READ ON FOR A PREVIEW OF
THE FIRST BOOK IN THE DEMON TRAPPERS SERIES
THE DEMON TRAPPER’S DAUGHTER
Available February 1, 2011 from St. Martin’s Griffin
St. Martin’s Press
THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. ALL OF THE CHARACTERS, ORGANIZATIONS, AND EVENTS PORTRAYED IN THIS STORY ARE EITHER PRODUCTS OF THE AUTHOR’S IMAGINATION OR ARE USED FICTITIOUSLY.
“Retro Demonology”
Copyright © 2010 by Jana Oliver.
All rights reserved.
For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
St. Martin’s books are published by
St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Atlanta 2018
The Proud to Be Retro decal on the house’s front door should have been Riley Blackthorne’s first clue. But then every day was bizarre when you were an apprentice Demon Trapper. She double-checked the address on the trapping order clutched in her left hand. This was the place.
Just my luck.
Retro was gaining favor in Atlanta, what with the economy fizzling like a damp firecracker and the city bankrupt. When today sucked, why not “live” in a simpler, more perfect time? Even if that time had actually sucked as bad as this one. Some Retros preferred the 1980’s, some the 40s. Exactly which era this client had chosen remained to be seen.
“Please, not the 50s again,” Riley murmured. A couple weeks back, she and her demon trapper dad had encountered a Retro lady with her head firmly in 1955. She’d been clad in a pink and white floral dress, a white starched apron, heels and a single strand of pearls. She had a picture of Dwight D. Eisenhower on her wall and her kitchen was all white metal cabinets, chrome chairs and linoleum. She’d been one very mad Retro lady by the time they’d fished a swearing, peeing and biting demon from amidst her prized cookbook collection. Though the mess on her pristine cabinets and floor wasn’t anything major, Ms. 50s acted like it was the end of the world. And told them so…repeatedly.
As Riley’s father had said after the incident. “Sometimes I like the demons more than the clients.”
With a silent prayer heavenward, Riley rapped on the weathered door. Fidgeting, she straightened her jeans jacket and flipped her long brown hair behind her shoulders. Up to this point her father had watched over her on each trapping run, preventing her from making seriously dumb moves. Today there was no dad backup and that made her off-the-scale nervous. No, she couldn’t expect special treatment just because her father was Paul Blackthorne, legendary master trapper.
That was the way it was done–the master took the newbie on trapping runs until he deemed the apprentice was ready to handle the smaller demons on his (or in Riley’s case) her own. Once she’d passed that test, they’d tackle the next grade level of Hellspawn, on and on until she took down a Grade Five Geo-Fiend. But that would be at least six months away. Once she’d completed her training, she took the test and became a journeyman trapper. A lot was riding on this gig, if nothing more than to prove to the other trappers in the Atlanta Guild she wasn’t some silly wannabe.
The door creaked open and a woman peered out at her. She looked about forty, but was trying to look younger. She had a blonde Afro, hip hugger bell bottoms, a bunch of beads and a black Peace Now tee shirt. More troubling: her eyes didn’t focus right.
Oh crap. She’s into the 60s. Her dad had warned her about these folks. Another face appeared–this belonged to a stick thin guy with shoulder-length brown hair held back by a black bandana across his forehead. A busy beard, tee shirt advocating free love and ratty jeans left no doubt he was way into the 1960s. Both of them wore sandals with no socks. In January.
“Peace,” the woman said, then made the appropriate sign with her two fingers. The guy did the same.
Clearly Riley was going to have to be the adult in this conversation.
“I’m here to take care of your…” She hesitated at this point. Her dad had taught her to never say the “d” word in public until the client was willing to acknowledge that they had a fiendish issue. Demons in your home rated right up there with declaring your place a plague pit. Some people wouldn’t buy a house if there’d even been a demon inside. “I’m here to take care of your problem.”
The pair just stared at her.
“You know. The problem?” Nothing. So much for subtlety. “I’m a Demon Trapper.”
“Oh, groovy,” the woman said and smiled. Riley decided she was probably called Sunflower or something like that given her oversize hairstyle. “The Man at the Guild said you’d like have this piece of paper.”
Maybe she means my license. Riley dug in her messenger bag and produced the apprentice Demon Trapper license, laminated proof that she was allowed to capture Hellspawn. Well, at least the small ones. Mini demons loved to steal jewelry, destroy books, burn out circuit boards and stick dead roaches inside denture cups. It was all annoying stuff. Unless you were a denture wearer. Or a librarian.
As Riley offered up the license the photograph mocked her. Back when it’d been taken her hair had been this amazing blend of brown and black with bright teal highlights. Now it was her natural brown because her dad had insisted on it. “People judge by appearances,” he’d said. “You need to look like a pro. Blue hair doesn’t cut it.”
Neither does dull brown.
“You’re only seventeen?” Sunflower asked, raising a blonde eyebrow.
“Yes, but I’m fully trained to handle Grade One demons,” Riley replied, just like her dad had taught her when the age issue arose.
“He’s a majorly wacked out,” Bandana announced. “He crossed the line.”
“What line?” Riley asked, puzzled.
“He went after Jim’s albums,” the guy said, shaking his head in disgust. “That’s so not cool.”
“We tried to get him to split, check out someone’s pad, but he won’t go,” the woman added. “So we called The Man.”
Don’t try to make sense of this. Just get it done.
The license was returned, then she was led through a house populated with garish orange and green bean bag chairs, bead curtains and a Che Guevara poster. Some sort of East Indian music played in the background. Worse, the place reeked of patchouli. Riley sneezed. Twice. Then dug for a tissue.
I just have to snag the demon and make a break for it. Then run her clothes through the washer a few times so they didn’t smell like she lived in a Buddhist monastery.
They entered a room at the back of the house that looked like a shrine. Probably because it was. One full wall was covered in posters, all of this particular band. In the middle of them was a huge picture of this cute guy with shaggy brown hair, clothed in a leather jacket, and holding a microphone. Beneath the picture was a plaque that said Light My Fire 1943-1971. Then there were the rows and rows of candles that sent pinpoints of light onto the remaining tapestry-covered walls.
This has to be a setup. My dad must have talked a couple of his buddies into messing with my head. Yeah, it’s a hazing.
She waited for the “Gotcha” moment from the pair of hippies. It didn’t come.
“See?” Sunflower asked.
All Riley saw was serious obsession with Jim Morrison and The Doors. Her father had been a fan, but this was way more than that.
“Neat room,” Riley said, figuring that was a safe response.
“No, not that,” Sunflower exclaimed. “See?”
Following the woman’s pointed finger, Riley finally spied the demon on the altar, perched next to a small statue of the Jim guy.
“Can you dig it?” Sunflower asked in a jangle of beads.
“Yeah, I got it,” Riley said.
Trappers had a rating scale for demons based on how dangerous they were: Grade One to Grade Five. This was a One, a Biblio-Fiend. It might be small, but it could rip through a library like a chainsaw when it was in the proper mood. Which was pretty much all the time.
As Riley slowly moved forward to study the fiend, it cut loose a string of swear words. It was about three inches tall, had pointed ears and was mocha in color. The most unnerving feature was its two brilliant red eyes. They glowered at her menacingly.
“Trappperr…” it hissed, then swore again.
The little demon did have two other weapons besides its foul personality: sharp teeth and…She backed off just in time to avoid a tiny stream of green urine that came her way. That was why trappers called them Little Pissers. No way did she want it to wreck her jeans.
This kind hated books. That didn’t explain why it was here. This wasn’t a library or a bookstore, but something had attracted it. There was a topped pile of New Age books on the floor near the altar, but nothing that compelling unless you wanted to read about composting or aligning your chakras.
As she watched, the thing tugged a book from underneath its butt and began to rip out the pages. She caught a glimpse of the spine. The book was by John Milton.
“Ah, that’s your problem,” Riley said, relieved to be on familiar ground. “You’ve got a copy of Paradise Lost in your house. Biblios hate Milton. Same with Dante, C.S. Lewis and most holy books. They’ll go after those every time.”
“So, like, how do we get the dude to bug out?” Bandana asked.
Riley turned toward the pair. They couldn’t be like this all the time, could they? “I have a secret weapon,” she replied, trying hard to sound confident. That’s not how she felt. Wish my dad was here.
There was the sound of another page ripping free. This time the demon made it into a spit ball and launched the missile at her. It plonked off her forehead
Glowering at the little fiend, she tried to think this through. That was paramount–the trapper must retain control of the trapping.
Warnings. I haven’t done those yet. She hadn’t memorized those completely, so she pulled the Unintended Consequences and Perils sheet out of her messenger bag and began to run down the list. As she read off the potential hazards, the clients clustered around her.
“They steal souls? Now that’s gnarly,” Bandana said, pointing to one of the listed perils. Most of which didn’t apply to the demon on the altar.
“Talk about a drag,” the woman replied.
Riley finished the list and then sighed in relief as Sunflower and her noisy beads signed the paperwork. Now she was free to get on with the trapping. She’d just opened her mouth to suggest that the pair take a hike, when Bandana guy said, “We’ll just hang loose, stay out of your way.”
“Yeah, we’ve got brownies in the oven,” And then they were gone, shutting the door behind them.
Riley sighed in relief. Then she turned to eye her foe. The demon flipped her off in response. “What are you doing here with these people? Are you nuts?” she demanded.
It grinned, showing its teeth. And tore another page out of Milton.
“That does it.”
Biblio-Fiends had a weakness: books. It’s why they hated them. If a trapper read the right text to a Biblio, they went comatose and were easier to capture. Her father had told her that dense prose worked better than a hot romance novel. Riley didn’t buy that, so she tried a steamy scene from The Virgin Bride’s Secret Greek Lover, despite her dad’s dire warnings. The results hadn’t been pretty. It’d taken them over an hour to catch the enraged Biblio as it’d rampaged through the stacks of police procedurals and true crimes in a local bookstore.
Having learned her lesson, Riley extracted her weapon of choice: Moby Dick. She took a deep breath, opened the book to the first page and began to read.
“Call me Ishmael.” She continued the literary torture of Melville’s convoluted prose. “It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation.’ If she’d had an extra hand, her fingers would be crossed at this point.
There was a series of moans. ‘“Boon I grant you Blackthorne’s daughter,” the demon cried out, writhing in agony.
Riley kept reading. She knew that one boon led to another and another. The final payoff would be the Welcome to Hell lecture by none other than the Prince himself.
There was a sharp cry of anguish when she got to ‘whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul…’. Then silence. Riley looked up from the page and grinned–the fiend had passed out. Her first trapping was a success.
“Trapper scores!” she said, shooting a fist into the air. Then she heard her father’s voice just like he was standing next to her. “Don’t count your Hellspawn before they’re secured.” If this fiend woke up before she got it in a sippy cup, it would go ballistic and trash the shrine to Dead Jim. That would be a drag.
Frantically she rifled through her messenger bag, pulled out a cup and popped off the lid. Picking the unconscious demon up by a foot she carefully dropped it inside the clear plastic container. The lid went on. Then she sank to the floor, the adrenalin fading already.
Now her first solo trapping run had been a success.
Dad is going to be so proud.
The Biblo woke and threw a hellish fit as Riley was completing the paperwork with the hippies in their kitchen. It screamed and banged against the side of the cup like a crazed thing.
“Chill out, will you?” Bandana said. The demon shot him the bird and made a rude remark in Hellspeak.
“What he say?” the man asked.
“Trust me, you don’t want to know.”
Ten minutes later Riley was headed toward downtown Atlanta, singing along to Dead and Lovin’ It on the car radio. On the seat next to her was the messenger bag, the signed paperwork and the Offending Minion of Hell. No surprise, it wasn’t happy so Riley had learned a couple new fiendish swear words, ones she didn’t dare use around her dad. She’d also scored a hug from Sunflower and three strands of beads that didn’t go with anything she owned.
What wasn’t sitting on the seat next to her was the couple’s oversized brownies, though they’d offered to send some home with her. Riley had pleaded a chocolate allergy. It was more like a “I don’t need to get busted for weed” issue.
As she edged her way through the intersection onto M.L. King toward downtown Atlanta, the messenger bag began to rock on the seat. She slapped her hand on it to keep it in place while the bag bounced around like a cat with its tail on fire. Tiny feet drummed against her palm as green liquid leaked onto the seat. Somehow the demon had managed to unscrew the sippy cup’s lid and now it was a good bet it was trying to find a way out of the bag. If it did, it might take off. What would she tell her dad?
The bag thrashed on the seat and then the demon poked its head out.
“Oh no, you don’t! Get back in there.” It pulled itself completely free, grinning manically.
Distracted, Riley jerked the steering wheel and nearly collided with another car. The driver honked his horn and glared at her.
“Stop it!” she shouted at the fiend. “You’ll get us killed, you idiot.”
At the last minute, she looked up and gasped in horror. Ramming her foot on the brake pedal, she plastered herself against the seatbelt causing the messenger bag to careen to the floor. The demon sailed upward and landed on the dash.
There was a screech of burning rubber. “Noooo!”
The car finally halted, missing the one in front of her by inches.
“Thank God,” Riley sighed, flopping against the steering wheel in relief. She didn’t dare lose her driver’s license. It’d taken her two tries to pass the road test.
Peals of demonic laughter came from the dashboard where the demon was doubled over, tears rolling down its eyes in mirth. She made a grab for it, but it skittered out of her reach.
“Hey, I didn’t hit him,” she said, retrieving her messenger bag from the floor. She had to put the thing back into the cup. The laughter grew louder causing her to hesitate. “What’s so funny?”
As she looked up she spied the row of blue lights on top of the car she’d nearly rear-ended. Like you’d see on an emergency vehicle. Or a…
Oh crap.
The Atlanta city cop climbed out of his car and headed her way, a ticket book in hand. His frown promised someone was in deep trouble and that someone was Riley.
“Good thing I passed on the brownies,” she murmured.
There was one final burst of hysterical laughter from the demon, then it dove down under the passenger seat, spreading green urine in all directions.
The moment the cop arrived at the car, Riley turned on the charm. She politely handed over her driver’s license with green-stained hands and tried to ignore that the car’s seats were splattered with demon pee. The smell was worse: rotting gym shoes.
When Riley explained the problem, the cop’s right eye began to twitch.
“I’ve heard ‘em all, young lady. Don’t even go there.”
So she handed over her apprentice license. The cop’s frown deepened as he studied it.
“You’re kidding me. You’re really a trapper?”
“Yes. The demon is under the passenger seat,” she said. Or at least she hoped it was. If not, she’d be out one fiend and get a ticket to boot.
Despite her charming personality, the cop wasn’t buying her story until she painstakingly fished Hell’s smartass from under the seat and dropped it into the sippy cup. She attached the lid with more care this time and then held up the cup so the officer could get a view of the little monster. It promptly flipped him off.
“Oh, God, that’s really a…” The guy turned pale and slowly backed away. “You drive safe now,” he said and then beat a quick retreat to his car. A few seconds later he sped away, no doubt keen to ticket someone who wasn’t packing a demon in their vehicle.
After a lengthy time at a car wash cleaning the seats, the windows and just about everything else inside the vehicle, Riley drove home. When the messenger bag gave another lurch on the seat next to her, she didn’t panic: she’d made sure the sippy cup’s lid was on tight. From the extent of the demon’s swearing, she’d done it right this time.
It hadn’t been pretty, but she’d trapped her first Hellspawn on her own.
Her dad was going to be very proud of her.
She cranked up the radio to cover the demon’s swearing. Next time she’d get the lip on right. Next time there wouldn’t be demon pee all over her and the car.
Next time it’ll be perfect.
READ ON FOR A PREVIEW OF
THE FIRST BOOK IN THE DEMON TRAPPERS SERIES
THE DEMON TRAPPER’S DAUGHTER
Available February 1, 2011 from St. Martin’s Griffin
2018
Atlanta, Georgia
Riley Blackthorne rolled her eyes.
“Libraries and demons,” she muttered. “What is the attraction?”
At the sound of her voice the fiend hissed from its perch on top of the book stack. Then it flipped Riley off.
The librarian chuckled at its antics. “It’s been doing that ever since we found it.”
They were on the second floor of the university law library, surrounded by weighty books and industrious students. Well, they’d been industrious until Riley showed up, and now most of them were watching her every move. Trapping with an audience is what her dad called it. It made her painfully aware that her work clothes—denim jacket, jeans, and pale blue T-shirt—looked totally Third World compared to the librarian’s somber navy pantsuit.
The woman brandished a laminated sheet; librarians were into cataloging things, even Hellspawn. She scrutinized the demon and then consulted the sheet. “About three inches tall, burnt-mocha skin and peaked ears. Definitely a Biblio-Fiend. Sometimes I get them confused with the Klepto-Fiends. We’ve had both in here before.”
Riley nodded her understanding. “Biblios are into books. Rather than stealing stuff they like to pee on things. That’s the big difference.”
As if on cue, the Off ending Minion of Hell promptly sent an arc of phosphorescent green urine in their direction. Luckily, demons of this size had equally small equipment, which meant limited range, but they both took a cautious step backward.
The stench of old gym shoes bloomed around them. “Supposed to do wonders for acne,” Riley joked as she waved a hand to clear the smell.
The librarian grinned. “That’s why your face is so clear.”
Usually the clients bitched about how young Riley was and whether she was really qualified to do the job, even after she showed them her Apprentice Demon Trapper license. She’d hoped some of that would stop when she’d turned seventeen, but no such luck. At least the librarian was taking her seriously.
“How long has it been here?” Riley asked.
“Not long. I called right away, so it hasn’t done any real damage,” the librarian reported. “Your dad has removed them for us in the past. I’m glad to see you’re following in his footsteps.”
Yeah, right. As if anyone could fill Paul Blackthorne’s shoes.
Riley shoved a stray lock of dark brown hair behind an ear. It swung free immediately. Undoing her hair clip, she rewound her long hair and secured it so the little demon wouldn’t tie it in knots. Besides, she needed time to think.
It wasn’t as if she was a complete noob. She’d trapped Biblio-Fiends before, just not in a university law library full of professors and students, including a couple of seriously cute guys. One of them looked up at her, and she regretted being dressed for the job rather than for the scrutiny. She nervously twisted the strap of her denim messenger bag. Her eyes flicked toward a closed door a short distance away. “Rare Book Room.” A demon could do a lot of damage in there.
“You see our concern,” the librarian whispered.
“Sure do.” Biblio-Fiends hated books. They found immense joy rampaging through the stacks, peeing, ripping, and shredding. To be able to reduce a room full of priceless books and manuscripts to compost would be a demon’s wildest dream. Probably even get the fiend a promotion, if Hell had such a thing.
Confidence is everything. At least that’s what her dad always said. It worked a lot better when he was standing next to her.
“I can get it out of here, no problem,” she said. Another torrent of swear words came her way. The demon’s high-pitched voice mimicked a mouse being slowly squashed by an anvil. It always made her ears ache.
Ignoring the fiend, Riley cleared her suddenly dry throat and launched into a list of potential consequences of her actions. It was the standard demon trapper boilerplate. She began with the usual disclaimers required before extracting a Minion of Hell from a public location, including the clauses about unanticipated structural damage and the threat of demonic possession.
The librarian actually paid attention, unlike most clients.
“Does that demonic possession thing really happen?” she asked, her eyes widening.
“Oh, no, not with the little ones. Bigger demons, yeah.” It was one of the reasons Riley liked trapping the small dudes. They could scratch and bite and pee on you, but they couldn’t suck out your soul and use it as a hockey puck for eternity.
If all the demons were like these guys, no big deal. But they weren’t. The Demon Trappers Guild graded Hellfiends according to cunning and lethality. This demon was a Grade One: nasty, but not truly dangerous. There were Grade Threes, carnivorous eating machines with wicked claws and teeth. And at the top end was a Grade Five—a Geo-Fiend, which could create freak windstorms in the middle of shopping malls and cause earthquakes with a flick of a wrist. And that didn’t include the Archdemons, which made your worst nightmares look tame.
Riley turned her mind to the job at hand. The best way to render a Biblio-Fiend incapable of harm was to read to it. The older and more dense the prose, the better. Romance novels just stirred them up, so it was best to pick something really boring. She dug in her messenger bag and extracted her ultimate weapon: Moby-Dick. The book fell open to a green-stained page.
The librarian peered at the text. “Melville?”
“Yeah. Dad prefers Dickens or Chaucer. For me it’s Herman Melville. He bored the…crap out of me in lit class. Put me to sleep every time.” She pointed upward at the demon. “It’ll do the same to this one.”
“Grant thee boon, Blackthorne’s daughter!” the demon wheedled as it cast its eyes around, looking for a place to hide.
Riley knew how this worked: If she accepted a favor she’d be obligated to set the demon free. Accepting favors from fiends was so against the rules. Like potato chips, you couldn’t stop at just one, then you’d find yourself at Hell’s front door trying to explain why your soul had a big brand on it that said “Property of Lucifer.”
“No way,” Riley muttered. After clearing her throat, she began reading. “‘Call me Ishmael.’” An audible groan came from the stack above her. “‘Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.’”
She continued the torture, trying hard not to snicker. There was another moan, then a cry of anguish. By now the demon would be pulling out its hair, if it had any. “‘It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, of regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul…’”
There was a pronounced thump as the fiend keeled over in a dead faint on the metal shelf.
“Trapper scores!” Riley crowed. After a quick glance toward a cute guy at a nearby table, Riley dropped the book and pulled a cup out of her bag. It had the picture of a dancing bear on the side of it.
“Is that a sippy cup?” the librarian asked.
“Yup. They’re great for this kind of thing. There’re holes in the top so the demons can breathe and it’s very hard for them to unscrew the lids.” She grinned. “Most of all, they really hate them.”
Riley popped up on her tiptoes and picked the demon up by a clawed foot, watching it carefully. Sometimes they just pretended to be asleep in order to escape.
This one was out cold.
“Well done. I’ll go sign the requisition for you,” the librarian said and headed toward her desk.
Riley allowed herself a self-satisfied grin. This had gone just fine. Her dad would be really proud of her. As she positioned the demon over the top of the cup, she heard a laugh, low and creepy. A second later a puff of air hit her face, making her blink. Papers ruffled on tables. Remembering her father’s advice, Riley kept her attention on the demon. It would revive quickly, and when it did the Biblio would go into a frenzy. As she lowered it inside the container, the demon began to twitch.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said.
The breeze grew stronger. Papers no longer rustled but were caught up and spun around the room like rectangular white leaves.
“Hey, what’s going on?” a student demanded.
There was a curious shifting sound. Riley gave a quick look upward and watched as books began to dislodge themselves from the shelves one by one. They hung in the air like helicopters, then veered off at sharp tangents. One whizzed right over the head of a student, and he banged his chin on the table to avoid being hit.
The breeze grew, swirling through the stacks like the night wind in a forest. There were shouts and the muffled sound of running feet on carpet as students scurried for the exits.
The Biblio stirred, spewing obscenities, flailing its arms in all directions. Just as Riley began to recite the one Melville passage she’d memorized, the fire alarm blared to life, drowning her out. A heavy book glanced off her shoulder, ramming her into the stack. Dazed, she shook her head to clear it. The cup and the cap were on the floor at her feet. The demon was gone.
“No! Don’t do this!”
Panic stricken, she searched for it. In a maelstrom of books, papers, and flying notebooks, she finally spied the fiend navigating its way toward a closed door, the one that led to the Rare Book Room. Ducking to avoid a flight of reference books swooping down on her like a flock of enraged seagulls, Riley grabbed the plastic cup and stashed it in her jacket pocket.
She had to get that fiend into the container.
To her horror, the Rare Book Room door swung open and a confused student peered outward into the melee. As if realizing nothing stood in its way, the demon took on additional speed. It leapt onto a chair recently vacated by a terrified occupant and then onto the top of the reference desk. Small feet pounding, it dove off the desk, executed a roll, and lined itself up for the final dash to the open door, a tiny football player headed for a touchdown.
Riley barreled through everyone in her way, her eyes riveted on the small figure scurrying across the floor. As she vaulted over the reference desk something slammed into her back, knocking her off balance. She went down in a sea of pencils, paper, and wire trays. There was a ripping sound: Her jeans had taken one for the team.
Scrambling on all fours, she lunged forward, stretching as far as her arms could possibly reach. The fingers of her right hand caught the fiend by the waist, and she dragged it toward her. It screamed and twisted and peed, but she didn’t loosen her grip. Riley pulled the cup from her pocket and jammed the demon inside. Ramming her palm over the top of the cup, she lay on her back staring up at the ceiling. Around her lights flashed and the alarm brayed. Her breath came in gasps and her head ached. Both knees burned where she’d skinned them.
The alarm cut out abruptly and she sighed with relief. There was another chilling laugh. She hunted for the source but couldn’t find it. A low groaning came from the massive bookshelves to her right. On instinct, Riley rolled in the opposite direction, and kept rolling until she rammed into a table leg. With a strained cry of metal the entire bookshelf fell in a perfect arc and hit the carpeted floor where she’d been seconds before, sending books, pages, and broken spines outward in a wave. Suddenly all the debris in the room began to settle, like someone had shut off a giant wind machine.
A sharp pain in her palm caused her to shoot bolt upright, connecting her head with the side of the table.
“Dammit!” she swore, grimacing. The demon had bitten her. She shook the cup, disorienting the thing, then gingerly got to her feet. The world spun as she leaned against the table, trying to get her bearings. Faces began to appear around her from under desks and behind stacks of books. A few of the girls were crying, and one of the hunky boys held his head and moaned. Every eye was on her.
Then she realized why they were staring: her hands were spotted with green pee, and her favorite T-shirt was splashed as well. There was blood on her blue jeans and she’d lost one of her tennis shoes. Her hair hung in a knotted mass over one shoulder.
Heat bloomed in Riley’s cheeks. Trapper fails.
When the demon tried to bite her again, she angrily shook the cup, taking her frustration out on the fiend.
It just laughed at her.
The librarian cleared her throat. “You dropped this,” she said, offering the lid. The woman’s hair looked like it had been styled by a wind tunnel, and she had a yellow sticky note plastered to her cheek that said “Dentist, 10:00 am Monday.”
Riley took the lid in a shaking hand and sealed the demon inside the cup.
It shouted obscenities and used both hands to flip her off.
Same to you, jerk.
The librarian surveyed the chaos and sighed. “And to think we used to worry about silverfish.”
Riley grimly watched the paramedics haul two students out on stretchers: One had a neck brace and the other babbled incoherently about the end of the world. Cell phones periodically erupted in a confused chorus of ringtones as parents got wind of the disaster. Some kids were jazzed, telling Mom or Dad just how cool it had been and that they were posting videos on the Internet. Others were frightened out of their minds.
Like me.
It wasn’t fair. She’d done everything right. Well, not everything, but Biblios weren’t supposed to be psychokinetic. No Grade One demon would have the power to cause a windstorm, but somehow it had. There could have been another demon in the library, but they never work as a team.
So who laughed at me? Her eyes slowly tracked over the remaining students. No clue. One of the cute guys was stuffing books in his backpack. When she caught his eye, he just shook his head in disapproval as if she were a naughty five-year-old.
Rich creep. He had to be if he was still in college.
Digging in her messenger bag, she pulled out a warm soda and took several long gulps. It didn’t cut the taste of old paper in the back of her throat. As she jammed the bottle into her bag the demon bite flared in pain. It was starting to swell and made her arm throb all the way to the elbow. She knew she should treat it with Holy Water, but the cops had told her not to move and she didn’t think the library would appreciate her getting their carpet wet.
At least the cops weren’t asking her questions anymore. One of them had tried to bully her into making a statement, but that had only made her mad. To shut him up she’d called her father. She’d told him that something had gone wrong and handed the phone to the cop.
“Mr. Blackthorne? We got a situation here,” he huffed.
Riley shut her eyes. She tried not to listen to the conversation, but that proved impossible. When the cop started with the attitude, her father responded with his you-don’t-want-to-go-there voice. He’d perfected it as a high school teacher when facing down mouthy teens. Apparently campus cops were also susceptible to the voice: The officer murmured an apology and handed her the phone.
“Dad? I’m so sorry….” Tears began to build. No way she’d cry in front of the cop, so Riley turned her back to him. “I don’t know what happened.”
There was total silence on the other end of the phone. Why isn’t he saying anything? God, he must be furious. I’m so dead.
“Riley…” Her father took in a long breath. “You sure you’re not hurt?”
“Yeah.” No point in telling him about the bite; he’d see that soon enough.
“As long as you’re okay, that’s all that matters.”
Somehow Riley didn’t think the university would be so forgiving. “I can’t get free here so I’ll send someone for you. I don’t want you taking the bus, not after this.”
“Okay.”
More silence as the moments ticked by. She felt her heart tighten.
“Riley, no matter what happens, I love you. Remember that.” Blinking her eyes to keep the tears in check, Riley stowed the phone in her messenger bag. She knew what her father was thinking: Her apprentice license was history.
But I didn’t do anything wrong.
The librarian knelt next to her chair. Her hair was brushed back in place and her clothes tidied. Riley envied her. The world could end and she’d always look neat. Maybe it was a librarian thing, something they taught them in school.
“Sign this, will you?” the woman said.
Riley expected a lengthy list of damages and how she’d be responsible for paying for them. Instead, it was the requisition for payment of demon removal. The one a trapper signed when the job was done.
“But—” Riley began.
“You caught him,” the librarian said, pointing toward the cup resting on the table. “Besides, I looked at the demon chart. This wasn’t just one of the little guys, was it?”
Riley shook her head and signed the form, though her fingers were numb.
“Good.” The librarian pushed back a strand of Riley’s tangled hair and gave her a tentative smile. “Don’t worry; it’ll be okay.” Then she was gone.
Riley’s mom had said that right before she died. So had her dad after their condo burned to the ground. Adults always acted like they could fix everything.
But they can’t. And they know it.
Forced to wait outside the library, Denver Beck gave a lengthy sigh as he ran a hand through his short blond hair. His mentor’s kid had just topped the list for Biggest Apprentice Screwup. That upset him not only for the ten kinds of grief she’d get from the Trappers Guild but the fact that that had always been his honor. Who’d have thought she could outdo his nightmare capture of a Pyro-Fiend in a rush hour MARTA station? A disaster that had required not only the fire department but a hazmat team.
“But somehow ya did it, girl,” Beck mumbled in his smooth Georgia drawl. He shook his head in dismay. “Damn, there’s gonna be hell to pay for this.”
He rolled his shoulders in a futile effort to relax. He’d been wired ever since Paul phoned him to say that Riley was in trouble. Beck was on the way to the library even before the conversation ended. He owed Paul Blackthorne nothing less.
Barred from entering the library by the cops, he’d cooled his heels and talked to some of the students who’d been inside during the trapping. It’d been easy to get information—he was about the same age as most of them. A few reported they’d seen Riley capture a small demon, but none of them had been clear as to what had happened next.
“Somethin’s not right,” Beck muttered to himself. A Biblio-Fiend could make a damned mess, but that usually didn’t involve emergency personnel.
A pair of college girls walked by, eyeing him. Apparently they liked what they saw. He ran a hand over the stubble on his chin and smiled back, though now was not the time to make plans along that line. At least not until he knew Riley was okay.
“Lookin’ fine,” he called out, which earned him smiles. One of them even winked at him.
Oh, yeah, mighty fine.
A campus cop came within range, the one who’d told him he wasn’t to move. They’d traded words, but Beck had decided not to push the issue. He couldn’t collect Paul’s daughter if he was handcuffed in the back of a patrol car.
“Can I go in now?” Beck called out.
“Not yet,” the cop replied gruffly.
“What about the demon trapper? She okay?”
“Yeah. She’ll be out pretty soon. I can’t imagine why you guys would send a girl after those things.”
The cop wasn’t the only one thinking along those lines.
“It’s not legal if she’s bein’ questioned without a senior trapper there,” Beck warned.
“Yeah, yeah. Your rules, not ours,” the man replied. “Nothing we care about.”
“Not until ya get a demon up yer ass, then yer all over us.”
The cop snorted, hands on his hips. “I just don’t understand why you don’t cap their asses, like those demon hunters do. You guys just look like a bunch of sissies with all your little spheres and plastic cups.”
Beck bridled at the insult. How many times had he tried to explain the difference between a trapper and a hunter? Trapping a demon took skill. The Vatican’s boys didn’t bother; they went for firepower. To the hunters, the only good demon was a dead demon. No talent needed. There were other differences, but pretty much that was the dividing line. The average Joe just didn’t get it.
Beck summed it up. “We got skills. They got weapons. We need talent. They don’t.”
“I don’t know. They look pretty damned good on that television show.”
Beck knew which one the cop was talking about. It was called Demonland and was supposedly all about the hunters.
“The show’s got it all wrong. Hunters don’t have any girls on their team. They live like monks and have about as much sense of humor as a junkyard dog.”
“Jealous?” the cop chided.
Was he? “No way. When I get done with my day’s work, I can go have a beer and pick up a babe. Those guys can’t.”
“You kidding me?”
Beck shook his head. “Nothin’ like that TV show.”
“Damn,” the cop muttered. “Here I thought it was all chicks and flashy cars.”
“Nope. Now ya know why I’m a trapper.”
Beck’s jacket pocket erupted into song: “Georgia on My Mind” floated across the parking lot. That earned him a few stares.
“Paul,” Beck said, not bothering to look at the display. It had to be the girl’s dad.
“What happened?” the man asked, his voice on edge.
Beck gave him a rundown of the situation.
“Let me know the moment’s she out,” Paul insisted.
“Will do. Did ya trap the Pyro?”
“Yeah. I wish I could get away, but I have to finish up here.”
“No sweat. I’ll keep an eye on things for ya.”
“Thanks, Den.”
Beck flipped the phone shut and jammed it in his jacket pocket. He’d heard the worry in his friend’s voice. Paul was fanatic about keeping his apprentices safe, and even more so when it came to his daughter. It’s why he’d slowed her training to a snail’s pace, hoping she’d change her mind and pick a safer profession. Like walking the high wire for a living.
Not gonna work. He’d told Paul that countless times, but he wouldn’t listen. Riley would be a trapper whether her father approved or not. She had that same stubborn streak as her mother.
Beck’s attention moved to the news crew positioned near the building’s entrance. He knew the lead reporter, George something or other. He’d covered Beck’s catastrophe. The media loved anything to do with demon trapping as long as it went wrong. A quiet catch in an alley would never land on tape. A Hellfiend going berserk in a train station or a law library and they were all over it.
A lone figure appeared out of the milling crowd. It took Beck a moment to recognize her. Riley clutched her messenger bag to her side with whitened knuckles like it held the Crown Jewels. Her chestnut brown hair was a mass of tangles, and she walked with a slight limp. Even covered by her jean jacket he could see she’d filled out in places that would make boys dream of her at night. She seemed taller now, maybe five inches or so shorter than his six feet. Not so much a kid anymore. More like a young woman.
Damn girl, yer gonna break hearts.
When the newshound headed for her Beck went on alert, wondering if he would need to run interference. Riley shook her head at the reporter, pushed the microphone out of her face, and kept walking.
Smart girl.
He could tell the moment she spied him: Her expression went stony. No surprise there. When she was fifteen she’d gotten a huge crush on him even though he was five years older than her. He’d just begun his apprenticeship with her dad, so he’d done the smart thing: He’d avoided the kid, hoping she’d latch on to someone else. She had, but that story didn’t have a happy ending. Riley got over her puppy love but not the hurt feelings. It didn’t help that he spent more time with her father than she did.
He flipped open his phone and called Paul. “She’s okay.”
“Thank God. They’ve called an emergency Guild meeting. Warn her what she’s in for.”
“Will do.” Beck stashed the phone in his jacket pocket.
Riley halted a few feet away, her eyes narrowing when she saw him. There was a rip in the leg of her jeans, a bright red mark on a cheek, and streaks of green on her face, clothes, and hands where the demon had marked her. One earring was missing.
Beck could play this two ways—sympathy or sarcasm. She wouldn’t believe the first, not from him, so that left the other.
He cracked a mock grin. “I’m in awe, kid. If ya can do that kind of damage goin’ after a One, I can’t wait to see what ya got in mind for a Five.”
Her deep brown eyes flared. “I’m not a kid.”
“Ya are by my calendar,” he said, gesturing toward his old Ford pickup. “Get in.”
“I don’t hang with geezers,” she snapped back.
It took Beck a second to decipher the insult. “I’m not old.”
“Then stop acting like it.”
Seeing she wasn’t going to give an inch, he explained, “There’s an emergency Guild meetin’.”
“So why aren’t you there?”
“We both will be, just as soon as ya get in the damn truck.”
Realization dawned in her eyes. “The meeting’s about me?”
“Duh? Who else?”
“Oh…”
When she reached for the door handle, she hesitated. Beck realized the problem by the way she held her hand. “Demon bite ya?” A reluctant nod. “Did ya treat it?”
“No. And don’t bitch at me. I don’t need it right now.”
Grumbling to himself, Beck dug in his trapping bag on the front seat. Pulling out a pint bottle of Holy Water and a ban dage, he headed around the truck.
Riley leaned against the door, weary, eyes not really focusing on much. She was shivering now, more from the experience than the cold.
“This is gonna hurt.” He angled his head toward the news van. “It would be best if ya not make too much noise. We don’t want them over here.”
She nodded and closed her eyes, preparing herself. He gently turned her hand over, studying the wound. Deep, but it didn’t need stitches. The demon’s teeth didn’t rip as much as slice. The Holy Water would do the trick, and it would heal just fine.
Riley winced and clenched her jaw as the sanctified liquid touched the wound. It bubbled and vaporized like some supernatural hydrogen peroxide, removing the demonic taint. When the liquid had entirely evaporated, he shot a quick look at her face. Her eyes were open now, watering, but she’d not uttered a peep.
Tough, just like her daddy.
A few quick wraps of a ban dage, a little tape and it was done.
“That’ll do,” he said. “In ya go.”
He thought he heard a reluctant “Thanks” as she climbed inside the truck, still clutching the messenger bag. Beck hopped in, elbowed the door lock, and then started the engine. He pushed the heater control to its highest mark. He’d broil, but the girl needed warmth.
“Do you really use that thing?” she asked, pointing a green-tipped finger at the steel pipe that poked out of the top of the duffel bag on the seat between them.
“Sure do. Handy for Threes when they get rowdy. Really good if they sink a claw in ya.”
“How?” she asked, frowning.
“Gives ya leverage to push the fiend away. Of course, that rips the claw out, but that’s for the best. Worst case, the claw breaks off inside ya and yer body starts to rot.” He paused for effect. “It’s this really gross brown stuff.”
He’d been graphic on purpose, testing her. If she was squeamish she might as well give it up now. He waited for her reaction, but there was none.
“So what happened back there?” he asked.
Riley turned toward the window, cradling her injured hand.
“Okay, don’t tell me. I just thought we could talk it out, figure out where it went wrong. I’ve had my ass chewed enough by the Guild, so I thought I could give ya some pointers.”
Her shoulders convulsed, and for a moment he thought she would cry.
“I did everything like I was supposed to,” she whispered hoarsely. “So tell me what happened.”
He listened intently as she told him how she’d trapped the Biblio-Fiend. The girl really had done almost everything right.
“Yer sayin’ the books were flyin’ all over the place?” he quizzed.
“Yeah, and the bookshelf tore itself out of the wall. I thought it was going to crush me.”
Beck’s gut knotted. None of this was right. To calm his worries, he tried to remember how Paul had handled him after the MARTA incident when he was sure his career was over. “What would ya do different next time?”
Riley’s misty eyes swung toward him. “Next time? Get real. They’re going to throw me out of the Guild and laugh about this for years. Dad is so disappointed. I totally blew it. We won’t be able to pay the—” She looked away, but not before he caught sight of a tear rolling down an abraded cheek.
Medical bills. The ones left behind after Riley’s mom died. From what Paul had told him they were barely getting by. It was why they lived in a dinky-ass apartment that used to be a hotel room and why Riley pushed herself so hard to learn the business. Why Paul had to take any trapping job he could find to make money, though it cost him time with his only child.
Troubled silence fell between them as Beck concentrated on the traffic and what the evening might bring. The trappers weren’t easy about change, and having a girl as one of their own made a lot of them just downright pissy. Riley needed to talk it out, get over the guilt before the meeting, or they’d eat her alive.
After honking at a rusty MINI Cooper that cut him off, he took the turn toward downtown. The intersection ahead of them was a tangle of bikes and motor scooters. One guy was pushing a shopping cart filled with old tires, another on Rollerblades, his hair streaming behind him, gliding through the traffic like a speed skater. Nowadays people used whatever it took to get around the city. With the ridiculous cost of gas even horses made sense now.
The biggest problem was the empty air above the intersection: the traffic lights were gone.
“They keep this up and there won’t be one damned light left in the city,” Beck complained.
Most of them had been stolen and sold for scrap by metal thieves. It took some guts to climb up on those things in the middle of the night and dismantle them. Every now and then a thief slipped and ended up a grease spot on the road, buried in a tangle of metal.
Like so many things, the city turned a blind eye to the thievery, saying they couldn’t afford to replace every missing light. Too many other things to worry about in this bankrupt capital of five million souls.
Beck nearly clipped some idiot on a moped and then made it through the intersection; his hands clutched the wheel tighter than was needed.
Talk to me, kid. Ya can’t do this alone.
Riley flipped down the visor and stared into the cracked mirror.
“Omigod,” she said. He watched out of the corner of his eye as she gingerly touched the green areas where the demon pee had dyed her skin.
“It’ll be gone in a couple days,” Beck said, trying to sound helpful.
“It has to be gone by tomorrow night. I’ve got school.”
“Just tell ’em yer a trapper. That should impress ’em.”
“Wrong! The trick is to blend in, Beck, not glow like a radioactive frog.”
He shrugged. He’d never blended in and didn’t see why it mattered that much. But maybe to a girl it did.
Turning to the mirror, Riley began to dislodge the tangles. Tears formed as she pulled a comb through her long hair. It took time to get presentable. She put on some lip gloss but apparently decided it didn’t work with the splotchy green and wiped it off with a tissue.
It was only then she looked over at him and took a deep breath.
“I should have…treated the doorway into the Rare Book Room with Holy Water. That way if the demon got loose, he wouldn’t have been able to get in there.”
“Dead right. Not protectin’ that room was the only mistake I see. Bein’ a good trapper is just a matter of learnin’ from yer mistakes.”
“But you never learn,” she snapped.
“Maybe so, but I’m not the one who’s gonna get reamed by the Guild tonight.”
“Thanks, I’d so forgotten that,” she said. “Why were the books flying all over the place?”
“I’d say the Biblio had backup.”
She shook her head. “Dad says demons don’t work together, that the higher-level fiends think the little ones are nuisances, like cockroaches.”
“They do, but I’ll bet there was another demon in that library somewheres. Did ya smell sulfur?” Riley shrugged. “See anyone watchin’ ya?”
She gave a bark of bitter laughter. “All of them, Beck. Every single one of them. I looked like a total moron.”
He’d been there often enough to know how that felt, but right now that wasn’t the issue. Why would a senior demon play games with an apprentice trapper? What was the point? She wasn’t a threat to Hell in any real sense.
At least not yet.
Riley shut down after that, staring out the passenger-side window and fidgeting with the strap on her bag. Beck had a lot of things he wanted to say—like how he was proud of her for holding up as well as she did. Paul always said the mark of a good trapper is how he handled the bad stuff, but telling Riley that wouldn’t work. She’d only believe it if she heard it from her father, not someone she considered the enemy.
They passed a long line of ragged folks waiting their turn to get a meal at the soup kitchen on the grounds of the Jimmy Carter Library. The line’s length hadn’t shortened from last month, which meant the economy wasn’t any better. Some blamed the demons and their devious master for the city’s financial problems. Beck blamed the politicians for being too busy taking kickbacks and not paying attention to their job. In most ways, Atlanta was slowly going to Hell. Somehow he didn’t figure Lucifer would object.
A few minutes later he parked in a junk-strewn lot across from the Tabernacle and turned off the engine. He was used to ass chewing, but the girl wasn’t. If there were any way he could take her place tonight, he’d do it without thinking twice. But that wasn’t the way things worked when you were a trapper.
“Leave the demon here,” he advised. “Put him under the seat.”
“Why? I don’t want to lose him,” she said, frowning.
“They’ll have the meetin’ warded with Holy Water. He’ll tear himself apart if ya try to cross that line with him in yer bag.”
“Oh.” Before every Guild meeting an apprentice would create a large circle of Holy Water, the ward as it was called, which would serve as a sacred barrier against all things demonic. The trappers held their meeting inside that circle. Beck was right, the Biblio wouldn’t cross the ward. She pulled out the cup, tightened the lid, and did as he asked.
“One piece of advice: Don’t piss ’em off.”
Riley glared at him. “You always do.”
“The rules are different for me.”
“Because I’m a girl, is that it?” When he didn’t answer, she demanded, “Is. That. It?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “As long ya know that goin’ in.”
She hopped out of the car, hammered down the lock with her uninjured fist, then slammed the door hard enough to make his teeth rattle.
A green finger jabbed in his direction the moment he stepped out. “I’m not backing down. I’m Paul Blackthorne’s daughter. Even the demons know who I am. Someday I’m going to be as good as my dad, and the trappers will just have to deal. That includes you, buddy.”
“The fiends know yer name?” Beck asked, taken aback.
“Hello! That’s what I said.” She squared her shoulders. “Now let’s get this over with. I’ve got homework to do.”
JANA OLIVER is an award-winning author who lives in Atlanta, GA. She’s happiest when she’s researching outlandish urban legends, wandering around old cemeteries and dreaming up new stories.
Visit her at www.JanaOliver.com.
