“Personal Demons”: Sharing a body with the supernatural has its perks ...Middle East

This book was the winner of the Colorado Authors League award for Fantasy/Paranormal.

Wind whistled through gaps in the rusted siding of the defunct train car. Metal groaned as Mira stepped inside and the old car settled under her weight. She squinted into the dark corners, searching for any indication of the creature who’d left a string of mutilated corpses across Atlanta. Her magically enhanced vision drifted over the graffiti that covered every inch of the interior space, colors muted in the last glint of fading twilight.

The voice could almost have been an effect of the whispering wind, except that it spoke within Mira’s own head, and only Mira could hear it.

She traced her fingers over the chaotic spray-paint designs, picking up a layer of dust. The jumble of overlapping images would certainly speak to the aesthetic tastes of a demon—even a demon as unusual as the one who shared her body. She rubbed the dust between her fingertips. “No one’s been in here for a while.”

She brushed her hand against the dark fabric of her jeans and turned toward the entrance. 

A metallic clang echoed through the night, faint except that Mira had used magic to amplify her senses.

She froze halfway out of the train car and scanned the decaying buildings and vehicles of the abandoned rail yard. She and Ty—the Paranatural Task Force agent she’d recently agreed to work with on the sly—had come here based on reports of mangled bodies found in and around the area. The reports also mentioned an elderly man with strange marks like cracks in his skin. “Puppet lines,” as Mira called them, were a manifestation of the strain a demon put on its physical host and a sure indication they were dealing with a rifter. Unlike Mira, most rifters wrought a month or two of chaos and death before burning themselves up. This one had to be nearing its expiration date, but it could still do plenty of harm before it popped.

Mira squinted toward a large building on the far side of the yard. More graffiti coated the dark bricks and the lower-level windows. “It came from over there.”

UNDERWRITTEN BY

Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.

The demon’s tone matched Mira’s skepticism that Mr. Just-So would be clumsy enough to knock over a broom while searching for something that could easily kill him if he lost the element of surprise.

“I still can’t believe we’re working with a PTF agent,” Mira muttered to the night.

“At least he doesn’t seem inclined to report me,” she agreed. “But his methods are gonna take some getting used to.”

“Personal Demons”

>> READ AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

Where to find it:

SunLit present new excerpts from some of the best Colorado authors that not only spin engaging narratives but also illuminate who we are as a community. Read more.

Before coming to the train yard, Ty had insisted on marking out a grid over a map of the area and assigning each of them a search pattern to ensure nothing got overlooked. Mira had been all for sniffing around until she found a track worth following, as she always had, but she’d agreed to give this partnership thing an honest try.

She stepped down onto the weed-covered dirt. She was trying, but the way Ty seemed to need to control every aspect of an operation, to control her, chafed. She’d been on her own since she was eleven . . . if you didn’t count her demon. Human relationships had gone out the window after her possession. Too messy. Too many difficult, dangerous questions in a world that barely tolerated the fae and treated human practitioners as tools. Someone like her . . . well, there weren’t any others like her. Once Mira and her demon had come to an understanding about whose body and life they were sharing, Mira had grown used to calling the day-to-day shots, doing things her own way. With Ty in the mix, it felt like everything was in flux again.

“Whose side are you on?”

Mira nodded, lips pursed, still staring at the distant building. A gust of wind stirred her hair and tickled her nose with dust, rust, and the smell of old oil. “Let’s check it out.”

The demon shrugged, lifting Mira’s shoulders.

Mira crouched low and jogged across the open space in the direction the noise had come from, carefully avoiding the rusted steel beams of broken tracks that littered the ground. She crossed the invisible line that marked the boundary of her search area and entered Ty’s.

Let’s just hope he doesn’t shoot me by mistake.

The doors to the central hub had been reinforced with plywood, chained, and padlocked against trespassers. Mira frowned and ran her hand over the metal links. If the rifter was inside, he hadn’t come through here.

? Listen here!

Go deeper into this story in this episode of The Daily Sun-Up podcast.

Subscribe: Apple | Spotify | RSS

She looked along the sides of the building in either direction. She could circle around, find another door or a broken window maybe. She sighed. We could be chasing a stray cat for all we know.

Mira bristled. She couldn’t tell if the mocking she heard in the comment came from the demon or her own imagination.

She gripped the steel chain in both hands and called on her magic. The demon stirred as Mira pulled energy out of the Rift—the incorporeal plane of energy that overlapped the mortal world and all the realms connected to it. Demons lived in the Rift, when not hitchhiking in human meat puppets. They were made of the same chaotic energy human practitioners used to cast magic. In that way, Mira supposed, humans did as much damage to demons as demons did to humans.

Mira exhaled and focused the swirling eddies of energy into shape, giving them order and purpose. The metal between her hands turned red, then yellow, then white. The center link melted, dripping a handful of steaming impact craters into the dirt. Mira waited until the glowing ends of the chain faded to gray, then gently slid the links through the door handle and set them on the ground without so much as a rustle.

She flexed her fingers and shook her tingling hands, then eased open the door. The hinges scraped. She froze, straining her senses. Nothing moved. The only sound was the wind and the distant traffic of the city. A wisp of cloud passed in front of the swollen moon. The world flickered as the shadows took over for a moment, then they were chased back by the silver glow.

Mira exhaled. She wrapped a thread of magic around the hinges to dampen the sound and widened the gap enough to slip through.

Moonlight streamed in from the building’s skylights, casting long shadows from the crisscross of scaffolding onto the concrete floor. Several large bay doors that would once have allowed trains to pull in were boarded over, each sporting the tag of a local artist. Steel tracks set flush to the floor created a ladder effect across the pitted, dirt-crusted surface.

A figure crept along the far edge of the building. Long, matted, white hair draped their shoulders and obscured their face save for the profile of a beak-like nose. Pale, wiry limbs moved amid tattered strips of soiled fabric, fingers nearly scraping the floor as the hunched form slunk from shadow to shadow between patches of moonlight. One bony hand clutched something. Mira squinted, then nearly gagged as she realized the man—he had to be the rifter—was dragging an extra appendage. A dark smear snaked across the pale-gray floor in his wake.

Mira scowled, but since the demon was inside her, the expression didn’t have much effect. Not that the demon tended to care about Mira’s disapproval in any case.

There but for the grace of God. . . . She sent a silent, grateful prayer for the miracle that had allowed her to strike a balance with her possessor all those years ago and saved her from becoming one of the creatures she now hunted.

The rifter shuffled from pillar to pillar, dragging its gory meal toward a break in the south wall—a section of empty window frame partially covered by a loosely propped piece of plywood. At the pace he was moving, she had maybe a minute before he reached the opening.

She glanced around the rest of the interior. Plenty of open space, good solid supports, no one nearby . . . couldn’t really ask for a better space to fight in.

She fingered the cell phone clipped to her belt. Carrying the device—basically a tiny tracker—made her uncomfortable, but she had eventually given in to the practicality of being able to quickly communicate with Ty. Yet another concession to this whole partnership thing. The plan had been to locate the rifter, text the location, then trail it at a discrete distance until they could take it down together. It had seemed logical enough when she’d agreed to it. Now, watching her target move slowly away, she wasn’t so sure.

She worried her lower lip between her teeth, then shifted her hand to the sheathed kukri knife also attached to her belt. By the time Ty gets here, the rifter will have moved on, and the next place we catch up to it might not be so accommodating. She slid the long, curved blade free. We can handle this ourselves.

Mira felt the demon grin.

Her lips twitched up to match. The “old days” were barely two weeks gone, hardly any time at all, but Mira couldn’t deny the thrill of acting without the need for debate or consent. The single hunt she’d worked with Ty—not including the unofficial case on which they’d met—had gone smoothly enough, but she’d chafed at his slow pace and meticulous planning. Right now there was a rifter in front of her, and she was going to kill it. Simple.

L.R. Braden is the bestselling, multi-award-winning author of the Magicsmith series, the Rifter series, and several works of shorter fiction. When not writing, she spends her time reading in a multitude of genres (speculative fiction is her favorite), playing games with her family, enjoying Colorado’s great outdoors, and weaving metal into intricate chain mail jewelry that she sells through her Etsy shop, Wimsi Design. Find out more at www.lrbraden.com.

Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( “Personal Demons”: Sharing a body with the supernatural has its perks )

Also on site :

• Catholic Bishops Issue Direct Response to Trump's Polarizing Pope Photo
• ‘Saturday Night Live’ Opens With Donald Trump Signing Executive Orders, Including The “Belichick Law”: “Old Men Can Now Date Far Younger Women”
• More man-portable air defence missile systems on the way amid India-Pak tensions