Healing Camp

“Mistress Theli!” Lavender waved across the room at the mouse demoness, racing toward her in a panic.

Thelixia turned from where she sat at a magnificent redwood desk, brushing coal black hair away from her eyes, looping a lock over one of her ram’s horns to keep it from falling back. “Yes, dear?”

The grey squirrel pulled herself up short. If a human stood next to her, Lavender would seem unusually tall: seven feet at the minimum, not counting graceful gazelle-like horns jutting through long white and violet hair. She also might seem unusually curved: a human form with generous hips and even more generous chest, breasts at least as big as her head. Next to the demon mouse, though, she was a strikingly similar figure, save for a bulge less restrained by her tight bikini bottom than simply highlighted.

“It’s Gary. We were having lunch, and he suddenly doubled over, screamed, and disappeared!”

Theli rolled her eyes. “He’s been summoned. Again. I keep telling him he needs to beef up his protection spells, but does he ever listen?”

Gary was a lesser demon compared to Theli and her partner Meridoris, and even to their servant/pet/lover Audrey—which put the hamster at about Lavender’s own power level. “He’ll be all right, won’t he?”

“Oh, yes, although he may find himself forced to do things that he doesn’t want to do if the summoner gets the binding right. A big ‘if,’ mind you.”

“I hope they fucked it up. But what is it summoners ask for? Back when I was a mortal I saw a few horror movies, but that’s mostly what I have to go on.”

“That’s mostly what they have to go on, too.” Theli shrugged, and crossed her arms under her mountainous chest. “Sometimes they’re trying to use us as djinns, asking for money and power and love. Those you can usually twist, and when they’re bad enough you might get their soul in return.” She licked her lips.

Lavender raised her brows. “I don’t remember ‘demons really do eat souls’ being part of my orientation. How do I even do that? Or know that they’re ‘bad enough?’”

“You just haven’t had the opportunity yet.” Theli waved a hand. “When they are, you’ll know, and it’ll come naturally, trust me.”

“I…huh. All right, mistress. But what do we do about Gary?”

“Nothing. We can’t in most planes, not without breaking covenants and getting the Powers That Be in a dither at us.” She shrugged. “Gary will be all right, but he won’t be happy when he gets back. It’s…indescribably unpleasant to find yourself forced to commit heinous acts against your will.” She looked distant. “Ironic, given how indescribably pleasant committing heinous acts can be otherwise, isn’t it.”

Lavender waved a hand, glittering purple claws sending reflected light dancing around the room. “So if I’m summoned, how do I get out of the binding?”

Theli laughed, smiling widely enough to show off both the expected square front teeth of a rodent and the fangs of a predator—not at all dissimilar to Lavender’s set of teeth now. “The best thing to do is to find a way to get them to break the binding for you. Trick them into crossing the line of protection. The expression on their face when they realize they’re in your power rather than the other way is almost as delicious as the rest of them will be.”

The squirrel demon set a hand on her hip. “And how am I supposed to do that?”

Theli pointedly looked up and down Lavender’s form. “You’ll find a way, dear.”

“And here we are.” Julie smiles widely, holding up a ceramic bowl piled high with an Instagram-ready pasta dish.

Despite all the potential mess—the from-scratch tomato sauce (from vine-ripe tomatoes grown on her family farm), the three cheeses (two of which she made herself in a previous video), the ground beef (from a neighbor’s herd)—she looks like a model from an 1950s issue of Good Housekeeping: brown hair in a pageboy cut with a perfect curl, blemish-free skin, suspiciously spotless apron. “The kids will love it just as much as store-bought ‘Hamburger Helper,’ and it’s so much better you can’t believe it! Even if you use store-bought pasta.” She laughs ruefully.

“Now, a quick update about our first Sunlit Farm Healing Camp.” She sets down the bowl and looks into the camera—an iPhone—more earnestly. Using a phone to shoot her videos is part of the any woman can do this allure she wants to project; never mind that the iPhone Pro sits in a specialized filming rig that costs substantially more than the phone itself. “We’ve done Tradition Camps here before, but this is a new experience for all of us. We have six young men and women at the farm, all here to get put back on the straight and narrow They’re not just tangled up in crazy ideas of feminism run amok, they’ve been sucked into postmodern ideas about gender.” She wrinkles her nose theatrically, spreading her hands. “What should be very simple—you’re a man or a woman, you’re born that way, you stay that way, a man is attracted to a woman and a woman is attracted to a man—has been made so, so confusing.

“Eric and I are praying with them and for them. But some of them are…challenging.” Julie lowers her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, leaning forward. “Almost demonic, Pastor Eric says. But we have ideas for that. I’ve talked about the way we use folk magic around the farm, and we’re going to use more, in ways we haven’t tried before. It’s a little scary.” She straightens up, her smile returning. “But I have faith. And I have faith we can introduce them to you, fully healed, in two weeks. Until next time, keep those aprons clean!”

Her video assistant clicks a button on the MacBook Pro handling the recording. “Okay. We should have it online this afternoon.”

The smile drops, and Julie just looks tired. “Great.” She slides the bowl across the counter. “Help yourself.”

He grunts, looking at it dubiously.

Julie tucks a wooden box under her arm and heads outside, smoothing down her handmade skirt before starting a brisk walk past the guest cottage toward the barn. The cottage is a new addition to the farm; her husband Eric thought setting it up as a bed and breakfast for the most devoted fans would be a good revenue stream—three hundred a night. She likes that, even if dealing with fans is exhausting.

It’s nothing compared dealing with a half-dozen screwed up brats dragged here for two weeks by their parents, though. Yes, they’re paying five thousand a head for the privilege, but she and Eric are also paying a dozen temporary staffers minimum wage to help with it all and providing them room and board on top of that, all of them staying in the cabin that’s meant for a family of four at most. And because the parents are all capital-F Fans she has to get them food that looks homemade enough that they don’t trash her on TikTok.

She slows for a second, frowning at herself, then shakes her head and walks on with renewed determination. Yes, this whole idea was Eric’s baby, but driven by real requests from their fans—and her realization that, even if she seemed to be unable to bear children herself, her brand demanded she do something with kids. Her followers were attracted to her “neo-traditional” take on household management and parenting, but she wasn’t a parent. And the ones who’d glommed onto Eric’s folk theology clearly felt the way she did about the nihilistic miasma of modernity—and many of them had families shattered by post-modern culture nonsense. Their kids had learned it’s okay to be homosexual, to be transsexual, to be “queer” in some mysterious positive sense of the term.

Julie doesn’t believe in evil the way Eric does, with those religious and spiritual overtones, literal demons and angels. As far as she can tell, evil mostly comes from humans. These kids have been poisoned by sci-fi and comic books, by godless modern “literature”, by TikTok and Tumblr. Those last ones are ironic. If they’d just found her on social media, her people, the good people, they wouldn’t be here.

When she enters the barn, the first sensation is just heat: it’s a typically hot, sticky Kansas summer, and without air conditioning, the place is sweltering. The heat’s followed by the pleasant scents of wood and hay and the less pleasant scents of cow—the feed, the manure, the animals themselves. She knows how to milk a cow, but she doesn’t like being around any farm animal much.

Pastor Eric is yelling in the face of a lanky nineteen-year-old. “You aren’t just possessed by a demon,” he’s snarling, “you are a demon!”

The other five kids stand back, varying degrees of misery on their faces. They all look refreshingly middle-America today: girls with makeup, blouses and skirts, all appropriately feminine rather than “tomboy” or “butch” or whatever other ridiculous term they want to use; boys in polo shirts and crew cuts. She did the makeup on the girls this morning—the fight’s starting to go out of them—and Eric gave the boys haircuts using his trimmer. They’re not good cuts, but that’s not the point. The staff members, eight of the ten they hired, stand far enough away not to interfere but close enough to make it clear nobody’s going anywhere without permission.

The kid Eric’s yelling at, Kaden, has a particularly bad haircut, because he wouldn’t sit still for it. When he arrived, he wore makeup, had scraggly blond hair past his shoulders, and insisted he was a “they/them”; they’d taken his makeup away, but when Eric called him a sissy and came after him with the trimmers, he’d kneed the pastor in the nuts. Now Kaden’s “makeup” is a black eye and a swollen jaw and his short hair is an uneven patchwork mess with at least two visible scabs. Julie suppresses a grimace. That’s a side of Eric she doesn’t like.

“There’s no such thing as fucking demons!” Kaden yells back. “Why is it so fucking important to people like you to control people like me?”

Kaden’s tall, but Eric, with his rugged black beard, wild eyes, and lumberjack build, easily overpowers him. “I’ll show you control, you little—”

“Please.” Julie sets down the box she’s been carrying and claps her hands. “Enough.”

“Don’t think I haven’t picked up on this ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine you’ve been doing,” Kaden mutters. “You know why it doesn’t work? Because there are no good cops.”

Julie merely returns a placid smile. “You’d be a handsome young man if you let yourself.”

“Your staff tried to rape us last night,” he says flatly.

She can’t keep her face from falling. “Excuse me?”

“They tried,” Eric retorts tightly, “to show you what proper relationships are like.”

“Oh, consent isn’t ‘proper’ in your religion? And Dan or whatever the fuck his name was went after Jim.” He points accusingly at one of the staff members, a burly six-plus-foot guy who snorts and flips him the bird. One of the well-groomed boys to the side looks down at the floor, blood draining out of his face. “What’s the rationalization for that? No, let me guess. Showing him the horror of homosexuality by making it as brutal as possible.”

“Stop.” Jim’s voice is barely above a whisper. Jim is soft and round-faced, and could stand to lose a few pounds.

Julie narrows her eyes at Eric, leaving the question unspoken. Another pastor they’d spoken to had talked about the necessity of physical demonstration and hand-waved around the ethical and legal implications, but she thought she’d made it clear that she wasn’t comfortable with that. It wasn’t just the liability risk, it was—just too much.

Eric barks, “It is brutal.” He points at one of the two girls, then the other. “You want a loving, correct relationship? That’s the way. That’s the only way.”

Kaden makes a fist himself.

Before things escalate again, Julie steps forward. “Kaden, listen. We told you that we’d prove you all have been under demonic influence, and today’s the day.” She takes a step back, kneels, and opens the box.

“You think you’re going to exorcise us?” He looks in the box. “What is that, a crystal ball?”

“You’re under demonic influence, not possessed.” She glances at Eric a moment, then back at Kaden. “What we’re going to do is try to talk to that demon. Everyone gather ’round.”

The group of campers move forward, herded by the larger circle of staff members around them. Meanwhile, Julie pulls out the scrying stone, along with a drawing she’s made: two circles with Hebrew letters between them. “Now, I’m not going to pretend I’m experienced in all of this; I’ve never tried this before. So it could be risky.”

One of the girls crosses her arms skeptically. Kaden rolls his eyes, sighing loudly. Eric slaps him, and Kaden lifts his own hand in response.

“Stop!” Julie says, literally stomping her foot. “Let’s not screw up the protection spells, all right?” She sets the sigil down on the floor. “Everyone concentrate on that.”

Gritting his teeth, Kaden looks at the circle. The rest of the group, from campers to staffers, does, too.

Julie pulls a piece of paper out from the box and hands it to Eric. He begins reciting.

Julie takes over, kneeling by the box. “We don’t have the demon’s name, so this is where this gets tricky.” She picks up the tinted glass scrying stone—the crystal ball, as Kaden put it—and turns slowly, meeting everyone’s eyes as she holds it out. “Concentrate on this. Focus on seeing your demons in the stone.”

The verses Eric recited are an abbreviated part of a protection spell from some goofy mythology website; the rest of it involves having to find a “summoning seal” for a specific demon, finding psalms and angelic emissaries and on and on. While folk magic is part of her brand, it’s nothing more exotic than divining rods, and she rarely goes past reciting blessings and following some quaint superstitions. She did an episode about scrying stones two years ago, just talking about their history, and it lost her a thousand followers. Pushing the magic and demonic element today is a calculated risk that her audience now is more open to this “secret knowledge” shit. See how much smarter you are than those liberal elites was always an unspoken part of her brand, after all.

But this isn’t about whether demons are real. It’s about putting on a show. When she sets the scrying stone back down on its base in the box, she switches on the electronics underneath.

As she stands and straightens, a subtle red glow appears on the stone, a point in the glass sphere, swirling around, slowly brightening. Other lights join it.

“Wow,” Kaden murmurs. “Who knew demons looked so much like LEDs.”

Someone—Julie doesn’t see who—stifles a giggle. She gives Kaden a stern look. “Concentrate,” she repeats.

Everyone stares at the glass ball, earnestly or skeptically or resentfully.

The lights swirl faster, brighten, then all at once resolve into a pentacle. Several of the onlookers gasp. Wind picks up, driven by hidden fans she had staffers set up when the campers were at breakfast this morning.

“That’s a demon?” a staffer says, on cue.

“It’s the presence of one. It’s here.” She looks around, eyes wide, then to Eric. “We’re sure we’re protected?”

“Yes,” he says, betraying a little calculated uncertainty.

Julie address the campers, locking eyes with them in turn. “You feel its presence, don’t you? Images. A prickle on the back of your neck.”

Several of them—not Kaden, of course—look nervous. One even nods. Excellent.

“Now, we chant a word of power. ‘Arrive’ is the one we’ve chosen. Ancients might say it in Hebrew, but we’re modern Americans, aren’t we? It’s not going to make the demon visible, but it’ll bring it here, bound. It can’t answer questions directly, but you’ll feel it manifest. I can interpret it.” She takes a deep breath. “Arrive. Arr—”

Kaden snorts.

“Arrive,” she repeats, clenching her fists. Eric joins in, followed by other staffers. The campers remain silent, but that doesn’t matter.

The fans ramp up speed, and the lights flicker. In a few seconds, the rest of the effects should—

The lights all snap off, and the fans die audibly enough to draw attention to themselves. The barn isn’t plunged into true darkness—it is, after all, a barn, with windows and a wide double door that flew open with a sharp bang when the power blew—but it’s in twilight.

Dammit. This was not supposed to happen. How can she improvise—

The stone glows solid purple, growing bright enough to be hard to look at, far brighter than the battery-powered LEDs under it could become. Then it shatters, laser beams of pale violet cascading around the barn.

Several people scream. Then someone points. Julie looks at what they’re pointing at, and screams, too.

Lavender had just sat down to dinner when she felt the tug.

While she loved going out on the town—the city around the palace had a seemingly infinite number of café options—she’d chosen to eat inside the palace tonight, at the least casual of the dozen dining rooms she’d discovered so far. (She’d been told there were dozens more.) She and Audrey had met for burgers and a shared side order of mortals. Tonight’s box of beings who’d chosen badly in mortal life looked like elves, jumping up and down in the bowl they’d been served in, screaming tiny curses and pleas which only grew in volume as the red panda demoness shook seasoning salt over them and shoved two into her mouth.

The squirrel took a big bite of her habanero jack burger and picked up a single elf woman, who kicked energetically and screamed. “I am the Princess of Farivel, and you will unhand me at—”

Lavender popped the princess into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “What was Farivel?”

Audrey shrugged. “You know elves, right? Some place that abused beings they thought of as ‘lesser.’”

“Not all elves are like that!” one shouted desperately.

Lavender rolled her eyes. “Yeah, but you are, or you wouldn’t be in a snack bowl in the land of the dead, would you.”

The red panda picked that one up, over his protests. “It usually takes ones like this a lot of passes through the Underworld before they admit any shortcomings and get to move on.”

“I don’t have any shortcomings, you wretched—”

Audrey tossed him in her mouth and swallowed him whole. “So,” she said to Lavender, “I wanted to check in and ask how things’ve been going for you since you, you know, came to grips with it all. Assuming you have.” She grinned.

“Mostly.” Lavender laughed. “After I stopped pretending Theli and Meri had done this to me against my will. They just saw it in me before I did.”

“They’re good at that.” Audrey took a big bite of her own burger—blue cheese and mushroom—and licked her lips. “So no regrets?”

She tilted her head, thinking. “No, there are regrets. Friends and coworkers I won’t see again. Feeling like I won’t make a difference in my world—my old world—anymore. But if I had the choice to go back now, I wouldn’t take it.”

Audrey nodded, looking distant a moment. “I don’t think I have even those regrets. I was on the edge of suicide. Weird to think becoming a demon was my salvation, but the universe is much, much weirder than I ever knew as a mortal.”

“Yeah, I’m definitely getting that feeling, too.”

The red panda smirked. “And, hey, if you want to make a difference in your old world, you have a lot of new ways of doing it.”

Lavender lifted her hands up, laughing. “I’m still trying to learn how to make change subtly as a demon.”

Audrey waved a hand dismissively. “The only people who think you can’t solve problems by stomping them flat are people who are…” She stomped a paw down. “Problems.”

The squirrel grinned. “You’re kind of terrifying.”

“You’re so sweet.” Audrey blew her a kiss.

Still smiling, the squirrel started to take another bite of her burger, then let a surprised whfff! Had somebody—or something—just yanked her back in her seat? She twisted around, searching.

“What is it?”

“I don’t—whfff!—it’s like something’s grabbing at me.” She dropped her burger and stood up hurriedly, glancing around, down, behind her.

Her vision blurred and swam for a half a second, a vision of another place superimposing itself on the café. She rubbed her eyes. “I just saw a barn, a stable, something. A big group of humans.”

Audrey grimaced. “I think they’re trying to summon you.”

“Fucking humans.”

Audrey lifted a brow, looking amused. Lavender had been a human not that long ago.

“Look, if any demon gets to say that, I do.” She shook her head after a moment. “It’s gone now. Huh. But it was so real, I can see myself right there—”

“Don’t!” Audrey said sharply, at the same time her vision blurred again, this time accompanied with a stomach lurch. Audrey’s voice warped in a funhouse Doppler effect as it receded. “Don’t tryyyy to seeeeee yourself there, orrrr…”

The scent of straw and animals—cattle and human—filled her nose as purple fire receded from around her. Or you’ll complete the circuit or whatever the magical equivalent of that is. Good going, you dipshit of a demon.

All of the humans were screaming. She shut them out momentarily to get her bearings. Yes, a barn, and they’d been performing some kind of ritual. She remained in the outfit she’d been wearing for her burger date, which at least looked appropriately goth: leather bustier laced in the front, matching leather short shorts laced on the right side, and thigh-high fishnet stockings, all black. A silver pendant with a pentacle hung from a black leather choker.

“Who summons me and why?” She used magic to put just a touch of extra reverb in her voice, a hint of a distant rumble of thunder.

One of the older men—bearded guy, wild eyes, the look of someone you saw in a documentary about a pseudo-Christian death cult—looked stricken as several of the other humans, including a woman standing very close to him, gave him a shocked, accusing look.

“Don’t stare at me that way,” he hissed to her. “You knew the risks!”

“Bullshit, Eric, it wasn’t supposed to be—to be…” She glanced quickly around at the other humans, and snapped her mouth shut.

“To be real?” Lavender growled.

“It’s all real. So are the binding and protection spells.” He looked up at Lavender, challenging, but she could read the desperate plea in his eyes.

But, she could also feel the spells he referred to, sense them as…not shields as much as a leash. “They are,” she confirmed, gazing down at him.

“No. No,” one of the humans said. “Come on.” They—he? No, they, Lavender decided—looked maybe old enough to legally drink. Cute, in an androgynous way, and…hmm. Scared, yes, but genuinely skeptical.

Lavender grinned at them. “Come over here and feel me.”

“Absolutely do not touch it, Kaden,” the woman snapped.

“I’m not an ‘it,’ I’m a she.”

The older man shook his head, pointing accusingly at her crotch. “You very visibly are not.”

The woman gawked.

“See? The man gestured at the other younger participants, all of whom looked as afraid of him as they did of Lavender. “You can hardly find more obvious proof that transsexualism is demonic than that.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” both Lavender and Kaden said at the same time. They looked at one another, and Lavender grinned; Kaden laughed nervously.

The woman cleared her throat and put her hands on her hips, facing Lavender. “Tell me your name.”

She felt a dismaying compulsion at the order. Dammit. “Lavender.”

“Tell me your real name.”

“That is my real name. It may shock you, but horror movies don’t get much right about demons. What’s your real name?”

“I’m asking the questions here.”

“That’s Julie Hammond,” Kaden piped up. “That guy is her husband Eric.”

“Kaden!” Julie snapped. Then she turned back to Lavender. “Tell them, Lavender. Tell them you’re influencing these poor kids to believe they’re transsexual, or gay, or lesbian, or ‘nonbinary.’” She made air quotes around “nonbinary” as she said it.

“What?” She looked around, and clenched her fists. “Is this a conversion camp? Are you running a fucking conversion camp?”

One of the other youths, a delicate looking boy, burst into tears.

“Say it!” Julie screamed. “Say the words!”

“I’m…” Lavender grit her teeth, but the compulsion was too strong. “I’m influencing them…to believe…that.”

“Jesus Christ.” Kaden threw up his hands. “You’ve been trying to force us to tell us what you want to hear, and now you’re forcing her to, too. She’s not influencing us at all.”

She let out a breath, relieved. “No, I’m not.”

“It,” Eric said.

“Her,” Kaden repeated.

“It!” Eric balled his fists. “Use your eyes, man! It’s made itself to look like some kind of animal!”

“She’s a squirrel.” Kaden looked up at her. “Squirrel, right?”

“Squirrel,” she confirmed. She glanced to Eric. “You understand that squirrels have genders, too, don’t you?”

One of the other younger humans—physically male, an athletic-looking redhead dressed to look as masculine as possible, but Lavender sensed the mismatch—was staring at the squirrel, gaze flicking between her crotch and her breasts. “Y-you can just be…even if you have…keep…uh…”

Lavender smiled. “You’re already a girl. Always have been.”

She blushed, looking away.

One of the other campers, a young woman, broke in. “Jesus, George, if this is real that’s a demon. Just because it’s telling you what you want to hear doesn’t make it one of the good guys.”

Julie shook her head. “It’s all too real.”

Lavender eyed her. She could tell the woman was trying to project authority with nervousness, but she sounded like she was trying to convince herself as much as the others.

“All they did was chant ‘arrive’ over and over.” Kaden sounded frustrated as they looked up at the squirrel. “How would that even bring you here, and if it did, how would it bind you? All they did was recite the names of angels.”

“Magical power starts with belief. They believe…” She trailed off, tilting her head, studying Eric and Julie. “They believe I’m controllable because they don’t believe I’m real. Each of them thinks the other must be behind this illusion.”

“What, if they start actually believing you’re real that’ll break the binding?”

“N-no,” Julie stammered. “Everyone who summoned demons in the past did believe they were real, and they kept them bound.”

Lavender leaned forward, the subtle purple glow in her eyes becoming brighter. “They believed in the magic. Do you, Julie Hammond?”

“Yes! Yes!” She started to back up, reflexively. “I believe you’re a real demon and we really summoned you here and we really bound you and we’re really sending you back right now!”

Lavender took a step forward after her. “Are you? What is it you actually believe in, beyond torturing young adults?”

“She also believes in making millions of dollars cosplaying as a pioneer wife,” Kaden offered.

“Shut up!” Eric growled, raising his hand again.

Kaden scrambled away from the threatened hit and smacked right into Lavender, colliding with a soft but audible thunk. They gaped up, running their hands through her fur, eyes slowly widening. “You’re—you’re—”

“Like me and the bitch have both been saying, I’m quite real.”

“Wow,” Kaden breathed. Then they became aware they had one hand on Lavender’s stomach and the other on her hip, and they dropped their arms to their side quickly, blushing.

“Return!” Julie shrieked. “Everyone! Chant! Return! Return! Return!”

Eric joined in, and a few of the staff members did, half-heartedly.

Lavender snapped her fingers, and Julie’s carefully-drawn sigil burst into flames. “And the binding,” she said with a predatory smile, “is broken.”

“Because now they believe in you.” Kaden backed away, starting to look terrified themselves.

“No.” She put a hand on their shoulder, her smile becoming warmer, and caught their hand gently with her other one. “Because now you believe in me.”

Their expression shifted—slightly—from fear to uncertain wonder.

“So.” Lavender straightened up. “You half-dozen are the campers here.” She motioned at the six younger humans, including Kaden, and they all began to subtly sparkle. Two of them shrieked.

“The rest of you are staff. This makes the campers your victims.” She snapped her fingers, and vines erupted out of the ground around the rest of the group, entwining their arms and legs. A lot more shrieking started, but Lavender’s calm voice carried over it. “Which makes you… my victims.” She smiled brightly.

Pastor Eric struggled against the vines, bending back and forth without getting free. “We will never be your—”

A vine wrapped around his mouth. “Shhh.” Lavender put a finger across her lips.

The young woman who’d reproached Kaden earlier looked at the sparkles around her, then up at Lavender, eyes brimming with panicked tears. “What are you doing to us?”

“At the moment, just protecting you.” The squirrel walked around them slowly. “What happens next depends on you.”

“Is….is this some kind of test?” That was the young trans woman who’d been staring at Lavender’s crotch a few moments ago. Now her gaze kept slipping to the demon’s breasts, despite her obvious effort to keep focused on her eyes. “To see if we’ll let you corrupt us with the temptation of taking revenge? Because w-we…uh…”

“You want to say you won’t, but you are. That’s okay.” Lavender grinned, then winked at Kaden, flicking her tail. Their cheeks flushed a deep crimson.

“But, no. Frankly, I’m not offering you in a say in what I do to them. I’m offering you the choice to stay and watch, or to leave. I doubt any of you want to go home, but I can give you a start elsewhere.” She turned back to the young woman, leaning over, making sure her prodigious cleavage was just below eye level. “And a start in any transformations you might want.”

When she responded, it was nearly voiceless. “Oh.”

“I want to stay,” Kaden whispered. “If I’ll be safe.”

“It’s a fucking demon, you moron,” one of the staff members shouted, struggling in the vines that bound him. “It’s not going to let you be safe!”

Lavender looked toward him contemptuously, and snapped her fingers. A flower burst from the ground in front of him, a single pale violet sunflower on the end of a thick green stem, growing rapidly until it was at his face level, several times as wide as his head. He had a moment to stare at it, puzzled, before it jerked forward and closed around his face. The vines let go as the flower swallowed him with loud, sucking slurps over the space of about five seconds, his body visibly traveling down the stem as most of the onlookers screamed or cursed or whimpered. The campers gaped, but the two who’d spoken with Lavender already looked transfixed.

“Anyone else want to misgender me?” the squirrel said over the gasps and cries. “The sunflowers swallow you whole, but the roses will eat you in bites.”

“Please.” Julie burst into authentic-seeming tears. “You can’t undo everything we’ve been working toward!”

Lavender narrowed her eyes. “Not in an afternoon, that’s for damn sure. But I can, and will, make sure you can’t do it to anyone else.”

One of the campers, a young man, approached Lavender, trembling. “P-please let me go. I just want—want—” He closed his eyes, voice lowering, and words came out in a rush. “I want to be with my boyfriend, I w-was getting away from my parents with money I’d saved up and I thought I was going to make it but they found out, somehow, they were reading my email or something and found out everything and they—they—”

“Where is he?” she said softly.

“Sacramento.”

“Go to that door,” she pointed, “and take the bag there. Then just walk through.”

“Just…l-like that?”

“Just like that.”

“W-what do you want in return?”

“For you to take the chance.” She smiled, not bothering to hide her predator teeth.

“That’s it. No c-contract, no bargain for my soul, no—”

“If I’m taking any souls today, I promise yours isn’t among them.” She waved her hand. “Go on.”

“Don’t trust her, Rob,” Julie warned. “You see what she is.”

“I…” Rob looked at Lavender, than at Julie. “Yeah. But I also see what you are.”

Eric, still muffled by the vine, couldn’t muster more than a “Nffff! Nffff!” as a warning.

He headed to the exit, hesitantly at first, but then faster. He picked up the bag, looked inside, and his eyes widened. He stared back at Lavender.

The demoness just smiled, eyes literally flashing.

With a more blissful smile than he’d had since he could remember, he stepped outside, disappearing into a purple light. “Holy…” his voice came, as he disappeared. “Tom! Tom!”

“Kind of the other thing, but we’ll let it slide,” Lavender said cheerfully. “Anyone else who wants to, go. Grab your bag. You’ll be where you want, to as much a degree as I can manage.”

Julie looked upset, but Eric looked furious. Ah. She was upset because she was watching money walk out the door, but Eric was a true believer.

Two more left. Kaden, the trans girl, and another boy—not trans—remained. “So. You’re Kaden.” Lavender pointed. “And you two?”

“Jim,” the boy said softly, not meeting her eyes.

“G…” the girl started to say, then stopped, looking at herself, her very male-presenting clothes and body. She gritted her teeth. “Marie.”

“If you all stay, you’ll be unharmed physically, but I can’t make any promises about what you see. Or what you become, at least temporarily.” She grins. “That’s entirely up to you. But like the others, you can leave at any time you want.”

“A-are you just going to kill them while they’re bound?” Jim said, voice rising a bit.

“That wouldn’t be much fun, would it.” She waved a hand, and the vines retracted back into the dirt and straw of the barn floor. “But I don’t want to make this too easy, so…hmm. I know. You’ve all heard the phrase ‘fix your hearts or die,’ haven’t you?” She clapped her hands, and cold purple fire raced around all of the humans except the campers. “Be only as big as your little, shriveled hearts are. Fix your hearts…or risk being stepped on.”

All of the camp staff began shrinking. Lavender began walking.

Julie struggles in the vines, seething. How dare this—this literal monster twist her and Eric’s good work like this? Until this moment, she believed in demons and Satan and hell the same way she believed in angels and God and heaven: metaphorically. They may be “real” in some sense, but they’re all a means to an end.

Truthfully, she’d never thought much about religion before she’d met Eric—one of her channel’s first true fans. She definitely hadn’t thought much about gays and lesbians and transgenders, how weird it was that nobody’d talked about them until suddenly everybody was talking about them. Eric made her realize that every television show and every movie had to have a gay couple or someone using “they/them” pronouns and churches had to marry them and bakers had to make cakes for them, and now somehow cops were the bad guys and companies had to stop using names like “Plantation” and football teams couldn’t be “Redskins” and it was all just so fucking much.

All this runs through her head as she blanks out on the scene around her, until she’s brought back to this unreal reality by the sounds of a temp worker being

eaten

by a

flower.

Dammit, how is any of this real? But the only person here who could possibly have set up something this elaborate, this over-the-top, this expensive, is her. Eric has the money, but not the connections or the imagination. And she knows the full extent of what she set up: the scrying stone with the lights.

It was a good effect, she thinks petulantly.

No time for this-can’t-be-happenings. She’s got to…to do what? Get free. Stop the demon. Somehow. First thing first: distract her. “Please!” she yells, working up tears almost on reflex. It’s easy, since they’re as much tears of rage as of fright. “You can’t undo everything we’ve been working toward!”

The squirrel-thing turns her head toward her. “Not in an afternoon, that’s for damn sure.”

One of the campers—Bobby or Robby or whatever—rushes up to the demon, begging to be let go and get away from his parents, the loving parents who sent him here and paid Julie and Eric money to get him fixed, and instead go be with his goddamn boyfriend.

And the demon grants it, like she’s some kind of—some kind of queer genie. She gives him a parting gift, like she’s a game show host. Julie clenches her fists. I should be thinking of her as it. Of it as it.

No, you shouldn’t, she corrects herself, because if you do you’re going to fuck up and say it out loud and you’re going to be fed to a goddamn flower. Think of the demon as her. It’s not that difficult. Lavender has, if she’s completely honest with herself, the kind of figure Julie dreamed of having when she was a teenager. Other than the squirrel part. That she’s suddenly seeing the attraction of furries is one more thing about this she hates.

The demon keeps talking with the campers, humoring George’s gender delusions.

Then, all at once, the vines let Julie go. She gasps, rubbing her wrists. Okay, now think about what to do, what to say, how to—

The squirrel-thing derails her train of thought, yet again, by talking about “fix your hearts”—and then purple light washes over her. Is she threatening to shrink them?

Fuck. What to do is run. Julie bolts for the closest exit, faster than she’s ever run in her life, shoving a staff member out of the way as she tears through the exit door and out into

the other side of the barn?

She exited one side, and came back in the other? She looks back and forth in confusion, and hurries back out the door she just came in, dreading the possibility that she’s going to

hurry back in through the door she first bolted through just a moment ago.

And the barn looks bigger. Which means Julie’s smaller. No no no this can’t be happening—

The squirrel demoness looks incredibly fucking pleased with herself as she strolls toward the exit on the other side of the barn.

Julie dives to the side, just as the squirrel walks in behind her, reality wrapping around like an old video game, and grabs another staff member, a young Aryan-looking kid who’s barely knee-high to the demon. They’re all barely knee-high to the demon, and getting smaller.

“Please!” he screams. “I’m not with these assholes, I’m just here to get paid.”

“So you’re working for them,” the demon says, huge tail flicking behind her. “You think they’re assholes, but you’ll still take their money.”

“I—uh—”

“Are you hurting these people?” She points back at the campers who haven’t fled yet, Jim and Kaden and George.

“No! No!”

She makes a tch noise. “Liar.” She touches a finger to him. “You’re still too big for your heart.” His shrinking accelerates comically, his height dropping down to oversized action figure, then figurine, then hamster, then—Julie can’t quite see now, but she guesses almond. “Just right,” Lavender says, beaming wickedly, then pops him into her mouth like a piece of candy.

Oh, sweet Jesus. They can’t get out, and if they did, they’d be tiny—and possibly still shrinking.

“Julie!” Someone grabs her from behind and she jumps, stifling a shriek. Eric. It’s Eric. “We have to hide!”

She’s aware she’s giving him a blank stare, but she can’t muster a better response. Yes, she absolutely wants to hide, but—something about that feels wrong. Not ethically or morally, but tactically.

It hits her. “The campers.”

“What? Julie—”

“The campers aren’t shrinking.”

“Of course they’re not.” Eric sounds angry that she’s wasting his time pointing out the obvious, and he starts all but dragging her toward the side of the barn. “She’s giving them power over us.”

“But they’re—” She pulls herself free from Eric’s grasp and gives him a shove. “Eric, if we hide, then what?”

“We pray. Only prayer can save us.” He points at the squirrel demon, who’s holding her paw over another staff member. “If we don’t hide, we get that.” She doesn’t hear any conversation between Lavender and the doomed staff member before the paw comes down with a firm, gleeful stomp. She puts a hand to her mouth.

Actually, maybe there was no conversation: there are also kicking legs sticking out of the squirrel’s muzzle, which disappear with a gulp. And now she can hear other screams and whimpers and cries for mercy. Dear God, are the campers killing people, too? They wouldn’t. Would they?

Is that—is that a rose bush?

They’re not shrinking any more. They’ve stopped at…maybe four or five inches, she’s guessing. Ankle height.

All right. Undoubtedly hiding would be a lot safer, but then what? The demoness is the only one who can reverse this. Eric might be convinced that praying hard enough will do it, but leaving her salvation up to unseen “works in mysterious ways” forces doesn’t sit well. There’s a seen force, right here, who can solve this with a snap of her furry fingers—if she can be convinced to do it. Hiding isn’t the solution. Tricking the demon is, just like old folk tales or that stupid-ass song about the fiddler from Georgia.

All right, Julie. If there’s ever been a time to call on your famous tradwife charm, this is that time. Steeling herself, she strides forward, waving. “Lavender! Miss Lavender!”

Eric looks aghast. “Woman, what in the hell—”

Lavender looks down, too, as well as all three campers. Jim looks shell-shocked; Kaden and “Marie” look…positively venomous, more so than the demoness does. Marie is holding another staff member, isn’t she? And—and squeezing him. Julie hears a very disturbing, very final crack noise.

Somehow none of the three look fully human from this vantage point, either. Before she can process that, the squirrel-thing crouches and fixes her eyes—glowing purple eyes—on her. “Yes, Julie.”

“What do you want me to do for you to stop this? To reverse it?”

She rests her fiercely-clawed hands on her knees. “What makes you think there’s anything you can do to make me stop?”

“You could have just snapped your fingers and set us all on fire or brought the roof down after saving the campers or…any number of things. But you didn’t. So I think you’re giving some of us a chance.”

“Oh, it wasn’t just up to me, was it?” The squirrel looks around. “And I don’t think there’s anyone besides you and your husband left.”

The blood drains out of Julie’s face.

“This bitch is just going to say whatever she thinks you want to hear,” Kaden protests. “Just like she did with our parents.” Kaden looks positively…feline. Julie squints at them.

“Probably,” Lavender agrees. She leans forward, expression positively predatory.

Julie swallows, and raises her hands placatingly. “What I said to the campers’ parents was what they needed to hear.”

“What they need to hear is the truth!” Jim, quiet, sad Jim, suddenly screams. Even Lavender looks startled.

Julie gazes up at him with her most authoritative look. It’s hard to sustain given the size difference, but she does her damnedest. “The truth that you’re naturally gay and there’s nothing that can be done to convince you otherwise, Jim? They have heard that, haven’t they? They heard it from you. It didn’t go the way you wanted, did it?”

“So just lie about it instead?” Jim’s high-pitched voice sounds like an angry bleat, and when he takes a hard step forward, almost a stomp, it rings like—like a hoof.

“What—what’s happening?” Julie can tell she’s losing the cool she’s been trying desperately to still project. “You sound like—you’re—what—”

Lavender speaks in an amused singsong. “I did say what they’d become was entirely up to them.”

“And Jim wants to become a fucking goat? A gay goat?”

“I’m a ram!” Jim screams.

And now, as if the veil has been lifted, Julie sees it: he’s a ram the same way Lavender is a squirrel, human-sized and shaped—incredibly, still recognizably Jim—but more…perfect. And angry. That quiet reserved fear she’s always seen in Jim’s eyes has kindled into a pure blue flame of rage.

Then, what she sees is the hoof smashing down toward her.

With a shrill, terrified shriek, she leaps to the side like—like literal demons are after her. Ha ha.

Another stomp misses in the sense of not leaving her flat, but the edge of Jim’s hoof grazes the back of her leg, sending her sprawling. That scream isn’t in fear as much as it is in pain. Oh God oh God oh fuck, did something snap?

Julie ends up on her back, and her eyes meet Jim’s. He is, she realizes in that moment, oddly beautiful, a breathtaking pagan god. For that moment, even though she knows she’s about to have her brains smashed in, she feels a sense of almost religious awe that she never once felt in church.

Then the ram god’s eyes shift to the side, widen, and he lets out a rafter-shaking bellow. He’s looking at a staffer, a (once) big, burly man whose face had been locked in a permanent sneer the whole time he’d been here. Dan, the one Kaden had accused of…oh.

Then Jim’s hoof drops like a battering ram. Julie barely has time to squeeze her eyes shut. The noise alone is horrifying enough.

She sits up after a moment, carefully avoiding the direction of the panting, snarling ram, then tries to stand. Shooting pain runs up her injured leg the moment she puts any weight on it, and she crumples to the ground with a cry.

Julie closes her eyes again, choking back a sob. Think. Think. “I’m sorry,” she moans, although she’s not sure who she’s speaking to.

“Sorry for what?”

She doesn’t recognize that voice. She looks up fearfully, and gapes. The creature crouching over her is a vixen, the most beautiful fox she’s ever seen and most beautiful woman she’s ever seen put together, long red hair and shining emerald eyes. She’s wearing tight jeans and a T-shirt, and Julie recognizes them.

“Marie,” she whispers.

The vixen’s brows lift. “You got it right. I’m honestly shocked. Sorry for what, Mrs. Hammond?” She looks over at Lavender as the squirrel-demon walks over. “She’ll know if you’re lying.”

For the first time in a very long time, Julie bursts into uncontrolled, real tears. “Sorry I did any of this,” she bawls. “Sorry I ever thought this was a good idea. Sorry I hired these people and sorry I brought any of you here, and…”

She swallows, trying to compose herself, and looks up at Marie sadly. “Sorry I don’t understand it. But I don’t. I don’t understand how you can be gay or how you can think you’re a woman in a man’s body or the reverse.” She laughs in a way that drips with hysteria. “I don’t understand furries, either. But…”

“Julie!” Eric yells from somewhere, his voice warning. “Don’t!”

She ignores him, takes a deep breath. “But I see. I see you’re fucking beautiful. Jim is beautiful. Lavender, God help me, she’s beautiful.”

“Damn right I am,” Lavender deadpans, crossing her arms.

“And that’s it?” Kaden snaps, stomping over himself. Themself? Is that a word? Julie rubs her head. Kaden is a cat, because of course they are, and they’re beautiful too, because of course they are. White fur mottled with gray, scraggly blond hair restored, and they is absolutely the right pronoun. “She says she’s sorry and we let her go?”

“She’s right in that I can tell she isn’t lying about thinking you’re beautiful, and about being sorry she got herself into this mess. But she’s also not lying about anything else.” Lavender tilts her horned head down, fixing Julie with her glowing gaze. “If you get out of this, you’re going to do this again, aren’t you?”

She shakes her head slowly. “No. Not like this. But you’re still right. I don’t believe that people really can be different sexes than what they’re born as, and I don’t believe it’s moral to be attracted to the same sex. Why…why is that so bad? Why can’t I believe that way? Shouldn’t I be able to believe a way you don’t approve of, and vice-versa?”

Marie sighs, luxurious tail flicking. “It’s bad because what you really believe is that we have to believe the way you do. We should act the way you want us to act, live the way you want us to live.”

“We believe that all of us on this earth to live the way God wants us to live!” Eric yells, striding out of wherever he’s been hiding, pointing his tiny little human finger up accusingly at the angry animal-people gods.

“And there it is.” Kaden throws their hands in the air. “What if God wants me to live like this? Did you ever once think of that?”

“Like a gorgeous cat god?” Julie says blankly. Kaden looks down at her, genuinely startled.

“For the love of Christ, woman, stop blaspheming,” Eric snarls.

A crack of thunder comes from one entrance. Jim, the ram, bleats in shocked pain and falls over.

The two staff members who weren’t at the ritual are striding into the barn. Both are big men with scared expressions and loaded shotguns, an especially lethal combination.

“Hallelujah!” Eric yells, pumping his tiny fists.

“No!” Kaden charges toward the two just as the one who hadn’t taken the first shot levels his shotgun. “Goddammit, shrink, you fucking—”

Both of them vanish, the shotguns dropping to the ground with clattering thumps.

“Holy shit,” Kaden says, drawing up short. Then he grabs both of them, one in each hand, and hurries back toward Jim. Lavender and Marie are both crouched over him.

The wounds look bad, blood spattered across most of his front and a lot of the ground. But as Lavender’s hand passes over them, they stop bleeding, start healing.

Julie tries to drag herself toward the group of giants in spite of the danger. She’s not even sure why. It hurts too much, though, and she gives up with a pained wheeze. Lavender glances over and down at her.

“Julie!” Eric strides toward her and shakes her shoulders, making her cry out in pain again.

“You’re both incredible, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.” Lavender turns from them and helps the mostly-healed Jim sit up. “You should eat something.” She motions Kaden over. “Give him one of those.”

“Give him—” Kaden laughs nervously. “Are you serious?”

Jim closes hoofed fingers around the one who shot him. Julie watches him struggle futilely as he gets shoved into the ram’s mouth.

Kaden gapes. “I don’t think I could do that,” they stammer.

Marie swishes her tail. “I don’t know if I could either.” She squints. “Give me the other one.”

Jim swallows, and his eyes get wide and distant. Julie isn’t sure quite how to read the expression on his half-animal, half-human face, but if she’s reading it right, he, uh, really enjoyed that.

“No, no!” the guy protests as Kaden holds him out. “I’m not goddamn animal food!”

Marie gives him a sniff, then a slow lick. “Hmm.” She murmurs. “Yeah, I think you are.” A second lick pulls him entirely into her long, slender muzzle. The barn goes completely silent other than the sound of her sucking on him for several seconds, until she tilts her head back and swallows audibly, throat rippling. Then she gasps, a shiver running from the tips of her ears to the tip of her tail, and her voice gets husky. “Oh, God, that was…I think I just…wow.”

Kaden runs their hand through their hair, blushing, eyes wide. Julie blushes, too, looking away.

Eric stares at Julie incredulously, as if he can read her mind. “Did you like seeing that?”

“No,” she protests. “I mean—God, you are such a fucking prick, Eric!”

Lavender smirks. “Well, that sure wasn’t a lie.” She crouches and reaches down toward the two tiny humans.

Julie passively lets herself be picked up. At this point, she just wants this to be over. Eric, though, punches defiantly at her fingers as the squirrel-demon’s hand comes down. “You may have her soul, you foul devil—devils—but I am righteous and I am protected and you will never have mine!”

Lavender touches him with a claw tip. “Let’s see about that, shall we?”

“I—” he starts to say, but he freezes, mouth open. “Iiiiiiiii—”

Light explodes out of his mouth like mystical vomit, and he collapses like a puppet whose strings have been cut. The ball of light swirls, shimmers.

And as it moves, it looks like Eric. Julie gasps.

As everyone’s eyes lock onto the ball, Lavender speaks. “The land of the dead isn’t either heaven or hell the way you think of it. But it’s true that you have to qualify for paradise. If you’re stuck with the demons—what you think of as hell—it’s because you have to learn something before you get to come back in a new life and maybe do it better. You know all that now, Eric, don’t you? Now that you’re freed from your mortal bonds.”

Ball-of-light Eric is ascending slowly, but as he reaches Lavender’s eye level, it’s as if he’s hitting a ceiling, bumping against it like a balloon. He nods frantically.

Lavender leans forward. “But, if you’re judged to be enough of a shit, we don’t have to give you that chance. I’ve never eaten a soul before, Eric, so congratulations on being my first.”

He screams silently, in true immortal terror, and paddles in the air without moving.

Lavender licks her lips, then opens her mouth slowly, very widely. Everything’s still for a moment, even though his mouth is open, too, screaming a voiceless No! at the top of lungs he no longer has.

Then she sucks him in and snaps her jaws shut. When she swallows, her throat glows for just a second.

Then she hiccups, putting a hand to her chest. “Oh, wow.”

“That good?” Kaden says hesitantly.

“I’m not sure I’d say ‘good,’ and I don’t mean that as a demon joke.” She shakes her head. “But…extraordinary.”

Marie crouches over Julie. “For someone who just saw her husband’s soul be devoured by the demon holding you, you seem pretty collected.”

“I’d…I’d say ‘resigned.’” Julie swallows and looks up at her. “And I-I’m having a lot of strange, conflicted feelings right now.”

“You’re sort of turned on,” Lavender deadpans. “You evil, evil person. Maybe I should do you in by using you as a sex toy.”

She stares, mouth open.

“Christ.” Kaden shakes their head. “Don’t give her that kind of reward. Just eat her.”

Jim puts a hand to his mouth, laughing. Marie gets a distant, dreamy expression.

Lavender lifts Julie up. “Julie Hammond, I’m giving you a boon you may not deserve. You’ll get to go to the land of the dead, where you’ll probably remain the size you are now and be at the mercy of a lot of demons who’ll be amused to do horrible, horrible things to you.”

“That’s a boon?”

“The boon part is that if you pay attention, you may learn enough to get yourself reincarnated, and maybe you’ll be less of a shit person when you’re back in mortal lands.”

Julie whines. “All right.” I don’t deserve this. Maybe I am not a good person, maybe I am flawed, but I don’t deserve this.

“So,” Lavender says, holding Julie out like a snack bar. “Who wants to do the honors?”

They crowd around her. Jim, the ram. Marie, the vixen. Kaden, the cat. Lavender, the squirrel. “Kaden, have you eaten anyone?” Marie says.

“No, but…uh, I don’t think I can do it with the same…style any of you three can.”

Lavender smirks. “You think that’s true, Julie?”

Julie’s mouth opens and closes several times without making any noise. She can’t—they can’t—this is—

“No,” Julie whispers, staring up at Kaden. “They could.”

Kaden bites their lip, tail flicking behind them, then takes Julie from Lavender’s hand.

Julie’s view becomes that incredible, divine muzzle up close, then the perfect teeth, then the beautiful textured tongue. Then there’s wet heat and darkness and squelching pressure. She’s a morsel, an offering, and as she’s swallowed whole and alive, she knows this is, in fact, more than she deserves.

“Oh, my God,” Kaden said, taking a shuddering breath. “That…felt…”

“Like you want to just go around eating little humans all day.” Marie’s ears flicked. “And it would make you so fucking horny to do it.”

“I was going to say it felt like a religious experience, but everything you just said is true, too.” They cleared their throat.

“Well.” Lavender clasped her hands together. “Being summoned sucks, but this was more fun than I expected. You get the same deal the others did. Leave when you want, go where you want, get a little head start.”

“And be human again?” Kaden tilted their head.

“I could leave you the way you are, but your lives have been difficult enough. And I can’t make you into demons the way I was made into one. I’m not nearly that powerful.”

“Probably for the best.” Jim sighed.

Marie’s ears flattened. “Yeah, but…” She looked at herself. “I don’t think I’m going to be this pretty as a human woman.”

“You will,” Lavender assured her. “But…hmm. I’ll make a deal with any of you who want it. You can change back into these forms on demand, if you promise to serve me in your next afterlife for a generation or two.”

“Deal,” Marie said instantly.

Kaden stared at her, then shook their head, grinning. “You know you’re not supposed to make a deal with a devil, right?”

“I get to be this, when I want, for the rest of my life, and then after I die, I get to serve her.” She gestured at Lavender. “Where’s the downside?”

Jim shuffled his hooves. “Deal,” he said hesitantly.

“Fine.” Kaden crossed their arms, sighing. “She’s right. It sounds kind of awesome.”

Lavender clapped her hands together. “Then it’s done.” She hugged each of them in turn. “I’ll see you all…eventually.” She turned, waving a hand, and a portal—a door opening onto blackness, lined with purple fire—appeared.

“Wait,” Marie said as Lavender started to step through.

The squirrel-demon turned back, lifting her brows again.

“When those two assholes with shotguns came in, Kaden commanded them to shrink and they did. Do we all have that power when we’re in this form?”

“I guess you’ll have to try it and see, won’t you?” Lavender grinned. “Farewell for now. And remember, using your powers for good is boring.”

She stepped back into her quarters at the palace, and dispatched an imp to send her apologies to Audrey before collapsing into bed.

The next morning, it was Thelixia—and Meridoris, too—who came to Lavender, rather than the reverse. “Lavender, dear, did you leave three mortals with the power to transform at will?” Theli said.

“I…did,” she said, clearing her throat. “I mean, just to specific forms that were already in their subconscious.”

“Mmm.” Meri put a hand on her hip. “And while they can’t shift their own size, they can shift the size of others.”

“Only when they’re in their animal forms. And just within line of sight.”

“Mm-hmm. ‘Just.’” Theli crossed her arms. “And that might cover cars and buses and even houses they’re in, if your new little demi-demons think to try.”

“It might,” Lavender muttered, looking away.

Meri arched her brows. “Do you know what kind of chaos that’s inevitably going to lead to?”

“All right, all right, maybe I shouldn’t—”

Both of the mouse demons stepped forward and kissed her cheeks, Meri on the left, Theli on the right. “We’re so proud of you!”