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I should probably warn: this is on the grimmer side of Addergoole stuff, not for AG itself, but for the apocalypse around it.
Shush had been following the hellhound since lunch.
The ‘hound was in three classes with Shush, only one after lunch, but the school was small and it wasn’t hard to figure out where the hellhound had gone. And after class, well, it was every man for themselves, and Shush had had no problem at all following the thing.
They were all things, of course. It hadn’t taken him more than a heartbeat to figure out he was in a school full of demonspawn. They were all around: the Pretty Ones and the Fierce Ones, the Fancy Pantsers and the Horror Shows. But a hellhound had killed Shush’s sister, so he was going after the hellhound first.
It looked like a girl. It looked like a short girl, not even five feet tall, with pretty blue eyes and warm brown skin. It had been trying to make friends with Shush the whole week, helping him find stuff in this maze, telling him secrets about the other students. Shush was already indebted – stupid, stupid, but he’d never known a demon to look so much like a person before.
The first thing he and his sister had learned about the demons was don’t get indebted. They’d watched their neighbor end up the thrall to one of those things, because Mr. Morrison had thought having running water and power was more important than his independence or his brain.
The second thing they’d learned was kill with rowan. A hunter had driven through, killed off the demon controlling Mr. Morrison, and left, leaving behind rowan daggers for Shush and Sahanna.
The third thing they’d learned was demons lie. They lied, and they hid their faces, and it wasn’t until they’d let the refugee women into their house – scraggly and feral looking, but human, he’d thought – that they’d turned into Horror Shows. They’d left Shush and Sahanna alive. They’d been after their parents.
He hadn’t had to learn that demons killed. He’d known that since the first day they showed up on TV. The hellhound that followed Sahanna home had been another page in a lesson book that was already too full.
Shush hadn’t been able to get his rowan dagger through security – no surprise, since the head of security was another demon, old-school bat wings and all. But the thing that had been calling itself Ema, the hellhound he was chasing now, she’d shown Shush the grotto. And in the grotto, it was a pretty simple matter to find the rowan tree.
The hell-hound rounded a corner. There was nobody else around. Shush followed the thing around the corner and stabbed his makeshift rowan blade through its chest.
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