Demonsense (Demonsense series Book 1) (21 page)

“Why do you do that?” Daniel asked with real curiosity. “Why do you continue to try to frighten and offend when we’re so well warded you can’t feed from it?”

“Oh, habit, duckie, I’m sure it’s mostly habit,” the demon replied in a world- weary tone. He put the lighter into his pants pocket and tossed the pack of cigarettes into the air with a lazy motion. The pack vanished as it left his hand.

“Tell me the truth, now, Gelsenim,” Daniel commanded, and Bree felt a vibration in the air as the force of his Demon Master energy moved against the demon.

“Well if you
must
know, I do it because that’s what you expect of me.”

“You’ve spoken of this before,” Daniel said intently, stepping closer to the demon. “There’s something about our expectations that shapes you. Something you’re reading from us. Or something in the collective unconscious of our species. We expect certain things of you, and you give it to us, but in a way that serves you, that feeds you. What would happen if we expected something different from you? What if we decided you were angels, and were here to help us? That would cause all kinds of intense emotion. Why can’t you feed from something like that?”

“I don’t know,” the demon replied, taking another drag from his non-existent cigarette. “You seem to think if you just ask the question in another way, I’ll know the answer. And I simply don’t. Did your God make me this way? Did your Satan? I haven’t met either of them, so I don’t know. All I know is that I’m
hungry
,” the demon said with a sudden snarl, “and you are keeping me from my dinner."
 

“Why are you taking this form now, to talk to Daniel?” Bree blurted out, moved by intuition rather than by any fully formed thought.

The demon glanced at her, and the orange light in its eyes flared brighter. The muscles of its face shifted to some combination of rage and agony, then back to amused indifference, almost too quickly for her to track. Although she knew Daniel had control of it, she immediately regretted calling its attention to herself.
 

“I don’t know that either, beautiful. You know, you really do have the most luscious lips. I have some lovely ideas for those lips.”

“But if it’s your habit, as you called it, to take frightening or disgusting forms because that’s what we expect you to do,” Bree went on doggedly, “why take this one? I doubt that anyone here is expecting you to take it.”

The demon was silent, but Daniel remarked, “He’s taken this form with me a couple of times before. The last two times I’ve called him, in fact. I don’t think this is a form I’ve ever associated with demons, so I don’t see how he’s getting it from me.”

“Are you getting it from Daniel? And why are you talking so much? I’ve seen my fair share of demons, and they almost never talk like this. Is it because Daniel expects that of you too?” Bree asked.

“I bet you give good head,” the demon reflected, staring at Bree. It took another, luxurious and suggestive drag of the cigarette. “You know, I once had a host of mine cut off a particularly fine pair of lips as a keepsake, but they just weren’t the same once they were off her face.”
 

“Gelsenim,” Daniel snapped, “answer her question!”

There was a long pause. “I got it from Daniel,” the demon answered, reluctantly, even hesitantly. “All of it. He wanted me to talk, so I talk. He, he…” The demon came to a halt, then continued more slowly, almost as if it was interested in its own answers. “He wanted me to be something else, something not so disturbing.”

“And do you like this form?” Daniel asked, getting on board with the direction Bree was heading.

The demon glanced down at itself, and ran a hand over the black silk lapel of its tux. “You know, I do rather like it,” the demon mused. “Dashing, don’t you think?”

With a start, Bree realized she was supposed to be monitoring Daniel. She’d gotten distracted by the drama playing out with the demon.
 

“Now why would a demon enjoy being dashing?” she heard Daniel ask as she carefully focused back in on him. Without physical contact she couldn’t do a deep read, but she could get some sense of his energy level. She found it lower than she expected, verging on dangerously low, in fact, and she narrowed her focus to his face. There it was, in the muscles around his eyes, the angle at which he held his hands, and in the slight forward hunch of his shoulders. He was tiring fast, but he was so intent on his control of the demon that she wasn’t sure he was aware of it. She couldn’t say anything out loud to him about it, because she didn’t want the demon to know Daniel was weakening. They had a pre-arranged signal, and she used it now, rapping four times on her bottle of holy water with her claddagh ring, producing a muffled ringing. Daniel didn’t show any sign of hearing it.

“I like to be dashing because it’s much easier to seduce the women that way,” the demon went on, and without warning, it turned and lunged toward Sophie, but was pulled up short by Daniel’s wards. Sophie's lips moved in prayer, and she stared over the demon's shoulder. Bruce's brow was furrowed in anger. Bree caught his eye and shook her head slightly. Unfortunately, she was too late. The demon turned to look at Bruce, and said, “Is she yours then? Would it bother you very much if I took her here, on the floor? If you like, I could pluck out your eyes first. That way, you won’t have to watch.”

Bree had never seen Bruce wear such a look of cold hatred before. The demon was clearly starting to get to him. She focused in on Daniel again, trying to catch his eye, to give him the sign he needed to wrap things up, but he didn’t notice. His dark eyes narrowed in thought as he said, “I don’t think that’s it at all, Gelsenim. I think you’re more than just your hunger, and this form allows you to explore that.”

The demon flicked its cigarette butt onto the carpet and ground it out with his heel, and it promptly disappeared. “That shows just how little you know,” it replied, a petulant tone to its voice. “There is nothing but the hunger, there is never anything but the hunger.”

 
“There has been something new among your kind lately, a new ability,” Daniel continued. “The fact that you can grow and learn in this way tells me there's more to you than the hunger. It’s an ability to mask demonic presence to some degree, to make a demon or its taint seem less than it is. Do you possess this new ability?”
 

The demon was engaged in straightening its imaginary shirt cuffs. “Why would I want to tell you that, dear Master?” it asked archly.

Daniel raised a hand and clenched it into a fist, and the demon suddenly, shatteringly, howled. “Yes, yes, I have it!” Its beautiful face was twisted with rage, bones and muscle moving beneath the skin in a manner nauseating to watch.
 

“And what do you use it for?” Daniel persisted, leaning forward, all his focus on the demon.

“It’s easier to avoid Exorcists, easier to break free of them if they can’t read us. We can stay longer in our hosts. It makes us harder to find,” the demon grated out.

“And where did you learn it?”

The demon started to laugh, a nearly hysterical laugh, with a metallic overtone that made everyone in the room wince in discomfort. “From you, you idiot, you dupe, you
fraud
. From how you hide what you are. I learned the spell from you! And I taught it to all my kin, just as fast as I could. Who is Master now?”

Bree turned a shocked look on Daniel. Had his hiding spell taught the demons how to hide their power signatures?
 

Daniel’s face was a study in cold control. “I am your Master. You have intelligence, you have a drive for self preservation, and you may have won a round, but I am your Master.” He raised his other hand, and clenched that as well.

“Stop!” the demon screamed, its form melting and reforming in flame, and spines, and orange eyes that grew until they were the size of Daniel’s body, bumping up against Daniel's ward near Kevin. Bree tapped her ring hard on the bottle again. While the ward was holding, and he looked outwardly as calm as he had throughout, Bree was now reading Daniel's base energy as nearly used up and his will energy as a ghost of what it had been at the beginning of the ritual. She was starting to feel frantic that he wasn’t hearing the signal, that he would lose control of the demon. Her mind flashed on an image of him burning just like Seth had, and the demon’s eyes whirled to focus on her, pressing to the farthest limits of the wards, less than a foot from her face.
 

Finally, she felt angry. She would not be intimidated, would not allow this monster, this
thing
to hurt anyone. She got to her feet, one hand clutching the crucifix around her neck, the other grabbing up her bottle of holy water. As she touched the ward between her and the demon, her hair blew up in a silky nimbus around her head. It was one like this who had killed her Seth. "Alright, you son of a bitch," she snarled, looking right into the demon's burning gaze, "That is enough!"
 

Her Demonsense was a violent pressure in her head. She dropped her crucifix so she could work at the lid on the bottle of holy water. As she did so, he saw Daniel move out of the corner of her eye, and shot him a look. His fists were still raised before him, but he was sweating now.
 

"Gelsenim, I command you, leave this place," he commanded.
 

The demon's eyes wavered and began to dissolve into an orange-red mist, and Bree was about to heave a sigh of relief when the mist brightened again, and the demon took the form it had started with. Dear god, Daniel was too weak to banish it! She wrenched the lid off the bottle, dipped two fingers into it, and made the sign of the cross over her body and on her forehead.
 
She started to chant, "Lord God, prepare me for battle. Lord God, prepare this space for battle with the dark."
 

The demon slewed around to look at her again, and this time, Bree avoided eye contact, focusing instead on preparing energy for an exorcism spell. She pulled focus in record time, and as she chanted, she felt the ritual energy building. She started grabbing up the energy that had already been created when Sophie cast a circle, and wove it in with her own, until her body throbbed with it.
 

"I am hungry, and I will have you, beautiful one," the demon hissed at Bree.
 

"Come on, Daniel, let down the ward. This one offends me. Give me a chance to take him out the old fashioned way," Bree improvised. She couldn't let the demon know Daniel was weakening.

Daniel shot her a burning look. "I don't think so," he said, voice gone to steel. He turned back to the demon, determination evident in every line of his body. “Gelsenim, I dismiss you! Gelsenim, go back to your place of origin and do not approach until I command you again!”

The demon exploded into a cloud of hot steam and vanished.
 

Chapter 11

Daniel
was engulfed by steam, and Bree couldn’t tell if he’d been hurt. Very gradually, the steam cleared and she could see he was still standing. His hair and clothes were soaked, and his eyes were closed. One hand was pressed up against his side. Sophie sprang to her feet, and she and Bree instinctively tried to move toward Daniel, but the wards stopped them.
 

“Daniel,” Kevin said firmly, “release the wards.” There was a long, anxious pause until Daniel finally opened his eyes, waved a hand, and moisture-laden air rushed out into the rest of the room. Bree and Sophie each took one of Daniel’s arms and eased him down to the ground. He sat staring sightlessly off into the corner, hunched over, one hand still protectively on his side, the other lying weakly, palm up, on the floor.
 

Bree cast her Demonsense quickly around the room, then let it quest out into the rest of the house, then further, to the widest extent she was able. No taint, no demon sign. “It’s okay, Kevin,” she said, and Kevin released the outer wards with a huff of breath. He took off his glasses and rubbed sweat off his forehead and out of his eyes. His shirt had wet circles under the arms halfway down his sides.
 

Sophie had her fingers on Daniel’s wrist, taking his pulse. Bruce muttered, “Holy shit, holy shit,” as he slumped against the wall. Sophie shook her head, and Bree registered for the first time that tears were leaking steadily down Sophie’s face.
 

“I knew it,” Sophie said angrily. “I should have listened to my gut. This was too much, too soon. He’s set himself back. Bruce, get some water. And bring up something to eat. His base energy is too low, he needs food.”
 

Bruce got to his feet with a groan, then leaned over, tipped up Sophie’s chin, and gently brushed the tears from her face. “We’re all okay love, we all made it. Let the mama lion rest.”
 

Sophie leaned her face briefly against his fingers, then said, a touch of her usual confidence back in her voice, “To work, you. Kevin, help him, would you? We could all use food and water.” She leaned over to her left, grabbed up her ritual knife, and made a door shape in the air to make a passage through the sacred circle.

Bree moved to kneel in front of Daniel. His eyes were still open, but he didn’t seem to see her. Bree slid both hands through his dark, otter pelt hair, squeezing the water from the steam out and back away from his face. She let one of her hands drop down to rest against his neck, and shot a worried glance at Sophie when he showed no response. She was appalled at how weak he looked. He had shown no outer sign of weakness while the demon was present. She wasn’t sure what to make of his sudden collapse.
 

“Daniel, honey, let Bree read you,” Sophie said gently.
 

Daniel heaved a sigh, then replied faintly, “Okay.”
 

Bree quested outward again, into Daniel, searching for any sign of taint, for any increase in the dark strain, reminding herself to keep more physical distance this time as she worked toward the deeper levels. Her adrenaline was up, and it took longer than usual to get a full read. She sought the shadowy area she was looking for, and when she touched on it, her heart gave a sudden gallop. It wasn’t taint, and yet it was something. There, where it had been before, but worse, like a deep bruise, a dark welling under the surface, slow and sluggish. Somehow, contact with the demon made this part of his base energy worse, although she would swear it wasn’t precisely of the demon. It was something she didn’t know how to articulate.