Praefatio: A Novel by Georgia McBride

hallway. Its lights had not returned.
    “Do you hear that?” I asked, turning my head from side to side like a dog. It sounded like dripping—not water—something heavier. Oil-based. Pooling. Something was dripping from the air vent directly above me. Warm around my feet, then my legs. So warm, hot even. Then burning. Scathing. Ripping. Tearing through my pant legs.
    I looked down and screamed. An oily creature with sharp, jagged teeth and a ton of eyeballs was encasing me in hot, dark, oily goop. It was slowly coiling and making its way up my legs. I brought the sword from behind me and started slashing at it.
    “Remi, help!” My pants were hanging off me from my thighs to my feet, ripped to shreds by the creature and my sword.
    But Remi didn’t move. He stood fixed at the door. It seemed something more important commanded his attention.
    I remembered what Remi said. I kept stabbing the thing, slashing and knifing. Eyeballs popped off left and right, but the teeth kept biting. I didn’t know which was worse, the pain from the creature, the gashes I’d made with my own sword, or the sound of popping eyeballs. I kept slashing, growing weaker as I did. I had lost a lot of blood.
    When the pain got to be too much, I decided I’d had enough of being attacked.
    “Get off me, you slimy, filthy demon, and don’t come back!” As I spoke, the power of my words energized me. “I said, get off me, you slimy, eyebally freak!”
    It worked. The thing slowly retreated down my legs, to my ankles, and then my feet. I watched until it was nothing more than a pile of googly eyeballs and gnarled teeth.
    “Gross!” I shook my head and looked over at Remi, who scrunched his nose up in a stink face at the thing on the floor that had about eighty eyeballs and more than a hundred teeth. Remi blinked often when he was worried, and I feared he might have thought the attack was not yet over.
    “What?” I felt good despite the blood pouring from the slashes in my skin. Right around the time the pain in my legs intensified to one hundred on a scale of one to ten, dizziness set in. I tried sitting on the bed, but my foot slipped on the oil, and a few of the eyeballs went rolling across the room.
    “Those eyes belong to someone who’ll probably want them back, all of them. Don’t make enemies, Grace,” Remi added. He took another look down the hallway. If all those eyes belonged to one person, I really didn’t want to know who.
    What? Wasn’t he the one who told me to go ninja on whatever attacked me, including him?
    I sheathed my sword and slowly placed it on the bed. I couldn’t leave the googly-eyed evidence lying around, and I didn’t think the angel vs. demon clean-up crew was coming. A pillowcase seemed like the most sensible way to transport eighty oily eyeballs and a lotta teeth, so I pulled it off the pillow and prepared myself for what I had to do. Dizziness made it hard to focus. My feet sloshed in the blood and oil that had pooled up around them.
    Kneeling down sent searing pain shooting from my hips through my shoulders. Still, I opened the pillowcase as if the eyeballs were going to jump into the bag of their own free will. The pain worsened. I wondered how long I could keep up the angel charade.
    “Oh, just get in the bag,” I joked in grossed-out frustration. But then something miraculous happened. All the eyes turned toward me. Then they rolled themselves into the pillowcase, one by oily one, and the teeth disintegrated into fine powder on the floor.
    Remi took a last look out into the hall, then shut and re-locked the door. I had a feeling whatever was after me wouldn’t be stopped by a deadbolt. Gradually, I realized something else: These beings were after me and me alone. Remi just happened to be around when they came for me. I wondered if that would always be the case.
    I knotted the pillowcase, placed it on the chair beside the bed, and took a seat on the mattress. Remi followed and knelt down in front of