Free Psyched by Juli Caldwell [fantasy] Page B

farted at me.”
    Vance could not have looked more perplexed. “Demons…can fart?”
    Aisi almost laughed. She took a deep breath, pushing a shiny, spiral lock of hair out of her face. Her hair bothered her, so she pulled her long black tresses out of the rubber band which held them and twisted it up on top of her head. As she secured it with the elastic in her hand, she said indifferently, “This one did. Smelled like rotten eggs.”
    Vance looked grim. He recovered a bit, thinking hard about all she said. “Sulfur. Hellfire and brimstone.”
    Aisi shrugged. “He said his name was Malus Indolus. In Latin, that means evil genius, but I called him on it. I told him the name was stupid. He didn’t like that so much.”
    Vance’s eyes grew wide. “You called out a demon? Whoa…” He looked at her with profound respect. “Aisi, you have no idea how exciting this is to me. I am totally blown away by this. I…I don’t even know what to do with all this information!”
    She leaned forward, her elbows on the table. Out of the corner of her eye she could see he father watching them, pacing inside the kitchen. Weird. She focused on the gold speckles in the cheap Formica table top, absently tracing patterns on it with her fingers. “I can’t help you much more with this school project or whatever. Everything that’s happened today is really confusing.” She shook her head. “I don’t even know why I told you all this, except maybe that you might be the first one to get it. I can’t tell my mom any of this. You’ve seen her. She’d use Leo and me to make more money. I never thought of telling my dad again. When they were still married I told them, and my mom kept dragging me to psychologists until I pretended I didn’t see anything and they said I was cured. The thing is, I never saw anything at all until…”
    Aisi paused and looked at a small framed picture on the wall close to the restrooms. She stood and walked to it, a feeling of hopelessness washing over her. In it, identical twin girls stood holding hands, wearing matching white sun dresses. Their long black curls were pulled up into pigtails on either side of their heads with white ribbons streaming down to their shoulders. Smiling parents stood behind them on the porch of the house that was now an abandoned wreck near the church where Father J, the famous demonologist, built his church. She pulled the image from its hook on the wall and handed it to Vance with trembling hands.
    “Everyone in town knows about my twin sister, Nakia,” Aisi said shakily. “She disappeared ten years ago. For a while, they said my dad killed her and threw her body into the old well behind the house. Then the police decided it must have been an accident after he passed all their lie detector tests. They never found a body…they said she fell down the well. They thought my dad just got nervous because he’s an immigrant and covered it all up so he wouldn’t get in trouble.”
    Vance looked outraged. “Why would they think that?”
    Aisi closed her eyes, wishing she didn’t have to remember any of it. “Because the night she disappeared, my father took cement and sealed the well.”
    Vance’s forehead furrowed. “Uh, yeah. That looks bad.”
    “He would never say exactly why or how he sealed the well, but they never pressed charges. Somehow his hands got horribly burned in the process, even though he swears those scars come from a grease fire here in the diner. All I know is one night my sister was here and his hands were fine, and the next day, she was gone and his hands got melted. The crazy thing is that the FBI came out with all their heavy equipment and were never able to pull out the cement plug,” Aisi said. “Some of their geology experts were able to figure out how deep it went. Well, everyone thought it was an old well. It was dry when we moved in, and it doesn’t go straight down. It’s kind of just like a hole in the ground by the hill, behind the old