Page 21 of The Music Demon

She nodded. “Good idea. What’s your name?”

“George.”

After sneezing, she exclaimed, “HA!” and gave a little jump of victory. “I saw a swirl of red ribbon in your aura. Icantell when you’re embellishin’ the truth, demon. So you’d better be watchin’ out for what ye say.” She frowned. “O’course I suspect a three-legged dog could tell your name’s not George.”

Lyric immediately remembered that she’d sneezed when she’d thought Gray had lied about his name. “You sneeze when you think somebody’s telling a lie.”

“What? Oh no. ‘Tis probably alien pollen.”

“Alien pollen,” he repeated drily. “No, Shivaun. Demons aren’t vulnerable to such things. And we don’t sneeze.”

“We?” It was taking a while for her to get used to thinking of herself as one of the demon horde. “Well. I do. Sometimes.”

“Another test.”

“Okay. What kind of creature are you?”

“Unicorn.”

She sneezed then flapped her arms against her sides in frustration. “Well, a very fine lie detector I am. The subject of my interrogation will know that I know when they lie.”

Lyric laughed. “Do you have a subject in mind? For interrogation?”

With a smile worthy of demons, she said, “I could find out how many females you’ve actually bedded.”

“Not if I refuse to answer.”

“Hmmm. Sly.” She grew still and quiet. “Suppose this means you really are old as dirt.”

“Music. Not dirt.”

“Are no’ those two pretty much the same age?”

“Give or take a few billion years.”

“Do no’ quibble.”

“Alright,” he said amiably, pretending to agree that billions of years was insignificant. “Does the age difference bother you?”

Shivaun stood with her mouth open trying to process information that was impossible to process. She was dating a guy who was almost as old as time while she was so new that she’d never even been on a date. Until recently she’d never left the confines of the New Forest, never seen a motorized vehicle or images moving on screens, never heard recorded music, never known the extent of how big and different was the world the New Forest shared.

Everything she knew about the world had been absorbed through experience in the wilds of the forest, lessons taught by elders, and folktales told by storytellers. Certainly, there was nothing wrong with that. New Forest inhabitants were far happier, more satisfied and content than their counterparts outside the walls in the modern world.

Contemporary reality was as alien to New Forest residents as that of societies in distant solar systems. And that’s why Rammel Hawking’s grandfather had the foresight to create the village lost in time. It was an anthropological study more expensive, intensive, and sweeping than any other to date. A major success. But the degree to which their reclusive society was a success would graph in direct reverse correlation to the culture shock experienced by the O’Malley twins.

They, themselves, were a grand experiment because they were the first New Forest citizens, born and raised, other than the legendary, Liam O’Torvall, to venture beyond the walls of the Preserve.

The demon watched her throat move as she finally began to regain her composure and swallowed.

“I…” The sentence was cut short when something in the distance moved across her peripheral vision.

Turning toward the water, she was frozen by a sudden onset of panic. Her body wasn’t sure whether to faint and be unconscious for what might be a very ugly future or scream and run. She wasn’t sure either of the last two was available because either her voice or feet might fail to respond to directions.

A dragon, much larger than the female who’d accepted her gift of cotton candy, was headed straight toward them at amazing speed. His wing span appeared to stretch from one side of the cove to the other.

“Ah,” Lyric said. “That would be dad.” Shivaun’s unconscious waffled between fainting and screaming then finally settled on jumping behind Lyric. Who was clearly surprised. “What are…? The flight of this male is frightening to you?”

The demon was constantly recalibrating Shivaun’s awareness. He wished he hadn’t told her that there are things in the world that can harm demons because it had chipped at her belief in invincibility. While he’d told the truth as he knew it, those things were few and far between. They might even by myths and not real at all.