Blood of the Demon Read Online Free PDF Page B

California.”

    I laughed. “Surfing?”

    “You nailed it. So how about you?” he asked as he looked through my fridge for something to drink. He snagged a Diet Barq’s out of the bottom drawer and quirked an eyebrow at me. “Anything going on that you can talk about?”

    I grimaced. “Yeah. I’ve had a pretty shitty day. Sarge called me this morning to go wake up one of our narcotics detectives, and I found him dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

    “Damn,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry to hear that. It doesn’t get much shittier than that.”

    I scrubbed at my eyes and leaned back against the counter. “Actually it does.”

    He gave me a disbelieving look.

    I took a deep breath. “Brian’s essence was gone. Consumed.”

    He was silent for several heartbeats. “You mean, like your aunt?”

    I shook my head. “Tessa’s essence was drawn out to power an arcane ritual. It was intact—sort of like taking a battery out of a robot and using it in something else. Brian’s essence was … eaten. There was nothing but shreds left.”

    Ryan sat down at the table and looked up at me, a frown playing across his face. “How can you tell? I mean, doesn’t the essence leave the body after death anyway?”

    “Yes, but not immediately, and it’s more of a gentle release.” I pulled out a chair on the other side of the table and plopped down. “Fuck, you’re going to make me try to explain this? Um, it’s like the body—the physical shell—has the essence in a firm grasp. When it dies, the grasp isloosened, which allows the essence to float away whole, so to speak. But when it’s consumed, there are ragged edges still left behind, like meat torn from a bone.”

    He gave a shudder. “All right, that sounds pretty hideous. So, he … what, doesn’t go to his afterlife or whatever now?”

    I rubbed my temples. “It’s a bit more complex than that. Everything I’ve been taught about essence and potency says that, while there’s no such thing as actual from-one-body-to-the-next reincarnation, essence does get reused. Think of it like water being poured back into a pitcher. The next time a child is born, another glass is poured out. But if too much essence gets consumed, then there won’t be enough to create new life, and we’ll start seeing some nasty side effects.”

    “Such as?”

    “Stillbirths,” I said quietly. “Ill patients dying when they should have been able to recover. An empty ‘pitcher’ would almost have a vacuum effect as it pulled back any available essence.”

    He frowned. “What about population growth?”

    “More essence can form, or grow from existing essence, but it takes time. Think of a tomato. Takes weeks to grow it but minutes to eat.”

    “I think it scares me that you know this,” he said, a slight smile twisting the corner of his mouth.

    I shifted uncomfortably in the chair and didn’t smile back. “I think it might have been my fault.”

    He straightened. “Wait. What? Why on earth would you think that?”

    I quickly explained about the ilius and my worry that somehow I’d failed to dismiss it properly. But by the end of my recitation he was already shaking his head.

    “Nope, not buying it. I don’t know that much about summonings and demons, but it doesn’t make any sense that it would escape your control and then go swoop down on this guy. Even if he did commit suicide.”

    I sighed. “I know, but I can’t think of a better explanation.”

    “Then you haven’t figured it out yet,” he said. “You will.”

    I gave him a small smile. His belief in me was probably misguided, but it was still reassuring. “Well, just for that, I’m going to let you come with me to my aunt’s house while I try—yet again—to break in to her library so I can do some research.”

    He gave a bark of laughter. “Like Tom Sawyer ‘let’ his friends paint the fence?”

    I grinned and stood. “Damn, I didn’t know you could