Demon Ensnared (Demon Enforcers Book 4)

by Jenn Stark

  He scanned the concrete building, noting the bullet holes, then pivoted and glared. He could almost see, almost sense…

  “Stearns, you’re hit. Jesus.” Joe was at his side, having exited the building from his interior station after no doubt securing Angela and her parents. But Joe was good to have here. He could watch and protect Angela.

  “Don’t leave her side,” Gregori ordered.

  Then he took off across the street.

  He knew instantly he was on the right track as the scramble of emotions inside the building he was running toward burst into chaotic frenzy. The structure opposite Angela’s condo had a series of storefronts on the first floor, then offices above. It was also teeming with people. Based on the trajectory of the shot, the sniper had to have been positioned in a high floor, probably the top floor… No. No, he’d been on the roof.

  Gregori didn’t hesitate. He dashed down the next alley, and when he got a scant thirty feet away from the crossing street, he started climbing. He couldn’t fully relinquish his human glamour in case anyone should happen to catch sight of him, but he scaled the wall as if he was scrambling up a ladder. Mortal constructs were never a barrier to his kind.

  Demons weren’t without their weaknesses, of course. You could capture and hold nearly any demon with magic, and you could outright kill a demon with the power of God at your back. But you couldn’t contain a demon with traditional bars or walls. The traps needed to snare a demon were far too complex and arcane for ordinary mortals.

  But something or someone was trapping the demon shooters here. They’d stopped firing and retreated, but he didn’t sense that they’d gone.

  He flung himself over the edge of the roof. Sirens rang out in the distance, indicating a police response to the shooting was already underway. Ordinarily, in the wake of most demon attacks, there’d be nothing left to see.

  Only, here, there was. Three demons stood at the far side of the roof, clearly held in place, their agonized and furious faces shifting in and out of their glamour. Just as with the beasts who’d possessed Angela’s parents, something was controlling these demons. But who could control a demon, other than a witch? And why would she be using her magic to enable demons to possess humans, which most witches considered anathema? It made no sense.

  As Gregori’s mind churned, he was assaulted by the demons’ emotions, a chittering cacophony of fear, confusion, hate, loathing, and recognition of what he was. These demons hadn’t been brought here to be attacked by a Syx. They’d been brought here to shoot humans and flee. But the hand behind these demons remained hidden, holding them fast for some reason.

  Not a witch, Gregori decided, or at least not only a witch. Witches could summon demons to do their bidding, but there was no spell of a traditional sort on these creatures. The restraint here was far more sophisticated in its style. Almost…almost electrical.

  Gregori quickly traversed the rooftop, advancing on the trapped creatures. “Why are you here?” he ground out, realizing his mistake too late. These demons were still armed. In his quest to understand what was going on, Gregori wasn’t racing to dispatch them, he was slowing down. As he did, all three of them raised their guns and fired.

  Fury exploded through Gregori along with the bullets piercing his body. With a howl of rage and pain, he dove at the demons, realizing that only one of their number was a true demon, while the other two were possessed humans that’d been so far degraded that the human hosts were nothing but smoke, a husk no longer good for anything but sustaining the demon within it. The possessed mortals he dropped, though they were still waving their guns. The third he wrenched forward, never mind the blood pouring from the demon’s nose and mouth. The outward manifestation of bodily damage to the demon’s glamour would be enough to give any human pause, but Gregori needed information.

  “Who sent you?” he demanded as the demon’s lips peeled back, revealing long canine teeth in a deep red mouth. The demon gave another manic laugh, but he couldn’t quite escape Gregori’s gaze as the bullets started up again. It was only a momentary flash of revelation, but it was all that Gregori needed.

  The demons had been summoned by a witch…but held by human technology.

  He yanked the demon to the side and sent him sprawling across the rooftop, where he exploded into black goop as Gregori blasted him across the veil.

  He fell on the two possessed men, but to his surprise, they were dead, bullet holes riddling their bodies. It was as if at the last minute, they’d given up on shooting him and instead had shot each other. Something about that bothered Gregori on a profoundly deep level, but he had no time to work it out.

  He needed to get back to Angela.

  He turned, but immediately stumbled, going down on his knees. Something… There’d been something in those bullets, something wrong. Or…maybe it wasn’t the bullets, maybe it was the same energy that had trapped the other demons? Was he encountering a force field of some sort that limited his abilities? Had he simply been lured into a trap?

  A brief, blinding flash of pain erupted between his ears and lit along every nerve ending in his body, making him howl. He lifted his hands to his ears and clamped down, trying to make the noise stop, but the voices continued, clamoring and raging and screeching at a level only he could hear, effectively fixing him in place. So it’s witches after all, he thought grimly. Unreasonably powerful ones, using an ancient antidemon tool to drive their quarry to madness. Good to know.

  Feet pounded toward him, and Gregori glanced up, bleary-eyed, to see a line of uniformed men rushing his way, guns up. For a split second, he thought they were going to attack him, but they raced by him to where the demons fell first, then circled back.

  “You’re Gregori Stearns?” the man in front asked, presumably the squad’s leader.

  “Yes,” Gregori gasped as he finally shut down the howling voices in his mind, cutting them off completely.

  “How the hell did you get up here? It’s four floors.”

  Gregori grunted a laugh as he staggered back to his feet. “Climbed.”

  “Well, we will have to get you back down if you can walk. We’ve got a situation.”

  7

  It took them another fifteen minutes to get back down through the building, using more conventional means of travel—namely, stairs and elevators. As he moved, Gregori healed himself as best as he was able. The glamour was the easiest part, but also the part that needed to remain at least reasonably damaged in appearance. Healing his deformed demon body beneath took more energy, and he didn’t have to feign his heaviness of breathing or grimace of pain as the security guards from Angela’s condo building stopped to allow him to lean against the wall and catch his second wind.

  Still, by the time he was back out on the street, he was walking more or less upright, which was more than he could say for the demons he’d dispatched. Bastards.

  “What’s the problem?” he wheezed. He knew it wasn’t Angela. With her as his charge, he’d have felt her pain in the very marrow of his bones if she’d been harmed.

  “Ms. Stanton’s parents,” the guard nearest to him said. “They’ve barricaded themselves in the corner of the lobby, won’t let anyone near, and are screaming their heads off. We’re this close to tranquing them with darts just to get someone close to them without causing them greater psychological stress, but—hey. No. You can’t go in there like that! Stop!”

  Gregori wasn’t listening anymore. He’d already picked up speed as the man started talking, and breached the doors to Angela’s building a second later, never mind that he didn’t bother opening them. He simply crashed through.

  The scene in the lobby of a ring of people gaping in horror at Angela’s parents was one he’d seen far too many times before, particularly in the Middle Ages when, for whatever reason, fear of demons had surged to an all-time high, particularly in Europe. Possessions had become almost commonplace then, causing havoc in villages and cities alike. The demon enforcers had been almost as busy then as
they were now, and their work had been made easy for them by the fear the demons engendered. With fewer people, a less structured society, and a broader willingness to believe in the skills of strangers, the enforcers could usually do their work and be gone in a matter of seconds.

  That wouldn’t be possible here, but he’d work with what he was given. Angela’s parents were huddled on the floor in their fashionable clothes, their legs crumpled beneath them, their fists up to their ears. He’d seen this reaction many times, though usually only after he’d identified the demon within the human host, a demon desperately trying to figure out how to escape without getting blasted beyond the veil.

  In this case, however, Gregori wasn’t here on a simple search-and-destroy mission. Not with Angela standing off to the side, watching with wide, horrified eyes, while her face remained carefully, painfully neutral. Too neutral.

  Gregori strode forward, shaking off the security guards and a man in a dress shirt and pants who exuded the air of being a doctor. Even Angela moved forward, attempting to block him. He lifted a hand and she stopped, clearly startled.

  “I’ve done this before,” he said.

  She nodded, her mouth opening though no words came out, then Gregori pushed past her, focusing on her parents. On their knees, they keened in pain. Gregori opened himself up to the extremity of their emotion. He could feel their shock at everything happening to them as a tiny subset of the very real rage that racketed around inside their minds.

  They were possessed, all right, but this possession had gone very, very wrong.

  Typically, a demonic possession was a one-to-one proposition. A mortal makes the mistake of opening the door too wide to outside influence, or perhaps they are simply too weak or downtrodden to resist. The connection is made, the demon slips in, and the edges grow a little darker for the human every day. Getting the demon out takes an extraordinary effort on the part of the mortal, or, more often, the intervention of a stronger external entity, such as an exorcist or your friendly neighborhood demon enforcer. All the demon has to do is make sure the human stays alive. If the human host dies, the demon gets booted back beyond the veil. Not a good situation for the demon.

  But in the case of the Stantons, this demon possession had a decidedly metallic aftertaste, and there was more than one beast apiece in their bodies. Hence the demons’ ability to control the Stantons so thoroughly…but also the chaos once the demons realized they were trapped inside humans who were getting shot at.

  Now, far worse, they faced a demon enforcer.

  With one glance at the Stantons’ rolling eyes, Gregori could identify the creatures inside them as if they were old friends. “Shemael, Barzac, Mithra,” he murmured to Angela’s mother. Her father quailed back, his eyes peeling wide, and in them, Gregori saw all he needed. “Mortain, Rickmalid, Zehim.”

  The demons shifted within the Stantons like coiled snakes ready to spring. These creatures were not former Fallen. They’d been born in the primordial evil that had been the unnatural afterbirth of the Father’s glorious creation of the universe, and they were once and forever demons. So unlike those dark creatures who walked the earth in punishment, these walked in prideful glory that God so loved His creations that He wouldn’t destroy a single demon out of hand, even though they did their level best to harm His most blessed of all creations, His children.

  Now Gregori spoke to these demons directly, with the compulsion the archangel’s blessing afforded him.

  “Who are you beholden to?” He asked the question in sighing, rustling words, the sounds of wings upon the wind.

  “Borast! Menneilah. Zenoth. Ankar!” they cried back at once. Of course, all the names were different. Gregori was not surprised. Whoever had coordinated this possession clearly hadn’t informed these demons of what was to befall them. Which was unfortunate, because it indicated a level of planning that went far beyond anything the archangel had suspected. So Gregori let the answers go while filing the names carefully in the back of his mind, just in case they weren’t total fabrications.

  “What was your charge?” he tried again.

  Once again, the response was fast and furious. At least in this, the answers made sense. They were to guide the Stantons to Washington to see their daughter. There was nothing more important than that. They were not to make the Stantons do or say anything out of the ordinary, simply go to DC and meet their daughter in front of her condominium building. They’d been loitering in the area all morning, waiting for Angela to return home. Because that was her parents’ expectation. Angela always came home.

  Gregori grimaced. He was going to have to talk to Angela about her habits. He was going to have to talk to her about a lot of things.

  “Then what?” he asked, bracing himself for another cacophony of responses. Only, the demons fell silent. They’d been given no guidance about what was supposed to happen after this pinnacle meeting. They’d only known they needed to make it happen. There was no joy within these creatures, none of the smug pride that typically accompanied a successful possession. Because the demons had not chosen the terms of this act; they’d been forced. They’d been thrust into the Stantons with almost the same level of violation the Stantons had experienced. Almost.

  “You cannot remain within them. You cannot remain without,” Gregori rumbled, turning over a problem in his mind. By all rights, he should return these demons beyond the veil as soon as he extracted them from the Stantons’ minds. Leaving them to roam this earth was a liability, not only to other humans but to the demons themselves. They were supposed to die this day. Trapped inside their mortal hosts who were to have been gunned down in front of their own daughter, these demons had been intended to be a sacrifice offered by whoever was behind this attack. Gregori didn’t know if that individual was human or demon, but that hardly mattered.

  “Serve you, serve,” the demons screeched and writhed. These were some of the new releases, he sensed, those members of the horde who’d recently been dumped out of darkness to sprawl across the earth. An older demon, one who’d had the experience of living upon this earth for any length of time, might not have been caught as easily as they’d been, but they’d been trapped. Ensnared.

  That gave him an idea. If these pitiful members of the horde had served as stooges for the powers behind this attack on Angela’s parents, they could also serve a purpose for Gregori. They could be bait.

  Without further hesitation, he laid his palms upon the shoulders of Angela’s parents. His large hands dwarfed their slender necks, and as he spread his fingers, he could feel the heat of the circuitry behind their ears. Bugs of some sort? Medical devices? If so, he suspected there’d be two devices per mortal, a fail-safe that spoke of a very careful planner.

  “You will answer only to me,” he cautioned the demons, who were now vibrating inside the Stantons with renewed hope. He didn’t think for a moment they would follow this dictate, but as they keened with renewed excitement, he mapped their emotions, as unique to each of them as it was to every one of God’s children. He would be able to find and follow them, he knew. He would need to.

  A chorus of affirmations greeted his words, and he squeezed the shoulders of the mortals, using his nails to scrape the skin next to the electronic devices that had been implanted in them. Both of the older humans stiffened, and behind him, Angela spoke sharp, alarmed words. But his focus was only on the demons. No demon could leave a host unless there was an opening to do so. With the break in the Stantons’ skin, he’d just given the creatures their opening.

  The exodus of the demons was not a pretty thing. Both Stantons convulsed and screamed in terror and pain. Only Gregori could witness the darkness that spewed out of them, the roughness of the demons’ passage shorting out the electrical components of the bugs embedded in the humans’ necks. Shorting them out, but leaving them in place.

  Because Gregori didn’t kill the demons infesting the Stantons, they appeared as nothing more than smoke even to his eyes and would be far less notice
able to those standing around, completely undetectable on video. They circled several times before exploding outward, shattering glass and leaving those they passed racked with chills and fear.

  Despite himself, Gregori allowed a tight smile to curve his lips. He’d not thought to add the small finesse of the broken glass, but he appreciated it nonetheless. Perhaps having his own set of demon informants wouldn’t be completely useless.

  All this happened in a matter of seconds, and as the demons left the building, all the demons but Gregori, anyway, the elder Stantons collapsed against him.

  Angela reached him first, Joe right on her heels. Gregori eased the passed-out couple into their arms.

  “We’re going to need them both checked for a mechanical device implanted behind one or both ears,” Gregori said to Angela.

  “What?” she demanded, her usual reserve momentarily supplanted by genuine horror as she hugged her mother close, then released her to the care of a security guard. “You think someone bugged my parents?”

  Just as quickly, she ruthlessly schooled her features once more. “What kind of devices? Anything that could harm them?”

  “Unknown. They’ll need to check.”

  Angela cursed as she yanked out her phone and tapped furiously. That had been the first real outburst of emotion from her that he’d seen, and he rocked back a little on his heels, surprised by the almost physical jolt that it caused him. It appeared Angela Stanton’s careful reserve cracked when it came to her parents. If the intensity of this snippet of emotional reaction was any indication…he wouldn’t want to be there when her walls fully collapsed.

  The building’s security team came up to them as Angela shoved her phone back into her jacket pocket.

  “EMTs arriving in two minutes, police right behind,” the lead guard said. “We managed to contain the media after the shooting, but the blowout of the windows makes that a little more problematic.”

  “Incendiary device, released by one of the suspects,” Joe said immediately. “Assailants fled the scene toward the back of the building, guards in pursuit.”