1
The demon was fast. Damn fast.
It had dragged me all through the streets of Upper East Side Manhattan, snaking through the backwoods of Central Park to finally arrive in Hell’s Kitchen.
Groaning, I forced my legs to keep working, my lungs starving for air as I tried to ignore the cramp pinching at my side.
I didn’t get paid enough for this crap.
This would be my tenth exorcism this month. No, I’m not talking about heads spinning while spewing out fountains of pea soup. That’s Hollywood. This is real life, and demonic possession is very real.
It happened when a demon hitched a ride inside a person’s body, making them do obscene things and act out of character, all the while sucking on their life force until they eventually dropped dead.
There had been a sudden influx of demons the past two weeks in New York City. Rumors had it that an unusually large Rift—a tear in the Veil, the dividing line between humans and the Netherworld demons—had opened, and thousands of demons had escaped through it.
It had been a busy month for the City of New York in terms of demon parasites, but that didn’t mean the city was free of other demons. Hell no. There were a lot of creepier crawlers and things far worse than your average body-snatching demon bastards. Still, tonight I was graced with the presence of yet another demon.
There was no way in hell a fourteen-year-old human girl could run that fast for so long without having to stop and catch her breath. The demon inside her was running her down, pushing her body to an extreme no human could endure. It had stolen her body and now ran it like a puppet on strings, feeding on her life force. If I didn’t get to her soon, the girl’s body would collapse, and she would die, leaving the demon to consume her soul and then human-hop into another poor bastard. Typically possessions happened when humans were stupid enough to play at summoning demons in exchange for the usual crap—money, fame, sex. Still, I couldn’t let her die.
Unlike demons or other half-breeds blessed with supernatural speed and endurance, I had to rely on my bursts of sweet adrenaline and my profound hatred for body-snatching demons to fuel my legs. I was fit, but I wasn’t an athlete. My mortal body could only endure so much, and if I didn’t banish the demon soon, I was going to drop dead of exhaustion.
I’d been hired by the dark witch court to keep tabs on the Veil, mostly on hunting and banishing whatever demon or supernatural baddy came through. The pay wasn’t great, but it took care of the bills and helped me keep my family home, which was all I needed.
Demons were always tampering with the Veil. They’d pierce it and manage to cross over to our world to feast on a few human souls. Days like the solstice or full moons, when the Veil was at its thinnest, resulted in a larger outpour of demons.
That’s where I came in.
I’d blast them back to the Netherworld. Fire usually did the trick. A couple of fireballs later, and the demons were back in their world, leaving the mortal world a little safer.
I hated nothing more than a body-snatching demon. Okay, maybe two body-snatching demons. The fact remained; I loathed them. There was something utterly disturbing about being trapped in your own body while someone else piloted it around, and you couldn’t do a damn thing about it. I wouldn’t stand for it. I would rip that demon out of her, through her throat if I had to.
I caught a flicker of movement across the darkened street and turned to see a shadow retreat. Julia, the girl, disappeared through a door at the bottom of a six-story apartment building on West 46th Street. Good. I couldn’t exorcise a demon openly in the streets of New York City, not without getting my ass arrested and my face splattered all over social media.
I took a deep breath and followed her.
A few humans blurred past me as I ran up the street. Humans—blissfully ignorant of the paranormal dangers and horrors that surrounded them. The Veil acted like a glamour, changing the way things looked to human eyes and preventing them from seeing the paranormal world and its inhabitants. Must be nice to wake up each morning with only your bills and mortgage and kids to worry about. Not the giant-winged ugnur demon that slipped through a Rift and decided to feast on your brain because, well, that’s what they do.
Exhaust fumes, hot pavement, and the stench of garbage displaced the night air as I ran across the street. The gathering dark rushed in to fill the spaces where the streetlights couldn’t reach. There were no lights in the windows, which was the perfect breeding grounds for demons who thrived in darkness. In turn, the darkness fed them with power. But that didn’t stop me.
By the time I reached the apartment building, my heart wanted to explode through my chest to say hello to the concrete slab at my feet. Damn.
You’d think by now I would have made a charm for endurance and speed. I made a mental note to look into that when I got home. A pair of super legs would have been golden right about now.
Pinching the cramp at my side, I gulped down buckets of air, feeling slightly dizzy, and pulled open the door. I stepped into the darkened lobby and stopped to listen. The faint whisper of water running through pipes answered back. Then nothing. The dim scent of sulfur lay on the air. I smiled. My demon.
The lobby led into an equally dark hallway—a recipe for more trouble. But I never followed recipes.
With my heart pounding in my ears, I stepped forward, and the sound of glass crunching under my boots stopped me dead in my tracks. I looked to the side wall, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could make out the two adjacent light fixtures, their glass bulbs shattered.
Not knowing which apartment door the demon had slipped through, I ran to the first door on the first floor and checked the knob. Locked. I hissed in frustration. It would take me hours to check all the doors in this place. Julia didn’t have that long.
I made my way forward again and then hesitated for a moment at the corner of the hall. The soft click of a metal door opening and then closing reached me.
Bingo.
I was running. As I rounded the corner, I saw a door with a faded sticker denoting 6A. Soft, yellow light shone from the gap between the floor and the door. I went to the door and tried the knob. It rolled freely.
“Gotcha,” I whispered.
My pulse pounded, and I opened the door as quietly as I could to step inside. The air was filled with the stench of blood. The apartment was of moderate size by New York City standards, lit with nothing more than a few candles on the wood floor. The burning candles lit the walls with dark, vague, and creepy shadows. Great.
The ceilings were at least ten feet high, and the walls were covered with wallpaper straight out of the eighties. Chairs, tables, and a desk were strewn against the walls, as though to make a larger space in the middle of the apartment. And then I saw why.
A large stone circle lay in the middle of the room. The stones were small, the size of my thumb, and bone white. Six black chicken heads were spread evenly around the circle, and in the middle was a black lamb’s head above a blood-drawn triangle. Strange runes I’d never seen before were written in fresh blood inside the circle, suggesting more of a pagan ritual than your modern demon summoning. Creepy.
I took another step forward for a better look.
A girl stepped into my line of sight. Gone was the healthy, happy girl I’d seen in the photo. Her hair hung limp and greasy over her dirty face. Her body was thin, almost gaunt, and her limbs, what I could see of them through her clothes, were stained and dirty. Her jeans and T-shirt were speckled in blood, but I couldn’t tell if it was her own or someone else’s. The flesh on her face was sunken and the bones sharp, leaving her black eyes feral and unsettling. They watched me with unrelenting rage. She was pissed.