The Soul Hunter Read Online Free PDF Page A

capable of both patient planning and violent fits of impulsive, pernicious rage. He is wildly immature and at the same time sagacious and shrewd. He is a raw nerve—petulant, churlish, childish, vengeful, dangerous.
    Peter Terry is evil. Evil as the viper of Eden.
    Had he just walked through my bedroom and into my garage? Or had I dreamed the whole thing?
    But the door. The door had burst open.
    I wasn’t sure which was worse. That Peter Terry had trespassed in my house or in my mind. Both possibilities terrified me.
    I sat there in my kitchen, shivering from cold, knowing somehow that he would not breach either barrier again tonight. It would be unlike him. He was more of a skulker than one to attack directly. He would content himself with the scare, with his twisted little lumberjack joke. And he’d spend his night—if time divides into days and nights for such beings—satisfied that he’d reminded me of his presence.
    I filled the teakettle and lit the gas stove, then padded backinto the bedroom and slipped a sweatshirt over my head and found myself some warm socks. Naturally, I developed a sudden, desperate interest in God again, now that I felt threatened by the other side. I sat in my kitchen and thumbed through my Bible, drinking hot tea with milk and sugar, until the sun came up.
    I was looking for an obscure passage that I’d remembered finding a year before—something about God allowing one of those assorted kings or Old Testament characters, whose names I could never remember, to see the angels around him.
    I never found the passage, but I longed to see the angels. I’d seen the enemy. It seemed only fair to me that I should get to see the allies too.
    No angels appeared for me that morning. And I didn’t waste any time asking why this was happening to me, either. I could wonder all I wanted. There would be no answer forthcoming. God’s ways are not my ways. He’d made that little fact perfectly plain to me the year before.
    Somehow, I’d gotten caught up in the swirl of battle again. Like the citizens of those little French towns after D-Day, those unlucky natives who learned to duck, to run, to fight, to hide.
    They had watched their monuments shatter, their archives burn, their loved ones die. They endured the cacophony, the chaos, the carnage. All with the firm and undeniable certainty that the battle had nothing to do with them. It was a clash of ideologies, of powers exponentially larger and more powerful than they. A raging thunderclap of conflict between two mighty forces.
    They just happened to be in the way.
    The bravest among them had learned that it was possible, even necessary, to participate. To do their part. To join the resistance. Courage comes in the moment, it turns out. God has a way of doling it out at the very second we need it most.
    God would win this battle, I knew, with or without me. The war had raged, after all, since the beginning of time. Faithfulnessto the task, for those of us who find ourselves in the crossfire, is utterly necessary. God has designed it that way. But I did not look forward to the wounds I knew I was about to receive.
    My contribution to the war effort would be small. Miniscule. But I intended to gear up and show up anyway. I would never, ever go down without a fight. Peter Terry should know that about me by now.
    As the sun rose that morning, bringing with it the hope of a new day, my bones hurt, I was so cold. If I was going into battle, I wanted a hot shower first.
    I lit a match in the bathroom, turning on the little hiss of gas in the heater on the wall and enjoying the small whoosh as the blue flame leapt to life and did its job. I shut the door and the bathroom began to warm. I held my hands out and toasted them in front of the flame.
    After some of the circulation returned to my fingers, I turned around and twisted the faucet handle in the tub, letting the water run onto the icy porcelain, holding my hand under the stream, waiting for the