I wrote a book a few years ago. I've been working on the sequel for a few years (it just sits there for long periods of time, calling my name, while I ignore it until the guilt of neglected talents over takes me) and am in the processing of editing it. Yay... I love editing...
Here is the first 2 chapters of The Demons of Isabelle Grace. You can find the full novel on Amazon.
Chapter 0.5
Five Years Ago
It had been a simple plan: we go in, take out the demons causing trouble, we go home, I thought as I sat on the uncomfortable wooden chairs provided, feeling the early morning dew start to soak through my shoes. My toes were numb from the cold; almost as numb as I felt inside. This was the third funeral I had attended in the past week. It wasn’t going to be the last.
Out of the twelve Hunters who had set out a week ago to stop a sect of demons that had started a war with the vampires that had somehow gotten out of hand and started to draw the attention of the police, not to mention the media, there were only four of us left. It had all started with a crack in the ground that had opened a hole to Hell. This in turn had attracted nasties from all over. That is what had actually led to the fight between the demons and vampires. We had just been the ones to clean up the mess. As usual.
A sniffle to my right had me digging into my purse for the packet of tissues I always kept there. My purse was something of a monstrosity, it being able to fit all sorts of useful things- like silver daggers, holy water and pepper spray for the occasional mugger. Not that I had any experience with human muggers; I just liked to be prepared.
A breeze rushed by, pushing bits of my long dark brown hair forward and chilling me further. I impatiently pushed my hair back, annoyed that it had escaped again. Mostly I hated how it felt like fingers crawling across my shoulders and face. Made me a bit twitchy after the past six months.
The earth beneath us quivered and panic raced through my heart. It was an earthquake six months ago that had started this mess. Now I was down eight friends. Good people all of them. Well, most of them…. There was one of them I had been less than fond of.
But despite those issues, and while I may have only met half of them two months ago, I still considered them friends; brothers in arms as it were. Their deaths made me wonder why God decided I deserved to live when they didn’t. I hadn’t done anything special and a lot of things that I was pretty sure were against some commandment or other.
“I will now turn the time over to those who would like to say some final words,” Father McKenzie’s slight Irish brogue broke through my thoughts.
I looked up to see the priest step back and to the left to allow anyone else who wanted to say something nice about Kendra. I wanted to get up, but some of the things I wanted to say shouldn’t be said in public. Not that it was anything bad. It was just that Demon Hunters shouldn’t go around telling Hunter stories at funerals when civilians were in attendance. Kendra was one of the few who had managed to balance a normal life and still be a Hunter.
I was attempting to do the same but I felt like I was failing miserably.
Chloe stood up to say a few things. She talked about the time she and Kendra pranked a couple of our guy friends (fellow Hunters) who lived across town. She talked about how Kendra didn’t take crap from anyone and had always been the first to defend the weak.
At that point Chloe chocked up and couldn’t continue. She sat back down to me and I handed her another tissue. I should just hand her the whole packet. I should also just get the big boxes of them, and I would have three days ago when I realized just how many of our friends we would be burying, except it would require me to remove weapons from my bag. After the past couple of weeks I was not comfortable even with the thought of being partially unarmed.
Somehow we got through the rest of the funeral. We watched as they lowered the casket into the ground. I shuddered when the first symbolic handful of dirt was thrown on top. I had been to too many funerals in my life; too many people I loved were now dead.
“Shall we go?” Gwen asked from the other side of Chloe.
I nodded and headed towards the cars parked across the cemetery. Of the four of us left only Derek, Chloe’s boyfriend, hadn’t made it to any of the funerals. Instead he was patrolling, trying to see if there were any demons left. I didn’t blame him for not wanting to be here. Maybe I would go out this evening myself. The only time I had felt remotely alive and able to function as a human being the last past couple of days was when I was Hunting.
“When is Daniel coming in?” Chloe asked Gwen. Daniel had been reassigned to
But he was done now and ready to come back to his childhood sweetheart.
“Not till eight tonight,” Gwen replied in her barely there Southern drawl. “Do y’all want to go to the lunch they are having at St. Catherine’s?”
“We should,” Chloe said as she unlocked the car.
“I don’t want to,” I put in as I climbed into the back seat. Even though I had made a pan of rolls for the lunch the thought of eating right now didn’t appeal to me. I had a feeling it would be awhile before I got my appetite back. One would think that after seven years of this I would be used to it. Maybe one day I would be able to live through something like this and eat dinner an hour later.
“Just drop me off at the apartment if you two want to go,” I said when I realized that neither Gwen nor Chloe had responded.
“Are you going to be okay?” Gwen asked.
“I’m sure I will be,” I replied. Then added another excuse when they didn’t seem to be reassured, “I have a paper that I really need to start working on anyways. I need to pass this class if I want to keep my scholarship.”
“Fine,” Chloe said as she pulled out of the cemetery and turned left.
The apartment wasn’t too far from the cemetery but it felt forever away in the silence that had fallen between us. I don’t know about my friends, but I was feeling guilty again. It was a feeling that I was not comfortable with.
“Thanks,” I said when Chloe pulled over in front of the apartment complex so that I could get out. I didn’t know what else to say so I didn’t say anything. There had been a lot of that going on lately. I was starting to think that there was only ever going to be awkward pauses and silence between us for the rest of our time assigned together.
Which could be a lot shorter than before.
Normally Hunters get partnered with another Hunter for about six months. It all depended on the concentration of demons in a city/area and how well those two Hunters got along. Chloe, Kendra, Gwen and I had been sharing a two bedroom apartment for the past nine months. I thought we had all worked well together and had hoped we would be able to stay together for a bit longer.
I entered the apartment and immediately went back to the room I shared with Chloe to change out of the skirt, stockings and ridiculously soft shoes I had been wearing. It was hard to fight in a skirt so I only owned three- two nice ones I could wear to church on Sundays and one jean one I could wear on dates. Not that I dated.
Maybe it was the fact that I was bruised more days than not that scared guys off. And these weren’t small bruises that I could hide. No, I always seemed to be the one who got the black eye, busted lip and broken nose. I wasn’t sure how that always seemed to happen but it did. I had had one professor take me aside and try to talk to me about it. She didn’t seem to believe me when I told her I just seemed to get into a lot of fights with strangers. I was rather mild mannered in class; a bit like
I would have said that I was clumsy but that seemed more suspicious than saying I got into a lot of fights. Maybe I should have told her I was a vigilante who went around stopping crime wherever I saw it happening. Just because it wasn’t humans that I was fighting, or that I was clumsy enough to constantly get thrown into walls, didn’t make any of those answers less legitimate. I think the bruise that had finally set her off I had gotten by walking into a street pole. I had had a cracked skull so wasn’t seeing straight. Chloe had tried to stop me but by the time her voice had filtered through my fuzzy head I was already on the ground again.
I stayed away from that professor after that. It was easy since she was in the art department, which wasn’t my major and it was at the end of the semester when she had cornered me.
I sighed as I sat down at the table. I opened my laptop and just stared at the screen blankly. I tried to sort through my feelings, seeing if I could finally cry for all of the friends I had lost. After a minute of feeling nothing other than a dull prickle at the corner of my eyes and emptiness inside I focused on writing my paper for my anthropology class.
I was well into the fourth out of five pages that I had to write when Chloe and Gwen returned with Derek trailing behind them.
“How was it?” I asked while I continued to type. I was in the middle of a thought process and didn’t want to loose what I was trying to say.
“Quiet,” Derek answered. He hadn’t been the one I was talking to, but neither Chloe nor Gwen said anything fast enough.
“Quiet?” I asked, finally turning around.
Derek and Chloe were sitting on the couch, Chloe removed Derek’s arm from around her and scooted away from him. I had once heard that the death of a child could tear a couple apart. I was guessing that the death of our friends was also going to be the end to Chloe’s and Derek’s relationship. I hoped that the same wasn’t going to be true for Gwen and Daniel.
“Too quiet,” Derek replied, pulling me back to the subject at hand. “It’s like the calm before the storm.”
“You mean the eye of the storm,” I corrected, then blithely continued when he gave me a dirty look. “We have already gone through a storm. In a hurricane people would be lulled into a sense of false security when they were in the eye of the storm passed over them, not knowing that the worst was yet to come. The second half of a hurricane is always more powerful than the first half.”
I was somewhat knowledgeable about the subject, having been born and raised in
“Whatever you say,” Derek muttered standing up. “What is there to eat? I am starving.”
“You should get your own food,” I called after him even as I returned to my paper.
“You should have gone to the lunch after the funeral,” Chloe chided him even as she stood up to follow him. I think it was her way of telling him he should have been at the funeral in the first place.
Kendra’s death had really hit Chloe hard. We had all hopped she was going to make it. She hadn’t died during the battle, only been wounded. We had taken her to the hospital along with Nick and Catherine, two of the new Hunters who had come in for the fright. Then we had gotten a call from the hospital three days ago saying that Kendra’s system had just shut down, even though it had looked like she was healing. Nick and Catherine had died yesterday.
“What are you working on?” Gwen asked as she came up behind me.
“Anthropology paper,” I replied. “I had to pick a culture and write about it. I chose Louisiana Creole, focusing on the history of hoodoo and voodoo.”
“Seriously Izzy?” Gwen demanded a bit incredulous. There were some things we tried to stay away from; witchcraft and anything like it were one of those.
I shrugged. “It was the only thing I could think of when I signed up a month ago and had to get it passed off by the professor.”
“And he let you?”
I shrugged again. “Why not?” I asked in reply. I continued when all I got was look of slight chiding from Gwen “Japanese Samurai were already taken.”
From the corner of my eye I could see Gwen shake her head. “I am going to go pick up Daniel from the airport in about an hour,” she said, changing the subject. “Do you want to come?”
“No thank you,” I said as I squinted at the screen. Last week my eyesight had developed a tendency to get a bit blurry if I stared at a computer screen too long. I probably had done some damage during that last fight and it was still healing. I wondered how long it took for brain injuries to heal.
“So, what are we going to do about the ‘eye of the storm’?” Derek asked, using air quotes, as he walked back into the room, Chloe trailing behind him.
I looked up from my paper a bit annoyed. I had just figured out what I had been saying and was now ready to continue.
“Air quotes are rude,” I told him, repeating back to him what he had told me a couple of weeks ago when I had done the same to him.
Derek opened his mouth to say something no doubt childish and perfectly justified in my case, but closed it again when he caught the look Chloe was giving him.
“I’m quitting,” Chloe said before anyone else could say something. “I don’t think I could handle another Armageddon.”
Armageddon? Well, it fit as well as any other name. We’d been under siege by an enemy army. This was a big enough fight that we might as well give it a name. For all we knew it could have really mean the end of the world.
“Daniel and I are quitting as well,” Gwen said when neither Derek nor I said anything. “If the past couple of months have taught me anything it’s that life is too short and we should seize the opportunity to live.”
I sat in my chair stunned. I knew that quitting was an option, but had never really considered it. After this week of funerals and the general clean up of the mess left by the demons and vampires who could blame Gwen and Chloe from wanting to quit?
“What are you going to do?” Derek demanded. He was obviously less than thrilled with this announcement.
“Move to
I was stunned. Next week? When had Chloe made all of these decisions and phone calls? Derek was fuming. I guess Chloe had kept him in the dark as much as the rest of us.
“What about you?” I asked Gwen to distract Derek and keep him from saying something before he thought it through.
“Daniel’s family is back in
I wondered when she had talked to Daniel about this. Maybe it was when he had called to tell Gwen his flight information. I wished them both happy and long lives.
“Does anyone else want to go out and get wasted?”
“You are too young to drink,” I reminded Derek.
“I have my fake ID,” Derek told me.
We all had fake IDs since we occasionally needed to go somewhere were teenagers weren’t supposed to go. Not that I needed to use mine any more since I turned twenty-one just two weeks ago. I hadn’t had a chance to celebrate yet. I was starting to think I wasn’t going to get that chance this year.
“Alcohol is evil and will only get you killed,” I told Derek. It was something that Father McKenzie told us repeatedly. It was an annoying saying, but something I fundamentally agreed upon.
“Whatever,” Derek muttered. He stomped out of the apartment, leaving us in another awkward silence.
Rather than talk to my friends about their decision I returned to my paper. I only had a couple more paragraphs that I needed to write. It was easier to focus on this than think about what Gwen’s and Chloe’s decision would mean for me.
“I am going to go pick up Daniel,” Gwen announced, finally breaking the silence.
“I’ll go with you,” Chloe said.
I waved them off, a bit distracted since I was trying once again to figure out where I was. Once they were gone the complete silence began to get to me and I started thinking about the future and what it held for me.
When we had first noticed an influx of demons in our area and other Hunters from surrounding areas had noticed a exodus from theirs, they had come to Los Angeles to help us figure out what was going on and to help get rid of them. That would now mean that a lot of the surrounding areas, all the way up to Vegas and down to the Mexican border were now Hunter-less. Someone was going to have to take up the slack.
Even though we had killed a majority of the demons in that final battle they always seemed to be able to recoup faster than we could. If Daniel and Gwen went back to
My fingers paused in the middle of a sentence. Even though part of me wanted to go back to
I shut my laptop. I wasn’t going t be able to finish my paper now. I went back to my room to lie down; I was feeling really drained all of a sudden. As I walked back to my room I felt my eyes prickle again but the tears still wouldn’t come. I hoped that I would be able to cry again. It was a silly wish, but I felt that if I could cry then I could mourn properly and the wound inside of me would finally be able to start to heal.
I pulled my blanket up to cover me and closed my eyes and hoped that tomorrow as going to be better than today.
Chapter 1
I woke with a start, pulled out my dream with a jerk of legs and arms flailing. I relaxed back onto the couch with a groan. My head hurt, my body ached, and I was on the couch.
Why was I on the couch instead of in my bed?
I stared up at the ceiling. I didn’t want to move; even breathing hurt. I probably had a cracked rib or something. Not that that explained why I was on the less than completely comfortable couch and not in my own moderately cozy bed. It felt like I had spent all night drinking. Only I hadn’t had a drop of alcohol in three years.
So, why was I on my couch?
The memory came back to me with a groan. I had been out Hunting last night and hadn’t quite made it back to my room once I had made it home. How could I forget? I had been doing this for twelve years.
I had come face to face with a troll and had fared worse than I should have. If memory served me correctly (which I was having serious doubts of at the moment), my left eye was half swollen shut and decorated a beautiful shade of black, blue and purple. Then there was the bruise that ran down the left side of my face to go with that black eye. And I was pretty sure that my right wrist was sprained. I was hoping that it wasn’t though. School had started and I really needed that wrist to take notes.
My phone started buzzing as I was beginning to contemplate getting up. I turned my head to look at it without moving any other parts of my body. After a couple more buzzes it stopped.
I turned my head to go back to staring at the ceiling. Whoever it was would either call back or leave a message. I frowned when I remembered that it could have been Herbert, one of the banes of my existence. He had a terrible habit of calling me every half hour until I picked up the phone, leaving perky “please call me back” messages until I finally did what he asked me to do.
My phone started to buzz again, dancing atop the table. I groaned but managed to pick it up without moving anything unnecessarily.
“Hello?”
“Izzy?”
“I hope so,” I told Herbert, rolling my eyes.
If I had met the six foot sun-kissed brown haired green eyed boy randomly on campus I would have thought he was a male cheerleader and a Phys Ed major. Instead he was working on his dissertation on seventeenth century law and how it was impacted by the Salem Witch Trials. Unfortunately for me he had found out that the proposed topic for my dissertation was on how societies were (and are) affected by witch hunts, my main example being the most infamous trials of American history, and that I had two books (now insanely expensive to get a hold of and that the library didn’t have) he wanted but didn’t want to cough up the money to buy. This somehow made him think that he could inflict his peppy-fifty-housewife-ness upon me whenever he wanted.
Since he had the cash to support my ice cream and pizza habit I allowed him to keep thinking that.
I heard Herbert huff. I ignored it, waiting for him to get to his point in calling me.
“Are you going to make it to Dr. Langersham’s class today?” Herbert’s voice implied that my attendance was something to be ashamed of. Just because I had missed two or three lectures didn’t mean I made it a regular habit of skipping class. Then again, there had only been six classes so far in the semester, so I supposed he had a point. Not that I would ever admit it to his face.
“What time is it?” I asked on a groan.
“
If Herbert had been standing next to me I would have smacked him for his nineteen-fifties-housewife condescending tone.
“I will see you in one hour,” I replied, sugar dripping off my voice. I shut the phone before he could say anything else.
I somehow forced my bruised and battered body off the couch and staggered into the bathroom. I avoided looking in the mirror; I didn’t want to know what I looked like at the moment. From past experiences I knew I looked worse than I felt, and that was never a comforting experience.
After a too brief shower I threw on some clothes from the pile that I knew to be clean. That pile was dangerously low. I sighed as I pulled on my last clean t-shirt; my two week supply of clothes was at an end.
I rushed through
“You look like hell,” was the first thing out of Herbert’s mouth as soon as he got a good look at me.
“I was just about to say the same about you,” I replied sweetly.
Herbert opened his mouth to give me a smart comeback but was forestalled by the appearance of Dr. Langersham.
“I have no doubt that all of you have had a chance to read the assignment,” Dr. Langersham began before the door even had a chance to close.
* * *
“So, what did you do to your face this time?” Herbert asked as we walked out of the class room and into the quickly filling hallway that would lead to fresh air and freedom.
“Threw myself against a brick wall,” I replied shortly. I didn’t know why Herbert insisted on asking such stupid questions. It wasn’t like I claimed I had walked into a wall because I was afraid to admit my boyfriend hit me. As far as Herbert knew, there had been no guy in my life for the past three and half years that he had known me. “What’s your excuse?” I asked just to see his reaction.
Herbert bristled, as if I had just insulted his sun-kissed beauty- which I had. The boy really should be cheering on football players or walking down runways rather than studying people being burned at the stake or being drowned to prove that they weren’t in league with the devil.
“Herbert,” a shrill voice squealed uncomfortably close to my ear before he could come up with something to put me in my place. I cringed and ducked away before Herbert’s girlfriend could get a look at my face. If he was shocked and peppy-fully condescending about my appearance then Raquel, his current girlfriend and head cheerleader, would be even worse.
“See you later,” I called out as I made my escape.
I sighed in relief once I got far enough away that I didn’t feel the itch of eyes boring into my back.
With distance between me and the cotton-candy-sweet couple I went merrily about my normal Thursday routine. I was in the process of exiting the library late in the afternoon when my phone began a merry jig of vibrations. As I stared at the caller ID that announced that it was Father McKenzie, the other bane of my existence, I contemplated not answering. My head had started to pound with a vengeance and all I wanted to do was crawl back into my bed and sleep until morning. But, if there was anyone more tenacious than Herbert when it came to getting a hold of me, it was Father McKenzie. If I didn’t return his call within a certain amount of time he would come to my apartment and commence a stake out until I showed up again. Those never ended well.
“Hello, Padre. What can I do for you today?” I asked cheerfully. I could hear the Irish priest’s teeth grind, which only made me grin, despite the pounding head.
“Good afternoon Isabelle,” Father McKenzie said once he had collected himself enough to say anything.
“Good afternoon,” I replied a bit redundantly when the priest didn’t continue.
“I need you to come down to the Archives today,” Father McKenzie informed me.
“Sorry, no can do,” I blithely told him. “Too much homework.” It wasn’t a complete lie. Just because there was going to be a nap in that time that he wanted me to use looking for something in that dusty ill-lit room didn’t mean that I didn’t have homework, not to mention housework, to do. “Maybe Linda can help you.”
“Linda is busy training,” Father McKenzie bit out.
“Not my fault,” I told the priest. “But maybe tomorrow,” I promised vaguely as I slid into the driver’s seat of my car. “I am about to start driving, and I lost my hands free devise. Talk to you later.” And with that I hung up.
With a sigh of relief I made my way back through traffic to home. Once inside I didn’t even make it to my bedroom. Sinking down onto the couch I let sleep take me back into its embrace. I would worry about homework, dirty clothes, and angry, disgruntled priests later.
