Savin Thorne stood before the weird, wavery, silver-blue vibrations that undulated in the midnight sky twenty feet above the lavender field. He waited. Twenty minutes had passed since he arrived in the beat-up pickup truck he barely kept alive with oil changes and the occasional battery jump. He’d gotten a call from Edamite Thrash regarding a disturbance in this countryside location, north of Paris.
He knew this area. It was too familiar. His family once lived not half a kilometer away. Yet when driving past the old neighborhood, he’d noted his childhood home had been torn down. Construction on a golf course was under way. Just as well. The bad memory from his childhood still clung to his bones.
To his right, Edamite Thrash, a corax demon, stood with his eyes closed, his senses focused to whatever the hell was going on.
Savin could feel the undulations in the air and earth prickle through his veins. A heebie-jeebies sensation. The demon within him stirred. Savin tended to think of the nameless, incorporeal demon inside him as “the Other,” for no other reason than it had been a childhood decision. She was upset by whatever was irritating the air. And when she stirred, Savin grew anxious.
Ed had been getting instinctual warnings about this disturbance for days, and tonight those dire feelings had alerted him enough to call Savin.
Savin reckoned demons back to Daemonia. The bad ones who had no reason or right to tread the mortal realm. The evil ones who had harmed mortals in this realm. Sometimes even the good ones who pushed the boundaries of secrecy and might have been seen by humans or who were trying to tell the truth about their species.
Savin wasn’t demon. He wasn’t even paranormal. He was one hundred percent human. Except for the part about him hosting an incorporeal demon for the past twenty years. That tended to screw with a man’s mental place in this world. But most days he felt he was winning the part about just trying to stay sane.
A sudden whining trill vibrated the air. Pushing up the sleeves of his thermal shirt to expose the protective sigils on the undersides of his forearms, Savin planted his combat boots and faced the sky that flickered in silver and red.
Ed hissed, “Savin, did you hear that?”
“I did. I’m ready.”
Behind them, hefting a fifty-pound sack of sea salt out from the back of a white hearse, Certainly Jones, a dark witch, prepped for his role in whatever might come charging at them.
“Hurry up, Jones!” Ed called. “It’s happening!”
With that announcement, the sky cracked before them. A black seam opened from ground to clouds. From within, a brilliant amber flame burst and roiled. A whoosh of darkness exploded out from the seam.
Savin cursed. That could be nothing but demons. An invasion? He felt the dark and malevolent beings, incorporeal and corporeal, as they flooded into this realm. Cool, hissing brushes across his skin. Wicked alien vocals. The gnashing of fangs and rows of deadly teeth. Tails scything the air. Claws clattering for flesh. And the ones he could not see vibrated a distinctive hum in his veins.
The protection sigils he wore tattooed on his body kept those invisible incorporeal demons from entering his system. As did the bitch demon he’d been serving as shelter to for twenty years. But that didn’t mean he was impervious to an external attack by a corporeal demon. He was strong but did not hold a weapon.
The only weapons he required were his stubbornness and his innate ability to see and deflect most demons with a few choice warding incantations.
In the inky darkness, there was no way to count their numbers as they spread across the field and whisked through the air above the men’s heads. Standing center of the freshly laid salt circle, Certainly Jones began to recite a spell. Ed swung above his head a black bone lariat bespelled to choke and annihilate demons.
For his part, Savin could recite a general reckoning spell that would reach about a hundred-foot circumference about him and send those demons back to Daemonia. So he began the chant composed of a demonic language he hated knowing.
“There are hundreds,” Ed said as a curse as he avoided the salt circle with a jump. “We’ll never get them all. Savin?”
He couldn’t speak now, for to do so would shatter the foundation of the spell. Raising his arms, palms facing inward—but not touching—and exposing the demonic sigils on the underside of his forearms, Savin expanded his chest and shouted the last few words. And as he did so, the power of those spoken words formed a staticky choker between his fingers. He spread his arms out wide, stretching the choker in a brilliant lash of gold sparks. Then, with a shove forward, he cast the net.
Demons shrieked, squealed and yowled as they were caught by the sticky, sparkling net. Like a fisherman hauling up his catch, only in reverse, it wrapped up dozens, perhaps a hundred or more demons, and wrangled them back through the rift in the sky.
“I expel you to Daemonia!” Savin recited, then immediately prepared to begin again.
“That took care of at least half!” Ed called. “But some are getting away. Jones! How’s it going getting that damned door to Daemonia closed?”
“Soon!” shouted the witch.
Savin’s net, filled with yet more demons, wrangled another gang and whipped them back through the rift.
The dark witch, a tall, slender man dressed in black, stretched out his tattooed arms. Using specific tattoos as spells, he shouted out a command that gripped the serrated rift in the sky and vised it suddenly closed.
The night grew intensely dark. Not even a nocturnal creature might see anything for the few moments following the closure of the rift to the Place of All Demons.
Savin dropped his arms and shook out his entire body like a prizefighter loosening up his muscles. He felt the air stir as a few creatures dashed above his head. None dared come too close, or try a talon against his skin. They could sense his innate warning.
No demon dared approach a reckoner.
Ed tugged out his cell phone from an inner suit-coat pocket, and the small electronic light glowed about his face and tattooed neck. The thorns on his knuckles glinted like obsidian as he punched in a number. “I’m calling the troops in Paris. We’ll head to town. Certainly, will that seal hold?”
“For a while,” the witch said. “But I’m not sure how it was opened in the first place. Had to be from within Daemonia. Which is not cool. Something wicked powerful opened it up.”
The witch cast his gaze about the field.