Demon Bait (Keeley Thomson) Read Online Free PDF

it would be easiest to kill her himself. So it
wasn't that. Not by any normal meaning of the concept. So what did that leave?
She thought about it, not for the first time, and ended up back at the same
possibilities that she always did.
    It was either that he wanted her
dead, without angering anyone else too much, like Finias, her father, or Darla,
or there was a trick involved. Probably not one meant for her, either. Of
course, that could leave an awful lot, if she wanted to be creative about what
she considered. The most likely one was that the man wanted her there as a
distraction. Possibly bait, in a trap. At the moment she couldn't see one
closing around her, but that didn't mean it wasn't there. Did the bait ever
really see the bite coming from above?
    Really, it probably had to
be that second one, or some variation of the same. Finias was an old and
powerful Demon in his own right, but no match for Tarsus, head to head. Oh, he might win a fight, but odds were he'd lose, as often as not. Darla, The Technician,
was a formidable person, but still young, compared to a being that had to count
the passing of centuries by using decimal places. The base unit there being
thousand year groups, she was willing to bet.
    Tarsus certainly didn't care for her ,
which included the fact that she wasn't feared either. So that pretty much left
either being bait, or something that she couldn't even think of. If it
wasn't both at once.
    That was one of the bad parts
about being a Greater Demon, she realized, as Hally and Zack moved into the
node that he'd created. She had the ability to really see reality for what it
was, but not all of it at once. She could generally work out what people were
doing, if she were able to find all the data she needed, but there was no way
to have it all. Not even most of it. That meant, much like a regular person,
she was left in the dark, a lot of the time. You had to have facts, to
make good choices.
    The other side of that was pretty
much where her power came from though. When she did get evidence, she could see
what it was all about and make it fit, the vast majority of the time. Okay,
unless it was a lie or tainted somehow, but other than that, she could see it
for what it really was. It gave her a measure of protection against most of
life's little mistakes, while still leaving plenty of room for the big ones.
    She was just standing there, the
door to her home left wide open, looking out into the street, with no one in
sight. It was a residential neighborhood, but a quiet one, as far as that went.
Families lived there, but they kept to themselves for the most part, and while
the older woman across the street did tend to spy on her a lot, that was just
curiosity, not anything too judgmental. The woman was bored, not a creep. She
had caught Keeley making out with a few people, including Hally, but she wasn't
torn up about it, just finding that the new family across the way was more
interesting than not.
    Before the woman could realize
she was there, doing nothing at all, except for missing people, Keels forced
herself to remember what it felt like to be alert and peaceful at the same
time, and moved back into the place. It wouldn't take too much longer for the
lady to realize that she was there alone now, for some reason. Even the flower
delivery van hadn't been sitting out front for weeks. Except for her, no one
was home. That probably wouldn't work for much longer.
    Not because of child protective
services, either. It was just that, no matter what happened, Keeley had to
leave the area soon. She was living in Darla's territory, and while that was
fine for a little kid, the council had named her a full adult already. She'd
passed the test for it and everything. Adults didn't live full time in anyone
else's area. On the good side, she probably wouldn't have to fight anyone to
take theirs, since there really was enough to go around. Some of her people
held large expanses of course, but most were content to