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  “Shoo, eh.”

  The bird glanced up at him, unimpressed, and began to peck through the remaining moss in the gutter.

  “I mean it, dude,” Richie tried. “Take off.”

  This time the gull glared and gave him a long, sour squawk, which ended abruptly when the gutter snaked upward, grabbed the hapless bird, and stuffed it into its own downspout. The pipe opened wide to devour the seagull whole. It was over in an instant.

  “I warned ya,” Richie said, shaking his head as a lonely feather drifted past him.

  Just then, the ladder began to lean backward. Richie grabbed hold of the gutter, but it squirmed out of his grasp, and he tilted away from the house. “No, no, no . . . ,” Richie stammered. He had a feeling of weightlessness—the ladder stood straight on its end, braced against nothing and rocking gently back and forth in the breeze. The thirty-foot drop would kill him, Richie decided.

  Then the ladder hopped. Richie gripped the rungs, white-knuckled. “Stop that!” he cried. The ladder spun on one leg and groaned—it didn’t like being yelled at, it seemed. “Sorry,” Richie said quickly, “sorry, sorry.”

  Richie cursed himself for not thoroughly checking to see whether the towering aluminum tool was a demon. The animated ladder hung him from his fingertips thirty feet in the air as it waddled across the yard. Richie closed his eyes and held on tight, hoping the thing didn’t want to fall over any more than he did. Then he felt it thump against something solid. He opened his eyes and saw that it had leaned itself against the house again. It had simply moved a few feet over so that he could reach the next gutter.

  Richie took a deep breath. An unstable ladder—classic chaos, he thought, a typical demon. He should have known. He cursed himself for missing it and began to scoop out the next section of gutter.

  Nat watched his apprentice from a window. The urge to rush out and help Richie was strong, but Nat left him alone to see if he could handle the chaos. He had survived the ladder’s antics, which was promising.

  Minutes later, Richie was back on the ground tossing rotten vegetables to a pack of portly cherub garden statuettes. The fat, naked little things toddled after the food like lost ducklings with round bellies that grew larger with each bite. They followed Richie until he had them all grouped together near the cracked backyard fountain filled with brackish water. He found an overripe honeydew melon and rolled it at them.

  Crash!

  Broken statuette limbs flew.

  “Strike!” Richie cheered. He turned, grinning. Nat was there, frowning.

  “Nice mess,” Nat said. “Didn’t I send you to clean things up?”

  “Hey, the gruesome little things always put themselves back together, eventually.”

  Behind him, the statuettes struggled to reconstruct themselves, fighting over pieces and mixing up body parts. One had an arm sticking out where its head was supposed to be. Another had mistakenly lodged a nose between its naked legs.

  “Cherub bowling is not acceptable,” Nat scolded. “There’s plenty of chaos around here without you contributing to it.”

  “Just havin’ a little fun,” Richie said. “You’ve got me doing butt-work and chores like a normal kid.”

  “You are a kid.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not normal. When you took me in, you said I had special abilities, and now I’m just manual labor for you. It’s like you’re using me.”

  Nat nodded. “You’ve been listening to the masks, haven’t you? I warned you about that.”

  Richie slumped. “I just thought I was gonna be learning spells . . . ”

  “We don’t cast spells. That’s fantasy nonsense. We’re not wizards.”

  “ . . . and fightin’ evil . . . ”

  “Demons aren’t evil. They’re just entropy incarnate.”

  Richie gave Nat a blank look.

  “Think of them as wild animals,” Nat explained, “like elephants or tigers, only nobody else can see them. Zookeepers don’t fight their animals, do they?”

  “No,” Richie admitted.

  “They keep them,” Nat said.

  “I just thought it would be more”—Richie searched for the word—“magical,” he said finally.

  Nat sighed. “Keeping demons is a serious responsibility, not a game. Generations of Keepers have devoted their lives to collecting the chaos in this house. Protecting it is a lifelong commitment that we place above our personal needs.” Richie rolled his eyes, and Nat realized he had given his young apprentice the speech before. “And goof-offs get eaten,” he added. He’d taken a chance on Richie, a street kid with no direction, no purpose.

  “You promised to try,” Nat reminded him.

  Richie sighed and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I just don’t do well with boring.”

  Nat knew what Richie was talking about. In a strange way, managing chaos day after day could be monotonous.

  “Big battles with evil Keepers and kid-eating beasts don’t happen all the time, Richie,” Nat said. “This job is mostly just monster-sitting, and the odds are a million to one that we’ll ever have another crazy day like we did when we met.”

  The day they’d met had indeed been crazy. Nat’s mentor, Mr. Dhaliwahl, had left the entire house and its care to Nat when he was just seventeen. Nat had only been in charge for a short time before a rival Keeper called the Thin Man had come to try to kill him, take over the house, and enslave all its demons. The Thin Man was Dhaliwahl’s failed former apprentice, and he’d returned with three dangerous minions and a nasty chip on his shoulder. Only a miscalculation that had gotten the ill-tempered Keeper messily devoured by the Beast in the basement had saved Nat and Richie from their own deaths.

  “Peace and quiet is a good thing,” Nat said upon reflection.

  Richie screwed up his face, which meant that he understood. Nat knew that living in the house was a good deal for the boy, even though there was no magic and he had to do chores. Three square meals a day and the supervision of a teenager were better than a cardboard box or a bus shelter on the street anytime, even if his bed played mind games with him and he had occasional near-death experiences.

  “Speaking of chores,” Nat said, “I need you to weed the garden.” Nat handed Richie a machete as long as his arm.

  “With this?” Richie asked, staring at the huge weapon.

  “Oh yeah. Right.” Nat nodded. “You might want this too.” Nat rummaged in the nearby garden box and pulled out a medieval shield.

  Blackberries grew wild in the Northwest, including Nat’s backyard. They were an aggressive, fast-spreading plant. When unmanaged, they grew into forbidding thickets of arching stems with numerous short, curved, and very sharp spines along their shoots. But the truly insidious thing about them was that the branches themselves would take root wherever they touched the ground, giving the bush a new foothold every few feet as it quickly took over and ruthlessly choked out other plant life.

  Richie approached the dark, twisted patch of thorny stems with the naïve confidence of a boy whose knowledge of blackberries didn’t extend beyond the label on a jar of jam.

  “Okay, just a little off the top,” he said, and he swung the machete in a lazy arc.

  Whack!

  A single blackberry branch fell, severed, to the ground. The bush shuddered all the way to its roots, which were buried directly under Richie’s feet. The ground beneath him trembled. Richie glanced about, thinking that perhaps a heavy truck had rumbled by. He shrugged and took another swing. This time the branches dodged his blade.

  “Hey!” Richie said, wondering if the wind had blown them out of its path, but the air was still. He waved the blade at the blackberry bush again and missed again. Suddenly, a clump of branches gathered together and swung back. Richie barely raised his shield in time.

  Wham!

  The knot of branches slammed against the metal and left long scratches on its surface. Richie’s eyes grew wide. The blackberry thorns had scratched solid steel. He wondered for a moment what the bush’s s
pines might have done to his face had he not moved so quickly. As he stood there, a sneaking shoot wrapped around his ankle.

  “Ahhhhh!” he yelped as its thorns bit through his sock like vicious bee stingers. “Friggit!”

  He brought the machete down hard, snapping through the branch and burying the tip of the blade in the dirt. He grabbed the shoot to pull it from his leg and immediately pierced his palm with a dozen thorns, which prompted a new round of self-invented curses.

  Richie whipped the machete in front of him to keep the other branches away as he peeled the spiny shoot from his bloodied sock. The branches swayed and twisted like a mass of writhing serpents, shrinking back where the weapon threatened to cleave them in two but pushing forward where Richie’s defenses were poor, fighting the same way they did when battling other plants for territory.

  Once he’d painfully removed the severed shoot from his ankle, Richie whirled, swiping and thrusting, holding the renegade plant’s other spiny limbs at bay with his machete and keeping the shield low to protect his legs. The bush whipped past his defenses and struck him twice more, once around the arm and once across his cheek, but he delivered two blows in return, each taking an entire length of branch victim, laying them out on the lawn in squirming death throes.

  Finally the blackberry bush shrank away, and Richie held up his machete and shield, victorious. The chore was done. He didn’t need to trim the bush anymore—it was retreating on its own.

  “Yeah, you’d better run!” Richie called after it. Then he walked away, thinking himself a skilled gardener and swordsman. He failed to notice the blackberry branches burrowing underground, escaping into Mr. Neebor’s backyard.

  CHAPTER 5

  SANDY

  Sandy strode up Nat’s walk. She had a bounce in her step, the kind that a smart girl got when her report card was outstanding, which hers always was, or when a responsible teenager’s car was cleaned and vacuumed, which hers always was, or when a girl had a real-live, honest-to-goodness, steady boyfriend, which Sandy had never had in her entire life, until now.

  She wore heeled boots and flare-leg jeans, which was daring for her, a bit of a fashion gamble even, but what the heck, she thought. Lately she felt like she could take a chance.

  “Hello, door,” she called as she mounted Nat’s porch. The heavy four-panel wooden door swung inward for her.

  Sandy stepped into the foyer and looked around, pleased. Having a place to hang out besides home was one of the boyfriend perks, even if the place was creepy and she’d almost died in it. She preferred to think of it as interesting. And because Nat had no parents, it seemed like it was practically half hers.

  She started across the entryway and noticed an irregular lump in the Indian rug. Despite that she was approximately twice as cool as she had been a month earlier, instinct kicked in and her fussy side took over. No one was looking, so she knelt to straighten the edge of the rug. Even in a house of chaos, she simply couldn’t leave something out of place.

  The Beast’s gnarled claw shot out from beneath the rug and grabbed her ankle. Sandy screamed and kicked as hard as she could. The rug rolled back, and her kick flung the claw high into the air.

  She stared. The claw wasn’t attached to anything. Pernicious morphed back into himself as he flew across the room, tittering like a stuttering teakettle.

  “Yee-hee-hee-heeeeee!”

  “Pernicious!” Sandy scolded. The little demon had shape-shifted himself to look like the Beast’s claw and conspired with the rug to scare her, and it had definitely worked. Her heart was thumping in her teenage chest.

  As if in answer to her cry, the stocky demon Nikolai bounded into the room and caught Pernicious by the ankle as he sailed past. They went down in a demonic heap and began to wrestle. Pernicious shape-changed madly, but the powerful Nik calmly pinned the squirmy little pest to the wood floor, where he could do no more mischief for the time being.

  “Thanks, Nik,” Sandy said. “You’re a doll.” Sandy gave the furry little blue demon a kiss on the head, and he grinned. “So, is my boyfriend home?” she asked, flipping her hair to one side.

  Nat arrived in the study minutes later to find Sandy sitting on the couch with a menagerie of demons scuttling and flying about her like chattering wildlife in a tropical aviary. He was surprised to see her in the house. He was surprised to find anyone in the house.

  “Hi, beau-beau,” Sandy said, putting her feet up and smiling.

  “Huh?” Nat replied.

  “Sorry,” Sandy said quickly. “Too cutesy?”

  “I thought I heard a scream,” Nat said.

  Sandy turned to Nik. “You hear anything?”

  Nik shook his thick head.

  “Did the front door just let you in?” Nat continued.

  “It’s my friend,” Sandy said.

  “It doesn’t even let me in every time,” Nat said.

  Sandy gave a little smirk. “Maybe it likes me better.”

  Nat wasn’t sure how to respond. The door was supposed to be secure from inside and out. The demons roamed free inside. They didn’t bother concealing themselves as they did in the outside world. Anyone who got into the house would see them and tell others. Nat knew well what happened to Demonkeepers who were discovered by ordinary humans. History was not kind to them. Some were jailed. Others burned. They were, at the very least, considered insane and dragged away from the demons they had sworn to protect. And so the door was not supposed to let anyone in. Then again, he’d never had a girlfriend in his entire life, so he wasn’t sure if Sandy was some special exception to the rule.

  “So,” Nat said, trying to recover from the idea of having his fortress so easily compromised, “what’s going on?”

  Sandy sat straight up, a gleam in her eye. “Haven’t you seen today’s news about the Troll? It’s all over the Internet!”

  “I don’t have the Internet here,” Nat said.

  Sandy laughed. “That’s ridiculous.” She unzipped her backpack and yanked out a laptop computer.

  “What’s that for?” Nat said.

  “The news, silly. I’ll just find a wireless signal nearby. There’s bound to be a free one around here. It’s Seattle, after all.” Sandy typed like mad and soon had several news sites on screen at once.

  Nat glanced around, nervous. “I wouldn’t do that in here.”

  Behind him, unseen, a small spark leaped from fiber to fiber in the rug, arcing straight toward Sandy.

  “Look at this,” she said. “Front page news all over the city.”

  At the last moment, Nat spotted the little demon. “Sparky, no!” he yelped.

  Sparky jumped the final distance by hopping onto Sandy’s sock, zipping up her pant leg, and setting the fine hairs on her arm upright as it dove at her computer.

  Zaaaap!

  Sandy’s laptop blinked once and went dead. Sandy groaned.

  “I told you,” Nat said. “This is not a good house for computers. Cyberspace is very susceptible to chaos.”

  “At least I got the scoop before your little friend crashed my laptop,” Sandy replied. She snapped her laptop closed.

  “And?” Nat urged her.

  “The police can’t find the Fremont Troll,” she announced.

  “It’s under the Aurora Avenue Bridge,” Nat said.

  “No, it isn’t.” Sandy had an excited look in her eye again. “It’s disappeared. Two tons of concrete, wire, and steel rebar—gone without a trace. Nothing but torn concrete and a hole where it once crouched under Highway 99. The Seattle Police says it’s a prank. They’re offering a reward for anyone who can find it. Ten thousand dollars. No questions asked.”

  Richie walked in. Blood soaked his torn socks, and he had red slashes across his face and arms. “Ten K?” he gasped. “Whoa!”

  Sandy stared. “What happened to you?”

  “Blackberries,” he said. “Long story. Don’t ask.”

  Nat stewed, puzzling over the news of the Troll.

  “What are
you thinking?” Sandy asked, wrapping a cloth around Richie’s bleeding leg.

  “This is no prank,” Nat said. “The Troll is a demon.”

  “Cool,” Richie said.

  “But it doesn’t make sense,” Nat continued. “The Troll has always been a sedentary entity. Its only chaotic tendency is to make people feel uneasy with its frightening expression.”

  “The Troll was an art piece created in 1990 from urban industrial materials,” Sandy explained, rattling off its history like an encyclopedia.

  “Why now?” Nat began to pace. “What could make a fifteen-foot-high concrete statue move?”

  “So we go hunt it down, right?” Richie said eagerly.

  “Maybe,” Nat mumbled.

  “And collect the cash-ola?” Richie wiggled his eyebrows.

  Nat glared at Richie. “We’re a nonprofit organization. And we only capture demons in the wild when they fit the ‘nuisance demon’ profile. Their existence must be mutually incompatible with that of mankind.”

  Sandy smirked. “Okay, let’s analyze what we’ve got here: there is an ambulatory, two-ton physical possession wandering around downtown in a major city.”

  “That sound like a nuisance?” Richie smirked.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll put it on my list of things to do,” Nat said, shaking his head. He was still fretting because he hadn’t located the demons that had escaped during his battle with the Thin Man and the Beast.

  The Thin Man had kept three personal demons as his minions—Goop, Charr, and Wedge. Goop, the Quagmirian Congealment, had been pureed in a horrible incident involving a fan that crazy night. But Charr and Wedge had both survived and escaped. Charr, the living flame, had eluded Pernicious’s squirt bottle, diving deep into the wood of the house’s floorboards and inching its way to the entrance. It smoldered at the threshold until the door was opened and it could slip out across the wooden porch. In all the excitement of the night’s wild events, Nat had not sensed its escape.

  Weakened to a mere ember, Charr slunk across the wooden porch, waited for days for the grass to dry out and then fled to the neighbor’s house and found Mr. Neebor’s newspaper, which the flame devoured for strength. From there, it leaped from flammable item to flammable item, burning its way down Queen Anne Hill. It found an old trash barrel, torched a junked car, rode a screaming transient’s coattail, and finally burned along a stretch of railroad ties that ran down to the shores of Puget Sound.