Demi Mondaine: Volume One

by N. R. Mayfield

  “Okay,” Demi replied, picking up a scalpel from the surgical tray. This was how it had gone, so many times. She’d told herself it was all for the cause, for the Country… but those had just been words. She was angry, and she was in pain. Inflicting that pain on someone else had just felt right… at least up until the day it hadn’t.

  “No,” Demi said, blinking at the scalpel in her hand. “No, I won’t do this.”

  “Oh, come on,” the demon’s voice said, and Demi felt a wave of cold air wash over her. The dank back room was gone, and she was standing alone in the middle of the California desert, nothing but sand and shrubs visible beneath the light of the moon overhead. She stumbled forward, writhing black shapes lurking just out of sight in the darkness, tendrils of smoke reaching out for her as she struggled to keep ahead of them.

  “I thought we really had something there for a second,” the demon’s voice called out from the shadows. Sergeant Casey stepped into view, dressed in the same camouflaged fatigues he’d been wearing the night she’d left his bullet-ridden body for the vultures.

  “I can keep you locked away if you want,” Casey said, his eyes flashing black. “Find some private little Hell to keep you occupied. Won’t be much fun for you, but it’ll pass the time. I was hoping you’d be my partner though. It’s always more interesting that way. Brooke fought me those first few weeks, but she came around. Before that, I was in her mom, and let me tell you, that lady loved every second of it—even begged me not to leave before I smoked out. Didn’t need to play these games, she was just straight-up into it. I still hear her praying to me at night, pleading for me to come back and fill that emptiness inside her. But sometimes being too easy just isn’t attractive. You… I think you want to play, but you want to be able to say you held out for as long as you could. So… if anyone asks… valiant effort, best I’ve ever seen, nearly had me beat. Can we get on with this now?”

  “No,” Demi said, clenching her hands into fists. “I told you no!”

  “That so, huh?” Casey demanded, looming over her in the gloom. “What are you going to do about it?”

  Demi’s foot shot forward, hooking on Casey’s ankles and sending him sprawling down onto his back. She threw herself down on top of him, biting and scratching at him as he struggled to throw her off. She dug into his flesh with her nails, and her fingers slowly sank deeper and deeper into his skin, drawing blood, pushing past fat and muscle. She tore at him savagely, until she was wrist-deep in his belly, ripping his innards out in a primal bloodlust.

  “That’s more like it,” Casey said, and the world fell away around her. She was back in the empty church, still standing at the altar, her hands still rummaging around her victim’s innards. Only the man lying on the altar wasn’t Sergeant Casey.

  Doug stared at her with glossy eyes, his breathing shallow and labored, and Demi froze. “It’s okay,” he said softly, trembling with every word. “This… isn’t you.” His eyes remained open, but she could feel him slip out of his body, leaving her there covered in his blood.

  Wow, the demon whispered inside her head. That totally could have been avoided if we hadn’t been having that whole little psychic back and forth. But what’s done is done. You’re one screwed up sister, you know that?

  “I hate you,” Demi said, turning away from Doug’s body and sinking to the floor. She rested her back against the altar and cried. “And I hate me even more.”

  Hate? Oh, yes, I can work with hate, the demon said, her voice dripping with eagerness. Let’s get started then. What do you want to do first? Killing spree? Horny teens? Horny teen killing spree?

  “Let’s just get this over with,” Demi said, smearing blood across her face as she wiped away her tears.

  ***

  “We need to get out of here,” Shawna said, helping Brooke to her feet. She could smell the sulphur on her daughter’s skin, and she remembered how she’d felt when the demon’s smoke had flowed through her own veins. It had been terrifying, yes—but it had also given her power she’d never dreamed of wielding.

  “How did you get here?” Brooke asked, wrapping Shawna in a tight hug. “I thought the demon was going to be in me forever. But she let me go.”

  “You’re safe now,” Shawna said, stroking her cheek. “We’re going to get you far away from this place.”

  “Mom,” Brooke said, her eyes going distant. “I… I did things. I…”

  “Stop,” Shawna said, pressing her fingers to Brooke’s lips. “Whatever you think you did, that was the demon. Even if it let you think you were in control, you weren’t. Try not to think about it.”

  “So we’re dealing with a demon?” asked the girl Shawna had found Brooke with—Adria. The round-faced teen pulled her gun close to her chest. “It has my friends. We need to go after it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Shawna said. “I’d help you if I could. No one wants to find that demon more than me. But I only just got my daughter back. I’m not risking her again.”

  “How did you end up possessed by a demon?” Adria asked Brooke.

  “Because I brought it to her,” Shawna said. “I let it out. I let all this happen.”

  “Then help me fix it,” Adria said. “It won’t go far. It never does.”

  “It’s been getting worse lately,” Shawna said, leading Brooke to the door. “Somehow the police haven’t caught on, but I’ve seen the crime scenes. It’s been leaving signs behind it, each one leading me to the one after.”

  “So you know where it will be next?” Adria asked.

  “No, it’s not like that,” Shawna said. “But it doesn’t matter even if it was. You can’t kill the demon. You can’t even hurt it.”

  “We can find something!” Adria insisted. “My friends… they hunted things like this!”

  “They hunted demons?” Brooke asked, stopping in her tracks.

  “No,” Adria replied uncertainly. “Not demons specifically. But lots of other things… ghosts, monsters, stuff like that. There’s a way to kill everything, we just have to figure out what it is.”

  Shawna stared at the girl, not sure whether to believe her wild claims. Then again, nothing she was saying was any more bizarre than the demon. If it could exist, why not all the other terrible things most people dismissed as stories? “Say we believe you,” Shawna said. “Where would we start? The demon drove off with your friends and their stuff.”

  “Not all of it,” Adria said, holding up her gun in one hand and a black purse in the other. “This gun is loaded with silver bullets.” She dumped the contents of the bag out on an unused table. There was the stuff you’d expect to find in any woman’s purse—papers, receipts, toiletries, makeup, and the like. Then there were things whose purpose Shawna couldn’t guess. “Let’s see,” Adria said to herself. “Looks like we’ve got a silver-bladed knife, couple jars of salt, some iron knuckles… and a bunch of… I don’t know what the rest of this is. They don’t tell me everything.”

  “How are we supposed to stop a demon with silver, iron, and salt?” Shawna asked.

  “Hey, they work on just about everything,” Adria said. “Silver kills monsters, and salt and iron stop ghosts. Don’t ask me why it works, but it does.”

  “How many of these things have you hunted yourself?” Brooke asked.

  “Um… Demi and Doug were really the knocking-down-doors types,” Adria admitted, rubbing a hand across the back of her neck. “I mostly stay in the car.”

  “Not tonight,” Brooke said, giving Shawna a look she knew all too well. “I don’t know about you, Mom, but I’m going after that demon.”

  “No,” Shawna said, grabbing Brooke by the shoulders. “Brooklyn, let this go. We can drop the kid off at the bus station and buy her a ticket to wherever she wants, and then we need to hit the road. We can’t go after the demon. What if it decides to take one of us again?”

  “It’s going to keep taking people until someone stands up to it!” Brooke replied. “If we don’t face it now, it’ll haunt us forever.
”

  “That’s exactly what might happen if we do face it,” Shawna said sternly. Brooke just stared back at her defiantly, and Shawna knew it was a lost cause. “Fine,” she said. “But we don’t even know where to start looking.”

  “Here,” Adria said, pulling a roadmap out of the purse. “Demi was marking all over this thing ever since she caught the demon’s trail. She was trying to identify places she thought it might target. She got pretty close a couple of times.”

  “The demon is headed west,” Brooke said. “She’s not going very fast, but she’s going to hit Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Denver, all on the way to Las Vegas.”

  “Why Vegas?” Adria asked.

  “She heard it was called Sin City and she got obsessed,” Brooke said. “She was cooped up in Tennessee for three hundred years. It’s a whole new world to her. Vegas is her destination, but she’s going to take her time getting there.”

  “So she’s probably still in Zanesville,” Adria said.

  “She’s definitely close,” Shawna agreed, her stomach flashing with electricity.

  “Does she need to sleep?” Adria asked.

  “No,” Brooke said. “She doesn’t sleep, but she doesn’t like the sun either. It doesn’t really hurt her, but it makes her sluggish. She probably won’t travel during the day if she can avoid it.”

  “Demi marked a couple places around Zanesville,” Adria said, pointing to a cluster of yellow circles on the map. “We’ve got a couple quiet neighborhoods like the kind all the other attacks have been. And… oh, that’s a little different.”

  “What?” Shawna asked, leaning over the younger girl’s shoulder to get a better look at the map.

  “Looks like an old church,” Adria said, pulling the address up on her cellphone. “It’s abandoned,” she declared, turning the phone to show them some street-view pictures of an old boarded-up Methodist church.

  “I’m not sure a church is going to be the place the demon would hang out,” Shawna said. “Even if it is abandoned.”

  “Maybe,” Adria said. “But it’s on State Route 666.”

  “Oh… yeah, that’s the place,” Shawna agreed, feeling the familiar darkness rising in the pit of her stomach. She’d only been possessed by the demon for a few hours, and it had been months before, but it was an experience she would never forget. “The demon wouldn’t be able to resist marking its territory on a place like that.”

  Adria repacked her purse, and Shawna borrowed a set of car keys from one of the dead patrons. There was a time when she would have hesitated to cross the street outside of a crosswalk, but after her time with the demon, earthly laws didn’t seem so consequential anymore. It was a strange thing to admit, but she was happier now than she’d been before the demon had found her.

  She drove into town on the interstate, taking the last exit before the river. She continued two blocks past hotels and chain restaurants before making a right turn off the main thoroughfare. They traveled a few miles down a seemingly innocuous road. But despite its ominous designation, there was little of interest along the way aside from trees and the occasional dwelling or business. Mostly there was just trees. After a time, the road veered off down to the Muskingum River, and then there was nothing at all but trees.

  “Here!” Adria shouted, and Shawna slammed on her breaks, almost missing the nearly invisible dirt driveway tucked back between the trees. Branches scraped the sides of the car as she entered the long-neglected road, and she followed it down to the river’s edge, where a crumbling wooden church overlooked the muddy waters.

  “It’s here,” Brooke said, clutching at her temples.

  “Yes,” Shawna whispered, the gaping hole in her heart calling out with longing. “I can feel it too.”

  “That’s Doug’s car,” Adria said when they pulled up next to the beaten-up old clunker. The teen leapt out of the car and raced towards the church, and Shawna and Brooke chased after her, armed only with the trinkets Adria had scavenged from her friend’s bag of tricks.

  Adria flung open the rotting wooden doors, and Shawna pushed her way past the younger girl. The church stank of mold and decay, and the demon had marked the pews and walls with its bloody sigils. A mutilated body hung from a cross behind the altar.

  “No,” Adria gasped. “Doug…”

  “Look who it is!” a woman exclaimed, and Shawna saw a short Hispanic female emerge from the shadows, her eyes black with smoke. “My two favorite outfits. Missing the blood, guts, and free love yet? There’s plenty more where that came from.”

  “Demi!” Adria shouted. “You have to fight this!”

  “I…” Shawna said, stumbling towards the demon’s new vessel. “I missed you,” she said, falling to her knees at the demon’s feet. She’d thought about this moment every day since the demon had taken Brooke, but she’d hoped she would be stronger than this when it actually came. “I need you back.”

  “I know,” the demon said. She looked down at Shawna and grinned. “We had a lot of fun together, but let’s be real—you come off a little needy. You were just a rebound vessel. It was nice at the time, but I’d been stuck in the Veil for three hundred years with nothing better to do. Now I’ve had a chance to stretch my legs a little, so let’s just say my standards are a little higher.”

  “No!” Shawna hissed, slashing at the demon with the silver dagger Adria had given her. The demon caught the blade with her hand, blood seeping between her fingers. She clenched her fist around the blade and ripped it out of Shawna’s grip.

  “Silver?” the demon asked curiously, tossing the blade away. “Nice try, but way off base.” She flicked her wrist, and Shawna flew across the room, slamming into a pew with enough force to smash through the wood. She landed in a bloody heap, surrounded by splintered wood and shredded hymnal pages. She tried to stand, but her entire body was a mass of soreness.

  Shawna watched from beneath the pews while Brooke charged the demon, striking her across the face with Adria’s iron knuckles. The demon screamed, and her skin hissed where the iron had touched it, releasing a burst of steam. “Oh, that hurt!” the demon gasped, staggering backwards, cradling her injured cheek in her hand. She waved her other hand through the air, and Brooke was tossed into the opposite column of pews.

  “You’re going to wish you hadn’t come here!” the demon growled, holding up a fist. Adria began sliding across the floor towards the demon, but the teen pulled out a large jar of salt and poured it in front of her. Immediately, the demon’s grip seemed to vanish, and Adria poured more salt around herself, forming a complete circle.

  The demon walked the rest of the way to Adria, only to stop just outside the salt circle. “You got that backwards,” the demon said with a laugh. “You’re supposed to trap me inside the salt circle, not the other way around. That’s okay though. You can watch me and your friends have one hell of a time.”

  “You’re not wrong about that,” a voice declared from the darkness, and a man emerged from the shadows. He was tall and lean, clad in a black frock with a white collar, a silver cross hanging from his neck. It was a priest, and not just any priest—the same one that had blessed Shawna in the diner a few weeks back.

  “Oh my Satan!” the demon declared happily. “Yes! A priest is just what this orgy needs. Let me show you how we do it where I come from.” She held up her hand again, and the priest slid across the floor just as Adria had a moment before, coming within a few feet of her before he held up his crucifix. Her hold over him abruptly vanished. “Not possible!” the demon hissed.

  “You and I both know all things are possible,” the priest said, pulling a glass vial from his frock and dousing her with its contents. Steam rose up from her body, and the demon wailed like she was being burned with acid. “Relax,” the priest said while the demon continued to scream. “It’s just a little holy water.”

  Shawna pulled herself to her feet, every muscle in her body protesting the slightest movement she made. She scrambled across t
he aisle to where Brooke lay in a daze, and she pulled the iron knuckles free of her daughter’s hand, sliding them across her own fingers while the priest distracted the demon. She sprinted towards the demon, somehow forgetting the pain she was in. Her feet flew across the dust-covered hardwood floors, and she slid to a stop, dropping down to her knees and driving her fist into the back of the demon’s leg.

  The demon collapsed at the priest’s feet, and then Adria was there, pouring salt all around the demon until she was trapped in a circle. The priest continued to flick holy water on the demon, and she screamed in outrage. Shawna collapsed onto her back.

  “Idiots!” the demon howled, her voice deep and otherworldly. “You won’t hold me in here for long.” She held up both hands, straining against an invisible cage, and the ground began to tremble. The circle shook, and one by one the grains of salt started to slide free of the ring, one granule at a time as an immense force built up inside.

  “She’s right,” the priest said. “Salt won’t hold her long. We have a few minutes, at best.”

  “What do we do?” Adria shouted, the building rumbling around them. “How do we get rid of it?”

  “We strip it of its vessel and cast it back to Hell,” the priest said, handing her his vial of holy water. “Keep splashing this on her. It will slow her down while I perform the exorcism.”

  “Exorcism?” Adria asked, flinging more holy water on the demon. “You can do that?” Shawna remembered how the darkness in her had been soothed by the priest’s blessing back at the diner. But could he really overpower the demon?

  “Only if you keep her contained long enough,” the priest said, holding his crucifix out towards the demon. “Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio. Contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium.”

  “Pray to your angels all you want!” the demon snarled inside the circle. The grains of salt flew away faster and faster. “I’ll send you to meet them!”

  “Imperet illi Deus, supplices deprecamur, tuque,” the priest continued, his body shaking. The demon’s howling continued. “Princeps militiae caelestis, Satanam aliosque spiritus malignos, qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo, divina virtute, in infernum detrude.” The priest stopped his incantation, stumbling back from the demon and wiping sweat from his brow. The ground had stopped trembling, and the salt ring was no longer deteriorating. “Amen,” he finished, and the demon’s body went rigid.