The First Sacrament (The Demons of Stone Chapel Book 1) (4 page)

My thoughts faded to a static that intensified as I approached the main entrance. By the time I allowed myself to stop moving, I wasn't thinking at all.

…And yet, I was content. I didn't try fighting it, this feeling that I wasn't completely myself. On the contrary, I welcomed it. It helped me realize that everything Demon-Rosie said was true. I
was
a miserable screw-up. My parents were dead because of me. I couldn't pay my bills because I was lazy. Selfish. I didn't believe in God. I cheated on last week's math test. I pushed anyone who tried getting close to me away. I was going to die alone.

This church was my salvation. I had to atone for my sins, beg forgiveness for leading a life of ill repute. I had to go inside, collapse at the altar, draw my blade across my throat. A sacrifice in blood. A small price to pay for an eternity in paradise, and all I had to do was―

Boom!

A scream curdled in my throat. I spun around on the heels of my boots, heart pounding rapidly against my ribcage. The static in my skull fizzled to nothingness as I squinted into the shadows. Whatever terrible presence that had somehow wormed its way inside of me was gone. I felt like Beatrice Todd again. Mostly.

“What the
hell?
” I sucked in as much of the damp September air as I could. A thin layer of sweat beaded on my forehead and dizziness rocked me in its disorienting grip. I’d need to check with Rosie, but I was pretty sure the church just tried to possess me. Or something like it.

I stumbled away from the doors on trembling legs, too terrified of what I'd see if I looked back. This was a horrible idea. What was I thinking? Demon hunting?! I barely even knew how to use my gun. I was an idiot. A stupid, stupid
idiot.

Another loud clap exploded from above, followed immediately by a crackle of lightning. That explained where the first boom came from. I'd never been so grateful for a storm in my life. If it hadn’t thundered…

God, I didn't want to think about it. I wanted to go home, take these stupid boots off, and go to sleep.

Unfortunately, the road to hell was paved with good intentions and the best laid plans never went without a hitch. Especially if said plans were made by me.

I didn't even make it out of the churchyard when I heard it. A snarl that rumbled through the electric atmosphere, a killer noise that sent a jolt of fear down my spine. That fear spiked to blind terror as the source of the growling stepped forward. First the church tried possessing me and now a demon dog was going to maul me.

Tonight was
really
not my night.

Four

When I was eight and living at the orphanage, I begged Mother Arden for a dog. She let me down gently, saying we didn’t have room for a one, but like any proper eight year old, I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I got mad. Threw tantrums, refused to eat my vegetables. If that Annie girl could have a dog, why couldn't I?

My underdeveloped brain saw her rejection as deprivation. Ten years later, I more than understood Mother Arden's decision. Not only was there no room in the cramped orphanage for a dog, the risk was simply too high.

Possessed, a dog wasn't a dog.

It was a monster.

A monster standing four feet tall with bundles of hard muscle rippling underneath its glossy black coat, with matching rows of yellowing fangs and paws the size of my head. As if that wasn't bad enough, it occurred to me as it prowled closer that something was missing. Eyes. This dog didn't have any
eyes
. In their place were bloodied stitches, empty sockets sewn shut.

My stomach flipped. I was going to have nightmares for weeks.

“Nice doggie,” I said, trying to avoid looking at its disfigured face. My voice shook. “Good doggie.”

Unfazed by my placation, the dog snapped its jaws, long strings of drool dripping onto the grass. Lightning forked across the sky, briefly illuminating my dark world in a flash of brilliant purple. The dog's gargantuan head swung to the side, distracted by something neither of us could see.

This was the opening I needed. It was now or never. Withdrawing my gun, I aimed and prepared myself to fire when another shot rang out. The dog fell to the ground with an unceremonious thud. Blood pooled in the grass from a perfect entry wound on the side of its skull.

My jaw dropped.

“Who's there?” I demanded into the dark, hoping I sounded more confident than I felt.

“Put the gun down, darling,” my intruder/savior answered from somewhere to the left. “You're going to hurt yourself.”

This lady obviously hadn't gotten the memo. Telling me to do something would make me want to do the exact opposite. I wasn't putting my gun down. No way.

The voice, prim and very British, sighed. “Please don't do this. Put the gun down and we'll talk. You owe me a favor, don't you? Since I saved your life and all.”

Ugh. She was one of
those
people. Turning in the direction of her sigh, I lowered my gun. Just a fraction. Easily remedied if she decided she didn't want to play hero anymore. “I'll put it down if you come out.”

She scoffed. “Come out? Darling, I came out in 1986.”

“
Ha ha.
” I might have thought it funnier had the circumstances been different, but considering everything that happened within the past fifteen minutes, I couldn't help but be wary of the gun toting British woman hiding in the dark like a narrator in a Jane Austen movie.

“I know, I’m hilarious.”

Her voice wasn't disembodied anymore. It was right behind me, so close that I could feel her breath on my neck. Stifling a yelp, I whipped around, nearly smacking her in the face with my pistol. Oops.

Her brow furrowed and within the space of a second or two, she seized my gun, unloaded all the bullets, and tucked everything away in her coat. “You won't be needing this old thing.”

“Hey!” I said. “That’s my property, I paid for that!”

She skipped the apology part and went straight to the interrogation. “What is your name?”

I crossed my arms over the logo on my chest. “Who wants to know?”

“Are you always this rude?” She asked.

“How do I know you're not a cop or something?”

She didn't
look
like a cop, more like a model straight off the catwalk. Her beauty was the dangerous sort, the epitome of femme-fatale wrapped in a black dress, a leather jacket, and a pair of knee-high boots. She had that statuesque figure a malnourished twig like me could never achieve, a tangle of ink colored hair, dark skin, and cheekbones sharper than a butcher's knife.

Eat your heart out, Brigid O’Shaughnessy.

“Because you and I have similar goals,” she said. Her gaze dropped to the dead dog at our feet. “You were attempting to hunt this creature, I assume?”

Attempting. Failing. Same thing. “Yeah, I―”

“You're aware such things are illegal?”

“What do you care?”

“I don't.” She crouched down, long fingers brushing the dog's eye-stitches. “Help me move this to the street.”

“What?”

“Have you gone deaf? Help me move this to the street.”

Knowing she'd pull the I Saved Your Life card if I refused, I braced one end of the dog while she braced the other and we did an awkward crabwalk over to the road, putting the dog underneath the yellow glow of a streetlight.

“We'll need to finish the cleansing process before it rains,” the woman mused, casting an upward glance at the sky. “You have chalk in that backpack of yours?”

“Yeah,” I unzipped the front pocket and retrieved an entire box of the stuff. I meant to toss it to her, but she gave me a look that made me rethink my decision.

“No, no, darling,” she said. “You do it.”

“You're kidding, right? I've never done this before. I'll screw it up.”

She raised a single perfectly manicured brow. “Now is your chance to learn, then.”

Another good point. I had to start somewhere. Especially if I wanted this hunting thing to pay my bills. Putting my backpack down, I plucked a fresh piece of chalk from the box and reached for the diagram of the banishing seal in my pocket. Drawing it wasn’t hard. I wasted many a math class practicing. The main design was simple: A triquetra enclosed within a circle, which was then enclosed in an inverted triangle, followed by yet another circle, then completed with a slick of the banisher's blood in the middle. Place the demon in the center, mumble a string of Latin words, and bing, bang, boom, no more evil spirit. Easy as pie.

Bolstered by newfound confidence, I put my chalk to the asphalt and began drawing. I’d gotten half a triangle done when Gun Toting British Woman intervened.

“What are you doing?” She asked.

Was that a serious question?

“What you told me to,” I said, affecting her haughty accent. “Have you gone deaf?”

She placed a hand on her hip. “Are you trying to summon another demon or banish this one?”

“What?” I asked, unable to think of a wittier response.

Her perfect posture slackened, her amused expression turning exasperated. “Are you daft, girl? You wanted to play hunter and you don’t know the proper way to draw the seal?”

“You didn’t let me finish!”

“Because you’re drawing it the wrong way.”

“I barely drew anything!”

“Counterclockwise,” the woman demonstrated as such with a twirl of her finger. “You must draw the seal in a counterclockwise manner to banish a demon. Drawing it clockwise would be pointless because clockwise is for
summoning
, yes? Surely they teach you these things.”

Oh. Right. Counterclockwise. I knew that.

Ashamed of my rookie mistake, I erased my half-triangle with my sleeve and started again. The seal had to be big enough to hold the demon in its entirety and since the dog was roughly the size of a small horse, the finished product took up half the road.

“Not too bad,” I said, taking a step back to admire my work. It wasn’t perfect. The circle was shaky and the triquetra was a bit crooked, but it’d get the job done.

My partner in crime wasn’t as impressed. “You need to work on your technique.”

Whatever. I thought it was good. Time for phase two. Withdrawing my knife, I stared down at my unblemished palm. This was going to hurt.

“Well?” The woman said.

“Give me a minute―”

“We don’t have a minute,” she seized my wrist and pressed the blade into my skin. Blood and a sharp sting of pain welled to the surface.

“Ow!” I yelped, wrenching my arm away. “What the hell?”

“You were being slow,” she said flatly.

Running my thumb along the thin wound, I smeared the blood onto the middle of the seal. “At least tell a girl your name before you assault her with a dagger.”

She gestured to the dog. “I’ll tell you my name after you banish this demon.”

Fair enough.

Once we moved the body safely within the seal, I got to my knees before it and pressed my hands to the asphalt. Thunder rolled in the distance, the chilly air charged with electricity. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end.

“You know the words, don’t you?” The woman asked from the sidelines.

I nodded. The banishing incantation was as almost simple as the seal. I guess whoever made them wanted them to be as accessible to as many people as possible. Good thing, too, or else I’d have been screwed. Drawing was Rosie’s thing and I barely passed my Intro to Latin class freshman year.

Breathing deeply, I closed my eyes and focused like Max told me to in one of his messages. I needed to believe that I could do this. I needed to envision myself overpowering the demon, forcing it out of its physical body and back down into whatever hell it crawled out of. Banishing required absolute concentration. If I lost that concentration, the demon could very well choose me as its next target.

Max called this phenomenon “jumping.” The transfer from one body to another. Nothing but a handful of iron pills, a symbol drawn out of chalk, and my own stubborn will keeping the demon from invading mine next. The tiniest cracks in my defenses had the potential to be fatal. I needed to focus.

“
Exorcizo te sanguine ferrum per virtutem crucis
,” I began. With every word I spoke, a dark energy grew inside of me like some foreign black hole, sucking everything else away but the ritual. This energy sewed itself into the marrow of my bones and set my blood to a boil. Wind gusted through the trees, but I could barely feel it. “
Exorcizo te sanguine ferrum per virtutem crucis.
”

The atmosphere around me seemed to shift, as though nature itself was responding to my chants. The thunder was louder, the lightning brighter, the wind stronger. Pressure built between my eyes, pushed against my wall of concentration, but I fought it back. This demon wasn’t going to win. It was going to get the hell out of this dog’s body and leave me alone.

The storm roared to a climax as I shouted the last incantation. My fingers curled around the hilt of my dagger, raising it up over my head. “
Exorcizo te sanguine ferrum per virtutem crucis!
”

Following Max’s instructions, I drove the dagger down into the dog’s corpse to finish the rite. The storm tempered as soon as the iron of the blade met the flesh of the demon. I opened my eyes. Was that it?

“How
dramatic
,” British Lady murmured, inspecting her nails. She sounded bored. “Shall we go? I would like to avoid getting my hair wet.”

Wait. This wasn’t what I was expecting. “How do we know the demon’s gone? Shouldn’t there have been, I don’t know, a receipt or something?”

“For God’s sake, it’s
done
,” the woman said. “Now hurry up and gather your things. We’re going to get breakfast. I’m in the mood for pancakes.”

We couldn’t go for pancakes yet. I needed to skin the demon, harvest its marketable parts. I told the woman so and she assured me someone else would take care of it.

“How do I know you don’t want it for yourself?” I asked. The profit I could make from this dog was huge. Entrusting it to someone else was a risk I wasn’t sure I wanted to take.

“Because I don’t work the black market, darling.” The woman zipped her jacket the rest of the way up. “Though I have many contacts who do. I will have one of them do transport and you will get a hefty portion of the money made. This is a generous offer, considering you weren’t the one who killed the beast in the first place.”

It
was
a generous offer. Too generous. “Are you going to screw me over as soon as I agree?”

“You’ve caught me on a good night,” she said, flipping her glossy hair over her shoulder. “I don’t much care if you agree anyway.”

I looked at the dog, then back to her, then at the dog again. If I had to be completely honest with myself, I had no idea where to even
begin
working the black market. I knew I wanted to hunt for money, but that was about the extent of my planning. Now here British Lady was, offering to do my work for me. All I had to do was trust her. A tall order without much in the way of alternatives. So, against my better judgment, I stuck my hand out for her to shake. “Fine,” I said. “You have a deal.”

***

We ended up at a twenty-four hour diner by the docks. The same one I’d gotten fired from two months prior, Sawyer’s Seaside Dive. It was embarrassing coming back here, doubly so when our waitress recognized me. Stiff small talk was exchanged, orders were placed, coffee was poured. British Lady and I were the only patrons for now. It’d get busier in later hours, when people too drunk to drive wandered in for a post-binge snack. I pitied our waitress. Night shifts were the worst.