Private Demon

Wherever she was, it wasn't Connecticut, or King Arthur's court.

The sun had sunk below the horizon, but threw out enough rays for Jema to get her bearings. There were no other buildings, just endless rolling green pastureland, the barn, and the big double doors handing wide open. The night closed around her, slowly but insistently urging her toward the open doors. A bored cop supervising a fender bender would have done it the same way. Let's go, keep moving, lady; c'mon, c'mon, nuthin' to see here…

"Cows." She could hear them chewing. "Why am I dreaming about cows?"

Maybe it was her way of dealing with being lactose intolerant.

She didn't walk through the door quickly, but crept in like a thief. Her caution seemed silly once she was inside, as it was nothing more than a barn: trampled straw speckled with bits of soil, manure, and feed covering a packed dirt floor. Some well-used tack and equipment hung from post pegs; a pitchfork was stuck in a pile of clean hay. Ten stanchions for milk cows, a couple of horse stalls, and a stock pen, all empty.

No cows. What was making that chewing sound?

Bemused, Jema took off her robe and hung it on an empty peg before she moved toward the center of the barn. It was so obviously a dream, and yet it felt real—as if this farm actually existed somewhere.

But I've never been to a farm, or walked inside a barn.

The light shifted, and she saw that she wasn't alone anymore. At the far end of the barn, a blond woman sat on a three-legged stool next to a fat black-and-white Holstein, her arms moving rhythmically. Jema could smell milk and hear squirts of liquid hitting the tin.

She glanced inside the empty stalls before she started toward the woman. "I beg your pardon. Can you tell me where I am?"

The cow ignored her and kept chewing its cud, but the woman's arms stopped moving and she turned her head to peek at Jema. The woman's chunky golden braids, rosy cheeks, and bright blue eyes were milkmaid pretty.

"Guten abend, fraulein." She smiled, showing even, white teeth, and then went back to work.

Jema waited for her golden-eyed demon to appear. He didn't. The milkmaid continued to work, and the cow kept chewing. "I'm sorry, I don't speak German, but 1 need help. I'm looking for a man."

The milkmaid pulled a tin pail out from under the cow and got up from her stool. "Wie bitte?" She looked down at Jema's nightgown, and her smile wavered.

"What is this place?" Behind the cow was another open door, but Jema couldn't see what was beyond it. "Why am I here?"

The milkmaid smiled again.

Jema looked all around her. The dream made no sense. The milkmaid was simply a German woman, the cow was just a cow, and the stuff in the pail was… milk. A little foamy around the edges, and definitely not pasteurized, but certainly not acid or nitroglycerin.

Am I really this boring?

She looked up at a nest in the rafters. A swallow poked its head out, wasn't impressed, and went back to sleep. The German woman stood there smiling, the cow stood there chewing, and the milk in the pail stayed milk.

Jema tried to communicate again. "You don't speak any English?"

The other woman made the pained little face that was the universal polite substitute for Obviously not, genius.

Taking that Spanish class in high school didn't seem so bright now, Jema thought as she passed the woman to go around the cow.

The pail dropped and milk splashed out and went everywhere. "Gefahr!" She threw out her plump arms. "Warten Sie hier!"

Jema threw her hands up, but the milkmaid didn't strike her. They stood there another couple of seconds, Jema waiting, the milkmaid with her arms thrown wide and her expression one of horror and fear.

"You"—Jema pointed to the milk maid—"don't want me"—she pointed to her own chest and shook her head—"to go in there"—she walked two of her fingers toward the door behind the cow—"right?"

The milkmaid nodded so hard that the ends of her braids bounced off her generously filled work apron.

"I'm sorry, but I think that's the point." Jema went around the cow, stepped through the door into the darkness, and felt something squish under her shoes. The smell of raw meat filled her nostrils and turned her stomach. "Hello?"

Her voice made torches flare to life above her head. The flames illuminated fresh beef carcasses suspended by huge steel hooks on thick, crude chains. Innards and pools of blood covered ten big stone tables; blood and piles of raw fat flooded what looked like river weeds laid out on the floor. The stench enhanced the atmosphere.

The place wasn't just plain disgusting, Jema decided. It was fancy disgusting. It was disgusting with a wine waiter and no prices on the menu.

To one side was a cramped pen with nine dirty, skinny, miserable-looking cows in it. They didn't make a sound, and their eyes were sunk into their skulls so far they looked like black holes. The one closest to the gate had a withered bag with scabby, dried-up teats dangling so low they dragged on the manure-stained, trampled straw of the pen.

"You should not have come here," a deep, familiar voice said.

The quick, sharp breath Jema took in was so cold it numbed her teeth. "Any particular reason why?"

The cows shuffled-around in the pen, carcasses started to sway, and the floor rumbled. No sign of her golden-eyed demon, however.

"I'm going to remember this," Jema warned him, turning around and peering into the shadows. "Better be nice to me so I don't hate you in the morning."

Jema's demon jumped down from the rafters and landed to stand in front of her. He wore a white tunic with an enormous red X across the chest, and carried a sword with a five-foot-long blade.

This was a much bigger, meaner version of the demon who had been haunting her dreams, one who evidently didn't care if she was impressed by his personal hygiene. He was filthy, his hair a matted, tangled mane, his eyes hostile slits. Drying blood spatters covered his arms, hands, and chest, and yet he still smelled of gardenias.

"What happened to you?" Without thinking, she reached for him, but he took a step back. "What's the matter? You're not afraid of me."

"Non." He leaned the sword against one of the butchering tables, took off the tunic, and tossed it next to a mound of organs. "Allez-vous-en."

French. She didn't remember him being French. "What does that mean?"

"Go away."

"If you come with me, I will." Jema wasn't sure how to leave this place. "Can you take me somewhere else? Netherfield?"

"Netherfield exists only in a book. This is real." The gauntlets he wore came off and landed on top of the fur with a muffled thump. His hands looked terribly raw, as if he'd pounded the sense out of someone. "You have a life, Jema. Why do you spend it reading love stories and only dreaming of better?"

"I don't know. There was nothing good on TV?" It was a pathetic joke, and so cold in this place that she could see her own breath as she spoke.

The demon removed the chain mail he had worn under the white tunic, which had been tied and strapped onto him in an archaic fashion. Beneath it he wore a loose-woven tunic and baggy trousers that hadn't been sewn together very well.

"If you need to change, I can wait outside." She gestured toward a glistening brain and some eyeballs with the ganglia still attached. "Happily."

"You come naked." Once he'd stripped to the waist, he walked toward her. "Naked to my charnel house."

Jema glanced down, indignant as soon as she saw she still had on clothes. "I did not—"

He clamped his hands on her waist and lifted her until her feet left the floor. "Naked as you are defenseless. I could do anything to you in your dreams, little cat, and no one could stop me." He brought her up to his eye level. "Is that what you wanted?"

She was in trouble. She would have tried the Purpose-Driven Life approach, but she was the only person in the country who hadn't read the damn book. "Is that what you want?"

He dropped her onto one of the tables. Jema's backside hit the stone edge, and something soft and wet splattered all over her back. She looked down and thought a replay of the morning at Wendy's was plausible.

"I don't like this, um, enamel house very much." She wanted to go back to another place, one where he did other, nicer things to her. "Do you?"

"No." He came to her, and braced his arms on either side of her, uncaring of what his hands squashed. "I never did. Even when I swore I would stay to defend the last man. Never did I enjoy what I had to do. Do you believe me?"

She blocked out their revolting surroundings and remembered how good it had felt to kiss him, to have his hands on her. His eyes burned with golden flame, and he spoke with his lips peeled back from his teeth, but she could feel something else.

He wants me to hit him. He wants me to fight him and hate him. To be disgusted by him. The way I behaved in the dream at the tavern.

"Why are you doing this?" she demanded, gripping bloody stone so she wouldn't slide off.

"You showed me your secrets. This is mine. This is what I was." He looked around them, as if he wasn't sure. Then, with more assurance, he said, "I lived a lifetime in this place. Killing for them. For God."

"It's not such a bad place." No, it was, but this didn't seem the time to get girly about it. She had blood from the table on her hands, and the cut she'd made across her palm stung. "Do you have to stay here?"

He stepped back, stunned. "Of course."

"But you could walk out anytime you want."

"Walk out? When Shujai and al-Ashraf had caught us in their trap, squeezing us to death between Beirut and Haifa?" He spoke as if it were something happening this moment, just on the other side of the walls.

"You were in Desert Storm?" He didn't look that old.

"Only two strongholds remained, Tortosa to the north, and Castle Pilgrim at Athlit, to the south. I was at Castle Pilgrim, sent there to safeguard the Christian pilgrims come to the Holy Land. Only none dared to come. There were only Saracens." Hatred and sorrow wove tight threads through his voice. "I wanted to go home, but I honored my vows." ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">