Days Gone Bad Read Online Free PDF Page B

doll, “is a portion of the demon you released into our plane almost ten years ago.”
    I stared at the small figure in her hand. The demon I released?
    She nodded. “The hunter, Damian. Ah am still uncertain why you were able to do it, but that was no mere spirit you stitched into its body. You didn’t just bind an aura of the dead to the body, but opened a gateway. Maybe because of the chakras you used. Ah do not know.”
    “Great,” I said.
    “This doll will also be training, for you and for me.”
    I stared at the lifeless, squirm-inducing doll. “Training for me?”
    “Yes, someone has to help banish the demons.” She smiled again, covering her face in fine, and some not so fine, laugh lines.
    My stomach dropped into my shoes and my eyes locked on the doll again. “I don’t think it’s going to fight back.”
    “Ah, you may be surprised.”
    “Even better. Demons weren’t surprise enough?”
    “If you can learn to use the aura of something tied to a demon, on purpose instead of by … accident …” she paused, her eyes shifting to the doll in her hand. “You can follow the bond back. Use that sympathetic power as an entry point. Use it as the demon’s weakness. You can learn with these.” Zola tossed the demon doll at me as she pulled another one out of her cloak.
    I grimaced and caught the thing. Instead of just looking like it was trying to wriggle out of Zola’s grip, now it actually felt like it was trying to get out of mine. Like a fist-sized nightcrawler. Nasty. “Sympathetic power, huh? Kind of an odd word for demon-speak.”
    She glared at me. I shut up. “The other doll is from another demon. A demon one of our brothers helped me bind last week.”
    “Who?”
    “His name is Zachariah.”
    I raised an eyebrow. “As in, Zachariah the assassin guy?”
    “Yes, the assassin that worked for Philip. We don’t know how many demons are loose, and we need help.”
    “Where there’s one …” I said.
    Zola laughed. It was empty, but we’d learned a long time ago you could laugh, smile, and shrug it off, or let someone clean your brains off the ceiling in the morning. She took a step toward the old green couch and sat down. “Yes, Damian, where there is one.” She slumped back, ran her hand over her eyes, and squeezed the bridge of her nose. I’d never seen a defeated look on Zola’s face before, and it scared the hell out of me.
    I sat down on a dynamic orange chair from the 1960s. It had the texture of a pilled sweater, and my hand started picking off little orange puffballs while I watched my master. The fire crackled in the stove, doing nothing but emphasizing the silence of the room.
    Within minutes, my unspoken questions burned more than the flames in the old iron stove. “Where have you been, Zola? I haven’t seen you, haven’t even heard from you in two years.” I shook my head and leaned forward. “Now you come back with stories of demons?” I half expected a sharp rebuttal from her, but none came.
    She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and sat up straight. The confidence I’d come to expect from my master returned to her posture and her voice. “Ah’ve been traveling to the hiding places of the war. There were demons, Damian, and not just the men who fought in wars. They walked our plane with abandon. Ah know you’ve heard me speak of Philip Pinkerton. With his help, and others on rare occasions, we banished or buried almost twenty demons through the years.”
    She closed her eyes for a moment and wrapped a hand around her pale, knobby cane. “We were able to banish five from our plane. The rest were too powerful to be banished by our group. We bound them to various vessels and hid them. No one but Philip and Ah knew the location for the stranded demons. Neither of us knew where they all were. Philip was going to go back and destroy the vessels after learning more about the demons. At the end of the Civil War, he left for Rome. He was alive then, at the end of it