~ 9 ~

The fire tore through the dry, aged wood like plague through a city. Within minutes, beautiful grey smoke had filled the room, leaking up through the ceiling above and puffing out the windows. It stained the glass with soot, it hissed as furniture collapsed into dust, it made drab furniture dance with glowing tongues of flame.

Yuk crouched, invisible, in a corner of the room, his green skin quivering with pleasure.

Shouts filtered in from outside. Obscured silhouettes moved just beyond the windows and called out warnings or orders to seek aid.

Dorst’s hirelings, insulated below ground from the heat and sound, finally stirred and a trapdoor inched open from behind a row of ruined barrels. The twitchy-eyed guard’s head poked up through the hole in the floor, then threw the door open.

“Fire! Get the girl!” he shouted, then scrambled up the rest of the ladder and into the burning room. He turned and reached a hand down into the hidden room. “Quickly, damn you.”

Yuk paced back and forth, watching as the guard pulled a terrified-looking Lina out of the saferoom. A man with an ugly beard emerged behind her, blinking in the smoke like a startled vole.

As a rule, quasits made poor combatants. They harried and harassed, and the moment a fight went against them, they fled or bargained for their lives. The largest of them stood two feet tall and they seldom weighed more than a dozen pounds.

So, when Yuk charged the two human males, he was not only outmatched but acting against every instinct he had. Unfortunately, saving Lina was the only thing that mattered in that moment.

The fidgety guard had no chance of seeing the approaching demon through the smoke. Yuk leapt, claws splayed and feet poised raptor-like to dig into the guard’s flesh and deliver poisons and disease. Cries of pain and confusion mingled with the din of the flames as the first blooms of blood blossomed on the man’s shirt.

Yuk dropped from the guard’s chest, avoiding his reaching hands. He landed directly in front of the older guard, and Yuk chose that moment to drop his shroud of invisibility. The bearded face flickered through confusion, surprise, curiosity, and then fear as he found himself eye-level with the green, alien creature.

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The man had hardly opened his mouth when Yuk blasted him with a burst of his own flame. He yelped and fell backwards off the ladder, the ugly beige of his beard twisting and shrinking as it burned. The quasit spun and thrust both hands at the first guard’s calf, forcing an illusion of pain up through the primary muscles of the leg.

The guard stumbled backward, screaming, as Yuk turned to Lina. She had stepped away from the violence, but her eyes had gone wide with hope at the sight of her brother’s demonic helper.

“Where is Toren?” she asked.

“Follow,” Yuk croaked.

A loud crack splintered the air overhead. A wooden beam separated from the ceiling and came down with an explosion of dust, wooden shrapnel, and embers. Lina screamed and shielded her face from the flying particles.

Yuk ignored her and scuttled forward, looking for a way out that didn’t involve Lina crawling through the same cracked window as a centipede. The door she had used with the guards, however, was apparently blocked by a large plank of wood.

Yuk rasped in exasperation. This rescue thing was new, he hadn’t considered the girl’s escape route would be any different than his. The fallen timber had rent a hole in the ceiling above large enough to crawl through. It even made a ramp!

The demon tugged the little girl toward the beam, but Lina planted her feet when she saw where they were going. “It’s too hot!”

Outside, humans had begun splashing water onto the structure. Nobody would be trying to get inside, not when they assumed the place to be an empty warehouse. Except—

“Guard,” Yuk croaked. “Outside. Watching—sentry. Will open door.”

Lina pointed to the hole where Yuk had blasted the newly de-bearded guard. “Make him stop hurting so he can help us,” she said, gesturing to the still-conscious guard clutching his leg like a wounded animal.

Yuk growled low in his throat. The cramping jinx would not work a second time, and there was no guarantee Yuk could free Lina from him a second time. There had to be another way, a key the sentry had, or—

Or a pearl necklace worth enough for a young boy barred from magic to risk summoning a demon to retrieve it.

Yuk ripped the necklace from his chest and shoved it into the girl’s hand. Immediately the pull he had felt towards her vanished. The phantom heartbeat silenced.

“What?” She could barely speak the word through the wheezing cough she had started.

“Use,” Yuk snapped. “Use!”

“I don’t—”

“Magic. Put on. Use! Use!”

Lina held the pearl up to her watering eyes, then clasped it around her neck. Her eyes went wide. “Oh, I—”

Voices cut through the din of shouting and roaring flame, imperious with authority. Elves.

“Use! Use!” Yuk cried.

Lina’s fist closed about the pearl. She closed her eyes and set her mouth. Her expression softened, then, and before Yuk could stop her, she grabbed his hand.

And, just as the hovel’s walls fell to reveal the crowd of scared humans in soiled rags and regal elves clad in gilded plate beyond, they were gone.