Demon Master (Demonsense series Book 2) Read online

  Before he could speak, Gelsenim charged the ward. A thick wall of air shoved against both Bree and Daniel, hard enough to make them stumble to keep their balance. Holtis joined in with a shriek of glee, and both demons together slammed against the ward again and again.

  “Gelsenim, this is not endearing you to me at all! I command you and Holtis to leave,” Bree shouted.

  Gelsenim ignored her, and his form changed again, jaw stretching, muscles bulging, skin darkening towards red. Bree staggered as another wave of force slammed the ward, and with it came a wave of heat. That was bad news. The ward was weakening. She looked again at Daniel and saw with relief that he was raising his hands in fists, the gesture he used when he was bringing up his Demon Master talent.

  “Gelsenim, I command you!” Daniel’s voice rang out.

  “No, I will not obey!” Gelsenim screeched in response, all human tones gone from his voice. Bree felt another crash against the ward. Its outer edge slammed into her, and she fell to the ground. The windows rattled in their frames, two of Daniel's African masks came off the wall, and she heard something made of glass in the room die a loud, inglorious death. For the first time, she began to be seriously terrified, the in fear of your life kind of afraid. She'd never seen Gelsenim successfully resist Daniel’s command, but it looked like he might manage it this time. The look of calm left Daniel’s face, replaced by anger. Both his fists clenched hard as he focused his will energy on the demon. “You must obey, I command you!”

  “You cannot keep me from her, she is mine!” the demon roared back, and the inner ward blew.

  Bree was sent sliding across the floor into the table, and Daniel down into a heap against the wall, where a painting fell on top of him. Gelsenim's form morphed completely back to the demonic, less large than his first appearance, but no less frightening for that. He stepped toward Bree, and a wave of heat preceded him, heat Bree knew could turn into fire in the demon's disembodied state. "And now, my host, it is time for us to join, as it is meant to be."

  Bree held her hands, palm out, towards the demon. The wards against possession she'd drawn on her hands earlier heated up, and flared briefly with light. That quickly, Gelsenim's energy burned through her personal wards. They were never enough to manage a demon as powerful as Gelsenim, but they should at least have slowed him down.

  Holtis bolted all around the edges of the outer ward, smacking into it at intervals like a frantic housefly. He was nowhere near Gelsenim’s level in power, but there was no doubt he was helping to put strain on the outer ward. If the demons broke that, they'd be free to seek someone to possess.

  Daniel sprang to his feet, face a mask of fury. “Holtis, depart! Gelsenim, depart!” he shouted, and Bree felt the air throb with magic so strong that it caused her heart to literally stop before it resumed its beat with a painful lurch. With a high cry of dismay, Holtis was sucked into the doorway between the worlds and vanished. Gelsenim threw his head back and howled, “No!” His form wavered and was drawn towards the opening as well.

  The demon changed back to his human guise, though this time he was partially transparent. An electric shock ran through Bree as the demon’s eyes met hers, in a sensation part pain, part pleasure. His form began to solidify, and he stopped moving towards the exit.

  “Bree, please!” the Gelsenim pleaded, voice perfectly mimicking the strangled, desperate tones of a young man begging for his life very much against his pride. His hands were outstretched towards her, and the simulation was so real, so nuanced, that she was moved in spite of her growing panic. “Daniel, wait,” she found herself saying, and she avoided looking at what she was sure must be Daniel’s incredulous face. To her surprise, he listened to her. Gelsenim’s form solidified and he lost his desperate look.

  Bree got her feet under her and stood up. Her knees were shaking and she had an almost irresistible impulse to sit back down in a heap. She took a deep breath and willed strength to her knees and her spine. “Gelsenim, you can’t fight us like this. I'll never be able to trust you as long as you behave this way. If I can’t be sure you’ll leave on command, I can never let you possess me again.”

  “I am so hungry, my host,” the demon whispered raggedly. “And you are so near. You have no idea how difficult that is.”

  It was a fine performance, and there was probably truth to it, but they were only moments away from Gelsenim’s clear attempt to possess her by force, so she wasn’t feeling that vulnerable to her all too easily triggered Reader empathy. “I’m sure it is difficult. Keep in mind that it’s difficult for me to tolerate your presence at all. Every instinct tells me to keep away from you, that you’re the ultimate evil. Anyone with Demonsense feels that way in your presence. If we have any hope of meeting halfway so that we can understand each other, you have to show me you can leave if I ask.”

  “Daniel has kept you from me for so long. How do I know you will ever call me again? How do I know this is not my last chance at our union?” the demon asked, one hand running through his shining hair as his posture slowly straightened from the half crouch it had been in when he transformed.

  Bree looked over at Daniel then, feeling uncertain of the path that was opening up before her, but she didn't want to discuss her options out loud in front of Gelsenim. The strain of holding the demon in place was evident in Daniel's dipping will energy level. She had better come to some decision quickly. “I would like to discuss this further with Daniel, but I think I might be willing to call you in another week or so and discuss terms for a trial possession. In the meantime, I want you to stop trying to get to me by force. And I want you to prove you will leave on my request, and not because Daniel makes you.”

  “You ask me to go against my nature,” the demon complained.

  “And you ask me to go against mine,” Bree retorted with heat. “Look, do we have a deal, or don’t we?”

  Gelsenim regarded her solemnly for a moment, then his expression smoothed, and he gave her a courtly little bow. “As you desire, my host.” Then his form swirled into a hot, damp cloud that imploded and vanished.

  For a moment, Bree was frozen with surprise. She quested out with her Demonsense and confirmed Gelsenim was gone, and the doorway to the other world was closed. Daniel heaved a great sigh as he dropped the remaining ward.

  Her knees finally gave out, and she folded down onto the floor hard enough to hurt her butt. Daniel strode quickly over and crouched down in front of her, concern on his face. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  A hysterical little laugh started to burble up in her throat, but she managed to confine it to a nervous smile. “Yeah, I’m okay,” she responded faintly. “I guess I’m just worn out.”

  “I’m feeling it too,” he answered ruefully as he settled down more carefully onto the floor across from her. He put his elbows on his knees and ran his hands forcefully through his dark, dense hair, making it stand up in messy clumps, then he rubbed his hands over his face briskly in what looked like an attempt at reviving himself.

  “So how close was that?” Bree asked, more than a little afraid of the answer.

  “Way more close than it ought to have been,” Daniel replied, dropping his hands from his face. “And I’m not really sure why. As long as I’m not overly tired, I usually have no trouble banishing Gelsenim.”

  “I’ve seen you handle five demons at the same time before, when you were in a lot worse shape. Why do you suppose it was so hard this time? Was Holtis a higher level demon than we thought?”

  “It definitely wasn’t Holtis. He wasn’t making things any easier, but he was just a minor distraction. If I weren’t trying to hold together so many pieces of magic at the same time, I would have slapped him down a lot quicker. No, it was Gelsenim. He seemed to go to a whole new level of power this time around. It’s obvious he was feeling desperate to stay, but frankly, I didn’t know he was capable of that level of power. I didn’t know any demon was. And besides, at first I didn't think the stakes weren't that high. I need that to b
oost my power levels.”

  “So when you say it was close,” Bree began hesitantly.

  “I mean he almost got away from me, yes.” Daniel answered her unspoken question. He looked away from her, and she realized he was embarrassed.

  “Were you, ah, low on energy?” Bree asked carefully. She knew she was heading into tricky territory with the question, given his history of becoming emotionally unstable with too much demon contact. It had come between them before, left her uneasy with him, and it was something he was ashamed of. The shuttered look that came over his face let her know that her cautious wording hadn’t fooled him for a minute.

  “I was getting tired, but no way near tapped out. And no, I wasn’t feeling demon burned either. I’m fine.” That last was said with particular emphasis. Whatever he saw in her expression brought a look of frustrated anger to his face, and he began pulling off his grey sweater then the white t-shirt under it. He flung the tangled mess down beside him. “Go ahead,” he challenged. “I want you to do a deep read. That way, we’ll both be sure.”

  Bree was caught off guard. She'd done only two deep reads of Daniel since they restarted their demon research. He'd agreed to allow them so she could monitor for signs of demon burn, and for any increase in the mysterious dark energy he'd developed, but they had both avoided doing it too often as it was a very intimate process. One thing that made her hesitate was that she’d have to touch him for a deep read. Not that she didn’t want to lay her hands on his pleasingly well defined chest. In fact, she wanted to far more than was good for her.

  On the other hand, what he was offering made sense. Their original deal with each other was that she’d help him with his secret, highly illegal research into demon kind and Demon Master abilities so long as he allowed her to monitor him for the changes in energy and behavior that inevitably took Demon Masters down the road to a very dark kind of insanity. For reasons they hadn't been able to unravel, Daniel seemed particularly vulnerable to demon contact induced instability. Most Demon Masters took years to manifest the first signs of loss of control once they began to have regular demon contact and allow frequent demon possession. With Daniel, it had taken perhaps a month of frequent contact, including a case of possession, to do it. Bree had often wondered if it was because of, or in spite of, his unusually strong abilities as Demon Master.

  In any case, here was an opportunity to check on the effects of the recent contact, as well as the regular, if brief, contacts Daniel had been having with Gelsenim as he kept the demon from bothering her. In a sense, Bree owed Daniel this deep read. He’d done so much to help her in recent months, to give her time to heal. That was what decided her.

  “That's probably best,” she conceded aloud, and began rubbing her hands together to warm them. She was tired herself, but reading was her strongest talent, and even a deep read was something she felt well able to do.

  Now that she’d agreed, Daniel began to look nervous. Not that anyone who couldn’t read tells would have known. Daniel was a fairly high powered Reader himself, but the particular magic enhanced brand of pattern recognition called reading tells was beyond him, as it was beyond most Readers. Bree could see it easily in the tiny shift of his shoulders, the slight tensing of his stomach muscles, and his steady gaze, which looked forced to her. All this added up to “nervous” in a way that was barely conscious for her.

  Once she felt her chilled hands were as warmed as they were going to get, Bree got up on her knees and shuffled closer to Daniel, until her legs were touching his. She took a moment to calm her body’s reaction to the close proximity to Daniel. He was looking with apparent calm into her eyes now, though neither of them were precisely relaxed. Close enough, Bree thought to herself as she leaned forward and placed both palms against Daniel’s lightly haired, surprisingly warm chest.

  “Whoa, cold hands!” Daniel exclaimed with a brief smile, and placed his warm hands over hers. The physical contact made the read much easier, and Bree closed her eyes and dropped into Reader awareness with a dizzy sense of transition. She started with a basic energy read and saw that as Daniel had said, he was depleted in both base and will energy, but still had a decent reserve. She would judge he was maybe seventy percent depleted.

  If she weren’t already familiar with Daniel’s energy, she would have read him as much stronger. Daniel at twenty or thirty percent of his capacity was the equal to most high power magic users at full levels. Being open near Daniel at his best was like being next to a hot nuclear reactor throbbing with barely contained power, one that could blow and take the world down into tiny pieces with it.

  As Bree let herself sink deeper into the read, she could sense ragged edges around Daniel’s emotional control. He was having trouble keeping a lid on the anger and shame that nearly blowing the demon banishment had caused. She’d seen him worse, closer to the edge, but it was disconcerting to realize that his surface presentation was so much calmer than what was going on underneath. She quested with her Demonsense to be sure, but there was no taint, no negative energy remnant of demon contact that was responsible for the cracks in Daniel’s control.

  And now for the tricky part. Bree had to let herself attune very closely to Daniel to go deeper, and she had to do it without losing herself. She felt for the shape and pitch of Daniel’s energetic signature and began adjusting her own to match. As she felt the resonance flow into place, she dropped down into a level of contact where she felt Daniel’s feelings, saw images from his mind. It was a rare Reader ability, to sense such detail on a deep read, a kind of intimacy that she didn't like to have with anyone. First, she felt his anxiety that he came close to failing her, to allowing Gelsenim to possess her. And there was a guilty awareness that he really wanted to know what they might learn if Bree allowed the possession. There was a sense that he was lurching precariously back and forth between the impulse to protect her, to go slow, and his burning desire to move faster toward some solution for the problem of demon possession.

  And she saw herself through his eyes, a warm and juicy vision looking far more attractive than she thought she was in real life. Bree tried not to be distracted by that. There was another level she needed to get to. She urged herself and Daniel deeper yet, below hopes and dreams, below defenses, into the unconscious.

  And there it was. The dark energy she could feel as a kind of quiet thread on a surface read appeared as a turbulent river on this deeper level. Bree's mouth went dry. She had so hoped it would be gone by now. It was deeper than before, the darkness, the violence, the self-hatred. And it still had that oily feel of demonic energy to it, not taint, not possession, not anything Bree had ever felt with anyone else. Did it have to do with Daniel being a Demon Master? Was it caused by demon contact, some unusual type of early stage demon burn? Or did it have to do with emotional issues? She tried and failed yet again to get a clearer idea.

  With a sigh, she finally gave up, and allowed herself to float gently back to the surface, slowly untangling her energy from Daniel’s as she went until she came back to an awareness of her own body. Her hands were warmed by the contact with Daniel’s chest and by his hands over hers, and she reluctantly brought them to her own lap as she settled back again on the floor across from him. Her knees ached from kneeling on the hard wood floor, and she rubbed at them. In the midst of her worry, she felt a small sense of triumph that she hadn’t fallen on Daniel with long repressed lust. Maybe she could touch him now without embarrassing herself with a loss of control.

  Daniel busied himself with putting his shirt and sweater back on while Bree tried to find words to describe what she had read. “Okay,” she began as he got settled and regarded her warily, “you were right, you still have a good bit of energy left. It wasn’t a matter of your getting tapped out. And you don’t have taint of any kind. You feel worried to me, and frankly, I think taking the research this slow is wearing on you.”

  Daniel produced a rueful half smile. “Hey, I’m working on it. I really am trying to be less obsessive
about all this.”

  Bree repressed the quiver in her stomach his smile awoke in her, and was careful not to smile back. “I know you are. But this isn’t exactly your natural pace. And while I know it’s my fault that we’re moving so carefully, I’ve got to tell you I can’t really be too sorry about that. Because that dark thing is still there, and it's worse now than when we last did a deep read.”

  Daniel’s eyes dropped and Bree felt him retreating deep inside himself. It had been awhile since she’d seen that, and it saddened her. “I don’t know what else to call it,” she rushed on nervously. “I suppose we should come up with some kind of name for it. It’s better than it was last fall. Not so near the surface. But I was hoping avoiding prolonged demon contact might keep it in check.”

  “You and me both,” he replied shortly, picking at the cuticle on his thumb.

  “Maybe if you hadn’t had to keep Gelsenim off me all this time, it would be different,” Bree said miserably.

  Daniel shook his head. “There was no choice. You needed time to get strong again. It was far too risky to allow him to contact you before. But I think you’re strong enough now.” He met her eyes in clear challenge.

  A reflexive denial bloomed on her lips, but it died there. He was right. She’d done well today, better than she might have expected. She had ultimately taken control of the situation. “I still can’t truly banish him, or any other demon,” she reminded him.

  “I’m here to do that,” he assured her.

  “And yet today, you almost couldn’t.”

  He sighed and leaned back on his hands. “I have to think that was something of a fluke. I think Gelsenim was truly desperate to get to you. You heard him say he had no hunger when he possessed you. Try to imagine what it might be like to feel full after eons of starving. If he believes you might allow him some possession time, he could be easier to control.”