Demon Master (Demonsense series Book 2) (6 page)

Father Steuban clambered painfully up to his feet and went to Geoff, who was still sprawled unconscious on the ground. While he tended silently to the boy, Bree walked over to Daniel. “You okay?” she enquired, crossing her arms in front of her.
 

He rubbed at his sweaty forehead with his sleeve and muttered, “Not really.”

“Stupid question,” she agreed, as she shifted her weight uneasily back and forth. He looked pale, and he was avoiding looking at her. She got the strong impression that he was struggling to get his emotions under control. As this was something she devoutly wanted him to do, she just stood quietly, allowing him time to gather himself. She didn’t even try to read him yet, focusing instead on calming herself.
 

“Every thing alright?” Father Steuban asked, coming up to them and laying a hand on Daniel’s shoulder. “It looked like things got pretty rough there. What happened?”

“The demon tried jumping bodies. Fortunately, my wards fought it off and I was able to complete the exorcism. It wasn't pretty, but it worked.”

Bree watched Father Steuban closely for tells as Daniel spoke, and it appeared to her that he accepted Daniel's lie. Perhaps he’d been so involved in prayer that he really hadn’t seen and heard all that had gone on.
 

“Well, congratulations, both of you. You’ve done a good thing. I’ll just go fetch some water and some things to clean up the boy,” Father Steuban said. “I’ll wait to call his mother until he’s conscious. I don’t want to frighten her any more than she already is.” He hurried off. Geoff was more neatly arranged on the floor of the sanctuary, and it looked like he was breathing easily.
 

“Well, maybe now you can tell me now what the hell that was,” Bree said quietly once Father Steuban was out of hearing range, and she was surprised at how angry she sounded. Daniel’s shoulders hunched a bit at her tone, and he stared at the floor as he said shortly, “That was a possession. I fought it off, with your help.”

“What I want to know is how the possession occurred,” Bree answered, frustrated. “How could you let it happen? You could have ordered it off you at any moment.”

“And let Father Steuban see I’m a Demon Master?” Daniel answered roughly, crossing his arms defensively as well.

“Better that than allow a possession. I trusted you!” she cried, revealing more about how betrayed she felt than she wanted to.

A muscle jumped in Daniel’s cheek, and he looked away and said tightly, “Obviously, you shouldn’t have.”

“Oh for God’s sake, don’t go all ‘I’m just hopelessly evil’ on me. I just need to know what happened here!"

Daniel huffed out a frustrated sigh, then turned to regard her, expression irritated. “I’m not sure what happened. I've never been possessed during an exorcism before. I haven't even really needed a second since doing my first few exorcisms. I've never been close to blowing it like that. And I've never been possessed except those few times I invited Gelsenim in as an experiment. And that one time..."
 

His voice trailed off, and she knew he was referring to the time last fall when Gelsenim had managed to possess him during a conflict with his psycho ex-girlfriend Franchesca. Bree knew how awful he felt about that. And she'd really believed that doing an exorcism wouldn't be a possession risk for him, or for her, because he'd be completely prepared. He'd once told her he'd successfully done over a hundred exorcisms during his time as a Keeper.

Bree felt better at that thought. She hadn't been crazy for trying an exorcism with him.

"There was this thing, I don’t know, a kind of surge or something when the demon tried to jump into me. At first, my wards were working fine, and I was focused on gathering the ritual energy to encompass it. But then this thing happened.” His shoulders jerked up into a shrug. "I’m not sure I even have words to explain it.”

“Try,” Bree said shortly, controlling the urge to grab him and shake it out of him. She realized the anger she was feeling was an after reaction to the exorcism, and perhaps even more to the sense of security she had lost in the process. She’d been so sure Daniel’s Demon Master talent made for a safety net.

Daniel looked gradually less upset and more serious as he considered. “Something inside me triggered me to drop my wards. The only thing I can make of it is that some part of me wanted the possession. Consciously, that’s not what I want at all. The idea scares the living hell out of me.” He finally met her eyes as he continued with some heat. “I know how careful I have to be about demon contact. I’m very well aware I'm prone to Demon Master instability. I would have sworn that no part of me wanted the possession.”

“And yet possession can feel good. I’ve experienced that myself.”

Daniel shook his head. “I haven’t. There's a certain buzz to it, but to me, it's actively unpleasant.”

Bree took a moment to consciously read him as he spoke, and he came across as quite sincere to her. Her anger started to leak out of her. Maybe there really was some mystery here. And maybe if they could solve it, it would be safe again for Daniel to do exorcisms if he needed to. “It seems to me a deep read is in order. I have the one from yesterday to compare it to, so it could be quite revealing.”

“Well, I’d certainly like to know if I picked up taint,” Daniel conceded, sounding more tired than anything else now. He pulled his shirt off over his head, then draped it across his back. It was chilly in the church.
 

Bree moved to stand before him, and for once, she wasn’t all tied up in knots about touching him. She still had a little frisson of unreasonable anger going to keep her libido in check. She put her hands on his chest and plunged into the read right away, and was immediately surprised at how his base energy read. He should by rights be quite depleted, but if anything, he felt stronger on that level than he had yesterday. His will energy wasn’t down much either. She forced herself to sink deeper, and what came across at the next level was how dark the energy felt. It wasn’t taint, that was clear. It felt something like depression, something like anger, and a sort of buzzing discomfort. The image that came to Bree’s mind was red and black carbonated liquid that had been shaken up and might explode. She’d read perhaps four or five people after they were primary in an exorcism over the years, and none of them had read this dark. That thing she called “the darkness” was larger and closer to the surface again.
 

She leaned a little into Daniel, an unconscious response to her activating her attunment to go deeper yet. On the feeling level, she picked up shame, anxiety, more anger, and that old strain of self-hatred and self-doubt that Bree felt was related to growing up with Demon Master and Binder talents, widely considered innately evil and corrupt. Even worse, she felt a sense of hopelessness. She couldn’t help but soften at that. She wasn’t ready to give up on Daniel, not really, and she didn’t want him to give up on himself. She pulled out of the read, and regarded him steadily. “No taint, thank God. But I really do think there’s a puzzle to be solved here. That dark thing is worse again.”
 

He squeezed his eyes shut, put his head in his hands, and clutched at his hair, as if he couldn’t bear to take in what she’d just said. Bree was taken aback at his obvious distress, in spite of the emotional turmoil she’d just read in him. She’d seldom seen him look so outwardly upset. He usually had a gift for appearing calm and in charge under stress. Unless, of course, he was freaking out and acting seriously scary.
 

Without thinking, she reached out and put a hand on his shoulder as she told him, “I really do think there’s some mystery here, and I don’t have the experience or skill to solve it. There has to be a reason your wards fell, and I think it’s related somehow to that dark energy I’m reading. I get the weird sense that it’s part of you and not part of you at the same time. And that fits somehow with your feeling that you didn’t want the possession at all, yet something in you moved to allow it.”

Maybe it was her touch, or her effort to seem calm and straightforward about it, but his posture relaxed a little, his hands dropped and his eyes opened. “You know,” he said slowly, voice a little hoarse, “what you’re describing couldn’t sound more like taint if you tried. And if it looks like taint, and acts like taint, maybe it really is taint.”

“But my Demonsense isn’t picking up even the slightest hint of taint,” Bree protested.

“And I know you’re exceptional in that area. I’m not doubting you on that. But maybe this is some other kind of taint that we don’t know about.”

“The trouble is, who can we ask about that who won’t immediately turn you in to the Ecclesias?” Bree replied, troubled. The Ecclesias would rip his powers out if they discovered his Demon Master and Binder talents, which would likely kill him.
 

Daniel still looked upset, but at least it seemed like he was thinking again, like he’d backed away from the edge of despair. He took a moment to get his shirt back on, and just then, Father Steuban arrived with a tray bearing a pitcher of water, some cups, a small bowl and some washcloths.
 

The priest settled the tray on the ground beside Geoff with a grunt, and poured out some water that he handed to Bree and Daniel, then downed a cup himself in several large, thirsty gulps. Then he lowered himself down dipped a washcloth in the bowl of water, and began gently wiping the boy’s face and neck. Geoff had foamed a bit at the mouth there at the end, and there was blood on his mouth as well where he must have bitten his lip.

By unspoken agreement, Bree and Daniel walked out of easy hearing distance of Father Steuban and settled down into a pew, grabbing their coats along the way. Bree put hers on, and Daniel draped his across his lap. After a moment, he said reluctantly, “We could ask Gelsenim. He has eons of experience with demon kind and Demon Masters. Maybe he could tell us something about what’s going on with me.”

“You know how hard it is to get coherent information out of him,” Bree replied. Daniel didn’t answer, and what he was getting at dawned on her. “Oh, you mean I could let Gelsenim possess me, then read you. That way, I’d get a clearer sense of what Gelsenim knows."

Daniel sounded a bit guilty as he said, “It might work, but I don’t like asking you to do it.”

Bree found she was more intrigued than upset by the idea. “It could work,” she said, thinking hard. “In fact, let’s do it. I was planning on trying out the trial possession thing next weekend anyway. Do you think you…” her voice trailed off uncertainly.

“Do I think I’ll be capable of calling him off if I need to? As long as he doesn’t try to possess me, I’ll be fine. That's how I got into trouble today. And he's certainly not going to try to possess me if he can possess you."

“Well, that’s a point.”
 

Geoff was starting to come around, and Father Steuban was helping him to sit up. He murmured something to the young man, but they couldn’t hear what. Bree let silence fall between them. She felt tired out from the rollercoaster of emotions she’d just been through. At the same time, she still felt unpleasantly revved up and restless with a mixed anger/adrenaline hangover. Her mind skittered around speculations about what had happened to Daniel, about her own reactions, and she finally came around to thinking more about how the exorcism itself had gone. “You know, all things considered, that exorcism went unusually quickly,” she commented. “You got the demon to the surface fast, and it didn’t take you long to raise the ritual energy. It sounded like you were invoking Norse gods.”

Daniel looked a little uncomfortable as he replied, “Yeah, well, it’s how I was taught by my father. I’m not actively into the Norse pagan religion thing, but I guess those are the deities I’m most comfortable invoking, that I have the most personal connection with.”

“What interested me most was that you didn’t seem to really attune to the demon’s energy to get a grip on it. It felt to me like you basically just powered it through, even though I never felt that you were using your Demon Master ability. That doesn’t make sense to me.”

Daniel put his elbows up on the back of the pew and leaned back tiredly. “I’m not the Reader you are, and honestly, I don't think my Demonsense is quite as good as yours either. I’m not that good at removing demon taint for that reason. The work is too subtle. For me, exorcism is more a use of Caster energy. If I can get the demon to come to the surface, I just raise a shit load of ritual energy and shape it in such a way that it encompasses the demon and forces it out.”

“But how can you feel the shape of the demon if you don’t attune? How can you feel that you’ve gotten it all out so there’s no taint left over?”

Daniel shrugged. “I’m not honestly sure how I do it. I’m reading enough of the energy signature to get the general feel of it, then I just sort of wrestle it into the ground.”

Bree zipped up her plum colored fleece jacket as she considered what he’d said. “I suppose since I’m not as much of a Caster, I’ve had to go about it another way. The only way I can get a grip on the demonic energy is to really attune to it. It feels pretty gross, but it works. It’s also the way I was taught to do it.”

“I think most Exorcists are taught that way,” Daniel conceded. “In a way, I’ve always thought of Exorcist talent as really more of a combination of Demonsense and Reader talents in people with strong will energy. They don't have to be strong Casters. Exorcist spells are actually quite simple compared to most castings. I suspect the type of will energy most Exorcists have is a sort of low level Demon Master ability. But since I’m not supposed to have Demon Master talent, I’ve had to figure out how to do it mostly on Caster ability alone.”

“I suppose that means you have less actual contact with the demon that way. That’s definitely a good thing.” She didn’t add, especially for you, but she thought it.
 

And then what the demon had said at the end jumped out at her. “Um, Daniel, didn’t that demon say something about a war?” When he didn’t answer right away, Bree felt her heart sink. “Okay, that’s a bad thing, right?”