What You Asked For - Chapter One
A routine formatting fix in a magical library summons a furious horned visitor—and reveals a far bigger mistake. Elspeth Isles wanted a quiet morning; instead, she gets a dead soldier, a panicked apprentice, and the first knock from Hell.
The Proofreader
Sunlight flowed over Elspeth Isles’s kitchen table and scattered in fractal bursts across the butcher block where the Air Crone kneaded bread dough. She worked with the calm efficiency of long practice, pressing, folding, and turning as she waited for her apprentice to finish an essay in the library.
Erin O’Connell—prodigy and plague—was somewhere among the stacks with her laptop, no doubt colour-coding citations and resenting the requirement that the final draft be printed. Ink, Erin had declared, was for spellcraft, not scholarship.
Elspeth had just dried her hands and lifted her tea when the first shriek split the house.
It was followed by a series of explosive pops and a crash that was, if anything, more alarming for being entirely unmagical.
Elspeth set down her mug and strode down the corridor toward the increasingly panicked sounds.
The Whispering Stacks, as Erin had christened the library, normally breathed in a hush of turning pages and moving air. Today, it howled.
Elspeth pushed through the door.
The room shimmered with loose, unbound magic. Books lay in drifts across the floor, some fanned their pages in distress while others shuffled along the shelves as if trying to put distance between themselves and the center of the disaster.
At that centre stood Erin. Her red hair haloed with static, her glasses askew, and she clutched her laptop with one hand while battering the keyboard with the other.
“Sweet baby Beelzebub,” Elspeth said. “What’s going on here?”
Less than three paces away, a figure loomed in smoke with glowing yellow eyes and an impressive set of horns. It also wore a rumpled button-down shirt, off-the-rack slacks, and a lanyard badge hanging crooked over a borrowed-looking tie.
It bellowed at Erin. “WHAT IN THE SEVEN CIRCLES IS THIS?”
The shelves trembled.
“Erin.”
“I didn’t mean to, Lady Elspeth—I was fixing the bullets in the bibliography—I only pressed—”
The figure wheeled toward Elspeth. “MADAM. WHY HAVE I BEEN SUMMONED?”
Elspeth flexed her fingers, gathered the room’s currents, and gave a single sharp clap.
The effect was immediate. Pages stilled. Ink blots froze mid-flicker. The figure faltered, as if the air had been pulled from its lungs.
“This is my house,” Elspeth said. “You are trespassing, however unintentionally. Lower your voice and stop frightening my apprentice.”
She held up one hand. “Stay where you are until I determine what happened.”
The creature blinked, momentarily wrong-footed.
Erin, still vibrating with fear, whispered, “Is it going to eat me?”
“No one is eating anyone,” said Elspeth. “This is a spell misfire, not a barbecue.” She flicked a glance at the figure. “Correct?”
After a beat, it gave the smallest possible nod.
“Good. Erin—show me.”
Erin angled the laptop toward her. “It’s the essay draft. I was reformatting the outline in Word, and the whole screen glitched and then—” She gestured helplessly. “—that happened.”
Elspeth studied the document. The outline was still visible, though every bullet point was now bracketed by unfamiliar sigils. The final line read:
Summon proofreader (optional).
Elspeth suppressed a smile. “Did you run a spellcheck?”
Erin stared at her. “Literal or—”
“Never mind.”
The figure drew itself up again. “Madam—explain my summoning.”
Elspeth narrowed her eyes. The lanyard badge flickered between legible and nonsense. The tie hung askew. More telling still, the posture beneath the bluster was wrong: awkward, apologetic, afraid.
She drew the room’s currents into her palms and sent a ribbon of blue air around the figure.
The glamour peeled away.
In its place stood a young man in a British Army uniform that had last seen fashion somewhere around the First World War. He was impossibly thin, rigid at attention, his hands clenched white against the seams of his trousers.
Erin straightened. “That’s not a demon. That’s a boy.”
He glared at her. “I’m seventeen years old.”
Elspeth caught the faint scent of cordite and old sweat on the air. “So you lied to enlist.”
He hesitated. “It was to serve my country, ma’am. Things were terrible. And I wanted to do something brave or die in the attempt.”
“I’m sure you see the flaw in that ambition now,” said Elspeth.
The room settled around them. Books stopped flapping. The currents above the wreckage slowed to a cautious drift.
Elspeth softened her voice. “Name?”
“Ashby. Clarence Ashby. Private, Manchester Regiment. Or was.” He ran his palms against his trouser seams. “Beg pardon.”
“Do you know how you got here, Clarence?”
“No, ma’am. Last I remember, I was filing reports in the Stacks of Perpetual Processing. Then it all went foggy.”
Elspeth took that in. Without malice, Erin had cross wired magical best practice with a moderately outdated version of Microsoft Word and summoned a World War One private out of Hell.
Erin stared at the wreckage she had caused. “I’ve ruined everything,” she whispered. “Lady Elspeth, I’m so sorry.”
Clarence gripped the edge of the table. “If they find me here, it won’t be good,” he said, panic breaking through at last. “I must have been sent there for a reason, even if I don’t know what it was. I’m in real trouble now, aren’t I?”
Elspeth looked at his shaking hands and the rigid set of his shoulders: the posture of someone expecting punishment as a matter of ordinary procedure.
“No,” she said, more gently. “Whatever brought you here, we’ll sort it out. It’s certainly not your fault you were hauled into my library.”
Erin made a small, guilty noise.
“Right,” said Elspeth, gathering the air into a pale, calming breeze. “Tea first. Then we untangle the mess.”
Erin nodded at once. Clarence gave a tentative, uncertain salute.
Elspeth turned toward the kitchen, muttering, “Summon proofreader, indeed.”
She hadn’t reached the door when the temperature in the library dropped five degrees.
The cold arrived all at once—hard-edged, unnatural, the chill of a walk-in freezer flung open in the middle of summer. Mist ghosted over every surface.
Elspeth looked up.
The air itself had stopped moving.
That, more than the cold, was the warning.
~ To be continued~ Chapter Two