Demon Hunter by Jenny Schwartz

Author:Jenny Schwartz [Schwartz, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BluA
Publisher: Jenny Schwartz
Published: 2014-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Demonology was a conservative discipline. Shelves around the edges of the lab held jars of poison, amulets and the raw materials for their creation, metals and crystals. A large freezer held animal carcasses. Shelf after shelf held texts, prayers and chants. The floor was marble, easy to wash chalk marks off, not easy to burn.

A man and a woman’s bodies lay torn in the middle of the room. The protective diagram chalked on the floor was smudged and broken. Candles were waxy pools set in a pattern new to Fay. She stopped at the edge of it.

“Why haven’t you had the guardians in?” she asked Angus. There had been time enough since the demon attacked her in Fremantle for a clean-up operation.

She read the answer in Angus’s tense face and his hovering in the doorway. “You weren’t sure the demon was contained.”

“He was probably waiting for a way to escape responsibility for the screw up,” Steve said. He waited between Fay and Angus, protective.

“People are irrational when it comes to demons,” Angus said. “I wanted to be sure they wouldn’t destroy the amulet.”

Fay saw it, the silver gleaming, in the center of the broken pattern, beside the outstretched hand of the dead woman. The demon had ripped off half her face.

“I’d say fear is a healthy response.” Fay breathed shallowly. The stink, the echoes of terror and the indefinable stench of demon all combined to induce nausea. A small part of her mind wondered how Steve’s heightened senses were dealing with the onslaught.

She bent and drew her knife from its ankle sheath. It was the same blade she’d lent Steve in the African jungle. She’d been honing its magic for years. She could have thrown it at the golem, but she’d known she’d need it now. With a demon, there were seldom second chances.

“Oran.” She’d learned the demon’s name in Africa. “Be visible.”

The demon’s power was bound within the amulet, a binding it fought with the whole strength of its rage.

Fay flinched.

It was strong, standing here between the two people it had killed.

“Bloody hell,” Steve whispered behind her.

For one of the rare times, the demon appeared in its own form rather than within a human body. It was terrifying, so beautiful and remote that it hurt. It wasn’t flesh and blood, but fire. Colors of orange, crimson, saffron and white gold melded into one another to form a creature half a head taller than Fay. It was naked but for the crimson bat wings that folded around it.

Without possession of a human body, Fay didn’t know if her knife could touch it, kill it. She held the blade ready for an underhand strike, ripping up through the stomach, under the ribs, to the heart. “Oran, I banish you from the world of humans, from the earth that nurtures, the sea that endures, the sky that holds our dreams. You are deceit and destruction. I know you. Name you.”

The demon bared its teeth and threaded its own words through the ritual of exorcism.

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