Demon Master (Demonsense series Book 2)

by Sara DeHaven

  She called out for him again, then again. She thought she heard what might be a shout of answer, far in the distance, but she wasn’t sure. “It’s Bree! There’s been an emergency!” she yelled. Nothing. Still she waited, hoping she’d heard something earlier, hoping it was Daniel answering her. She swayed back and forth on her feet, hands in coat pockets, in a combination of cold and nervousness.

  Finally, through the glowing white grey of the fog, she saw a dark shape that gradually resolved into a boat. It didn’t take long before she could make out Daniel’s erect form, dipping his long oars into the water in strong, even strokes. He glanced back as he neared, his face a blur, and rowed harder on his right to get the boat in line with the dock. He slowed, and his boat came gracefully in. He shipped the oars, stood, and stepped nimbly out of the boat, onto the dock. He turned and knelt back to the scull, and pulled it backwards until it was set in the cradle of the manual boat lift.

  Then he turned to face Bree. His hair and his navy waterproof jacket glinted with tiny beads of moisture from the fog. His eyes were black in the fuzzy illumination of the fog shrouded dock light, and his expression was strangely empty. “What is it? What’s happened?”

  Bree shivered, not sure if it was the early morning chill or Daniel’s remote air causing it. “Look, I have some bad news. Are you going to be okay if I tell you?”

  “Well, that’s probably hard to say for anyone,” he replied, crossing his arms. “If you’re asking how I’m coming on getting some stability, I'd answer that I think it’s coming along well, better than I expected, really.”

  “Good, because Kevin needs you,” Bree rushed on. She couldn’t seem to get a clear read on him, and it was making her nervous, in spite of his reassuring words. “There was a riot downtown last night and Kevin was shot. He’s been through surgery, and it’s still touch and go if he’s going to make it. He needs a Healer.”

  “Right,” Daniel replied shortly. “Help me wipe down the boat and get it stored.” He disappeared into the rowing club building, and came out with a handful of cloths. Without another word, they cooperated in rapidly drying off the boat, then hoisted it together down the dock and into the building, setting it on its assigned rack inside.

  Once he had locked up the building behind him, she gathered her courage and said, “I think it’s important I do a deep read on you before we go. I need some reassurance that you’re stable enough to handle the emotional strain of seeing Kevin hurt. The last thing he or any of us needs right now is for you to go divided again.”

  “Do I look like I’m not handling the emotional strain?” Daniel replied, first looking down at her, then off to the side as he was distracted by the arrival of two chatting rowing club members. They nodded at Daniel and Bree, and Daniel took Bree by the arm and led her away from the building, up the stairs, and out onto the city sidewalk, where he let go of her. “I get why you want to read me, and maybe it’s not a bad idea, but do you really want to do it here?”

  Bree glanced around. The occasional car was going by, and another couple of people approached and headed down the stairs to the boathouse. “Not really, but we’re in a hurry.”

  “Can Kevin have visitors yet?"

  "Let me call Steve and check." She got hold of him quickly, and he said he was told it would be at least another hour before visitors would be allowed. "Is Daniel coming?" he asked.

  "I'm pretty sure," Bree said cautiously.

  Steve's silence told her he wasn't happy with that answer. "I'm just making sure it's safe," she forged on.

  "I get it," Steve finally answered shortly, and hung up.

  "Steve said we have an hour. So we have time to go to your house and do a read," she told Daniel.

  Daniel put a hand on her shoulder and bent over her. “Are you all right?” he asked with an edge of concern, the first real emotion he’d shown since he’d gotten out of the boat. As she felt the weight of his hand on her, looked up into his serious face, she teetered on the edge of throwing herself into his arms, even in the face of his apparent remoteness. No, she was not all right. She was sick with worry, exhausted, starving, and terrified she was making a mistake bringing him in on this. And yet he seemed perfectly steady.

  As she looked into his eyes, it finally, fully struck her that he appeared unaffected at seeing her. Given all the intensity between them in the past, both positive and negative, she wasn’t used to feeling this much distance from him. Something in her folded up into a ball of grief at the thought that his detachment might be permanent. It killed off her urge to turn to him for comfort. “I’m hanging in there,” she told him, forcing calmness she didn’t feel into her voice.

  He squeezed her shoulder briefly, and said, “So I’ll see you back at my place?”

  “I’ll be right behind you.”

  The drive back was quick, and Bree spent it preparing herself for the read, doing deep breathing exercises as she drove. She didn’t dare examine her feelings about Daniel’s apparent distance, she told herself. She had more important things to focus on than her weird and twisted love life.

  Daniel beat her back to the house and let her in. As she sat on the couch in the living room waiting for him to change out of his damp workout clothes, she meditated.

  She heard the sound of his feet on the stairs, and in a moment, he was with her. He was dressed in jeans and had his shirt off, draped across his back with the long brown sleeves hanging down the sides of his chest. He was holding a sweater in one hand, and he set it aside as he perched next to her on the couch. He still seemed amazingly calm. “Ready?” he enquired.

  Not really, Bree thought, but she said, “Yep.” She turned to face him more fully, one knee drawn up onto the couch, and put her hands on his chest and closed her eyes. The difference was apparent immediately. He was not faking the calm, not at all. It was there on the surface read, and still there as she started to attune energy with him and sink deeper. There was worry there, she could sense it, but it was a distant sort of concern, as if it involved something Daniel had decided he could do nothing about. She reflected that that would be the evolved way to look at it. There was nothing he could do in the present moment for Kevin but be here for the read.

  His base energy was very strong, as was his will energy. Whatever he’d been working on lately hadn’t drained him much. He was maybe down ten percent. He’d dropped his hiding spell, so the full force of all his talents was there to read. Bree took a steadying breath and sank deeper yet, towards those levels where the division in his psyche was apparent.

  And there she found what she could only describe to herself as a scaffolding of interconnected lines of force. In her mind’s eye it was like the underlying structure of a building, angles clean, everything nailed together nice and tight. She would have been hard pressed to explain why, but the scaffolding felt multi-colored to her, as if different energies or levels of containment were present in the various lines. It was as if he’d inserted support beams in his psyche. Bree could feel the pulse of the dark energy behind the structure, and she could dimly feel the rift where he had divided before. She delicately probed, trying to judge the strength of the restraints Daniel had somehow forged. She couldn’t find any obvious weak points, not that she was certain she’d recognize them if they were there. She promised herself for about the hundredth time that when things settled down, she would go for advanced training in deep reading.

  There was a certain beauty to the structure, to its order, although there was also a sense that it might be in some ways restricting the normal flow of energies, and not just the dark energy. Overall, she had to admit that he felt much more stable to her, certainly as much as he’d been the first time she read him, before he’d started to exhibit those outbursts that spoke of being demon burned.

  She pulled out with what haste she could safely manage, and came back to herself to find she’d moved closer to Daniel during the read, forehead almost touching his shoulder. She sat back and opened her eyes to find him reg
arding her with the first expression of doubt she’d seen in him.

  “I don’t know what you did, but whatever it is, I think it’s working,” she told him. “I can feel the dark energy, and the place where things broke apart before, but it seems to be contained by the structure you put in place.”

  Daniel pulled the long sleeved T-shirt on over his head, and the darker brown sweater over it as she spoke, then replied, “What does it feel like? The structure?”

  Bree pulled off the elastic tie holding her hair back and began finger combing her hair into a neater ponytail. “It feels like a scaffolding, or a building. It has a definite structure, very mathematical, I’d say. How did you manage it?” She was alight with curiosity, and she found she was nearly trembling with the hope that he’d found an answer, maybe even a permanent answer.

  Daniel stood up as he answered her. “I did some research on meditation and visualization techniques. I called a few people I knew, tracked down some sources on coping with getting demon burned, and just experimented from there. I drew from the hiding spell for my Demon Master and Binder talents as well. Once I decided on what to try, I spent most of every day in meditation and casting for about a week. For the last few days, I’ve been trying to do a couple hours a day to see if that will hold it in place. It’s kind of hard for me to tell how well it’s working. I know I’ve been feeling progressively calmer.”

  “Well, you feel really collected and stable,” Bree confirmed as she stood up as well. “And I can definitely feel the structure, like I said. You feel like you, if you know what I mean, like you before, except more settled, maybe even happier. You were kind of depressed before.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe it’s a side effect of all the meditation, but I do feel better. On the other hand, I have to admit my emotions feel a little, I don’t know, a little muted.” The look he gave her clearly communicated that he was feeling muted in his feelings about her. It fit with what little Bree had been able to read in his tells, and with that sense she’d had on the deep read of his energy not flowing normally in some way.

  “I have to tell you, Bree, that all this time in meditation has made something clear to me,” he went on. His look was earnest but still somehow removed. “I’ve had to admit to myself that I’ve got to give up on the idea of us being together.”

  An emotional shock washed through her at his words in a hot wave of hurt mixed with shame, the shame of rejection. She could feel her reaction registering on her heated face. For a moment, a flicker of uncertainty came and went across Daniel’s features, but he went on resolutely. “I’ve got serious issues even apart from this divided thing. I made a decision some time ago to avoid relationships with powered women, and I think I was right to do so. I have to either hide much of who I really am, which obviously prevents any real closeness, or I have to admit I’m a Demon Master and Binder, which will make it impossible for the woman to trust me, as it has with you.”

  Again, Bree felt flooded with shame. He was right that she seemed unable to completely trust him. She knew that on some level, it was justified due to his unpredictability, but on another level, she recognized it for a failing, a kind of self-defense against her attraction to him. She was, at her core, terrified to love and lose again. She felt laid bare by his words. And she had the urge to fight against them.

  “Daniel, there hasn’t been time for us to work through all this,” she replied, passion seeping into her words in spite of her efforts to sound calm and reasonable. “I know I’ve had trouble fully trusting you, but maybe this new technique of yours will keep you from getting so demon burned. Maybe it’s a fix for the division inside you that’s causing all the instability. If it works…”

  Daniel shook his head as she spoke, and interrupted her firmly. “I don’t think my fixing the division is going to be enough. I think you basically are never going to be able to feel safe with me given the talents I have. And I have to accept that. I have to move on, have to focus on the bigger picture. Call me crazy, but I’ve felt for a long time that I have a chance to solve the puzzle of demon kind. In spite of all the troubles with getting demon burned, I’ve gotten further faster with your help than I ever have before. I still want to work with you, Bree, but in order to do that, in order for me to be effective at that, I have to let go of the idea of a relationship with you. It’s not going to work. It was never going to work.”

  Bree tried desperately to think of a way to change his mind. She was blindingly aware how unfair this was of her. Still she sputtered out the only argument that came to her, knowing as the words left her lips that they wouldn’t move him. “What if this new structure is restricting your emotions? What if that’s why you’re saying all this?”

  Daniel sighed. “If that’s the case, it’s just helping me to do what was right all along. I wish we had more time to discuss it, but we don’t. We can talk about this more later if you need to, but I’m right in this.”

  Bree fought off the tears that started to well up in her eyes. “Yeah, we have to get moving. For the record, I think it’s definitely worth your trying to do some Healing on Kevin.”

  “I trust your judgment on that. And I’m relieved that your read seems to back up what I’ve been feeling,” Daniel replied, back to that calm, even tone. They both put on their coats.

  “I’ll drive in case you get drained by the Healing work,” Bree told him as he locked up his house. He gave her a searching look as they headed out to her car. “You look pretty drained yourself. I’m sure the deep read didn’t help.”

  “I was able to eat some last night, and that helped. But I am starving. I’ll get something at the hospital cafeteria after we see what’s up with Kevin.”

  As they drove to the hospital, the awkwardness in the air between them was palpable. Bree did her best to try to put the emotions raised by their talk behind her. It wasn’t easy. She was already feeling vulnerable from the night’s events. She realized she desperately needed some sense of normalcy to be reestablished, so she filled him in on what had happened at the latest riot. She briefly considered, then abandoned, the impulse to avoid telling him about Franchesca. Either she was willing to trust her read of his new method of staying stable, or she wasn’t. She couldn’t go around constantly second guessing what would or wouldn’t set him off.

  Bree could feel the shift of energy in the air as soon as she mentioned Franchesca, but on putting a quick Reader tendril out toward him, she didn’t find any major disturbance, and she allowed herself a small sigh of tired relief. He asked a few clarifying questions, but mostly just listened. By the time they reached Harborview, the awkwardness was less. She parked her car in the hospital parking garage, and they strode as quickly as possible through the hospital towards the ICU. They saw Bruce in the waiting area, and, as they got closer, saw Sophie laid out on a row of chairs, apparently sound asleep. “Steve and Dion are in with Kevin now,” Bruce told them as they approached.

  “Is Sophie okay?” Bree asked.

  “She got your message and came right over after the birth. She was a little tapped, but figured she might as well see what she could do. I’m afraid she pushed it a little too far and passed out. She came to once already and assured me she’d be fine with some rest and food.” Bruce was standing back from hugging Daniel, one large hand still on Daniel’s shoulder. “And you, my man, how are you?”

  “Figuring it out, Bruce, figuring it out.”

  Bruce slapped Daniel hard enough to rock him a little. “I knew you could do it.”

  “How long has Dion been in there?”

  “Oh, maybe five minutes. We’re only allowed to go in two by two. Kevin has been in his room maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. I’ve got to warn you both, he doesn’t look good. You should be prepared.”

  Before either Bree or Daniel could reply, Steve and one of the nurses came into the waiting area supporting Dion between them. His eyes were half closed, and he was barely able to keep to his feet.

  The nurse, a well padded, m
otherly looking woman with short, dark blonde hair was red faced with effort. “I have to say, you lot are sensitive. He’s the second one to go down in ten minutes,” she huffed. “You would have thought a paramedic would have a stronger stomach than that.” She assisted Steve in dumping Dion down into a waiting room chair, where he immediately closed his eyes and went boneless. The nurse fixed Bree and Daniel with a gimlet eye. “Either of you fainters?” she asked briskly.

  “No ma’am,” Daniel said earnestly, and Bree murmured, “Not that I know of,” right behind him.

  “Well, give us a break. If you get dizzy at all, sit down immediately and put your head between your knees. It can be a shock for friends and family seeing a loved one with tubes coming out of them,” she concluded more gently, then marched off to her duties.

  “So that was a little embarrassing,” Steve muttered. He folded down next to Dion, and glanced at first him, then Sophie, fondly. “They were wonderful,” he said. “They gave it every thing they had, and they both showed up already exhausted.” He straightened his tired body abruptly. “They’ll need food, won’t they? Kevin always needs food after a working. I’ll run down to the cafeteria and get something.” He sprang to his feet and hurried off.

  Bruce sighed heavily and shook his head. “He’s been like that since I got here, more and more wound up. He’s going to crash any minute.”

  “He just needs to feel like there’s something he can do,” Bree said softly. “He must feel so helpless.”