Demonica

by Preston Norton

  “His name is Amon,” he said. “He’s a Demon. Although your kind would probably refer to him as a werewolf.”

  Demon? Werewolf? The way he threw around insane terms with such casualness was unnerving. Like. How do you even respond to that?

  Oh. Well, okay then.

  I didn’t even know where to start. Finally I sputtered the one question that seemed to bother me most.

  “So what are you?”

  “I’m a Demon too. You can call me Dante.”

  The living room lights of my house flickered on. Two silhouettes passed by the curtains.

  “Uh-oh. Looks like we woke up Mom and Dad.” Dante directed a distasteful glance at Casey. “You really ought to get your brother to an emergency room. He doesn’t look so good.”

  The Demon’s legs slowly disappeared in wisps of black smoke. The rest of his body began to vanish likewise.

  “Until next time, Monica,” said Dante, winking. “I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of each other very soon.”

  With that, he was gone. The last traces of black smoke dissolved into the night.

  6

  Thirteen Deaths

  It’s amazing the shit you can get away with when you’re a shaken up, teary-eyed sixteen-year-old on the verge of emotional spontaneous combustion. How exactly do you explain your brother getting mauled in the woods and then making it back home while both of your cars are parked miles away at the Saint Salazar Cemetery?

  As long as your eyes are going nuclear with the waterworks, apparently you can make anything up. The police bought it. I don’t know how or why or what the fuck, but they bought it.

  Of course, I suppose I could have told the truth…

  Ha! Right. If I wanted to spend the rest of my youth with the window-lickers at the local psyche ward. The truth of my story ended after I had followed Casey to the old cemetery. From that point on, Casey and I were chased by a bear. Like, fucking Smokey meets Satan. Chased for miles. We were just about to make it to the highway when it caught my brother. Fortunately, an 18-wheeler drove by with its high beams on, scaring the Smokey the Hellspawn off. And from that point on, I threw Casey’s arm around my shoulder and dragged him home. (And I apparently was running on pure adrenaline because any sane person who compared me and my brother would tell you that that’s imfuckingpossible.) When we finally made it to our front lawn, I collapsed, and that’s where my parents found us.

  Not a single aspect of my story was questioned. My stuttering and awkward pauses only made it more believable. Poor, traumatized girl.

  “You’re a brave young lady,” said Sheriff Patterson. His mustache twitched across his friendly face. “And your brother is darn lucky. We could use more teenagers like you.”

  Right. More lying teenagers. I’ll spread the word.

  With my mind in such a fray, my thoughts slowly wandered to Dante.

  A Demon.

  No. Demonssssss. We were attacked by one Demon and then saved by another. What was that even supposed to mean? Like. My brain. Danger, Will Robinson, my brain can’t compute this shit! Whatever the hell was happening here, it needed to stop, like ASAP, or I was gonna start licking windows on my own. Fuck you, Windex. This bitch is mine.

  And “mixing blood” with a Demon? What was that all about? Yeah, so I made Dante tangible. But could that be a bad thing? Whatever the case, I knew one thing for damn sure: If I hadn’t mixed blood with Dante, Casey and I would both be dog food. Dante saved us.

  And then, of course, there was the dagger thingy I made appear out of nowhere.

  Monica, you have the power to summon a special dagger.

  My skull was an auditorium, and Dante’s voice was and endless echo.

  Okay, brain. Time for some fresh air.

  “Monica, where are you going?”

  I had just started towards the exit sign in the ER waiting area. My mom’s head perked up from her slouched sitting position. She was otherwise restricted to that posture with my dad’s wrecking ball head resting on (aka crushing) her shoulder, fast asleep. The bags under her eyes begged for unconsciousness. The doctors told my parents that Casey would be just fine, that it was okay to leave. They weren’t having it. They refused to budge until he regained consciousness.

  It was already two in the morning. Thank god my parents insisted I stay home from school tomorrow. I was perfectly okay celebrating an early weekend.

  “I was just going to step outside for some fresh air,” I said. “Is that okay?”

  It was plainly obvious from my mom’s scrunched expression that she did not like the idea of me wandering out of her sight. Especially after tonight’s fucktasrophy. She crossed her legs, briefly exposing the star tattoo on her ankle. I was surprised when she responded with an approving nod. “Alright. Just don’t wander off, okay, dear?”

  I smiled back. “Okay, mom.”

  The emergency room hallways were quiet and slow paced as I backtracked my way to the lobby. Nurses and doctors passed by in scrubs and white coats, occasionally glancing at the clipboards in their hands. If they looked any more bored, they’d be Ben Stein clones. I wanted to be like, ‘Hey, Doc. You’re hospital is treating a werewolf victim. Cheer the hell up.’

  I stepped through the automatic glass doors. The wind gave my face a big, fat, breezy hug, and I was totally okay with that. I plopped myself against the nearest entry column, staring into an empty street. The untainted canvas of a starless night stretched over Villeneuve’s tranquil horizon. I had to just stand there and breathe in the serenity just to calm the hell down.

  “So you won’t believe what I just overheard from Deputy Dawg back there,” said a voice only inches from my ear. A voice that I recognized from only a few short hours ago.

  I nearly screamed. I would have really screamed, but my vocal chords broke into a sprint too fast, tripped over themselves, and the sound that came out was like a squeaky toy that had just lost its poor little squeaker. Nevertheless, I whipped around. Dante was only a foot away, arms folded and smiling down on me.

  “W-w-w-wha…what are you doing here?” I asked. I was wide-eyed and only a notch away from hyperventilating.

  “I told you we’d be seeing more of each other very soon,” said Dante.

  “It’s only been a couple hours! Enough time to drive my brother to the hospital and get interrogated by the police!”

  “Yes. Well. I guess I should have put extra emphasis on the ‘very soon’ part.”

  I folded my arms, matching his. “I want answers.”

  I don’t know who the hell I thought I was. Making demands to a Demon? But shit. The words were already out there. I couldn’t very well back down now, could I?

  “Answers?” said Dante. “You haven’t even asked any questions. I’ll tell you what. I’ll answer three of your questions…if you let me tell you what I heard Sherriff Patterson talking about.”

  This was the strangest negotiation I had ever taken part in. Of course I wanted to know what he overheard! But I sure wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to get more answers. And one particular question was throbbing on my tongue.

  “Okay,” I said. “Why is there a real-life werewolf in Villeneuve?”

  “As opposed to a…supermodel werewolf?” said Dante with a smile. “You weren’t expecting Taylor Lautner, were you?”

  I did not return the smile.

  “Like I said before, that ‘werewolf’—” he quoted the term with his index and middle fingers “—is actually a Demon named Amon. Let’s just say that the history of Demons in Villeneuve goes waaaaay back. Fortunately, we, Demons, don’t always cause a scene like tonight.”

  “So why are you following me?”

  “Well aren’t you a blunt little fireball. Truth is…I’m not following you.”

  “What do you call this?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Hel
ping you out? Providing useful information?”

  “And back at the restaurant?”

  “It’s quite simple really,” Dante glanced down, casually examining his fingernails. “I’m bound to your brother.”

  My rapid-fire questions sputtered to a halt. Dante’s statement was the goddamn Berlin Wall.

  “What?” I finally said. “Bound? To Casey?”

  “Well…we were. Your brother summoned me. He and I made a Deal. With a capital D, mind you. It’s a very professional Demon/human contract. Once my half of the Deal was executed, I wasn’t bound to him anymore.”

  Casey summoned a Demon? He negotiated with a Demon? I dreaded where this was going. And it bothered the shit out of me that Dante made these “Deals” sound like professional business transactions. “What was your half of the Deal?”

  “Well it’s really quite silly actually. First he asked if I could bring his dead girlfriend, Cate, back to life—”

  “HE WHAT?”

  “—Which I said I couldn’t. Demons don’t have the power to return a soul to its body properly. We can do it improperly, but that’s a mess that I’m sure you don’t want to hear about.”

  Ice pricked beneath my skin. How could Casey even consider such a thing? Let alone initiate it! I knew Cate’s death had seriously fucked him up. But this? This was a whole new level of fuckage.

  And that brought up a new question: How the hell did Casey even know how to summon a Demon?

  Dante cleared his throat, acknowledging the need for a subject change. “But back to your brother. After a brief discussion of what he wanted, we arranged a two-part Deal. I would show him how to find the thing that killed Cate. And then I would tell him how to kill it himself.”

  “And you actually let him?”

  “Hey, it’s not about me letting him do anything. Your brother is eighteen, after all. A legal adult by your culture’s standards. He summoned me. He proposed that end of the Deal. If it’s any consolation, I told him that trying to kill Amon was suicide. He didn’t seem to mind.”

  My stomach clenched. Everyone who knew Casey was well aware of his obsession. He wanted to hunt down the thing that killed Cate. It was all he thought about. But could he really have considered death as an alternative?

  I shook the thought away. Nope. Not even gonna go there.

  “So wait,” I said. “What was the other part of the deal? What was Casey supposed to do for you in return?”

  “I’m sorry, but you’ve asked way more than three questions. And quite frankly, I’m not at liberty to say. Bound by Demon contract. That’s your brother’s concern, so ask him.”

  Confronting Casey about Cate’s death. That was definitely in my top three favorite things to do. Right up there with geometry and being eaten by werewolves. But if Casey was making dipshit decisions over an unhealthy obsession, did I have a choice?

  “But back to what I originally wanted to tell you,” said Dante. “So I was eavesdropping on the Sherriff—”

  “No surprise there,” I said.

  Dante paused mid-sentence, gazing incredulously at me. “…and…I happened to overhear him mentioning some recent deaths.”

  Already, I didn’t want to hear the rest of what he had to say.

  “Thirteen deaths to be exact. And each of them has occurred in the past month. The police are going to great lengths to keep it all under wraps, like they might blow a critical lead or something. But I doubt they’ve got anything.”

  “Thirteen?” I said in my most holy-shittish tone.

  “Yep. Thirteen. And they all started shortly after Casey and I made that Deal.”

  My mouth unhinged. I didn’t have words. I watched Dante, his mouth pulled into a straight line, as if waiting for my permission to continue. It was obvious he had plenty more to say.

  “Okay, I’m listening,” I said.

  “I hope you won’t take offense to this,” said Dante, “but your brother is an idiot. I warned him about this before the Deal was ever made. Obviously, he didn’t care.”

  Pressing his fingers together in front of his lips, he stared off into space, as if pondering how best to break the bad news. Like. Shit. Didn’t I already have enough bad news? Behind his arctic eyes, I discerned vast wells of experience.

  Experience in what, I didn’t care to know.

  “There’s only way I can think to put this,” he said. “Demons have a strange mental network. We can shut some Demons out, let other Demons in. Sometimes we do things and other Demons can sense it without fully realizing it or even trying. It just depends. Usually Deals between Demons and humans will go undetected by other Demons. But in the case of your brother and me, it was a two-part Deal with the sole intent of eliminating another Demon. A Deal like that, even before it’s executed, can cause serious ripples in the Demon network.”

  “So your saying…Amon…” —the name sounded awkward rolling of my tongue— “…he knew about the Deal beforehand?”

  “Not just him.”

  “Another Demon?”

  “Think bigger.”

  Could this conversation just stop now? Please?

  “When the Sherriff was discussing the manner of deaths,” said Dante, “there didn’t seem to be a real set pattern. Some were half-eaten, some ripped to pieces, some were drained of their blood, some had their skulls cracked open and their brains devoured like a bowl of—”

  “Okay, okay, wow, I get it!” I said. My overly visual imagination was having a heyday. “So a whole bunch of Demons know about it.”

  “Bingo. Casey just kicked the hornets’ nest. You’re a smart girl, Monica. It doesn’t surprise me that you’re the one.”

  “The one?” I said. I didn’t like the sound of that. Not one bit. “What’s that supposed to mean? This doesn’t have to do with that dagger, does it?”

  “That is an explanation for another day,” said Dante. His blue eyes flicked up. “Your parents are on their way down. Casey woke up, and they just finished talking to him.”

  “What? Really?” The abrupt change of subject caught me off guard. “So…you can see stuff like that. Like visions and stuff?”

  “I catch little glimpses here and there. What do you expect? I’m a Demon. Anyway, get some rest, okay? We’ve got a long day of school ahead of us.”

  It took a moment for my brain to register that the words “school” and “us” were used in the same sentence. This conversation just kept getting worse.

  “Well I’m skipping school tomorrow,” I said. “My parents said so after everything that’s happened. And what’s all this ‘us’ business?”

  “You can’t skip school tomorrow. We’ve got work to do.”

  It was official. Dante liked being cryptic just to be annoy me.

  “Oh yeah? And what work is that?”

  “Scoping out your high school for Demons, of course. Duh! What else would we be doing?”

  “Okay, first off, why do you think the Demons are at my high school? Secondly, why do I have to find the Demons?”

  “Oh, silly me. I forgot the most important part. The Sherriff said that even though there was wasn’t a set pattern with the manner of deaths, they did find a pattern with the victims. Eight of the thirteen were teenagers—students at your high school, in fact.”

  My mouth went fucking Arizona-dry. “What?”

  “It gets better. Patterson mentioned that of the five remaining deaths, various witnesses claimed to see a teenager at three of the crime scenes. A different teenager at each one, judging from their descriptions.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense! How does no one know about this? Eight students at my high school are dead? What about their parents? There’s no way the police can keep something like that a secret.”

  “Well, that’s another thing,” said Dante. “I don’t think the police are in charge of thi
s investigation. The guy the Sherriff was talking to…he looked like some sketchy government type. Men in Black, maybe? He seemed kinda Tommy Lee Jonesish.”

  I think this was supposed to be a joke. I didn’t laugh.

  “And honestly,” said Dante, “even though the Sherriff knew about the deaths, it seemed like he was being kept in the loop on a need-to-know basis. Which is a nice way of saying he didn’t seem to have a damn clue.”

  “You think the government is covering this up? Like a conspiracy?”

  Dante shrugged. “Makes more sense than the police, doesn’t it?”

  This was all too much for me to handle. If I hadn’t already experienced a life-threatening event only hours prior, I would probably be having an anxiety attack right now. Paper bag and everything. Instead, my brain felt numb. This flood of information was spilling over the edges of my sanity.

  “But why teenagers? Why my high school?”

  “Demons love tormenting teenagers,” said Dante like this was high school 101. “Seriously, Monica. Even Hollywood knows that. Adults just aren’t as fun.”

  Ah, it was all so clear now. Dante was annoying simply by nature.

  “And to answer your other question: why do you have to find the Demons?” said Dante. “That’s because you’re the one. I already told you that.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  Dante’s usual amused smile split across his perfect face. I’m not sure what I hated more: that he thought this was all so funny, or that he looked so sexy when he made a joke out of everything.

  “Monica, there you are.”

  The voice sent me into instant atrophy. It was my dad.

  I shuffled around like a wobbling wind-up toy. Sure enough, my mom and dad were stepping outside. The automatic door slinked shut behind them

  “What are you doing?” Mom asked. She seemed visibly concerned.

  “Oh.” I flushed a nice shade of red to match my hair. I gestured a hand to my Demon stalker. “Uh…yeah. This is Dan—”

  “They can’t see or hear me,” said Dante.

  “—n-n-nnnn…” I stammered. My hand was still extended, apparently for no reason. I dropped it at my side.