Other Places 3: Detours by P. S. Power

more than
even magic could hide.

Chapter six
     
     
     
     
     
    "Barkeep,
make it a double." He had to force himself to pretend he was in a bar,
actually seeing it overlaid on reality for an instant to get the words out.
Just to try and be slightly funny. It was too much work, suddenly, but
fortunately that came after the words were already out. Edom looked at him
seriously, and fixed him with his eyes, carefully.
    "Hard
day?"
    Then,
as if playing a role himself, the man "poured" him a large, plain
frozen yogurt. Zack took it, gratefully, and started to eat with a red plastic
spoon, not answering at all, since he really didn't know what to think at the
moment.
    He'd
been a slave to a Greater Demon. It made sense, after a fashion, since even
Xenses had admitted to him that he'd made him do some pretty horrible things.
That was, without a doubt, the easiest way to get it done. Even a child of nine
would have to do what they were told, in that case. No matter how much it hurt
them to do it. Or how much they wanted to fight.
    Really,
it had to be something like that, didn't it? It always had.
    The
only problem with that was, simply, that there was no way to break that kind of
thing, unless he'd died. That probably meant that the Greater Demon Finias, his
grandfather, had killed him. Carefully, and for his own good, of course.
    That
part he could deal with. Even if the man had smothered him with his own hands,
locking painfully over his mouth and nose as he struggled for breath, not able
to do it at all, his lungs searing from the pain... Yeah, he could let that
pass without comment. It had to be done. Because the rest of it was so bad that
even dying was better.
    He
remembered it.
    Not
all of it, but that part, his dying, the man, Finias, looking Mexican at the
time, and smelling like pears. He'd explained what had to happen and why ,
and had given Zack a choice.
    He
could stay with Xenses, or die.
    Even
at ten, which was the age he'd been at the time, he'd asked the man to kill
him. But then he'd woken up. At home, or at least with his grandparents, who
took him in instantly.
    There
were touches of things in his mind then, little hints and bobbles of memories
that threatened to break free, even as Mirror Him screamed in his head, trying
to distract him. To protect him for one final time.
    It
didn't work.
    He
stood in front of the counter of a frozen yogurt shop, a plastic spoon
shoveling frosty whiteness into his face mechanically, with everything that had
ever been hidden from him pounding into his consciousness, as if it had
happened not a day before.
    For
sixteen months, he'd feasted on Humans and other creatures. All of them begged
him not to eat them, since they were alive at the time. Every single one. His
mother... He'd been told that he'd eaten her legs and that she'd survived it,
but in that moment he could hear the screaming, the begging, as his little
teeth tore into her chewy flesh. He'd been ordered to do it, naturally, but he
was so hungry...
    It
was so good .
    That
was the least part of things. By the time he got to the daily rapes, he almost
didn't care. That Xenses hadn't raped him was a surprise, actually. He'd
kind of been told, by the Demon himself, that he had. It was just that he'd
been passed around to about twenty other things to do the work. So that he
wouldn't blame Xenses later, most likely. It was insightful, on his part, he
knew.
    There
were things so dark and evil that he wanted them to simply not be true. The
monster had fed him babies. Tiny living ones. It started with Humans, but
hadn't ended there at all.
    This
had all taken place in a silver and purple land, which he knew was what most of
his kind saw when they walked the lines. He didn't. He avoided that place, and
moved from one point to another. Now he finally understood why.
    It
took him a few moments, but he rallied enough to get Edom to refill his large
cup, and start eating again, and then, slowly, as the memories finished, he
made all