Page 9 of Snowed in with the Demon Lord
My eyes adjusted to the firelight and I saw him, back in demon form, rushing for the door. On instinct I followed him, though I don’t know how I planned to help. I had just enough presence of mind to wrap my blanket around me before rushing outside into the snow, with a confused Belial watching me go.
The blanketbarely kept the cold off me as we hurried through the storm. Snow fell thick enough that I could have lost sight of Abaddon at an arm’s length, except for the constant hiss and sizzle of snow evaporating on contact with his skin. The radiating warmth helped, too.
I didn’t see the door until he opened it. In fact, I’d lost track of the cabin in the blinding whiteness, and the dark opening almost surprised me. What waited insidedidsurprise me.
“What the fuck is that?” The tremor in my voice was from the cold, I swear. Not from the pentagram glowing with purple energy, surrounded by a circle of ominous sigils carved into the concrete floor.
“That is my power supply,” Abaddon said, sealing the door behind me and brushing the melting snow from his hair. He should have looked bedraggled, but he only looked hotter, literally and figuratively. Steam rose from his crimson skin, and in the purple light cast by the pentagram, he looked even more demonic than before.
To distract myself, I looked around the utility room, its strange mix of demonic and human fascinating me. Strange runes covered most of the bare concrete floor, a weird contrast to the small washing machine and shelf of laundry supplies to my left. Tools covered the opposite wall, along with a workbench.
And against the far wall stood a weird contraption, part human and part demon, connected to the central sigil by lines of purple energy flowing along carved channels. Wires laid out in complex runes caught the energy and fed it under a battered metal cover, and heavier cabling vanished into the wall. I didn’t need to be a witch or an engineer to spot where our problem lay.
“That’s not supposed to be smoking, is it?”
“No.” Abaddon ground out the word unwillingly, advancing on the hybrid device. The tension in his shoulders made me think he was about to pick a fight with it. “You have put your finger on the crux of the problem.”
I followed, careful not to step on any energy trails. Abaddon hadn’t paid them any attention, but I couldn’t forget the way he’d ignored being splashed with boiling oil. He might not think of warning me about something dangerous to mortals.
The battered, dented metal cover looked like it had been a car’s hood in a previous life. Abaddon lifted it and set it aside, revealing a mess. I looked at it with a mixture of horror and awe.
“Thisis what you’re using for power? And it hasn’t burned the cabin down?”
The demon lord turned his frown on me again. I barely noticed, my attention on the jury-rigged generator. Abaddon’s diagram was all clean lines and precise measurements, and that hadn’t prepared me for the reality. My engineering skills didn’t extend past the basics of car repair my dad taught me, but that was more than enough to be horrified by the twisted pieces of metal grinding against each other, old oil burning where it still clung to an axle. The wonder wasn’t that it had stopped working, it was that we still had air to breathe.
“There is a reason I keep this separate from the main cabin. My first few experiments disassembled themselves energetically; this one has been working well for years.”
“Okay, that addresses the bare minimum of safety concerns. What the fuck is this doing? You’re turning magic into electricity?”
While I spoke, I grabbed a pair of heavy gloves from the workbench. Far too big for me, they’d still protect my hands if I had to handle hot metal. The screech of grinding metal filled the air, and the acrid smell of smoke thickened.
“Yes. I need to power your mortal technology, and this was the solution I came up with.”
“You could have bought a fucking generator like a normal person,” I grumbled. “But no, you’ve got to use your special magic powers to get free energy.”
“Notfree,”he snapped. “The sigils take effort and attention to fuel, but it’s cheaper than a regular supply of fuel would be. And easier than disguising myself to buy it. I have limited resources in this realm. Better to use my own power, especially since I needed the circle anyway.”
A grin spread across my face, and I carefully kept my back to Abaddon so he wouldn’t see.A little defensive there, are we? Maybe the big bad demon lord can’t do everything.
Instead of saying that, I looked for something to smother the fire with. No, of course the demon hadn’t thought of fire safety. No extinguisher, no fire blanket, nothing.
“Can you stop it turning? That’s going to make working on it hard.”
He drew a clawed fingertip through a line of purple flame, severing it, and the grinding screeched to a stop. Waving the smoke away, I looked at the mess the machine had made of itself. “So, how often did you grease this axle?”
He leaned in beside me, close enough that I felt the heat radiating from him. It wasverydistracting, and I tried to keep my focus on the problem in front of us.
“It shouldn’t have needed…” His voice trailed off. “Hm.”
I waited, but that was apparently all he had to say. “You’re not great at talking problems through, are you?”
“I am not used to having a collaborator. It has been a long time since anyone stood by my side.” The note of sadness was new, and I wondered what had happened to his last assistant. He shook off the melancholy, and to my surprise, kept talking. “The generator is supposed to self-regulate. Something went wrong there, and you can see the damage.”
He pointed to where the axle ground its way into its housing. I pointed out where flying metal had ricocheted inside the generator. Over the next half hour we made a list of the damage, and I gave up trying to figure out how the generator worked. I could figure outwhatit did, and that would do.
“Is it just going to tear itself apart again?” I asked as we started work on the repairs. “I don’t know how many times we can rebuild this.”
A part clattered as Abaddon discarded it, rooting through his pile of junk with the brittle silence of a man trying not to swear. I didn’t push, and after a long pause, I got my answer.
