We agreed that we all couldn’t skip the next week of school without it looking crazy suspicious. Yesterday drew up a schedule that we would have to keep to. I skipped first, on Monday, and Yesterday called it in, so they wouldn’t contact Linda. She could fake Linda’s voice better than I would’ve thought. I started to wonder what my sister did her spare time. I used to think she just sat up in her room all day, reading. Clearly, I had been wrong about that.
While Yesterday made the phone call, I sat in the living room with Seanan and Seamus, rubbing my hands down my thighs. “How did it go for you guys? You know, dealing with him?”
Seamus shrugged, leaning back against the couch. “He didn’t say much to me, and I said nothing to him. I watched a marathon on TV and didn’t bother even looking at the bastard.”
Seanan rolled her eyes. “Yes, we get it. You’re tough and he’s just a demon in a cage. You can chill out now.”
He huffed out a breath, staring at his sister. “That’s not what I’m saying. We have to give him some time to start to fidget. The longer he’s in there, the more hopeless his situation will seem. Eventually, he’ll start to want out, and that’s when we’ll dangle the carrot in front of his nose.”
“What if that doesn’t happen?” Seanan asked.
“It’ll happen.”
I didn’t know if it would. I had spent the last day thinking about the boy we had locked up. Eighteen years old, and his parents wouldn’t even notice that he disappeared. That sucked all on its own. When I added the fact that he didn’t seem to care if he got out…I didn’t think Lochlynn would break so easily, because I didn’t think he wanted to go home.
Shaking those thoughts out of my head, I looked at Seanan. “What about you? Did you talk to him at all?”
“A little,” she said. “It was weird, ya know? Having a person in the room, and knowing that they hated me, and not saying anything? I couldn’t handle doing that, so we talked a little. Nothing important. We mostly just traded insults back and forth until my shift ended.”
That sounded about right. I couldn’t imagine Lochlynn being kind to either of them, and Seanan would be more than happy to snap back at anyone that sniped at her first. I liked to think of it as one of her charms. Even though it bothered me somewhat.
Yesterday hung up the phone and dropped the act she had been putting on. As she walked over to me. “All right,” she said. “You’re all set for the day. There’s still a chance that Linda will figure out that you’re skipping. If that happens, then you’re going to have to lie your ass off. Just tell her something that she would already expect to hear.”
“Like what? That I’m banging a hot guy, and we like it rough and in the midmorning?”
“If that’s what you think will work,” Yesterday said, and turned away from me. I glowered at my sister’s back while she grabbed her bag. “But I wouldn’t suggest it. She would send you to the doctor to check if you were pregnant, and that might bust you, since ya know, you haven’t had sex.”
“Oh god, she would…” I said, leaning back against the couch to stare at the ceiling. The whole thing would be a giant nightmare.
“Don’t get caught,” Seanan said. “Believe me, it’s not worth it.”
I just looked at my friend and sighed. “At least Linda isn’t my mother, so I wouldn’t have that kind of mortification. She would want to know all about the boy, though. She’d want us to…” I gagged. “Girl talk.”
Yesterday laughed. “She definitely would. You’d never be able to live it down.”
“I wouldn’t want to.”
Seamus shook his head. “We should get going before we’re late to school. Until this whole thing is over, we shouldn’t draw unnecessary attention to ourselves.”
I didn’t know if it would end, though. What did we do with Lochlynn, even if he gave us the information that we wanted? Could we trust that he wouldn’t get pissed and try to hurt us? I couldn’t take on a demon. I didn’t even know how one would go about doing that.
“You’re right,” Yesterday said, and turned on her heel. “Text me every couple of hours, Tomorrow. Otherwise, I’ll think that you’ve died and come barging in.”
That reminded me of the day before, when I had said something similar to Seanan. Maybe my sister and I hadn’t grown so apart after all. “Got it,” I said, holding my phone up and wiggling it back and forth.
I watched my friends leave, and then felt lost. We had a demon downstairs that could’ve been doing anything…Whoever had outfitted the panic room had been smart about the entire thing. The bathroom had been attached to the demon cage. Which meant that whenever I had to pee, I had to leave the room, but at least Lochlynn wouldn’t wet himself.
When I had found out about the bathroom the night before, I had freaked, thinking that Lochlynn could get out that way. Seamus assured me that it had been demon proofed as well. That made me nervous, but I let it go. Lochlynn hadn’t gotten out yet, after all.
I had been too nervous to eat that morning, and now my stomach cramped. I went into the kitchen and grabbed a muffin off the counter. It didn’t feel stale, so I took it with me, along with a small container of orange juice. Because the Nash’s didn’t do jugs, I guess. Their entire house had been filled with small containers of drinks from sodas to milk.
At that point, I admitted that I couldn’t delay the inevitable anymore, and went downstairs.
The television inside played. I could hear a sitcom from the early nineties. Some woman screeched with laugher, and I tried not to wince.
Lochlynn sat on his bed. This time, he had both his legs dangling off the edge, and his arms crossed over his chest. He watched the TV with his head cocked to the side, and a frown on his face.
“Good morning,” I said, because I was an idiot.
Lochlynn glanced over at me but didn’t say anything. His eyes hadn’t gotten any warmer since I’d seen him last and didn’t that just put a sour taste in my mouth. I wandered over to one of the recliners and turned it so that I could watch both Lochlynn and the TV at the same time.
“How was your night?” I asked.
He turned sardonic eyes my way. “Do you really want the answer to that, or do you want to pretend like you never asked.”
“Right,” I said, taking a bite out of my muffin. A blueberry exploded in my mouth, which I didn’t like in the least. I continued to eat, though, because didn’t know what else to do. The orange juice still tasted good, even though my stomach had soured since walking into the room.
The sitcom changed episodes, and we kept watching, in perfect silence.
When I glanced over at Lochlynn, he hadn’t moved an inch.
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
He glanced over. “I don’t see why you’re asking. You said you can’t open this door anyway. Even if you could, why would you risk it?”
Two excellent points. “Um…”
“You don’t know what else to do, huh?” he asked, looking back at me.
“Well, no, but I also don’t want you to be uncomfortable,” I said, and realized the stupidity of the statement a second too late. I wished that I could take it back.
He snorted, twisting around so that he could lay on the bed. “I don’t think my comfort has anything to do with this situation. I’m on a cot, for one thing. For another, you and your friends are holding me prisoner. No, I have not eaten. Even if you could get the door open, I’m not sure that I would eat anything you brought me.”
“That’s reasonable, I suppose,” I said. “Hard to trust me, right?”
“Kind of.” Lochlynn had to lay on his back, with his knees up to fit on the bed. He had his hands laced over his chest, and he looked bored.
Frowning, I got up, and walked around the room. The door to the demon cage had been open when we brought Lochlynn down, so I hadn’t seen how it even opened. There had to be a switch, or something. It couldn’t have been powered completely by magic, because no human had magic. And I figured that if the Nash did, Seanan would have blabbed that to me a long time ago.
I walked around the room, lifting up random things, and looking underneath them. Mostly, I found dust or empty air.
“What are you doing?” Lochlynn asked, not looking away from the ceiling.
“I’m trying to figure out how to feed you,” I grumbled.
“You could just stand really still and let me have a taste of your soul,” he said in a bored tone.
I sighed, looking at him. “You don’t have to be like that.”
“Like what? A prisoner?”
I wanted to scream out of frustration. “You don’t have to try and force me to ignore you. We don’t like each other, and that’s fine. But I would rather not like you, and give you some food, than let you starve.”
He didn’t say anything, continuing to look at the ceiling.
When I couldn’t find a remote or anything like that in the room, I started to run my hands along the walls. After ten minutes of that, and feeling like an utter fool, my fingers found a seam by the wall next to the cage’s door. I used my nails to pry the seam up, and voila. A panel appeared, with a number pad on it, and everything. I ran my fingers along the number, feeling their plasticky texture.
“Hey, you found something,” Lochlynn said, sitting up. “Now you just have to figure out the code. That could only take hours.”
I glared at him. “I already know the code.”
“How?”
“I’m not going to tell you,” I said, putting the panel back into place, trying to make the seam hard to notice again. If they had a panel on the outside, chances were good that they also had one on the inside, so that if someone got stuck on that side of the door, they could get out. I didn’t want to let Lochlynn loose just yet.
Without saying another word, I left the room. I felt Lochlynn’s eyes on me the entire way. That same cold feeling speared through my chest with every step that I took. When I got through the door, I relaxed. It just seemed easier when he didn’t watch me all the time. Like I could actually breathe.
I rushed up the stairs, and stood in the kitchen, unsure of what to do from there. I wanted to give Lochlynn something to eat, but he had been right that he could easily kill me if I opened that door.
Before I got him any food, I needed to protect myself. I jogged down the hall, to Seamus’ room. I’d been in there dozens of times, but it felt like invading his privacy when I walked in that time. His room was all grays and blues, the colors making everything look dark. Or perhaps the blackout curtains did that. It could be hard to tell sometimes.
His room had the usual mess that it always did. The bed had been left unmade, he had a pile of dirty clothes in the corner, his dresser had been filled with dishes and a couple of empty cans of soda. Somewhere in there, he had his laptop, but I couldn’t imagine where. The trashcan by the desk had been overflowing for probably a couple of days at that point. My skin crawled just standing in the room. I couldn’t handle misses. Probably because of my father.
But everything that I saw looked a couple of days old. So, I started to go through his drawers, swearing that I would tell him what happened the second that he got home. It only took me two desk drawers before I found what I wanted. The taser sat on some magazines innocuously. I pulled the weapon out, testing the weight in my hand. It felt weird to be holding something like this, especially knowing that it could put Lochlynn on the ground for hours.
I tucked the thing into my waist band, picturing it going off and dropping me. What an embarrassing way to go…
Back in the kitchen, I scrounged around for food that I could put on a tray for Lochlynn. He got a bowl of fruit, a Pop tart, and a plate of freshly toasted waffles. I also put a container of milk and one of orange juice on the tray. It would have to do for him, since I didn’t know how to cook. Yesterday had learned, but I had never bothered, because Linda always had food ready for us. It started to feel like a mistake.
I brought the tray and the taser down to the basement with me. Lochlynn hadn’t moved since I’d left. The laugh track on the sitcom played again, loudly and clearly. It seemed out of place in this room.
“I’ve brought food,” I said, setting the tray down on the table. “And this.” I took the taser out and showed it to him.
“Oh, great. I was hoping we could have another round with that thing,” Lochlynn said. “It was so much fun the first time around.”
“I’m not going to Taser you.”
“I find that hard to believe,” he responded, dryly.
“I won’t. Unless you give me a reason to. I’m going to open this door, and slide the food in. If you make a single move toward me, then I’ll drop you on the ground and I won’t feel bad about it.”
“Yeah, you will,” Lochlynn said.
“Excuse me?”
“If you really wouldn’t feel bad about it, then you wouldn’t have said that. You would’ve just left it at, ‘I’ll drop you on the ground.’”
I ignored him and set the door down on the floor. Lochlynn didn’t move, but I watched him out of the corner of my eye while I walked over to the panel. I opened the thing up and stared at the numbers. Casting a prayer up that I got it right, I typed in one-one-two-nine.
I heard the hiss of a seal releasing and looked over as the door started to open. Before Lochlynn could react, I rushed over, and pushed the tray inside. He started to look up as it slid across the tiled floor, but before he even sat up, I managed to get it past the door. I pulled it closed again and watched as the seam disappeared once more in a wave of magic.
My breath left me in a rush.
Lochlynn raised his eyebrows. “Color me impressed,” he said. “I thought you would be standing at that panel for days.”
“No,” I said, looking back at the thing. “It wasn’t that hard to figure out. My father always said that dates are important.” And I had typed in the Nash’s anniversary date. They always celebrated the day by going to another country for the weekend. Last November, they had gone to England, and had enjoyed it greatly. They had left their kids behind, like always.
Lochlynn stood up and approached the food. He looked at it with a quirked eyebrow. I waited for him to say something about how he liked much better food. The kind that his cooks would make him. Something snide like that. He didn’t do that. Lochlynn brought the tray over to his bed and sat down with it. “Dates are important, huh?”
I nodded. “Yeah. My dad always said that. I used to think he just wanted every day to be special, but…” I shrugged. “I’m not sure about that anymore. I think he wanted us to remember him, so he would make certain days special. So that every year, when that day rolled around, we would remember how awesome our father was.”
“Was?”
I smiled bitterly. “Yes, was. My dad sold his soul, just like my friend did. But Dad’s been gone for eight years now.”
“What did he want?” Lochlynn asked.
“He wanted us to be taken care of,” I said, hearing the sad note in my voice. “Dad said that our mom took off when we were only a few months old, but I don’t know if that’s true. I could see Dad trying to protect us from something he thought was too painful for us to hear. After that, it was just him, my sister, and me.”
“Yesterday,” Lochlynn said, with a twist of his mouth. “I met her during her rotation.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t get me started on that.”
Lochlynn shrugged. “With us demons, it’s tradition to name your children with the same first letter as their parent of the same gender. That’s why my father is Landers, and I am Lochlynn. Everyone has a reason for naming their child something. I won’t judge your parents for it.”
“You’d be the only one. Anyway, after Mom died or took off or whatever, we hit a rough patch. My dad lost his job when Yesterday and I were really little. He worried that the state would take us away and that we’d end up in foster care. So, he made a deal with some demons. If they provided for us, then he would give them his soul.”
“He thought this would be better than foster care?” Lochlynn asked.
“I guess. At least we don’t have to bounce from home to home, and Linda, our guardian, has never hurt us. She’s a little annoying, but she takes her job very seriously.”
“That’s good,” Lochlynn said. I noticed that he had been eating the food, though I couldn’t recall him taking a bite. He must’ve done it whenever I looked away, for some reason.
“They gave dad five years,” I said. “I don’t know why some people get years and some don’t, but they gave dad five of them. He seemed determined to make every one of those years matter more than the last. He would wake us up every day and tell us the date. Some days, nothing new would happen. He would drop us off at school and pick us up. And some days, he would take us somewhere nice. He would buy us things, and he would tell us stories, and he would try so hard to make that day special.”
“Did it work?” Lochlynn asked.
I frowned. “Today is January thirteenth. This day ten years ago, my father took Yesterday and me to the circus. It was cold, and the entire place smelled like elephants. You would be surprised that they have a scent. He bought us cotton candy and popcorn, and he got us stuffed toys that still sit in a chair in my room. On the ride home, he told us about how his mother died. Car accident. I cried, until my father told me that she would have loved us so much that we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. Then we got home, and Dad made dinner and we had cookies for dessert. To commemorate the day, he read us a book about a circus monkey. Yeah, I’d say that it worked.”
Dates mattered. They always mattered. Dad had worked so hard to make sure that we always remembered certain days. He would take pictures, and give us calendars, and eh would drill certain stories into our heads. When he went away, he left us with this photo album he made. He had put all the picture in order of the days they happened. I hadn’t even been able to look at it for the first two years after his death. The day I finally got the courage up to peek inside, March 14th, the anniversary of his death, I’d broken down so hard that Yesterday hadn’t known what to do.
“Is that why you want to save your friend so badly?” Lochlynn asked. “You couldn’t save your father, and you have to live with a lifetime of grief and guilt, but you think you can save this Derrick?”
I blinked, coming out of my head, and turned to look at the demon. His expression hadn’t changed, and he watched me with those cold eyes. He either didn’t realize the way those words hurt me, or he didn’t care. I thought it most likely the latter.
I didn’t answer him, choosing instead to sit in the chair and watch bad TV, pretending that he didn’t exist.
***
Seanan and Seamus got home with my sister shortly after three in the afternoon. I jogged up the stairs to meet them, happy that I didn’t have to spend more time in that room, not talking to Lochlynn. “Thank god,” I said. “I was going stir crazy down there.”
Seamus ran a hand through his hair. “Did he try anything?”
“No,” I said. “But I did go into your room to get your taser, just in case I needed it.”
“Why would you have needed it?” Seanan asked, throwing her bag down on the couch. “He’s locked up nice and tight. That bastard couldn’t get out to hurt you.” She leaned against the back of the couch, her foot bouncing.
“Because I had to open the door.”
“What?” my friends both asked in shocked unison.
“Why did you do that?” Yesterday asked, in a much calmer voice.
I answered her, because I thought she would understand more than either of the others. “He hadn’t eaten. I thought that having a prisoner who starved to death would be counterproductive, you know?”
Yesterday nodded. “That makes sense. “
“No, it doesn’t,” Seamus barked, glaring at her. He turned that glare onto me, and I flinched away from it. “You shouldn’t have opened that door under any circumstances. If I wanted you to open it, then I would’ve given you the combination. How did you even figure it out?”
“It wasn’t that hard,” I said.
“His parents’ anniversary?” Yesterday asked.
“Yeah.”
Seamus let out a harsh laugh. “Oh, not that hard to figure out. Well, this isn’t your house, Tomorrow. You can’t just decide what’s okay and what isn’t and taking care of that demon isn’t okay. What did he do to make you try something so stupid?”
Again, I flinched.
“Hey,” Yesterday said, holding her hand out. “You wanna calm down. Nothing bad happened, as you can see. And if you keep yelling at my sister, you’re going to learn exactly what I’m capable of, got it?”
Seamus sneered at her. “You don’t want me yelling at her? Fine. I’ve got someone else I can take this out on.” He turned around and started for the basement stairs. I was so shocked that he got halfway down them before I realized what he meant by that. Seanan and my sister must’ve realized the same thing, because we all bolted for the stairs at the same time. Seamus slammed the door in our faces before we reached him.