“You couldn’t give me even one of those figs?” Asmod said, scrambling after Luos down the red dirt path. Forest lay to their right, and a vast fenced field lay to their left. The sun was setting over the rolling hills. The boy was walking ahead of him with the stick Asmod had found – a good, quality stick, almost pilgrim staff material if it weren’t dead wood – over his shoulders, balanced by a sack of figs on either end.

  “These figs are for Uncle and Master Samsian, Asmod. I can’t have you eating them. There’ll be none left for the old men.”

  “But you had three!”

  Peezlebub had expressed his hatred for his cat vessel, and Asmod hadn’t understood at the time. Not really. Now, having been a hawgling for a couple of days, he felt he was starting to understand. His senses were alien to him. Hawgs could see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. They had a sense of balance and a sense of temperature. But none of them were human senses.

  The world was less colorful to behold, but he could smell the exotic bouquet under the grass and in the middens. He wasn’t as repulsed by muck, as he could identify and separate individual scents within even the most putrescent accretions. It was off-putting, and he had a sudden appreciation for the lives of the animals his parents raised.

  His parents. That was still a sore spot for him. It wasn’t but a few months ago he still had a mother and father. They had found his father, who succumbed to his wounds, but his mother…

  Would his mother even recognize him? She would run to Luos and embrace him, but what would she think of a daemon inhabiting the body of a hawg who claimed to be her son?

  “Are you coming, Asmod?” Luos had stopped to check on him as Asmod had fallen behind.

  He scrambled to heel to his real self. “Yeah, I’ve just got these short little legs.”

  Asmod really did want one of the figs. Peezlebub had been right. The food of the spirit world was delicious, but eventually one became disillusioned to the glamor. How many times can you have the same hunk of meat, the same piece of fruit, the exact same cup of wine, before you grow sick of it? Try as he might, Peezle couldn’t imitate the spice of variety. Simulation still lacked that small push into a satisfying experience, like how a series of shallow breaths couldn’t quite replicate the feeling of taking a deep lungful of air. It made the figs, the ones his real vessel could eat, that much more tantalizing.

  “Hey,” Asmod started, “how about we take a quick breather. Maybe sit down and rest. My trotters are-“

  But he was cut off. Beyond the wood line he heard a crack, and from the same direction came a whizzing rock.

  “Auuggh!” Luos said as the bullet ricochet off his temple. He staggered and lost his balance, dropping first one sack and then the other. Bodies were rushing from the shadows to block the road before and behind.

  “The bugs today are out in force!” someone said. It hadn’t been one of the people blocking the road. They were thugs about Asmod’s age. The one speaking didn’t hustle like the rest of them, but strolled out from the woods.

  He covered his mouth with excitement, his eyes wide. “You’re bleeding! You actually scored blood, my man!” He high-fived one of his mates in the blockade as the others became infected with the ringleader’s joy.

  Luos grunted and rubbed his temple, pulling his fingers away to see the blood himself. Asmod had already smelled it, but having been aware of people arriving, kept mum.

  “I mean, uh,” he said, playing coy to the amusement of his followers, “ouch, that sure was some bug. Did you get a good look at it?”

  Luos didn’t need Asmod to tell him they were in trouble. These guys had a reputation in Hill Hill. They weren’t the only child gang in town, but their leader sure was infamous. He made everyone call him Chuff.

  Asmod didn’t know his real name, but it couldn’t have been Chuff. Still, he had some of the adults scared of him. One of his biggest advantages to his criminal career was that he had taken the worst the village of Hill Hill could do to him. Being a minor, no one could hold him to the punishment given to misbehaving adults. Not yet, anyway.

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  So he was free to terrorize anyone weaker than him, taking the cuffs and batterings that came with it. The farmers and day-workers strong enough to do something about him were loathe to punish someone else’s child – unless he did something to inconvenience them. Which he never did. He was and remained a thorn in everyone else’s side on an individual basis.

  “Hey, nice baby hawg. Does it do tricks?”

  Chuff tilted his head as he looked at Asmod, crouching to sit on his haunches, putting his hands in the dirt of the road. Luos had a hand where the stone had hit him. Asmod felt immediately uneasy and started looking up at Luos.

  Is that was I look like when I’m angry? Asmod thought as he avoided Chuff’s curiosity. This outside reflection was giving Asmod insight like he had never had before, and at the most inopportune time.

  “What do you want?” Luos asked. It sounded pitiful, but Asmod couldn’t think of any other way to have asked it. While Luos confronted the bully, Asmod began casting around for possible exits.

  The fence into the pasture was an obvious choice. No kids were blocking them there. But that was because it was the perimeter fence where Old Joan was keeping Big Nasty, the bull hawg with a raging temper.

  Still, it was a big field, and Big Nasty wasn’t here at this moment. Could Luos get to it and climb it? There was a gap Asmod was sure he could squeeze through.

  Chuff scoffed, keeping up the coy act. He opened and closed his mouth, pretending to be at a loss for words while trying not very successfully to hide a smile. “Well, I guess we haven’t been properly introduced, new kid.” He radiated innocence, but the scummy oily kind you get on a day-old puddle. His group stood by expectantly, looking tough. There were eight of them in all, between the ages of seven and thirteen from the looks of it, and the ninth – Chuff himself – almost sixteen.

  “My friends call me Chuff. I don’t have any enemies, but they’d call me Chuff, too. It’s my unfortunate responsibility to inform you that this road here,” he indicated the dirt road which Luos had taken dozens of times to go into and return from Hill Hill, “this road is now a toll road. I’ve got to take something off you if you want to pass.”

  Asmod looked to the forest. How many kids were in Chuff’s gang in all? Did he leave any beyond the tree line in case they had tried to escape? Luos didn’t have to be particularly fast to lose people in the dark woods. And the sun was almost down. They could find a place to hide and lay low.

  “I know who you are,” Luos said. “Just tell me what you want or get out of here.”

  The circle – which Asmod had noticed was shrinking by inches as the kids slowly advanced on both fronts – oooh-ed in anticipation.

  “Aww, don’t be like that Luos. Yeah, I know your name, don’t look so shocked. You’re Skinflint’s ward, right? The little weirdo who went out to the wizard tower out this way?” his words were rife with fake compassion. Then the crouching boy stood. He advanced on Luos, his hand held out for shaking. “I guess we got off on the wrong foot, fella.”

  Luos recoiled, not taking the hand. But even as he looked at it in his moment of confusion, Chuff’s other hand came up spraying red dirt.

  Asmod squealed in panic and fury, not even thinking before trying to headbutt the bully’s shin. He received a kick for his efforts, sending him rolling a few feet.

  Luos tried to get the dirt out of his eyes, then grunted as Chuff punched him in the gut. He fell over, clutching his stomach.

  “No, no, don’t get up on my account,” Chuff said courteously, putting a foot on his chest. “I’ll just help myself. Looks like-…” He knelt without moving his foot and looked inside one of the burlap sacks, taking Luos’ carrying stick in-hand.

  “Looks like a bunch of fruit,” he finished, disappointed. The circle closed around the three of them, the two boys and the hawgling. Asmod and Luos stayed down.

  If they were lucky, the kids would take the fruit and leave. Asmod hoped they wouldn’t take the time to drive the message home with their fists, the one informing Luos that Chuff and his gang did what they wanted.

  Then Asmod was surprised by a pair of red-rimmed eyes. Luos had rubbed out the dirt and was now staring intensely at him, as though urging the daemon into action.

  But what could he do? He had been forbidden by Samsian to do magic until they were given the go-ahead.

  “I guess fruit pays the toll this time,” Chuff muttered. He knotted the end of one of the sacks and tossed it to a mate of his, and then did the same with the other. “Nice stick, though.” He bounced it on its end and twisted the end in the dirt. “Thanks.”

  But wait. It wasn’t Asmod who was forbidden from doing magic. It was Luos. Asmod was only forbidden from hurting people. If he couldn’t hurt Chuff and his goons, maybe he could do something to scare them. He would need to make it look like an accident, or he’d risk the kids running to tell someone that the new kid did something magical. Or worse, that his pet hawgling was bewitched.

  Asmod retreated from his vessel, stretching the seconds to let himself think, recalling when he had been tutored before the daemon ritual.