by Deck Davis
Molly was standing at the far-right corner of the room. She leaned over a chair, one that was long and curved and looked like it had been stolen from a dentist’s office. It reminded me of all the visits I’d made after fights, ones where my gum shield hadn’t been enough to stop me dislodging a tooth. I pictured myself in the chair, with the dentist leaning over me, a mask covering his nose and mouth and leaving just his eyes visible, making him look a little demented.
Molly tapped the chair. “Let’s get you fixed up,” she said. “Come on, I won’t bite.”
I looked at my left hand now, my money-maker, strapped up so that I couldn’t see my skin, couldn’t see how my bones were jutting out of position. It would have bruised now. My skin would be horrible to look at, a disgusting mess of purple, red, and black.
Molly tapped the chair again. I crossed the room until I was standing in front of the chair.
“Sit,” she said.
“What are you going to do?”
“I said I’d fix you up, didn’t I?”
Fix me up. Give me a job. That was what I needed more than anything.
But the walls. The demons. Wren and his obvious dislike of me. Having to give up my flat. What the hell would I say to Glora about this? I didn’t even understand it myself. What was I going to say, that I’d given up boxing to become, what, a hunter? When they did ‘bring your parent into school’ day, was Ruby going to take me in and tell her school friends that her dad hunted demons? The teacher would think I was crazy. They’d call social services.
It was only thinking about Ruby that made me sit down. Whatever I needed to say to explain this, I’d say it. I’d tell them I got a job somewhere. As long as I had money to pay the bills and I could spare Ruby having to leave the only home she’d ever known, spare her having to worry about things only adults should think about, then it was worth it.
I lowered myself onto the chair so that my back sank into the curve, and my legs dangled over the edge.
Molly walked to the wall nearest to her. There was a refrigerator resting against it, a model so old it looked like it had been new fifty years ago. She opened it, and a faint curtain of mist drifted from it. Inside were three shelves. The bottom was filled with vegetables and bottles of red liquid. Molly grabbed something from the second shelf, which was lined with plastic Tupperware containers.
She held a container in her hand when she rejoined me. “This is gonna stink,” she said.
She carefully pulled on the corner, dislodging the lid. As soon as she did, an aroma whacked my nose harder than the worst punch I’d ever taken. It was the stench of old meat, of steak gone so bad it was dangerous. The odor was so thick I could almost reach out and grab it, and I started thinking that every breath I took of it was snaking into my nostrils and down my throat and winding its way inside me.
I flinched. I moved my shoulders, ready to get up. Molly pressed on my left shoulder. “Steady,” she said. “This is how we fix you.”
She lifted something from the container. It was misshapen and thin, a deep chestnut brown in color. It looked like hide from some kind of beast, all ridged and dry.
“What the hell is that?”
“Cured demon flesh,” said Molly.
“What are you going to do with it?”
“What do you think? I’m going to fix you up. Things will be different now, Joshua. You think you were tough before…you don’t know the half of it. That feeling you used to get? It’s going to be stronger now. It’ll knock you sick, the first time you really feel it. But where it used to be vague, and you used to wonder if something was wrong with you, now, it’ll be real. Now, you’ll be able to do something about it.”
She cut the cured demon flesh into two pieces; one the size of my left fist, the other a little circle, barely bigger than a stamp. She grafted the larger chunk of demon flesh around my left hand using what looked like some kind of soldering iron, except it wasn’t plugged into anything, and the tip gave off a white glow like burning magnesium. I’d winced at first, expecting a shock of pain, but I felt nothing. The only ache I had in the three-hour-long process was a cramp in my back from sitting in the same position too long. With the flesh burned into my left fist, she then grafted a piece to my right, a coin-sized circle on my palm. This took less time, and I was glad when she was done.
“Phew,” Molly, said, wiping sweat from her forehead. “Finished.”
I stared at my hand. A wave of nausea crashed through me as I looked at the brown, cracked flesh on my hand. It was hard like rock, but when I touched it with my right index finger the flesh felt soft.
I wanted to tear the thing off. Forget the money, forget everything. This wasn’t my hand; it was some foreign appendage, fixed to me in a way that made me sick. I remembered stories of people getting transplants and grafts and how the new parts of their bodies didn’t always take, and that they didn’t feel real.
But this was real. And I hadn’t lost my hand; it was the opposite. When I clenched my fist a shock of relief flooded through me. No pain, no breaks. Not only that, though. I could feel its power now, something reverberating through the demon flesh and to my real hands, a kind of energy that filled me and ran from my arm.
“You’re going to hear a voice,” said Molly. “It’s the flesh talking to you. Don’t worry, it isn’t sentient or anything.”
“What’s it going to say?”
But Molly didn’t have to answer. Because as I stared at my cracked, foreign hand, my newly-regenerated southpaw fist, words echoed in my mind.
Demon fist generation. Tissues bound.
Level: 1
Abilities: Blast Level 1
I looked at Molly. Maybe she could read the surprise on my face. It must have been etched all over my skin and in my eyes.
“It’s telling you your level,” she said. “The more you use your fist, the stronger it’ll get. Earn enough power, and you’ll learn more abilities.”
“What the hell is Blast?”
“Just a minor Banisher power. Nothing special; energy will store inside you, and it’ll explode out of your fist when you punch. The longer you wait between using Blast, the stronger it’ll be.”
“And how do I earn power?”
“You’re a Banisher. You earn powers when you banish things. Demons, lesser sprites, any creature of the underworld that a demon brings with them. They even corrupt animals on earth, too. Your fist will tell you when you’ve earned enough to upgrade, and then you come here to the Spend Circle. Or, if we’re in the field and you need to upgrade in a hurry, Wren will throw something together.”
The small piece of flesh on my right palm tingled. When I looked at it, the voice spoke again.
Demon Eye. Tissues bonded.
Level: 1
Abilities: Demon Eye Level 1
“It’s saying I have a demon eye,” I said, a part of me still not believing I was even saying the words. “What exactly do demons see?”
“It’s not what they see,” replied Molly. “More that you’ll see them. The circle on your right palm is a kind of eye. Touch a person with it, and you’ll be able to see if there’s a demon inside them.”
“Shaking hands is going to fun,” I said.
Footsteps sounded from outside the room, and Wren appeared in the doorway. He marched across the room until he was standing beside me. He grabbed my hand and turned it over. I pulled it away from him.
“Not a bad job,” said Wren. “Is he ready for training?”
“It’ll take him a while to get used to.”
“Well, we’ve got time. The spotters haven’t reported anything yet. Besides, I just heard back from the Grandmaster. He’s sorted all the paperwork.”
“What paperwork?” I said. “Don’t tell me you guys actually sign contracts. Should I expect a paycheck through the post?”
“We need you to close your bank accounts,” said Wren. “Give up the lease on your flat and open a P.O box for mail. There will always be a trail under your rea
l name, but we can’t do much about that. We get as under the radar as we can, but that’s just a precaution. We don’t need to wipe your identity or anything.”
“When do I get paid?” I said. Then, another question occurred to me. “And what exactly do I get paid for?”
Wren shook his head. “See? Talking about money already. Capgrove would never have done that.”
Molly shrugged. “He’s here to earn money. What do you expect? Just tell the man.”
Wren stared at me, and I saw the same sense of purpose I had earlier, a fierce drive that made him stand a little taller, made him seem bigger and stronger than his scrawny body suggested. “You get paid for banishing demons. We have spotters up above. As soon as they see the signs, we go to work.”
“What signs?”
“Signs that a demon has taken a vessel.”
Molly placed a hand on my shoulder. Her palm was still hot from the weird soldering iron. “You’ve got a lot to learn over the next few days,” she told me.
She was right. After sending whatever cash I still had in my account to Glora, I promised I’d get in touch with more soon. I gave notice on my flat, and I closed my bank accounts. The only thing left was to go back the hunter’s bunker, where I was supposed to learn everything I needed to know.
Unfortunately, Wren the Loremaster was my teacher. He made me sit at a desk in what I now knew was the control room, where demon faces covered the walls and were connected by string to printed photographs of people. From there Wren led me deep into the heart of the Hunters and their enemy, telling me more information than I could ever process.
Despite the fact he obviously despised my presence there, Wren proved himself to be an engaging and passionate teacher. I listened to him the way I never had at school, and in a worrying way, the comparison made sense. Because sitting there, in the concrete tomb, I felt like a kid again, having to try and learn what I was being told, to process this new way of life and see if there was a place for me in it. Of course, I didn’t really have much of a choice now, given I’d let Molly heal my hand with flesh cut from a demon and stripped of its badness, leaving only a regenerative power.
I could tell every time Wren looked at me that he was comparing me to Capgrove, the Banisher before me, the guy who, by the sounds of it, they both loved, who was great at his job and who had come into it with purer reasons than I had. In a way, Wren seemed to look down on the fact that money drove me here, that I was a real person who needed to support a family. Maybe Wren had never lived in the real world. Maybe he’d been born in the darkness of the bunker and had grown up in a world where demons existed and so did the people who fought them. For me it was all new, and the newness made me feel like a kid struggling to keep up. It took me back to school, where my academic growth was nowhere near as efficient or fast as my physical one.
Yeah, Wren held me in contempt, and I could tell with every syllable he uttered, every look he gave me, that he didn’t think I was even worthy of being there. That was why I knew I’d do everything possible to prove him wrong.
So, I listened. I soaked in Wren’s words as he taught me about the hunters and about demons, and I made notes in messy handwriting, and when the day was done and Wren and Molly went to the dorm to drink and play cards and read books, I stayed in the control room and re-read everything once, twice, three times, shoving the knowledge as deep into my skull as I could.
It was a lot to process, and my repeated blows to the head and knockouts over the years didn’t help. There were parts that sank in easier than others. I grasped that there were other hunter chapters in the country and some spread across Europe, and each chapter knew nothing about the others. This was a necessity in case one of them was breached. The only thing knitting them together was the Grandmaster, a man – or woman – whom none of the hunters knew in the flesh.
This, again, was for safety. The Grandmaster didn’t just oversee his chapters around the globe. He also used wards in the same way as Wren. Wards were spells woven into the fabric of what we perceived as the world, the strongest of which kept shut some of the openings that demons used to visit Earth. If the Grandmaster ever died suddenly, his wards would fail. When that happened, there wouldn’t just be one or two demons sneaking through the cracks in the earth that kept them out; an army would flood through. All the dukes and generals of the underworld would lead their fiery armies on a charge into the mortal realms and that, Wren assured me, was a very, very bad thing.
“If the Grandmaster dies, everything goes to hell?” I said.
“The other way around. Hell comes to us. But there are things in place; don’t worry.”
“Like what?”
“Focus more on what I have to tell you than worrying about things you’ll never understand.”
Keep calm, I told myself. Getting mad makes you hit things, and we all know where that leads.
Thanks to the Grandmaster, the more powerful demons in the underworld could only send a part of themselves to Earth – shards, Wren called them. A piece of the demon that would still be powerful, but could be destroyed.
Other, more minor demons found ways to sneak passed the Grandmaster’s wards, since the GM wasn’t all powerful, and he couldn’t waste his precious energy on keeping every single demon out. The job of rounding up the minor demons fell to the hunters. To Molly, to Wren, and now, as much as I couldn’t believe it, to me.
There were spotters employed in every city and every town in the country. These were the forgotten members of society; the homeless whose families never thought about them, the people who would accept ready cash with the promise of diligence and keeping their mouths shut. Without being told the full reason, they looked and listened for signs of a demon’s entry into the world. This could be anything, because the signs of a demon’s entry were as individual as the demon itself, but Wren explained that they had a common theme. The uncanny, the strange, the creepy, and the evil. Maybe the residents of a street in the outskirts of Huddersfield would wake up to find a dozen dead crows outside their homes. Perhaps a sinkhole would open on the moorland in Yorkshire, and a foul smell would seep from it.
This, added with dozens of news alerts Wren had arranged on his laptop, meant that the hunters would know when a demon had crossed into our realm. Then, it was time to act.
This had been Wren’s least favorite part of his lectures. I could tell from how his face changed from passion to fear. For me, it was the most interested I’d been since I got there. I devoured every word.
When demons entered the world, they always needed a vessel to allow them to stay here. An animal, a person, even an item, sometimes. They would find a host weak enough to force their way into, and then they would consume their spirit, taking control of their bodies. Other, wilier, demons tricked their way inside, getting their victims to voluntarily let them in through lies, deceit, through deals, and through promises.
From there on, the demon would hear a clock ticking in whatever passed for his mind. They could only inhabit a vessel for a certain amount of time, because the host body would reject them, and their foul control would corrupt their flesh. Vessels hosting a demon would begin to scar, to bleed, to age, to rot. This was a sure sign of demonic possession, but it was also a sign that the hunters had discovered the demon and its vessel too late.
The more powerful demons who sent just a shard of themselves to Earth would create an anchor; a location or a possession they’d trap a part of themselves in, and by anchoring this to their vessel they would keep their hosts fresher a little longer, giving them more time to complete whatever they had come to Earth to do.
“So, the spotters tell us when they see a sign,” I said, aware that Wren glared at me impatiently. “What then?”
“We have to fight it.”
“Fight the demon?”
“What else?”
“Well, this might sound stupid, so you’ll have to bear with me. But if a demon takes a vessel, say he takes possession of a child. You’re not tel
ling me I have to go punch the lights out of a kid?”
He scoffed. “Jesus. No, Joshua. We need to find the demon’s true name. When a banisher speaks a demon’s true name, he unmasks him. You’ll see his true form, and you’ll fight him, and not the vessel.”
“And how do we find out a demon’s true name?”
“That’s why you have me,” said Wren. “I’m a Loremaster. I know every demon. I know what makes them special. I know their signs, their powers, I know what they smell like, I know what they sound like.”
“So, you’ll find out the demon’s name, I’ll fight it…what about Molly?”
“Molly is our Cleanser. She makes sure we don’t leave behind any evidence of a demonic possession or battle, both physically, and mentally.”
“What exactly do you mean by that?”
“Molly can change a person’s memory. The things they see, the ideas they think. She makes sure we don’t leave a mess.”
The frustration began to wear on me. After teaching me the basics, Wren tried to have me memorize demon names, the way they looked, the things they did. I put everything I had into it, but my brain couldn’t cope. Maybe once, years ago, I could have put effort into the academic side of things, but as soon as I’d taken the boxer’s path, my thinking skills started to decline a little. The worse thing was, Wren saw it straight away. He knew I was no match for him intellectually.
That was what made me start training again. Every morning, before Wren and Molly were up, I’d drag myself out of my covers. I ran laps around the bunker. I did push-ups, press-ups, chin-ups, sit-ups. Every ‘up’ I could. I started to hammer my body into shape.