by Amy Braun
Surprisingly, Hell had a ranking system. It started with lowly peons and imps, moving up to Knights, Presidents, Dukes, and Princes of Hell, and of course, the King himself.
Satan. The Morningstar. Lucifer. The one that nobody, human or demon, ever wanted to cross.
While we found out information on demons, we learned of the existence of cambion, the offspring of a demon, usually an incubus, and a human woman. Cambion could inherit certain demonic powers from their fathers, like super senses and strength. They could see other demons and if they became powerful enough, they could manipulate dreams and create hellfire, the blazing white flames that Dro burst into.
We were ready to call it then and there, until Max said one day, “Dro can’t be a cambion. I would have sensed the evil in her. Besides, she seems to have divine powers, and cambion don’t have those.”
So it was back to the drawing board, where we stumbled upon the Nephilim, the children of angels and humans.
They were more rare than cambion (it was no secret that demons liked to fuck more), but perhaps more powerful. Nephilim could read minds, heal injuries, and create bursts of nearly blinding light. That sounded a bit more like my sister.
It always seemed to me that Dro was more angel than demon, and it made sense that demons would be out to kill her. Demons and angels didn’t exactly make best friends. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were missing something. Some of her powers still edged to the demonic side, especially the fire. I kept going back to what she had said under her hypnotism. Angels didn’t usually talk about murder and carnage with glee. At least I hoped they didn’t.
I doubted we’d tell Dro what she’d said during the hypnosis. She seemed content believing that she was half-angel instead of half-demon, so we left it at that.
After our brains were filled with demonology-induced headaches, I usually trained alone. Manny bought me a punching bag and training swords. I was surprised, and told him he hadn’t needed to do that. He just smiled and said I was getting too tough for dartboards and two-by-fours.
He wasn’t wrong. Over the next few weeks, I got stronger, faster, more efficient in my strikes. There was no such thing as too much training. When came time to killing demons, I wasn’t going to get a second chance. They weren’t exactly charitable.
My sister, thankfully, didn’t have any episodes. She drew herself closer to Max, something that made me wary and a little depressed. There was no way we could keep staying here. We were gambling Manny and Max’s lives with the demons chasing us. The longer we stayed, the more we would care, and the harder it would be to leave.
But she was still a teenage girl with a crush on a cute boy, and Max wasn’t the type to betray her virtue. Probably because he knew I would kill him if he did.
While they got closer to one another, I spent more time with Manny. He wasn’t a replacement for my father, but he still treated me like a daughter. He was more like me than I originally thought. He didn’t delve too deeply into the past, and he never held many assumptions over my head. He also refused to quit on me, no matter how dismissive and stubborn I was being. Even when we argued, he made me break my own rules, and become more attached.
I liked being around them. I liked waking up in the same place every morning. I liked Max’s witty attitude and the affection he showed my little sister. I liked Manny’s patience, intelligence, and unrelenting determination. It was like I had gained a cousin and an uncle.
Which is probably why Manny lost it when I decided it was time to put my skills to the test, and summon a demon.
“No,” Manny said flatly. “Absolutely not.”
I crossed my arms under my breasts and looked at him evenly. “What’s the problem? It’s not like I haven’t killed them before.”
“The danger is too great, Constance,” he said. “Six weeks in demonology doesn’t make you an expert in it. You don’t know what you can let through. You could become possessed.”
“We’ll put it in a trap until it’s time to kill it. I’m just going to ask it a couple questions,” I insisted. “And I thought you said that Possessors can’t be summoned because they choose their victims. I’m not going to let a demon run through the streets, if that’s what you’re really worried about.”
His dark grey eyebrows knit together furiously. “I’m more worried about your heart being torn out of your chest,” he said.
I worried about that too, but I tried not to let it show. Manny’s fear for my life was touching, and I was grateful to know he cared about me, but I had to do this. Books weren’t getting us anywhere.
“Manny,” I said, taking a step towards him, “I need to confirm that Dro is a Nephilim. If I get a Red, it might be able to understand English enough to tell us if we’re right. We can’t keep guessing and hoping for the best, any more than we can stay here forever.”
Hurt filled his eyes when I suggested that we were going to be leaving. The same hurt stung my own heart, but we couldn’t stay. Not if we wanted to keep them alive.
“I can do this,” I assured him, “but I need your help. Please.”
By now, he knew me well enough to understand that ‘please’ wasn’t a common word in my vocabulary. I used it around Dro when no one else was listening, but I had been raised hard. I didn’t beg for anything, from anyone. Not unless I was truly, crushingly, desperate.
Manny exhaled. “You’d better tell your sister what you plan on doing, because I don’t want to face her wrath.”
Despite it all, I managed a weak laugh. Manny gave me a reassuring smile, then walked off to get the supplies for the summoning.
***
Dro was even more upset than Manny when I told her what I was going to do a couple hours later.
“You’re insane!” she said. “You can’t do that! You won’t do that!”
“It isn’t a matter or can’t or won’t, Dro,” I said calmly. “It’s something that has to be done. We have a pretty good idea of what you are now, but we need to figure out why the demons are chasing you. At least then we might have a chance at figuring out how to stop them.”
“But you always thought that people who summon demons are idiots! You’re contradicting yourself!”
“I know. But unlike them, I intend to be a lot more careful,” I showed her the small bottle of holy water, my throwing knives, and my hatchet. The holy water was added on Manny’s insistence, though I doubted I would use it. Blades were my specialty. The weapons weren’t silvered yet, but they would still work on the demons. They were the best things I could use since I didn’t have any faith.
None of it made Dro any happier. “Constance, please don’t do this. It’s too dangerous.”
I shifted across the mattress in the basement to be closer to her, putting my arm around her shoulders and giving her a reassuring shake. “It’ll be okay, sis. The demon will be trapped, and Manny will be backing me up. I’ve killed these bastards before. At least this time I’ll have a head start.”
Dro put her head in her hands. “Stop it, Con. I can’t let you do this.”
“Why not?”
She looked at me. “You’re going to get hurt. I can’t live with myself if something happens to you, Connie. I can’t.”
Ah. So that’s what this is really about.
“All that’s going to happen is me summoning a demon, questioning it, then killing it. Nothing else, Dro. I promise.”
“You can’t promise me anything. You don’t know what will happen. This is a bad idea.”
I paused. “You’re right. But I’m not going to let anything hurt me, or you. Just trust me, all right?”
Dro bit her lip and looked away from me. She hunched herself over her knees and made a hurt noise. I almost gave in right then, but there was no way we could keep running if we didn’t know exactly what the situation was. I squeezed Dro’s shoulders.
“I won’t hold it long, Dro. But you should stay inside. I don’t want it to see you.”
She shook her head. “I want to be out there
with you. If something happens.”
“Manny will be there. He’ll look out for me. Stay with Max, okay?”
Dro sighed again, and I was grateful to have mentioned her not-quite-boyfriend’s name. He was the only other person I mostly trusted around her, and the only one who could keep her distracted while I was gone. I started to push myself up.
“I’ll be back in a little while. I promise,” I said, leaning down to kiss the top of her snow-white head.
Dro nodded, knowing there was nothing she could do to stop me. I thought about ditching the idea, but then I remembered how scared she was when a demon appeared and tried to kill us. I wanted her to be free from that fear.
So I pushed off the mattress and started walking to the stairs, hoping that I hadn’t just told a huge lie to my little sister.
***
Summoning the demon wasn’t hard. Keeping it contained was.
As the town exorcist and expert demonologist, Manny Garcia knew what it took to summon a demon.
I looked at the chalk pentagram drawn on the driveway, grateful that it was midnight on a Wednesday and no one would be awake to see what we were doing. It would certainly cause a fuss.
The circle was made of thick salt lines that had been sprinkled with holy water and peppered with sage. When the demon was summoned, it was going to be trapped, and really, really pissed. I had one hand on my hip, the other on the hilt of my hatchet.
“Are you sure this is going to work?” I asked.
Manny laughed sarcastically. “Don’t tell me you’re backing out now,” he teased.
“Let me rephrase. Have you done this before?”
Manny flipped through his Bible, glancing up from the silver, half moon reading glasses he’d placed on his nose. “Of course not. I’m an exorcist. I don’t summon demons. No sane person summons a demon.”
I sighed, running my hand over my face. “That’s reassuring.”
“The theory is simple,” Manny continued. “I can contain the demon until you’re ready to destroy it, but I don’t think you’ll be looking forward to that. It won’t be in the best of moods.”
“I figured as much.”
Manny looked at me seriously. “You can still change your mind, Constance. No one will think any less of you. We all understand why you’re doing this.”
That should have made me feel better, right along with the comforting look in Manny’s eyes. But it was too late. I had been running blind for far too long.
“Thanks,” I said. “But let’s just get this over with.”
Manny nodded solemnly, disappointed that I hadn’t backed out. He stepped behind me and began the summoning. My Latin sucked, so Manny did the chanting. About midway through, I reached for one of my knives. Throwing knives had been a skill I’d learned during in my time with the Blood Thorns. I had excellent hand to eye coordination, and I’d only gotten better as I practiced. But that wasn’t why I was taking the knife out now.
I drew the blade across my palm and dripped my blood into the center of the trap. I stepped back, carefully keeping away from the chalk and the salt-sage lines, then picked out a match from the pocket and scraped it along the side of its box. The match flared to life, and I tossed it into the middle of the circle on the drops of my blood.
My blood caught fire and the world ripped open, revealing a gaping wound of fire. The scent of sulfur and smoke hit me like a slap, and I forced myself not to gag. This close, I could feel the heat from Hell making me sweat, beads of it trickling down my face.
A scrawny Red demon tumbled out of the portal, landing right in the trap and closing the door behind it. Manny immediately switched to English, reading a passage he had chosen from the Bible to annoy the demon. It got to its feet, saw where it was, then paced and snarled.
Yup. I had officially pissed off a demon.
“Do you understand me?” I asked.
It hissed and choked something at me. I couldn’t tell if it was attempting to speak, or deliberately making animal noises. I asked again in Spanish, and got the same ugly response.
“I take that as a no,” I said. I huffed out a breath. Time to try another tactic. “If you understand me, nod your head.”
The demon snarled harshly. I frowned. So far this interrogation was not going as planned. If I’d been dealing with a human, at least I could’ve used my fists to get the truth. I waited a second longer, then moved onto my next question.
“Do you know my sister?”
The demon’s lips contorted. I wasn’t sure what it was doing, until I realized the corners of its mouth were twitched up. It started snapping, chittering and jumping up and down. It definitely knew about my sister.
“Is she a cambion?”
It snorted and snarled harshly. Okay then.
“Is she a Nephilim?”
The demon got excited and paced even quicker, chattering something I couldn’t have kept up with even if I spoke demon. Maybe I was wrong, and Dro was a Nephilim after all. I could have been letting skepticism and paranoia get the better of me. Dro aside, it wasn’t like I came across half-angels every other day.
“Are you trying to kill her?” I asked the demon.
The creature stopped pacing and stared at me. Then it started convulsing. My free hand dropped to my hip, finding the hilt of my hatchet. My other hand gripped my knife tightly as the demon started to make a sharp, hacking sound.
Then I realized it was laughing at me.
It sounded like it was trying to choke down broken glass, but there wasn’t anything I could do about the way a demon laughed.
Except stop it.
Knowing I wouldn’t get any more information from it unless I got a crash course in demon-tongue, I decided the conversation was over. I turned my head slightly so I could keep my eyes on the demon while talking to Manny.
“Get ready,” I told him.
Manny stopped the prayer. I walked towards the edges of the salt circle. The demon slowed its chuckling and watched me intently.
I hesitated for a moment longer. I’d never faced a demon so directly before, where I could stand calmly and not have to worry about fighting for my life. I thought I would have felt stronger, less afraid than I did. But I couldn’t hold back the fear that made my heart rattle in my chest. I couldn’t keep myself from thinking that when I let the demon out of the circle, it was going to be faster than me. I had plenty of scars to prove just how quick and savage demons could be.
But my fear didn’t matter. Dro did. Manny and Max did. If I let that fear overcome me, the demon would go after them. That was something I could not– would not– let happen.
I gripped my weapons tighter, then broke the circle with my boot.
My first mistake was assuming I knew what the demon would do. I thought it would jump at me the first chance it got.
I was wrong. It ran in the opposite direction. Down the street.
“Shit,” I hissed, taking off after it.
Manny called after me, but I kept running. I had loosed the demon from the trap. I was the one who had to kill it before it slaughtered some blissfully ignorant Texan in the middle of the night.
The Red demon was fast, weaving its lean body around cars and through down the suburban street, toward the center of the town. It had a head start on me, but I had spent a good portion of my life running from cops, feds, thugs, and monsters. The only difference was that I was the one doing the chasing this time.
When we hit downtown Amarillo, the Red made a sharp turn into an alley that almost tripped me up. I caught my footing and swerved around the alley after it.
At the same moment the Red decided to jump me.
It rammed into me with the force of a linebacker, knocking me hard onto my back. My head smacked the pavement, dazing me for a second. That one second was all the opening the Red needed.
Its claws slashed across my chest, right under my throat. I gasped from the pain, and again when its claws sliced along my stomach, not deep enough to eviscerate me b
ut deep enough to hurt. I wondered why the demon hadn’t taken the chance to kill me yet. Then I saw the gleam in its black eyes and the twisted smile on its face.
It was playing with me, the same way a cat plays with a mouse in its paws.
While the demon was slowly cutting me to ribbons, I was prying my hands free from under the Red’s weight. My knife was still in my hands, but using it was more of a challenge than I wanted it to be, since the demon refused to move. It leaned forward and raked its claws across the side of my face, just barely missing my eye. I winced, but didn’t scream. In my experience, the more you screamed, the more your attacker wanted to hurt you.
I shoved against the Red’s leg, pushing the throwing knife into its smooth skin. It howled, but didn’t loosen its grip. I got my arm under it and forced it up, relieving some pressure on my chest. It leaned forward and slashed at my throat with its claws. I bit back the scream this time because I thought it had killed me. All it took was an ounce or two of pressure to make someone bleed out from a neck wound. But the Red had shifted just enough for me to buck my hips and throw it off before my throat was ripped out. All I got were paper cuts.
We turned and twisted on the hard concrete. The Red didn’t want to let me go, but I came up slashing with the knife, just as the demon lashed out with its claws. They tore through my jacket and shredded the flesh beneath.
Pain was everywhere, but I didn’t stop moving. I grabbed my hatchet with my free hand, swinging and catching the Red in the arm with it. I’d been going to its neck, but I took what I got.
We were on our feet when the Red started slashing at me again. Now I had really made it angry. I stayed away from its claws, but was completely aware that I was being backed toward the wall. I kicked out, catching the Red in the shin. I roared in fury and swung at my head. I ducked low and shoved out with the knife. The demon batted the blade away, making it clatter on the ground.
The Red grabbed my arm and squeezed, its claws puncturing my bicep. I dodged its other strike and kicked its knee. The demon tried to pull me down with it, but I reached down for another blade. I found the holy water instead. No time to care, I thought. I popped open the plastic cap and threw it on the Red.