"I will tell him; he will be glad to hear it. I will." Detective Winters told someone that he was talking to on his phone. He was looking at me. I had not thought of anything except where that kid would end up.

"So there is good news." He told me. "That little girl was adopted already. Get this: her story got her adopted by a rich couple. He is a plastic surgeon and she is a child psychologist. Does that make you happy, Lord?"

"It's too good to be true." I sighed. I wanted to go and see my family. I couldn't stand being around Detective Winters already.

"I know, right? You couldn't write this stuff." Detective Winters smiled. It looked weird on him.

The lights went out and we got some sleep. Cory clicked once, early in the morning. I was startled by his quietness and slowly and alertly opened my eyes. Detective Winters slept very soundly, a heavy sleeper in contrast to my light sleep. My right hand ached and I felt terror.

I knew an unseen presence was in the motel room. If I had to guess, it was the demon we had set free. It had returned to feed in the night. Detective Winters sat up stiffly, still asleep. His eyes opened, just white.

"Detective Winters?" I stammered, fear tripping my lips.

"Sret niwe vitceted to nmai esu aceb ynn uf ta ht." He said in a weird voice and then laughed evilly.

"You don't know how to speak?" Cory chastised the creature.

"Silence, fool bird." It said plainly.

I reached for the Salem pack and offered it to the creature, trembling in fear. It took the cigarettes and looked at them with its eyes going dark. Then it put all three of them in its mouth and lit them with its fingertips. While it smoked it was like it had three right arms moving hazily to work each fag to its puff.

"Neat trick." Cory clicked in Corvin.

"It is calm." I pointed out.

The demon finished and laid back down and exhaled. Detective Winters coughed in his sleep. I was very frightened and had to act despite my fear.

The smoke drifted around the room and I stood, hoping I knew what I was doing. I glanced around for a receptacle. There was a candle with a lid on it. It would have to do. I uncorked the lid and went to the drifting cloud of smoke. I deliberately inhaled all of it and then spewed the smoke into the candle and closed the lid on it.

My head swam from the demon's thoughts. I never wished to recall or put in order the images and emotions it gave me. Unclean, unholy and horrible beyond description. A creature that feeds on filth and destruction and hatred. I felt quite sick. For a few minutes I considered claiming the weapon of Detective Winters to drastically end the residue of the demon in my mind.

Then I heard a sound like a baby crying. She was alone, crying for her daddy. Her mommy was alone and couldn't get up again. I could hear all that in her cries. I shook off the nightmares that were hissing and whispering and chanting and mocking me in my own mind. The song of the demon ended as I crawled out from under the weight of its influence. I could hear my daughter.

"You would not ignore it." Cory hopped up to me.

"That was you?" I asked.

"I hoped the imitation of your child would be heard. You would not listen to reason." Cory pecked at what was in my hand.

I dropped it onto the bed, horrified I had gotten it and held it without knowing. I stared at the loaded gun, the safety already off and a round chambered.

"Where is it?" I looked around nervously.

"Behold." Cory set to where it was soaking up the shadows.

The monkey doll sat there with its back to us. The shadows were being drawn into it like water being drawn down a drain. It wasn't entirely real or unreal. It flickered, as though caught between a dream and reality.

"It is imprisoned." I observed.

"In a way. Now it is tethered. It is stronger; though it cannot reach across space and time when it is here and now." Cory clicked a mocking click. "It does not prefer this form, imprisonment is a good way to describe it. Now it is stronger, more focused. Be careful. It can take a person if they are not baptised."

"You mean like a Catholic?" I asked Cory.

"No. I mean any baptism in the way that pleases the Creator. You are forgetful." Cory chastised me, strangely. It was not his way to speak down to me; to sass me yes, but not to speak downward.

"I am forgetful?" I asked.

"Man is forgetful: that religion is just his words to the actual Truth. I do not think that my Lord is forgetful. This language that I can speak now, it is baffling." Cory explained.

"You can speak to me in our language." I reminded him.

"It is difficult. The enchantment has made my thoughts and words English first. I must use effort to remember how to speak and think exactly as a crow." Cory complained.

"What time is it?" Detective Winters requested. He looked at his phone and satisfied himself it was time to wake up. He sat up and went for the Salem pack and found it empty. "Goddamnit."

"The demon smoked them all at once." I told him.

"You are a fiend!" He growled and looked around. He spotted the monkey doll in the corner, facing away from us still. He crumpled the soft pack and threw it as a green wad at the monkey's head. It struck and bounced onto the carpet.

"Did you dream of it?" I asked him.

"I can't remember my dreams. I wasn't surprised to see it back." Detective Winters looked and saw his gun next to me on the bed. "Long night?" He asked.

"You can see for yourself. Our cigarette-addicted demon has taken shape as an object. Cory says this is a relatively dormant state. Like it is in prison. While it is like this: the influence it has on those who are near it is much stronger. It can possess people this way. This demon: I have already seen it seize people. We must be careful."

"I agree. May I have my gun back, handle first?" He requested. I carefully gave him his gun. He put on the safety, took out the clip, popped the round out of the chamber just by winking at the ejection rod, caught it, put the bullet in the clip and stuck it back into the gun and stuck the gun into his chest holster. He had done it all in just a few quick seconds.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

We went to the police station. I asked if it was possible to visit administration, where the main evidence room was located. He told me there was an evidence storage location. Even better.

As though the demon knew this was the time to shine, things began to go horribly wrong.

"I am Dawson." A spectacle-wearing young man popped up from the other side of the divider where Detective Winters's desk ends. I looked past him, wondering how he had approached us unseen. There was a clear path from where I was sitting to the door, unless he had come from the break room, which had remained unoccupied long enough for the lights to go out automatically. I stared at him suspiciously.

"I know who you are." Detective Winters kept working and didn't look up. Dawson slinked around the desk, between my knees and the divider awkwardly, and slid up behind Detective Winters, all in one fluid motion. I felt like he might have teleported and my mind simply filled in his movements.

"As you know, Detective Winters, I am assigned to make a few routine observations about you. I will then report whatever I notice to our internal review board." Dawson smiled like he was offering Detective Winters a birthday card. Detective Winters took the clip board and signed it and handed it back. Then he accepted his green copy.

"Mostly this is going to be about disclosure." Dawson grinned like we were all best friends having a sleep over and he was about to show us his dad's baseball card collection. "I would like to know how good our communication is with you."

"Don't touch me." Detective Winters muttered. The hand retracted, burnt. I cringed.

"Detective Winters, we are all friends." Dawson said like a jackass.

"Sorry. I just felt surprised when you put your hand on my shoulder." Detective Winters realized he had opened the door for Dawson with his flinching words.

"How is your sex life, Jack?" Dawson sat on the desk and asked aggressively, with a cheap smile. I was trying not to dislike him.

"Excuse me?' Detective Winters demanded, again shocked into a defensive response by Dawson.

"Off the record, of course. I am just wondering." Dawson kept the smile on. His hand went down and his fingertips were at the feet of the monkey clouded in the illuminated folds of the evidence bag.

"Careful not to caress that toy, sir. You would be marked for evil." Cory warned Dawson. He looked up, startled, then he looked from Cory to me and decided I was a ventriloquist. I just shrugged as he waved a finger at me, having caught me. I watched as the hand went back down and landed closer to him on the desk, less likely to touch the demon.

"Okay, guys. I want to just be cool with you guys, is that okay?" Dawson shifted gears and started speaking with his hands, trying to get our eyes on him. I wondered what sort of man he was. I could not quite comprehend his ways.

"It's fine. Dawson, this is Lord. His crow really does talk. They help me solve the spooky crimes that got me in this corner and got you here sitting on my desk." Detective Winters responded to Dawson's sudden shift in tone and approach. I wondered at this, part of some policeman ritual; they had gotten to know each other and established a rapport. I had blinked and missed it.

Dawson got up and left. He had gone into the break room, as the lights had come back on. Detective Winters took the opportunity to read his green piece of paper before he committed it to a desk drawer where a bottle of Jack and some blue pantyhose were waiting for their day. I could see a firecracker and a spark plug in there also.

"Who is he?" I asked.

"He might be our best friend, destined to reincarnate at the same time as our souls and meet us again and again. He might be our worst enemy." Detective Winters looked at me and used my way of speaking for a moment. I liked it.

Dawson came back and had brought a coffee for each of us. He had bought sunflower seeds from the vending machine for Cory. He said to my bird:

"I have never met an animal that can talk. I thought that was like only in pirate movies and stories for kids." Dawson poured the seeds on the desk.

"I am not a parrot. I am not imitating you." Cory pointed out. Then he began to feed on the sunflower seeds with effort. He had to peel them open and then peck the seed into a slightly smaller piece. I timed him, counting: it took him a minute and a half for each seed. I considered that in the wild: sunflower seeds would be a fair food source, if the bird could alight on the tall plant and open fresh seeds up there, somehow.

"Have you eaten these before?" I asked.

"These? No. We steal these from the Farmer to trade with the Fen and the Fell. They plant sunflower seeds in their gardens, where no man may set foot and live." Cory told the sunflower story and then laughed heartily, clicking and grinding like a broken engine.

"Is he choking?" Dawson asked.

"He is laughing. He finds his own jokes to be funny. This is even more so if those he has told the joke to don't know what makes it so funny. To a crow ignorance is worthy of mockery, knowledge is their currency. A poverty of knowledge is always met with amusement by a crow that knows something that you do not." I explained to Dawson.

"So they are snickering nerds." Dawson told Cory and me.

"That's right." Detective Winters teased Cory and laughed a fake and forced laugh at him.

"At least my jokes make sense." Cory turned and cawed at him, flaring his tail as he met the challenge. Then, deciding he had won the exchange, he laughed victoriously. Then he went back to feeding on the precious sunflower seeds.

I shrugged at Dawson and Detective Winters. They sipped their coffee and watched each other. I had no idea what was going on.

"We are going to get rid of this monkey doll. It has a demon in it, not part of any case, just a demonic object. I shot it and it blew up into all these small white sticks. Each stick had a few red stripes, like a barcode. Kinda thought about weaves, you know, like tapestries. I wondered if you took all these sticks and put them together if the red stripes emerged into something, a word or an image." Detective Winters pointed at the bag.

"It's an ugly toy monkey with chimes." Dawson examined it from outside the bag, looking in. Its big shiny eyes were staring back at him from between the light reflections on the plastic.

"It can also possess people like in Denzel Washington." Detective Winters said with a convincing tone.

Dawson looked at it again, this time I could see he took it seriously. I found it ironic that the mention of an actor convinced the policeman of the authenticity of our claim. I shrugged, evidently policemen had a code I did not know anything about. If it was just a demon in doll form, oh well. If it is like a movie prop of some kind, that's to be taken seriously. I had no idea what they were talking about.

"Wasn't it called Azazel, or was it Zozo? Or was it Pazuzu?" Dawson wondered, staring at the monkey.

"Azoza, Pazoza, Llama Pajama, Rama Ramen." Detective Winters coughed a laugh, mocking the demon's name.

"Do not guess its name, there is no reason to say it." Cory advised them.

"Azoza." I picked one for it. I already knew it had a name and had not wanted to know it. I had seen its works. My mind had nearly shattered as it put the backwards sounds and parts of horrible images together; after the demon had made me know all those things it had caused.

"Better not to call it by its true name, with no reason." Cory reiterated.

"Hello." Dawson answered his phone. He had to take the call into the break room, away from us.

"Let's go." Detective Winters took Cory's seeds, sweeping them off the desk into his hand. He then put them into a cellophane box from a cigarette pack that was sitting on his messy desk. "Here."

"And that?" I asked, accepting the seeds for Cory. Detective Winters picked it up and we headed out. We had gotten to his car and driven out before Dawson came running out of the building.

"Where to?" I wondered.

"Ghanat's place. I can't think of anywhere else that when it is eventually dug up or found somehow, as it will be. If it is there then it will get boxed up with the rest, treated like its hazardous even. We can forget about it." Detective Winters had inspiration.

I wasn't sure it was a good idea, but I couldn't think of a better one. We stopped for some McDonald's and also at the hardware store. The girl at Ace knew where everything was that Detective Winters asked her for. He bought a bunch of cheap tools and screws and a deadbolt and stuff.

Then we drove all the way up there, to the cabin. We arrived long after sunset. Lake Raiden was too quiet.

Detective Winters got out his flashlight and a spare one for me and we crunched the gravel after he slammed the trunk shut. The cabin was exactly as we had left it. I should have expected that with certainty, as nobody would come to Ghanat's cabin. We took the monkey doll all the way down to Ghanat's secret office and locked it into the safe.

Afterward we pushed all the heavy machinery in the cellar into the tunnel and covered it so it was just a heap of machine parts, boxes and tarps collecting dust in an otherwise hidden cellar corner. Then we installed the deadbolt on the cellardoor.

Starlight shone on the briar rose outside. Something in the forest was watching us. I saw its glowing eyes and its dark shape moving under the bushes. Cory clicked a sound like a suppressed click, or a click that doesn't quite catch. I wasn't sure what it meant in Corvin. I should have:

"Fox." Cory said in English. I was getting rusty on my Corvin and our hybrid language was hardly used anymore.

"Time to get going." Detective Winters finished boarding up the front door of the cabin. When he was done he showed me he had police tape also.

"Too much. You are asking for teenagers to come here. Like honey with yellow tape, all year round, till it fades." I spat.

"I was kidding." Detective Winters put the police tape away.

As we drove away Cory asked: "Then why didn't you laugh?"