Demonsense (Demonsense series Book 1)

by Sara DeHaven

  “Are you ready to handle it now? You could probably get away with leaving it for another couple of weeks if you really didn’t feel up to it. At the size I’m reading, that’s about as long as you could go without any risk of it evolving into a demon. Any longer, and you get into that area where it gets hard to predict how fast it will turn.”

  “No,” Daniel sighed. “No, if it’s okay with you, I’d rather just get it over with.” The half smile appeared again, and for the first time, Bree felt the frisson that told her some of the attraction she felt was mutual.

  Daniel stood up and gestured behind him. “There’s a little bit of a back yard out that way. It’s fenced and private, and it’s already warded. Kevin did the honors as a kind of housewarming gift.”

  Kevin was no Reader, and had zero Demonsense, although he was always thinking he was sensing demons. But he was a high power Warder. “That sounds perfect,” Bree replied. She could clear taint inside with no trouble, but outside was optimal. It was interesting that Daniel opted for outside as well. It was a more traditional form of working.

  She went to get her coat and followed Daniel out his back door. There was a small brick patio, some empty clay planter pots, and a ten by twelve or so patch of grass well infested with moss. It was misting with rain, and Bree shivered inside her coat. Daniel walked the perimeter, obviously double checking the wards, which Bree could have told him was unnecessary. If Kevin warded a place, it stayed warded. While a group of powered could break such strong wards, no normals would get past them. They would simply lose the will to approach the house.

  Daniel cast a sound stop spell with a quick pass of his hands over his ears and a pivot in a circle more graceful than she would have given him credit for seeing how tensely he seemed to be holding himself. He faced her, and she nodded. He lowered himself down onto the grass, unzipped his sweatshirt and unbuttoned his shirt again, this time all the way. Bree couldn’t help but notice that he was one of those guys who had a fine, dark line of hair going down the center of his stomach from his chest hair, continuing past his navel and disappearing under his jeans. She had the impulse to see where that line ended. Must not think of taking off his pants, she chanted to herself several times. Lord, but this attraction thing was a distraction.

  She knelt on the ground beside Daniel, grimacing as her jeans immediately became soaked at the knees and tucked her hair behind her ears to keep it out of her way. Daniel closed his eyes, and Bree looked down at him, struck suddenly by his vulnerability. Could she really do this, after so long?

  It’s only taint, it’s no big deal if you can just concentrate. She forced herself to run through some memories of the many taints she had banished. Clearing taint wasn’t without danger, but if you knew what you were doing, and the taint wasn’t too large, it was a relatively easy working.

  Bree narrowed in on feeling her base energy, then the shape of her will energy. She drew a marker out of her coat pocket and marked ward circles on her palms. She drew the three wavy lines for water to fight fire, the rayed crown for light, the sword for cutting ties. She drew in a breath and activated the wards. Then she leaned over and placed one hand on Daniel’s chest, another lower down, just above his belly button. He was cold and wet from the rain. His eyes opened again and he looked up at her, the nervousness in his expression plain, although she suspected he was trying to hide it. She nodded at him again, then closed her eyes and reached out with her Demonsense and touched the taint.

  Slowly, she let her base energy subtly attune to its vibration. The more attuned she got, the sicker her stomach felt. Sweat broke out on her forehead and between her breasts, but she kept with it. She had to attune first so she could feel and find all of it. The attunement fully clicked in, and she reached out to feel the size of the thing.

  As she engaged her will energy to move to the next phase, she felt the taint surge up against her wards, then through them, up her hands, and into her arms in a rage of heat. She started to panic, sent her base energy and will energy to feed her wards, but the taint kept coming, kept growing. It felt big enough to be a demon part, not just taint. God, no wonder her wards weren’t holding it, they weren’t meant for something this big! They were slowing it down, but they weren’t stopping it. The taint was far stronger than it had felt during her read. How was that possible? How could this fucking disaster be happening to her again?

  Her eyes flew open, and she could see the heat haze in the air around Daniel’s chest and her hands, moving up her arms, flickering red along the edges. It was going to be like what happened to Seth, and that boy Jeremy, her mind gibbered. She wasn’t going to be able to stop it. With one this large, if its energy wasn’t contained in the banishment, it could feel threatened and burn one or both of them, maybe even enough to kill them. She felt the taint surging back and forth between her and Daniel, straining to use their energy to break loose now that she had disturbed it. Her wards weakened, and she knew, she knew it was going to get away from her. Daniel’s body started to jerk under her hands, and an agonized groan escaped him. She opened her eyes and glanced down at him for just an instant, and she felt a righteous anger break lose inside her. “No, you bastard!” she gritted out, and she reached deep into her base and pushed.

  She immediately felt increased resistance as the taint responded to the boost in her energy. That level of resistance implied the beginnings of sentience, and that was very bad news. Her mind raced as she pushed harder, visualizing her energy as heavy, glacial blue ice moving against the heat of the taint. If this was a demon part, the very beginnings of a full-fledged demon, what she really needed was the ritual energy raised in an exorcism. It’s a little late for that, she thought desperately as she felt the taint inch further up her arms. If it got all the way up and into her chest, she was done for. Once it entered her body fully, it could take over her energy and use that to burn her.

  She had to find a way to push it out of her without sending it back into Daniel. And the only way to do that was to get full control of it. Just pushing back against it wasn’t going to work. It was clear she was losing just straining against it, energy against energy. She had to focus on attunement again. But it was a risk. She’d have to alter her energy focus from resistance to acceptance. If she did it too quickly, the taint would surge into her body. She had to pace it somehow.

  She imagined the ice where her energy met the taint’s heat beginning to melt. And where the ice melted, she opened up to attunement. In an exorcism, that was her greatest strength. She had a better than average ability to match her energy to that of a demon’s, which allowed her a greater skill in manipulating the energy. But she could tell that the base and will energy in her body wasn’t enough to move the taint, even with full attunement. Without the energy raised by exorcism rituals and spells, she just couldn’t get enough leverage on the damned thing.

  The attunement was nearly complete now, but she was losing ground inch by inch. She felt the heat rising up toward her shoulders. She could tell by the intensity of the heat that the taint was intent on burning, not just possessing. Her concentration wavered as images of both her and Daniel going up in flames intruded on her consciousness.

  Daniel moved under her hands, and she became aware of him again. She could feel his chest rising and falling in the hard jerks of hyperventilation. She stole another glance at his face. His eyes were still closed, his brows furrowed in pain. God, what a horrible shame if someone of his amazing, high power potential was killed by an inept taint clearing.

  Like a rock falling on her head, it hit her. Daniel was high power. If she could somehow tap into his base and will energy, it might be enough to help her move the taint. She’d never tried such a thing before, never heard of sharing energy with someone taint infected to remove the taint itself. If she'd never heard of it, it probably meant it was a bad idea. But with the heat bleeding into her shoulders now, she didn’t have time to come up with anything else.

  Instinctively, she reached for an image
to help her divide her attention between pushing against the taint, attuning with it, and reaching out to attune with Daniel’s energy. The taint was red heat, the resistance still glacial ice melting in a wide band of attunement along its edges. To this she added a two pronged blue-green light emerging from that attunement, one arm reaching out to connect to Daniel’s body, another to connect with the center of her own chest. She felt again for his energy signature, that multi-colored, shimmering lake of blazing power inside him, and shifted the blue-green light to attune with those colors. Then she drew on that light, hard and fast, pulled it toward her own body.

  It lit her up like fireworks exploding. She rocked back at the impact and almost lost control of the structure of energies she was balancing. With an effort more intuitive than thought out, she threw the energy around the taint, through her attunement with it, and pushed again.

  The heat rushed back down her arms, until it rested between her palms. She reached out with her will energy and felt the thin line of the taint connected to Daniel’s body through her remaining attunement with him. She pulled that in too, cut the whole package loose, and squeezed the rest of it out between her hands.

  “In the name of God, in the name of the light, I release you to earth,” she sang out. She thrust her palms against the grass and felt the heat of the taint being sucked away from her, into the ground. An ear splitting shriek sounded and was cut off suddenly. Bree sank back onto her heels, panting, and did a final sweep. She’d gotten it all. The taint was banished. Hell, it was exorcised, and without any of the proper preparation.

  She looked back at Daniel and he was sitting up, his knees raised, elbows on them, his face in his hands. It took her a moment in her rattled state to see that his body was starting to jerk with sobs, though he wasn’t making any sound. Her Reader sense reached out automatically to scan Daniel, and she was inundated with an agonizing mixture of despair, fear and shame. She needed it to stop, but she was too charged up by the near disaster with the taint to get control of her Reader sense, and it just kept coming. She was trembling all over with after reaction, both hers and Daniel's, and tears started pouring down her face.

  Bree moved behind Daniel and wrapped her arms under his, palms on his chest, and held him to her, cheek against the back of his head. She didn’t often touch a subject like this, but she was too tired and frazzled to resist her damned, over-active Reader empathy, and it was the only thing she could think of to get his feelings calmed down so they would stop flooding her. She held him while he released the huge amount of negative energy that had been tied into the taint. She couldn’t imagine how he could have held one that size and not started to show signs of demon possession. That she would have sensed the minute she met him.

  The rain came down harder, and as Bree’s terror started to quiet, she became more aware of the comparative warmth where their bodies touched. She also started to notice she was enjoying this a little too much. She liked holding him, probably any man would do, as long as it’d been. Gradually Daniel’s silent crying and shuddering slowed, then stopped. He stirred under her hands, and she removed them from his chest and sat back on her heels. He rubbed at his face for a minute, and Bree did the same, trying to erase evidence of her own tears. Then he surged to his feet, turned, and held out a hand to pull her up. He pulled harder than she expected, and she had to catch herself with a hand on his shoulder to keep from plowing into him. He looked down at her seriously, the rain dripping from his wet hair and down his face. Then his mouth turned up in a rueful smile. “Well,” he said, “that was, ah, rather awkward.”

  Bree was surprised by a sudden rush of anger. She jerked her hand out of his and pushed off against his shoulder, stumbling backwards in the process. “That was rather fucking dangerous!” she spat out. “I don’t know what the hell that was, but it was way more an exorcism than a taint clearing. And that shouldn’t be possible. None of this should be possible!”

  Daniel's face went stiff. “I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Bree started pacing around the small space. “The taint,” she said, “if it even was taint, was huge. It might have even been a demon part. And I should have sensed that. I’ve never been wrong before about the severity of taint, and only twice on the size of a demon. It was a heartbeat away from getting out of my control, and it was big enough to burn us both. How could it hide itself like that?”

  Daniel was watching her as she paced. “I don’t know Bree, I honestly don’t know. I was preoccupied with staying open and allowing the working, so I didn’t sense any details. And I swear I wasn’t even sure it was taint.”

  “And that’s another thing,” Bree said, facing him. He took a half step back from her as she continued. “How could you not sense that thing in you? I heard you battled the Keltoi, and I figure that makes you a Keeper. So you must have Demonsense. One that big should have registered with anyone with a lick of Demonsense.”

  “Well it didn’t. Look, there’s obviously some mystery here, and I’m happy to discuss it, but can’t we do it inside?” he asked, holding his palm up to the rain.

  Bree’s anger started to drain out of her as she realized the absurdity of ranting about outside. He was right, they should go in, and besides, she needed to get some food, pronto, to replenish her energy. Her legs were still shaking. “Okay, let’s go,” she conceded roughly.

  Once inside, Daniel rounded up some towels for her, then disappeared upstairs to change into dry clothes. When he came down, rubbing at his hair with a towel, he had a blanket draped over one arm. Bree had a towel around her shoulders and had hung her wet coat up on the back of one of the chairs. She was cold and miserable.

  “I could, um, loan you some clothes or something,” he said awkwardly. “Or maybe this blanket would help?” It was big enough to have been dragged off his bed.

  “Yes to the blanket,” she said. She took it from him and put it around her shoulders on top of the towel. He rustled up some saltines and cheese and a package of chocolate covered graham crackers, the latter of which Bree began devouring immediately. Daniel didn’t try to talk to her until she’d had six of the cookies. One of the nice things about being around other powered was this unspoken understanding of what it took to recover from a working. You could be a total pig without worrying about a lick of judgment. He poured out more tea, then sat fiddling with his teacup and half-heartedly nibbled at a cracker until she paused in her decimation of his cookie supply and looked up.

  “So I’m sorry for snapping at you out there,” Bree began a little sheepishly. “That thing, whatever it was, scared the crap out of me. I could tell when I did the reading that you really didn’t know you had something that serious going on, and I shouldn’t have implied you held something back from me.” Daniel's body relaxed quite suddenly, like strings holding him taut from the ceiling had been cut. “But I think we should try to figure out what that was and where you might have gotten it, because something that good at hiding itself is dangerous.”

  Though visibly less tense, he still looked drawn. “You know, like I mentioned earlier, I dealt with an Utukku about two months ago. That’s the last exorcism I did. I can’t say I was the happiest camper you’ll ever see before, but things did kind of go downhill for me after that. You guessed right that I was a Keeper, and I’d been at it a long time. That exorcism just seemed like the last one I had in me.”

  He paused and took a drink of his tea, seemed to consider for a moment, and Bree got the impression that he wasn’t sure how much more personal detail he wanted to disclose. But he seemed to decide it was relevant, because he continued in the same vein. “I knew I was pretty burned out before that. You know, Keepers get trainings on burnout, just like normal cops, but after the Utukku, I just felt done. And I guess that could be significant. Taint can certainly suck the hope right out of you.”

  “But taint can take awhile to manifest to the level where you show significant behavior change, something serious like quitting y
our job,” Bree argued, hands clutching her cup for warmth. “And the way that thing reacted when my will energy touched it, it seemed more sentient than taint. It felt more like a demon, or rather a demon part that had nearly grown up. And yet I could have sworn you didn’t read as possessed.”

  “I’m not sure I can say the desire to quit as Keeper was exactly sudden,” Daniel said slowly. “But, when I really think about it, I felt pretty, I don’t know, pessimistic right after the exorcism, and for some time after. Well,” he laughed shortly, “more pessimistic than usual. Like you might with taint.”

  “What can you tell me about the Utukku?” Bree asked intently. She was surprised she was asking. Asking for details could start the nightmares again, and they'd just died down a couple of nights ago. They'd been bad since Jeremy's exorcism.

  Daniel leaned back in his chair, teacup cradled against his chest. His eyes narrowed as he thought. Bree registered that the sweater he had put on was blue, as was the blanket draped around her. As had been his sweatshirt jacket and shirt. Keeper blue or something more personally symbolic?

  “I got called in on the Utukku by a powered woman who thought her husband had been acting weird enough to be possessed.” Impatience crept into his voice. “She’d kept making excuses for him, I think, didn’t want it known he’d been taken, so his case was well advanced. Anyway, there’d been a rash of light powered tending dark in Boston and D.C. in the last year. It really had the M.O. of one demon jumping bodies. Definitely going mostly after prominent powered, but it never seemed to stay long in one body.”

  “So, a smart demon,” Bree mused.

  “Smart demon or Demon Master directing a lesser one,” Daniel replied. “But the pattern was strange. The possessed would get greedy, take up study of dark lore, get ruthless or violent in a minor way in business or personal life for a couple of weeks or months, but none of it seemed to add up to any master plan. No particular business seemed targeted, no one too high in government, normal or powered. So we were thinking free demon rather than mastered demon. Bailey, the Keeper I was working with on the case, helped me corner the demon in the husband. We got it controlled enough to talk to it a little before we exorcised it. We were surprised it was an Utukku. Neither of us had picked up that it was that big. Mostly all it would say were threats, you know, ‘I will eat you,’ ‘I will destroy you, and all your line,’ the usual stuff. But it also said, ‘I am a new kind. No one can find me, no one can master me.’ ”