Demon Master (Demonsense series Book 2) (3 page)

“I was getting tired, but no way near tapped out. And no, I wasn’t feeling demon burned either. I’m fine.” That last was said with particular emphasis. Whatever he saw in her expression brought a look of frustrated anger to his face, and he began pulling off his grey sweater then the white t-shirt under it. He flung the tangled mess down beside him. “Go ahead,” he challenged. “I want you to do a deep read. That way, we’ll both be sure.”

Bree was caught off guard. She'd done only two deep reads of Daniel since they restarted their demon research. He'd agreed to allow them so she could monitor for signs of demon burn, and for any increase in the mysterious dark energy he'd developed, but they had both avoided doing it too often as it was a very intimate process. One thing that made her hesitate was that she’d have to touch him for a deep read. Not that she didn’t want to lay her hands on his pleasingly well defined chest. In fact, she wanted to far more than was good for her.
 

On the other hand, what he was offering made sense. Their original deal with each other was that she’d help him with his secret, highly illegal research into demon kind and Demon Master abilities so long as he allowed her to monitor him for the changes in energy and behavior that inevitably took Demon Masters down the road to a very dark kind of insanity. For reasons they hadn't been able to unravel, Daniel seemed particularly vulnerable to demon contact induced instability. Most Demon Masters took years to manifest the first signs of loss of control once they began to have regular demon contact and allow frequent demon possession. With Daniel, it had taken perhaps a month of frequent contact, including a case of possession, to do it. Bree had often wondered if it was because of, or in spite of, his unusually strong abilities as Demon Master.
 

In any case, here was an opportunity to check on the effects of the recent contact, as well as the regular, if brief, contacts Daniel had been having with Gelsenim as he kept the demon from bothering her. In a sense, Bree owed Daniel this deep read. He’d done so much to help her in recent months, to give her time to heal. That was what decided her.

“That's probably best,” she conceded aloud, and began rubbing her hands together to warm them. She was tired herself, but reading was her strongest talent, and even a deep read was something she felt well able to do.
 

Now that she’d agreed, Daniel began to look nervous. Not that anyone who couldn’t read tells would have known. Daniel was a fairly high powered Reader himself, but the particular magic enhanced brand of pattern recognition called reading tells was beyond him, as it was beyond most Readers. Bree could see it easily in the tiny shift of his shoulders, the slight tensing of his stomach muscles, and his steady gaze, which looked forced to her. All this added up to “nervous” in a way that was barely conscious for her.
 

Once she felt her chilled hands were as warmed as they were going to get, Bree got up on her knees and shuffled closer to Daniel, until her legs were touching his. She took a moment to calm her body’s reaction to the close proximity to Daniel. He was looking with apparent calm into her eyes now, though neither of them were precisely relaxed.
Close enough,
Bree thought to herself as she leaned forward and placed both palms against Daniel’s lightly haired, surprisingly warm chest.
 

“Whoa, cold hands!” Daniel exclaimed with a brief smile, and placed his warm hands over hers. The physical contact made the read much easier, and Bree closed her eyes and dropped into Reader awareness with a dizzy sense of transition. She started with a basic energy read and saw that as Daniel had said, he was depleted in both base and will energy, but still had a decent reserve. She would judge he was maybe seventy percent depleted.
 

If she weren’t already familiar with Daniel’s energy, she would have read him as much stronger. Daniel at twenty or thirty percent of his capacity was the equal to most high power magic users at full levels. Being open near Daniel at his best was like being next to a hot nuclear reactor throbbing with barely contained power, one that could blow and take the world down into tiny pieces with it.
 

As Bree let herself sink deeper into the read, she could sense ragged edges around Daniel’s emotional control. He was having trouble keeping a lid on the anger and shame that nearly blowing the demon banishment had caused. She’d seen him worse, closer to the edge, but it was disconcerting to realize that his surface presentation was so much calmer than what was going on underneath. She quested with her Demonsense to be sure, but there was no taint, no negative energy remnant of demon contact that was responsible for the cracks in Daniel’s control.
 

And now for the tricky part. Bree had to let herself attune very closely to Daniel to go deeper, and she had to do it without losing herself. She felt for the shape and pitch of Daniel’s energetic signature and began adjusting her own to match. As she felt the resonance flow into place, she dropped down into a level of contact where she felt Daniel’s feelings, saw images from his mind. It was a rare Reader ability, to sense such detail on a deep read, a kind of intimacy that she didn't like to have with anyone. First, she felt his anxiety that he came close to failing her, to allowing Gelsenim to possess her. And there was a guilty awareness that he really wanted to know what they might learn if Bree allowed the possession. There was a sense that he was lurching precariously back and forth between the impulse to protect her, to go slow, and his burning desire to move faster toward some solution for the problem of demon possession.
 

And she saw herself through his eyes, a warm and juicy vision looking far more attractive than she thought she was in real life. Bree tried not to be distracted by that. There was another level she needed to get to. She urged herself and Daniel deeper yet, below hopes and dreams, below defenses, into the unconscious.
 

And there it was. The dark energy she could feel as a kind of quiet thread on a surface read appeared as a turbulent river on this deeper level. Bree's mouth went dry. She had so hoped it would be gone by now. It was deeper than before, the darkness, the violence, the self-hatred. And it still had that oily feel of demonic energy to it, not taint, not possession, not anything Bree had ever felt with anyone else. Did it have to do with Daniel being a Demon Master? Was it caused by demon contact, some unusual type of early stage demon burn? Or did it have to do with emotional issues? She tried and failed yet again to get a clearer idea.
 

With a sigh, she finally gave up, and allowed herself to float gently back to the surface, slowly untangling her energy from Daniel’s as she went until she came back to an awareness of her own body. Her hands were warmed by the contact with Daniel’s chest and by his hands over hers, and she reluctantly brought them to her own lap as she settled back again on the floor across from him. Her knees ached from kneeling on the hard wood floor, and she rubbed at them. In the midst of her worry, she felt a small sense of triumph that she hadn’t fallen on Daniel with long repressed lust. Maybe she could touch him now without embarrassing herself with a loss of control.
 

Daniel busied himself with putting his shirt and sweater back on while Bree tried to find words to describe what she had read. “Okay,” she began as he got settled and regarded her warily, “you were right, you still have a good bit of energy left. It wasn’t a matter of your getting tapped out. And you don’t have taint of any kind. You feel worried to me, and frankly, I think taking the research this slow is wearing on you.”

Daniel produced a rueful half smile. “Hey, I’m working on it. I really am trying to be less obsessive about all this.”

Bree repressed the quiver in her stomach his smile awoke in her, and was careful not to smile back. “I know you are. But this isn’t exactly your natural pace. And while I know it’s my fault that we’re moving so carefully, I’ve got to tell you I can’t really be too sorry about that. Because that dark thing is still there, and it's worse now than when we last did a deep read.”

Daniel’s eyes dropped and Bree felt him retreating deep inside himself. It had been awhile since she’d seen that, and it saddened her. “I don’t know what else to call it,” she rushed on nervously. “I suppose we should come up with some kind of name for it. It’s better than it was last fall. Not so near the surface. But I was hoping avoiding prolonged demon contact might keep it in check.”

“You and me both,” he replied shortly, picking at the cuticle on his thumb.
 

“Maybe if you hadn’t had to keep Gelsenim off me all this time, it would be different,” Bree said miserably.

Daniel shook his head. “There was no choice. You needed time to get strong again. It was far too risky to allow him to contact you before. But I think you’re strong enough now.” He met her eyes in clear challenge.
 

A reflexive denial bloomed on her lips, but it died there. He was right. She’d done well today, better than she might have expected. She had ultimately taken control of the situation. “I still can’t truly banish him, or any other demon,” she reminded him.
 

“I’m here to do that,” he assured her.

“And yet today, you almost couldn’t.”

He sighed and leaned back on his hands. “I have to think that was something of a fluke. I think Gelsenim was truly desperate to get to you. You heard him say he had no hunger when he possessed you. Try to imagine what it might be like to feel full after eons of starving. If he believes you might allow him some possession time, he could be easier to control.”

“I wish I knew he could understand the concept of building trust,” Bree replied as she tucked a lock on hair behind her ear. “Not that I think I could ever truly trust him. A demon that old has to have the most unmitigated history of violence. I’m sure I can’t even imagine some of the things he’s done. Nor do I want to.”

“You can’t trust someone you can’t understand,” Daniel replied. “And we can't understand demons, or have a real shot at getting rid of them unless we have contact with them, even allow possessions. You know, in a way, the demons are the only aliens we’ve ever encountered. They’re a unique life form, and if we’re to believe what Gelsenim told us before, they weren’t always innately violent.”

“So what you're saying is that I should probably allow a possession. It should definitely be me, not you, since it didn’t appear to harm me before," Bree replied. "In fact, it worried me more how good it felt. I don’t want to get addicted."

“That is the risk,” Daniel admitted. “But we’ve just got to keep taking it slow. You’re right about that.”

“What say maybe we give it a go next Saturday? I’m afraid if we delay any longer, Gelsenim will become even more unmanageable.” Bree said, getting slowly to her feet, ready to end the tension of this conversation, of this whole subject. She just wanted to go home and curl up with a good book on the couch and forget demons and possessions even existed.
 

Daniel agreed, and he led the way downstairs to the main floor of his house. It was a building that had once been a neighborhood store and had been converted to a house. Two of the walls were exposed brick, and there were wood floors that had been waxed but still bore some of the scars of long use under the fresh topcoat. Daniel had more plants than the average guy, but otherwise, it was a typically masculine space; sparsely furnished with an old leather couch, a Navajo rug in oranges and reds half rumpled in front of it, a worn green recliner, and a round wood table in the kitchen area surrounded by mismatched chairs.
 

The paintings were the other unique feature. There were a collection of small canvases Daniel had told her were by artists he’d known and traded with back in Boston, and there were some large works Daniel had painted himself, mostly abstract takes on the New England woodlands where he’d grown up. They were all of transitional seasons and times of day: Autumn, spring, twilight, dawn. Daniel’s paintings weren’t polished in terms of technique, but they captured a dreamlike quality, a sense of the landscape as seen through a child’s eyes, when the world is full of the unseen, the half-felt wonder and fear of another world ghosting into our own. Bree’s eyes lingered on her favorite, one depicting a forest in the spring, as she got her coat on. Then she pulled her cell phone out of her coat pocket for a quick check and saw that she’d missed a call. It was a number that caused her to freeze momentarily in dismay.
 

“What is it?” Daniel asked quickly.

She glanced over her shoulder at him. “Father Steuban just called. Let me check the message.” Daniel waited while she listened to her voice mail. When it finished, she turned back to him. “Well that was fast,” she said uneasily. “He already has one for us. That’s what I get for putting out there that I was ready. He wants us to do an exorcism. Tomorrow if at all possible.”

St. Stephan’s
was Father Steuban’s parish, and Bree had been attending mass sporadically at the humble church at the north end of Seattle for the last eleven years or so. She had chosen St. Stephan’s over a number of more prosperous parishes with far more lovely churches because of Father Steuban’s warmth and kindness, as well as his understanding of demon kind. Exorcisms had fallen very much out of favor in the modern American Catholic church, and where they were practiced, they were not always done on people with actual demon possession.
 

Father Steuban was that rare priest who knew demons existed but did not, as a result, see them everywhere, in every acting out teenager, alcoholic mother or mentally ill father. There was another priest in Seattle like that, and he caused more trouble than he solved. Father Steuban also had the distinction of being a normal trusted with the secret of the existence of magic users who had the capacity to perform exorcisms. He was discreet, sensible, and had something much like low powered Demonsense. He was also disorganized, harried, and a little too fond of good food. In spite of his portly, unprepossessing appearance, he had a covey of older lady admirers in the parish, as did so many priests. He was with one of them when she and Daniel arrived for the exorcism.