Demon Within
The Silver Legacy, Book 2
Alex Westmore
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Demon Within
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So you’ve just scored your very own copy of Demon Within. Awesome! Hey, you know what’s even more awesome? I want to give you a present as my way of saying thanks for checking me out. Yes, indeed, I’ve written a free short story just for my newsletter subscribers. You can grab your free copy at www.AlexWestmore.net/Newsletter. Happy travels!
Alex
Demon Within
This demon fought harder than any other she’d faced. Maybe because he was of a higher level than those she’d recently destroyed, or maybe he just recognized the imminent threat Denny posed and fought harder to stay alive.
Did he underestimate her as so many others had, or just overestimate his own abilities?
It didn’t matter.
Either way, he was toast.
Like others before him, this one would die a horrific death––the proper death for an evil being.
Snapping open her sword-like chain whip called Fouet, Denny Silver stood with her feet shoulder width apart. She whipped expertly over her head and Fouet crackled and popped like a power line as it sliced through the muggy night air, spitting and sizzling as if alive and desiring nothing but the taste of demon blood.
Fouet was an amazing tool…a killing machine that could sever limbs and destroy any demonic weapon it faced, and this demon knew all too well what would happen if the razor whip managed to strike home.
And it would.
The demon dodged left, the chain biting off the top of his ear and part of his eyebrow; blood flowed freely from both wounds as he clamped his hand over the cuts and cursed loudly.
In her left hand, Denny held Epée, a scimitar-shaped sword that crackled with the same kind of electricity as Fouet. Both weapons were of ancient origin and had a slight electrical glow about them. They were sharp, shiny, and capable of shearing through flesh and bone without slowing down.
Ancient weapons for an ancient job.
As she brought Epée down toward his head, the demon lifted the bat he’d been using to pummel a gang member and tried to deflect the blow.
He was completely out-weaponed and outclassed.
Epée easily cut the bat in half, the sword taking the demon’s nose and biting through his lower lip as it did. Blood poured from his face.
“Jesus!” The demon yelled, now trying to staunch the blood flow from his lip with his other hand.
“Jesus can’t help you, demon,” Denny said, whipping Fouet for a second pass at the demon’s neck. He ducked and swept his leg out, taking Denny off her feet. She landed with a thud on her back, both weapons still in her grasp.
She expected the demon to jump on her, but as she scrambled to her feet, she saw him disappear around the corner.
“Motherfucker,” Denny growled. The voice was not her own, but one she knew well by now.
Sprinting after the demon, Denny rounded the corner straight into a two-by-four that clipped her in the forehead, sending her sprawling hard on the ground. Fouet clattered from her hand, immediately retracting into the silver cylinder that housed it. All she had now was Epée.
“You never learn, do you, hunter?” Now the demon was on her, his hands around her neck, squeezing with all his might. “You got lucky before, but you’ll never kill me, rookie.”
Denny had little training, but knew she had one shot at his throat. One shot. Demon or not, the human body could only withstand so much. The Adam’s apple was just one of many Achilles’ heels on the body and when Denny drove her fist into it, the demon gasped, then fell backwards clutching his throat.
Denny scrambled for the whip and flicked her wrists as soon as the cylinder hit her palm. Her weapons lit up the air around her as she took the ready stance, Fouet crackling in the darkness as if hungry for flesh and blood.
It was hungry: natural for these supernatural weapons to want to bite into flesh.
They weren’t the only ones.
Denny felt the demon within, her Hanta Raya. It filled her entire being like expanding air in a balloon. The Hanta that possessed her had been dormant inside her for six years, but now that it was awake, it came to her whenever she was in danger. It came like a gust of wind that billowed a sail and filled her spirit with energy more powerful than any drug.
The Hanta Raya was a spirit eater, a demon that craved the souls of other demons, and it was hungry for the soul of this foe. Ravenous. It wanted to feed.
And she would let it. She would let her own demon consume the spirit and the energy of this one because this one demon in the alley was evil incarnate. Could and would. Unlike the Hanta Raya, which was a spirit inhabiting a human body, her attacker was a demon physically walking the earth.
The Hanta Raya would not let this pissant demon hurt Denny or another human again.
Ever.
“Bring it, chump,” Denny’s demon voice growled. “I’m just getting warmed up.” The Hanta slowly took over the majority of Denny’s body, filling her muscles with fast pumping blood, giving her a strength and a power she did not possess on her own. When the Hanta took over, Denny felt invincible, strong, fearless.
And she developed quite a sailor’s mouth.
“Come on, fuckwad. Take your best shot.”
The demon in the alley shook its head as it watched Fouet crackle and whip back and forth over Denny.
“You’re going to take on a Hanta without any weapons? Are you stupid? An intellectual deficient? An idiot? What the hell is wrong with you that you would think you were a match for me?”
The demon looked around for a weapon.
Denny jutted her chin out. “There’s a steel pipe over there. Why don’t you try that one on for size?”
The demon glanced quickly at the pipe and then back to Denny. “That some sorta trick?”
Denny crackled the whip. “Go on. Go for it. You think you’re such hot shit, let’s see whatcha got.”
When the demon scrambled for the lead pipe he lost his right arm to Fouet.
“Fuck!” The demon stared at his useless appendage lying on the dirty parking lot as if it were a dog that had just shit on the ground. “You ain’t got what it takes to control that Hanta, Golden Silver. It’s gonna eat your soul for lunch and everyone else you know and love. Mark my words. They always do.”
The Fouet snapped back into the cylinder. “Oh, I don’t want her soul. I want something altogether different.” Denny put the cylinder back in the inner vest pocket that the weapon called home. Denny was a passenger in
her own body now, having allowed the Hanta to take over, which it did whenever a situation got too out of control…something that was happening more often lately. “You wanna live, all you gotta do is tell me who set my brother up for that murder. Give. Me. A. Name. And I’ll let you live.”
The demon was bleeding out. “No way. I know you never keep your word, Hanta. Hantas lie all the time.”
With Epée in her left hand, Denny walked toward the demon. She caught a brief glimpse of herself in a store window...or at least the self that came out to play when the Hanta Raya emerged.
It wasn’t pretty.
Glowing red eyes were the only outward indicator that a normal human might think bizarre...well, that and the voice. The Hanta Raya had a voice that sounded like Denny had swallowed gravel with a gasoline chaser after smoking six packs of cigarettes.
The Hanta was somehow connected closely to her senses. She’d only discovered she was possessed by a demon three weeks ago, and there was so much to learn. So very much. She knew virtually nothing, other than what it felt like when it came to life and the power she had when hunting other demons. She had learned so little in these three weeks––just that she had inherited the demon within her from a family legacy over seven centuries old––a legacy many other demons had spent the better part of the last three weeks trying to destroy.
The line of demon detritus she’d shed was long, as Denny had carved and whipped her way through dozens of fiends in human skin on their way to test their mettle against the newest legacy demon hunter––against her. They wanted to kill her family and destroy her Hanta. They wanted her and the rest of her family dead.
She had other plans.
Denny had but one goal: to find the demon responsible for setting up her brother, Quick, for a murder he did not commit. And she would stop at nothing until she crushed that demon and helped her brother out of a sentence and a fate he did not deserve.
Whirling around toward the one-armed demon, Denny smiled the grin of the Hanta Raya–– evil, malicious, and antagonistic. “Give me a name or you’ll discover there are things worse than dying.”
The demon stumbled as he backed away. In human form, a demon can only be truly killed by special weapons that demon hunters carried with them, and the only time they appear demonic is right before they combust.
Denny didn’t want this one to combust.
Not yet.
“I...I’m not even sure it was...him.”
Denny couldn’t believe how strong she felt as the Hanta flowed through her. “A name, my one-armed friend, and I’ll let you live to see another day. Just one name.”
The demon looked left. Then right.
“You’ll never make a run for it without bleeding out first, and then I’ll have to chase you down in the next body you inhabit. And if I have to do that, your next death will be your last. So give me a name.” Denny placed the tip of the sword upon the demon’s chest. “Or my face will be the last thing you see.”
The demon blinked and swallowed loudly.
“You have five seconds. One.”
The demon held his bleeding stump in the air.
“Two.”
“Fine! I don’t know for sure, but I know a guy who knows.”
Denny waited.
“He’s a bartender at the Black Stallion. That’s all I know. I swear.”
Denny grinned. “You know, I swear a lot, too, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the centuries, it’s that a demon’s word doesn’t mean shit.” With one powerful thrust, Denny shoved the sword completely through the chest of the demon, who looked down at it, back up at Denny, and then opened his mouth to say something as he exploded, sending bits of flesh and blood all over. The only thing left was a small pile of flesh at her feet.
She smiled as he put Epée away. “There’s no honor among us, dumbass.”
Denny felt the Hanta recede back into whatever depths it lived inside her. It seemed to come and go at will. Again, one more item on a very long list of things she did not know about the demonic world or her own personal demon. Someday, she would go back to the demonological education she’d started with Ames Walker three weeks ago. Someday, she would resume reading about Legacy demon hunters and the demons they passed down through the generations.
Some day.
Not today.
Today, she was awash in demon blood. Today, she’d rid the world, or at least Savannah, of one piece of the evil puzzle that shoved her brother into an eight-foot by eight-foot cell.
Today, she was content with drawing the blood of a mid-level demon and continuing her rounds in search of others who could help her help Quick.
Today, she was just fine being…
The demon hunter.
Denny walked back to the edge of the city, stopping along the way to wash the blood from her face in one of the many fountains scattered throughout Savannah. Why did demons always explode? Perhaps it was Fouet and Epée’s power. She’d probably know that if she’d remained in her training, but she hadn’t.
Had she delved deeper into the three thousand demonology books in her lair or finished reading her mother’s demon hunter journal, she would know, but she hadn’t made the time. She was too busy on her quest to get her older brother out of jail to bother with her mother’s journals or the minutiae of her new craft. She would have to change that, of course. She would have to crack them open eventually and see if they could shed some light on the reason the demons combusted, on how and when they took over the host, and on any number of important topics.
But right now, she needed to track down the demon who worked at the Black Stallion and see what he might know about what happened the night of the murder. Freeing her brother was the only item on her daily agenda, and she’d been skulking around night after night ever since she discovered what lived within her. Ever since everything in her world was turned upside down.
Ever since her lover disappeared into the mists.
As she walked through the darkened alleys and back streets of Savannah, she did so without one ounce of fear––without the slightest hesitation, compliments of the Hanta within.
A Hanta Raya, as Denny had discovered three weeks ago, was said to be the master of all spirits. This particular demon feasted on the spirits of other demons, of darker demons. The darker the better, and it was Denny’s job to keep it fed. Over the centuries, the Hanta/host relationship was one of symbiosis…mutual need. And her demon had lain dormant for so long, the hunger was intense..
The mid-level demon she had just killed would sate her Hanta’s blood lust for the time being, but it wasn’t the soul she craved. No, that was something darker, much darker than the cretin she’d just killed.
As she walked along, eyes scanning the ominous shadows of a city filled with demons, the scents of Savanna filled her nose, reminding her that she was, indeed, human, even if she didn’t always feel that way. A combination of chicory coffee and wisteria wafted into her nose, reminding her that not everything in the world was sinister.
As she stopped to gaze into the depths of one alley’s darkness, her cell phone vibrated.
She saw her best friend, Victor, calling, but she let it go to voicemail. She knew he was worried about her. They all were. Denny hadn’t been the same since she’d discovered what she truly was. She’d received nearly three dozen such calls in the last three weeks, and she’d handled each one the exact same way: ignoring it.
One second she had been a normal college kid with little to worry about except grades and parties, and the next, she was out killing demons and wearing their guts on her clothes.
Since then, she’d dropped out of college and spent every night roaming the shadows within shadows of Savannah looking for the demon responsible for sending her brother up the river with a life-in-prison sentence.
Nothing else mattered to her but her family.
She hadn’t let anything keep her from her nightly rounds.
So when three punk teenagers started wolf
-whistling at her, she just kept going. Humans did not interest her unless they were possessed. All they did was get in her way, and Denny didn’t have time for their bullshit.
When one of the punks stepped in front of her, she shoved him so hard in the chest that he landed twelve feet away on his back. The other two boys just stood there with their mouths open.
“Fuck off, boys, before someone gets seriously hurt.” Denny’s voice was deep and gravelly, but she was still in control
“What the…how the hell did she do that?”
Denny stopped and turned to the other two hoodlums. “What’ll it be, fellas? Wanna get your ass kicked by a woman or you gonna leave me the hell alone?”
The two boys wearing dark hoodies parted like the Red Sea and let her through.
“Good choice. I’ve already killed one asshole tonight. Let’s just leave it at that, shall we?” Denny continued toward the Black Stallion, unmolested.
The BS, as everyone called it, was a shitbag little bar that had never had a better day. From the moment it opened, it stood as such a dive that only the truly brave went there for a drink.
When she walked in, a few people looked at her, but the din made it too difficult to see the remnants of the demon detritus still clinging to her clothes. Bellying up to the bar, Denny ordered a shot of whiskey.
“Where’s that other bartender?” Denny asked when the current bartender set her half-filled shot glass in front of her. The amber liquid appeared alive as it rocked back and forth in the small glass.
“Rocky?”
Denny laughed. “His name is...Rocky? What’s his real name?”
The tall, rugged-looking bartender just stared at her. He wasn’t the only one. “Miss, you look around you? You’re in a gay bar. No one goes by his real name in here.”
She stared down at the whisky she seldom ordered and swirled it slightly. “I see.”
Though there were demons walking this earth, perhaps the greatest evil lay dormant in those bottles on the wall. Dormant, that is, until their contents made their way down the gullet, where they worked voodoo magic, changing the very nature of the drinker.
The Demon Within (The Silver Legacy Book 2) Page 1