Evil is... (Once a Demon Book 2)

by P. S. Power

Lisa was a decently powerful Mage, being that she clearly practiced occasionally. It showed in the silver shroud of energy around her. A thing visible even through the wall and closed blue door. The man in the front of the place was different. A Mage still, but also presenting to the world in a different, very focused, way.

  A line walker. The massive mental clarity gave him away. It fairly sang to the world what he was, really. Not even her own people had that kind of thing going on. It was a powerful thing. One that anyone would have noticed, if they were in the presence of such an individual for any length of time.

  All of the line walkers gave off a sense of calm and peace. A nice thing, really. It ordered and influenced the world around them, if only slightly.

  Since there was only one Mage in the world that fit that description, being a line walker as well, she simply walked in that direction. Quickly, without running. Not that she was going to spook the man. Not without launching an attack as she approached him.

  Vince, the line walking Mage turned to look at her, his eyes scanning the world around her briefly, seeing the energy sucking into her body, then his eyes locked on hers. Those were as green as her own, which was interesting to notice. She’d picked the color due to it being real, but rare. It was a bit like seeing red cars everywhere when you bought a new vehicle in that color, most likely. Rather than it being due to her own nature. She did pull coincidences to her, constantly, of course. That didn’t mean that eye color matching would be the order of the day, in particular.

  The pale boy, who was thin, blond and not that good looking, waved at her. He’d clearly made an effort to cover for his looks or lack of them with a nice outfit. It was off the rack, but hung on his lanky form rather nicely. It was all in black, except the smoke gray vest he had on under the jacket.

  “Hi! Um…” There was a slow head shake then. Followed by a hand wave. “Sorry, I don’t know who you are. I get the thing with the universe falling in on you constantly. Greater Demon…”

  Keeley, looking cute and blonde herself, as well as tiny, shook her head.

  “I get what you mean, but no. I gave that up. Most of us have, so there are very few Greater Demons left. It was… Really, it was a job title. Like being a line walker. You’ve heard about that?” She didn’t use his name, even if she knew it. There being a new line walker who was also a Mage was kind of a big thing in the world. That kind of thing would be, until there were several thousand people that could manage the trick. Honestly, that probably wouldn’t happen.

  At the moment, the people willing to do the incredible amount of work it took in order to gain that particular power were mainly motivated by personal reasons. Even if they ended up being wealthy, so far, riches weren’t enough to get people to spend thousands of years in isolation like that. In all the world there were only about ten thousand people that were willing to really try it. Only one out of a thousand of those would be able to make it. Maybe up to three out of that grouping. So, at a guess, no more than thirty line walkers for her world.

  There were currently ten, if she counted Zack and herself in the mix, which wasn’t really fair. She could walk the lines and travel to different realities, but wasn’t a true line walker. That so many of them had found their way to Westfield Mall wasn’t that hard to work out, either. The bigger question was why were so many of them from the western civilizations. That, she had to suspect, was going to end up being important in the long run.

  Rather than go into how he knew all about her clever plan to fool the world into thinking she wasn’t a demon any longer, the young man smiled and shook his head.

  “Nope? You can just give up being a Greater Demon? I can see signing up on that one, if it were me, if it’s an option.”

  She smiled then and nodded. The man was being pleasant with her, so doing it back made sense, regardless of who she was trying to be at the moment.

  “Sure. We aren’t really demons, after all. We never were. We just had to fill that role for people for a few thousand years. Then the veil broke and our services were no longer needed to protect the minds of humanity from their own worst impulses. We haven’t really decided what we are as a group yet. A new name or what have you. I’m pushing for Wise Ones, if I get a choice. So, nice to meet you, Vincent the line walking Mage. I’m Keeley. Keeley Thomson.”

  Rather than call her a liar or tense up, the kid simply smiled at her.

  “Oh? Well, nice to meet you then, Keeley The Wise One… Can I help you find a candle?”

  The words got her to laugh. Vince did that too, which was nice to hear. Nearly a first for her in a while. A person just joking with her, as if she was just another person.

  It was nice.

  Chapter three

  As it turned out, it was harder to find a succubus willing to travel to a different state twice a week for sex than Keeley would have figured it being. The real issue wasn’t that they didn't want the free sex, which they did, or even the hinted at relationship with an awesome Human guy. Really, of the three Alede that she spoke to about the subject, all of them liked the basic idea. It was simply that the distance was too far to really work. At least if Will wasn’t going to come to them.

  Which was possible, except that the man didn't really have the needed resources to make that happen at the moment. Like time. It was one thing to ask him to take a long lunch on occasion, in order to take care of a biological need, another to have a bridge set up by Troy or for her to carry the man a long distance just for that kind of thing.

  It would have been frustrating, except that, even without bothering to use magic to make the emotion go away, it really wasn’t that strong of a feeling. A thing that she’d never really noticed, before that moment. Since waking up to being different, at sixteen, she’d pretty much used her powers all the time to make certain she didn't feel that sort of thing too often, since it might get in the way of her plans. Frustration, doubt, even anger and fear were held back, with the assumption that they existed in her. Even if they didn’t.

  The easy thing to do would, she knew, would be to take one of the Alede as a slave and simply order them to go and hang out at the Alede embassy in Sparks. Then they could get with Will without it being an issue at all. At least that would have been the simple thing to do if she were still going to be evil and just take people over for her own convenience.

  Really, she could also do the same thing with the Alede Ambassador there or one of the underlings at the office. If she was taking that route, Keels knew that simply pointing out there was a needy Human in the basement available for sex a few times a week or more would have been enough for them. That didn’t get Will a relationship, however.

  Thinking about it, she decided that part was the important thing. Really, it shouldn’t be hard for her to find someone closer to home that would serve that function well enough. Will was good looking, big, strong for a Human and had a good, interesting job. The trick would be finding someone that understood his duty as being sexy or at least something that made sense.

  Human women would try to insist that the man focus on them, in a relationship. An Alede wouldn’t, but they’d probably sabotage the whole thing sooner or later, due to their early life training.

  Given that Will Dern would live, regardless of him being happy about his sex life at the moment, she had to figure there was a bit of time to work something out. Alede were the simple answer, perhaps. Not the only one. Plus, there really were Alede at the Sparks compound. The truth was that she’d never met any of them, so hadn’t considered them first, since Will was special to her. As a boss. Possibly as a friend.

  That meant she wanted a woman for him that would treat him correctly.

  Shrugging, she went back home, making a direct portal for it, bypassing the inroads totally. Using Zack’s special trick for that sort of thing. It was much easier, now that she had the basic skill down. It didn't even leave her feeling tired or like a lot of energy had been used to get the job done. A thing that was due to her friend and ne
phew having simply taken several days to teach her how to do it.

  From there she went inside her little single story yellow home, got the food that would be needed to make dinner and headed over to Tyler’s. Again, using her new travel trick.

  That meant coming out in the front yard of the mansion, next to the hippo topiary that she’d put in years before. It needed a trim soon, but was holding up well enough. People had been giving the bush water, she noticed. A thing that got her to smile. Not everyone would think to do that kind of thing all the time. Especially lazy and somewhat spoiled musical stars.

  Yet, her band made certain not to abandon their plant buddy, even if they were rich, famous and important enough in the world that no one would have begrudged them hiring a gardener. They even kept the nice grass lawn mowed. It wasn’t done well, perhaps, with a few spots being missed in places. From the pattern of it, it seemed that Scotty Laird was the one doing the work there. Probably during the day, when it felt like he was in a blast furnace all the time.

  That made him even twitchier, which showed in the subtle variation of the lines left in the short and tidy grass. She might have complained about it, when she was a Greater Demon. Just to show she’d noticed who had done it and what the trouble was, asserting her power over him. The man could fix most of the errors, if he were scared enough. The truth was that most people would never see the need for the lawn to be more than it was. Weed free, green, watered every few days and trimmed in a way that left her feeling like it was nearly professionally done. That was, she had to consider, good enough.

  Normally she knocked at the door, since she didn’t live there, even if she owned the house itself. She had keys to it, of course, which wasn’t needed when she got to the white and gold trimmed door itself. Pounding on the thing for attention wasn’t, either, since it opened before she got to it.

  The man that walked out, Jonas the New Vamp, smiled at her, eyed the bags with food in it and waved a bit.

  “Hello! Can I help you with those? They look heavy.” He wasn’t the best-looking man in the world, perhaps, though trim enough and symmetrical through the face. Really, he was trapped by the same thing that captured most men in their society. He would have looked incredible with the right makeup on.

  It simply wasn’t allowed to someone like him. Not if he wasn’t going to become an actor. That or a flaming homosexual or cross dresser. If he decided on either of those paths she could have really hooked him up as far as looks went, without shape changing at all.

  A thing that wasn’t a bad idea, to be honest. She was working on a television show and his girlfriend, Rebekah, was already going to be in the thing. Jonas was a bit young, but when she checked the data she had on him inside of herself, she realized that he could be coached to be a good enough actor for at least a minor role in Reality Wars. Then he could wear make up in public and no one would even think of it as strange.

  The problem would be that it would seem like she was sucking up to Rebekah, if she mentioned it to anyone. Not that she cared that much about things like that. Rather than begin a major plot to insert the man into the show seamlessly, or to her own benefit, Keeley smiled back.

  “Hey, Jonas.” She winked at him, her green eyes getting the vampire’s attention easily enough. She was pretty enough to turn heads, without seeming all that fake about it. “Oh… I’m Keeley? We’ve met. I have that…” She leaned toward him and whispered, in case Tyler was inside. The man wasn’t, of course, still being at work, like a good boy. “Chair. If Tyler isn’t here we can sneak it in now? Just let me dump this stuff off in the kitchen and I can go get it.”

  The work on it, a Chippendale’s original that had been smashed up to turn one of the legs into a weapon, was decent. Even if she did have to say so herself. Really, while she could tell it had been repaired, and the man that built it would get it, she wasn’t at all certain that Tyler or anyone else in the mansion would be able to even see that kind of thing.

  A slow blink from the man was the only response. A subtle thing that showed real shock, without being scared of her. His slightly bigger smile was an indication of him being pleased.

  “Thank god. I’ve been living in constant fear for the last month. No one mentioned it since… Well, you know. Since I made an idiot of myself? I nearly took off after poor Bey.” The man seemed actually embarrassed, rather than freaked out about the fact that he’d nearly tried to fight one of the most powerful Vampires to have ever lived. Armed only with a short stick.

  Walking, since the food bags still needed to make it to the kitchen, she nodded.

  “Yeah. Good thing you caught on in time not to do that. That would have been embarrassing. I mean, he hadn’t done anything at all.” She grinned a bit, looking away so the man would get the idea, without her actually being bitchy about it.

  The truth was that Bey had barely registered the man as a threat, and probably couldn’t. It had been that, his relative lack of personal power, that had saved him. If anyone else in that room had come for Bey, running at him with a club in hand, they would have died or at least been in a massive fight. When it was Jonas, the man had ignored anything going on at all.

  Keeley wasn’t certain, but had to wonder if Bey would have fled, instead of killing the man, if Jonas had tried to beat him for real. That or gently taken the weapon away and hugged him. It was a thing that few understood about the Killer of the Vampire Council. He was dangerous, but also a kind being. Perhaps the best of his type that way.

  For Greater Demons that position was probably filled by Zack. A thing that left her feeling a bit odd at the moment. She wasn’t incredibly evil for one of her people, personally. Really, a lot of the others had thought of her as being weak and too gentle by far. Even as she killed and tortured people and beings of all sorts to make it seem like she was hard and not a target.

  Zack had barely killed anyone at all. In ten years, she only knew of about twenty people that were ended at his hands. All of them had deserved it, which wasn’t the case for the rest of them.

  Then, in the last five months, Keeley hadn’t killed anyone at all that hadn’t deserved it. All she’d done was save some lives. As if she were truly as weak as everyone had always told her she was. That or gone on about, behind her back.

  She knew where the kitchen was, having set it up herself in the first place. The design was hers, as was most of the work that had been done in there. The lighting fixture had been changed at some point, in the last years. It was a big metal work piece now, instead of the fine crystal and glass thing that had been there originally. That was fine. It probably meant that it had been broken and replaced at some point, as if she wasn’t going to notice it.

  The marble top counters were the same ones that she’d put in place with her own hands, however. The plastic bags of veggies, pasta and bread, along with some cheeses of different sorts were put in place quickly enough. It was only four in the afternoon, meaning she had a few hours to get everything done. The sauce was going to be the time sensitive thing. She had just enough time for it to reduce, since she was starting from real tomatoes.

  Instead of running off for the chair instantly, she started that first, leaving fifteen minutes later, for her house. She scurried back from her work shop, only to be met just inside the door of the mansion by Jonas and Rebekah, his girlfriend.

  Being blonde, short and a bit cuter than she’d been the last time they’d met, Keeley waved at the woman. She was still a Manthori Vampire, but looked like a twenty something Human woman now. Shorter than she had been, with even teeth that were pearly white instead of a hundred plus fangs. That and nice brown eyes, which was a change up from the solid blood red that used to be there. It was close but the other woman was just a touch nicer looking than she was at the moment.

  “It’s me. Keels. Here, Jonas.” She passed the chair over, the man taking it smoothly. He was in a heavy sweater, which was tan and had long sleeves. Those were pushed up. It wasn’t dressy, but it also wasn’t time
for dinner yet.

  “Thanks, Keeley! I’ll get this into place. Um… What do I owe you? This work looks… Good. I can’t even tell that anything happened to it.”

  Rebekah, looking cute and Human, if still vaguely like herself, seemed a bit stressed then. Which was all about the question that had been asked. After all, a secretly repaired chair, hidden from the head of the Coalition of Nations, who was an incredibly powerful being, could have come with a very pricey tag on it indeed. Even just for the work done, it could have run into the tens of thousands, without Keeley even gouging the fellow at all.

  The truth was, it was a lot harder to do a seamless repair on splintered wood than most would have bothered with. She’d had to jigsaw the thing together and carve a few missing pieces, tiny odd shaped things, to fit in perfectly, then strip the whole thing and re-cover it with a finish that was the same color, but thick enough to fill the cracks so that they wouldn’t show. They were still there, just hidden in a fashion that almost no one in the world would have bothered with. It was why it had taken her a month to fix a simple chair. She could have copied the thing and replaced it in a week, otherwise.

  Really, she’d made four new chairs while doing the work, in the same style. Those were going to go with her new kitchen table. It was too nice for the space, really, but had given her something to do at night.

  Every instinct in her body told her to ask for at least something in return for the work done. A trade of some kind, or perhaps just a promise to do something for her later. Instead she wrinkled her nose at him. The move was cute, of course.

  “For my friend Jonas? Nothing, of course. I mean, you’d help me out, if the roles were reversed, right?” She nodded, engaging him in a way that was obvious to her, while being missed by the other two standing there almost totally.

  He simply smiled.

  “Yep. I totally would. Not that I can do work like this. Still, if you ever need help fielding phone calls, emails or setting appointments, I’ve totally got your back. I can even get you calling cards, if you want? We have a good printer for that here.” It was a joke and the truth was that she had her own cards, on her. She almost always did, anymore. They were a call back to an older time, while still being useful, even if they weren’t digital. People needed to know the numbers and e-mail addresses to contact you at, after all.