The Demon Side Read online

  “We’re home!” John’s crackling voice rang through house. René shuffled out of the room. Whatever she was doing, she didn’t want anyone to know. This woman was hiding more than just vodka bottles around the house.

  Something inside me wanted to go downstairs to see how Etta was doing, but it was that something that got me far too wrapped up in her to begin with. I’d continued my search for hotspots on the cold hardwood floor when Etta startled me, dropping down onto her bed, stomach first.

  “What are you doing down there?” Etta seemed close to bursting into tears even though her voice sounded happy.

  “Looking for hot spots,” I replied before turning back to the floor.

  “What for?” Etta asked.

  I really didn’t want to get caught up in another conversation with the girl. I tried to ignore the impatient tapping of her finger on the mattress as I felt around the floor at the foot of her bed.

  “I understand. I have another entity so you don’t want to talk to me now, huh? Typical guy gets all quiet when there’s competition around.” Etta giggled at her own failed attempt at comedy. The funny thing about jokes is that there is some honesty to them all.

  Typical guy? What did she think I was, some jealous boyfriend? She may have known a few things about Demons, but she hit off target with that one. Demons aren’t the jealous type; we’re more the territorial type. I could care less what happened to her or her demonic stalker as long as it didn’t involve my house. Yet I didn’t bother to correct her.

  “I’m trying to concentrate, and your constant squawking is a bit of a distraction,” I said instead.

  “He was standing right next to you. That’s where you’d find the warm spot. It’s probably gone by now.” Etta rolled on her back and let out a loud frustrated sigh. Normally, I wouldn’t be too happy about a barely eighteen-year-old girl knowing more than I did, but she did have a leg up on me in this situation. I couldn’t see or hear who or whatever attacked her. I got up and went over to where I had watched Etta get lit up a few days ago. That’s what it’s called when we send someone into sheer, paralyzing terror. It’s a difficult trick to pull off. You basically muster up every available ounce of energy you can safely spare and send it through a person’s body. Just the act scares the person so bad they don’t realize they are actually being cooked from the inside out. If done properly it can cause brain damage or death. The human eye can’t see it, but the victim’s eyes, mouth, and every other orifice lights up like New York at night. And I do mean every orifice. It’s a beautiful sight to me.

  “You learn all this stuff from your books?” I asked. I grudgingly sensed a little excitement in my voice. Maybe it could be because someone finally paid enough attention to know what happened around us all or maybe it was the fact that now I had a worthy opponent who wouldn’t fall for amateur tricks.

  “No. Most I learn from my friend Mosh’s dad. He runs the Parapsychology Department at Duke. When you guys started coming out, he was the only one who believed I wasn’t another schizophrenic running around screaming, ‘The demons are coming!’ So, while my dad shoved pills down my throat and René dragged me from one shrink to another, he actually took the time to find out what was really happening to me.” Etta’s eyes never turned from the ceiling.

  “Duke?” I asked, shrugging off her “woe is me” monologue. I didn’t want to dive into the depths of Etta’s emotional pool of who loved her and who didn’t.

  “It’s a university in North Carolina.”

  I rubbed my hand lightly over the spot Etta said the houseguest had been in. She was right. On the floor where she said he’d stood lingered a faint warmth and slight odor, but no trail leading to where he might have set up camp. I would have to wait for him to come for Etta again and trust me, he would. No Demon would risk going out of a home into the nothingness after using as much energy as it takes lighting someone up unless he’d found another plaything. And that’s what Etta apparently became, his plaything—his favorite squeak toy.

  Chapter Six

  “You didn’t see him, did you?” Etta rolled onto her side, resting her head on her hand as she gazed at me, waiting for my answer.

  I wasn’t interested in getting buddy-buddy with Etta, but I needed her to fish out the other Demon in my house. I was in no mood to get into an ongoing pissing match over who did what, what belonged to whom, or who scared whom with one of my kind. It was time to remove the other player out of my game, and fast. But if I told Etta that I couldn’t see him, she might perceive it as my weakness. I needed her to believe that I held the ultimate power. But if I told her I’d seen him, she might not trust me since I didn’t help her during the Demon’s attack.

  “No, I didn’t,” I reluctantly replied.

  “Why’s that?” Etta’s eyebrows rose.

  “Anything a Demon can do to you, it can do to another Demon. If I don’t want another Demon to see me, he won’t be able to. It’s called cloaking, and that’s probably what he did.”

  Etta looked eager to hear more. Although my honesty came as a bit of surprise to me, I couldn’t see the harm in it. It wasn’t as if I was telling her where a Demon’s Achilles heel was located.

  “But I see you all the time. Well, except when I take my meds. They tend to blur you guys out.”

  Ah-ha! Her medications had blocked me from her sight all those months. And I suspected René did the same with her constant trips to the liquor cabinet. I needed to learn everything about her yellowish pills. How long did they last? Where did John keep them? Maybe I could switch them with a placebo, leaving Etta with nowhere to hide. I’d need this information for when it came time to get rid of her.

  “Do you take them every day?” I asked Etta.

  “Off and on. I’m supposed take them twice a day, but most of the time I flush them down the toilet or spit them out. I don’t like the way they make feel. Besides, I don’t even need them, really. I’m not crazy like everyone thinks.” Etta’s body tensed up. Talking about her medication made her edgy.

  “How do they make you feel?”

  “Numb.” Etta shrugged her shoulders.

  “Why do you even have them then if you never take them?”

  “Because I can see people like you. Because of your kind, I had to spend the last few nights in a psych ward. Because of Demons, my family is falling apart.”

  Etta jumped off the bed and walked to the window, clenching her fists. Though this new information could prove incredibly helpful to me, it wasn’t my intent to upset her.

  She’d dropped the tough girl act and showed me her vulnerable side. I didn’t know what to say. The weird tingle in my stomach returned as I stared at this disheveled girl. Something about seeing her that way appealed to me, but not in my typical sadistic way. Her brown eyes sparkled as her tears began to dry. For the first time in my existence, I wished I could hold something for more than just a few minutes. I began to walk toward her when I caught my reflection in her white wicker vanity mirror.

  Dull black and dingy grey scales covered my entire eight-foot tall muscle-packed form. Eight six-inch long, thick black claws tipped each hand. Two rows of sharp, pointed teeth and large blood-red eyes filled my sucked-in face. Four curled, blood-stained horns framed my hideous features. The image snapped me out of my delusion. What was I thinking? Holding her? Demons don’t think those things. We feed off screams of fear, chaos, and terror. We think only of ways to torture and inflict pain, both mental and physical.

  “You’re not like the other one, you know.” Etta turned and faced me with her arms across her chest. How she could stomach not only to talk to me, but to look at me was truly puzzling. But what became even more puzzling was what she said.

  “What do you mean I’m not like him?”

  “You’re different. As in, not the same.” Etta’s sarcastic response irked me, but I had to remain calm to get a straightforward answer.

  “What does he look like?” I hissed through my teeth, trying hard to keep my te
mper under control.

  “I don’t know. There’s just something really different about you.” The topic made Etta fidget and me extremely impatient. It was time to change the direction of the conversation. I struggled to think of what to say when Etta turned the subject to me.

  “So, what’s your story?”

  “What do you mean?” I knew what she wanted to know and I had to be very careful. Tell her too much and she could use it against me. Don’t tell her enough and she might shut down communication altogether.

  “For starters, why this house? Of all the places you guys can go, why did you choose this place to settle down?” Etta asked a question I’ve been asking myself for centuries.

  “I didn’t choose this place. This is where I woke up,” I growled. Why and how I ended up in this forsaken dump was beyond me.

  “I thought Demons didn’t sleep.” Etta sat back down on her bed.

  “We don’t.” I felt my eyes grow redder.

  “So then how do you just wake up somewhere if you don’t sleep?” The girl wasn’t going to give up no matter how tense my outward appearance became.

  “C’mon,” I said as I walked inside the closet, motioning for her to follow.

  “Wait. Where are you going?” Etta asked, hesitation in her voice.

  “You want to know more about me and my kind, I’ll show you.” I opened the plywood access and pulled myself up. When I looked down through the opening, Etta stared up at me expectantly.

  “Can you help me up, please?” Etta reached her hand toward me as she stood on her tiptoes.

  I’ve never had a human reach for me, except to try to fend me off. Watching her fingers wiggle, as if that would somehow magically extend them upward to me, my stomach tingled again. What I was doing was not only wrong, but against every rule I’ve ever made. And now I found myself about to give her an intimate sneak peek into my life.

  I hadn’t gotten much rest since Etta and her family came into my home, and today I was running on empty. Based on Etta’s height and weight, I knew pulling her up into the attic would require a large drain on my reserve.

  “Are you going to help me or not?” Etta tried to extend her hand farther.

  I couldn’t resist her sheepish smile, but if this could become a bad habit of mine, I needed to get her a stepstool. Moving all of my energy to my five-foot long arm, I wrapped my claws around her wrist and yanked her up into the attic. She was slightly heavier than I pegged her for, by maybe fifteen pounds. It turned me on in my own sadistic way. What can I say? I am a big Demon and I prefer a woman with meat on her bones.

  Etta was a nice change from the last girl I decided to pick up and throw across the room. She weighed a hundred pounds and was almost six feet tall. I used to watch her make herself puke after every meal. She had dreams of being a supermodel. Posters of Tyra Banks and Cindy Crawford covered every inch of the bare walls. Boys would literally fight over that bag of bones. Quite honestly, being able to see a girl’s ribs grossed me out; it’s so unnatural. She and her parents were extremely easy to get rid of. It only took me three months, a little tampering with the mirrors in the house, and once she threw up her last meal, mom and dad moved.

  “Why did we come up here?” Etta smacked her hands back and forth on her hips, dusting herself off. I found it a little silly to be honest. I controlled her landing in the attic perfectly to make sure she didn’t disturb my sanctuary, so there should have been nothing on her. She probably did it out of nervousness more than she did it to clean off her baggy blue jeans.

  “Over here. Can you see it?” I walked to the far back corner where I kept my belongings, mostly little things that stuck out to me or annoyed me that I had taken from previous occupants. I’ve collected everything from quilts to pictures and even a few CD’s. But behind them all was where I kept my prized possessions: my armor, shield, and sword. I have only used them in severe cases when tenants simply would not get the hint. I used it on the last Marine that lived and died here. Poor guy hung himself with his belt. Wonder what made him do that?

  Etta walked past me to the far back corner. She studied a picture of a goat with a human face that sat on a throne of gold. I had stolen the picture of Lucifer from tenants back in the 1800s who were in a “Satanic” cult. They had been hilariously off base with their practices and beliefs. Trust me—no number of black candles could summon Lucifer.

  Her footsteps barely made a sound as she drifted around the mannequin I had stolen from a cross-dressing personal trainer. It was the perfect item to display my chest plate on. Her fingertips traced each black embossed line, which made a red pentacle the backdrop of my chest plate. She inspected every detail of my blood-red, black, and gold armor.

  “Ouch!” Etta stuck her finger into her mouth and sucked on it. The razor sharp spikes on my cuirass had pricked her fingertip even though her touch barely grazed them.

  “Are you okay?” Not thinking of my actions, I flashed to her side.

  “Yeah. So you’re a fallen, huh?” Etta asked, with a slight smile.

  “That’s usually how one becomes a Demon.” I waited for the smell of her fear to waft its way into my nostrils. Much to my surprise, I smelled nothing. Etta wasn’t scared or uncomfortable. With no way for her to escape, I could have easily ripped off her clothing and admired what she desperately hid so well under her loose-fitting clothes. But I grew more curious about where this conversation would go than about how her body would feel squirming under my weight.

  “You were an Angel once. What made you change sides?” Etta walked around the attic, examining each token of mine one by one.

  I knew I had to choose my words carefully, but for some reason when I neared her, I suffered from rambling fits. “Look outside the window behind you, down by the water’s edge. That is where I found myself. I woke up wearing that suit of armor, my sword at my side, blood on my hands and face, and no memory of how I got there. I tried to teleport my way back home, but I could not remember the sequence of words.”

  Etta looked out the small slotted window to the river below. Though I couldn’t see what she saw, I bent over her, placing a hand on each side of her on the wooden studs of the wall and pointed to the spot I remembered so well. I waited a moment before continuing. Etta made no attempt to get out from under me. Being so close to her enticed my senses. The aroma of lavender body wash and kiwi shampoo invaded my nostrils. The glow of her skin beckoned me to caress it. In all my years I’ve never wanted to take something or someone so strongly. But I’m a Demon. I’m not a monster. At least that’s what I kept telling myself. I had to resist my urges and turn my thoughts back to the objective at hand.

  “Back then there was nothing here, just a forest of pine, ivy, and ferns taller than you. The boredom of waiting on the water’s edge for a summons back home drove me mad until one day I finally decided to walk into the forest to look for my shield. I found a Native American village not too far from here. They called themselves Omàmiwinini, but history books today refer to them as Algonquians. I sat and watched their superstitious ways and rituals almost every day. They were a stale group of people. Their daily routines of hunting, gathering, and playing became immensely boring for a creature like me. I assumed I would be called back to my home soon, so I didn’t bother terrorizing them.

  “Almost a century passed and still no word came from my master, Lucifer. I grew impatient. I was on my way to the village to start having some real fun when I sensed a major power source coming from down river. The year was 1608 and the Europeans were beginning to settle on the Potomac. They were filled with everything I needed to not only survive but flourish—malice, hate, and a fear so rich in their hearts I could literally taste it on my tongue. Their settlement was great for me, but not so much for the Algonquians.

  “I roamed through the settlements, implanting fear and hysteria in the hearts of the Europeans, causing them to turn on the Algonquians and vice versa. The natives that were lucky enough to survive the mayhem I created fled
the area, leaving me with only the settlers to play with. Once the Europeans were finished killing everything in sight that wasn’t white, Catholic or Protestant, they began to build homes and farms. That was their first mistake. You should never build on top on a Native American killing ground; life will never be the same. It will become cursed. The spirits of the Algonquian people always remain in the land they once inhabited and protected. Those who try to live there will become ill and insane. At least I led the settlers to believe that.

  “But it wasn’t until a home was built in this spot that I became trapped. They broke ground for a root-cellar and uncovered my shield. When I retrieved it, an enormous fire broke out. I tried to step through the flames to sit by the river and watch the panic, but found myself stuck inside the wall of fire. When my shield was unearthed, my territory had been set. On the inside of the fiery line, I could see everything as it was and is. On the outside of the line, I could only see my Hell. With such a small area to roam, there wasn’t much to keep me occupied or fully powered.

  “A preacher built the two-room cabin for his wife and four daughters. When they finished the log house, I moved in with the unknowing family. After coming in from a very short walk, testing my new downsized perimeter one day, I saw just what a holy man he was as he laid on top of his youngest girl, while his wife looked the other way, baking bread. I had moved in with the perfect source for the energy I needed. After his untimely death, the family moved and another family just as deserving of my abilities took their place. Over the centuries, this home has been torn down and rebuilt more than a dozen times, but it never changed the type of people that moved in, moved out, or died here. So, short story longer, I’ve been here ever since, stealing the souls of the tainted and wreaking chaos on the innocent.”

  In a roundabout way I’d just told Etta I had not only killed people, but helped almost eradicate an entire race. She didn’t need to know that I hadn’t physically killed them, but my hand had certainly facilitated their deaths. Relief came over me when Etta showed no signs of fear. I couldn’t have resisted my desire to take her any longer if the sweet odor of her fear filled the room.