First demon you summon, it’s kind of scary. After a few hundred, it becomes just another job. Unfortunately I hadn’t reached that point.
My name’s Alex Noziak and I’m one of the five sorry-assed members of a team called the Invisible Recruits that are supposed to stand between the world’s humans and the rising population of non-human bad guys. One of the team was here voluntarily, and it wasn’t me. But that wasn’t my biggest problem right this minute; wrestling with an echo-demon that look mostly like green slime and a smattering of the living dead was.
I’m part shaman, part witch, not a card-carrying Wiccan but a blood-born witch, and one of my abilities was to summon others to me, both human and non-human, but only within a limited range. Sounds useful, but how many times do you really want to invite a Were, or vamp, or foul-mouthed dark angel to a party? Exactly which is why this particular summoning spell was a little rusty. Okay, a truck that sits on the back-forty for twenty years is rusty. I was in the what-the-hell-am-I-doing category.
Embracing magic was not a piece of cake, because it came at a cost. Always. My last summoning here at the IR (I for Invisible and R for Recruits) compound was coming back to bite me now. Sort of like an athlete who was a star performer one day but a dud the next. So now I was more witch-wanna-be who had to produce something, and fast, to keep my spot on the team.
A thought one of my team members actually voiced just about then. “You going to make this demon appear sometime in this millennium, Noziak?” Mandy Reyes snapped, standing kitty-corner from me across the training gym at our Maryland facility.
Mandy had hot Latin blood, a mouth like a stevedore, the patience of a gnat, and was one of the four non-voluntary members of the team. I wasn’t sure what was being held over her head to work this gig, but I knew it couldn’t be pleasant. I also knew her talent-she was a spirit walker. Which meant she could walk between the spirit world and the real world. Again, sounds cool but the price for that specific ability was to be soulless. Which meant when you were on the spirit side, or when spirits crossed over or remained on our side, she was an empty vessel with a neon For Rent sign flashing. Any spirit looking for a new home, she was the perfect candidate.
Right now though roving spirits weren’t our issue; a missing echo-demon was as four of us maneuvered in a gym that looked like an average high school holding cell. Nothing fancy for our group. Mandy and fellow team members Jaylene Smart and Kelly McAllister formed a triangle around an X-marked-the-spot circle. A circle that was outlined in salt for protection once I called forth the demon as training for taking one down in real life.
Our instructor, M.T. Stone and our team leader, Vaughn Monroe, the only one of us not coerced into being on the team as far as we could tell, were watching this exercise from a room near the rafters. Smart people.
Not that an echo-demon was all that threatening; they were nuisances more than deadly as they had earned their names based on their willingness to make a lot of high-volume screams that could scare the willies out of people and echo in a person’s mind long after the demon had departed. At least when the demons traveled alone. In packs, they could turn really nasty, really quick.
The intention of this little training session was to make sure I knew what the hell I was doing, which I didn’t. Get some practice in whipping demon butt before we left the safety of the compound. And learn to work as a team.
That last was the biggest challenge. All five of the IR members were not even trained to fight human bad guys yet. We were just humans who had a little extra, extra to our genetic make up which would made us freaks among humans, if the humans knew what we were. The four of us had spent most of our twenty-some years hiding our talents unless we really needed them, like I had when a rogue Were was about to kill my brother.
So I used a summoning spell. That was the first mistake. Second was I summoned a death demon who made such a mess of the Were that I faced life in prison for murder. Try telling a lawyer or judge there were extenuating circumstances, like the victim was a Were and my brother was a shifter who was caught turning, which meant he was too vulnerable to defend himself. I was damned lucky I hadn’t killed my brother along with the Were.
Yeah, so that’s why I was here, sweat pouring down my face, my arms shaking from holding them straight before me for the last thirty minutes and my throat getting hoarse from repeating a summoning spell that wasn’t working.
Instead of telling Mandy can’t-you-do-more where to shove her comment, I was saved by Kelly. “Leave her be, Mandy. You can tell she’s trying.”
That was Kelly all over. Raised in the flat farm country of Iowa and a former kindergarten teacher, Kelly could make muggers melt with kindness. She was our team placater, the rah-rah cheerleader and the let’s all-play-nice playground monitor. She’d never said what had landed her here, but it was probably because she had sweet-talked someone to death. Nothing else made sense.
Kelly’s ability was to disappear. Which sounds uber cool, but that too came with a price. She could remain truly invisible for only a few minutes at a time and when she reappeared she was blind for about ten minutes for every minute of invisibility. Which made her really vulnerable to attack if all the bad things were not vanquished. Another downside to her ability was she wasn’t very good with it, so when she was frightened she could wink out of sight unintentionally.
But then who was I to talk about being proficient?
Kelly stood braced just to my right, and though I couldn’t see her except out of the corner of my eye, I could feel her gripping a sword with a white-knuckle death grip. Echo-demons hated metal, as did a lot of the non-humans, so this late afternoon’s session was steel vs. demon blood. If I ever called the freaking monster forth.
I glanced at the observation room window and caught M.T. Stone eyeing his watch. But what did he expect? We were barely three weeks into our regular training and only just started flexing our other abilities earlier this week. That was after one of our fellow recruits tried to kill me and wasn’t too picky who else she took out at the same time. That’s when I began to wonder if prison might not have been the safer option.
Then we’d gone on one official mission, but that was mostly a babysitting session when Vaughn went up against the son of a Russian mob lord, a guy she had known in her previous life as a debutante. It wasn’t a picnic, but it wasn’t demon baiting either.
Talk about neophytes. Most of us rarely if ever voluntarily used our gifts in the world we came from and some, like Jaylene and Mandy, had skills that didn’t directly translate to taking down anyone. Jaylene was a psychic, or had visions. A fat lot of good it did to hang out with visions when monsters were out for blood. Human blood. Even I could guess at what the future held in that situation.
M.T. Stone’s voice broke over the loudspeaker making all of us jump. “This is a no show. We’ll call it a night. Try again tomorrow.”
“No,” I shouted back. I’d been raised with four older brothers; I could hear his tone if not his thoughts. Wimp. Lightweight. Poser. No one called a Noziak a loser and got away with it, even if it was my own inner voice. “Give me one more minute. Let me take this up a notch.”
“You sure that’s a good idea?” Jaylene asked.
“Yeah.” Though I wasn’t really.
I heard Mandy and Jaylene groan, which only helped me go deeper. I could do this. I would do this.
Here in this place and before the eyes of the unbelievers, come forth.
I call the creatures of the elements. The seekers of release who wish to walk amongst the humans.
I bid you to destroy the binds holding you in thrall.
Come. Prove yourselves.
Salty sweat seeped into my eyes. I bit my lip till I could taste blood.
Of course. There was no human blood. What an idiot I was. That was the missing piece.
“Jaylene, cut your finger and squeeze a few blood drops into the inner circle?” I shouted, holding my pose. This was blood magic, second cousin to black magic, but just a smidge might help. White magic sure wasn’t doing squat.
“No way am I cutting myself,” came the bullet-fired retort. Jaylene might be six feet tall and built like an Amazon, with looks that could earn her a fortune as a model, but growing up alone on Chicago’s south side had made her very wary of sticking her neck or a bloody finger, out for anybody.
“I’ll do it,” Kelly offered and stepped forward.
“No.” She’d probably cut a vein with her sword and then disappear on us before we could stop the bleeding. “I’ll do it myself.”
I dropped my arms, swiping one bare arm across my forehead to wipe the sweat as I reached with the other toward Kelly. “Put your sword out here.”
She did as I asked even though the blade shook. It was wicked sharp, the better for demon killing, but instead of a paper cut I dug a pretty deep slash into my right finger. “Ouch.”
I swear I could hear Mandy snicker so I shot her a glare, cupping my right hand with my left to make sure I didn’t leave a trail of blood for the demon to escape the inner containment circle. Just in case my teammates were not quick enough, or skilled enough to kill him.
That was one of the sucky parts of being the one doing the summoning. I couldn’t be holding a weapon of any kind, no matter how deadly the non-human being called. If this echo-demon found a way past the containment area, I was sorry out of luck. Except for my anathema dagger I had stashed against the nearest wall. Noziaks came to a rumble prepared to fight.
It took only a few steps to reach the crudely salted circle where the demon should appear, and only seconds to have a nice snack of fresh human blood drops scattered on the floor.
Man, a sliced finger could hurt. Sucking it as I returned to my spot I realized I was focusing on the minor pain to avoid the bigger issue. If the blood did its thing then I was about to break a promise made to my father years ago. He was a full-blood shaman, a shifter, and a wise man in his own right. Plus he loved me to the depths of his soul. He rarely punished his children, especially me, the baby, but when he did it was serious.
“Great gifts are not given lightly, Alex,” he’d said. “They come with great responsibility and consequences. Do you understand?”
I shook my head like any fifteen-year-old who wanted to get out of immediate trouble for doing something wrong.
“Then you must promise never to use your abilities for harm, of anyone or anything.”
More head shaking on my part. Right then I’d have agreed to anything he’d asked. That’s how much trouble I was in.
“Promise me as a Noziak.”
My head had started to bob when he’d raised one calloused hand. “And the love you have for me.”
That wasn’t playing fair. Especially since, after my mother had left us when I was five, my dad had been my whole world.
“Will you promise this, Alex?”
What could I say? I nodded and meant it.
I sucked in my breath, ignoring the throbbing in my finger which I pressed tight against my thumb to make sure the blood flow was stopped. It was harder to push aside the tenseness in my gut, wondering if calling a demon to its death meant I was harming another? Or if my dad would forgive me if he ever found out?