Demons by John Shirley Page B

coat hanger, a priest making him kneel before an altar and then before him, a girl surrendering to him, a college degree handed to him, a car accident where the girl dies. Then the light cartoons faded, as the man’s screams became muted. The crowd was parading around the feasting demon, clashing and clanking and chanting rhythmically, some chant I couldn’t make out, and now a Sharkadian was darting down from above.
    I turned away, sickened and feeling suddenly claustrophobic. But something else had caught my attention from the corner of my eye.
    I went back to the balcony railing and looked down to see a nondescript bus pull up, men with guns get out below, far below. Men with guns going into our building.
    “Oh no,” I said.
    I think that’s what I said. And I went back inside the building.
    Shephard’s people, maybe. The black magicians had sent mortals, unaffected by the power of the Gold, to take Melissa away.
    I had no way to stop them, but maybe I could misdirect them.
     
     
    I ran downstairs, got as far as the second-floor stairwell landing, before the soldiers burst into the stairwell and surrounded me. There was a gun shoved against the side of my head, one arm twisted behind me. “Let’s see your pass,” someone growled in my ear.
    “I don’t have one.” I told them I was from Paymenz’s apartment and then wished I’d bitten my tongue, thinking I shouldn’t have told them that.
    But it turned out to be the right thing to do. They let me go.
    I went into the lobby and saw the front door was ringed by a semicircle of soldiers. None of the other buildings in the area was guarded. Our guardians seemed almost relaxed as they checked a nervous old woman’s building pass. Maybe the soldiers were glad to be here, because the demons were afraid of this building—because the Gold was here. Word had gotten around that the demons wouldn’t attack the building because they were afraid of Melissa.
    Laboring back upstairs—the elevator was broken, of course—I realized the soldiers had been sent here, through Nyerza’s government contacts, specifically to guard the building against Shephard’s mortal associates. The bus I’d seen had brought relief soldiers for the next watch; they were protecting Melissa, not threatening her.
    Then perhaps it was safe to go to the roof . . . to get out , after all these weeks, really outside . . .
    Enjoying the exercise, I climbed to the roof. I wasn’t alone up there.
    I didn’t see them at first, though I heard a tinkling piano from somewhere. There was a little building containing the elevator engine housing and the top landing for the stairs, and when I came out of it, they were on the other side, behind me. I strolled across the transplas-coated roof to the railing, reveling in the open air but scanning the sky for nearby Sharkadians or Spiders. I wasn’t protected up here. I was too far from Melissa, from those who were called the Gold.
    Then they raised the volume, and I turned at the sound of someone playing an electric piano. It sounded like a perverse take on honky-tonk ragtime.
    I walked around to the other side of the building, following the sound, and found two figures standing at an electric piano, the tall skinny one fingering a bass part, the stocky one in the hat tinkling away at the upper register. The electric piano was portable, on folding steel-tube legs, battery powered, and sounded fairly close to an acoustic piano. Up here, it sounded lost, plaintive. I took half a dozen steps toward them, before I realized that the guy playing the upper register, the guy wearing patchy jeans and work boots, and a shabby vest unbuttoned over a dirty white T-shirt . . . that his clothes had grown on him, were not real clothes, were part of his skin.
    His? Its skin. The demon seemed to sense me, as I realized this, and though I very much did not want to see its face, the Bugsy snapped its whole body around and showed its face to me, and we both knew I couldn’t