Lord of the Manor -- Section 5

[3,417 words. Take THAT, Nasal Congestion!

[By the way, if you didn't see it before, Talk is now a girl, and so is Noise Feast. So...whatever you imagined before, I'm afraid you have to re-imagine it. Sorry.]

            "How did you get in here?" asked Michael.

            Sticks blinked at him, then pointed at Michael--no, not at Michael, but just behind him.

            "Where we come from," said the demon, "we call them 'doors.'"

            "Right," said Michael. "But...what do you want? Why wait for me in my room? Why not come next door? We were right there."

            Sticks nodded and grimaced, sort of at the same time. He grodded. Nimaced? "That's exactly the problem," said Sticks. "You said 'we,' as in 'more than one.'"

            Michael glanced back to the butler's pantry. Oh. Right. The BUTLER'S pantry. "You have a problem with Silver?"

            "More like he has a problem with me. He knew me when I was younger, and has it stuck in his head that I'm a completely irresponsible seventy-five-year-old. You know what it's like."

            Michael felt his eyebrows go crooked. "Not really, no."

            Sticks snapped his fingers. "Sorry. Human ages and demon ages. Seventy-five for us is more like...twenty-five for you."

            "But...isn't twenty-five pretty adult?"

            "To a sixty-year-old? No. At least, not to most sixty-year-olds, and actually, Silver was more like a one-hundred-sixty-year-old. Which is beside the point. The point is that I'm here to help you."

            "Sure," said Michael. "Great. Look, do you mind if I sit down? My knees feel funny."

            "No problem," said Sticks, then he looked around the room. "Huh. There's pretty much just the bed, isn't there. Do you want me to move? I can, if you don't feel comfortable sitting by me."

            Michael looked at Sticks and decided it was probably safe. The demon looked fit enough, but still, Michael must have had three feet and at least sixty pounds on the guy. That, and Sticks didn't FEEL scary. He didn't feel exactly safe, either. It was similar to the feeling he'd had around the attorney, Mr. Canker. Come to think of it, he got the same feeling from Silver. They all seemed like normal people--well, normal people with a few seriously weird things about them, like, oh, BAT WINGS, to pick something at random--okay, so they weren't really all THAT normal feeling, but they didn't feel foreign to him, like an insect or a slug. He felt like he could relate to Silver and Sticks, like a lot of the same things would matter to them that mattered to a fifteen-year-old boy.

            But they didn't feel tame. None of them. Not the lawyer, or the butler, or this miniature whatsit in jeans. They felt like wild things.

            "Where's my wolf costume?" Michael muttered.

            "Excuse me?" asked Sticks.

            "Can I tame you through the magical trick of staring into all your eyes without blinking?"

            This didn't get the reaction Michael expected. One second, Sticks was sitting casually on the end of the bed, the next he was clinging backwards to the far wall with his hands and bare feet--Michael hadn't noticed that the demon wasn't wearing shoes. Sticks stared at the boy with narrowed eyes.

            "Did I say something wrong?" asked Michael.

            "Were you serious about that?" asked Sticks, looking like a lizard, poised and ready to bolt.

            "About what?"

            "About taming me."

            "What? No." Michael could hear something in Sticks' voice, something that made 'taming' sound like a lot more than just teaching a few tricks. "It's just something from a children's book. WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. It's, like, forty years old. Haven't you read it?"

            Sticks shook his head. "Haven't read much for the last half-century or so. Things have been busy for me."

            "Right," said Michael. "Busy doing what?"

            "Working for a guy."

            "My great-grandpa? The old Master Arches?"

            "In a sense," said Sticks. "There's a guy who's in charge of the South Wing. He didn't exactly WORK for your great-grandpa. They had more of a...beneficial working relationship. A treaty, of sorts."

            Michael realized he wasn't really hearing what the demon on the wall was saying. He was looking at the bed.

            "Sorry," he said, "I didn't mean to scare you and I don't want to be rude, but really, do you mind if I sit down? I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed at the moment."

            "Of course," said Sticks, holding out one hand palm up toward the bed. "Sit wherever you feel like. This is your house. You don't have to ask MY permission."

            "People keep telling me that," said Michael, sitting down on his bed and crossing his legs. "When do I start believing them?"

            Sticks shrugged, an odd gesture from someone clinging to a wall backwards. "As soon as you make it true, I suppose."

            "And how do I do that?"

            The small demon smiled. "If I knew that, I suppose I might be Lord of the Manor."

            "Nice," said Michael. "You can have it."

            Sticks scampered even further away until he was crammed entirely into the corner of the ceiling.

            "Take that back," he said, his voice strained.

            "What?"

            "I said take it back!"

            Michael blinked at him, saw tiny tendons standing out against his tiny neck. Sticks was sweating. Michael wasn't sure what he'd done, but apparently it was something serious. The little demon was frantic.

            "Okay. I take it back."

            Sticks immediately relaxed and took a deep breath, wiping sweat off his forehead with the bottom of his T-shirt. "Young Master, you need--no, I shouldn't put it that way. I'm not in a position to tell you anything that you 'need' to do." He looked down at Michael's bed. "Do you mind if I join you?"

            Michael shrugged. "It's a big bed. I don't mind."

            "Thanks." Sticks pushed away from the wall and, in one long spring, leapt to land near Michael's pillow. He dropped down, sitting cross-legged in a mirror of Michael's pose. "You really didn't get told anything, did you?"

            "Um...probably not. What do you mean?"

            "Did your great-grandfather teach you anything about the manor? About Daimon Home? About what he did here?"

            "I never meat Great-grandpa. At least not that I can remember."

            "Oh, Air, Earth, and Night," muttered Sticks.

            "What's that?" asked Michael.

            "Sorry. Something a friend says when he's upset. I picked it up from him. Bad habit."

            "What was he supposed to tell me?" asked Michael. "Great-grandpa, I mean."

            Sticks scratched behind his ear. "I don't even know where to begin. Or if I even should begin. Is it too late for you to go back home? You're not stranded out here, are you?"

            "No. Not stranded. I've got my cell phone. Shouldn't be too hard to get a taxi."

            "Not a bad idea," said Sticks. "I'm sure they could find someone else. It's not like it HAS to be passed down in a family." He was tapping his thumbs against his knees.

            "I still don't know what you're talking about," said Michael. "My grandpa DID leave this place to me."

            "Exactly. And you can sell it. Give it away. Find someone else to deal with it. You can go back to being a normal twenty-three-year-old."

            Michael blinked at him. "I'm...uh...fifteen."

            Sticks waved the comment away as if it were irrelevant. "You could go back to wherever you came from. That is, assuming you haven't handed out any Rights or Privileges that you can't take back." The demon's head twitched, and Michael found himself looking into eyes with pupils slit vertically, like a snake's or a lizard's. "You haven't, have you?"

            "I have no idea what you're talking about."

            "Who have you met so far?"

            "Just you and Master Silver."

            "Perfect. And did you give Silver any assignments?"

            "I had him get the door once."

            "Think back. What did you say to him? How did you ask him?"

            Michael looked up at the ceiling, trying to concentrate. "I...think he asked me if I wanted him to take care of it, and I said, 'sure.'"

            "That was it?"

            "I think so."

            "He didn't have you accept him as your butler? Or manservant? Or gentleman's gentleman?"

            "N...no. He SAID he was my butler, but that was it."

            "Again, perfect," said Sticks. "And what you gave me wasn't really official, either, so you're not bound to the place yet. You can get out of here. What time is it?"

            Michael pulled out his cell phone and looked. "A bit after six."

            "Right. They'll be waking up in the forest and even on the grounds soon, so tonight is a bad time to go, but if you wait until the morning--and DON'T TALK TO ANYONE--then you'll be fine. You call a taxi, you fly back home, and you have that lawyer sell the place to someone else. You got that?"

            "Hang on," said Michael, starting to feel a rushing in his ears. "You told me this is MY home, right? Now you're trying to throw me out!"

            "I'm trying to save you," said Sticks, standing up. "You're not ready for this. You haven't been prepared at all, you're ignorant of even the basics--no need to get huffy, that wasn't an insult--and, frankly, neither of us have any idea if you can handle even a simple binding." The demon's face wasn't exactly gentle, but it wasn't unkind. "Go home, young Master. Leave the manor to someone else. We'll do all right until he comes. Or she. Don't want to be sexist, right?"

            Sticks smiled, and Michael tried to smile back, but his brain felt even foggier than before.

            "Stay in my room, huh?"

            "Right," said Sticks. "And especially, don't give anyone an assignment. Don't ask for anything if you can avoid it. Just go to bed, wake up, and go. It'll be better." Sticks hopped off the bed and walked over to Michael's door. A quick jump and twist of his arms was all it took to turn the knob, and the door swung open. "I'll go tell my boss that you're heading out. He'll understand. Take care of yourself, young Master."

            Michael lifted his hand and waved, then let it fall back into his lap as the door swung closed.

            "This is so weird," he whispered into the empty room.

            "Washed out," whispered Rope Feast, his voice quiet with rage. He paced up and down the abandoned upstairs sitting room that was the Lynch Feast base of operations when they weren't trying desperately to control the kitchens. "Washed out of my Scullery like common dirt."

            TECHNICALLY, thought Tickertape, IT ISN'T your SCULLERY. ALSO, IT WAS THE IMPS THAT WERE WASHED OUT. YOU WERE DRIVEN OUT BY A HEAVY RIGHT FROM NOISE FEAST. The quirk never ceased to be amazed at how QUICK the Master of the Feat of Din was. She was like a snake, except Tickertape had never seen a snake quite that fast. Or that vicious. He stole a quick look at Rope Feast's split lip.

            "I'll get her tomorrow, though, mark my words." The Master of the Feast of Lynchings stopped, looked out the window at the darkening world, and grunted. Around them, scattered over chairs and tables and on the carpet, were the tired remains of Rope Feast's army. Hunger was starting to take its toll. Only one meal a day didn't match up too well with battles morning and evening, and the grumbles, tumbles, quirks, firks, lags, bags, tags, snags, and flickers were starting to feel it.

            "I'll come up with something," muttered Rope Feast. "Or you will, quirk." He turned and looked down at Tickertape. "Yes, I think you should. Especially considering the quality of the armor you dressed me with. Not up to my standards, quirk. Not at all."

            Tickertape looked up at Rope Feast's bruised face and saw red. Not just on the larger demon's lip--that red was quickly turning to brown, anyway--but a red like a kind of haze, washing over everything and narrowing his vision to a tunnel, centered right on the wrinkled, leathery face of Tickertape's master. It was a strange haze that did strange things to the small quirk's mouth and brain. It loosened words that had been lodged there for weeks, waiting to come out. In fact, things got so jumbled up inside that Tickertape finally admitted to himself what his hungry stomach had refused to let him consider before: he was mad. Angry. Furious. He was outraged. He was like a tag when you put a library book on the shelf out of order. He had finally snapped.

            So Tickertape did something he hadn't dared do before: right to Rope Feast's face, he...muttered.

            "What's that, quirk?" Rope Feast's eyes narrowed, glowing a hot yellow.

            Tickertape would not be cowed. He screwed up his courage, stood up straight, and mumbled.

            "I told you to speak up!" shouted Rope Feast, and then it really happened.

            "I told you that the armor is fine," said the quirk.

            Rope Feast blinked. Several times. Furiously.

            "In fact," said Tickertape, "the armor is more than fine. It is spectacular, and if you weren't so SLOW, you would never have been hit. But you ARE slow. Slow in a fight and slow in the brain. Do you know how I know?"

            Rope Feast could only sputter.

            "I'll tell you how I know. I know you're slow in a fight because, even in armor that I made, you STILL couldn't win. And I know you're slow in the brain because you think you CAN win. No, that's not it. You think it's even worth fighting. You can call out food at Lynch Feast, but that is IT. You'll never be able to do Break Feast, and never be able to do Din Feast, because you don't have the Right or the Privilege. But you keep fighting, thinking that somehow you can TAKE it, and you can't, because it's not something you can take, but you don't realize that. You struggle and starve, rage and rail, and I'm done with you. I, Tickertape, Chief Quirk Exemplary Plenipotentiary over Dishes and Sundries, am through with you." He turned to look at the tiny lag who was standing on his hands next to a chair. "You coming with me, Micklewhip?"

            At first the Lag looked stunned. He glanced from Tickertape to Rope Feast--whose face was progressing from red to a lovely purple--then back to Tickertape. Then he smiled and nodded vigorously.

            "Fine," said Tickertape. "The two of us are leaving."

            "You are NOT!" shouted Rope Feast. "You are staying with me. I won't have imps thinking they can wander off, willy-nilly. You are part of the United Army of the Feast of Lynchings, Grand Conquerors of the Scullery, and you will STAY part of this army! Anyone caught defecting will be dealt with severely." The larger demon flexed his fingers and leaned in close to the quirk, his trumpet-bell helmet dully reflecting the light from the flickers scattered around the room. He almost spit as he delivered his final line to Tickertape. "Have I made myself clear?"

            "Very," said Tickertape. He then reached up, tapped two places on the helmet, and watched as the entire assembly collapsed around Rope Feast's eyes. As the Master of the Feast of Lynchings struggled with his armor, the quirk ran to Micklewhip, took the lag by the foot, and dragged him out into the hallway. Behind them Rope Feast raged, the rest of the imps twittered and tittered, and Tickertape wondered what he had done.

            He didn't STOP to wonder, though. He kept them moving at a good pace, Micklewhip's hands churning along almost in time with the patter of Tickertape's feet. They cut through an unused bedroom, slipped into a demon-sized servant's hallway, and shuffled quickly down the stairs until they were, as best as Tickertape could tell, solidly out of Rope Feast's territory. The problem was, he was no longer sure whose territory they were in.

            "Well, I've done it, haven't I, Micklewhip."

            The lag nodded. "Yup," he said.

            "Suppose there's no going back, is there?"

            An upside down headshake. "Nope," he said.

            Tickertape rubbed his hand over his face and looked around. Looked like they'd ended up in another sitting room. Abandoned, of course, even with white sheets over all the furniture. Most of the rooms in the North Wing were designed for human habitation, and so matched the normal sorts of places humans lived. Or, at least, Tickertape assumed they did. The manor was the only house he'd ever known.

            He pulled on one of the sheets, looking up at the human-sized couch that was under it.

            "Pillows up there," he said. "We can sleep here for the night--not that you need a pillow." The lag grinned and settled comfortably on his broad hands. "I don't know what we'll do about food in the morning. I suppose it wouldn't be too late to join Noise Feast. She might take us in--"

            He stopped. Micklewhip was shaking his head vigorously.

            "Yeah, you're right," said Tickertape. "I saw the punch she landed on Rope. Don't want to be on the receiving end of something like that. Well then. Wait until morning and try to find Shatter Feast?"

            "Yup," said the lag.

            "Excuse me," said a voice from under a sheet-covered table. "Do you mind if we join you?"

            Tickertape stepped back cautiously, reaching with one hand for the extendable pen-knife he kept on his back. He always felt a small rush of pride at how well the pen wrote--when he could find ink--but he hadn't shirked on sharpening the blade, either. As sharp as a snag's needle, but quite a bit larger. With the other hand he pushed Micklewhip behind his back. Lag's weren't much use in a fight, with their awkward, hourglass bodies.

            "Who are you?" he called.

            "I'm Walk," said the voice. "And I'm here with my friend, Talk. We're coming out now, but we're not going to do anything scary, so, um, don't do anything scary back, okay?"

            "Fine," said Tickertape, but he kept his hand on his knife. "Come out."

            A slightly scaly hand reached under the edge of the table's sheet and lifted. Two minor demons came out--young ones, from their look--one boy and one girl. The boy--Walk?--had human-like features, but was completely bald with scales over his head. He wore a leather apron and an oversized wristwatch. Tickertape felt his hand twitch at the sight of the watch--a new toy!--but he kept his face in control.

            The other demon, who must have been Talk, was horned with long hair that wrapped around her, almost with a mind of its own. She looked good in an oversized T-shirt that went down to her ankles, but she was a good half-foot too tall for Tickertape's tastes.

            "Hi," said Walk.

            "Hello," said Tickertape.

            "Yo," said Micklewhip.

            Talk said nothing.

            "You don't look familiar," said the quirk.

            "Yeah," said Walk. "I mean, no. We're probably not. We're from the South Wing."

            Tickertape's eyes went wide. "You're joking with me."

            Talk shook her head and Walk looked sad. "No joke," said Walk. "We...came through the Great Hall."

            "You...you're...you..." Tickertape was stuttering. "You're insane!"

            Walk's face cracked and he looked like he was about to cry. "We felt like we HAD to! We're running out of food down there, and the kitchens are here. We thought we could make it through--we were careful, we really were! And then the shadow came, and Shambles ran off, and--" He couldn't finish, but just closed his eyes and tried to control his breathing. Talk put her hand on his shoulder.

            "Oh my," said Tickertape, sighing. The two demons were barely kids. The must not have any Rights or Privileges, which probably meant that Tickertape was not only the oldest, but the most useful of the group. How odd. A quirk about to be in charge of two minor demons and a lag. It was almost enough to make him smile. He shook his head and spoke. "Looks like we're all refugees, of one sort or another. I'm not sure I can promise you food, but whatever we find, you're welcome to join us. That all right with you, Micklewhip?"

            The lag nodded his upside down nod, sympathy all over his face. Then again, lags were always sympathetic, which was why Tickertape felt a need to look out for them. Not from these two, though. These two minor demons were just as harmless as a lag.

            Walk swallowed and got his breath back. "Thank you," he said.

            "Thank me after we found some food," said the quirk.