Barion leaned back, putting the keyboard down. “Uh, well, I could, you know, show them to you?” He was looking very intently at his fingers. Jon furrowed his forehead.
“What do you mean, show them to me? Are they still ongoing? Where? And I’m not sure I want to be on a battlefield.”
“No, no, the demon wars ended roughly two thousand years ago. It’s…” He fell silent, wiggled on the couch, grabbed the keyboard, put it down again. Jon got the feeling that Barion was nervous and Jon didn’t understand why.
“Hey, Barion, if this is going too fast, I understand. We can let it go for today, sleep over it, if you want.”
“That’s not it.” Barion sighed. “You see, demons have secrets—lots of them, actually—and even though we haven’t known each other for long, I feel compelled to tell you one of mine, and it makes me all worked up.”
Jon sat back down next to Barion, putting his hand on the demon’s forearm. The heat tingled through his fingertips, traveled into his body and made him feel more alive than he had been before he died. “Barion, you don’t have to share your secrets with me if you don’t feel comfortable about it. I agree that we haven’t known each other for long, and I, too, feel the need to involve you more in my life and history than I normally would after such a short time. I swear to you that whatever you’re going to tell me is safe with me. I won’t ever betray your confidence.” Jon chuckled. “Besides, who would I tell? I assume Dre and Sammy know, and while I do meet the others regularly in the book club, I’ll hardly get up and say something like, Oh, and by the way, did you know…while we’re discussing male stereotypes in Huckleberry Finn.”
Barion laughed. “Okay, if you put it like that.”
“I do put it like that.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you. You know that, don’t you?”
Jon nodded.
“Then here we go. Additionally to our very impressive powers and skills, every demon of the royal family has a special talent they inherit through the mother’s line. We guard those talents closely, even though they’re usually not that impressive, more like party tricks. It’s a tradition.”
“And where would we end if we didn’t respect tradition, even if we don’t know how they originated anymore?” Jon grinned.
“Exactly. Anyway, my talent is… There’s not really a name for it. Dre calls it ‘time bending’, though that’s a big word for the five minutes I can actually bend.”
“You mean going back and forth?” Jon was fascinated and a little jealous. It seemed every supernatural had something cool up their sleeves while zombies were…undead. Just that. It was unfair, really.
“Yeah. I honestly don’t know if there are beings who can manipulate time on a larger scale, though Quirion doubts it. He said five minutes is probably the longest span possible, because everything before it is already cast in stone and everything after offers too many variables to grasp it with even the most powerful magic.”
“Sounds logical. How does it work?”
“If you were to go over there and, let’s say, drop that plate, I can step between the, the, what does Quirion call them? Ah, yes, the event horizons leading to the plate falling, skip them and catch it before it smashes.”
“You freeze time?” Jon wasn’t sure he’d understood Barion correctly.
“No. Not as such. Think of it as cheating. You can’t really freeze time, because it always moves, like a river. But in a river, there are rocks, and with rocks, you can build little dams, which is basically what I do. I buy myself time to be there when the event takes place.”
“I think I’m getting a headache.” Jon shook himself. “Wait a moment. When you and Dre open those rifts, you always call it traveling through time and space. Now you say you can’t manipulate time beyond those five minutes and that the others can’t do it at all?”
Barion looked puzzled. “We do travel through time and space, like everybody who gets into a car to drive from point A to B or when you go up into Sammy’s shop. The demon way of travel is just fancier, like everything demons do.”
“So you can’t leave me in time? Like Sammy said last time?”
“Uh, no and yes. No, I can’t dump you, let’s say in the Middle Ages, because I don’t have access to time that has been used already.”
“But?”
“But what?”
Jon rolled his eyes. “Your tone suggests a huge ‘but’ and you said ‘no and yes’. I’m curious what the ‘yes’ entails.”
“You’re a smart one, aren’t you?” Barion grinned.
“You only realize that now? The yes?”
Barion tapped his index finger against his lips, clearly thinking for a moment. “In order to travel demon style, you have to change the shape of space. Time and space are…connected—not in a way that’s logical for a non-demon, but the connection is there. So, if I left you—and I want to stress very strongly, that I would never do that—in a rift in transition, so to speak, you would technically be lost in time, even though time as such isn’t even a component of the rift. Neither is space, but you need non-space and non-time to hop around dimensions. I’m not making any sense to you, am I?”
“What gave me away?”
