Stopwatch

Jimmy Douglass waited until the thunderous applause had started to taper off before walking back onto stage, arms over his head, knowing it would energize the crowd that much more. It did.

“Yeah! Yeah!” he screamed, even before he reached the microphone. “Give it up for Leon, everybody!”

He grinned, brushing back his short-cropped sandy hair, and surveyed the crowd. Well over two thousand, although it looked like a few were filing out now that the comedy set was over. He figured that. They’d sold out months ago, even though the venue sat nearly four thousand—thanks to Father Michael, dozens of churches in his ultra-conservative breakaway Catholic denomination had purchased steeply-discounted tickets for all their parishioners. Most hadn’t shown up, but that wasn’t the point.

As the applause started to fade again, he cranked up the heat level. “Can you believe that Leon’s brand of comedy is what liberals hate? What they’re trying to cancel?”

The hall filled with boos. The cameras panned across the front rows, carefully eliding the empty seats toward the venue’s rear as the giant screens to either side of the stage reflected the raucous anger back at the crowd.

“But no cancel culture here. Free speech is alive at Right Turn America!”

He waited for the hollering to die down, the fist pumps, the—what. The Nazi salutes? Good thing none of the liberal media had shown up to cover the conference this year. That was the sort of shit they loved to twist.

He raised his hands again. “Now, though, it’s time to get serious.”

The crowd slowly quieted.

“Many of you know I’ve become more actively religious over the last few years, and that’s in no small part thanks to our next speaker. And, as you know if you read our program,” he held up a pamphlet, “we’re trying something a little different here. Maybe a lot different. Maybe, let’s just say it, fucking bold.”

There’d been light laughter and uneasy chuckles at the pamphlet joke, but a roar went up at the last line.

“We’ve prayed for America for years, haven’t we? Every Right Turn conference. Every Sunday. Even every day. And I’m going to ask a difficult question: what’s it gotten us? It’s gotten us gay marriage.” (Pause for booing.) “Drag shows for children.” (More, louder booing.) “Men in women’s bathrooms and boys in girl’s sports.” (Booing getting frenzied.) “You can’t watch a movie or a TV show or even a cartoon without having DEI and critical race theory jammed down your throat.” (A roar.) “It’s almost like the country has been possessed, isn’t it?”

A mix of booing, applause, and hooting greeted that.

“So.” He raised his hands, flashing his patented am-I-serious-or-not grin. “What if—stay with me here—what if we performed an exorcism on the whole country?”

That got more applause, a few screaming roars of approval, more than a little laughter. The roaring and applause grew exponentially as someone else walked out on stage to join Jimmy—a priest, in traditional black garment, albeit with red, white, and blue trim. The touch wasn’t added for this conference, Jimmy knew, but was mandated by the breakaway sect Father Michael had founded. They simultaneously claimed the mantle of the true traditionalists, rejecting any change to the church made in the last century, and the mantle of the true patriots, rejecting any notion of separating politics from religion.

Father Michael was a good fifteen years older than Jimmy’s thirty-one. Unlike Jimmy’s button-down neoconservative look, though, he had the vibe of a hard rock guitarist who’d been born again, from the visible tattoos to a barely-contained frizzy ponytail of greying hair. That was, in fact, exactly what he was, having rapidly moved from agnostic libertine to evangelical Baptist to conspiratorial, post-liberal Catholic nationalist. He waved to the crowd like a rockstar, too.

“Now,” Jimmy continued, “we know that this can’t be a traditional exorcism, which made it a hard sell to Father Michael here.” (Scattered laughter, as if on cue.) “This might just be symbolic. But as conservatives, as real Americans, we believe in symbols, don’t we? We believe in faith! We believe in the power of prayer!” He waited a few beats after each sentence for an approving cheer; he wasn’t disappointed. “Take it away, Father.”

As Jimmy walked off stage, a member of the liberal media he was sure he’d kept out pulled out her Field Notes notebook and a pen. She didn’t blend in as much as do her best not to stand out, keeping to simple jeans and T-shirt with no jewelry, not even dying in the purple streaks she loved to put in her long hair. There were more than a few faux punks here, so that might not have drawn extra attention—but at six-foot-one, Lavender risked drawing too much attention as it was.

The priest stepped up to the microphone, spreading his hands apart, palms up. “Join me in prayer.” He barely waited a moment before continuing. “Our Father, who art in heaven…” The crowd chimed in haphazardly.

As he finished, he bowed his head in silence for a theatrical beat, then raised his arms. “The world,” he intoned, “has always been a world of darkness, a world of spirits of evil in high places. We have always seen it.” He looked around the room, as if meeting each eye in turn. “And today, we see it everywhere. In our political office-holders. In our corporate boardrooms. In so-called journalists. In Hollywood.”

The crowd booed and jeered.

“Satan, we know, is not a myth. He is real. He is here. He brings a multitude of wicked spirits, here to blot out the name of God and of his Christ, to cast souls into eternal perdition. Men of depraved mind and corrupt heart are ascendant. They fill our ears and eyes with sin, with temptation, with untrue ideologies. Liberalism. Feminism. Homosexualism. Transsexualism.”

Lavender clenched her teeth, scribbling in the notebook.

The frenzy in the crowd grew. Standing off to the side of the stage, Jimmy crossed his arms, grinning crookedly. He’d never been sure how much of this the priest believed, but he’d never been sure how much of it he believed, either. But it sure as hell made people fanatics.

Father Michael’s voice grew in volume. “They have raised the throne of their abominable impiety, laid waste to the most sacred truths. Pray to the Lord that he bring help against the attacks of these lost spirits, and bring us our victory.” He motioned at the crowd to stand. “So we command. Say it with me. So we command.”

The crowd murmured half-heartedly.

He continued, unfazed. “I command you, unclean spirits, along with all your minions attacking and confusing our misguided brethren, by the mysteries of the incarnation, passion, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord, by the descent of the Holy Spirit, that you tell me by some sign your names, and the day and hour of your departure. So we command!”

More of the crowd joined in.

“I command you, moreover, to obey me to the letter, I who am a minister of God despite my unworthiness. Nor shall you be emboldened to harm in any way these creatures of God. So we command!”

This time nearly everyone roared along with him.

“Depart, then, transgressor. Depart, seducer, full of lies and cunning, foe of virtue, persecutor of the innocent. Give place, abominable creature, give way—”

Feedback squealed through the amplifiers, enough to make everyone cover their ears. The lights flickered, and the huge television monitors went out, along with the two smaller ones facing the stage that mirrored the camera views.

“Crap,” Jimmy muttered, then raised his voice, calling off-stage. “Get those goddamn monitors back on!”

Even as he spoke, the screens flickered back to life. The images broke and twisted, psychedelic multicolor distortions of the stage flickering in and out with—

“What the hell?” Jimmy said aloud as the “distortions” revolved into images, videos from…somewhere else. Holy shit, they were images of demons. Two furry demons, obviously (even gratuitously) female, one on each monitor. They looked like they were different angles on the same room, that the two sat at opposite ends of the same grand wooden table in a palatial room.

Shit, this was a crazy special effect that Father Michael had cooked up, wasn’t it? The fucker should have let Jimmy know he was going to do that, but it was a great idea. Although they looked like—

Goddammit, did they look like mice? Like—like cartoon mice, undeniably human-shaped, exceedingly cute. No, “cute” wasn’t the right word. Lewdly sexy and flaunting it, tits at least as big as their heads, no clothes but lots of jewelry. Like, what the hell were they called, plushies? Furries?

(Lavender, on the other hand, knew they were furries—she’d been to a local furry con twice—but had no idea what the hell was going on. A prank from some anarchist group? If so, good on them.)

Jimmy hurried back onto the stage, flashing a forced smile at the crowd as he nudged Father Michael away from the microphones. “Oversexed mice? Seriously?”

The priest had been staring up at the demons fixedly, but his expression flashed to suspicion. “I was going along with it because I thought it was your idea,” he hissed.

“Why the hell would I—”

“You have succeeded in forcing our attention,” one of the mouse-demons said. Her voice was a low, seductive lilt, honey and ash, belied by her distinctly irritated look.

“But you aren’t trying to summon us, are you,” the other one said. Her voice wasn’t at as low a pitch, but it carried the same undercurrent of fatal temptation.

Father Michael swallowed, looking between them, then raised his hands. “I—we—command you, unclean spirits. Tell us your names, and the day and hour—”

“Yes, yes, we heard you.” The brunette with the ram’s horns rolled her eyes. “My name is Thelixia.”

“And my name,” the redhead said, “is Meridoris.” She leaned forward, spreading her hands. “Now we command you to tell us. Why are you seeking the attention of major demons?”

The crowd had been clapping and murmuring. Some edged toward the exits now, though. Theli looked up and snapped her fingers, and all the auditorium’s doors slammed shut. “None of you have permission to leave.” Those who’d been trying to leave tugged and pounded on the doors, to no avail. “Answer her, Michael.”

The priest glanced at Jimmy accusingly. Jimmy shook his head. Whoever’d set this up wasn’t anyone on his team. “Play along,” he mouthed.

Father Michael glared, but addressed both mice with the deepest boom he could muster. “It is time to free the country from the grasp of the demons who have had control over it for far too long! To vanquish the evils of the so-called ‘Enlightenment,’ the devil’s ideas clothed as virtues! Give way, you monsters, give way to Christ, for He has already stripped you of your powers and laid waste your kingdom.” As the demons watched him with clear growing incredulity, he found his voice faltering. “He has—he has cast you forth into the outer darkness, where everlasting ruin awaits you—awaits you and…”

The redhead covered her face with her palm. “He’s trying to exorcise his whole country.”

“So we command!” someone from the audience shouted. “So we command!” Quickly it became a chant, and Father Michael joined in. Jimmy did, too, through a forced grin. He didn’t know whose stunt this was, but he’d make sure there was _real _ hell to pay for not clearing it with him first.

Theli, the brunette, looked between the audience and her companion, open-mouthed. “That’s not how it works,” she sputtered. “That’s not how any of this works.”

”So we command! So we command!”

“Be quiet!” both of the mice thundered together, their voices echoing around the auditorium at a near-deafening level, enough to shake the room like a momentary earthquake. The chant abruptly fell apart, ending in yelps and screams.

“We know you, Michael Taft Allen.” Meri narrowed her eyes. “And you, James Douglass. We’ve seen you before, on many worlds. Moralistic reactionaries who value your own spiritual comfort over the safety, even the lives, of others.”

“How—how dare you—”

“We dare because it’s true.” Theli leaned back, fixing him with her gaze. “You only champion the freedom to believe, to live, to love the way you approve. A book that says it’s all right to be gay? Banned.”

“A law that says anyone can get married? Revoked,” Meri added.

“History that shows humans of your skin color mistreated others? Erased.”

“A transgender person might be in the same bathroom as you? Outlawed. It never bothered you before, but now you’re thinking about it.”

Theli nodded. “You’d better outlaw thinking, too, just to be safe.”

“We knew it,” Jimmy yelled up. “The demons really are liberals!”

Uneasy laughter rippled through the crowd. Lavender was rapt.

Meri bared her teeth, revealing both the flat—but guillotine-sharp—front teeth of a mouse and the fangs of a predator. “The demons,” she snarled, “are libertines.”

“Why is it so often the humans who do this?” Theli sighed, gesturing at Michael. “At least half your realities base your major religions on a treatise about how you should treat one another, and it’s a perfectly fine book—”

“—well, creaky in parts, but it gets the gist right enough—”

“Yet somehow it’s always the ones who invoke it the most who haven’t read any of it. Well.” She turned to Meri. “Father Michael wants his new congregation—”

“—by which we mean little Jimmy’s fascist fanatics—”

“—to fight a demon. Should we give him what he wants?”

The crowd worked up enough energy to jeer at the fascist fanatics jab. Jimmy jeered with them, but shifted on his feet uneasily. This felt like they were being led along. This wasn’t Father Michael setting up the crowd, it was some left-wing cranks trying to set up Father Michael. And Jimmy.

He signaled an ashen off-stage flunky, who hurried over. “Get this feed off the fucking monitors,” he hissed.

The flunky managed to look even more pale. “We’ve tried. We unplugged the projectors, Jimmy. There’s no power going to those TVs and they’re still on.”

“And if—when—we dispatch both of you,” Father Michael, was saying, “then you will—”

Theli and Meri both burst out laughing. “Oh, please. You against us?” Theli snorted.

“No. No no no.” Meri waved dismissively. “We’re, how do those gamers say it, final bosses. We’re going to be fair.”

“For demons,” Theli clarified.

Meri nodded. “For demons.”

A good chunk of the audience had risen to their feet, starting to leave. Theli glanced at the crowd. “All of you stay put.” She snapped her fingers, and the room fell deathly still.

And like that, Jimmy couldn’t move. None of his muscles responded. He couldn’t even let out a startled scream. The people he could see, from Father Michael to the flunky to the rest of the crowd, seemed equally frozen. Lavender grimaced, at least inwardly.

Theli reached out her hand to take the hand of someone walking in from off-screen. A…what was she? Raccoon? No, red panda. With demon horns, just like the two mice. If he could move, Jimmy would swear aloud: was hell filled with preposterously hot animal women?

The panda bowed respectfully. “Yes, mistress?”

“Audrey, dear.” Theli gestured toward the trapped audience. “These humans, being led by the one with the silly hair and the smarmy one in the bad suit there on the stage, are trying to exorcise the demons they think are possessing their country.”

“They’re what?” The red panda leaned forward, swishing her huge tail. “Are they morons?”

“No. A few of them are grifters and the rest are marks.”

“Which isn’t mutually exclusive to being morons,” Meri pointed out.

“True. The two on stage aren’t morons, they’re evil. Most of the rest are morons.”

“Which isn’t mutually exclusive to being evil.”

Theli nodded. “Since they’re so desperate to fight a demon they interrupted us with this effort—”

“—quite an accomplishment, although exceedingly ill-advised—”

“We thought we’d give them one. But even one of us would be too much, don’t you think?”

Audrey surveyed the crowd. “I don’t want to sound arrogant, Mistress Theli, but—”

“You’re a demon, dear, you’re entitled. Anyway, you’re thinking one of you would be too much, too.”

“I am.” She paused, finger in the air, then turned to the two mice and laughed. “You’re thinking about having them fight Debbie, aren’t you?”

“We are,” both mice said simultaneously.

“She’ll love it.” Audrey clapped her hands. “She has a real hatred for religious hypocrites.”

“Excellent.” Meri snapped her fingers, and a ripple passed over the audience like a visible heatwave. Everyone gasped audibly, then burst into conversation.

“All right.” Jimmy took in a ragged breath. “I want to know what in the—the fuck…”

There was a third person on stage now. If she counted as a person. A woman, about five and a half feet high, short ash blonde hair, very nicely curvy. And…a coyote. Wearing nothing but a wide, studded leather collar.

Great tail, Jimmy couldn’t help but think. Ha ha. Tail. Get it.

“Debbie,” Audrey said, leaning over far enough to—holy shit, to lean through the TV, as if it were a window.

Half the audience gasped again, a few clapping, as if this was the best fucking special effect. Which it was. Right? Right?

“Yes, mistress?” The coyote stared up, wide-eyed.

“This group of humans are a bunch of pseudo-religious fascists who’ve been grandstanding about exorcising their country of demons like…” She paused and pointed at Father Michael. “What was it again?”

“Silence, foul—foul—” The priest shuddered violently as the panda slowly curled her finger, and spoke through clenched teeth, as if the words were being forcibly pulled from him. “Liberalism. Feminism. Homosexualism. Transsexualism.”

Debbie narrowed her eyes, tail flicking more sharply, less like a happy dog than like an angry cat.

“So are you up for giving them what they want?”

“I think I am, mistress.”

“Lovely.” Meri clapped her hands. “All of you little moronic humans, you try to stop Debbie from killing you all, and Debbie, you try to kill all of them.”

Lavender grimaced again, edging toward the side of the auditorium.

“This is a trick!” Jimmy yelled.

Audrey crossed her arms. “Well, you have the option of doing nothing and letting Debbie walk all over you—probably literally—but if I were you, I’d at least try not to end up as carpet stains.”

“Or food,” Meri added. “Humans are delicious. Have you ever had any, Debbie?”

The coyote shook her head. “Not yet, mistress.”

“Stop!” Father Michael thundered. “Commit to what we get if we pass this test, vile demons. Commit to withdrawing from this world. Commit to freeing our country from your thrall!”

Jimmy groaned. “Mike, we can’t go along with—”

“Your country isn’t in our thrall, it’s in yours,” Theli said, with no trace of a smile. “What we’ll commit to is letting any of you go who survive the next sixty minutes. And while we may be demons, we will keep that promise.”

Michael stared up at the projected screens. “That’s not—not—”

“Not up for debate.” Meri turned her hand around, now holding a brass stopwatch. She clicked it audibly. “Go.”

The room fell silent again, other than the sound of the ticks. Debbie the coyote girl remained motionless.

Jimmy started toward her, stopped, then motioned at the closest flunky. “Get her offstage.”

The flunky had frozen, staring at the mouse demons on the stage monitors, expression stuck somewhere between confusion and lust. He jerked his gaze to Jimmy, then to Debbie. Clearing his throat, he approached the coyote woman like she might be a venomous snake, finally grabbing her arm around the wrist. “Come on.”

She smiled, showing off an alarming array of teeth. “What’s your name?”

“I don’t think I’m supposed to tell a demon that.” He tugged on her arm. She didn’t move at all.

“Oh, I’m not a demon. I’m as mortal as you are.” She laughed, grabbing his wrist with her other hand. “Well, not quite as mortal. Now, tell me.”

“Dammit!” Jimmy hissed. “Move! Her!”

The guy pulled on her with both hands, to no avail. “I can’t.”

“Tell me your name.”

“I’m Tucker, okay? Now come on.”

“You’re a true believer, aren’t you, Tucker?” Debbie kept holding onto his wrist, but pulled her other hand free from his effortlessly, waving it to take in the audience. “In all this.”

“Yes.”

“Good.” She nodded, and grinned. “One last question, and I do mean last. Do you think I can swallow you whole?”

He furrowed his brow and tugged on his arm to free it from her grip, with no success. “No. You’re not nearly big enough.”

“Good answer!” She swung her arm up, hard, and Tucker flew toward the ceiling, some fifty feet up, like he’d been fired from a slingshot, screaming all the way.

As he reached the apex of the arc, barely avoiding smacking into one of the roof support beams, flames erupted around the coyote. The fireball billowed out around half the stage and up nearly as high as the ceiling.

“Holy fuck!” Jimmy dived to the side while Father Michael hid behind the lectern. For a split-second, it felt like standing next to a campfire. His ears rang from the force of the explosion.

As his vision partially cleared, bright red-orange spots swimming in it, he saw—uh—

Debbie sat on the stage now, legs crossed at the knees, her now yards-wide digitigrade paws in the front row, at least a half-dozen people caught between her paw pads and their seats. He didn’t know how tall she was, but from her disturbingly shapely butt to the tips of her ears her upper half took up maybe two-thirds of the height between stage and ceiling.

Her jaws snapped, catching Tucker as he fell past her, his shoulder and head outside the left side of her jaws and his feet outside the right.

For about a half a second, his panicked eyes locked onto Jimmy’s. Then the coyote tilted her head back and swallowed him whole.

She licked her lips, and her eyes, far ahead, locked onto Jimmy’s. “Mistress Meri is right.” Her grin had gone from alarming to pants-wettingly terrifying. “Humans are delicious.”

Jimmy ran, his own screaming momentarily drowning out the rising scream of the audience.

A loud wrenching sound came from the direction of the coyote’s paws. He risked a look behind as he reached the side of the stage. She remained sitting, but she’d stretched powerfully, arms over her head, chest thrust out almost lewdly—and legs straightening. She’d pushed the chairs under her paws, along with their occupants, back into the seats behind them, and those into the seats behind them, and those into the seats behind them. The audience members nearby scrambled away in all directions desperately, except for three—four—she lazily caught with her fingers, bringing them to her muzzle and snacking on them like potato chips. Complete with crunching.

Father Michael was mumbling something, over and over, while crossing himself. Jimmy thought it must be a prayer, but he caught it in a momentary lull in the screams: “—special effect, must be a special effect, must—”

Yeah. Special effect. Demons didn’t exist, they certainly weren’t furry-wet-dream mice, the furry-wet-dream coyote couldn’t possibly be sitting there larger than a dinosaur, casually eating and crushing some of the high-paying attendees. Most of the crowd had fled their seats in a panic now, crushing against the immobile doors, pounding, screaming. Others had huddled to the side, watching in panic. Or—was that woman in jeans staying close to the stage looking lustful? Christ, how did the perverts get in here?

Lavender was, in fact, looking lustful, even as she felt herself burn more with embarrassment than passion. What was wrong with her? This was monstrous!

Right?

One of the coyote’s huge triangular ears tilted toward the priest, and then all at once all of her tilted toward him as she rolled onto her side. “Oh, yes, that must be it. But who paid for me, do you think? Did you do it yourself? Did Right Turn America do it?” She lowered her muzzle, and Father Michael backed up hurriedly toward where Jimmy stood. “Is it a liberal plot? Am I part of Antifa?”

Michael swallowed, then grabbed the crucifix he had on his necklace and thrust it toward her. “In the name of—aaah!” He dropped the cross, grabbing his own hand and pulling it to his chest. The cross, now red hot, hit the floor, sizzling. “You beast!” he gasped. “How dare—dare—”

“I didn’t do it.” Debbie stared at the cross, wide-eyed, then shook her head. “You know, that’s not our symbol you’re taking in vain, is it?”

He stared up at her.

She locked eyes with him, then with Jimmy, and laughed, licking her lips.

The coyote licked her lips, but abruptly turned away, going into a crouch—then pounced toward the crowd, vaulting over dozens of rows of intact seats and landing with a crash that knocked nearly everyone, including him, off their feet.

“Dammit.” Jimmy pushed himself back up, then gaped. Debbie was larger than she’d been, and she corralled audience members between her hands, thrusting her muzzle into their midst, and—

He didn’t wait to see any more. He flew backstage into the midst of the panicked crew.

It took a few seconds for the sinking feeling to hit. These doors were sealed, too, weren’t they? Of course they are, you idiot. The mice are real and the demons are real and the magic is real and you are minutes away from being coyote kibble.

The screaming and pounding from the auditorium rose in volume, punctuated by building-shaking whams! as the coyote leapt back and forth, chasing her prey.

“Basement,” a stagehand yelled, pointing at a trap door. “Basement!”

He didn’t have to be told twice. Jimmy pushed his way to the front of the herd dashing madly down the rickety stairs.

In the auditorium, Father Michael remained on stage. Where the ever-loving fuck had Douglass gotten to? This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t—

And yet, it was. The coyote woman had to be well over a hundred feet paws to ears now, maybe closer to two hundred, taking up far too much of the auditorium, which increasingly looked like it’d been hit by a bomb. She’d rolled over onto her back, wriggling with feral pleasure as she dropped handfuls of Right Turn’s biggest supporters onto her body. Not only into her mouth, but across her stomach, over her tits, between—oh, sweet Jesus, between her legs. He didn’t have to know much about coyotes to understand what her growling meant as those poor souls struggled in the thick fur, no doubt slipping into her. No, being massaged into her as she brought down a massive hand.

“Jesus, why is this arousing?” someone murmured.

He looked around wildly. “Who’s there?” But no one was there; it was a fluke of acoustics, a voice carried from somewhere else in the auditorium.

Michael felt something behind him, though, and turned back to see Debbie’s massive left paw descending toward him, fast. With a cry, he scrambled back, but he was too late. Her toes curled, enveloping him in rough fur, and hauled him into the air.

Gasping, he kicked wildly, struggling in the grip of the toes, until she splayed them and he fell with a grunt into her open hand.

She pinned him to her palm pad with her thumb, and held him in the air over her head, far too far over her head.

He swallowed, forcing himself not to struggle, and steeled himself. “Do your worst, you vile beast!”

The coyote’s eyes brightened, and she caught her breath. “Really?” She beamed at him. “That’s so thoughtful of you!”

He felt the blood drain from his face. “That’s—that’s not what—”

“Now,” she said, lowering him toward her sex. “You shouldn’t just join your congregation, should you?” She waited a beat so he could stare down, seeing at least a half-dozen “little” humans struggling in and around her damp sex, trapped by her fingers. The scent was overpowering, and God help him, it wasn’t unpleasant.

She moved her hand again, pressing him crushingly against the fur on her thigh, sliding down along her rump. “You should lead them. And I have a very…sensitive…tail.”

He began kicking wildly, pushing against her fingers. “No! You can’t—please—God—”

His head slid against the pale-skinned, tight opening of her anus, and he squirmed futilely. She was clean, but surely—she wouldn’t really—

“No,” her voice purred rattlingly from above. “Please me.” She pressed, and his head and shoulders slipped inside.

Both Father Michael and Debbie screamed, for decidedly different reasons. She pushed both hands hard against her, crushing her toys into her sex and sliding the kicking, flailing prize toy completely into her ass.

She barked, shaking the rafters again, and started to buck, each slam of her tail against the floor matched with a kick through the stage. When she came, everyone—everyone surviving—knew it.

How many had survived was an open question. Lavender, whose voice had carried to Father Michael the moment before his fate had been sealed, still had, though. She stood against the theater’s left-hand wall now, close to the stage, whipping her gaze back and forth between the exhausted, sobbing crowd still pounding against the exits and the horrible, beautiful coyote monster. She felt dizzy, a mix of nausea and—and longing fighting in her head, visions of giant furry demon women looming over her. The coyote, right there. The red panda, the two mice, the squirrel. Wait, there hadn’t been a—

The giant sat up, still breathing hard. “Jimmy,” she called in a singsong voice. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.” She looked around, swinging her head toward the largest knot of people crowded by the main entrance. “Are you there, with all those fine treats?”

They scattered, screaming. Debbie picked up handfuls randomly, sifting through them and letting them fall back down. “Nope. Nope. Nope. Grrr.” She pivoted, leaning over the stage again, then locked eyes with Lavender.

Freezing, she stared back, swallowing hard, and pointed at the stairs to the basement.

Debbie tilted her head to one side, flashed a curious smile, and blew the little human a kiss. Then she leapt onto the stage, tearing at the floorboards.

Jimmy, along with another three or four dozen people—mostly staffers, a handful of rich backers who’d had VIP seats, a few randos—had taken uneasy refuge in a furnished “den” in the basement. He couldn’t quite figure out what it was; part break room, part cafeteria, part office, it looked like. A lot of suspiciously liberal posters on the wall, for other stage productions and foreign movies and, most damning, a banned books festival.

The ceiling rattled, then shook, pounding and cracking noises coming from above. Plaster rained down. Cracks started appearing.

“Oh, shit,” someone said, just before half the ceiling caved in, two massive hands coming in, followed by the coyote’s monstrous face.

A tongue the size of a city bus flicked out, and slurped up three people at once. As others started to flee, she fenced them in with her fingers, herding them closer. Herding them toward her mouth.

Jimmy missed being on the death side of those huge hands by about two feet. He didn’t let himself feel relief, though, dashing into a storeroom.

The sounds of screaming, of licking, of swallowing, tapered off.

“Well,” Debbie boomed. “I’m sure it’s been about an hour. I guess you survived.”

He furrowed his brow. Could it have been an hour? It felt like forever. But she was a demon. Or a demon’s pet. Some damn shit. The point was, she was probably trying to trick him.

A blast of air rushed through the basement, a hurricane-force gale, ending with a thunderclap. Then silence, other than moans and whimpers.

Jimmy risked looking back into the ruins of the break room. No giant coyote woman.

Quickly but cautiously, he made his way back up the staircase.

She was gone. As impossibly as she’d appeared, she was gone. The once magically-animated monitors had gone dark. The auditorium emergency lights had flicked on, showing the massive scale of the destruction. God, would Right Turn’s insurance cover all this? Were “Acts of Demons” an exclusion? Not as if he could talk about this with anyone who hadn’t gone through it. He’d go from conservative power broker to religious lunatic in a heartbeat. Sure, that was exploitable, even profitable, but not like what he had now.

He had no idea where Father Michael was. Some of the other guest speakers had been in the basement with him, so they were likely churning in a coyote stomach. Bigger immediate worry: the doors to freedom remained shut. Audience members still crowded around them, tugging on them fruitlessly. There were hundreds of survivors, at least, but it was obvious they’d trampled upwards of half their own in their frenzy to get away. Idiots.

But if the demon—pet, whatever—was gone, why the hell were they still trapped? The magic should be over, the twisted “lesson” supposedly learned. It’d been an hour, right? Demons might twist bargains, but they’d still keep them. They—but—

All right, if nobody could get out, maybe somebody could get in. He pulled out his phone, even as some part of him nattered you don’t think anybody else had thought of this? Sure enough, the phone had no signal. Great. He almost dashed it to the floor in frustration, but stopped, staring at the time.

It hadn’t been an hour. It hadn’t even been a half-hour yet.

“Fuck,” he whispered.

Lavender had started to look for an exit, too, but avoided the rest of the audience. Maybe there was a vent, something like you’d find as an escape route in a movie. She was so busy looking up that she didn’t see whoever she’d walked into until she literally hit them. “Sorry—” she started to say automatically, then the words froze in her throat.

In person, Audrey wasn’t giant—right now?—but stood considerably taller than Lavender did, and she was over six feet high. The demon was just as attractive as she’d looked on the monitor, but scarier. Despite all that red panda cute cuddliness, she radiated powerful predator.

“Time to get you outside, Lavender,” Audrey said, pulling her into a one-armed hug.

“What—how—”

All at once, no special effect beyond her ears popping, they stood together on a street corner. It wasn’t right outside the auditorium, either; it was a good block away.

“How did you…” Lavender trailed off, staring up open-mouthed. Debbie stood over the theater, but saying that didn’t do over nearly enough justice. The coyote’s left paw almost covered the building.

“Whichever of the multiple obvious questions you were about to ask, the answer’s ‘because I’m magic,’” Audrey said. “Also, that’s why nobody’s running away from the ridiculously huge coyote woman there. They don’t see her. They’ll see what they think is a bomb blast that’s going to bring the entire building down in a few seconds.”

“Why…why save me?”

“If you want to go back—”

“No! Uh, no, ma’am. No, mistress? I don’t know how to address a demon.”

“’Mistress’ is good. We were watching you, Lavender. You’re not with that group under the coyote paw.”

She shook her head, and brushed her long, platinum blonde hair out of her eyes. “I’m with an LGBTQ+ news site. I was working on a story…”

Debbie was raising her paw high into the air, and Lavender trailed off.

“This is going to be a serious blast. Hold onto something that’ll anchor you.” Audrey grinned down. “I suggest me.”

Lavender’s eyes widened.

The coyote drove her paw downward. Lavender wrapped her arms tightly around Audrey, hugging her from behind, just as the edge of the shock wave hit. The explosive boom followed a half-second later, along with a gale-force wind and an expanding cloud of debris.

“Holy shit.” Lavender staggered backward. The coyote was gone. “She—that wasn’t fair at all!”

“Nope.” Audrey turned around, waving over the human’s head. She almost didn’t want to turn around, but she did, knowing what she’d see: the two mouse demons. They crouched behind her; she was knee-high to them. Maybe.

“Do you think we should have been fair?” the brunette with ram’s horns said. That was…Theli, right?

“Twenty-five minutes, eighteen seconds,” the redhead with goat horns said, clicking the stopwatch. Meri. She looked down at Lavender. “Would any of them have been fair to you?”

“No, but…” She’d been about to say they didn’t deserve to die, almost reflexively. Yet the article she’d been planning on writing was about how Right Turn America’s platform took “queer, especially transgender, people don’t deserve to live” as axiomatic. “Are you sure Jimmy Douglass is…”

“He’s flatter than a flounder,” Theli said cheerfully.

“And…what are you going to do with me?”

Meri wrapped a hand around the human, lifting her up to their eye level. “We’re going to ask you a few questions, Lavender. Be honest with us.” She grinned, showing off her predatory teeth.

Lavender squirmed, going pale. Passersby were fleeing, but they weren’t looking up at the demons.

“They’ll only notice us if we do something like this,” Theli said, reaching out a hand to stop a cop running past. He smacked into her palm, staggered back, then stared up. She leaned over. “Boo.”

He screamed, whipping out his gun and emptying it into her. Lavender flinched, trying to pull back into Meri’s hand like a turtle into a shell.

“Ouch.” Theli pouted. “My turn.” She casually flicked a sharply-clawed finger across him. He had enough time to look shocked before both pieces of him hit the ground. Lavender covered her mouth.

“So. Lavender.” Meri grinned. “You found Audrey’s pet coyote extremely attractive, didn’t you?”

“How is she a pet? She’s got to be a full demon herself!”

“You didn’t answer the question.” Meri opened her mouth wide and moved Lavender’s head inside it.

“Yes! Yes, I did!” Lavender shrieked.

Meri moved her back out. “Good girl. To answer your question, ‘pet’ is relative. Debbie’s got a hefty amount of demonic power, but she chooses to be submissive.”

“If that was submissive, I’d hate to see dominant,” Lavender muttered.

Theli leaned over. “Would you really hate that?”

She swallowed. “No,” she said weakly.

“So here’s the most important question.” Meri grinned, too. “Why? Why did you find a giant coyote woman doing manifestly horrible things to people you despise attractive?”

“I…I don’t know.”

Theli narrowed her eyes, giving her a look.

“I swear, I…” She swallowed, looking between the two mice, then down at the equally-expectant looking red panda demon. Lavender took a deep breath, staring at the smoking remains of the auditorium. “Power,” she finally said. “She was predatory and sexual and unashamed of either, but…but more than that, she was just so…effortlessly unstoppable.”

“And that’s why you were so turned on.”

“Still so turned on,” Meri corrected.

Lavender’s face flushed. “I’m—uh—”

“In my hand and wearing tight jeans.”

Her blush shifted from pink to scarlet.

Meri brought her lips close to Lavender’s ear. “Are you hard because you’re picturing yourself as prey, or as the predator?”

“Predator.” She said it so quickly she shocked herself.

The mouse grinned, setting her back down by Audrey. Lavender took a deep, shaky breath.

“One last question before we go.” Theli winked down. “What’s your fursona?”

“What?” She laughed nervously. “I don’t…have… ”

“Be honest,” Meri sang. “With yourself as well.”

She opened her mouth without saying anything. She knew what the mice meant: the squirrel she’d seen with them in her mind. Pale grey fur—and long hair, with purple streaks. Just like Lavender’s usually had.

And horns. Like a gazelle’s. The squirrel was another demon.

The squirrel was—

“Good girl,” Meri said again, even though Lavender hadn’t said anything. She looked up in shock.

“You’re trying to start a collection, aren’t you?” The red panda crossed her arms, looking up and smirking.

Theli put a hand to her chest. “We have no idea what you mean, dear.” Both mice rose to their paws.

“No one’s going to remember this, will they?” Lavender murmured. “What happened here.”

“You will,” Audrey said. “I mean, don’t tell anyone, because they will fucking lock you up.”

“That’s for damn sure.” She twisted her hand in her hair. “Will I see any of you again?”

Theli and Meri both laughed. “Oh, we’re sure you will,” they said together.

Then all three demons were gone.

Lavender stared into the distance, motionless for a full minute, then squinted at the sidewalk. She’d thought there’d been no sign the demons had been there—not counting the cop’s body—but they’d left something, hadn’t they. She crouched by it.

The brass stopwatch.

She picked it up, examining it, then started to shove it in her pocket.

Instead, she clicked it on, watching it start to count down, and held it in her hand as she walked along the street, away from the ruins, no destination in mind.

What would this stroll be like at a hundred feet high? How much space would squirrel paws take up? If she stepped on cars on the way, would it hurt? Would she enjoy it? Would humans be delicious? How hard would it be to imagine that?

It wasn’t. It wasn’t hard at all to see herself as that gorgeous, powerful, terrible horned squirrel. With each step she took, it became easier and easier.

The stopwatch ticked down.