The demon appeared twenty feet behind me as I stepped out of Crazy Henry’s that evening. His body was tall and supernaturally thin, with spindly arms and freaky long fingers. His skin was sick dark yellow, wrinkled and brittle like old paper. He was wearing a long black robe, like someone had killed a judge and stretched him to seven feet tall.

He wasn’t actually seven feet tall, by the way. He just used levitation to make himself look taller. A lot of demons use that trick, but it certainly intimidated me the first time.

His robe was long, but it didn’t quite touch the ground. I couldn’t see feet - just an inch of blank space between his hem and my driveway. His eyes were empty black sockets. His head was hairless, topped with elaborate black horns. No visible weapons, but he had so many torture instruments in his robe, he jingled when he walked. I couldn’t see teeth or tongue. His mouth was a gaping black hole. His voice was shrill and commanding, reverberating with an obvious archaic accent.

He said, “I am an Inquisitor serving the Demon Prince Baalphezar. You know why I’m here.”

“And I don’t need to ask your Name,” I said, “because I already know it. Your Name is Aleister. Jacob wrote about you.”

“Really!” Aleister gave some kind of grotesque smile, seemingly flattered by this. “And what did he say?”

“He said you two were friends… eventually.”

“Indeed we were! We’d still be friends today if he had accepted my offer. Stupid, stubborn man. Jacob Kovach should be a demon right now. I offered him the full Merlin package at the end, but he didn’t believe me. He thought our Master was going to turn him into some kind of bloated slug demon as a joke.

“He went behind our backs and tried to cut a deal with the Overlord - before he was the Overlord - trying to negotiate for a better form, once he inevitably ended up in Hell. The Overlord refused him and commanded us to never make Jacob a demon.

“So, there he remains, bound to my Master, strapped to a table in the palace courtyard. I send Imps to eat his liver and pluck out his eyes every day, but at least he has someone to talk to. I’ll be sure to tell him you said hello. Or perhaps you can tell him yourself, once we have an understanding.”

“So, you’re here to scare me? Threaten me with torture?”

“Eventually,” the demon said. “But first, I’m going to teach you how to duel. I dueled Jacob a dozen times before he finally beat me. Perhaps you’ll do better.”

“You beat the smartest mage in my bloodline a dozen times? Have you ever fought a guy who can walk?”

“You really want to spend your last few moments of freedom making jokes?”

“I will tell a joke with my dying breath, asshole. Duels have rules. What are the rules?”

“We each take turns casting spells at the other. I am not allowed to kill you, but I can bring you very close to death before I extract your soul. I’m one of the best healers in Hell because I am one of the best torturers in Hell. Isn’t that funny? I know magic that can keep you alive, no matter how wounded your body is. I could even sustain you for a while as a disembodied head!” Aleister bragged.

“The duel is over when you surrender, or when you manage to send me back to Hell. No angels, no gods, but I’ll keep the rules of engagement loose this first time, just to see what you’re capable of.”

“Who goes first?”

“You.”

I quick-drew my pistol and popped off ten shots as fast as I could, only to watch the little metal pellets go plink, and bounce off in random directions.

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“Really?” Aleister said, using a disappointed teacher expression I had seen a hundred times. “You want to be a wizard, but you’re going for the musket first? Very disappointing.”

The Inquisitor waved his hand and something in my brain went click, like a light switch turning off.

“No more wards,” he said, patiently waiting to see what I would do next.

I tried to cast them again, but it felt like the magic was running down an open drain, before it could get to the runes. Then Aleister waved his hand again, and my fortitude spell went poof.

“No wards, no strength. What now, little mage?”

We were facing off in the junk yard outside Crazy Henry’s, surrounded by crushed cars and rusted parts. A dirty old toolbox sat on an upturned barrel to my right.

Levitation was a bitch to control in any direction other than up and down, but what if I didn’t try to control it? I focused on the pile of tiny parts and blasted them toward him like a shotgun. A dozen of them bounced off his shield thing, but one of them, the battery got through, and hit him in the shoulder. But was it the weight that overloaded the object deflection thing, or the number of objects?

“Creative!” Aleister said, sounding impressed. “I’ve never seen levitation used like that before. Your powers may be sloppy and unreliable, but you seem to have a gift for improvisation!”

“You’re Baalphezar’s magic expert, right? Can you tell me why my powers are like this? Do you know what’s been happening to us?” This guy seemed eager to play teacher, maybe I could keep him talking, and give myself time to think.

“I have theories, but nothing I can prove. The power went wild inside your grandfather. Stefan certainly wasn’t like that, so perhaps the power was twisted by the same thing that made Jim a drunk. Now that I’ve met you, I think this chaos may be a manifestation of mental illness. Your grandfather had extremely poor control over his emotions, your mother was clinically insane, and now you, so deranged and arrogant, you think you can take on an army of demons by yourself!

“I think the pain I inflict will be good for you, Kovak. Enduring the agony, learning your place, feeling the consequences if you don’t learn to regulate yourself. Think of it as… torture therapy.”

Aleister threw his arm out, and a tiny blob of yellow goo shot out of his hand and splashed on my chest, burning a neat hole in my shirt as the acid started eating my skin.

I did a quick gesture to bring my healing spell up, and cast it as fast as I could, counting on Tobias to have thought of this. The purification runes of the spell cleaned the acid off, and the rest of the first aid bit closed up my skin. I thought about using a spell to repair my shirt, just to make a point, but I didn’t understand this dueling stuff yet. Casting two spells in a row might allow him to fire two spells back.

“Excellent!” he said, cackling with that disgusting oval mouth. “They told me you had been working with healing magic, but you were able to do that while you were surprised and in pain! We might be able to turn you into something useful after all!”

Aleister twitched his finger and a larger, faster blob crashed into my chest, hard enough to knock me on my ass.

“Some duels would be over now,” Aleister said, “if we had agreed to fight until the first fall, but this is more of a training exercise, so I’ll give you a moment to compose yourself.”

I leaned on a barrel to get to my feet and tried to distract him with a compliment, “Jacob said you were a gentleman.”

It apparently worked, because Aleister beamed and didn’t seem to notice I had swiped two items off the top of the barrel: a yellow plastic squeeze bottle, and an ancient Zippo lighter that I had used to test my wards a few weeks earlier. He also didn’t notice the fortitude spell I recast while I was getting to my feet.

Instead of attacking with magic, I twisted the top off the bottle of lighter fluid and used levitation to launch it at him, dousing his robe and his face with ethanol, even splashing some on the wall of tires behind him. Then I flicked the lighter and threw it at him, and his whole body went up in a column of fire.

Aleister laughed through the flames. “You can’t hurt a demon with fire, boy.”

But I wasn’t trying to burn him. I was trying to blind him, first with flames, then with smoke, as the old tires behind him lit up from the backsplash and started spewing thick black smoke all around him. My eyes were just as useless as his for a moment, then the lidar in my lenses kicked in and gave me a wireframe of his burning body.

I did my shotgun levitation thing again, forcing him to deflect another toolbox full of random objects while I ran around behind him, and hit him with something too heavy for his magic to stop.

It had been twenty years since this junk yard had scrapped a gasoline engine, but they still had one half-buried in the dirt behind the tires. I used fortitude to yank it up and used levitation to boost myself and multiply the weight as I slammed it down on his pointy head.

Aleister the Inquisitor fell backwards as two hundred pounds of engine block crushed his head. The long robe vanished, and I saw how short he was. His gnarled yellow feet twitched twice, and his body vanished into the gray. The dirt around him was still blazing, as the alcohol continued to burn.