by Sara DeHaven
Bree realized with shame that she was afraid of Franchesca. She’d bested the demon burned harpy last year with Daniel’s and Gelsenim’s help, but it had been a very near thing. Franchesca was a high power Caster, Reader and Demon Master, and she was frigging crazy.
She was clearly trying to blend in with the crowd. She’d forsaken her usual East coast, urban glamour for a more casual look of black jeans and a lamb’s wool lined green corduroy coat. Dressing down took nothing away from her beauty, Bree noted with huge annoyance. She appeared to be alone.
Kevin dragged Bree back a few steps, making sure there was a group of people between Franchesca’s line of sight and them. “This is not a good sign,” Kevin was saying. “If she’s here, there’s a chance the L.A. Keltoi have sent reinforcements.”
“Which probably means a whole hell of a lot of demons will be called,” Bree replied grimly.
“Not to mention what Franchesca can do on her own with Casting. She’s a nasty fighter.”
“As I have reason to know,” Bree confirmed, glancing around nervously.
“We should inform one of the Keepers.”
“Agreed. But I’m afraid to lose sight of her. If we go looking for a Keeper, she might move.”
Kevin rubbed his nose in frustration. Then he straightened his glasses and his shoulders. “Yeah, but I don’t think it would be good if she saw us, either. She'd probably go ballistic. We can’t stay right on top of her like this. How about we stay in this general area, but out of her sight, and keep an eye out for any passing Keeper.”
“We could also grab any of the other powered we see and send them after a Keeper.”
“Good idea.”
Now, Bree reflected, she was glad Daniel wasn’t here. Franchesca really got to Daniel, in ways Bree could understand but resented.
Of course, Daniel also got to Franchesca. He’d come close a couple of times to convincing his ex to leave the Keltoi, but in Bree’s opinion, the woman was too far gone in Demon Master instability to be salvageable. Of course, maybe she wanted to believe that. Her gut reaction to Franchesca’s presence was, unfortunately, pretty revealing of where her feelings for Daniel stood. She wanted Franchesca gone, out of town, away from Daniel. There was a fierce chant going in the back of her mind. He’s mine, you can’t have him.
Bree rolled her shoulders, trying to rid herself of accumulated tension, then staggered against Kevin as someone was pushed into her. Oh lord, here we go, she had time to think before it happened again.
Kevin pulled her away from the two women who were engaged in a pushing match. As Bree shook herself out of her preoccupation with Franchesca and cast an eye over the crowd as a whole, she could see that some fights were starting to break out. The volume of the crowd noise went up along with it. She was torn between wanting to keep an eye on Franchesca and wanting to focus on her original assignment. If she was smart, she’d make sure Franchesca didn’t see her. The woman wanted Bree dead, and she had the powered chops to see it done, and quickly. Bree knew a moment’s intense temptation to call Gelsenim, but she squashed it. She and Kevin moved back a few more steps toward the crowd’s edge, still scanning for a Keeper to set on Franchesca as well as trying to pinpoint any trouble spots with which they might help.
As they moved further out of direct sight of Franchesca, anger overtook her fear. It really pissed her off to be running away from that woman. The surge of anger helped harden her toward action, which was a great help when she spotted a possessed young woman in the crowd knock down and straddle a young man, slapping him.
She signaled to Kevin, and they moved together towards the conflict. Bree gathered her will and base energy and formulated her easiest offensive spell, then flung it at the young woman. The woman, with magenta dyed hair in pigtails, paused in her attack as she listed to the side with dizziness. The young man underneath her managed to wiggle out from under her, swearing, “Bitch, what is wrong with you?” To Bree’s relief, one of the young man’s friends grabbed him and pulled him away, preventing him from responding with further violence. The woman got to her feet, a confused look on her face. But as they watched, her expression twisted into one of rage.
“Uh oh,” Bree had time to say before the woman’s eyes fastened on Bree, and she charged. With a rush, Kevin threw up a heavy duty ward, and the woman smashed into it hard enough to knock her on her ass. Bree readied a freeze spell. It had thus far been hard for her to succeed at a full body freeze. She was fairly good at freezing particular body parts as it took less juice to do it. She opted to focus on legs in hopes of keeping the possessed woman out of action for a while. “Okay, drop it!” she shouted to Kevin.
Bree threw the spell at the woman with a discrete underhanded, softball pitching motion the minute Kevin’s ward dissolved, and she watched with satisfaction as the woman went down, then tried and failed to get back to her feet.
Kevin grabbed Bree’s arm and pulled her back to the outside edge of the crowd. His eyes were glittering with a mixture of tension and excitement. “That was good,” he told Bree. “That’s just the sort of quick strike I was thinking about. If you could do more of that freeze the legs spell on possessed, that should keep the damage they can do to a minimum.”
“I’m worried about people getting trampled if they can’t get up,” Bree admitted. She was scanning the crowd again for Franchesca.
“Damn, that’s a good point,” Kevin conceded. “How about if you save that for people who are being actively violent? In those cases, it could be the lesser of two evils.” As he spoke, Bree read the movement of the crowd. Much like her experience at Pioneer Square, she could perceive a pattern in the growing chaos, and a sharp, metallic feel of rage was building up in the energy field all around. Her Demonsense was telling her more demons were present now than had been at her first arrival.
She suddenly got why that might be. In order for the riot to seem natural, the Demon Masters had to call in demons gradually, had to build the tension over time. Well, it sure as hell was working. She spotted a nexus of demonic activity near at hand, and pulled Kevin in that direction. They started to get jostled as they wove their way into the crowd, and Kevin moved in front of her to protect her with his greater bulk. He kept hold of her hand, and she could feel through his touch how close to the surface his Warder magic remained. It reassured her.
They arrived at the focus of the trouble. There were two groups of protesters facing off, yelling at one another, and just as they arrived, one of the men shoved an opponent hard with his sign. There was a roar of outrage from the other side, and more shoving and pushing broke out. The possessed man, who was in a Mariner’s baseball cap and had the look of a friendly blue-collar guy from the corner tavern, gave Bree a very unfriendly look. Even at that distance, Bree could see the orange spark of the demon’s presence in the man’s eyes. This demon must be strong enough to perceive her as powered, and maybe even as an Exorcist.
The man’s focus on her was broken when someone threw a punch at him. Rather than looking shocked or upset at the impact, he looked gleeful as his head snapped back around after the punch, mouth bloody, smile fixed. He returned the blow with interest, and the man across from him reeled back into his buddies behind him. The possessed man immediately followed, aiming another punch. Bree quickly cast a freeze spell on his punching arm. He staggered a little as his muscles failed to respond to his half thrown jab. Immediately, he turned to face Bree.
She felt Kevin’s magic surging, and she shouted, “No, wait!” and cast another spell. She went for the legs again, and the possessed man toppled. Bree winced as someone tripped over him, then saw one of his companions reach down to try to pull the man to his feet.
Satisfied, she started backing away from the scene, but found her way blocked. Kevin was pressed in front of her, and another person close behind her. She was hemmed in on all sides now and was starting to feel claustrophobic. She could just make out more violent activity over Kevin’s shoulder. There was a full out fist
fight going on. As the crowd around them shifted, a small opening emerged to her left, and she took it, grabbing for Kevin’s hand and weaseling through. She could feel the push/pull on Kevin through their grip as he tried to follow her through spaces too small for him. She heard him apologizing as they went.
Bree felt a growing sensation of frustration as the energy of the crowd continued to worsen. They were able to do so little. Sure, disabling the two possessed probably helped some, for a brief time at least. She couldn’t help but think how much more good she could be doing if she could simply order all the demons she encountered out. As they broke through again to the less dense outer part of the crowd, she remembered how well Gelsenim had been doing lately on masking his demonic energy signature. If he were able to keep it that muted, might she be able to utilize his help with fairly minimal risk of getting caught?
She pictured making that argument to Kevin, and could easily imagine his objections. He was doing amazingly well here tonight, as he’d done when they worked together at Alki. But it wasn’t truly in his nature to take many risks. He was protective and cautious to a fault, and she knew he’d throw her promise not to call Gelsenim ruthlessly into her face if she tried to make her case. Yet again, she wished Daniel were here. She thought he’d back her up on it if he thought she could get away with it.
She and Kevin made it all the way out and turned to face the action. She scanned for Franchesca. It was clearly going to be difficult to try to keep track of her while avoiding being seen in all this mess. She could see more police in riot gear moving into place around the pockets of violence, trying to move in and break it up, and Bree had a brief hope that they would be able to contain the worst of it.
As her eyes moved over the crowd, her attention was caught by a flash of red light. She realized as she searched for the source that she was seeing the reflection of the light in the huge glass expanse that was the front of the Westlake Center mall.
The flickering of the light increased in tempo and then, to her great shock, she saw the form of a disembodied demon rise above the crowd. It looked like a dragon, long reptilian snout opened in a roar of anger, red lined black wings rising over it’s long body, orange eyes whirling.
Bree was drenched in involuntary terror. A demon in a form like this had killed her husband Seth. It might even be the same one. That it was visible here, now, was a violation of the deepest tenant of the magical community, both light and dark, that of secrecy. Even a demon burned Demon Master would be highly unlikely to allow a disembodied demon to be seen in public if they had any control over it whatsoever. Which may well mean that this particular demon had escaped control of the Master who had called it. And that was a seriously bad thing.
There were shrieks of surprise and fear as the people in the crowd nearby saw the apparition, followed by screams of pain as the demon’s energy began to burn the people around it. The demon wouldn’t be able to hurt people for long. It couldn’t maintain enough physical energy on this plane to do so for more than a minute or two. But a minute or two was all it would take to get a lot of people seriously hurt or killed in a crowd this dense. She turned frantic eyes on Kevin, who was looking as freaked out as she felt. “Kevin, I have to do something!”
“No. It’ll burn out in a minute.” His face had turned grim as he looked at her. He gestured to his right, and she saw Keeper Chen and her partner moving toward the demon. Chen clutched some kind of amulet around her neck, probably a religious focus of some kind, and her lips were moving in what Bree assumed was the beginnings of an exorcism spell. Bree knew the likelihood of the exorcism spells being raised in time to protect those nearby from the demon was nil, though she didn’t blame Chen for trying. What else was there to do?
She watched in trepidation as Chen and her companion broke into the area around the demon. The crowd was trying to move away from it, so there appeared to be some space around it. Chen was tall enough to be seen over most of the crowd. Her partner wasn’t visible at all. Chen’s arms rose as she prepared to throw the exorcism spell she’d prepared at the demon.
Just as she cast the spell forward, the demon spun to face Chen, jaws outthrust. The spell did nothing to stop the demon as its spectral form bit into Chen, and she watched in horror as Chen started to burn. She caught fire and blackened like a marshmallow being roasted in a campfire. Bree had to clamp a hand over her mouth and turn away to keep from throwing up. Panic competed with nausea as her eyes lit on another demonic form coming into being, a devil form this time, much further away, but visible over the mass of people in a swirl of red, orange and black. Bree forced her gorge down and grabbed Kevin by the arm, turning him to face her. “I have to call Gelsenim!” she shrieked.
Kevin’s hands went to the sides of his head and he was saying, “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Bree shook him by the arm, hard, and said, “I need you to ward me. And I need you to keep an eye out for Keepers. Jesus, Kevin, I have to, you know I have to!”
He closed his eyes and grimaced, then he dropped his hands and said, “Shit, yes, I know!”
She turned full circle to scan for Keepers, Reader sense questing at full range for powered. When she came back around to Kevin, she said, “Clear for the moment.” She rubbed at the demon repelling wards on her hands, forcing them to break, then gathered her will quickly, and called mentally, desperately, "Gelsenim, come to me now! Come directly into me!" She stood, braced, as another, then another demon took shape, both civilians and police scattering away from the nightmare forms. A familiar rush of heat flowed into Bree, and she heard Gelsenim’s voice in her head, My host, yet again you place yourself in danger. Is this truly necessary?
Just shut up and get busy. Are you muting your energy signature?
Yes, my host, I know that is what you prefer.
Fine, now help me banish these fucking demons! She stalked forward into the crowd, Kevin at her side. She went straight for the dragon. It was probably about out of steam, but it was closest. Can we do this silently? I don’t want to broadcast to the world what I’m doing.
It is only slightly more difficult that way. She got about twenty feet away from the demon and focused both her base and will energy in that configuration she had come to think of as Demon Master energy. She shouted the words in her mind, Demon, I command you, be gone!
Gelsenim’s power combine with hers and struck the demon. It howled in protest, but almost immediately broke form and vanished. A wild triumph rose up in Bree at the sight. She turned to face the next demon, and instead came face to face with Franchesca.
“You know, I put a lot of effort calling that one, and I don’t appreciate you messing with my work,” Franchesca said conversationally. They were in a relatively open area near where the vanished demon had been, and while there was a lot of crowd noise nearby, Bree could easily hear Franchesca speak. Before she could think up a reply, she felt Kevin’s ward spring into place. She was immensely grateful for Kevin’s quick action. They had at least a couple of minutes to get away from Franchesca while staying protected from both magic and physical force.
“Yeah, well I don’t appreciate you messing with my city,” Bree replied angrily. “Get out of my fucking way.”
“Or you’ll do what?” Franchesca asked, eyes narrowing.
Gelsenim, can we take her?
I can help you cast several offensive spells, but your friend would have to drop his ward. The structure of the spells he intended bloomed in her head.
She can probably counter those, Bree replied anxiously. She realized that the longer she failed to answer Franchesca, the more strain she was putting on Kevin. He couldn’t hold the ward forever.
“Look, you can probably sense I have a demon on board,” Bree temporized. “It’s an Erekim. So you might want to think twice about screwing with me.”
Franchesca threw back her head and laughed. “And you think I can’t call one of my own?” she taunted.
“I think you’re probably overextended from calling as many demons as you
have already tonight,” Kevin put in. “I think your control is slipping already and you don’t dare let yourself be possessed right now.”
Franchesca’s expression darkened to anger, and Bree immediately read that Kevin had hit the nail on the head. Damn, the man was brilliant. Franchesca didn’t want to be possessed right now, so Bree had at least that advantage.
Won’t you let me kill this one for you? Gelsenim wheedled. She is truly a danger to you. We have encountered her before, and she is a very high power Caster. You are right, she may be able to counter even our combined power.
Bree was mightily tempted, but she thrust that temptation away. She had to come up with some other way. And the longer it took, the more people were going to die. “How can you do it?” she blurted out. “How can you just ruthlessly kill all these people?”
“For a higher goal, of course,” Franchesca responded with an ironic sneer.
“Oh, I think you enjoy it,” Bree shot back. “I think you are that completely sick and twisted. How do you suppose Daniel will react when I tell him what you’ve done here?”
Franchesca’s face dissolved instantly into rage, and Bree knew a moment’s intense fear, fear that she’d gone too far, fear that Kevin’s ward would fail if Franchesca hit them with her full power, as she was like to do in anger.
