now bare, and she expected to feel a knife plunge into her flesh at any moment. “You’re a clever man,” she said.
“I am?”
“Got me doubting myself.”
He chuckled. “It’s all true, though. Astaroth can’t have you too unstoppable, you see. You demons need chinks in your armour, both figuratively and literally.”
Her arms. Her arms were bare. Amber could feel the bogles’ claws digging into her skin now. She could feel the cold steel of their knives pressing between her shoulder blades.
“He didn’t just grant you the ability to talk to these little bastards, did he?” she asked, even though she was pretty sure she knew the answer.
Axton shrugged. “I can talk to anything and anyone.”
“Including me. You’re getting me to calm down. The more I calm down, the less scales I have.”
“We’re just having a conversation.”
“While you’re getting ready to kill me,” said Amber.
“That’s by the by, is it not? I’m not a violent man.”
“How many people have you killed?”
“There are plenty more people to go around, young lady. There are only a few of these bogles. Although, admittedly, they do breed incredibly fast.” Axton nodded to a bogle that sauntered towards him, holding its bloated belly. “They need very specific nesting conditions in order to lay their eggs, however. A very particular environment that provides both a viable temperature for birth and food for the offspring.”
“Yeah?” said Amber. “And where’s that?”
Axton blinked. “Why, on you, of course.”
AMBER GLARED. “DON’T YOU dare.”
“It’s actually a very beautiful process,” said Axton.
“I swear to Christ,” she responded, gritting her teeth, “if it lays its eggs on me I’m gonna break every goddamn bone in your body.”
Axton smiled with reassuring banality. “It’s not going to hurt, if that’s what you’re worried about. Well, it will, but it’ll be over before you know it. They are rather fast eaters.”
“It’s not about the pain, Paul. I just have a rule that forbids anything from ever laying its eggs on me, that’s all. It’s a personal thing.”
“It’s nature, young lady,” Axton told her. “It’s the circle of life.”
“If it were the circle of life, it would keep happening to me. But this, this right here? This’d be the first time a little furry freak laid their eggs on my body, so it’s not the circle of life, it’s just gross.”
“It won’t take long.”
Amber watched the pregnant bogle get closer. “Which part?” she asked.
“Any of it,” said Axton. “They have an accelerated hatching rate.”
Amber took a deep, calming breath. “Paul, you pay attention to what it is I’m saying to you.”
The pregnant bogle moaned.
“Too late, I’m afraid,” Axton said. “Fahl-ahey booshop.”
Amber felt dozens of little hands grabbing her, and before she could lash out she was flipped on to her back. The bogles swarmed over her once more, their knives tearing through the lower half of her tank top, poised to pierce her red skin as her scales continued to slowly retract.
“I wouldn’t move, if I were you,” said Axton. “Their eggs can be laid on a freshly killed corpse, but it’s certainly not the ideal way to do it.”
Some of the other bogles lay down, forming steps to allow the pregnant one to waddle up on to Amber’s bare belly. The bogle poked and prodded and Amber growled, and got a couple of blades nicking her throat for her efforts.
Finally, the pregnant bogle squatted down, right over Amber’s navel, and closed its eyes and started straining.
The scales on Amber’s face were now fully gone, and the knives had more places to threaten. It was Axton’s voice that was doing it, even more than his words. His voice was getting into her head, lulling her defences to sleep.
“Someday I want their eggs to be laid on me,” Axton said. “To be a part of this, to be such an integral part … that would be the ultimate honour.”
“Take my place, then,” Amber said quickly. “Come on, time’s a-wasting.”
“I’m afraid not,” said Axton. “They were going to use the body of the security guard, but now they have you. I can only hope that someday soon I prove myself worthy of being a nest.”
The pregnant bogle grunted, dumping a reddish-tinged liquid on to Amber like someone had upturned a bucket. The smell hit her and Amber clamped her mouth shut and stopped breathing as she turned her head away.
Axton was weeping. “Nature’s miracle,” he said.
Amber looked back at the bogle as its straining got more intense. Its belly bulged, and as the egg protruded Amber tried to go to her happy place. But she didn’t have a happy place. All she had was the floor of a department store at night, and the furry monster that was laying its eggs on her belly.
The first egg plopped out. It was grey and mottled, covered in a thick, mucus-like liquid. It settled on her belly.
The bogle strained again, and a second egg began to appear.
“How many?” she muttered between clenched teeth.
Axton raised an eyebrow. “Sorry? What was that?”
“How many eggs?”
“Ah,” he said. “Typically six, though I have seen some bogles lay nine.”
Amber lay there and tried not to breathe through her nose as more eggs plopped out, joining the sticky mess on her belly. A group of bogles stood close by, their eyes on the eggs. They all wore ties around their necks, and stood like expectant fathers. They were short, furry and they all looked the same.
The pregnant bogle was done and it collapsed, but there were others to catch it before it hit the ground. They held the bogle overhead, like it was solemnly crowd-surfing, before dumping it behind a display. Amber counted the eggs. Seven of them.
“How long?” she asked Axton.
“Mere moments,” he answered, jotting something in a little notebook. “Try not to move. They’ll emerge feeling nauseous if you move too much.” He checked his watch.
One of the eggs cracked, and Axton scribbled furiously.
A clawed fist punctured the shell from the inside, and the baby bogle squeezed its mucus-coated, furry head through the gap. It looked around with huge, crazy eyes, drawing a chorus of ooooohs from the assembled crowd. A fist burst through another egg, and another, and suddenly it was a race to see who’d be the first one out.
Amber didn’t bother keeping track, but one by one the baby bogles emerged, already scratching Amber’s belly with their sharp claws. When the last baby hatched, there was a cheer from the tie-wearing bogles, and Amber watched as one of them handed out cigars. Another of the little bastards had a lighter, and soon they were all puffing away like proud fathers, chattering in that nonsensical language of theirs.
Amber watched them puff those cigars, watched the cloud of smoke slowly rising …
An alarm went off and the sprinklers activated and the bogles, every one of them, looked up to see where all the water was coming from. Amber turned over, brushing the chittering babies to the floor, and scrambled up. Axton saw her coming and shrieked. He ran and she followed, knives flashing at her heels. He slipped on the wet floor and she grabbed him, swung him round, used him as a shield as the bogles closed in.
“Tell them to back off,” she ordered, and gave him a violent shake. “Tell them to back off!”
“Ah ween oh shah!” Axton cried over the sound of the alarm. “Ah ween oh shah, kah plemby!”
The bogles kept coming.
“What did you tell them?” Amber snarled into his ear as she dragged him backwards.
“I did what you asked,” Axton said. “They’re just not obeying.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I don’t know,” said Axton, listening to the bogles babble. “I … I don’t think they like me.”
“Seriously?” said Amber, spitting water.
“Also, they don’t like getting wet. That’s one of the rules. It puts them in a most disagreeable mood. So this …” He looked up at the sprinklers, still spraying water. “This is bad.”
As one, the bogles screeched in homicidal rage, and swarmed in. Amber spun, Axton right behind her.
They ran and slipped and scrambled and fled, and the bogles screeched and snapped and swiped and pursued. The water shorted out something over in the home-entertainment aisle, throwing sparks into the air like fireworks. The bogles stopped running and stared in wonder, and Amber and Axton ran on, deep into the grocery section.
Amber threw Axton behind a freezer in the middle of an aisle and fell to her knees beside him.
She grabbed the front of his shirt and twisted. “How do we stop them?”
“We run,” said Axton, still panting. “We get in a car and we drive away. They won’t be able to follow. They can operate machinery, but not very well. It’s their short attention spans – they’re always crashing.”
“We’re not going to just leave them here,” Amber said. “They’ll kill people. They’ll spread.”
The water cut off, but the alarm kept wailing, and Axton blinked at her. “So?”
“So I don’t want innocent people to die,” she told him.
“What do you care? You’re Astaroth’s representative. Saving innocent people isn’t exactly your job.”
“Yeah, well, I’m changing the terms of my employment. How do we stop them?”
“We can’t,” Axton said. “There are too many.”
Amber resisted the urge to throttle him. “Can we draw them all into one place? Is there something they can’t resist? Catnip for bogles?”
“Not … not really.”
She leaned in. “You hesitated. There is something.”
“I … well, I’ve always worked hard to keep them away from alcohol. They have an … unhealthy reaction to it.”
“Unhealthy how?”
Axton looked conflicted, and Amber punched him.
“Ow! Why did you do that?”
“Because you have a face I like to punch, and you’re holding something back.”
“Fine,” he muttered. “I introduced five bogles to alcohol in a controlled environment in order to study the effects it might have on them. None survived.”
She frowned. “Alcohol kills them?”
“No, alcohol gets them drunk. Really fast. Once they’re drunk, they argue and kill each other. At first, I thought it merely heightened their violent tendencies. Then I realised it just made them bigger jerks than they already were.”
“They get drunk, they annoy each other, and they fight until they’re all dead,” said Amber. “Okay, that’s a definite weakness. So how do we get them to drink?”
“Well … that shouldn’t be a problem. You just need to show them booze, and they’ll do the rest.”
Amber jumped to her feet, took Axton with her.
“So what’s the plan?” he asked as she dragged him after her. “You’re going to lead them to the drinks? Where will I wait? I can wait over there, if you want.”
“You’re coming with me.”
“Is that strictly wise? As you have seen, I’m not very good at physical confrontation.”
“Is it my fault you sold your soul in order to be a bigger nerd than you already were?”
“I – I guess not.”
“Hey!” Amber shouted over the wail of the alarm. “Hey, bogles! Here we are! Come get us!”
Wet bogle heads popped up and out from around corners, and suddenly the aisles were swarming with them, their little feet splashing in water as they came.
Amber pulled Axton backwards and they ran, past the frozen meats and the chips and the sauces, and plunging down into the wine, spirits and beer section. They got to the very end before stopping and turning, just in time to see the bogles come round the corner like a wave, rolling towards them.
Then the little bastards noticed where they were, saw the bottles of booze all around them, and the wave slackened, and became smaller, and eventually stopped. The alarm cut off. A happy, gurgling cheer rose from the bogle ranks, and Amber and Axton stepped backwards, forgotten about.
It took fifteen minutes of revelry, arguments and carnage before the last bogle slumped to the ground, impaling itself on a broken beer bottle.
“So sad,” Axton said, wiping away a tear. “Such a tragic waste.”
“They wanted to kill you,” Amber reminded him.
“True,” said Axton, “but you can hardly blame—”
Amber slugged him across the jaw and he dropped, unconscious.
“No,” she said. “I guess you can’t.”
She returned to the sports section, found the activewear and picked out a dry pair of yoga pants and a tank top to replace her own ripped, wet clothes, then slipped her feet into a new pair of sneakers. By the time she was dressed, her scales were once again under her control. She took hold of Axton’s shirt collar and dragged him towards the exit.
She was halfway there when she stopped, hauled Axton back a few steps, then let him drop. She wandered over to where Milo Sebastian was tied to a large display table.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” said Milo. Like the rest of him, his dark hair, shot through with grey, was wet. That, combined with the stubble on his square jaw, made him look like a mature aftershave model who’d just emerged from the pool.
“Sorry about the sprinklers,” Amber said.
“That was you?”
“Kinda.”
“And all that singing and screeching?”
“I got them drunk,” she told him. “The bogles. Got them drunk and let them kill each other. Vicious little bastards.”
Milo grunted. “Yeah. Axton?”
She turned one of her fingers into a claw, and cut the ropes. “He’s over there. He was studying them, can you believe it? I get the feeling he knew way too much about their mating habits. Do you know they lay eggs?”
“I do,” said Milo, standing and wiping the slime off his chest. “I do know that.”
“They laid eggs on you, didn’t they?”
“Yeah,” said Milo. “You?”
“Nope,” she said. “They didn’t. They tried, but I got free.”
“You’re lucky. It was … disgusting.”
“I can only imagine,” said Amber. “The clothes section is behind me. You can get yourself a dry shirt. Maybe one that isn’t ripped. I’m going to deliver Axton.”
Milo nodded. “Meet you back at the car,” he said, and walked away.
She dragged Axton out into the parking lot, heard the sirens approaching. The Kingston Valley Fire Department was not the fastest to respond to possible emergencies, it had to be said. Amber dumped Axton behind a wall and used her claw to open a cut on her palm. Blood flowed freely and she turned on the spot, forming a circle of blood around both Axton and herself. When the circle was complete, the blood caught fire, and they weren’t in California anymore.
THEY WERE IN A castle with high stone walls that vanished into the darkness overhead, walls that were decorated with tapestries and punctured by stained glass. A cold wind blew through the castle, and carried with it the screams and sobbing of the damned. Amber threw Axton from the circle of fire, and he woke as he landed.
It took him a moment to realise where he was, and then he spun, eyes wide.
“No,” he said. “Please.”
Footsteps approached, from one of the five arched doorways ahead of them. Axton tried to scramble back into the circle, but Amber stepped out, pushing him away, as Bigmouth led Fool into the chamber.
The meat beneath Bigmouth’s peeled-back skin glistened like a freshly made wound, and blood still trickled from the hooks that held those layers of skin in place. His lower jaw, reat
tached to his skull with thread and wire, swung with every step he took. Behind him came Fool, a thing without gender dressed in a patchwork robe, blinded by the lengths of glass that still pierced its closed eyes. Its bald head was covered in ash and its mouth was smeared with lipstick. It bared its glass-shard teeth as it sniffed the air.
“Amber Lamont,” it said. “And … Ooooooh. Axton, Axton, Paul Axton. I remember you, Paul Axton. You tried to cheat my Master. You tried to run.”
“It was a misunderstanding,” Axton said. “I swear that’s all this is, a simple misunderstanding.”
“Then why run?”
“I panicked. I got scared. There’s really no need to—”
Amber smacked him to shut him up. “I need to see Astaroth,” she said. “Just a word. That’s all I want.”
Fool frowned. “Pertaining to what matter?”
“Pertaining to me, Fool.”
“I will tell Lord Astaroth you are here,” said Fool, and tugged on Bigmouth’s chain. Bigmouth scrambled ahead and Fool followed, disappearing through a wide crack in the wall. Amber didn’t know the shortcuts the way Fool did – she barely knew how to take the long way round – so she shoved Axton ahead of her and started walking.
When they got to the giant doors, Fool and Bigmouth were waiting for them.
“Lord Astaroth is ready to receive you,” said Fool.
The doors swung open, and Amber dragged Axton into a large hall with mirrored walls, in the centre of which were ten steps that led up to the throne of the Shining Demon. And there he sat, Astaroth, gazing down at them, orange light swirling like lava beneath his skin.
Axton dropped to his knees. “My Lord Astaroth. Forgive my stupidity.”
Astaroth ignored him, looked instead to Amber. “You grow impatient, it seems.”
Her eyes flickered to Fool, who kept its head down. “Not impatient, Lord Astaroth, just … eager. You sent me to track down my parents, but every time I get close I have to go after people like this.”
“And that upsets you?”
“I just … I feel like if I could focus on my parents, I’d be able to get them to you a lot quicker.”
“And you want your vengeance, naturally.”