Sterek Stories - A Collection - I

Summoning a demon - part 1

The first summoning

The first words he hears are almost always the same. "Oh my god! It worked!"

Why they bother calling on God when summoning a demon, he'll never understand. It's not like she looks kindly upon these things. The people calling upon her are more likely to call a smithing over themselves, you know, if she would ever bother to listen to those who are calling her. Hell always listens. They are bound to listen, whether they want to or not.

Which is why De'rek is now here, wherever 'here' is. It's pretty cramped, that's what it is. The summoning circle only barely fits between the dresser and the bed. Something pokes in De'rek's back: the handle of a desk drawer. He pulls up from his ungainly sprawl. He was visiting with B'oyd and Eric'ha when he was suddenly pulled away to this dimension. He groans a little when he realises he has probably spilled his whine over their new carpet. White carpet, because Eric'ha is evil like that; she takes pleasure in tormenting her friends and forces them to take off their shoes when they enter her private domain.

"Huh. You don't have hooves. I thought the devil had hooves," a voice says, sounding nonplussed.

De'rek clamps down on the urge to pull his feet in and hide them underneath his legs. His feet which have their soft, humanoid shape, because he knows better than scratching up Eric'ha's furniture with his claws.
Demons come in many shapes and sizes. De'rek has some he prefers over others, although not all of those forms are fit for when you are visiting friends. Shedding fur is frowned upon by those who have white carpet flooring.
He is lucky the summoning startled him enough to call out the fangs and claws on his hands. At least now he looks sufficiently dangerous. Humans are scared easily, it won't be -

"Dude! Where are your eyebrows?!"

"Don't call me dude," he says on a growl, forgetting himself shortly.

"Yeah," the human in the room with him drawls, glancing at a printed sheet of paper in his hands. "Not gonna be able to pronounce your real name, dude. It's hella long and I'm sure there are some syllables in there the human tongue was never meant to pronounce."
Before De'rek can react, the boy - for it is a boy, of maybe not even twenty yearly cycles - continues. "It's lucky your summoning spell was in common Latin, or I would've never managed to get it out in the right way. I could very well have set myself on fire or something."

"Too bad you didn't," De'rek can't help but mutter. The boy wasn't too far off with his reasoning: mispronouncing a summoning spell was often cause for excruciating pain on the side of the summoner. They considered themselves lucky when Death came to whisk them away. To Hell, of course, because again: God doesn't look kindly upon those who summon demons.

Not that De'rek was the kind of demon that was easily summoned. He didn't use to be. Like the kid said: his real name was too difficult to pronounce for the beings in this dimension. It wasn't until he was bound to that simple summoning spell that he was forced to show up when some bone headed individual decided he needed a demon of destruction for whatever the hell his hate-addled mind considered a plan.

De'rek pushes himself in an upright position so the drawer handle isn't pressing in on his spine anymore. He doesn't bother with standing up to try and reclaim some dignity. This wasn't the worst state he was summoned in. At least he wasn't in the middle of shaving this time.
Then he registeres what he is sitting on: a flattened cardboard box. The boy hadn't even chalked the summoning circle on the floor, as was traditional. Gone were the days where a proper summoning circle was drawn on a stone - or at least oaken - floor, with candles on the corners of the pentagram. De'rek doesn't see candles. He does see little plastic lights, that flicker in a false sensimile of candle light. He takes his words back: this is the most humiliating summoning he'd ever had.
"What do you want?" he grits out. He has to bite his tongue to not add 'Master', a degrading side effect of the summoning spell.

"You're the Lord of Destruction, right?" the boy asks. De'rek nods. His uncle is the actual Lord, but the boy doesn't really need to know that. It would do no good to unleash Peet'ehr in this dimension, nothing would be left of it and De'rek likes the coffee here.

"Good!" the boy answers brightly and tosses something plastic with buttons in De'rek's lap. "You're gonna help me destroy the other players!"