A Demon

Here is a demon for you:

Probably he is a demon of Bad Ideas.  Ideas like, "Sure I'll go back to work today!"

The Cambion

My parents weren't able to have a baby together. Mother says this made them very sad, and she would cry and cry, and Father says he would feel so helpless that he couldn't stop her tears. But one day Auntie Lilli came to them and told them a secret, a special secret for having a baby. And whatever that secret was, it must have worked, because here I am! And I have Father's hair and Mother's eyes and they both say I am the most perfect child in the world.

Of course, I can't live with my parents yet. They say I have to stay here with the woman who birthed me, at least for a few more years. I'm supposed to call her 'Mother', and I do if there are other people around, because it pleases my parents, but when we don't have company I call her Agnes, because that's her name and she's not my mother. It upsets the others, but I don't care. They aren't my real siblings. All you have to do is look at them and you can tell the difference. Any idiot could. They're all flushed and pink and noisy, constantly breathing in and out and beating hearts and spewing mucus. It's disgusting. I'm glad I'm not like that. But Mother says that I will become more and more like that, until no one will be able to distinguish me from normal people. That frightens me- I don't want to be like them. And I tell Father that the villagers can't tell, anyway, but he says that the sharpest amongst them have noticed a few tell-tale signs, but they don't dare move against me while I'm so young because what if they're wrong and the church takes dim view on child-murder. And then I ask why I can't just come live with them, where it won't matter that I'm not quite human and then they look very sad again and say that I couldn't survive in their home. And I say well why can't we just go somewhere far away from everyone anyway and they say that it's not an option and to be quite and behave myself.

And I do because I love them and I'm afraid if I don't they'll stop visiting me and then I really will be nothing but a stupid human filled with disgusting blood and breath and mucus.

I sometimes wonder about Agnes, tho'. Sometimes I think she knows full well what I am, birthed from her body or not. But it's like... she doesn't care. And sometimes she looks at me with such tenderness and tries to stroke my hair and murmurs about how beautiful my father was, and it frightens me because I don't think she means the man everyone thinks is my father (whose name is Henry and who is not handsome by anyone's standards and anyway he drinks too much), I think maybe she means my real actual father, and I don't like to think about that so I run away. And then other times she can't bear to be around me and just looking at me makes her cry and really, those times are better.

The preacher likes to come around every so often and rant at my so-called siblings about how their antics will land them with the demons in hell. I always laugh behind my hand at this because even if my parents say I'm not fully demon like they are, I'm demon enough and the other children are already stuck with me in this life, so it's like they can't win. The best part is that the preacher thinks I'm an angel, because I'm so much more clever than him and I never get caught at anything and Mother makes certain that I know my bible really well and can quote it on demand because she says you never know when it's going to come in handy, even as a demon. Maybe especially as a demon.

Resident

The sun slid slowly towards the horizon, turning the walls of the old building a shade disturbingly akin to dried blood. In an upper-story classroom, It lay coiled and waiting.

One by one, the surrounding lamps flared to life, casting eerie plays of light and shadow among the precise pathways, lending them a bit of mystery entirely absent during the day. The students had long ago scurried back to their homes, only a few of the most dedicated lingering in the hushed chambers of the library- but the library was across campus, and this particular area was deserted.

By humans, anyway.

As the last rays of sunlight were extinguished by the falling night, the Creature spread Its (for lack of a better word) wings, and heaved a sigh that was an equal blend of relief and irritation. How It loathed being trapped all day- and in the undergraduate department, of all things! Bad enough that It had been summoned (and summarily abandoned) in a school of filthy divinity, but to have to endure, year after year, the arrogant, ignorant prattle of wide-eyed freshmen- it was enough to make It want to gouge Its own immaterial eyeballs out.

Little maggots have no business calling down Beings of any stripe until they're working on their doctoral thesis, at least, It grumbled to Itself. Small wonder the three in question had failed so spectacularly in summoning It.

Well, to be fair they'd summoned It just fine- the problem was that they hadn't really believed it would work, and when it did they'd panicked and fled before finishing the ritual, leaving It in the bizarre position of being only semi-manifested, and restricted to the confines of one particular classroom, to boot. Highly irritating, to say the least.

Fortunately night-time brought just the barest easing of Its restrictions, and the Creature had full range of the building. But only the building. It stared longingly out the window to the library across campus and sighed. Not that there was much in there It hadn't already learned in Its millenia of existence, but it might have been nice to have something to read other than Calvinism: How Many Points Do YOU Have?

That old coot, the Creature thought grumpily. It ran Its ephemeral claws absently across a chalk-board, noting with satisfaction that all the chalk on its frame turned to dust as It did so.

For the first few decades, the Creature had made a concentrated effort to wreck as much psychic destruction as possible on the building in which It was ensnared. It hoped that perhaps if it could somehow damage the physical shell enough, the half-formed esoteric shell would crumble, as well.

Such, apparently, was not the case.

Then It thought that perhaps if It could just attract the attention of a few appropriate students...

But no. It turned out that the vast majority of the student body, for all that they were there to study the Word of their God, did not actually believe in Beings such as the Creature and Its ilk. Difficult to get the attention of people that didn't believe you existed (always a problem with these Johnny-come-lately reformers). It had abandoned such tactics after It had driven half a dozen into institutions. It might have enjoyed such pursuits in an earlier age, but in the past half-century sanatoriums had become too depressingly civilized by far, and there wasn't nearly enough anguish produced to be worth the effort.

Finally It had resigned Itself (more or less) to a miserable couple of centuries until someone else (somewhere else, for that matter) got it into his or her head to summon It. If It had been the praying sort, It would have prayed for such a thing to happen as quickly as possible.

But It was not particularly optimistic. Seemed like hardly anyone had use for purposefully summoned demons these days, especially a middle-ranking one such as Itself. No, if people were going to summon a demon at all, they either wanted something really impressive, or else small and easy to control. The Creature fell somewhere in between the two extremes, and had never before had such cause to rue it.

It sighed again, feeling supremely sorry for Itself.

(Patina)