This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in the book are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2016 by Devin Graham
All Rights Reserved.
Cover design by Devin Graham
Cover image Copyright Anchiy and Copyright Geraldas Galinauskas, used under license from Shutterstock.com
Visit the author at: www.thefictionist.com
The Demon-Eater
Book One, Part One
Devin Graham
This book is dedicated to you, reader, for giving it a shot. Thank you.
Author Note:
Please note that this is part one of four parts which, together, make up the first book in the BONDFORGERS series. I will publish each consecutive part monthly.
Once Book Two of the series is completed, I will combine all four parts into one complete manuscript making up Book One.
Find a mistake that slipped past me? Or just didn't like the way I handled something? Feel free to contact me via the contact form on my website at: www.thefictionist.com and perhaps find yourself in the acknowledgments of the full-length Book One.
Without further ado, happy readings.
PROLOGUE
NIGHT HAD LONG SINCE FALLEN and the one flickering streetlight did little to illuminate the long, narrow street, still damp from the previous night's rainfall. A strange chill was carried on the breeze, intermingling with the summer heat, and the foul stench of decay pervaded the air all around, clinging to the atmosphere just as the humidity caused the hunter's clothes to cling to his body.
Although...
The hunter removed his bowler hat, welcoming the slight breeze, which played among the strands of his matted hair. He tilted his head upward and closed his eyes, concentrating on the smell of rotted flesh. Breathing deeply of the fetid air, his nose instinctively crinkled. That smell, strong as a pelt to the gut, might have made any other man fall to his knees. But not the hunter. He was accustomed to it, after so many years. That was, he was as accustomed to the stench as every other man was forced to become accustomed to his own waste.
His nose ever sniffing, the hunter turned in place, making a complete circle. He continued, as though to make another full circle, then stopped suddenly.
The hunter cracked a smile. His particular line of work—if one could truly call it a line of work at all—did not allow for many smiles, and so he had learned to take them wherever he could.
He lowered his head and opened his eyes, finding himself facing the tenebrous mouth of an alleyway. The putrid decay wafted out from that baleful opening just slightly stronger than it was anywhere else. Staring into the interminable darkness of the alleyway, the hunter frowned. He was not at all fond of going into shadowed corners of any kind when hunting a demon, especially when the hot, near-palpable odor of decomposition was contained to the area, trapped by the walls of the narrow passage.
Derelict buildings loomed lopsidedly on either side of the alley, many of their windows boarded up, making them seem abandoned. They were not all abandoned, he knew, from the little snatches of flickering candlelight he caught wanly shining from behind some of the boarded windows.
An alleyway somewhere in the middle of the slums, such as this, was even worse. He was not afraid of the danger; he was afraid of where his thoughts went in the silent dark. No, the hunter had grown bored of danger a long time ago.
The man replaced his bowler hat atop his head, then rested his hand on the hilt of his dueling sword fastened at his hip—which he had only just learned this night was not fashionable for a lord to wear at balls; canes were the fashion now. He could never keep up with the trends of the nobles, as often as they changed.
With his other hand, he felt at his revolver pistol, hidden in a holster beneath his suit jacket. He probably would not use it. Too loud. But he liked to know it was there. It was a gift, after all.
A murderous demon in a dark alley, the hunter thought. Fun. He started forward and was quickly enveloped by the shadows.
The alley was narrow and cramped with trash and questionable puddles, but the way remained straight, with no branching paths nor doorways through which the demon could have gone. Forward was the only direction...for the most part.
The hunter paused at a large heap—more a small mountain, really—of trash clogging the way, like a pile of logs might dam up a river. A particularly smelly dam, the hunter thought, frowning. Looks like, for now, the way is up. Planting one foot as firmly as he could in the heap, and finding as well a grip as was possible with his hands, he began a sloppy ascent. As he climbed, he hummed a soft tune to himself—something he had heard on a phonograph recently; music was another thing changing almost as quickly as high society's fashion, becoming more lyrical and strumming than instrumental—in an attempt not to think of what things laid carelessly tossed into the mountain of garbage to which he clung.
Rusty needles? he thought when his footing was knocked loose and he scraped his palm against something sharp, as he was searching for a handhold. Grumbling a curse, he slid down a foot or so, before finding his grip again and pulling himself back into a climb.
Pitsville truly was a trash pit of a city. It was a city without many of the funds for the technological advances of other, larger—and wealthier—cities. But it did not exactly take an advancement in technology to build a fire and burn down its mountains of trash every so often. That was merely a lazy disposition.
When the hunter reached the top of the trash heap, he slid down the other side, not even bothering with handholds. Once again, he found himself consciously trying not to think of what things laid just beneath the trash's surface, which probably did even less to take his mind from it. Glass? he wondered, then nearly laughed at himself. He would chase a demon through an alleyway in the slums, but place some broken glass in a pile of trash and it would give him pause.
The hunter reached the bottom a moment later with the click of his heels upon the cobbled street. He stood up straight and patted off his tailcoat and breeches with his hands, his mouth turning downward in a frown. Though it was dark, he suspected his suit was ruined with grime. And...yes, there it was, a rip in his sleeve. A true shame it was, since this was his best suit—his only nice suit, in fact. He would have to buy a new one.
The thing just had to make its presence known in the middle of a flaming ball. He had actually been having a grand time, too. However, even grand times did fall a bit flat when the decaying body of a demon jumped from a ballroom balcony, brandishing the severed head of the event's host amid an audience of squeamish nobility like some moralless loon. It had been a demon, so a lack of morality was to be expected; but had the thing really needed to flaunt the deed?
“It could have killed the man in secret,” the hunter muttered to himself, advancing slowly through the alley, making as little sound as was possible. He had already made quite the raucous climbing his way over the heap of garbage. I would have found out about the death anyway, and after the fun. But, of course, there is no such luck for me.
Lord Placent, the host of the ball, had been a kind man—even for a lord and probably because he had only been a baron, and not so corrupted by the thin air the other nobility breathed in regularly from their towering pedestals—and it truly was a pity he had died this night. Even still, the death was at a flaming inconvenient time.
The hunter's eyes slid over the gloom, moving from shadow to shadow, searching. He could not completely trust his eyes in the dark; every mound of blackness could be just another pi
le of trash, or it could be the demon. Added to that, the stench of the trash did well to mask the stench of decomposing flesh, so he could never be sure if he were still a distance away from the demon. Or standing right over top of it.
He leaped to the side as something to his right fell to the street with a hollow clink, a sound like a rolling glass bottle following after. He already had his sword drawn and pointed toward a shadow hunkered up against the wall.
“Please, sir,” the figure, shrouded by shadow, begged in a rasping voice, slowly scooting on his backside along the wall, away from the hunter. “I don't have nothin'. Just a beggar.”
In the wan moonlight, the hunter caught the beggar's eyes flashing hungrily to his pockets, then back to the tip of the sword he had pointed toward the beggar's throat. All thoughts of stealing vanished from the beggar's eyes in an eye blink.
The hunter flicked the tip of his sword in the direction from which he had come.
“Leave,” he commanded in a harsh whisper. The beggar was already scrambling toward the trash heap the hunter had only just slid down from. The grimy, skeleton-of-a-man seemed to care a lot less about what laid beneath that garbage, as he pulled himself up and over as though he had done it a hundred times before.
Sheathing his sword, the hunter turned from where the beggar had been atop the mound and started on his way again. He encountered little more than the eerie sounds of night—the occasional pattering of feet, belonging to no one he could see, or the loud scraping of a pipe dragging the ground somewhere in the distance—as he walked.
The noises could have been placed in his mind by the others, of course. They did enjoy picking the strings of his mind, making already ominous settings all the more terrible for him. The others could do no more than manipulate the sounds of his surroundings—occasionally the images, also. Other than that, he had pretty good control over them.
They were a necessary burden, which sort of came with his line of work.
The hunter stopped suddenly, a soundless shadow scurrying across the way before him, into the deeper shadows. The overwhelming reek of rotting flesh hit him like a punch to the gut in that moment, nearly causing him to gag. He would have thought that smell would have no affect at all on him by now. But, then again, something so foul could never become pleasant, no matter how accustomed he grew.
The hunter frowned. Had I really been so much in thought that I missed it? Well, it was too late to be inconspicuous now.
The hunter stood rooted for several moments, watching for any movement from the pool of shadows, into which the thing had scurried. He thought he saw something within the deep darkness, but it could have just been his eyes playing tricks on him.
“Skin Crawler,” the hunter said as one might call to a pet, taking a slow step forward. “Here, boy. Or...girl.” A shadow, just a little darker than the shadows behind which it hid, seemed to stir.
“There is no use hiding, little demon,” the hunter continued. “You know I'm here, as I know you are here, as well. You seriously caused a mess back at that ball. Why reveal yourself like that, to people who don't want to be reminded that demons still exist in their world? You've allowed them the right of denial for decades now. Why raise questions of your kind again to them?”
To himself, the hunter thought, Is it sloppiness? Or is there a purpose behind it?
The shadow of the demon stirred again. This time the demon crawled closer to the edge of darkness, its pallid, rotting, human face peeling out of the shadows. A Skin Crawler. A demon with the ability to possess any living creature, by infiltrating the body and killing it from the inside.
It stared at the hunter with eyes devoid of emotion. Dead eyes. Its face, however—with its dangling bits of sinewy flesh, revealing glimpses of the stark white bone of the skull beneath—, did contort into an expression that was clearly anger.
It did not move to attack, but remained hunkered like some feral creature, half shrouded in shadow. Wary. Who was this man to chase a demon?
“And murdering a perfectly respectable nobleman only to waste his body...?” the hunter began again. Slowly, the hunter grasped the hilt of his dueling sword once more. The demon extended a talon-like hand, its flesh barely knit together, and crawled forward a step, humming a growl. “Why? I can smell you, after all. You must be needing a new body by now.”
Aside from a terrifying smile tearing across the demon's rotted face, its growl was his only answer. I hate you, the hunter thought almost reflexively. Every last one of you.
“No answer?” The hunter shrugged and forced a smile for himself. “Truly, I don't care why you did what you did.” Blade scraped against scabbard, as he unsheathed his sword.
“You...will...die.” the Skin Crawler said in a distorted growl through a barely functioning mouth.
The hunter nodded, simply. His smile faded, replaced by a grim expression, which he willed into another smile. Hunting demons was his mind's only solace; it was his happiness. And, so, he had to smile.
“You are quite right, little demon,” the hunter replied. The creature leaped for him in that moment. He waited as its flight brought it closer, then feinted right, when the demon was mere inches from slamming into him, slashing upward with his sword. The blade severed through an arm, already barely attached, but the blow did send the thing off balance in its bounding leap and it crumbled to the ground, leaving behind a trail of rotting flesh upon the cobblestones as it skid to a stop.
“We will all die, one day. But I will not die now, in this place,” the hunter cringed at the sight of flesh smeared into the cobblestones, “by your hand. I won't die until your kind is wiped from existence here, in my world.”
I hate you, he thought again. He brought his free hand up to the side of his tailcoat, feeling at the revolver holstered beneath it. The gift. I hate you.
As the demon struggled to its feet, the hunter found himself almost disappointed. He had expected more of a fight. This demon was already finished.
It tried to take a step forward, but instead its leg collapsed beneath it. A flimsy banknote might have given more support than that leg. The demon stood upright and tried, again, to take a step, but this time the thing's leg hardly moved more than a couple inches.
“Oh dear,” the hunter said blankly, “you seem to be paralyzed.”
The demon bemoaned a shrill and deep wail all at once, two separate voices echoing out into the night. The hunter doubted it would matter if anyone heard. In the slums, people did not seek out sounds of distress, and the constabulary were sluggish to respond.
“What is this?” it cried. “What have you done?”
The hunter held up his blade, wiping the meat and flesh and what little blood was there from it with a cloth he pulled out from his suit pocket, before sheathing it. He tossed the cloth aside. He was silent for a time, but eventually he spoke.
“Poison, Skin Crawler,” he said. “It targets the nervous system. Blocks whatever part of the brain it is that controls your movement from sending your muscles messages—so I was told. You know, a doctor used something like this on me once? Or, rather, I thought it was a doctor, at first.”
The demon only growled in response, its limbs twitching as it struggled against the poison.
“Anyway, you may not be of the body you're in, little demon, but you still have to use it in the same way the human owning it before you had to. With the same muscles...the same nerves.”
Its disjointed mouth twitched into what the hunter thought to be a smile, but might have been a grimace. Then, the body fell limp onto the damp street abruptly, all signs of even the slightest struggle gone. The hunter looked at the body's eyes, visible enough in the thread of moonlight, and found them completely without perception, rolled back to show the whites.
Trying to escape on me, are you?
Quickly, the hunter strode closer to the body, until he loomed over top of it. He did not move for several seconds, in thought. Most humans—or most of the few who even acknowledged the e
xistence of demons anymore—assumed a demon could disappear and reappear in some place halfway across the world in the blink of an eye, and so, in most situations such as this—there were almost none who would end up in this situation; though, in the case they did—, a human would leave, in search of the demon elsewhere. Dim as most demons seemed to be, they would understand this human tendency, also.
The hunter, however, knew better. Demons were not omniscient, despite the common belief—they had to travel, just as every other living thing did, by mundane means. Something about being without a body for a long period, however, pushed demons into a state of near-insentience. Being so, they could not travel far without taking a new human host.
This demon could not just disappear and it would likely expect the hunter to be like most humans and simply wander away, believing it had. The hunter lingered, betting the demon still had yet to leave.
He glanced up at the moon, a thin, silvery beam shining enough into the alley to illuminate the one-armed corpse. Although, the narrow beam was quickly fading as the moon inched across the night sky.
Quick at work, he positioned himself between the silver glow and the limp body, so that his shadow was cast over the body. Blade sang against scabbard as he, once more, drew his sword, peering down on the two shadows cast over the corpse.
Now, which shadow was his and which one was not?
The moonlight was fading already, as the silvery disk passed over the gap between the buildings of the alleyway. With it, the two shadows were steadily fading. The hunter lifted an arm above his head, suddenly. Both shadows moved, but one was slightly off key. Demons, in their natural form were not shadows, but they were semi-amorphous and so they could imitate the shadows. But they could not read minds, and their movements showed this.
The light ebbed further, the shadows hardly distinguishable from the general darkness now. The hunter slammed his sword toward one of the shadows. The shadow moved to flee, the light faded completely just as he heard the tip of his blade break against the stone, and the demon disappeared somewhere beneath the hunter.
The hunter stood unmoving, heart thumping wildly in his chest, pressing his sword down against the stone with both hands. The silence seemed to last an eternity.
“Demon-Eater,” a hiss like the whisper of the wind finally sounded from the darkness at the end of his blade. There was a slight tremble of fear and realization to the voice. Demon-Eater. It was the name by which the demons knew him. They had given him the name. He found himself forgetting his true name at times, these days.
Your name is Demon-Eater, the others whispered in his mind.
I am the hunter... he reminded himself. I am Gabriel Hall.
“You cannot kill me,” the demon went on. It was almost a question.
The hunter, Gabriel, remained silent, but knelt down, still gripping the hilt of his sword, with one hand now. Demon-kind were immortal, as far as the hunter knew, but he wished he could kill them. They deserved death, every one of them.
He leaned in toward the ground, until he could see the dark mass of the demon's form, just slightly darker than the night. He had never fully understood how they could be so formless, yet still be impaled by a sword. He leaned still lower until his face was nearly touching the monster beneath him.
They could not physically harm anybody in their natural forms—unless one considered possession physical harm, of course. He did not know why, except to guess that it was because they did not belong to his world, but to another. After years of hunting demons, Gabriel still felt like he knew nothing about them.
And that was well with him.
“I will find a way,” he said to the demon after a few moments. He kept telling himself that.
The demon laughed. A slow, deliberate cackle, lacking all humor. Gabriel frowned.
“You know, laughing is an odd thing for a demon to do when facing me,” he said.
“Yes,” the demon said, sounded oddly amused. “The great Demon-Eater. He who has yet to actually rid any of us from this place. We are still a part of your world, still among the people. Through you.”
Gabriel's frown deepened.
“How many of us are inside you?” the demon asked. “A hundred. More. Why, I would bet you are more demon than you even are human anymore. What is it in that head of yours still keeping you from being just another monster—because, that is what we demon-kind are right, monsters, Demon-Eater?”
“Don't call me that!” An image flashed in his mind. Of a long, pallid corridor, and a demon wearing a ring. A memory. A reminder of why he did what he did.
I am Gabriel Hall, he told himself. The hunter. The human.
No, the others whispered in his head, the way a mother might correct a mistaken child. You are Demon-Eater now. You are no longer who you were. You are new. You...are...Demon-Eater. The others began to chant the name over and over again in his mind.
He did his best to suppress their chanting as he opened his mouth as though to yawn. Only, instead of exhaling, he breathed in. Not of the air, but of the demon below him. He did not know how he did it; it was as if a completely different part of him was breathing. As though the sinister darkness that made up the demons was this different part's oxygen. Its life force.
“How many more of us can you take, before you are the monster?” the demon whispered in a strained, breathless wheeze, barely audible above the others' cries inside of Gabriel's head. He continued breathing, until the demon disappeared below him.
A new voice was added to the chanting army in his mind. Demon-Eater! Demon-Eater! they cried like an angry choir.
Another voice, suppressed somewhere deeper than the others were in his mind was nearly drowned out by the fervent chants. I am giving up on you, Gabriel, it said.
Demon-Eater! Demon-Eater!
“I will kill you,” he whispered to the voices, setting his jaws as he climbed to his feet and sheathed his sword.
I am giving up on you, the other, singular voice whispered behind the cries of the others again.
“I will kill you all.” Gabriel turned away from the rotting corpse, toward the alley's entrance, and started back the way he had come.