The Armadillo's Song by Sarah E. Seeley

I sat in a folding chair in an office with sterile white walls and ugly orange carpet. Four boys my age, about ten or eleven years old, sat in chairs on either side of me arranged in a semi-circle. I was the only girl. We were dressed in white jumpsuits, barefoot. The carpet was rough to my toes and the balls of my feet. The room smelled like someone had stuffed an old tuna sandwich into a vent for several hundred years. It punched the pit of my stomach and brought bile to the back of my throat.

A demon paced in front of us. She was short for an adult, shorter than the tallest boy in the room who sat two chairs away on my right. Graceful black horns curled out of the blacker ringlets of her hair. Her humanoid face was round and taut, and her skin glistened red and silver like she was made of liquid iron. A long black robe draped from one shoulder, wrapped about her stout body, and fell just below her backward-hinged knees. The demon's legs were sturdy and goat-like, covered in coarse hair with a fiery sheen. In some ways, she resembled the old, handsome Spanish caricatures of El Diablo from Abuela Carmen's vintage book of folk stories.