“He’ll find me. He always finds me,” Frankie whispered and my stomach dropped at the terrified tone. “You should go though. If I go kill mode again I’m not sure I’ll be able to stop it. Like…yeah I think I might be in love with you but…”
“But what?” I asked, glaring. He grimaced.
“It's like a barely twenty-four hours type of instant love. I don’t want to test that against Gus’ magic.”
“Well, that was enlightening,” I grumbled. I jerked my hand from Frankie’s and stomped back into the kid’s arcade.
“Ramona! I didn’t mean anything by that—”
“Stop,” I sighed, twisting around to look at the animatronic. “This isn’t about the limits of your love for me against Gus’ magic. Magic?” I asked.
“He’s a much better satanist than I ever was,” Frankie sighed. I took one long blink, then another.
“Let’s revisit that later. This is about me killing Gus with a little thing I like to call Bloodlust,” I said holding up my fist because I’d named my fist Bloodlust when I was in fights. I nodded, biting my lip and smiling at Frankie. He blinked at me.
“What?” He finally asked.
“I’m going to kill Gus,” I said in exasperation. I turned around and started walking through the games again. I eyed the ball pit and a flush crept up my neck as I thought of getting eaten out by an animatronic not ten minutes ago in there. Now I was going to have to live with the memory of fucking around in a rainbow ball pit for the rest of my life. I was probably going to develop a fetish for the rainbow balls. I looked over at Frankie stepping up beside me, keeping pace. I wondered if he had balls and if they were rainbow.
No, stop. He wouldn't have balls. I snorted.
“What?” Frankie asked.
“Nothing. So like, how does one go about killing…whatever Gus is. A wizard?” Frankie snorted.
“Gus is human and in a demon deal…like me. I wanted to be famous so they made me famous,” he huffed, shrugging. “Kind of thought it would be more Guns N’ Roses instead of the Muppet Show but can’t really ever trust a demon, Ramona.”
“I’ll remember that next time I see a demon,” I joked. “Why isn’t he an animatronic?”
“He wanted power, not fame. So they gave him power.”
“He got magic powers and you got turned into an animatronic?” I gave him a look.
“No, he got put in charge of me. My manager. Power.” Frankie began laughing and I joined in, it was contagious. Demons made some shit deals. This barely even made sense to me. The whole story felt vaguely unbelievable but I was chalking that up to the idea that actual demons existed.
“Well then why does he have magic and come back to life?”
“Gus is a committed Satanist, killing people all the time to stay powerful. He knows all those Latin spells.” I looked around and then moved us off to the side. Gus was going to be back soon and I wanted to find a weapon.
“So you were a Satanist too, right? Because you also made a demon deal?”
“Not really, I just went to a crossroads like most musicians looking for a deal with a demon. All I wanted to do was play music for a crowd, see people happy because of what I created. Give them an experience.” That was actually a really nice dream.
“How are you so sweet?” I asked.
“You’re whose sweet,” he said, smiling. I swallowed and tried to will a blush away.
“Right,” I cleared my throat. “So how do I kill Gus?”
“You have to decapitate him,” Frankie said.
“Why couldn’t you do that when he was bleeding out earlier?”
“He’s done his work protecting himself from me. If I killed him, I’d die too.”
“You won’t die if I kill him, right?”
“Is that concern I hear?” Frankie teased.
