Demon Master (Demonsense series Book 2) (16 page)

Just as she started to really think the words,
I’m dying,
she suddenly remembered she had help, if she would only ask for it. Trouble was, she couldn’t speak. Doing her best to shut out the pain, the panic, she focused all her will energy and called, in her mind,
Gelsenim, I call you!
 
Gelsenim, I command you!

It took a moment, but faster than she had hoped, she saw the demon take shape in his human form right behind her attacker. She couldn’t get the air to say it, but she consciously dropped her personal wards and formed the words with her lips. “Possess me.”

In a flash, the demon was inside her, filling her body with a sense of heat and sparkling power.
Allow me to help you, my host. You need a telekinetic spell.
 

Instantly, the spell appeared in her mind, and focusing the last of her fading will, she formed it, invested it with her base energy, stronger by many magnitudes now that she was possessed, and flung it straight at the chest of the boy strangling her.
 

The boy simply flew off of her and slammed into a boy and a girl wrestling on the ground behind him. Bree desperately pulled air into her straining lungs.

Up on your feet, my host,
Gelsenim’s voice chided in her mind.
Your opponent is down but not defeated.

Bree did as she was told. The possessed boy was getting up as well, a look of rage on his face. Bree was terrified of closing with the boy again. She had more confidence she could cast a paralyzing spell with Gelsenim’s help, but she’d have to touch the boy to do it, given how unskilled she was still.
Yes, I can help you with that,
Gelsenim whispered.
You have the form of it, I will boost the power. You must try to get behind him where he can’t get hold of you.

“Good idea,” Bree said aloud. She feinted to her right as the boy approached, tried to dodge left, felt her foot slip on the sand, and at the last minute, before the boy could reach her, threw herself as hard as she could right again. She slipped again, but the boy just missed her, and she managed to get a hand on his arm as she went down into the sand. She threw the spell into him as hard as she could. There was a palpable sense of power in it, and it felt good.
 

The boy stiffened and went down. He nearly got his face stepped on as a fight careened past, and Bree winced. Just as she managed to crawl over to him, Kevin appeared. His jacket was pulled half off one shoulder, and his nose was bleeding, but otherwise, he looked all right.

“My god, it’s a full out riot,” he panted.

“I know,” Bree replied, voice coming out in something of a croak due to her abused throat. “Help me pull this kid out of here.”

Kevin got hold of the boy’s shoulders and Bree picked up his feet. The demon inside the boy glared out of the boy’s eyes at her, but it was staying put inside the boy, which was the best case scenario at this point.
 

They managed to get him to a clear space past the edge of the crowd. As Bree straightened up, she could see the riot had spilled over from the beach onto the street. She heard the sound of glass shattering, but couldn’t see if it was one of the storefronts or a car that was being vandalized. The kids on the beach were in a whirl of motion, and the sounds of screams were frequent.
 

It was overwhelming. She quickly considered her options, and decided the most help she could be right now was to work on exorcising the demon in the boy, given she was unlikely to be much help in breaking up fights, even with Gelsenim’s help.
 

Gelsenim said in her mind, voice wry,
Must we banish the poor demon? The food here tonight is rich. If you will but allow him to stay awhile longer, he will not feel hunger for many days.

“Too damned bad,” Bree snarled, and earned a confused look from Kevin. He didn’t have Demonsense, and had no idea that she was possessed.
In case you hadn’t noticed,
Bree continued mentally,
things have gone to hell in a hand basket here. People are going to get killed, if they haven’t already.
She slung her daypack off her back and began getting out her supplies. “Get a ward going around us,” she told Kevin as she pulled out a bottle of holy water and a vial of salt. She started to pull out her bible, but shoved it back into the pack. It would be faster to just use some simpler prayers for the exorcism, and anyway, the bible would look weird in this setting.

Why do you object so strongly to the death of these?
Gelsenim went on as she worked.
The existence of you humans is temporary. Their lives will end soon anyway.

I object because every life has value, no matter how short,
Bree replied.
Now, would you save the damned philosophical questions and let me work here?

Bree found it easy to engage the demon possessing the young man lying on the ground in front of her. It was already close to the surface, and it already knew she had recognized it.
 

Getting it to admit its existence wasn’t hard. Getting its name was. After about the fourth try, including the failure of contact with holy water to spur the demon toward cooperation, Gelsenim offered,
My host, if you will allow, I can order this one to leave.

Bree was tired enough and worried enough to seriously consider it. She glanced around, looking to see if any other powered were nearby. She didn’t see anyone she knew, but she decided not to risk it. All she needed to make her life really wonderful was to be labeled a Demon Master.
No,
she told the demon,
let me do this the old fashioned way.

It took another ten minutes, but she was finally successful in exorcising the demon. The boy was unconscious but breathing, and he looked much younger and much smaller than he had when he’d been strangling her. She and Kevin dragged him further down the beach and arranged him under a park bench in hopes of keeping him from being trampled if the crowed surged in that direction.
 

“Now what?” Bree said anxiously, looking back the way they’d come. There were flashing lights from police cruisers illuminating the scene and she could see some police officers in the crowd, and heard the muted sound in the distance of someone talking through a bullhorn.

“They have to be sending for tear gas or something,” Kevin said, pushing his glasses up his nose.
 

“Who knows how long that will take? I think our best bet is to keep locating the possessed and taking them out. But I’m worried about Daniel. I’d like to find him.”

“In all this?” Kevin gestured at the crowd ahead of them. He shook his head. “I doubt we could find him at this point if we wanted to. I suspect you’re right, and we’d be more use focusing on possessed. The conflict is likely to be most violent around them. Which raises the problem of how to do it without getting killed.”

“Are you up to another ward that will repel physical contact?” Bree asked.

“For short periods of time. I’ve been saving some energy back in case I have to do more of that.”

“Well, get ready, that might be what it takes to get us into position safely.”

As they set off back toward the milling crowd, Bree realized she was limping.
 
She felt like she’d bruised her hip on a rock one of the times she’d been pushed to the ground, or maybe someone had kicked her, she couldn’t remember. Her throat was killing her, and she brushed a careful hand along it, feeling for the extent of the damage, but she couldn’t tell anything by feel.
 

My host, if I may make a suggestion,
Gelsenim said diffidently.

Go ahead.

In the past, when I have possessed high power Readers, I’ve seen that some are able to read patterns in battle in such a way that they can avoid harm. Might you have that ability?

Bree only had to consider a moment before she remembered experiencing something like that in the only full scale battle she’d been involved with. “Kevin, wait,” she said as she stopped in her tracks and tried to do as Gelsenim had suggested. She opened her Reader sense wide, and at first, all she got was chaos. The night was awhirl with energies of all kinds, confusing her senses.
 

But gradually, a pattern emerged. And once it occurred to her to think of it more in terms of tells, tells of the crowd, it all started to make sense to her. She could see a nexus of trouble, energetically and based on the flow of movement of the crowd, and she could see a relatively safe path to get there. “Okay, follow me, and be ready to ward us both,” Bree told Kevin.
 

It took some careful dodging, and some shoving on Kevin’s part, but they quickly got to the area she was shooting for, an island in all the physical conflict where a group of kids were standing around in a circle. There was a tall, gawky girl at the center of it, maybe college aged, with chin length dark hair curled up on the ends, in a short pink and green plaid jacket and low rider jeans. A boy was kneeling in the sand in front of her, shirtless, and the girl had a gun pressed into the boy’s forehead.
 

A jolt of terror went through Bree. Somehow, she hadn’t been expecting a gun. The girl was possessed, and this demon was a big one. And she hadn’t the slightest idea what to do to intervene. If she startled the girl, she might shoot. Of course, she might shoot anyway.

Kevin took a step forward, and said firmly, “Okay, that’s not funny. Put the gun down, you don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

“Oh, but I think I do!” the girl replied, eyes widening disturbingly.

Ideas, Gelsenim?
Bree asked desperately.

A telekinetic spell, well aimed, could knock the gun out of the girl’s hand,
the demon replied.

Even if you boosted my casting power, I don’t have the fine control. If I do it wrong, I could make the gun go off.

Almost before the thought was complete, the gun jerked right out of the girl’s hand, high into the air and over the heads of the circle of young people. For a moment, Bree thought Gelsenim had done it somehow, through her, but then she saw Daniel walk into the circle, holding the gun.
 

“Did you lose something?” he asked the girl. Strangely, the boy kneeling in front of the girl hadn’t moved. He looked dazed and glassy eyed, and she wondered if he was on something or had been hit in the head at some point.
 

“Give me that!” the girl demanded, hand outstretched, with that irritating, nails-on-chalkboard tone that indicated the demon was in full control.
 

“If you want it, come and get it,” Daniel said with a taunting smile.

Well played,
Gelsenim commented.
He draws the girl away from the crowd.

It seemed Gelsenim was right. The demon possessed girl followed Daniel as he walked backwards. The kids in the crowd made way for him at the sight of him holding a gun.

Kevin took the opportunity to wade into the group of kids. “All right, you guys, look around you. People are getting hurt, things are out of control. If you have half a brain in your heads, you’ll get out of here as fast as you can.” He literally grabbed a couple of them, and began shoving them toward the more lightly populated end of the beach. He seemed to be having some effect, so Bree grabbed a few kids herself. The first three gave her a startled look, then obeyed, but the last one pulled away so hard he clipped Bree on the chin with an elbow. Her head jerked back, and she heard Gelsenim hiss inside her,
Allow me to punish him, my host!

No, no, what are you talking about?

He harmed you!
the demon protested.

It was an accident. Jeez, bloodthirsty much?
 

I will try not to be if it disturbs you,
he replied with a sudden meekness Bree didn’t trust. She studied the crowd around her. Things were breaking up a bit on this end, but glancing behind, she saw the riot was still in full swing. Looking up towards the street, she could see the glass fronts of some of the stores had been broken, and looting was in progress. She heard sirens off in the distance. She’d lost sight of Kevin, but as she looked around, she saw Daniel. He had retreated close to the water, the girl following him. If the demon possessing the girl hadn’t felt so powerful to her, she would have left him to it. But if he was going to try to exorcise that thing without using his Demon Master abilities, she wanted to be there for back up, because she couldn’t help but remember what had happened to him during the last exorcism. So much for her idea that she wouldn't let him take primary. She was desperate enough that she had to trust Daniel to stay in control.

The water was calm and black, lapping the shoreline in gentle waves. Daniel was standing with his back to it, having lured the girl well away from the crowd. “I see you, demon,” Daniel was saying as Bree approached. He was totally focused on the girl and Bree didn’t know if he’d seen her approach. She wondered if Daniel might take the risk of just ordering the demon out when she heard Dion’s voice raised somewhere behind her, shouting, “I said you ought to be ashamed of yourself, beating on a girl like that!” Bree saw Daniel’s eyes flicker as he registered the familiar voice. Well, there went that easy option.

How about another one of those nifty paralyzing spells?
she suggested to Gelsenim.
 

I am happy to assist,
he replied smoothly.

Bree approached the girl slowly from behind. The girl was saying, “It’s mine, give it back to me!
 
I want…”
 

Bree froze when the girl stopped talking, but it was too late. The girl jerked around and saw Bree just before she got close enough to touch the girl. “Keep away from me!” the girl screeched, tripping back a few steps towards Daniel, then turned to face him again. “Don’t you touch me either, I’ll call the cops!”

“Nice try, demon, but I know just how unlikely that is,” Daniel replied as he shoved the gun into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back. Then he raised his hands sharply, palms forward to either side of him, and Bree felt a ward go up around all three of them. The girl’s head jerked back and forth as she tried to keep both Bree and Daniel in her sights. Bree decided against trying to touch the girl, opting instead for raising the ritual energy for an exorcism. “Mother Mary, hear my prayer,” she intoned aloud, and started pacing a circle around the girl. She felt Gelsenim stir uneasily inside her.