Tempting The Dark

No demon dared approach a reckoner.

Ed tugged out his cell phone from an inner suit-coat pocket, and the small electronic light glowed about his face and tattooed neck. The thorns on his knuckles glinted like obsidian as he punched in a number. “I’m calling the troops in Paris. We’ll head to town. Certainly, will that seal hold?”

“For a while,” the witch said. “But I’m not sure how it was opened in the first place. Had to be from within Daemonia. Which is not cool. Something wicked powerful opened it up.”

The witch cast his gaze about the field. Dark shadows flitted through the sky, black on black, as the demons that had avoided Savin’s net dispersed. The cool, acrid taste of sulfur littered the air.

Savin thought he heard someone walking across the loose gravel back by his truck. He swung around, squinting his gaze. He didn’t see motion. Could have been a demon. More likely a raccoon.

“The energy out here is quieting,” he stated. For the hum in his veins had settled. “I think we’re good for now. But Ed will have to post a guard out here.”

The corax demon nodded to Savin and gave him a thumbs-up even as he spoke on the phone to organize scouts.

Savin slapped a hand across Certainly’s back. “Good going, witch.”

“I can say the same for you. You took care of more than half of them. I don’t know anyone capable of such a skill.”

“Wish I could be proud of that skill, but...” Savin let that one hang as he strode back to the parked cars with the witch.

His system suddenly shivered. Savin did not panic. He knew it was the Other expressing her thanks. Or maybe it was resentment for what he had done tonight. He’d never mastered the art of interpreting her messages. So long as she kept quiet ninety percent of the time, he couldn’t complain. Some days he felt as if he owed her for what she had done to help him. Other days he felt that debt had long been paid.

“I’m off,” Ed said as he headed to his car. “I’ll post a guard out here day and night. Thanks, Savin. I’ll get back to the both of you with whatever comes up in Paris. If my troops find any of the escapees, we’ll gather them for a mass reckoning. Okay with you?”

“I love a good mass demon bash,” Savin said. But his heart could not quite get behind his sarcasm. “Check in with me when you need my help again.” He fist-bumped Ed and the dark witch, then climbed into his truck and fired up the engine.

Alone and with the windows rolled up, Savin exhaled and closed his eyes. His muscles ached from scalp to shoulders and back, down to his calves and even the tops of his feet. It took a lot of energy to reckon a single demon back to Daemonia. What he’d just done? Whew! He needed to get home, tilt back some whiskey, then crash. A renewal process that worked for him.

But first. His system would not stop shaking until he fed the demon within.

Reaching over in the dark quiet and opening the glove compartment, he drew out a small black tin. Inside on the red velvet lay a syringe and a vial of morphine that he kept stocked and always carried with him. He juiced up the syringe and, tightening his fist, injected the officious substance into his vein. A rush of heat dashed up his arm. A brilliance of colors flashed behind his eyelids. He released his fist and gritted his teeth.

And the shivers stopped.

“Happy?” he muttered to the demon inside him.

He always thought to hear a female chuckle after shooting up. He knew it wasn’t real. She had no voice.

Thank the gods he no longer got high from this crap. The Other greedily sucked it all up before it could permeate his system. A strange thing to be thankful for, but he recognized a boon when he saw it.

Flicking on the radio, he nodded as Rob Zombie’s “American Witch” blasted through the speakers. Thrash metal. Appropriate for his mood.

Savin was the last of the threesome to pull out of the field. He turned left instead of right, as the other two had. Left would take him over the Seine and toward the left-bank suburbs of Paris. He lived near the multilaned Périphérique in the fourteenth arrondissement. Driving slowly down the loose gravel, he nodded to the thumping bass beat, hands slapping out a drum solo on the steering wheel.

When the truck’s headlights flashed on something that moved alongside the road, Savin swore and slammed on the brakes.

“What in all Beneath?”

Was it a demon walking the grassy shoulder of the road? He’d felt more incorporeal demons move over him during the escape from the rift than actually witnessed real corporeal creatures with bodies. But anything was possible. And yet...

Savin turned down the radio volume. Leaning forward, he peered through the dusty windshield. The figure wasn’t clawed or winged or even deformed. “A woman?”

She glanced toward the truck. The headlights beamed over her bedraggled condition. Long, dark, tangled hair and palest skin. She clutched her dirtied hands against her chest as if to hold on to the thin black fabric that barely covered her limbs from breasts to above her knees. Her legs were dirty and her feet almost black.

She couldn’t be a resident from the area. Out for a midnight walk looking like that? Or had she been attacked? Savin hadn’t passed any cars in the area, which ruled out a date-gone-bad scenario. That left one other possibility. She had come from Daemonia. Maybe? Corporeal demons could wear a human sheen, making them virtually undetectable to the common man.

But not to Savin’s demon radar.

Shifting into Park, Savin spoke a protective spell that would cover him from head to toe. He was no witch, but any human could invoke protection with the proper mind-set. The demon within him shivered but did not protest, thanks to the morphine. He shoved open the door and jumped out. His boots crushed the gravel as he stalked around to the other side of the hood.

“Where in hell did you come from?” he called. Daemonia wasn’t hell, but it was damned close.

The woman’s body trembled. Her dark eyes searched his. They were not red. Tears spilled down her cheeks. She looked as though she’d been attacked or ravaged. But demons were tricky and knew how to put on a convincing act of humanity. And yet Savin didn’t sense any demonic vibes from her. He could pick a demon out from a crowd milling in the Louvre at fifty paces. Even the ones who had cloaked themselves with a sheen.

He stepped forward. The woman cringed. Savin put up his hands in placation. With the sigils on his forearms exposed, he advertised what he was to her. Just in case she was demon. She didn’t flee. Nor did she hiss or spew vile threats at him.

Now Savin wondered if she had been hurt. And perhaps it had nothing to do with what had just gone down in the lavender field. Had she been assaulted and fled, or had some asshole abandoned her far from the city?

“It’s okay,” he said firmly. “I’m not going to hurt you. My name’s Savin Thorne. Do you need help?”

“S-Savin?” The woman’s mouth quivered. She dropped her hands to her sides. “Is it... Is it really you?”

He narrowed his gaze on her. She...knew him?

“Savin?” She began to bawl and dropped to her knees. “Savin, it’s me. Jett.”

Savin swallowed roughly. His heart plunged to his gut. By all the dark and demonic gods, this was not possible.

Chapter 2 (#u0811bce2-2f5c-5daa-9969-cb41021cab97)

Twenty years earlier

Savin grabbed Jett’s hand and together they raced across the field behind their parents’ houses. The lavender grew high and wild, sweetening the air. Butterflies dotted the flower tops with spots of orange and blue.

Jett’s laughter suddenly abbreviated. She stopped, gripping her gut as she bent over.

“Wait!” she called as Savin ran ahead. “I’m getting a bellyache. Mamma’s cherry pie is sitting right here.” She slapped a hand to her stomach. “I shouldn’t have eaten that third piece!”

Savin laughed and walked backward toward the edge of the field where the forest began. The dark, creepy forest that they always teased each other to venture into alone. Neither had done it. Yet.

Today he’d challenged her to creep up to the edge and touch the foreboding black tree that grew bent like a crippled man and thrust out its branches as if they were wicked fingers. If she did, he’d give her his Asterix comic collection. Fortunately, he knew she wouldn’t do it. Jett was a chicken. And he teased her now by chanting just that.

“I am not!” she announced as she approached him, still clutching her gut. Her long black hair hid what he guessed was a barely contained smile.

“You can’t use that excuse to get out of it this time.” Savin planted his walking stick in the ground near his sneaker. The stick was one he’d found in the spring and had been whittling at for a month. He’d tried to carve a dragon on the top of it, but it looked more like a snake. “Girls are always chicken!”

“Am not.” Jett stepped out of the lavender field and stopped beside him to stare into the forest that loomed thirty paces away.

The trees were close and the trunks looked black from this distance. Savin nudged Jett’s arm and she jumped away from him and stuck out her tongue.