“What’s her deal?” Demi asked.
“Now look what you did,” Doug said, giving Demi a weary look. “I don’t get it. Sometimes you like the kid and want her to help out on cases, and other times you act like you hate her guts.”
“I don’t know,” Demi said, half-knowing that Doug was right, even if she wasn’t ready to admit it. “I guess I’m kind of a bitch when I’m sober.”
“You’re kind of a bitch all the time,” Doug said, leaving to chase after Adria. Demi glanced after them, then towards Adria’s untouched plate. She slid the teen’s unwanted breakfast towards herself and began shoveling eggs into her mouth. The door chimed again. She nearly choked when her phone rang, and she answered it with a mouthful of food.
“You really stepped in it this time, sunshine,” Owen grumbled. “You looked into the old Devil’s Forge cabin a little ways back, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” Demi said, frantically chewing on Adria’s sausage while she cradled the phone between her ear and shoulder. “Doug and I hung out for a couple weeks poking into the old legends there. It was creepy, but we didn’t find anything too out of the ordinary. We figured maybe it’s haunted, but nothing active enough to bother anyone.”
“It wasn’t a damn ghost, you idiot,” Owen exclaimed. “It’s called Devil’s Forge, not Casper’s Forge, for Pete’s sake! I mapped out all the kills matching your creature’s, but I went back two months. The killings don’t start in Charleston. I found a string of them from Baltimore all the way up to New Haven. And before that, there were four separate murders along I-81 North between Tennessee and Connecticut, all in a single night—the first one was just an hour out of Devil’s Forge, right around the time you guys were there.”
“There was a woman,” Demi said, suddenly remembering. “Mousy little housewife type. We caught her jogging near the old cabin, but we steered her clear. The next day she lit out in a hurry, but there was something off about her, like she went from soccer-mom to cougar-town overnight. Doug didn’t stop talking about the milf in spandex for weeks.”
“That fits,” Owen said. “I was supposed to meet a couple buddies up in Vancouver about a little vampire nest, but you’re gonna need me more. Problem is, I’m two days out, even if I floor it all the way without sleeping. You guys need backup a lot faster than that.”
“Wait, hold up,” Demi said, swallowing the last of her sausage. “What exactly are we dealing with here?”
“Do I have to spell it out for you, pumpkin?” Owen shouted. “You’re chasing a goddamn demon!”
“Those are real?” Demi asked. “Of course they are,” she said, answering herself. “Everything is. Everything bad, anyway. Okay, so how do we kill it?”
“You don’t,” Owen replied. “Demons don’t come up much, and when they do, it’s bad news.”
“Do you know any hunters that have dealt with them?” Demi asked.
“Not successfully,” Owen said glumly. “Kid, this is beyond anything hunters can handle. We need professional help.”
“Speak for yourself,” Demi said. “I’ve been doing a lot better lately, barely drinking at all, sleeping great.” Not entirely true, but she was doing better. As hard as life on the road was, it was actually an improvement over her life before all this.
“Not that kind of professional help!” Owen groaned. “We need the Church. They’re the only ones equipped to deal with demons. Lucky for us I know a priest out of Baltimore—Father Gilbert. If he’s available, he could be up in your neck of the woods as soon as tomorrow. I’m telling you, keep your distance until the padre shows up. You can’t bring this thing down by yourself. And remember this—demons have to possess a vessel to move around in our world, and that body is some poor sap that’s just along for the ride. You try to kill it, and you’ll only hurt the bag of bones it’s latched onto, never the demon itself. Salt can trap them, and iron can burn them, just like ghosts, but nothing kills them.”
“Got it,” Demi said, pushing the rest of Adria’s food away. “We’ll wait for your call.” She didn’t like the prospect of a monster she couldn’t kill. They’d come across some pretty weird things in the last few months, but no matter how weird they’d been, there’d always been a way to end them.
The door chimed behind her, and she turned, expecting to find Doug and Adria on their way back in. Instead, a woman had entered the diner. She looked to be in her early twenties, dressed in a leather jacket and pants. Demi blinked, remembering the woman from Devil’s Forge. She’d been much older, but somehow this girl looked nearly identical to her. The room went icy cold.
“Nice rack,” the woman said, smirking down at Demi when she caught her staring. Demi blinked and tugged at her blouse uncomfortably under the young woman’s gaze. “What’s good here?” she asked, sliding down into the seat across from Demi like they were old friends.
“The company,” Demi said with a polite smile, slowly pulling her gun free from its holster under the table.
“Oh?” the woman asked with a wink. “Looking for a good time, are we?”
“You could say that,” Demi agreed, her gun flashing up to eye level. The woman’s eyes filled with dark smoke, turning completely black. Demi tried to squeeze the trigger, but her arm was frozen in place. The lights in the diner burst one after another, and shards of glass splintered down as the room plunged into darkness.
“I’ve been looking to trade up for a while now,” the woman said, staring soullessly at Demi. She struggled to move her body, but she was held firmly in place by an invisible force. “And the things I could do with a rack like that… I mean, this pile of flesh isn’t bad, but you can only put so many miles on before things start to loosen up, if you know what I mean. You and I are going to have a lot of fun.”
“Screw you,” Demi spat.
“That’s the spirit,” the woman said, opening her mouth as if to scream. Instead, a torrent of black smoke erupted from her throat, shooting across the table to engulf Demi in a cloud of inky darkness. After a long moment, her vision cleared, and Demi leapt out of her seat, only to find the woman slumped face-down on the table. She spun around, frantically trying to make sense of what had just happened. The waitress and the handful of other patrons in the diner were on the ground, blood trickling from their ears, noses, and eyes.
Demi stumbled to the bathroom, feeling like she’d just drank half a bottle of whiskey. Like the rest of the diner, the lights were busted. She ran water over her hands and splashed it across her face, then looked up at herself in the mirror. To her horror, she saw pitch black eyes staring back at her.
That’s right, a woman’s voice said in her head. Time for that fun I promised you.
***
“I can’t keep doing this,” Adria said, slamming the car door behind her and throwing herself down across the back seat. She pulled a blanket over herself and began to sob.
“Come on,” Doug said, climbing into the front seat and leaning back over the armrest. “She’ll come around eventually. You’re a good kid. She actually likes you, even if she has a funny way of showing it. She was real impressed when you doctored up that FAA trainee investigator ID card back when we were hunting that minokawa.”
“She’s a terrible person!” Adria said, peeking out from under the covers as the roar of a motorcycle engine approached nearby. “All she wants to do is kill things. She killed my sister. She wants to kill me.”
“She doesn’t want to kill you!” Doug insisted with a weak chuckle. The motor grew louder and then abruptly died. “I know she can be pretty awful sometimes—”
“All the time!” Adria interrupted, watching a slender, leather-clad woman walk past the car on her way into the diner. “Why do you even stay with her? She doesn’t treat you any better.”
“She’s been through some stuff,” Doug said. “But believe it or not, she’s better than she used to be. She’s trying. Trust me, when things get dicey, there’s no one you’d rather have watching your back.”
Adria winced. An iciness stabbed through her head, like she’d just tried to drink something very cold too quickly. “You okay?” Doug asked.
“No,” Adria said, stepping back out of the car to stare at the diner. The lights had all gone out, and the windows were frosted over.
“What is it?” Doug asked.
“Whatever you were hunting...” Adria said, frozen in place. She’d never felt anything like this before, like an icy weight pressing down on her shoulders.
“Stay in the car,” Doug said, pulling his gun and cautiously approaching the diner. Adria drifted backwards across the parking lot, crouching low beneath a row of bushes at the edge of the lot, letting herself fade into the darkness. Demi exited the diner, and Doug lowered his gun.
“What happened in there?” Doug asked in the distance.
“I wasn’t satisfied with the service,” Demi said, stopping just in front of him, much closer than she usually got. A pit formed in her stomach. Something wasn’t right about Demi’s voice. It was different, less bitter. Demi leapt at Doug, throwing herself into his arms and wrapping her legs around his waist, kissing him and ripping at his shirt.
“Whoa, whoa!” Doug exclaimed, dumping Demi back onto her feet unceremoniously. “Where is this coming from?”
“Oh, this has been a long time coming,” Demi replied, breathing heavily as she approached him again. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed the way you look at me out the corner of your eyes—the way your chest tightens every time I brush against you. Sometimes a girl just wants to get taken in the middle of a parking lot. Is that so wrong?”
“Yeah,” Doug said, backing away. She matched him step for step. “Something’s not right here. You would never try to jump me—you call me Seabiscuit.”
“So let’s see just how much of you is like a horse,” Demi said, grabbing his crotch aggressively.
“What the hell are you?” Doug shouted, shoving Demi back again. He raised his gun, squaring his shoulders and leveling the barrel of his pistol at her heart.
Demi’s eyes flashed black, and Adria swallowed hard. “I’m the same old Demi,” she said with a grin. “Just a hell of a lot more fun. Get in the car,” she growled, flicking her wrist to send Doug’s gun flying out of his hand. “We’re going for a little drive.”
Demi shoved Doug into the passenger’s seat, then climbed in herself. Adria let out a sigh of relief once their taillights vanished into the early morning gloom. The chill that hung over her slowly faded away, and Adria raced across the parking lot to retrieve Doug’s discarded sidearm. She tucked it into her waistband and scrambled back inside the diner, only to find the patrons sitting upright in their seats, looking down at their half-eaten meals with eyeless chasms, the walls and windows painted with the same cryptic glyphs Demi and Doug had found at all the crime scenes they’d investigated lately. Even the waitress and cashier had been propped up behind the counter, their eyes burned right out of their skulls.
Adria found their table, and to her relief, Demi’s purse was still sitting there in their booth, her cellphone left forgotten on the table. Another woman sat at their booth, the same woman Adria had seen go in just before everything went to hell. She was slim—she had to be, in all that leather—with pale white skin and dyed black hair. Adria gave her a cautious nudge with the barrel of Doug’s gun, and the woman woke up with a gasp.
“It’s gone,” the woman exclaimed. She was only a few years older than Adria, but there was something in her eyes, a hollowness that made her seem far older. “What happened?”
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Adria said. “Who are you?”
“Uh… wow,” the girl replied, rubbing her forehead. “I don’t even know anymore. My name’s Brooklyn—call me Brooke.”
“Adria,” she replied. “There was a woman sitting here at this table. Shorter than you, brown hair, great eyebrows, kind of a bitch. Did you see her? I need to find her.”
“No,” another woman’s voice said, and Adria spun away from Brooke, aiming Doug’s gun at a shadow lurking behind the lunch counter. Her hands trembled, and the figure moved out from behind the counter. She drew closer, and Adria realized it was a woman, five-and-a-half feet tall with long brunette hair tied back in a ponytail through a camouflaged baseball cap. She wore pleather jeans and a vest over a flannel shirt, and she stood with her arms across her chest. Her age was hard to place, but Adria could spot the faint lines around her temple. Aside from that barely noticeable feature, the woman could have been a sister to the one sitting down in the booth.
“Who are you?” Adria demanded. “What’s going on here?”
“I’m Shawna,” the woman said. “That’s my daughter sitting there. And if you think for even one second she’s going to help you find that demon, I’m going to rip that gun out of your hand and shoot you myself.”
***
Demi opened her eyes to find herself sitting in the dark. She was naked, wet stone cold against her skin. She raised her hands, and a chain rattled. Her fingers found the end of the shackles, which were anchored into a slippery stone wall. She tugged with all her might, but the chain showed no sign of breaking free. She tried to stand, only to find the chains ran to additional shackles around her ankles and throat. She heard the sound of dripping water in the distance, but there wasn’t even the faintest trace of light.
“Where the hell am I?” she asked aloud, trying to remember how she’d gotten here.
“That’s exactly right,” a woman’s voice said, echoing in the darkness. Demi leapt to her feet, throwing herself in the direction of the voice, only to find herself held in place by the heavy chains.
“Who’s there?” Demi demanded. “Where am I?”
“You know who I am,” the voice replied, and Demi realized it was her own. She began to make out a shapeless black mass even darker than the pitch-black surroundings. “And you know what this is,” the voice continued. “Hell—or my little piece of it anywhere. Or should I say ours? We’re going to be spending a lot of time together, so I wanted to get to know you before we got started.”
“You’re a demon,” Demi said, remembering what Owen had told her. “You possessed me.”
“You were asking for it,” the demon replied, the black shape moving slightly against an equally black background. “You see, I’m not that big of a deal where I come from. I crawled my way up from the pit, sure, but in the grand scheme of things, I’m nobody. I can’t possess just anybody, not indefinitely. I need someone who’s emotionally broken. The girl I was in before, she was pretty screwed up. But you… wow. How are you even still walking? I could stay in here forever. Question is, are you someone to keep locked up in the basement, or do you want to be my copilot?”
“I want you to get the hell out of my head,” Demi said, shouting at the invisible black shape.
“Fair enough,” the demon replied. “Let’s get back to it, shall we?”
Demi blinked, and when she opened her eyes she was standing on the altar of a church. The pews were covered in dust and debris, and the stain-glass windows had been boarded up. The walls had been ripped open where someone had plundered the copper wiring. Doug lay flat on his belly atop the altar. Demi ran her hands across his back, and he groaned deliriously. She pulled at a large, rectangular patch of skin, ripping it free and turning to hang it by a clothespin on a string, next to three similarly sized bits of flesh. He screamed all the while, but she barely noticed.
“Please,” Doug sobbed. “Stop this.”
“I thought we were having fun, Dougie,” Demi said, leaning down to purr into his ear. “I wanted a different kind of fun back there in the parking lot, but I’m just not the kind of girl who takes kindly to rejection. Don’t worry though, we’ve got a lot more time together, you can count on that.”
She slapped her palm against the bloody wound on his back, and she laughed while he screamed some more. She left him there whimpering while she ran her bloody fingers over the pews, drawing a series of interlocking lin
es inside a crude circle. She hadn’t known what they meant before, but now it made sense. She was marking her territory, forming a bridge between this world and the demon’s. She could feel the energy flowing forth from the sigil like water from a spring, black and filthy and intoxicating.
“You’re a natural at this,” a red-haired woman said, standing at Demi’s side, her face completely expressionless. Demi blinked, and they weren’t in a church anymore. She was in a dark room that stank of fear and sweat and blood. She could still hear sobbing, but it wasn’t Doug’s. A man lay tied to a narrow board leaning against the wall, a tray of surgical implements standing nearby. “I didn’t even have to coach you,” the woman said. “I just pointed you in the right direction.”
“He killed my friends,” Demi said, remembering that day, so many years ago during the war. There’d been a bombing, and she’d taken a blast that had left her on guard detail at a CIA facility. For weeks, she’d watched defiant prisoners go from their cells to a back room. If they came back at all, it was with a look of utter hopelessness in their eyes. She’d lost people, and there was a fire burning inside her that she couldn’t repress. She hadn’t known what went on in that back room, but she wanted to be a part of it. The blank-faced woman had made that possible, and the work Demi had done had helped her forget about what she’d lost… at least for a while.
“It doesn’t matter what he did,” the blank-faced woman replied, staring at Demi with eyes full of black smoke. “Your job was to hurt him, and you did. What if I told you he was innocent?”
“No one is innocent,” Demi replied. She had answered the question the same way years ago. “We all get what’s coming to us.”
“He’s innocent,” the blank-faced woman whispered, and suddenly the man tied to the board was Doug, his eyes filled with terror, a dirty rag stuffed into his mouth to keep him quiet. “And I need you to hurt him. Your country needs you to hurt him.”
Demi Mondaine: Volume One Page 22