C.E. Murphy - Demon Hunts

My astral self, it seemed, was absolutely unimpressed with my puny logic. Eventually, swearing silently, my astral form crawled up a drainpipe and swung onto the roof. There was no way I could've done that physically. Neither the pipe nor my dignity nor my hand strength—which was pretty good, but not that good—would have let me. Astrally, though? No problem. It made no sense at all. On the positive side, it didn't have to make sense. It just had to work.

And up there on the rooftop, the monster was waiting for me.

By all rights I should've woken up dead. I'd thought the thing would've been scared off. It was only once I was up there on the roof, nose to nose with a stinking beast, that I wondered why I thought an invisible ravening magic cannibal would be frightened by a kid with a cell phone or a few police sirens.

While I was standing there stupefied, it raised a lazy paw and backhanded me so hard I flew off the roof and slid across Mandy's front yard to smash up against her white picket fence. Little peaks of snow fell off the fence and right through me, making tiny lumps on the frozen lawn.

I couldn't remember anything ever doing that before. I tended to think of my astral form as a pretty safe place for me to be. Sure, a god had stuffed a sword through me once when I'd been incorporeal, but we'd been traveling through time and space, too, so under those circumstances it seemed fair that I could be hit. I'd fought another god in a kind of dreamscape, but dreams were a little different. I didn't remember anything ever flat-out belting my astral self while it was just standing around in the Middle World. But this thing had, and I didn't like that at all.

It hadn't come after me. I pushed onto my elbows and scowled at the roof, where its form was barely more than a glimmer against white snow and gray skies. It stood on two legs, but its shoulders were hunched forward, like it was devolving toward four legs. It hadn't moved beyond hitting me.

A clear, unpleasant thought unfurled itself. Maybe it hadn't come after Mandy. Maybe it had just used her to draw the more powerful agent to it, so it could get another look at me. Size me up, study me. Decide if I was a threat or a tasty morsel.

I figured lying on my back in the snow wasn't at all threatening, and got to my feet. The thing watched. Warily, I thought. Hoped. I wanted to be scary enough to set it on edge. That would be a definite score for my side.

It had hit my astral form. That suggested maybe my astral form could hit it. All I had to do was get close enough, but I was pretty sure it wasn't going to give me another chance to climb the drainpipe.

Which meant I had one chance to convince my recalcitrant brain that the laws of gravity and physics didn't apply to a soul set loose to wander away from its body. I'd crossed great leaps and bounds effortlessly in other planes of reality. I could do it in this one, if I had to.

And I had to. The monster on the rooftop was still watching me, and I didn't want its attention to land on anyone else. I muttered, "There is no spoon," took three running steps, and jumped.

The creature vanished, I smashed into Mandy's house, and warm fingers touched my face as Morrison said, "Walker," drawing me back into my body.

I opened my eyes disoriented and confused. The world had tipped over sideways, and a puddle of slush had crept up to envelop my left cheek. Rather a lot of weight seemed to be pressing the slush into my jaw and shoulder, and enough blood rushed to my head to make my nose itch.

Morrison was perpendicular to me, feet planted in the same icy water that was crawling over my face, and his forehead was wrinkled with concern. "You fell over, Walker."

That explained a lot. The pressure, for example, was my own body weight resting on my head and shoulder, which were at the foot of the stairs, while the rest of me was angled down them. It was profoundly uncomfortable, and I was beginning to fear it might be embarrassing, too. On the other hand, it distracted from the dull ache running from head to toe, which I suspected was the physical response to psychically smacking myself into Mandy's house. I'd been so sure I could make it, too.

Morrison offered me a hand up, which proved to be more like putting his hands under my armpits and bodily hauling me to my feet. "You okay?"

"Yeah. Sorry, I thought I'd propped myself up well enough that I wouldn't fall. I was…" I made a feeble gesture, which was apparently enough to remind Morrison he was holding me up. He let go and stepped back. I was kind of disappointed.

No, not disappointed. A little sad, maybe. I liked being close to my boss; he smelled good. But I'd blown it on that front, and was working on living with the consequences. "I was trying to follow the killer. Hang on a second, okay?"

Dismay and confusion spasmed across Morrison's face, leaving his blue eyes darker than usual. The color he'd put in it at Halloween had grown out of his hair, leaving it short and silvering, the way I liked it, and the whole package made for a handsome man in need of some reassurance. Or at least explanation, if I couldn't offer the other. The best I could do was step away and look up at the roof.

No monsters. There were tracks, cold trails through the air visible with the Sight, but my prey had run away. I whispered, "Maybe it decided I was tougher than it was," without much hope, and glanced toward the ambulance.

Two paramedics were still checking Mandy over. A third stood with Jake at the vehicle's tail end. They had her on an IV already, and I figured it wouldn't be more than another minute before they brought her to the hospital. I wondered if they'd let me in to see her, and if I could be any help if they did, or if I'd be better off trying to track the thing that had attacked her. But I hadn't spoiled the marks this time, so its trail wasn't going to get any colder, and there was something I really had to do before trying to either follow it or help Mandy.

It took everything I had to look back at Morrison and say, "This is my fault, boss."

Every shred of warmth fled the captain's face, turning him back into the nemesis he'd been for years. A short jerk of his chin said "Keep talking."

I did, through knots of anger and guilt. "She volunteered," wasn't much of an excuse, and I knew it as I told him what Mandy Tiller and I had done that morning. "I never imagined it might come after her once we were off the mountain. I should have," I said before he could. "I should have, and I didn't. I completely fucked up. I'm sorry." Sorry didn't begin to cover it, but language was badly suited to expressing handshaking chills of misery and a hollow feeling burning my eyes in a single word. "Sorry," inadequate as it was, had to do the job.

"You got a civilian involved in a dangerous case that the media is all over, and now she's hospitalized and you're sorry? "

"This one's on me, Captain." Billy put himself between me and Morrison. "I asked Mandy to give us a hand."

"Why?" Morrison erupted like a bull seal, and Billy, who was bigger than either of us, somehow seemed to absorb the captain's rage and expand a little with it. "There are dozens of officers who could have—"

"Two reasons, sir," Billy said very steadily. "One is that Walker's original plan was to use herself as bait—"

"Which she would have needed permission for!"

"Not," I mumbled, "if I did it off duty. Which I did." I was sure I wasn't actually helping the situation, but sometimes I talked when I knew I should shut up. It was a character flaw.

"And the other," Billy went on as though neither of us had spoken, "is that this is getting worse fast, sir, and even under the best of circumstances, going through the department on this would have added another twenty-four hours to the search. Getting permission from you, possibly having to wait for a green light from your superiors, getting volunteers, getting equipment…this was faster."