The demon Mara waited alone in her lair, the old abandoned arcade on the outskirts of Nekomi. No functional lights remained; she was lit only by moonlight, and by the candles she had set out for the summoning. The candles burned more red than orange, and flickered strangely upon the ancient game consoles, the glow almost washing out her red facial tattoos. Her eyes were closed and her head was bowed, and she heard only the steady drip drip drip of water, as she lurked with growing impatience.
A slight breeze rustled through the busted out windows and broken walls, disturbing her curled, blonde hair. She shivered, slightly – the wind always made her a bit nervous – and adjusted her perch on the old bench. The client was not late – yet – but neither was he early, and she really wanted to finish and seal this contract. Not only to increase the demons' share upon the earth, but because what she had offered in the contract made her really, really nervous.
She glanced at the aged parchment laying next to her on the bench. Much like the Lord of Terror's urn, it had come to her unbidden, attached to a standard order from Hell's catalog. Which alone should have suggested "do not touch", to her, giving what had happened when she had followed the instructions from that thing. But, this piece of parchment did not speak to her, it had no voice of its own. It merely gave the requirements and instructions for a summoning, and stated that whomever of mortal kind performed the summoning would gain power to fulfill his every desire.
That, she knew, was most likely a lie. None of immortal kind ever made an open-ended offer like that to mortal kind. Not even the goddesses of Heaven would do something like that; while they demanded fewer codicils and costs than would a demon like her, they also only offered one wish per person. Granted, those wishes could be very open-ended, if the goddess allowed her client to wish so carelessly. But they had to allow it, and "power to fulfill his every desire" was not the sort of wish that a goddess would encourage.
On the other hand, no hand of heaven had ever written upon that parchment. Of that much, she was wholly certain. Nor, for that matter, had any hand of Hell.
On the other other hand, a promise of "power to fulfill your every desire" made for good ad copy. A little bit of legwork, and little bit of putting a bug in the right person's ear-
She started upright at the sound of footsteps in the arcade. She grinned, baring one fang, and sent out a little bit of her power, igniting the other candles she had set in place throughout the arcade. They were arranged into a series of arrows, which would direct the client to where she waited.
Presently she heard the footsteps approach her. She looked up and saw the client standing in the doorway, silhouetted by red light from the candles behind him. Every time they had met prior – especially the times he did not know who he was meeting – he had worn an olive colored three-piece suit. Now he looked to be wearing blue jeans and an old hoodie; she only recognized him by his glasses. He also, she was glad to see, carried a large paper bag.
"Well, well, well," she said. "Come on in. I was beginning to think you wouldn't show."
"Please," he said as he stepped into the room. His voice had a haughty, dismissive drawl, the voice of one who considered himself the obvious superior to everyone he ever met. "I always honor my business arrangements."
And that's all you honor, I'll bet. The arrogance in the man, combined with the underlying bitterness of one who had no real right to be bitter... ah, she hadn't had a more promising client since the Mishima girl! She let herself grin at him, evilly, as he walked up to the summoning circle.
"I see you finally changed clothes."
The candlelight filled his glasses, obscuring his eyes.
"I normally don't come to this side of town," he said, with a winning smile and an audible sneer. "It seemed wise for a man of my station to travel incognito through such a place as this."
"All too true," she said, tossing her head back in mock sympathy. "You never know what sort of disreputable folk you might encounter, here in the darker places of life."
"Spare me the philosophy, Mara," he snapped. "You asked me to come here. Do you have what I wanted?"
"Just look down," she said, and gestured at the circle. "There's one more step to take, but I needed you here for it. Did you bring the price?"
He tossed the bag at her feet. It landed with a soft thump, like a bag filled with very fine sawdust.
"My, my, you actually went and did it. I'd have expected that to be beneath you."
"I take what I want, Mara, and when and how I want it. For what you offered? That was a small price to pay."
Oh yeah. Best client ever.
"Very well," she said, and moved the bag aside with her foot. "Now if you'll just come over here-"
"Wait, I thought you needed that for the ritual?"
"Huh? Oh, the bag." She turned and looked at the bag, then shrugged and looked back at him with a sly grin. "No, bringing me that was just the price to get to do the ritual. I never said it was a component of it."
"Then why..."
"I just wanted to see if you would do it."
"What?!"
"Listen, do you want to go through with this or not?" she snapped. "Now shut up and stop asking stupid questions, we've still got a lot to do here!"
"Fine. What do I need to do next?"
"First, you need to come over here," Mara said. "Don't step on the circle, and don't step over the circle. There's one more key ingredient to this ritual, which you just happened to bring in with you."
"And what ingredient would that be?" the client asked warily, as he very carefully stepped around the circle. She waited until he was just a few feet from her.
"What else? Rituals like this always need one little, teen tiny component," Mara said, then pulled a jeweled and wickedly sharp knife out from her belt. She brandished it high, and the light from the candles reflected like dark sunfire from the damascene blade. "It lacks only a few drops of your blood!"
The client, to her full gratification, jumped back a good three feet. Sometimes it's just the little things.
"Get away from me with that!" the client yelled. "I should have known this was some kind of assass-"
"Oh, get over yourself," she said, letting out a breath and lowering the knife. "For one thing, there's no one out there who particularly wants you dead. Or, at least, they haven't wanted it hard enough to draw my attention. For another..." She shrugged, then expertly flipped the knife in the air, caught the tip of the blade, and then offered it to him hilt-first. "I'm not the one who'll be cutting on you. Spilling the blood is your job, big guy."
The client stared at her, his eyes still hidden by the reflected candlelight. Gingerly, he stepped forward and took the knife from her. He held it like it was snake, but still pointed at her.
"You're awfully trusting, handing me this."
She let just a bit more power flow out of her, not enough to do anything of real use, but enough to make a glow around her which drowned out the candlelight.
"If you think you can take on a first class demon with that thing," she said slowly and quietly, "then you're quite welcome to try."
He lowered the knife.
"Wasn't going to, just noting the fact. So now what?"
"Here, take this," she said, and picked up the parchment. She would have sworn to Hild that it pulsed, then, like a heartbeat. But there was no point in worrying about that, as she handed it to client, since it was then quite literally out of her hands. "Just read it and do exactly what it says."
He regarded the parchment even more dubiously than he had regarded the knife.
"Read it how? I have no idea what these letters-" He stopped and jumped back, but managed somehow not to drop the parchment. "I... what? It's in Japanese now? The kanji is perfect..."
"I couldn't read it at first, either," Mara said. "It was in that strange tongue you just saw. But then it changed into the language of Hell... all except for those few lines near the bottom."
"Near the... huh. Yeah, you're right. Strange, I actually..."
"You actually recognize the sounds, don't you?"
"Yes."
"So did I, but I have no idea what they actually mean."
"Me neither. Why didn't these change?"
"Those, I think, are the summoning words. What actually allows the entity being summoned to cross over into the mortal realm."
"Entity...being summoned..."
"That's right," she said, smiling as the hook caught. "This ritual summons a great and powerful entity, which will be bound to your service by the use of your blood."
Of course, she had made all that up. She had no idea what the ritual actually summoned, or if the use of the client's blood would bind the entity to him. However, blood used in such rituals did tend to have that effect, and no one would waste a ritual of this sort on anything but a very powerful being. Unless the parchment was some of sort of bizarre prank, to trick some unsuspecting soul into binding to herself a weakling imp, or perhaps a pebble-spirit.
If that happened, she was going to take the bag and run.
But somehow, she did not expect such an anti-climax.
The client read through the parchment once, stopped, and then read it through again, this time more slowly. A strange thing happened, at the second read-through: to Mara, the parchment no longer looked like parchment. As the client's eyes traced down the page, it took on a smoother, thicker texture, more like leather than parchment.
No, exactly like leather, she realized as the client began his third read-through, for the summoning instructions were written in blood upon a sheet of flayed and tanned human skin. There had been a glamor cast upon the instructions, to hide its true nature from anyone not actually performing the ritual, and now that glamor faded from her eyes, having served its purpose. A necessary purpose, she had to admit, as while she wanted to increase the demons' share upon the earth, she did not want to bring in the sort of trouble that would summoned up by following instructions written in blood!
That would just be stupid. Why had she thought this was a good idea, again?
Mara tried, then, to stop the client. But now the sheet of skin pulsed, as if a heart beat within it, and before she could even move, a Presence in the skin brush against her mind and threw her to the floor. She could not even shout a warning, could only sit there in growing terror as the Presence held her down, as the client took the knife and began to prick his fingers, one by one.
Each time he pricked a finger, he touched a small dab of blood to a certain point on the circle. Around each dab glowing runes appeared, spinning in a circle. As each set of runes completed one revolution, they were then copied by the summoning circle, and ran, glowing and humming, around its circumference. Each new set of runes added to the last, until by the tenth the runes filled the whole circumference, with no space between the beginning and the end.
The candles were long since extinguished, and the wind had long since fallen still. Lit now only by the glowing runes, his eyes still hidden behind his reflective glasses, the client stood above the circle, knife in his right hand. He let the instructions fall; the sheet landed in the middle of the circle, and stood upright. The blood-writ words glowed with their own red light.
Uttering the first lines of the summoning words, the client transferred the knife to his left hand. He drawled out the second set, his voice never changing, as he swiftly sliced the knife into his right palm. He squeezed his hand; blood oozed out between the fingers. With a voice like a gong, he uttered the third and final set of lines, and dashed a splatter of his blood across the circle and the sheet of skin.
And the circle opened.
Mara could feel the power of the summoning rushing through the circle, out of the mortal world, and into... She shuddered, once, and tried to slink away, but the hold from the Presence in the skin remained. The summoning reach to a place far away from Heaven; to a place beyond even Hell; to a place and inhabitants which until then Mara would have sworn were just a myth.
But as all sound in the arcade ceased, as all light was extinguished, as the circle became a dark and silent emptiness which shone like the sun and rang out like a thousand gongs, she knew that place was no myth. And as the great faceless thing came up out of the circle, as pieces of it reached out for her and for the client, she knew the inhabitants were no myth, and that she had just conspired to let loose on of those inhabitants in the city.
And still she could not move, and still she could not even cry out. She could only sit there and quiver and cry and watch as the grasping, gnawing, pieces drew ever closer to her.
Then a new light filled the room, a rushing, purple-red light from behind her. Mara felt strong hands grasp her under the arms, and then pull her sharply back across the floor, away from the pieces and into... a newly opened portal. The arms shifted, wrapping around her belly, and she had the welcome sensation flying through a portal-between-worlds. She turned her head and looked up.
Carrying her was a woman, whose luxurious, white hair and violet eyes set off her caramel skin. She wore a purple gown, which was somehow both skin-tight and flowing. That gown was open down the front, exposing all of her cleavage and coming to a point just past her navel. Of course, Mara couldn't see all of that, as she was presently pressed up against that opening, but she had seen her rescuer enough to be familiar with her mode of dress.
"Lady Hild!"
"Mara, dear, just what were you thinking?" said Lady Hild, the Queen of Hell. It astonished Mara that she had come in her adult, fully powered form. Even the jewelry which bound her power had been removed, allowing her body-length white hair to flow freely. "Did the debacle with the Lord of Terror teach you nothing? Or Celestine? Or Trigon? There are simply some things which must not be let into the mortal world."
"I... I'm very sorry, Lady Hild!" Mara exclaimed, trying very hard to bow repeatedly in supplication without slipping free of Hild's grasp.
"Oh, it's far, far too late for apologies. What you've let into the world... and don't even think of thanking me for pulling you out of there, after what I had to cut through to get to you."
"Cut... through...?" At last, Mara noticed the bruises and cuts on Hild's face, one running straight across the six-pointed star on her forehead, the deep weariness in her violet eyes. So there had been a fight. Lady Hild had gone to war... to rescue her?
She started to tear up, but a quelling glance from Hild stopped her from gushing.
"Lady Hild?" she asked into the silence.
"Hmm?"
"Should... shouldn't we go back and warn them?"
Hild let out a breath.
"I had to fold space and time too much to get us out of there without being pursued," Hild said, her face full of regret. "By the time we'd get back to Nekomi, it'd be all over. My daughter... her sisters, are on their own."