Page 10 of My Demon Teacher

Heat sears through me and all my extremities—both human and eldritch—tense. My hands start shaking. My entire body starts shaking. There’s so much pain. It hurts. It hurts so much. I can’t help but flail like a tortured animal.

What’s happening, Master? What’s happening to us?

Has the music cut out? Is everyone watching me? Why is no one helping me? Why is everyone just standing there?

Ryan steps into the man-made circle, holding a big, old leather-bound book with a smile on his face.

It sounds like Latin.

I don’t need to speak it to know he has no good intentions whatsoever.

Have I walked into a trap? Is this what they meant when they said they were going to invoke an eldritch monster? Were they always planning to use me?

“Ryan, what are you doing?”

He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t even look at me. He keeps going as if he doesn’t even know I’m there, at his feet, in pain.

The creature inside me swells, writhes, splits apart. I clutch my heart, whatever good that will do, but it’s no use. When I look beside me, the creature with its large slithery wings and tail is there, dripping with dark, disgusting slime. Its scream pierces through the room like a guillotine and cuts my insides into pieces.

What the fuck?

How did they do that?

“Mason was right. You are a weakling. Even with all the power coursing through your veins, you are pathetic.”

Mason?

What does he have to do with anything?

The monster lets out another screech beside me. Its wings flap, but it won’t fly. Despite it being separated from me, I still feel its pain as if it were my own.

This was a trap, after all. A trap I was too foolish to see. Ryan is right. I am pathetic.

I thought that because I hadn’t seen Ryan since that day, he had no affiliation with Mason or the Taylors. But for all I know, they were best friends. Maybe they never came home because Kevin forbade it or because he liked walking around naked with blood dripping down his body and didn’t want to have an audience when he used me as he pleased.

But if Ryan knows what I am, Mason must have told him my mother was an eldritch witch and what that means. As soon as Ryan saw me walk through the doors of Lockwood, he either assumed or knew I had inherited my mother’s powers.

That’s the only explanation for what’s happening right now. The only one I can think of. I don’t know what they’re trying to accomplish, but I’ve walked right into their trap.

Ryan raises his hand, opens his palm, and slices it with a knife. The blood drips in front of his feet, and as it does, he repeats the same phrase over and over again.

“Servis mihi. Servis mihi. Servis mihi.”

He points a finger at the creature, and it stands, arms pulled above its head, feet spread apart. Threads, red and ethereal, form around its wrists and ankles and connect to Ryan.

I feel the shadow of them around my own limbs, but it doesn’t last long.

In fact, the more I watch what’s happening, the less of the creature I feel inside me until…until I don’t feel it at all.

“What are you doing?” I shout.

Not that it matters to Ryan and his lackeys. Their entire focus is on the creature and the creature alone.

Ryan moves his left arm as if for the first time. The creature moves its left arm too. He takes a step forward, and the creature takes a step forward too.

He…he’s subjugated it. I don’t know how, but he’s separated the eldritch creature from me—which shouldn’t even be possible—and enslaved it.

“Aren’t you going to do anything? Isn’t anyone going to do anything? Doesn’t anyone think there’s something wrong with all t?—”

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