Raw Power: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Demon-Hearted Book 1) Read online

  The cloaked hag muttered to herself.

  Standing a good foot shorter than me, she steadied herself against the wall of the alley and cast a single, grotesque eye up towards me from beneath the edge of her vast, black hood.

  It was one of the witches, all right. Her waxen face was illuminated by the far-off glow of the Waffle House. I watched as her eyes dropped to the magic circle on the ground, and as her lips crinkled in the corners, forming what I took to be a smile. Her lips were like two earthworms, their bodies rubbing up against one another, while a small laugh grew in her throat.

  “Well,” said the croaking thing, approaching me until she'd come uncomfortably close, “let's see what it is I've caught.” The witch reached out and took my arm, turning it so that my wrist was facing her.

  I let her have it. Not because I couldn't have overpowered her, but because I was too stunned to protest. This hideous thing was running its long, clawed fingers against the inside of my forearm, purring and squinting as if looking to conjure up my veins like charmed cobras. Finally, she set two fingers against the center of my wrist and closed her eyes.

  In the next moment the bitch reared back and fell against the wall with wide eyes, stammering but unable to form a proper sentence.

  Giving my arm a shake and trying to free it of the sensation her touch had produced, I grimaced. “What do you want with me?”

  From a half-crouch she surveyed me cautiously, eyes trembling in their sunken sockets. “Y-you,” she finally managed, “are a demon.”

  “Well, obviously,” was the best I could come up with, sporting a slight grin. “But thanks for noticing.”

  Her breathing kicked into overdrive. I had her freaked out, hyperventilating, and I didn't have the foggiest idea why. She clutched at her black cloak like a church-going woman who'd accidentally tuned into a hip-hop radio station and shuddered. “But this can't be. You... you're working with the Veiled Order, are you not?” Her throat quaked as she spoke, a mound of loose skin hanging below the almost nonexistent nub of her chin.

  “That depends,” I replied, “on who's asking.”

  Pacing around me but keeping out of arm's reach, she shook her head. “It bewilders me... why do you serve the Veiled Order when me and my sisters devote our lives to serving beings like you? Why not join us, demon? Help us to rid the world of the destructive Veiled Order?”

  I chuckled, placing my hands on my hips and peering down at the circle below my feet. “That's a mighty fine offer,” I said. “Let me out of this little trap and I'll consider it.”

  Pursing her lips, the witch's eyes narrowed and her flabby face took on a graver look. Though it may have only been a change in the light, her features looked more pointed now, animalistic. Her teeth, sharper than before, were bared in a grin. “It's all right. I will convince you to join us through other means.” Holding out one hand, she started into a guttural chant, the bulk of her face mercifully hidden beneath the hood.

  I watched as her hand transformed into a long, glimmering blade that looked awfully familiar.

  Shit. I'd seen this trick before, and I didn't like it.

  My heart began to race. I tried to move my feet, tried to lash out at her, but found I lacked the reach. As the creature glared up at me, revealing a visage of refined hideousness and animality, she reared back and prepared to let me have it, the blade poised to run me through.

  Hadn't I been stabbed enough for one night?

  Damn it, I thought. Don't you have something for me here? Can't you do anything? I was asking the demon, but I couldn't be sure whether he was aware of my thoughts.

  The witch loosed a chilling war-cry.

  I closed my eyes, waiting for the blow to come, and then felt something come over me. I found myself removed from the situation, made a spectator as someone else sat down in the hot seat.

  The demon.

  It was taking over for me.

  Turns out he did make house calls. All I had to do was ask.

  I'd long gotten over the discomfort it caused when he took the reins. I didn't care about being displaced, about being forced to watch from the sidelines. As I reopened my eyes and saw the witch before me, her enchanted hand raised to deal a deathblow, I willingly threw the demon the keys. He'd know what to do in this situation, would handle things where clueless me would fumble.

  “We shall see,” muttered the demon through my lips, outstretching his arms.

  This got the witch's attention. Either that, or it was the nigh instantaneous change in the air. An unseasonably cool breeze shot through the alley at once, ruffling the witch's cloak and giving her pause. On it came the scent of fresh rain. Taking another step back, the witch looked skyward, as if expecting a furious rain to fall.

  What she didn't expect was the white-hot lightning bolt that surged from the clear sky and struck her dead-on.

  So intense was the heat that wreaked her body that she wasn't even afforded a scream in her final moments. Like a flagpole in an open field she coursed with an incalculable surge of electricity. Then, before the wave of heat had even dissipated, or my eyes had been readjusted to the usual dimness of the alley, I saw that a vaguely human-shaped smear had formed against the ground. The outline of a person was rendered in hues of black, like charcoal, and a smoldering cloak remained draped over it.

  The demon and I had a good laugh. I, laughing internally; the demon, outwardly. The scent of burnt flesh flooded the alley; an awful smell, but one that I relished because of what it meant. Glancing down at my feet, I noticed I was still held in place by the magical seal the witch had inscribed. Freeing myself of it was a matter of some few moments with the demon's help.

  Opening my mouth, I loosed a few drops of spit upon the ground. They struck the cement with a sizzle, rapidly eating away the seal and even some of the concrete below. With the symbols disrupted in this way, the seal lost its effectiveness and I was free to step out of it.

  Stretching, I gave my neck a little twist and returned to the captain's seat. The demon sank back into the depths of my mind, and I could sense it was pleased with the work it'd done. “Thanks,” I said, looking up into the sky, smirking.

  I'd lost my appetite and figured I'd return home. Continuing down the alley, going back the way I'd come, I spotted the form of a blank-eyed girl near the edge of the street. She lingered there timidly, hands pressed to the sides of her raggedy dress. The familiar was still watching me, trying to track my movements. A black cat circled her heels, sniffing the air and staring me down from afar.

  Pointing directly at her, I said, “Get out of here. Go and tell your masters what I've just done. This is what they can expect if they interfere with me.”

  Both the girl and the cat dashed off, disappearing from sight.

  Stepping out of the alley with my head held high, I shoved my hands in my pockets and took my time walking home, triumphantly. It felt good to take matters into my own hands, to defend myself without Kubo and the others giving me shit.

  I still didn't have a lot of answers, but two things were clear to me.

  The first was that, if the worst happened, I didn't need the Veiled Order.

  I could take care of myself.

  The other was that being able to control lightning bolts was way fucking cooler than anything Joe could do with his dumb lighter. I couldn't wait to try it again soon. “Fire Joe doesn't have shit on Lightnin' Lucy.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I sat on the couch, toying with the black flip-phone.

  On the one hand, I knew I probably needed to call Kubo and tell him about my encounter with the witch in the alley earlier that morning.

  On the other, I wasn't in the mood for a lecture. His “for official business only” schtick had really rubbed me the wrong way, and I almost delighted in keeping this tidbit from him as a result. If he pressed me I could play dumb, throw it in his face and tell him that I wasn't sure whether it counted as “official business”.

>   I held off on calling him, ultimately, because there wasn't really much to tell. I'd met one of the witches, smited her with a thunderbolt like a badass Norse god, and then I went on my merry way. What use could he possibly have for that information? We knew some of Mater Agatha's coven to have survived; if nothing else, the witches she'd dispatched back to that suburban home to collect the infant had survived Joe's firestorm in the warehouse district. I'd have bet my bottom dollar that at least a few of them had squeaked through that debacle relatively unscathed, too.

  I'd done Kubo and the others a favor, culled the numbers of our enemy. There was no need to call and report to him.

  I pulled up the archaic calendar application on the phone and did a bit of figuring. Though I can't attest to being an expert on the phases of the moon, it seemed to me that we had about eleven days before the the full moon. That was all the time we had to save that kid and keep the witches from summoning up some fearful thing that, apparently, no one wanted to tell me about. It wasn't much time, less than two weeks, and yet I remembered what Kubo had said. He'd hoped that the witches would give themselves away in the interim, that they'd show themselves or trip up along the way. My little encounter with one of them in the alley outside the restaurant certainly seemed like a slip-up. For whatever reason, the witch I'd met had felt compelled to confront me. Just couldn't stay away.

  “I guess demons are like catnip, but for witches.” I set the phone down on my coffee table and kicked my feet up. The witch had asked me to join her and the coven, to fight with them against the “destructive” Veiled Order. It didn't surprise me that an abomination like her should consider the Veiled Order “destructive”, and yet I wondered what she'd meant. More than that, I wondered what the hell she was thinking believing that the demon in me would ever want to join forces with the likes of Mater Agatha.

  The afternoon was spent napping. In those moments where I awoke to take a piss or shift on the sofa, I checked my work phone. No matter how many times I checked, however, there was no message from Kubo. Things were quiet as far as the mission was concerned. Otherwise those douches at the Veiled Order hadn't heard anything they were willing to tell the likes of me.

  A secret society has to keep things, well, secret.

  I get that.

  But what I couldn't understand was the utter secrecy with which they operated even around their low-level members. Joining a secret society hadn't been like anything I'd ever imagined. There'd been no swearing in, no ritual, no passing on of knowledge. Joining the Veiled Order had been like starting at a new office, except instead of a cubicle, I'd been given a demon's heart and a cell phone straight out of 1997.

  When more sleep wasn't forthcoming, I started pacing around the room. Still, the anger in me continued to grow till I felt I might start punching in the walls of my apartment. Putting on a jacket, I decided to step out. The day was young, and a trip to the bookstore or bar would likely soothe my nerves a good deal more than spending the day inside, climbing the walls.

  Fiddling with my keys, I stepped out and went to lock the door, when I noticed something was amiss.

  It isn't the greatest complex in the area, but my apartment building is a pretty decent deal for the price. It's a two story building, only about a dozen units on each floor, and for the most part all of the tenants keep to themselves. I'd lived in far dirtier, noisier places than this one as a student, and appreciated the way that people didn't blast their music or host obnoxious parties in this place. I hardly knew my neighbors; I might've recognized them in a lineup, but the sounds of their voices and even their names were pretty hazy. There was one exception, a girl who lived across the hall from me by the name of Heather. Heather was just out of school, a physical therapist with bottle blonde hair and a rack so perky it must've been crafted by one hell of a surgeon. She had a little dog, a Pomeranian, that I really couldn't stand. She'd take it for walks sometimes, and its yapping would fill the halls till she finally dragged it out onto the street on its leash.

  Well, that Pomeranian was out in the hall as I stepped out of my unit.

  Trouble was, the poor thing was laying on the ground outside my door, its guts hanging all over the place.

  I knelt down, looked the animal over closely and felt sick to my stomach. Someone or something had slit its body open, ass to throat, and had left the innards splayed against the grey hallway carpet. The Pomeranian was laying in a pool of its blood; it looked pretty wet, but I couldn't be sure just how fresh it was.

  I was about to stagger down to Heather's and was wondering who the hell would do such a thing to a dog when I noticed a large marking on the outside of my door. It was a simple, circular design, evidently drawn in the dog's blood, and it reminded me of the magic seal I'd stepped in the night before, in the alleyway.

  I immediately turned around, looking from one side of the hall to the other.

  The witches.

  They'd been here.

  Approaching me in an alley downtown is fair game, but if you think you can bring a fight to my literal doorstep and get away with it you're in for a rude awakening. Livid, I tried to wipe away the symbol on my door. The blood, however, had dried too much.

  It was time for me to call Kubo. I didn't like the thought of reaching out to the chief, but knew I didn't have a choice. Things were heating up, and now the witches knew where I lived. It was possible that I'd been tagged by one of them, or that they'd followed me home last night. Kubo, though, would know what to do. I went to open the door to my apartment but paused as a faint rustling sounded from behind me.

  I turned and watched as the Pomeranian's exposed guts began to writhe in its abdominal cavity. Then, without warning, a length of intestine shot out towards me like a whip, winding itself around my neck and tightening with all the force of a boa constrictor. I coughed, trying to tear the slick intestine away from my throat, but it only squeezed tighter, eventually bringing me to my knees.

  The lights in the hallway flickered several times before they eventually shut off completely. The light coming in from the windows on the two ends was snuffed out by a shadowy mist and the space was darkened considerably. Straining to breathe, I tugged on the length of gore fastened around my neck and watched in horror as someone ambled down the hall towards me from the direction of the fire escape.

  Stepping slowly, deliberately, was a young man. He was tall, with dark hair and stunning blue eyes. I recognized him the moment he came into focus, even though he appeared disheveled. The circles under his eyes bespoke countless sleepless nights, and the needle in his trembling hand dripped with a bit of liquid. I recognized him because he was my older brother, Conrad.

  Trouble is, my brother Conrad was dead.

  He'd been dead for years now.

  This probably doesn't seem like the best time for me to launch into a bit of family history, but I want you to bear with me. See, despite what you may think, I come from a decent background. My folks divorced when I was young, but up until that point we lived a fairly comfortable lower-middle class life in a nearby suburb. It was me, my parents, and my older brother, Conrad.

  And everyone loved Conrad.

  That one child should be favored over his siblings is nothing new. Happens all the time. And I'm convinced now, after so many years of reflection, and late nights of drinking, that my parents never meant anything bad by it. They just preferred him. Everyone did. Conrad was a child of promise. He was walking before he was a year old, learned to read and count by the time he was three. Did great in school, played sports, was a handsome devil. My youth would have been spent competing with Conrad for my parents' attention, except that I knew better than to think I'd ever win. No, I learned early on that Conrad was the chosen son, the one who would go on to do great things and do right by the family name. I got used to playing second fiddle and just kept my head down. It was easier that way.

  Conrad and I, we looked kind of similar. I don't mean that we were twins or indistinguisha
ble from one another, but you could tell we were brothers, certainly. Back in the day, people would always tell me that I was the spitting image of my brother. It pissed me off so much, knowing that the best attention I could garner was a comparison to him. “Your eyes are just like his,” they'd say. Or, “Are you sure the two of you aren't twins?” Shit like that. It got tiresome, listening to that day in and day out till I graduated high school.

  But then, one day, all the comparisons stopped.

  Because Conrad died.

  See, for all of his “promise”, for all of his natural talent and charisma, Conrad was no angel. He'd been hiding a nasty habit from everyone in my family. For him, lies were an effortless thing. His delivery was such that he could piss on your pant leg and tell you it was raining and you'd believe him even as you watched him whip it out. But this little habit, a drug habit, caught up with him, and in the end, he couldn't talk himself out of that one.

  We found him one morning as I was preparing to head to school. He was slumped over the toilet with a needle in his arm, face serene and eyes totally blank. Even in death he was handsome and carefree-looking. Even in death I was a little jealous of him.

  Oh, my folks mourned. You'd better believe it almost killed them, my brother's death. And me? Listen, I know you probably think I'm dirt already, but I'm going to tell it to you straight: I didn't even cry at his funeral. It's not that I didn't love my brother in some capacity. I did. I mean that. The two of us grew up together, and despite all of the comparisons and other bullshit, we were still family. But I could never bring myself to cry over him, to mourn him like the others did. His entire life, or the vast majority of it, had just been such a sham in my eyes. The world had fed his ego, blown him up to this being of grandiose proportions, and when the house of cards came tumbling down, everyone suddenly knew what he'd really been.

  A phony. A sweet-talking drug addict with a pair of baby blue eyes and a wicked smile. Nothing more, nothing less. He was never going to go on to do great things. Wasn't going to get a doctorate, run for President, nothing. And somehow, deep down, I'd always known it.