The Spritely Ways of Dark Familiars (A Pact with Demons, Vol. 1): A Pact with Demons, #1

By Michael R.E. Adams

Almon Campbell encounters a cat. The feline accuses his mother of a heinous crime.

 

Justice must be served. And the cat demands only one payment… Almon's soul.

 

Almon's first mystery plummets him down the rabbit hole. A world where demons lurk. But something beautiful also awaits. Should he risk it all?

 

Cozy mysteries in a paranormal world. A Pact with Demons investigates uncanny tales with heart and danger. In a world where cats talk. And darkness lurks everywhere. Why do lost hearts sell their souls to demons?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Enchanted Cipher
• Release date: Mar 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201371586

Michael R.E. Adams

MICHAEL R.E. ADAMS pens myths both natural and speculative. He invokes the lyricism of poetry and the suspense of genre fiction to create verse and prose in literary and SFF worlds. Portraying underrepresented groups, he seeks to expand the world’s imagination of who we can all be. He tells tales that all people can relate to, stories about the desire and fear of connecting to others and exploring our own hearts. (www.MichaelREAdams.com)

Book preview

1

THE SPRITE & THE FAMILIAR

My mother stepped on a cat’s tail and laughed. I didn’t believe him when he told me. My father always said she liked animals, especially cats. She tried to bring home a kitten but he said no. She couldn’t keep her. In three days, her nose would run, her eyes would itch, and her face would swell. He seemed sincere. The cat, I mean. But also my father. She liked cats, but a cat said she stepped on his tail and laughed. The feline believed the act to be deliberate and malicious. ‘That made it a crime,’ I said. ‘I know,’ he said. I asked him what he had done to upset her. He hissed and pawed. I told him what my father had told me. She had found an orange kitten under the bridge, the same bridge we were under now, Tarago Bridge. A thunderstorm had scared the kitten. The wild creature slipped on the steep bank and scurried under the structure for shelter. My mother was also under Tarago. She cradled the shivering animal until the rain ceased and the thunder had rumbled passed. She brought her home and tried to keep her. My father said no.

The big cat, black with honey stripes, commended me on my poetic details. ‘How else could it have happened?’ I asked. He pondered. Maybe she loved small animals. He was fully-grown and fat. That was his answer. Personally, I felt being fat made up for him being grumpy. Fat made him cuddly. People wanted pets to keep them warm. His lumbering walk, hips shaking, offset his bad attitude.

‘Are you calling my mother a liar?’ I asked.

‘Technically, it’s your father’s veracity in question,’ he replied.

‘Well, it’s not necessarily related. My mother’s grudge with you is with you not all cats.’ As I had said the words, I knew the door I opened.

‘Then that gives me even more reason to take this assault personally.’

The cat told me he knew the story. The kitten was no larger than the dead rat I now held in my hand. And it was not a kitten. It was a cat, a lucky cat, a gulukkugakat, bright orange with a golden belly and black eyes. Only one was born in sixty-six days of every three millionth litter with six cats. I believed those numbers to be too round. It’s easy for people to make rules up and say it’s magic. Regardless, the lucky cat sacrificed its fortune of nine lives and bestowed that karma to its possessor. On the day in account, a gulukkugakat had slipped down the trickling stream’s banks and scurried under Tarago Bridge during a thunderstorm. She climbed up the pier’s bricks and sandwiched herself in between the gaps. My mother had fallen into the river, and the lucky cat gave its seventh life to save her.

‘Belug is a stream not a river,’ I said. ‘Ducks can’t even squat to float.’ They slapped their feet about, splashing the water as they waddled up and down the rocky bed. The cat claimed that Belug was a river for two days. Torrents swelled the gentle stream into a rapid river.

Local history established the Belug was originally a river that dwindled into a stream. A mayor had it reclassified in order to avoid the sense that our town was diminishing. As I explained these origins, the cat tilted his head. He had not known. I found that telling of his age. He wasn’t ancient. He probably didn’t read. Everything he knew he had witnessed; everything he had witnessed he knew. He was not as old as the drying of the river. He had been born since the stream, less than a century, a youngin’. A familie like him was not one for travel. Where they were born, they would die. Where they died, they had been born. So where they lived was where they had been born and would die. They figured themselves superior to mundane animals, but I betted this one liked yarn like any other cat.

A tale had popularized the sacred cow that blessed water melted a familie, and therefore a familie considered wetness a natural enemy whether cat or squirrel or bird. I assumed that, given millennia and smarts, they had probably deduced for themselves the difference between tap, rain, river, and blessed waters. Also, the people had to take another step and assume a familie would never be a fish. I had talked to a brook trout once. I believed a familie’s fear was due to a familiarity with their own nature and hence a hesitancy towards the unknown. Creatures of the water were wary of pastures and forests. Creatures of the land were wary of ponds and lakes. If a familie were never curious beyond their own home, they were not explorers. That truth could reasonably extend to explain a lack of inquisitiveness for habitats they considered foreign. And what we refused to understand, we avoided, just in case. He was comfortable by the Belug, so he must have been born close by. He saw the river sweep away my mother. He saw the lucky cat scooched between the spaces of the Tarago pier’s protruding red bricks. He saw the stream sweep away a baby rat. He saw me, walking home after classes, see the drowning pup and stumble down the hilly bank to run split splatting through the water in my academy uniform, trying to scoop the innocent up. I didn’t get the idea this incident with the orange cat coincided with the incident of his tail. He and my mother had met before or met then only to meet again.

I wasn’t sure what I was trying to determine, but I felt I probed this cat for a reason, even one beyond the obvious, and that the details strayed from some intuitive sense of relevance. Either way, I decided to go with what I knew. I decided to indulge the cat. Maybe he could tell me more stories about my mother. Whenever I had asked my dad, he wouldn’t look at me. He’d shrug. I don’t think he was aware of it, but he’d shrug. Then he’d keep reading the Smithton Chronicle or yell at the Warlocks on the television for once again losing to the Reapers. Rugby.

Once, I thought he was going to yell at me. His lips pursed, he slapped his palms against his forehead and huffed, then sauntered away to plop in his beat up recliner. ‘I forgot I recorded the game,’ he said. ‘Let’s see if the Warlocks don’t stink it up again.’ He asked me to get him a beer. I knew he liked it in a frosted glass mug. We kept three in the freezer. I poured, delivered it wrapped in a dishrag, and knew I’d never ask about her again. I don’t like stressing my father out. It’s only the two of us, and I don’t do much. I take out the garbage, keep my room and bathroom clean, and get him beer. ‘Get good grades,’ he said. ‘That’s your job.’ In a way, it would’ve been easier to just clean the toilet than study. School learning was pointless but kind of like a puzzle. I liked it enough.

His old girlfriend said we did our best to make a home. She was right. I still didn’t like her though. She was fine. I just didn’t like her. Dad insisted that I told him the truth about how I felt. ‘Be honest. This is serious. Do you like her?’ he asked. I still bobbed and weaved. ‘If you like her, I like her,’ I answered. He pressed. ‘She’s fine,’ I said. Which was true. He called me a liar. I stamped my feet and declared that at best I fibbed. ‘Alright, Sport,’ he said and shrugged as he left me in the kitchen. There’s always a disappointment in him when he calls me Sport. I don’t know if the regret is in his voice, or behind his eyes. I think it’s one of those dreams parents have for their children. They love you. They accept you. But they still have that one wish for how you’d turn out. He imagined laughing and patting me on the back, saying ‘Good job, Sport,’ as I caught a pop up ball. Instead, he watched the game while I read history books on the sofa I covered with a white bed sheet. He didn’t mean anything by it. It was just for him. I wasn’t supposed to know. I wasn’t supposed to hear it, the sadness. Or see it. I went with it. Sometimes, I even smiled. But not that time.

Back to the point, the fat cat said the lucky cat saved my mother. My father said my mother saved the lucky cat. He lied to me, or she lied to him. He didn’t want more questions, or she didn’t want him to worry.

As I thought the situation through–or tried to–the cat had moseyed off and plopped in the grass to lick himself. I wanted to pet his swollen belly, but he already had the upper hand. I needed to deduce what had happened with my mother. Although, I wasn’t sure I cared. I wanted to pet him more.

I walked from under the bridge, buried the baby rat on the shore, and returned to the stream. The Tarago stood on its two brick piers. A cherry wood arch with triangular trusses supported an oak deck that did not extend passed the piers. A bridge that never connected two lands. You had to leave the woods, hop over the river basin, and onto the bridge, then cross to hop over the river basin again and return to the woods on the other side. Beacon Woods had paths, but none led to this bridge.

A tale held that the Tarago was a shrine dedicated to a water sprite. I accepted this as a fairytale as a child, and now, as a man–albeit a young man–I now questioned the story. What was wrong was often held true, and what was true was often held a myth. Once, there were sprites and demons, and now, only demons. Sprites were beautiful spirits of the seas and forests who wore flowing robes and radiated light. They healed the sick children who sipped from their waters and ate their fruit. Demons were horned beasts of the underworld who smelled of sulfur and left trails of ash. They exploited the greedy who valued money over their own lives. In the end though, sprites and demons both collected payment, a soul. Your child chewed the sprite’s roots and was healed, but she came to collect him seven years later. You signed your soul to a demon and had a streak at the tracks. Your luck all spent, you tripped in a pothole and cracked your skull. A demon was an ugly sprite. A sprite was a beautiful demon. Evil took all forms to appeal to all people.

I agreed that they were all demons, but I didn’t take offense with their price. The assumption that beings should alter fate for nothing, or only what you wanted to pay, was the true evil. Sprites could only be sprites. Demons could only be demons. But Man had a responsibility to be more than man.

‘Is it true,’ I said, ‘that if you connect the bridge to connect the east and west of Beacon Woods that you will summon a water demon?’

The cat stopped licking as if shocked: ‘I thought I had about ten more minutes of you dozing off into space before we addressed your penance for your mother’s sins.’

‘What does the water demon have to do with your tail?’

The cat walked into the stream