Personal Demons

by Phoebe Ravencraft

  So if she was that powerful, how did he track her? Unless she decided to blow up another dragon, there wouldn’t be an energy spike like that.

  Ash pinched the bridge of his nose. Then he sighed again. There had to be something.

  Absently, he resumed scrolling through the data, looking for a needle that could reshape itself into anything in the middle of the haystack.

  To his surprise, something caught his eye.

  There were three instances of dream magic in the last twenty-four hours across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The ability to enter someone’s dreams was extremely rare, and it left a distinctive signature. Even those who could astral project didn’t generally enter someone’s dream. They moved along a different ether. To get into someone’s sleeping mind, to give visions was something very few creatures could do.

  In fact, Ash had only ever met one person who could do it: Eli Silverman.

  Sassy’s father . . .

  Commander Silverman adjusted his tie. He sighed and shifted from foot to foot.

  “How do I look?” he asked.

  Ash appraised him up and down. He wore a grey suit with subtle, blue pinstripes, a soft blue shirt and matching tie, and stylish, black, lace-up dress shoes.

  “Sharp as a knife,” Ash replied.

  The commander seemed unconvinced. He looked himself over.

  “Are you sure this is the right look?” he said.

  “You look fine, Commander,” Ash said, with a mild laugh.

  What was the matter with him? He was usually so confident, so strong.

  “It’s just . . .” Silverman began. “Well, it’s just that I don’t know what you’re supposed to wear to the first meeting of your long-lost daughter.”

  Ash smiled sympathetically. So that was it. He was nervous about meeting Cecily. He’d been searching for her for twenty-five years. Now that this quest was at an end, it terrified him. Ash understood. He’d had little contact with his own father. Demons didn’t make very good parents.

  “You should wear whatever makes you most comfortable, Commander,” Ash said. “When you’re not in uniform, you generally prefer suits. I recommend going with what you’ve picked out.”

  Silverman nodded. He looked both comforted and still unsure. He shifted his weight again, raised his hands like he was going to make a point, and then dropped them.

  “What am I going to say to her?” he asked.

  “I would start with, ‘Hello,’” Ash quipped.

  The commander hit him with a withering gaze. Those green eyes bored into him as if to beg for a just a little courtesy.

  “Sorry,” Ash said.

  “No, you’re right,” Silverman said, his expression softening. “I’m overthinking this. Maybe she’ll be glad to see me. Do you think she’ll be glad to see me?”

  “I don’t know,” Ash said. “I don’t know her. I’ve no idea what sorts of feelings she has for you or . . . your absence.”

  “See, that’s just it,” Silverman said, raising his hands again. “That’s what I’m afraid of. What if she hates me? What if she’s angry I was never there? We know she’s a martial artist – a good one. Will she be mad I never came to any of her tournaments? Will she be furious I missed her first report card? Her Sweet Sixteen? Her first drink? How many other milestones are there that I wasn’t there for?”

  “But it wasn’t your fault.”

  “So? I wasn’t there. Did she miss me?

  “What if her mother poisoned her against me? What if, after hiding her from me, she told her all sorts of terrible things about me? What if Cecily is disinclined to give me a chance before I even introduce myself?”

  Ash frowned. He was unsure how to alleviate his superior officer’s fears. He had all the feelings for his own father that Commander Silverman described. Only they were worse. Ash’s “dad” was an incubus, a demon who impregnated a mortal woman, then left her. Ash was nothing to him, nothing more than the byproduct of a tryst. How could he explain to Eli Silverman that his daughter might have similar, valid feelings?

  “Listen, Commander, I don’t know your daughter. I’ve no way to know what her feelings are about you, or what her mother may have told her before she died.

  “But if she’s anything like you, she is a good person. She cares about doing the right thing. And if she’s a good person, she’ll give you a fair chance.

  “It’s not your fault you were separated from her before she was born. And it’s not her fault she never knew you. But if she’s a good person, she’ll listen to you. She’ll give you the opportunity to explain and to bring her into our world.

  “Where you go from there is a matter for the both of you to explore.”

  Silverman stuffed his hands into his pockets. The corner of his mouth twisted down as he thought about what Ash said. He nodded several times.

  “I hope you’re right,” he said. “I’m not sure I could bear it if she hated me.”

  “Just remember that whatever she feels is valid, Commander. It may not be your fault, but she grew up without her father. She’s going to have to work through those feelings before you can have any sort of ‘normal’ relationship.”

  “And that’s before I explain she may be the N’Chai Toroth.”

  “I don’t think I’d lead with that,” Ash said. “I think I’d let that one sit on the back burner for a bit.”

  The commander nodded again. He met Ash’s gaze.

  “Probably a good idea,” he said. “Thanks, Ashrael. I appreciate your insight.”

  “Any time,” Ash said. . . .

  Except that was the last time they’d spoken. Eli Silverman had left to make contact with his daughter, only to be murdered before he found her. He’d never gotten to have that talk, explain to her that it wasn’t his fault she’d never known him. That job had ultimately fallen to Ash. Eli and Sassy had been denied their reunion.

  Or had they?

  An idea broke across Ash’s mind like a wave at the beach. He opened a database on his computer, pulling up all the information he could find on dreamcasters. He skipped past the basic overview to the more minute and theoretical stuff, looking for the one item he was sure he’d read some time in the past.

  There it was! He examined the passage carefully. It confirmed what he thought.

  Sassy had mentioned dreaming of her father, hadn’t she? He couldn’t remember. He thought she had.

  Eli had been desperate to find his lost daughter. He’d been so nervous about meeting her, fearing she would reject him. He was murdered before he could realize his lifelong dream of connecting with her.

  And his primary Nephilim power had been dreamcasting.

  Ash switched apps back to the magical-activity tracer. He tapped in commands to track the three instances of dream magic. One was in Western Ohio. The second in Eastern Indiana. And the third was in Chicago. What did it mean?

  Sassy had disappeared. She’d left Felicia a note, then gone completely to ground. Prior to that, Ash had given her twenty-five thousand dollars in cash, her payment for killing Dulac. With that kind of money, she could travel with practically no trail.

  But how?

  He’d found out the hard way on their last mission that she didn’t know how to drive, so a car was out. Had she hitchhiked? That was dangerous. Sassy might be a badass, but she wasn’t stupid. She was unlikely to get into a car with someone she didn’t know, even if she had her katana with her.

  She’d have had to use a credit card and her ID to fly. Ash could run a quick check on the TSA database to see if there were a plane ticket in her name, but he was certain that wasn’t it. She was trying to disappear. Flying wouldn’t take her off the grid.

  So what then? The bus?

  Ash ran an analysis of the hits on dream magic. It took twenty interminable seconds. Only one of the instances lined up with a road. So she couldn’t have been in a motor vehicle.

  Unless . . .

  Tapping keys quickly, he punched in another query. Twelve seconds
later, he got a match.

  The path of the dream magic lined up perfectly with Amtrak’s Cardinal Line from Cincinnati to Chicago.

  A smile slid up his face. There wasn’t enough data to confirm that this was indeed Sassy. But his gut told him it was. He had a lead.

  It was only a start, though. If he was going to follow up on it, he had to take some additional steps first.

  Eight

  The next stop was Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. I couldn’t even tell you where it is on the map. But as we pulled into the station, it was pretty obvious there wasn’t much there.

  We came to a halt in front of a small, one-story, red brick building, with large windows trimmed in white and green. It sat on a flat stretch of pavement at an intersection that went off in several directions. Despite obviously being a train station, the building didn’t look like it belonged where it was. A white grain mill stood a few yards away to the north, a red-brick house was right across the street, and a small parking lot was located on the other side, leading to streets that went away into the country. It was like this station had been dropped in the middle of a cornfield, and no one had noticed.

  My city-girl sensibilities had no idea what to make of this wide-open space with a few buildings but no people. It was strange.

  Three other passengers got off with us. The mother and the boy playing the Switch were two of them. The third was a man from another car. They were all met by relatives who were glad to see them. They piled into vehicles and drove away while Devlin and I waited.

  It was late afternoon, and the sun was getting low in the sky. With it being early May, we were in Daylight Savings Time, so it would be a couple more hours before it was dark. But the light was already turning that red color as it begins to wane for the day. A cool breeze blew across the tracks, rustling Devlin’s trench coat like a cape and swirling my hair.

  I knelt to the ground and quickly opened the guitar case to get my sword out as the train started moving west. As it chugged away and the breeze picked up, I couldn’t help but feel like I was in some old Western – the kind with the whistling music and two gunfighters facing off in the center of town. I pulled my sword from the guitar case and stood with it in my left hand.

  As I watched the train recede into the distance, panic leaped into my heart. I was in some small town in Middle America, where I didn’t know anyone. I’d lived in the city my whole life. I had no idea how you got anything in the country. And my ride – my ticket to a place where I might know how to survive – was pulling away. It felt like I’d been dropped on a desert island and stood on the shore watching the ship sail off on the horizon.

  I flushed those ridiculous thoughts from my mind. They weren’t helpful, and I was about to fight for my life. If I survived I could figure out how to navigate country life. In the interim, I had more important things to think about.

  Devlin turned slowly in a circle. When the passengers had fully departed and the train was a quarter mile down the track, he gripped his staff in both hands, preparing to face whatever awaited us.

  “Show yourselves!” he commanded, his voice echoing off the buildings.

  The demons didn’t wait to obey. To the north, came a low buzzing. Directly across from the station on the opposite side of the tracks stood a small, white building with a flat roof. Five insectoid demons the size of humans poised atop it.

  Their bodies were black with red and yellow stripes. They had bulbous abdomens that tapered to a narrow thorax from which extended six appendages. Their heads were shaped like birds’, with sharp beaks and enormous, silver compound eyes on either side. Four gossamer, insect wings extended from their backs, twitching in anticipation of the coming battle.

  The beasts stood upright on four of their legs, which were thin and striped like the rest of their bodies. In the upper two appendages, they clutched short, fat swords. Each demon wielded two blades, and though they didn’t have mouths like ours, they seemed to grin evilly at us.

  I ripped my katana from its sheath. It sang its war song with a pronounced ring. I leveled the blade at the horrors on the opposite rooftop.

  “Come get some, bitches,” I said.

  Devlin was a step ahead of me. He cried out in some language I couldn’t understand, whirled his staff, and aimed a bolt of red energy at the demons.

  They leaped into the air, scattering in five different directions as they buzzed through the sky away from whatever sort of spell he had cast.

  A second later, they came about. Three of them dived for me, while the others went after Devlin. Hate and destructive glee sparkled in those silver, alien eyes of theirs.

  Despite their size, they moved fast – faster than I’d have thought possible. They were on top of me before I could decide which of them to attack first. I was forced to dive to the ground, rolling forward and underneath them.

  Fortunately, they weren’t too smart. They were all converging on me. Two of them collided with each other, and the third rocketed forward and slammed into the brick wall of the station house behind me.

  I sprang to my feet and brought my katana down in a fierce chop. The blade sliced cleanly through one of the insectoid monstrosities, cutting it in two. Strange, green blood shot from both halves of the thing, and its upper body fell to the pavement.

  The other two recovered quickly. They zipped to either side of me, slashing at me with their swords. The demon on my left swung high and low at me. I parried the low attack and ducked the other.

  No sooner had I evaded those strikes than I sensed danger from behind. Dropping into a squat, I spun to the right, narrowly avoiding a twin-bladed stab. I launched upwards, swatting the fiend’s swords out of the way.

  But before I could I rip the katana across his now-open abdomen, movement to my rear caught the corner of my eye. I spun back and just got my weapon up to block two more slashes in time.

  And then the other guy was attacking again. This was rapidly becoming a problem. The katana had greater reach than their short blades, but there were two of them to one of me. They kept darting in on my undefended side, forcing me to break off the attack against one of them to prevent the other from cutting me open.

  My Nephilim combat reflexes kept me one step ahead of them, but just. I couldn’t keep up this pace for long. Not only was I was fighting two opponents, they each had two weapons. Four swords ripped through the air, constantly seeking my soft flesh. Sooner or later, I would grow too tired to parry a fatal blow.

  Where the hell was Devlin? He was the demon hunter. He was supposed to know what to do against these bastards.

  I dodged around one attack and ducked under another. Then I stepped back so that I had them both in front of me. That way at least, they couldn’t outflank me.

  Behind them, Devlin was engaged in a similar duel. He whirled and parried with his staff, keeping the blades of the demons off him as he fought for his life.

  He blocked a double strike from one demon, then twirled his staff, knocking both swords from its hands. As they clattered on the concrete, he thrust the silver-capped tip of the shaft hard into the demon’s abdomen, staggering it.

  The still-armed demon slashed at his head from behind. Somehow, Devlin anticipated the attack, ducked, and slipped away from both of them. Then he released his grip on the staff with his left hand, aimed his open palm at the one with the swords, and let loose a blast of fire from his hand. I was so stunned at that maneuver, I damned near lost my head when one of my opponents came high. I got my katana up just in time to deflect the blow.

  The immolated demon let out a high-pitched, unholy scream as the flames engulfed it. The sound sent shivers down my spine cold enough to make me want to stop fighting and hide.

  But the assholes on me weren’t going to give me that chance. In fact, one of them had snuck around behind me while I was distracted by the gruesome death of his comrade. As my brain screamed at me to watch out, I bent over and drove a vicious rear-kick into his abdomen. He was overbalanced, leaning forward to cu
t me to pieces, and my thunderous kick knocked his legs out from under him, causing him to face-plant directly behind me.

  Naturally, his piece-of-shit teammate didn’t give me the chance to finish him. That bastard pressed his own attack, forcing me to parry with my sword instead of burying it in the prone demon’s brain.

  But Devlin’s display reminded me that I wasn’t just a badass fighter. I was the N’Chai Toroth, capable of sucking in magical energy and making it do whatever I wanted. That was going to be the key to taking out these giant insects from Hell.

  I kicked the grounded demon in the head, hoping to stun it long enough to buy me some time. If I only had to fight one foe, I could sacrifice enough attention to search for some magic.

  Backing towards the train tracks, I reached out my senses, searching for those threads of magic I’d been able to detect while we were on the train.

  I found damned near nothing.

  Maybe I was too distracted by the fight to look hard enough. Maybe we were in some kind of magical dead zone. But there was, like, one tiny current in the area. It hardly seemed like it could do anything.

  My demonic opponent pressed his attack, continuing to slash at me with both his swords. Over his shoulder, I saw the one I’d knocked down beat his wings and take to the sky.

  Shit. There was no choice. There might be only a tiny spark of magic available, but it would have to do. I reached out with a mental hand and yanked that sucker to me.

  Suddenly electrified with power, I channeled the eldritch energy into superspeed. This, at least, was something I knew how to do. I’d used the same ability to save Felicia’s life and kill Dulac’s vampire assistant, Annette.

  The second demon arrived just as my superspeed went live. He divebombed me, and I dropped to the ground once more. This time, I lay flat on my back and thrust my sword straight up. I caught the insectoid bastard in his lower thorax and held on tight as his own momentum caused him to disembowel himself as he sailed across the tip of my blade.