Blood of the Demon

Chapter One



The demon was little more than a mist of fog and teeth, barely visible to normal sight. It coiled in slow undulations in the backseat of my Taurus as I drove through the night, the tires of the car humming on the asphalt in low rhythmic counterpoint to the movement of the demon. The nearly full moon draped my surroundings in silver and shadow, making even this deserted highway running through a rank swamp look beautiful. There were no other headlights along this stretch of road, but this was little surprise since there were no houses or businesses out here nothing but swamp, marsh, and the occasional patch of dry ground that pretended to be woods.

I could hear the demon murmuring softly to itself in hunger, and I stilled it with a nudge of pressure on the arcane bindings. It would feed soon enough, but I needed it to complete the agreed-upon task first. I d dealt with this type of demon many times before and knew that the creatures were far less useful after a feed preferring to coil in sated comfort rather than hunt.

I continued to drive until I felt the change in the demon a sudden tension as if it had perked up its nonexistent ears. I pulled over to the side of the highway, then walked around to the other side of the car and opened the back door. It felt a bit absurd to cart a demon around in the backseat of my car, but I couldn t exactly perform a summoning out in the middle of the swamp. I was limited to summoning demons in the prepared diagram in my basement.

Murmuring again, the demon slid out in eager anticipation of a hunt. The demon was an ilius a third-level demon, about as intelligent as a dog but a thousand times better at tracking. It was little more than a shifting fog, visible in my othersight as a coil of smoke with teeth that flashed and disappeared like a teeming mass of vaporous piranhas. Without othersight a sense beyond the senses that revealed more than the mundane world most people were able to see it was

Diana Rowland has lived her entire life below the Mason-Dixon Line. She has worked as a bartender, a blackjack dealer, a pit boss, a street cop, a detective, a computer forensics specialist, a crime-scene investigator, and a morgue assistant, which means that she s seen more than her share of what humans can do to one another and themselves. She won the marksmanship award in her police academy class, earned a black belt in hapkido, has handled numerous dead bodies in various states of decomposition, and can t Rollerblade to save her life. She lives with her husband and daughter in south Louisiana.