A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [77]
Layers of color spiraled around the pen’s heavy body, ranging from dark red to light cream, like the desert spires that filled the Valley of Fire outside of Las Vegas. A place of mystical beauty and terrible danger. Did the pen share the danger or just the beauty?
I knew words would flow easily from this pen. Beautiful words that melded together into a story.
Something tickled the back of my mind. An idea? A sentence, then a paragraph filled my head. I touched the nib to the pristine page of a new notebook. Ten words. Two dozen.
Then nothing. My mind pulled back to reality. Where the hell had the pen come from? I pondered the mystery as I wiped the blue ink off the pen with a tissue.
I looked up at the ceiling. Lacking a large glowing hole in the ceiling, the pen clearly had dropped out of thin air. That left one option.
“Scrap?” I demanded of the ether.
A low hum skirted the back of my mind, lodging at the top of my spine.
I jabbed with the pen into the air. “Scrap, where did this pen come from?”
Dahling, I found it, Scrap replied from elsewhere. Scrap was an imp. He could transform himself into my Celestial Blade when danger demanded it. He could slip between dimensions and times. Today he chose demure and invisible.
“Spit it out, buddy,” I searched my cluttered office for a glimpse of his translucent gray-green body. I detected motion. A hint of a barbed tail twitched between an American English dictionary and a French lexicon on the top shelf of my book case.
I crept away from my station at the computer and latched onto that tail, winding it around two fingers in a special grip that kept him from popping out into another dimension.
Ah, Tess, you didn’t have to do that, he cajoled, trying to yank his tail out of my grasp. I held firm.
“Tell me about the pen. Where’d it come from?”
I told you, I found it.
“Where?”
I tightened my grip as Scrap tried to slither up my arm to my shoulder.
“Cuddling won’t persuade me to relent,” I told him firmly.
Finally he crossed his arms and pouted at me from the edge of the bookcase. I could almost see the book covers through his half-present body. The blue and black leather bindings faded and brightened with Scrap’s attempts to disappear.
Nowhere you’d want to look.
“If you found it, then it’s more than a fancy pen.” I looked down in my opposite hand. It still held the pen. Hadn’t I put it down? “Who dumped it and what was it used for?” I looked beyond the graceful lines of the onyx and the tiny slit that revealed the empty ink reservoir. I’d drained it writing my feeble paragraph.
Tiny flecks of rusty brown stained the gold nib. I’d wiped it clean. I knew I had.
Ugh, great. Dried blood. Someone had used the pen to sign in blood. I’d done that once. Blood contracts were irrevocable.
The details of signing the contract poured back into my mind. The pen. This pen. I had used it.
Someone, or something had buried that memory pretty deep so it wouldn’t surface easily or often. Probably me.
My blood on the nib.
Well, you see, the Powers That Be don’t like to use a pen more than once. In case the blood mixes between two clients and there’s crossover in their contracts, Scrap explained in a gush of words. Straight words, no drawled “dahlings” or endearing “babes,” not even a flick of his hot pink feather boa—which was missing from around his neck.
“So they discard the pens after each use. Go through a lot of them, do they?”
Not as many as you’d think. People and demons alike kinda avoid dealing with the Powers That Be. You’re the only one stupid—I mean desperate—enough to actually seek them out