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Something was not right.
Bartimaeus felt it, an itch in his essence that had nothing to do with the eternal length of time his master had kept him in this dirt-heavy world (although there was that as well). He felt it every time he wandered down an empty road and felt someone’s eyes on him, every time he sleepily took roost in a tree to wait for the morning and felt a hand rustle his feathers. He felt it in the fact that it’d been days and Nathaniel still hadn’t summoned him for his weekly updates.
-
Something was not right.
Lights turning on and off of their own accord, candles lighting themselves in empty rooms, smears of blood left at the edges of his pentacles.
-
Nathaniel yawned and stretched. He flicked his watch open and frowned. The timepiece must have broke—the hour and minute hand ticking backwards counter-clockwise and the second hand alternating between the same two seconds, back and forth, back and forth.
“Piper!”
No answer. Nathaniel sighed and got up to fetch his assistant who had been sent to retrieve a sheave of papers and had yet to return in an hour.
“I really must talk to her about responsibilities,” Nathaniel muttered.
-
Bartimaeus squinted at the poster advertising some circus coming into town. He could have sworn the images were moving on the page, clowns opening and closing their sticky red mouths, fire crumbling the corners of the paper, men twisting their bodies up into impossible shapes.
It started to rain and he suspiciously backed away from the poster to find shelter.
-
“Piper?”
-
Grey stuff was leaking somewhere on the eighth plane. His essence shivered.
-
Nathaniel went to open his office door. The handle was stuck. He grunted and twisted harder. Somewhere behind him, his desk light flickered.
-
Something was not right.
It had almost been a month.
Bartimaeus circled back towards Nathaniel’s house.
-
Nathaniel’s hand was clammy. He took a deep breath and turned around.
-
Bartimaeus was flying as fast as he could, beak pointed straight in the direction of his master. He had a strange sense of apprehension and dread lingering at the boundaries of his mind.
What has that moron gotten himself into now…
Nathaniel’s house was dark, not a single light or window lit although it was barely 9 pm and Bartimaeus knew for a fact that Nathaniel hadn’t slept before 3 am in years. Almost unconsciously, he flew faster.
-
Nathaniel made his way to his pentacles to summon his strongest djinn and suddenly was overwhelmed with a sense of dizziness. He looked down and the usually pinpoint perfect straight lines of his diagrams suddenly were wriggling towards him. Dark squiggly lines trailed behind them and Nathaniel stumbled backwards. A cold hand wrapped around his arm.
-
“Nathaniel?”
Bartimaeus could feel the demonic presence lingering in the hallways, every candle extinguished and cold fingers of essence leaving a bad taste in his mouth. Shadows were languidly contorting themselves into familiar shapes—a sharp chef’s knife, the slumping body of a dead child, Nathaniel’s mouth open in a scream for help.
-
Nathaniel looked down at what was clenched in his fist and let out a cry, flinging the clump of bloody, blackened hair as far away from him as he could. His heart was hammering in his chest and he could feel a prickle of disgust slowly spread from the palm of his hand up his arm to the back of his neck.
“Begone!” he commanded in a shaky voice, flicking his right hand and muttering a counter-casting spell. Sinister laughter crawled across the floor towards Nathaniel, his usually pristine floor, which was now smeared with lumpy, grey matter.
“Foul demon,” he muttered under his breath and drew an silver amulet from his jacket.
“Stupid boy,” a voice crooned, halfway between mocking and comforting. Nathaniel could feel the otherworldly presence prying at his lips, forcing his jaw to open farther than it ever should. He heard his bones start to crack and he wildly brandished the amulet, struggling to get away from the unseen spirit.
“Your party tricks won’t help you,” that cold voice said amusedly, and when it spoke, Nathaniel could feel freezing liquid tumbling down his throat, too much for him to breathe. He began to choke.
Slimy fingerlings one by one fixed themselves around Nathaniel’s throat, five, six, seven, too many to count. Too many that should have fit around his neck. His vision was getting blurry and he had long since dropped his amulet. The water in his throat was freezing him inside out; he could feel his head spinning.
There was a loud roar in his ears.
Oh, wait.
No. It was just Bartimaeus.
“Away from this place!” Bartimaeus bellowed. “I am Bartimaeus of Uruk! I am Sakhr al-Jinni, N'gorso the Mighty and the Serpent of Silver Plumes! I command you leave right now, right now, I say! Scram! Get out of here!”
A sarcastic comment came to Nathaniel’s mind, but he bit it back. Not because he was grateful or anything, but because the damned demon was still in his mouth.
He did attempt to command his djinn to properly attack the demon currently strangling him and save him instead of all this shouting and demanding that wouldn’t come to anything except his frozen corpse on the floor and 78 freed djinn. But all that came out was a feeble gargle.
Bartimaeus looked down at Nathaniel briefly. “Sorry, what was that?”
Nathaniel’s eyes were bugging out and he rolled them with a ferocity he hadn’t felt since he was a child.
Bartimaues sighed and muttered something under his breath before rolling up his sleeves (he had taken on the form of a well-muscled Hessian soldier) and snapping his fingers. Flames burst from them, lighting the previously darkened room and warming Nathaniel’s icy face. The demon clinging on to his face hissed and its grip loosened. Nathaniel blindly groped around the floor, banging his head against his desk before brushing against the amulet he had dropped. With quickly weakening fingers, he picked up the trinket and, trembling with the effort to think straight on stale breath, pressed it against his face. A loud shriek filled the room and Bartimaeus took the chance to grab onto the many-tentacled demon sucking the life out of his master.
“A bit too noodly for my taste,” he said, licking his lips. “But nonetheless tasty.”
The quip fell flat. Nathaniel just curled in on himself, gasping and gagging for breath, and Bartimaeus was suddenly hyperaware of what had just happened.
He watched his master struggle silently, without offering a hand to help him up. Nathaniel’s hair was damp and his face pale. There were bright red marks on his throat that Bartimaeus could see through all planes. He turned away.
“That’ll teach you to mess with Farrar again,” he said tonelessly.
“It could have been anyone,” Nathaniel said, his voice sounding like someone had taken a good amount of salt and sand to his throat. Which wasn’t too far off.
Bartimaeus huffed and shifted into his usual form. “A nasty little treat like that? It has her icy fingers all over.”
There was a beat of silence and then Nathaniel said two words that Bartimaeus hadn’t heard directed at him in centuries.
“What was that?” he asked quietly. He looked around to face his master.
Nathaniel was shuffling with some papers at his desk and refused to look up. “I hardly think an all-powerful djinn who’s conversed with Solomon and built the walls of whatever needs words repeated back at him like a parrot.”
Bartimaeus watched Nathaniel’s face regain some of its color as the blood slowly began circulating normally again (was that what it was?).
“You’re welcome,” he mumbled, soft enough that Nathaniel wouldn’t be able to hear.
Nathaniel seated himself at his desk again, clearing his throat hoarsely, and Bartimaeus shifted into a cat to nap one on of the bookcases. The next day Nathaniel would send Bartimaeus out into the streets again and Bartimaeus would leave after some crushing sneer about Nathaniel's suit jacket or hair. They'd never speak of the event again, and eventually, the details would fade like the marks 'round Nathaniel's neck.
But they both knew something irreparable had just happened. It was clear from the lingering fear Bartimaeus still felt when he remembered Nathaniel’s sheet-white face when he burst into his office. It was clear in Nathaniel’s silence, the weekly report long forgotten.
Something was not right.