Demonsense (Demonsense series Book 1) (20 page)

She took Bree by the hand and positioned her, placing her in the east of the circle she was forming. Bree dug into her bag of exorcism gear, although she devoutly hoped she wouldn’t have to use any of it. She wore her grandmother’s gold crucifix, along with Daniel’s protection amulet, and as she sat down, she arranged a glass bottle full of holy water, her bible, and a small jar of salt within reach at her side.
 

Sophie put a solemn looking Kevin in the south, Bruce in the north, which he occupied with a wide-legged stance, and Daniel in the center, leaving the west for herself. She did her usual consecration of the circle ritual, then began the invocations she’d devised.
 

“Spirits of the East, powers of Air,” she began, facing east, palms up, “be with us all and especially with our sister Bree. Grant her your powers of objectivity and clarity and your openness to what is new and possible."
 

She turned to the south. "Spirits of the South, powers of Fire, be with us all, and especially with our brother Kevin. Grant him your powers of energy and will so that he may hold the wards to protect those within and outside of our circle."
 

"Spirits of the West, powers of Water, be with us all, and especially with me. Grant me your powers of healing and regeneration that I might be ready to assist any here who need me."
 

She turned to face Bruce in the north, and the two exchanged nervous smiles. "Spirits of the North, powers of Earth, be with us all and especially with our brother Bruce. Grant him your centeredness and calm that he may ground us all when we are in fear and doubt."
 

Sophie turned to face Daniel, who was standing straight backed, with his shoulders squared, and her face settled into a more serious expression. "Lady of the Moon, Lady of Earth, Mother of us all, please guide and protect us all and especially our brother Daniel. Grant him your wisdom and light as he goes into the dark.”
 

Bree offered her own prayer as soon as Sophie had settled into her spot in the west. “Lord God, please help and guide us. Know that we call up evil tonight not to consort with it but only to know it that we may better protect others and ourselves from it. Have mercy on our imperfections and weakness, as these are what the demon will target. Help us hold to the good, to the light, and to your will. Amen.” Then silently, she added,
Saint Jude, hope of the hopeless, pray for Daniel.

Daniel had been facing Sophie as she made her invocations. Now he turned to face Bree. He still looked tired and drawn, and she had to remind herself yet again that he didn’t need his full base energy to do the working, as the Demon Master talent was almost all about will energy. Dion had done a healing on him four times in the last three days, but she could tell by the way he moved that Daniel still was far from recovered from the knife wound.
 

He raised his hands so his palms faced out at chest level, and said simply, “I dedicate this working to the benefit of all beings.” Then he began unbuttoning his shirt as Bree approached him. They had agreed she would do a full deep read before he called the demon to get a baseline. He had promised to drop the spell that hid his Demon Master and Binder powers for the reading. She found herself looking at Kevin for courage. He smiled slightly and nodded.
 

Bree took a deep breath and stepped closer to Daniel, and put her right hand on his bare chest. She met his eyes briefly, and felt the frisson of excitement that eye contact with him gave her. If she’d had to rely only on his facial tells to read him, she wouldn’t have gotten far. He was clearly very focused for the working, and not much else was visible on the outside. He put a hand on a bracelet he wore around his wrist, a polished green stone on a leather cord. He'd told her it was the focus for his hiding spell, and she felt a surge of some kind of magical energy as he undid the spell. She closed her eyes and tuned her Reader sense to the energy level.
 

She sucked in a hard breath as the intensity of his energy rolled over her. There was just so much of it that it was hard at first to distinguish anything more specific about it. And to think that this was Daniel without his full base energy. Her first reading of him had felt incredibly high power to her, but with the Demon Master and Binder energy unmasked, he was completely off the charts. As she began to sift through what she thought of as the different flavors of energy, she realized that the only other of his powers that surpassed his Demon Master and Binder talents was his Caster ability.
 

She searched for and found the darker feel that wove through his base energy like a ribbon of smoke. It was less than before, when she'd read him before clearing his taint. She stretched out her Demonsense to be certain, but there was no sense of remaining taint at all. She really needed to get a better feel for that darker energy, and to do it, she had to do something akin to what she did with taint clearings and exorcisms. She began attuning her energy to Daniel’s.
 

The attunement allowed her to go to a deeper level, one where she could discern not just energy, but feelings. This was as close as Reader sense got to psychic ability. It required a lot of concentration, the openness and cooperation of the person being read, and extended skin-to-skin physical touch, so it wasn’t something even a good Reader could do casually or easily. And it required a near painful openness of the Reader, a level of openness Bree had to push herself to.
 

She followed that sense of darkness down, down and in and found a well of grief and loss. She was so focused, so strongly attuned that she started to get images, something she had only very rarely experienced before. Several disturbing pictures flashed across her awareness; blood pumping past hands pressed to a thigh wound; the still, waxy face of a dead blonde woman with a gaping slice across her neck; a man clutching a raw, burned shoulder and screaming; a funeral in the snow. Fellow Keepers, she thought, or perhaps victims of demons Daniel had seen in his work as a Keeper.
 

A number of other images went by too fast for her to register, then finally, she saw a montage of memories of one person at many different ages. A curly headed little girl; a pretty, flirtatious teenager in a bathing suit; a beautiful dark haired young woman with deep brown eyes, a look of contempt twisting her features. They pictures were accompanied by a welter of conflicting, despairing feelings of love, fear, fury and self-doubt.
 

As the images faded, Bree felt another thread that throbbed with dark energy, and traced it. It led to a place she had trouble finding words for. Focus? Drive? Perhaps obsession? Something Daniel had to know, to prove, something with a desperate feel to it. Bree instinctively felt this was a place a demon could enter. Grief and loss were good entry points as well, but this felt darker. She pulled back another level, widening her focus, feeling for other emotions. Yes, there was the focus she saw on his face, some nervousness, but more determination and confidence. And
that
, she felt with a little jolt, was sexual energy. And it was building.
 

Her awareness returned to her body with an uncomfortable snap, and Bree realized that she'd moved closer to Daniel during the reading, probably in response to trying to go deeper. Her cheek was resting against his neck, and the whole right side of her body was pressed up against his. She felt flushed and aroused, and that startled her, though if she were honest with herself, she could hardly claim it was unexpected. Pressing up against Daniel Thorvaldson’s body had come to feature prominently in her fantasies of late in spite of her attempts to banish the thoughts.

She pulled back and dropped her hand, then forced herself to look at his face. His lips twitched into a complicit smile, and she knew without a doubt that he'd perceived both of their sexual responses to standing that close. She said, with an effort at keeping her voice calm, “Just meditate for a bit, and then I’d say you’re good to go.”
 

Bree gave her libido strict instructions to cease and desist, and went back to her spot in the circle, reflecting on the read. He wasn’t tainted, and although she’d seen some dark energy, it didn’t feel at all like demonic energy. She was, truthfully, no more concerned than she’d already been about proceeding tonight, although considerably more curious to know more about the images she’d seen. But at least now she’d have a good idea if contact with the demon affected him negatively with a deep read as a baseline.
 

They all settled down on the floor and meditated until Daniel stood again, saying, “I’m ready.” He glanced around the circle to check that everyone else was good to go. At their nods, he raised his arms with a small grimace of discomfort as the gesture pulled on his injury, and spun slowly in a circle, raising a final level of warding between him and the others. Then he called, in a shockingly loud voice, “Gelsenim, I call you! Gelsenim, I command your presence!”
 

There was a long, electric pause, then Bree felt a rush of heat and her Demonsense erupted into clamoring life as a form started to take shape in the air in front of Daniel. At first, all she could make out was movement and sharp edges appearing, then disappearing. The form elongated, the movement slowed, and a figure started to emerge. The feet coalesced first, naked, with ruddy, alligator-like skin, long toes, and toenails painted with what looked like red nail polish. Muscular legs came into view next, human shaped, and an appallingly huge phallus appeared, erect, scale covered and mobile, waving about as if looking for something to impale. The torso materialized, more red in tone than the legs, and the demon's chest was adorned with a swirling pattern of small, white chips. The demon moved, and the light struck the pattern at an angle, making it sickeningly clear to Bree that the tiny white squares were teeth, children's teeth. A row of short spikes ran along its spine. The arms and hands came next, with fingers ending in claws rather than fingernails. Finally, the horn topped head came into view, face dominated by a large hooked nose, fiery red mouth, and blazing orange eyes.
 

“Daniel, how kind,” the demon growled. “You brought me some women!”
 

Panic washed over Bree. The thing was huge, not just in form, but in energy. Daniel had warned her he was calling an Erekim, the strongest type of demon, but she'd never encountered one before, and the reality was terrifying on a deep, instinctual level. The demon turned to look directly at her, and she had to remind herself that Daniel had a ward between her and that thing. Its eyes held an avid malice. There was blood, and screaming, and a terrible lust in those eyes.
 

“Hardly, Gelsenim. I just brought a few powered to help out, to keep things civil,” Daniel replied, his tone no longer overtly commanding, but cool and very firm.
 

“Oh, you’re no fun,” the demon complained, its form wavering around the edges, then dissolving completely to re-form into that of a small blond boy. The boy looked pleadingly up at Daniel. “Can’t I have just a little fun? I really am hungry. Just a little sip? It doesn’t have to be one of the women. How about that one, there?” it said, pointing at Kevin. Kevin clenched his teeth and narrowed his eyes. He looked stern, but Bree saw he was sweating.
 

“Come on, Gelsenim, you should know by now that I’m not going to let you eat,” Daniel chided, crossing his arms in front of his chest.

“You let me feed from you that one time. Why can’t we do it again? How about another experiment?”
 

Bree's initial terror was giving way to curiosity, and she was able to focus more closely on Daniel. She read embarrassment in the way he shifted his weight, in the slight straightening of his spine, although his expression remained serious and focused. He’d let the demon feed from him?

“You might as well drop the little-boy-lost routine,” Daniel continued more matter-of-factly. “It really doesn’t affect me one way or the other, and I know it’s a difficult form for you to hold.”

The demon looked around the circle of people, studying each of their faces in turn before it went through a quicker transformation. It was still a little boy, but this time, the face and form was Hunter’s. Kevin jerked in response and made a small noise. Bree felt the outer wards waver around her, but they quickly stabilized.
 

“Ah, I see you all care for this one,” the demon hissed in its own deep, gravelly voice, disturbingly incongruous coming out of Hunter’s mouth. “So young, so tender. I will be sure and give him my special attention when I find him.” The demon's form burst into flames, and a desperate shrieking emerged as it's skin blackened and curled, as if Hunter was burning to death.

Bree glanced around and saw that everyone’s faces were as stiff with the effort of showing no reaction as hers felt.
 

“As you see, my people are strong,” Daniel said smoothly. “And you are in sacred space here. Your power is limited. Since you can’t break free, and you can’t eat, why not talk?”

The demon stared hard at Daniel. The fiery form wavered, as if in indecision, then it dissolved again, into a swirl of red, brown and orange that took longer to solidify. This time, it coalesced into a handsome man, decked out in a tuxedo with a white bow tie, blond hair slicked back, with just a hint of orange spark to his blue eyes. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes, flipped open an old-fashioned silver lighter, and lit up. As he did so, Bree saw his fingernails were painted red. This form put her in mind of Noel Coward, with it’s relaxed posture and expression of jaded amusement. She had never seen a disembodied demon take such detailed and solid appearing human form. She noticed, however, that no smoke was coming from the glowing end of the cigarette.
 

“Ah Daniel,” the demon sighed, “you really are a stick-in-the-mud, old chap. Talking, talking, talking. Questions, questions, questions. Where is the amusement in that? We could be having it on with these two lovely ladies instead. I’ll take the pretty brown-haired lass, and you can have the curvy darling over there. I'm being generous, you realize. Big girls are usually a better fuck. So comfortably padded.”