Demon of Darkness

by Andrea Pearson

  “Your happiness and even your lives depend on it.”

  The ad had been showing pictures of me from when I was in high school all the way through my graduation from the Fire Impeder training school. I nearly threw up, watching. Where had they gotten those pictures? How did they know so much about me?

  The man continued. “If necessary, we will remove her from our state by force.”

  The TV went blank before a credit screen popped up. I wasn’t surprised to see Governor Boggs’ name in big, bold letters, along with the words, “Funded by.”

  I sat back on the couch, staring at the TV, feeling weak and nauseated.

  12

  Holy cow. I could barely think through my shock. “He’s not shy about it, is he?”

  Mrs. Russell shook her head. “It’s one of three that have been airing all day. I’ve seen them all, and I called the number on the bottom just to see what they’re telling everyone. They’re recruiting people to hunt you down and stop you.”

  Abel’s hand tightened on my fingers, nearly crushing me. I couldn’t get up the energy to tell him to stop. My whole body felt frozen. What was I going to do? What would happen? So many people in this state, and in Lehi in particular, admired me. They gushed their thanks regularly for my service whenever they recognized me. Was all of that about to change? How could it not? Governor Boggs was even more well-known than I was. He’d been in the public light a lot longer than I had.

  “He’s evil,” I whispered.

  Mrs. Russell nodded. Neither she nor Abel said anything.

  Even if Governor Boggs hadn’t been a hound, he really was evil. I would show him no mercy next time I saw him, even if it meant a lifetime in jail. Having his memory wiped was too good for him. The first chance I got, I would destroy him.

  Just then, my phone rang. It was the police chief in American Fork. I answered it hesitantly, unsure what to expect.

  “Miss Ashton?” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you available to come out for a job? We’ve had an emergency come up.”

  I nodded, ignoring as Abel tightened his grip even more, making my hand throb. I gently extricated it.

  “Yes, of course. Tell me where to go.”

  He promised he would send me a text, and we ended the call.

  “Are you insane?” Abel asked. “Did it not occur to you that this could be a trap?”

  I shook my head. “I know this man. I’ve worked with him for several years. He wouldn’t stoop to a level like that.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I can’t. But I still have to do my job.”

  “Well, I’m coming with you.”

  I nodded. I knew I couldn’t keep him from going if I wanted to—which I didn’t. I got to my feet, shaking off the dead flies that had dropped on me and brushing the live ones from my hair before turning to Mrs. Russell. “Thank you for letting me know about this.”

  She only shook her head as she stared at me. “I just don’t see how you’re going to overcome this,” she said. “Your job here might be ruined.”

  I’d thought of that. I hoped that wouldn’t be the case.

  Abel and I headed to the address in the police chief’s text. It was yet another robbery, though this time, the man and woman weren’t as quick about getting in and out as most robbers had been so far. They seemed to think that if they waited long enough, the manager of the store would get them more money from other restaurants in the fast-food chain.

  By the time I got there, the cops had everything ready, and all I had to do was pull through the drive-thru. Apparently, the guy was standing close enough to the window that I wouldn’t even need to get out of the car. We just would act like regular customers.

  It was one of the easiest jobs I’d ever had, and only moments after we got there, I had the situation defused and the man and woman were in handcuffs, their guns confiscated.

  Several cops thanked me before we left, and the police chief gave me a check.

  As we were driving away, I breathed a sigh of relief. “They obviously haven’t been watching the news.”

  “That’s going to change.”

  His response was so quiet, I barely heard him. But he was right.

  By the time we got back to Mrs. Russell’s house, the hound had arrived. We were surprised to find she’d brought another with her. I hadn’t even realized two were on their way, since their lights were so close together.

  Abel and I decided to interrogate them together, and we learned something very valuable. Apparently, Lord Kenan had given as many hounds as possible a device that masked them from my detection almost completely. It couldn’t hide them from the amulet, but somehow he’d figured out I had a magical item that helped me find hounds above and beyond the amulet.

  I closed my eyes, glad to finally know why their dots had been concealed.

  I wiped their memories, loving working with good hounds now. They were so much easier than the evil ones.

  Once finished, Abel grabbed me by the shoulders, staring into my eyes. “I’ve hired guards. With all of these commercials, you’re going to be facing a lot of danger, and probably soon.”

  I frowned. “Is that necessary? I mean, I’ve got you here, the Russells next door, and Mindy. Plus, I’m not exactly helpless.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t care what we’ve got on our side—I’m not going to budge on this. They’ll be here soon. You’ll barely notice them—they’ll keep out of sight, for the most part, only engaging if they have to. They’ll rotate on their own schedule, making sure the house is constantly guarded. Lizzie, I’m serious. This isn’t something I’m willing to negotiate on.”

  And that was the end of the discussion. I didn’t feel like putting up much of a fight. Abel always had my back, and I really appreciated that.

  13

  It didn’t take long until I started getting phone calls from worried friends and family. Apparently, the campaigns had aired all the way in Texas. My family was frantic, and so were my friends who didn’t quite understand what I did for a living.

  The only ones who truly understood and offered compassion were my closest friends. When I asked Chief how Alice, his wife, was handling it all, his voice quieted.

  “I don’t want to upset you, but Alice . . . well, she believes Governor Boggs. She blames you for what’s happening.”

  I sank to the couch in my living room next to Abel, trying not to cry.

  Chief sighed loudly into the phone. “The frustrating thing, Lizzie, is that the campaigns are technically correct.”

  I didn’t respond. I wasn’t sure how to. Because he was right. My choices had led to the plagues. If I’d been strictly doing my job and hadn’t started hunting hounds, none of this would’ve happened. Still, though . . .

  “You know I didn’t have a choice and that I still don’t,” I said. “I didn’t ask to be a hound hunter. I didn’t even know what one was before Alexander and Nicole came.”

  “I know.”

  We ended the call, and not twenty seconds later as I was about to get up to use the bathroom, my phone rang again. This one was from a neighbor I hadn’t talked to in a while. The moment she started shrieking at me about destroying her garden and harming her family, Abel took my phone away, clicked the end-call button, and handed the device back.

  “We really should keep your phone off now.”

  I shook my head. “I still have a job to do. And it’s even more important that I keep working now than before. They need to know I’m reliable and willing to go out, even if it might be dangerous or inconvenient for me.”

  That was before the local officials stopped calling me. Not even Chief could get me work, regardless of how bad things out there got. It seemed too many officers and firefighters were believing what the governor had said. They’d obviously decided it would be better to face the situations themselves than have a disloyal and dangerous person helping them. It made me feel so helpless and so angry. So out of contro
l. I especially felt bad for Mindy, since it affected her too. But when I brought it up, she shrugged it off.

  “The amount of work we had after I arrived was more than enough to keep us afloat for a long time.”

  I nodded. We’d decided that because she was interning under me and wouldn’t get jobs if it weren’t for me, we would split the fees half and half. Which ended up being a generous amount of money, given the fact that Mindy followed what they taught all of us in training and charged a tad more than I did. Yeah, I needed to be okay asking for more, especially if my brand-new intern had no qualms about it.

  Abel and I had just gotten settled on the couch to eat marshmallows and crackers and watch a movie when we heard shouting outside. Abel jumped to his feet, striding to the front door and looking through my curtain. He glanced back at me. “You’ve got visitors.”

  I joined him, trying to ignore the swarms of flies that followed, and glanced out the window. Oh, heavens. It was nothing short of a medieval picketing, complete with villagers bearing pitchforks, guns, and shovels.

  People were yelling at and threatening the guards Abel had hired to protect me. I still felt silly about having them there until I realized that yes, I could stop guns, but I couldn’t stop a knife. Watching those angry people, some gratitude for Abel and his foresight flowed through me. He’d been right about getting guards.

  My phone started beeping with texts and messages and ringing with incoming calls. Even my social media accounts and email inboxes were soon overflowing with accusatory messages from people I’d scarcely talked to my entire life. I read some of those messages until Abel forced me to stop. I seriously disliked this feeling. Knowing that so many people despised and hated me and, according to their many messages, wanted me dead.

  In despair, I called Nicole, not sure what to do.

  “Oh, Lizzie,” she said. “I’m so sorry. We’ve been watching from up here and I just can’t believe how vicious those campaigns are.”

  I felt tears prick the back of my eyes. “What they’re saying is true, though. If I hadn’t chosen to do this whole hound thing, none of the plague crap would have happened.”

  I was especially frustrated that I would never have been able to find the last few hounds if we hadn’t gone to attack Lord Kenan, weakening his hold on them. I would have been hunting down the last of the hounds, thinking it was two or three, when in reality, I still had around forty to destroy.

  But by attacking Kenan, I’d missed my deadline with the globe. Talk about a rock and a hard place. Even if Hamza hadn’t kidnapped me, I still would have missed the deadline.

  “You didn’t really have a choice, honey,” Nicole said.

  “I know.”

  “And if you had decided not to do it, things would have gone bad anyway. Maybe not in the shape of plagues, but the hounds would’ve started devouring people. They’d already started it, back when Alexander and I arranged for the effigy.”

  “Yeah, but if it was just the hounds, at least no one would be blaming me for it.”

  I felt like a wimp the moment those words left my mouth. Some hero I was, wishing for the days when I had anonymity on my side. I suppose it was human not to want to be blamed for such horrible things, but still. I needed to buck up.

  How many people had died by now? Yes, the water situation was pretty much under control, but we’d still lost a lot of it, and Utah had already been under a state of drought. Now what was left of our food sources after frogs and lice was being spoiled by flies and their maggots.

  What was going to happen to my beloved state when all this was done?

  “Have you checked out the Bible to see what the next plagues are going to be?” Nicole asked.

  I shook my head. I hadn’t. I’d been too afraid to do it. Call me a wimp again, but I’d been struggling with the current plagues too much to handle what was coming next.

  “I’m guessing from your silence the answer is no,” Nicole said. “And, yes, this is a grisly topic, but it’s something that needs discussing. The next one will be diseased livestock. After that are boils, thunderstorms, and locusts. Darkness is the ninth one.”

  “What’s the tenth plague?”

  Nicole fell quiet for a moment. “Death of the firstborn in every family.”

  I put my head in my hands, too panicked, stressed, and exhausted even to cry. I couldn’t let it get to that point. But what could I do? Go into hiding? Fly to some remote jungle where no one lived and wait it out until the plagues were over? Or should I be more proactive and get all of the firstborns out of every city before we reached that point? I didn’t know what the answer was.

  Running and hiding didn’t feel right—especially not while I was still monitoring the hounds that were coming. And putting my head in the sand wouldn’t do any good. Lord Kenan was on his way, and I knew he’d make things an awful lot worse for the innocent citizens than the plagues had been so far.

  Besides, I wasn’t a coward. And I wouldn’t do something cowardly.

  But what to do in the meantime? How on earth would I regain the trust of those I worked with? And was it possible to stop the plagues? I didn’t think so. All of my experience told me that when ghosts and such meted out judgment, nothing could be done to convince them to end it.

  I’d known the consequences for missing my deadline from the very beginning.

  “We’re going to get you through this,” Nicole said, perhaps recognizing where my thoughts had gone.

  “I really, really hope you’re right,” I said.

  14

  Abel continued to pressure me not to answer my phone, but when someone called me ten times in a row, I finally picked up.

  “Oh, thank heavens you answered,” a man said.

  It wasn’t a number I recognized, and I didn’t know his voice. “Sorry about that. Things have been pretty crazy here. What can I do for you, and with whom am I speaking?”

  “My name is Ron Zabriskie. I’m the leader of Salt Lake County’s volunteer search and rescue team. And, well, I think you need to know upfront that Sergeant asked me not to call and I’m going against his direct wishes to do so.”

  The sergeant he spoke of was in charge of all of Salt Lake County’s sheriffs and was over the search and rescue teams—both paid and volunteer. “Are you sure you should be talking to me?” I couldn’t help it—I had to ask.

  “I’m in the business of saving lives, not pandering to politicians. If you’re still in the same business, yes, I’m sure. Because we desperately need your help.”

  I straightened. “Of course. I’d love to do anything you need me to do. What’s going on?”

  “Construction crews ran into problems working on widening the road in Little Cottonwood Canyon. A worker fell into a crevice while setting up the next round of explosives. We’re not sure exactly what is going on, but we can’t reach him without risking the bombs going off.”

  “All right, I’ll head out right now.”

  “No need. We’re sending a helicopter. Traveling by car is too slow, and I have a feeling you wouldn’t get very far anyway.”

  I glanced out my window at the people picketing. He was right. “Sounds good. When will it be here?”

  “In about twenty minutes.”

  “I hope that’s fast enough.”

  “So do I, Miss Ashton.”

  We ended the call, and I quickly finished eating my snack of crackers and marshmallows. I desperately needed protein, but we hadn’t yet found something that didn’t attract flies.

  Abel was oddly calm about this job. I’d explained it to him, and he hadn’t once gotten possessive or defensive.

  “I need to get out and check on the water-purifying device while you’re gone. Plus, I’d like to do a couple more rounds through the underground.”

  I nodded, giving him a kiss just as the helicopter landed on my street.

  One of the side benefits of having it come and get me—it scared off the picketers. Hopefully, they’d stay away.

&
nbsp; ***

  The ride was over in no time. I spent the whole trip staring out the window, enjoying the views. I’d ridden in helicopters several times, but for some reason, this time just felt different. Probably because I’d been cooped up so much lately. But also because the flies weren’t as annoying in the helicopter. Maybe they were enjoying the ride too.

  We landed half a mile away from where the blasting had been taking place and hiked up the road to it. Several search and rescue people were there waiting for me, and in no time, they had me hooked up to a harness and ropes.

  “How are you at rock climbing?” Ron asked.

  I blanched. “I’ve never done it.”

  “That’s fine. We’ll have people above help pull you up.”

  I felt the blood rush back into my cheeks. That wouldn’t be embarrassing or anything.

  Swallowing my pride, I said, “Where do I need to go?”

  Ron took me to the side of the road, where a steep wall of rock waited to be blasted away. I could see where they’d already done work—the edges were rough and fresh, needing to be smoothed down. The section they’d been attaching explosives to when the man had fallen jutted over the road, which they’d closed.

  Following Ron’s instructions, I started climbing the side of the canyon, swatting away flies and wondering if there wasn’t an easier way to do this. Apparently, there weren’t a lot of close trails above, and due to the rocky landscape, they didn’t feel comfortable helicoptering me to a higher location and risk having me fall where they’d need to rescue me as well.

  I felt it as the people above helped pull my rope. To my credit, they didn’t need to work as hard as I’d expected them to. I did my best to carry my own weight, gripping the rough stone, and knowing my hands would hate me the next day.

  Soon, I reached the top, where several volunteers helped me to my feet, then showed me the crevice the man had fallen into. I could see immediately why they wanted me there, despite the many flies swarming around me and blocking my vision. There were tons of holes drilled into the stone where the explosives had been dropped, ready to be detonated. Next to them was a crevice only a few feet wide, but very straight down. The man had fallen ten feet. He was too high from the road for me to reach the explosives from down there.