Personal Demons

by Phoebe Ravencraft

  I was on my feet and out of the way before his gross-ass blood could land on me. It splashed on the tracks and the gravel instead.

  The second demon seemed to understand he was in a shitload of trouble. He renewed his attacks with increased savagery. But now I was moving more than fast enough to keep up with him, even though he was using two swords.

  I parried a series of attacks, then chopped down, taking one of his legs. He leaped into the air, buzzing around me, flitting in and out and trailing green blood from his missing leg.

  Once again, I was stunned at the thing’s maneuverability. It flew like a hummingbird, hovering in a spot and then moving at what seemed an impossible angle to avoid a strike. It practically teleported behind me, and I was barely able to whirl around to deflect what would have been a deathblow to my back.

  As I struggled to come up with a plan, a gout of flame raced across the sky, hit the demon’s wings, and burned them quickly to ash. The surprised fiend dropped to the ground. I poured on the last of my superspeed, closed the distance between us, and gored the thing before it could even register it was no longer airborne.

  I looked at Devlin. He’d slain both of the demons attacking him. It was over.

  Wiping sweat from my brow, I assessed our situation, turning in a slow circle. Standing in the yard at the house across the street from the station was an overweight White kid in a Deadpool t-shirt and a Chicago Cubs hat. He had sandy-brown hair, freckles, and a look of utter astonishment on his face.

  “Oh, no,” Devlin said. “The Veil . . .”

  Leave it to the stick-up-his-ass demon hunter to worry more about The Veil than the kid himself. I seriously hated the people from the magical world sometimes.

  “Are you guys The Avengers?” the kid asked, awe in his voice.

  I studied him a bit. He couldn’t be more than ten. And he’d mentioned The Avengers. This was my territory. Devlin might know all there is to know about slaying demons, but I’m a nerd girl. I could fix this.

  “Nah,” I said with a laugh. “They don’t want us. I’m Elektra, and this is Stick.”

  Somehow, the kid’s eyes got wider.

  “I watch you guys on Netflix!” he practically shouted.

  Yes! My ploy had worked. Between the Deadpool t-shirt and the Avengers question, I’d been certain that a) this boy was a huge Marvel fan, and b) his parents let him watch shit that was inappropriate for someone his age.

  “Hell, yeah,” I said. “Up top!”

  I put my hand in the air and crossed the street to him. His expression immediately changed from enthusiasm to concern. I sort of understood. A leather-clad woman with a bloody sword was walking towards him. But I smiled broadly to try to put him at ease and continued to offer my hand for a high-five.

  When I got to him, he stared at me with a mixture of fear and wonder in green eyes nearly the same shade as mine. I nodded at him. He slapped five with me. Boom.

  “Those guys were with The Hand,” I said, kneeling in front of him, so I could get down to his level. “They’re after us. So you can’t tell anyone you saw us, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said, his voice vaguely uncertain.

  “I’m serious, man. If they find out we were here, they’ll know where we’re going next. So you’ve gotta keep my secret. You can’t tell anyone. Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  There was more enthusiasm in his voice. He was on the team now.

  “Thanks,” I said. “What’s your name, Little Man?”

  “Matthew.”

  “Matthew? Like Matt Murdock?”

  He nodded.

  “See, now I know you’re a superhero,” I said.

  A broad grin spread across his face.

  “Are you and Matt ever gonna get together?” he asked.

  I frowned.

  “I don’t know, Matthew,” I said. “It’s complicated.”

  “I’ll say,” he said.

  We nodded sagely at each other, as if we both understood how difficult love was. Then I held out my hand.

  “Shake on our promise?” I said.

  He took my hand. I gripped his nice and tight and smiled.

  “Okay, Matthew,” I said. “You take care of yourself and listen to your mama. She’s looking out for you, even when she’s a pain in your ass.”

  He laughed when I swore. I smiled again like we were sharing some kind of secret.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Now run inside before someone sees you talking to me. I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

  He nodded and raced into the house. I continued grinning. That had been fun. I don’t usually like kids. Of course, they don’t generally mistake me for a superhero. So he had that going for him.

  I sauntered back across the street. All the demon bodies were gone. Devlin had gotten rid of them somehow.

  “What did you tell him?” he asked.

  “I told him we were characters from Daredevil,” I replied.

  “I don’t understand,” Devlin said. “Daredevil?”

  “It’s a Netflix show about a superhero,” I said. “It’s based on a comic book. I told him the bad guys were after us, and he needed to help us hide by not telling anyone what he’d seen.”

  “And he believed that?”

  “Yes.”

  Devlin shook his head.

  “There is much I do not understand about modern children,” he said. “I cannot fathom how an otherwise-bright-looking child could think characters from a comic book could be real.”

  “As opposed to children in your day believing a strict and cruel god would cast them into a fiery pit if they didn’t behave?”

  He stared at me in confusion. I wanted to smack him.

  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve not no problem with people believing in God. I’m not sure I can do it – which seems kinda weird since I know demons and other supernatural creatures actually did exist. But there’s too much cruelty in the world for me to accept there’s a good god in the sky who has a master plan to help everybody, you know? Maybe I’ve got it all wrong, but accepting the bad things that happen to me as part of God’s plan just doesn’t work. It’s like, maybe God needs a better fucking plan if this is how it turned out.

  But whatever. People can believe what they want, especially if it makes them happy. There’s little enough happiness in the world as it is without me pissing on something that makes someone feel good.

  Don’t sit here and tell me, though, that a Twenty-First-Century kid is an idiot for believing the superheroes he admires could actually show up across the street from his house, but Seventeenth-Century kids were wise for listening to their parents about the mean god they had better obey if they didn’t want spend all of eternity in agonizing torment. Sanctimonious piece of shit.

  “In our defense,” Devlin said, “there was much we didn’t know.”

  “Including, apparently, resisting the temptation to raid a Native American village, steal their shit, and rape the women,” I said.

  Devlin looked like I’d just driven a knife through his soul. I suppose it was a dick move of me to throw back in his face the terrible sin he’d spent over three hundred years trying to atone for. But he’d pissed me off. Maybe it was my nerd-girl instincts getting riled up for liking something outside the mainstream. Superheroes might be cool now but try being a girl who’s into comics. Spoiler alert: It ain’t easy.

  “Perhaps we should change the subject,” Devlin said.

  “Good idea,” I replied, with more venom than I intended.

  I scowled for a moment. Why the hell did all this shit keep happening to me? Jesus, I was supposed to be running away from this! I left Cincinnati and The Order and Ephraim behind!

  Ephraim. Oh, shit.

  Someone is looking for you.

  Isn’t that what the little girl in my dream said? Yeah, I was pretty sure it was.

  “Can you drive?” I asked.

  “I haven’t driven in years.”

  “How
many years?”

  “Fifty-two. No, I’m sorry. Fifty-four.”

  My jaw hung open. That was before my mama was born!

  “You haven’t driven since 1965?” I exclaimed.

  Devlin shrugged.

  “There hasn’t been a need.”

  “Well, there is now,” I said. “We’re buying a car, and then you’re going to drive us to Denver.”

  “Drive us?”

  He looked as though I’d told him he was going to take us to the moon. All the feelings of sexual attraction I’d had towards him were completely gone. He was infuriating and slow.

  “Yes, God damn it, you’re going to drive us, Devlin.”

  “But why?”

  “Because the fucking train left us here!” I shouted. “We’ll have to wait a day or more for another one!

  “And because it isn’t safe on the train. My br— Someone is trying to kill me. They’re sending demons after me. We can’t risk an innocent passenger getting hurt or killed. And trust me, the person who’s after me just doesn’t give a fuck about that.”

  “Who is after you?”

  I sighed. What did I tell him? The longer we stayed together, the more impossible it became to keep my secrets from him.

  “Look,” I said, “not only did my father appear to me in a dream, telling me I needed to seek you out to train me, he also apologized to me for my . . . for putting me in danger.”

  “But what sort of danger are you in?” Devlin asked.

  He was genuinely confused, which I suppose was a fair reaction. But it was kind of a pain in the ass to deal with.

  “Someone is after me. This person is commanding a horde of demons. I don’t think I was random target for that CarFax—”

  “Carthaax.”

  “Whatever! That carthaax demon. I think it was deliberately sent after me. If you hadn’t come along when you did, I’d be dead now.

  “And I know those assholes we just fought were not randomly looking for someone to rough up. They were looking for me.”

  “They could have been pursuing me,” Devlin offered. “I’ve made quite a few enemies in Hell.”

  “There were five of them, Alistair. Three of them came for me. They sent two to keep you occupied, while three of them ganged up on me to make sure they got me. If you hadn’t taught me how to pull magical energy from thin air, I would likely have been killed before you could deal with the two on you.

  “This guy hates me with the fire of a thousand suns, and he’s got demons at his disposal. He is very definitely sending them for me.

  “So we need a private vehicle if we’re going to get to Denver. We can’t take the train. We can’t take the bus. We definitely can’t fly. There are too many people and too much risk. I’ve got enough shit on my conscience already to deal with that sort of guilt and so do you.

  “We buy a car – a cheap, shitty one, so we can buy another if those assholes wreck it before we get there.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t really understand this when I asked you to teach me back in Chicago. But if you want me to come to Denver with you, if you want me to help you catch your last demon, you’re gonna have to put up with the fact that someone wants me dead, and he will stop at nothing to accomplish that.”

  I fell silent. I hadn’t gone off on a rant like that since I’d let Ash have it in Gerard Dulac’s cellar. I felt a little guilty. This wasn’t Devlin’s fault. He’d been on his way somewhere else when I got in his way. He was on a mission. I dropped in unexpectedly and fucked the whole thing up for him. I felt like John McClane in Die Hard – “Just a fly in the ointment, Hans. The monkey in the wrench.” Damn, I’d really seen that movie too many times.

  “You did not tell me any of this,” Devlin said.

  “I know. I’m sorry. To be fair, I didn’t realize that was what was happening until this most recent attack.

  “But if it makes you feel any better, my father told me I needed you to train me to fight this guy. So, I help you catch your demon. You help me learn what I need to take out the asshole who’s after me. Everybody wins. Hell, you win twice.”

  Devlin nodded. He let his mind drift for several seconds.

  “And why am I driving?” he asked.

  I sighed heavily. Then I threw my best irritated glare at him.

  “Because,” I said, “I don’t know how.”

  I wish I did. I might have avoided the doom that was waiting for me down the road.

  Felicia

  Felicia sat across from Ash at Java Jive. To his right was a strange woman with chocolate skin, long dreadlocks that ended in beads and rings, a sash tied over her head and behind her neck, and a purple, flowing top similar to the light-green one Felicia wore. She had ice-blue eyes – the lightest irises Felicia had ever seen – and against her dark skin, they unnerved her. She looked like she wasn’t quite of this Earth.

  “Okay, I’ve got something,” Ash said without preamble.

  “Who’s this?” Felicia asked.

  “Mo am Aurelia Danvers,” Aurelia said in a strange accent Felicia had never heard before.

  “‘Mo’?” Felicia asked.

  “Creole form of ‘I’,” Ash replied. “Aurelia is originally from Louisiana. She’s a medium. She’s going to help.”

  A medium? Like someone who could talk to dead people? Was Sassy dead? Shit, this all had a giant voodoo vibe to it Felicia did not like.

  “How?” she asked, her voice hard.

  Ash frowned. He looked vaguely irritated by the question. Fuck him. Felicia hadn’t grown up around real magic like he had.

  “I discovered a few things while I was looking for Sassy,” Ash said. “First, her father was Nephilim, just like she is. But his power was to send visions to people’s dreams.”

  “You didn’t know this before?”

  “Yes, I did, just . . . listen, okay?”

  Felicia bit her lip to avoid shouting at him. But her brown eyes met his and lasered her gaze into his brain, warning him to watch his mouth. Among the advantages of her being lesbian was that his incubus pheromones had no effect on her. She didn’t find him cute or disarming, and he wasn’t igniting her sex drive. He was just pissing her off, and he was gonna get the full fury of her worry and anger if he didn’t knock it off.

  “What I discovered,” he went on, “is that people with that power can send their . . . what? Souls, Aurelia?”

  “Oui,” Aurelia said.

  “They can send their souls into the subconscious of someone they love at the moment of a traumatic death.”

  “What?”

  Felicia had heard a lot of weird shit. There was no faith on Earth that didn’t have some metaphysical explanation for what happens after death. But this? This was out there.

  “It happens,” Aurelia explained, “when de dying man is desperate to see li beloved once more before de morte. It is rare.”

  “Felicia,” Ash said, “Eli Silverman was on his way to meet Sassy for the first time when he was murdered. He’d been trying to find her for twenty-five years, and he was killed right before he could finally see her.

  “I checked with Aurelia. That is the kind of trauma that could cause the transference to occur.”

  Felicia’s brown eyes grew wide. She flicked her gaze back and forth between Ash and Aurelia.

  “So . . . what are you saying?” she asked.

  “Li is haunting de girl,” Aurelia said. “Like a ghost.”

  Her accent made the last word sound sinister, frightening. Sassy’s father was . . . what? A specter?

  “What?” Felicia said again, unable to come up with anything more articulate.

  “Commander Silverman’s power was to project his thoughts into a person’s dreams,” Ash said. “Well, that’s not quite right. Dreamcasters send ideas into others’ minds. This has the effect of shaping what their subconscious shows the brain during sleep.”

  “So they can control your dreams?” Felicia asked.

  “Not exactly,” Ash said. “
They implant these ideas deep in the subconscious, and the individual’s brain forms the images.”

  “Dere is no way to control what de dreamer see, but dream yé will,” Aurelia said. “It is more accurate to say the individual is given a vision, for yé own mind decides what shape it takes.”

  Felicia shuddered. She’d never heard of anyone manipulating dreams before. She’d read a lot of comic books and fantasy lit in her life, but she hadn’t come across anything like this.

  “Sassy’s father sounds like a hell of a guy,” she commented.

  “Li was a man like any other,” Aurelia said. “Some things li did were good. Others not.”

  “When he died, he realized he would be unable to ever see her, know her,” Ash said. “And the trauma of that loss, combined with his ability, allowed him to make contact across the ether.”

  Felicia blinked at him. Sassy’s father was dead. But he could still contact her?

  “What are you saying, Ash?” she asked, forcing him to say it out loud.

  “When Sassy’s father died, he sent her his soul. So now, he lives in her subconscious.”

  “Like a ghost,” Aurelia said. “A dream-ghost.”

  Felicia’s mouth hung open. Her eyes were even wider. Whatever she’d expected Ash to tell her tonight, this was about as far from it as she could imagine. Instead of his soul going to Heaven or wherever, it went to Sassy’s brain? How could that be possible?

  “At least, that’s what I believe,” Ash said. “Felicia, did Sassy ever mention dreaming of her father? I mean in the last six months, since the Guild of the Blade attempted to assassinate her.”

  Cold horror fell over Felicia’s brain. Oh, holy shit.

  “Yes,” she said, unable to keep the astonishment from her tone. “Yeah, she dreamed of him several times. She said he was always telling her to go back to The Order and saying she had a destiny and shit like that.”

  Ash turned to Aurelia. She met his gaze and nodded once.

  “What’s this got to do with her disappearance, Ash?” Felicia asked.

  “With her disappearance? Nothing. But it may give us a means to find her.”

  “If mo can make contact with de pére, mo can trace li to de child,” Aurelia said.