Immortal Hunter

by Kait Ballenger

  Another cry escaped her throat when David said his son’s name. No one else had ever cared enough to call him that before, and she could tell by the way he said it that he cared, more than he probably wanted to. “I’ve never heard anyone else call him by the name I gave him before. It makes him feel so much more real.”

  David kissed her forehead. His lips were so tender and soft, warming her from the inside out like a favorite blanket on a cold winter night.

  He whispered against her skin, “He was real and he is real. I know it may be hard for you to believe, but I know in my heart you’re going to see him again someday. We’ll see him again.”

  When Allsún had cried all the tears she could possibly manage, she pulled away from David’s arms.

  “Thank you for coming here. I needed to say all that.”

  He nodded. “Sometimes all we need to begin to heal is for someone else to bear witness to our pain. I don’t know if the pain of losing a child will ever fully leave, but now you have someone to share it with,” he said.

  A small part of her wanted to tell him everything was different now. That she could feel a change, some sort of shift between them now that he knew everything she’d endured, but she was smarter than that. She needed to think things over still. Needed space. “This doesn’t change anything, you know. Not yet.”

  He tried to smile at her, but she could tell his heart wasn’t in it. “I figured that would be the case.” Though she expected him to, he didn’t get up to leave. “You still need protection,” he said. “I can’t just leave you, not after everything that’s happened.”

  She stood and gestured toward the door. “You have to, David. At least for tonight. I need some space to clear my head.”

  He began to protest, but she held up a hand to silence him. “Please go.”

  His face twisted into a look of frustration, but to his credit, he respected her wishes. She opened the door and showed him out without another word.

  As soon as the dead bolt latched into place behind him, Allsún breathed a sigh of relief. Time for herself at last. Her cats came rushing up to her again, and she petted them one by one, snuggling them to her chest.

  Wait a second.

  One was missing. Another older tabby who had once been an adorable kitten named Mew, but after having an accidental litter of kittens and then getting spayed, was now a fat cat affectionately nicknamed Moo.

  “Moo!” she called out.

  Silence answered her.

  She tried the cat’s other nickname. “Moo-ey bueno!”

  Finally, a small mewing sound answered her back.

  “Moo, where are you?”

  Another mew came from her guest bedroom. “Moo, what are you doing? Come here.” Finally she stood, turning on more lights as she went.

  Just before she rounded the corner to her mother’s bedroom, Moo skyrocketed out the door, running right past her.

  “Moo, what’s wrong?” She let out a long sigh. “You weren’t being bad again, were you? You better not have been scratching Mama’s quilts.” She turned into the bedroom and flicked on the light.

  She didn’t have time to scream before the demon lifted its hand, pinning her against the far wall and knocking the wind out of her.

  Shite. How had it gotten inside?

  “You really should have put bars on the window above the fire escape,” the demon said. It was wearing a man’s body, someone she recognized as one of her downstairs neighbors, a man she’d rarely spoken to but had often seen in passing.

  The demon stepped toward her. The man it was wearing was middle-aged, slightly overweight, with just a hint of a receding hairline. But knowing there was a demon inside him made his normally innocuous form unbelievably threatening. The demon stepped closer to her. “I promised you I’d be back one day.”

  Allsún’s eyes widened. No, it couldn’t be. The demon that had killed her baby? “You sick, pathetic hell-crawler,” she spat. “What do you want from me now?”

  “Call me Sammael.” The demon grinned, managing to twist the face of the innocent man it was wearing into something distorted and evil. “Don’t worry, no dead babies this time.”

  Allsún struggled against the demon’s invisible hold. She knew it was no use, but she had to at least try.

  “Exactly what you’ve given me—you.” Sammael lifted an open hand, then clenched it into a fist.

  Allsún’s muscles spasmed as pain seared throughout her body. She screamed before the demon slapped her across the face.

  “Shut up,” he hissed.

  “If you’re going to kill me, just kill me already,” she gasped.

  “By the time I’m done with you, you’ll wish all I wanted was to kill you. Unfortunately, I can’t kill you. I need you. You followed the plan exactly. I planted that demon, and I instructed it to tell David about your light because I knew it would drive you here—alone, now that the exorcist has left you unprotected once again.”

  “How did you know I’d taken my light back?”

  The demon laughed. “Don’t be stupid. The whole reason that demon possessed your doctor in the first place is because I needed to drive you back to Aronowitz. I needed you to reclaim your light. That’s why I’ve put every demon under my control on a hunt for you. I knew you’d have no option but to flee to the Isle of Apples, and I knew you and that pussy Aronowitz would inevitably crawl back into bed together. You humans act like you’re independent, but you’re so fucking predictable.”

  She fixed the demon with a glare of pure hatred. “What do you need from me if you don’t want me dead?”

  “Tonight marks the four millionth full moon since my Mistress was cast from the Garden of Eden. Magic is in the air tonight, just as my Mistress ensured before she was cast out, and it will ensure Lilith’s rise from hell. And you, my dear, have a role to play. You see, the fear of the parents and the deaths of their children were part of the spell Lilith cast. Consider it her punishment to God for cursing her with infertility when he cast her out. Two infant deaths seasoned with their parents’ fear have led to this night, when you’re going to help us with our third and final family, the family that will bring Lilith to this earthly plane once again.”

  Allsún scoffed. “I’ll never do anything you want me to, even if you torture me. Believe me, whatever you have up your sleeve, I’ve been through worse. I can withstand anything. I’m a survivor.”

  Sammael ran a single finger across her cheekbone. A shiver of disgust and fear ran down Allsún’s spine.

  Sammael pulled his hand away. “As much pleasure as I’d find in torturing you, I won’t need to. Lilith is going to possess you.”

  What in the world was this hell-crawler talking about? “Lilith? As in Lilith from the Bible? Besides, I’m Fae. No demon can possess me, you sulfur-sucking idiot.”

  Sammael grinned. “That’s where you’re wrong, my dear little Fae whore. You see, demons as powerful as Lilith and I are capable of possessing you disgusting little Fae. We’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again.”

  “I’d like to see you try.”

  “You will, my dear. You will.” She cringed as the demon patted her cheek. “All in due time.”

  Allsún opened her mouth to speak again, but before she could, the Sammael drew back his arm and aimed his fist straight toward her face. That was the last thing she saw before everything faded to black.

  * * *

  MAYBE THE LIBRARY wasn’t the best place in the world to research the crime scene symbols. Shane rested his forehead on the keyboard of his computer and groaned. Damn it. No matter where or how he searched, whether online or in books, everything was coming up empty. He knew he would identify it eventually, because innocent lives depended on it and he prided himself on never letting his team members down, but he was practically ripping his hair out
, and at this rate he was going to go bald before he found the answer.

  “You don’t look too happy,” a female voice said from behind him.

  Damn it. No way. He didn’t have time to deal with this right now. He looked up to find Vera Sanders now standing in front of him.

  Couldn’t the universe give him a break for two fucking minutes so he could crack this case?

  He collected himself and asked, “What can I help you with, Miss Sanders?”

  She rocked back and forth on her high-heeled boots as if she were nervous. “Well, when I saw you sitting here, I was kind of hoping you’d be willing to help with that tutoring we discussed before.” Her eyes widened in a look of concern. “I really don’t want to fail your class, Dr. Grey,” she added.

  Damn. He wanted to help her. He really did, and not just because he was attracted to her, but because he genuinely cared about the academic welfare of his students, but this wasn’t the right time.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Sanders. Right now just isn’t a good time. I’m researching something rather important.”

  She leaned in to look at his research. He slammed the lid of his laptop shut, so she wouldn’t see the symbol smeared in blood from the crime scene, but it was too late.

  Her eyes widened with surprise and she immediately grew flustered. “Damn, Doc Grey. That’s some serious black magic you’re getting into. A ritual to summon the demon queen is—” She clapped her hand over her mouth.

  Shane pushed back his chair. “Demon queen? What did you say?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was talking about. I need to go now.”

  She moved to step away from him, but he stood and blocked her path. “Vera, this is really important. What did you mean when you said ‘the demon queen’?”

  She tried to step around him again to no avail.

  “Vera, please. Lives may depend on this,” he pleaded.

  She shook her head as if she couldn’t believe what she was saying. “Lilith. The demon queen. She’s in lots of folklore, you know. I saw it on TV”

  Oh no. Shane wasn’t falling for it. He wasn’t stupid by any stretch of the imagination. “Vera, how did you really recognize that symbol?”

  She met his eyes with a stricken look, then dodged past him at last and practically bolted for the front door of the library. He grabbed his textbooks, shoved them into his bag, and ran after her.

  The cold Rochester air prickled against his skin as he sped out the door in her wake.

  “Vera, wait!” he called.

  She ran without looking back.

  And then he knew. It was so clear that he wondered how he could have missed it.

  Vera Sanders was a witch.

  * * *

  WHEN ALLSÚN’S EYES flickered open, it took all the self-control she had not to scream. She tried to move, but her hands were bound behind her back. She wiggled her feet and discovered that they were tied to the chair where the demon had placed her. Her eyes darted around the room as she took in the scene before her. A mother, father and son lay on the floor, tied up just as she was and also gagged.

  A house. She was in a house. What had to be the family’s home. The bindings on her hands and feet bit into her skin. The terrified expressions in the family members’ eyes struck a terrible chord in her mind as she remembered the carnage she had so recently seen.

  For now the family was safe, but they were frozen in fear and reduced to the occasional whimper.

  “Have a good view?” a familiar, disgusting voice whispered behind Allsún.

  She tried to turn and see who was speaking, but the ropes limited her movement. It didn’t matter. She knew that foul voice. She didn’t respond, instead pulling harder against the restraints.

  “You really should save your strength.” The neighbor’s normally bland voice turned snakelike and poisonous when the demon spoke.

  She felt its hot breath on her neck as the words slithered into her ear. It was close, very close. At that moment, an unfamiliar woman entered the room. Allsún felt the brief urge to warn her, tell her to run for her life, but when she saw the cold, dead-eyed expression on the woman’s face, she knew any warning would be pointless.

  The clearly pregnant mother whimpered something from behind her gag. The female demon kicked her hard in the stomach, causing her to curl into a fetal position, eyes welling up with tears. The son writhed in impotent agony at seeing his mother in so much pain.

  “Now, now, there will be time enough for that,” the demon behind Allsún purred, “when we have our little Fae bitch to do the kicking for us.”

  Allsún wanted to hurl at the thought that she was intended to be the instrument of their torture and death.

  She struggled against her restraints again, the taut ropes rubbing her flesh raw at her efforts.

  The demon stepped in front of her and grabbed her by the chin, jerking her face to meet its lifeless eyes. “You’ve got fight in you. I respect that.” It lashed out, slapping her hard enough across the face that her mouth filled with the metallic tang of blood.

  “That one was from me. Consider the rest to be courtesy of Lilith,” it snarled.

  Allsún defiantly locked eyes with the demon. “You can go straight back to hell you piece of shi—”

  The demon grabbed her by the back of the head and with one swift move locked its mouth over hers. Allsún immediately felt a chilling sensation slinking through her body. A cold, numb tingle floated down each leg and then back up again—a slow paralysis.

  She heard a strange, eerie noise as the neighbor’s mouth performed what felt like a demented form of CPR. A cold gaseous substance entered her lungs. Her motor control started to fail.

  Her senses remained as sharp as ever, but her ability to control her arms, her legs, was lost. She saw and felt the hand at the end of her arm clench, but it could not be hers, not in an objective sense. She screamed and then realized no sound was coming from her mouth.

  Her body was lost to her, invaded by the demon. Somewhere in the back of her mind she heard laughter—a sick, high-pitched giggling, like a disturbed child dismembering a small animal. The demon had her. She tried screaming again, to no avail. The giggling continued like the hellish refrain from a nightmare, reverberating somewhere in the confines of her consciousness.

  She felt her limbs flexing against her will, the hell-beast taking her for some kind of demented test drive. She remained defiant, screaming silently in her own mind, Get out of me, you fucking coward. I will never do what you want me to do.

  Her face smiled, and she heard the distorted voice reply directly in her brain, in the most bloodcurdling horrific language imaginable, straight out of hell itself, with no body to filter it through, no host to dilute it. It was a choked, malignant hiss of a voice, fashioned out of knives and suffering.

  We’ll see what little Allie can and can’t do. The voice giggled again like some kind of evil clown. Allsún’s mind flashed back in vivid detail as the demon controlled her memories.

  It blurred back to the day she’d walked out of David’s door and fled to her apartment. It made her remember every fading heartbeat of the baby she’d lost, made her relive every second of that anguish. She snapped back to reality to find she’d been untied by the demon’s accomplice.

  The voice rang in her brain again. Do you really want to keep defying me?

  Allsún didn’t respond. She felt the demon’s power coursing through what had once been her body.

  While this really is fun, Allie, we have more important matters to attend to. Like the question of which of these people will you kill first?

  Allsún fought with what little strength the demon had left her to try to stop her body from moving toward the family.

  Hmm...that boy sure didn’t like seeing what our friend did
to his mother. Perhaps her first?

  The female demon-host put a large butcher knife into Allsún’s hand and sat in an armchair to watch, rapt, its eyes filled with sick fascination.

  Let’s see what happens next, shall we?

  Allsún knelt down by the mother and grabbed her by the hair. She pulled the gag away and forced the woman’s mouth open with the flat of the knife. She slowly inserted the blade into her mouth, making sure the son and father were watching. The two men writhed and wailed beneath their restraints.

  Allsún pulled the knife out slowly, nicking the corner of the mother’s mouth into a little half smile.

  No...not enough pain in their eyes yet. No. No fucking way. There was no way she would allow the demon to hurt these people using her body. Allsún focused every ounce of mental energy she had on redirecting her own limbs. Her whole body was trembling, but the hand that held the knife slowly began to drop.

  The demon hissed inside her head. No, what is this? How are you doing that? You filthy faerie whore.

  Suddenly, her mouth was hanging open and the gaseous white substance that had invaded her earlier was escaping in a frigid cloud. Once again she was in control of her own limbs, but before she could process what had happened, the other demon seized her from behind. She struggled against its hold, attempting to elbow the monster in the ribs to no avail.

  The body Sammael had previously abandoned was now animated again as the demon sidekick began to tie her up. In one last attempt to save herself, she threw her head back, bashing the top of her skull into the demon’s nose. The demon let out a muffled grunt, and she felt the warmth of blood pouring down the back of her shirt.

  “You stupid whore.” Sammael crossed the room and backhanded her across the face. The sting in her cheek was nothing compared to what she planned to do to him someday. No demon was going to take over her body and live to tell the tale, at least not for long.

  Sammael leaned into her, their faces so close their noses nearly touched. “You’re going to regret that little stunt, because the pain I’d planned to cause those humans using your body will be nothing in comparison to the pain I show them now.”