Gabriel's Demons (Demon's Assistant)

  Gabriel’s Demons

  (Demon’s Assistant Book 1.5)

  Tori Centanni

  Published by Enigmatic Books

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  Copyright © 2015 by Tori Centanni

  Cover art by Yocla Designs, 2015

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-938767-06-7

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE DEMON’S DEADLINE:

  CHAPTER ONE

  The first time a vision hits, I’m standing in the middle of the dairy aisle at SaveStop Plus, minding my own business.

  There’s no warning when it happens. One second, I’m trying to keep a mental tally of the cost of stuff in my basket. The next, searing pain fires across my synapses. It’s like someone struck me in the back of my skull with a hammer. The pain blazes across my eyes and the room spins. I squeeze my eyes closed as if it can guard against the pain. My knees buckle out from under me. The plastic basket falls from my hand and smacks into the tile. Distantly, I hear eggs crack in their carton.

  I struggle to breathe through the pain. Nausea churns my stomach and the world spins beneath me. The pain is so bad I’m sure I’m going to puke. I slide down against the cold floor, and press my cheek against it, panting for air.

  It’s then, when I’m on the ground and think I might actually be dying, that the vision scorches across my mind’s eye. In it, a guy my age gets behind the wheel of a black Honda. He’s handsome, with dark hair and the beginnings of a beard. He’s also visibly, stumbling drunk. But it’s not just that I see it: I feel the hazy, soft-edged intoxication and taste the acrid booze on my tongue. A girl pouts at him and tries to take his keys through the open car window. He yanks them back, playing drunken keep-away and the girl giggles. Another guy waves his phone from behind her, says he’ll use his taxi app. But they’re drunk, too, and the guy in the car waves them off. “I’m fine,” he slurs, which proves that he isn’t, but his friends shrug.

  His name is Alan Henry Mead and he’s in grave danger. I know these things the same way you know things in a dream: they just come into my head as established facts, like how you know a shadowy figure is supposed to be your Aunt Lucy.

  I watch helplessly as Alan Henry Mead’s car swerves across the yellow line as he speeds around the curves of a windy, suburban road. He fumbles to plug in his iPod while he drives. He’s focused on making the music work when he drifts into the other lane. A car swings around the corner and honks. Startled, he swerves back into his lane but over-compensates. The car smashes into a pole at such a speed that its metal hood bends around it. I’m helpless and paralyzed as I watch Alan’s body go flying through the windshield, shards of glass slicing his skin open. His head slams on something hard. I hear bone crack. I feel his consciousness slip away into nothingness and then vanish like it was never there at all. His mangled corpse remains behind, lifeless and empty.

  The vision cuts out, leaving only a dull ache behind my eyes and a burning from the bile in my throat. I realize I’m not breathing and take a deep breath that burns my lungs, gulping in air, heart racing. Then I roll onto my back and stare up at the too-bright lights overhead. My eyes ache. I pull off my glasses and rub until spots appear behind my eyelids, then shove my glasses back on.

  An elderly man wearing an ugly maroon sweater stands in the aisle and looks at with me distain, hissing something about drugs, like that’s the only explanation for a teen guy to be writhing on the ground in obvious pain. A middle-aged woman abandons her cart to see if I’m okay. I nod uselessly, because obviously I’m not okay. I just collapsed in the middle of the aisle and appeared to have had some kind of seizure.

  I wave off offers of help, mortified even though it’s not my fault. After I manage to stand, I straighten my glasses and wipe the dirt from the filthy linoleum off my jeans. The embarrassment triples when the cute guy from the produce section pushes his cart around the corner and sees me standing there looking bewildered, my basket at my feet. I rush out of the store, abandoning the basket and broken eggs where they fell.

  It has to be some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, I think, as I stand at the bus stop. About a month ago, I lost my parents and sister in a house fire that nearly killed me. While I was dying, I hallucinated a demon offering me some kind of deal to live, proof that hallucinations are part of how my brain deals with trauma.

  Or maybe it’s not PTSD but some kind of physical reaction due to unchecked brain damage. I shudder at that thought. I was exposed to high levels of toxic fumes but I was treated at the hospital after the firefighters came to my rescue. Surely if it were something neurological, they would have caught it when they were checking me over. Besides, the idea of racking up medical bills right now fills me with whole new levels of stress.

  I take the bus to MegaMart, the next closest supermarket. This time I grab one of the small carts on wheels and lean on it unsteadily as I navigate the aisles. Pulling out my phone, I recheck the photo of the white-board grocery list. Uncle Rick gave me two twenties, which isn’t nearly enough for everything he scrawled on the list. I had figured that out at SaveMart. I do my best to buy the stuff that seems important—eggs, milk, bread, deodorant for me—and stop when my mental tally hits $38. I haven’t done a lot of grocery shopping—my mom used to take care of that—and I certainly haven’t had to do it on such a tight budget. Uncle Rick isn’t used to having to buy groceries for more than one person and I can’t tell if that’s why he only left forty bucks. I’d like to believe it was an oversight rather than a budget problem, but I suspect otherwise.

  As I scan through the self-checkout, the store employee stares fixedly at me, like she’s afraid I’m going to sneak something into my bag without scanning it. I glare at her. She looks down at her podium but as soon as I turn back to my groceries, I feel her eyes on me again. It’s not unusual—I’m tall, dark-skinned, and seventeen. Suspicious store clerks are part of my life. But it ticks me off anyhow, especially because there’s still a dull ache in my head and I don’t need her attitude and judgment stare on top of everything else.

  I finish shoving the cash into the machine, take my bags, and resist the urge to ask her if she wants to see my receipt as I brush past.

  Rick’s house is small, the kind of place built for a bachelor or a tight-knit couple with no kids. It was never meant to house a grown man and his teenage nephew, but Rick took me in anyhow. It’s not like I was swimming in options. My only living grandmother has dementia and lives in a home, and my mom was a single child.

  Furniture crowds the small living room, especially with Rick’s computer desk jammed against the far wall, pulled out of the “office” I now use as a bedroom. I maneuver through to the small kitchen and drop the bag on the counter. My bedroom is a tiny space next to the kitchen that might have been intended as a bedroom for a baby, but not a person who owns actual possessions and, at over six feet in height, needs a full-sized bed. Rick’s room is the loft with a low ceiling that makes up the small upstairs. I toss my wallet and keys into my room, onto the futon that’s serving as my bed, and then put away the groceries. I hang the receipt on the fridge next to the white board, e
rasing the stuff I bought. Stuff like laundry detergent remains on the list, too expensive for the forty-dollar budget and too heavy to carry besides.

  I make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, grab a can of Pepsi, and sit at the card table in the corner with my laptop. Jasper, my sister’s gray cat, ambles into the kitchen to see if I brought him anything. He sniffs the empty paper bags I left on the floor and then hops up onto the table. Uncle Rick shoos him off but I let him curl up behind the laptop and sleep. I was never a fan of Jasper when my sister Aisha, his original owner, was alive. He would claw up my socks and one time, when I locked him out of my room, he managed to get back inside and peed on my bed in revenge. But now that she’s gone, he’s following me around like a lost puppy. I know exactly how he feels. I scratch behind his ear and he stretches his paws in front of him before curling back into a ball.

  I google PTSD. Like I thought, most people who suffer from it and do have flashbacks of any sort usually flashback to their own trauma, rather than the imagined trauma of someone they’ve never met. Or at the very least, it should be similar in nature: fire rather than a car crash. But then, the mind is a strange thing. Maybe it was some kind of panic attack daydream. I try to shake it off but every time I close my eyes, Alan’s dying again. Over and over, he dies in gruesome detail.

  If this is a messed up attempt at a coping mechanism from my imagination, it’s not working.

  “You ready to go back?” Uncle Rick asks me, shoving the egg pan in the sink. I’m sitting at the table scrolling through a social media site on my phone. My Facebook page is still full of condolences and I can’t even look at it, so I joined a newer site where no one I know follows me. Only, in order to have anything to scroll through while still avoiding the constant stream of virtual hugs and sympathies, I couldn’t follow anyone I knew. I followed local celebrities and favorite authors, suggested by the site, including a couple of local news people. A weather guy from Channel 4, someone who writes a funny column for a local alt-weekly. Which means my feed is mostly people plugging their books or local news. Not the most exciting stuff, but at least there aren’t constant reminders of my grief. I don’t need them. It’s not like I can forget.

  “I guess.” I shrug and look up at my uncle. He’s made us both eggs and toast and I’ve cleaned my plate without really tasting any of it. The faint smell of smoke curls into my nostrils. I glance at the stove but there’s no sign of real smoke. The acrid smell is ghost smoke, a memory, and it makes everything taste like burnt leaves.

  Tomorrow I have to go back to school. There are only a couple of weeks left of my senior year. I have to get through finals in order to graduate. That shouldn’t be hard. I took AP English and AP Economics, meaning those finals were the AP tests, so they’re already over. My French teacher is going to give me a personalized test so it doesn’t cover the weeks I’ve missed. The only thing I’ve really had to study for was Calculus. I should be golden to graduate with a 4.5 GPA, and if I want, I can still go to UW like planned, assuming the funding can be worked out.

  I can get through what remains of high school, but the thought of facing more sympathetic faces, more pitying looks… That part will be hard. Since the fire, most of my friends have been distant. They’re busy with their own finals and college-bound problems, but also, it’s clear they don’t know what to say or how to act around me. Last time I saw Michael and Kayla, we went to Denny’s. Kayla complained about her mom and then went white, looked at me apologetically like she’d said something offensive, and then took great interest in the rubbery eggs on her plate. They text me and post things on Facebook like “Miss you” with emojis, but in person, things are stilted and awkward.

  And on top of that, my sister Aisha was a sophomore, so while I don’t know a lot of her classmates other than her friends, and don’t have any of the same teachers, people there knew and loved her. People there lost her, too.

  Rick nods and fills the pan with soapy water to soak. “You’re tough, Gabe. You’ll get through it.”

  I’m not tough. People love to say things like that when you survive a tragedy. It sounds good if you don’t think about it too hard. But when you do, you realize it’s sort of like saying the people who didn’t survive—my family—were weak somehow. I know Rick doesn’t think that. My dad, Ryan, was his older brother. He loved him more than anything. But the comment still irritates me.

  “I’ll be back this evening,” Rick says, tugging on his blue work shirt over his tank top. It’s the standard uniform for the Blue Bottle Brewery, where he works. He bends down to pet Jasper, who’s winding around his legs getting gray fur all over Rick’s dark pants. “Have you thought more about getting a summer job?” I can tell from the way he focuses on the cat that he doesn’t really want to ask.

  “Yeah,” I say, running my fingers over my scalp. “Michael always works at the MegaPlex. He’s going to put in a good word.”

  Rick nods and straightens. “That’s great,” he says, unable to hide the relief in his voice. Uneasiness worms through me. After the funeral, we met with my dad’s attorney, who explained how most of the insurance money would go to the bank to cover the remainder of the second mortgage. What little is left will pay off the credit cards Rick used to fund the triple-funeral. It turns out, dying isn’t cheap.

  Rick’s job waiting tables, which used to support his not-too-shabby lifestyle, now also has to support me until I manage to find employment of my own. I haven’t had the nerve to look into how all of this will affect my financial aid for college. It’s looking more and more like the better plan is to take a year off, work enough to get my own place, and then worry about school. Maybe start at a community college for undergrad classes, where school is cheaper.

  I huff out a breath. I’d give up anything to have my family back. I’d work the rest of my life making burgers at a fast food joint and donate every extra penny to charity if it would save just one of them. But that’s not a bargain I can make, no matter how hard I pray. My sister won’t get to go to college or prom or fall in love or get married. It’s unfair for me to get frustrated at having to change my plans for the future, when at least I have a future. But there are selfish moments when I can’t help it. It’s yet another thing the fire took from me.

  “Have a good day,” I say to Rick.

  “Yeah,” Rick says. He smiles and it doesn’t reach his eyes. Neither of us smiles all that genuinely these days. “You, too.”

  I turn back to my phone and my coffee. That’s when I see the article in my feed: “Local teen killed in drunk driving accident.” My heart pounds and my palms sweat, the vision replaying in my mind like a bad movie I can’t unsee. It has to be a coincidence. Lots of teens drive drunk and get themselves killed. We have assemblies about the statistics at school every year.

  My hand shakes as I poke at the link and wait for the article to load.

  As soon as it does, I scan it quickly. Local student, set to graduate with honors, black Honda. And then I see his name and my heart sinks: Alan Henry Mead. He went to another high school, one out in West Seattle. I don’t play any sports, so I doubt we’ve ever met. He’s only familiar from the vision. He was drinking at a friend’s house last night and crashed his car into a ditch.

  My blood runs cold. He died last night. I had the vision on Friday. A whole day before. Which means… Which means it wasn’t like I read about this and then my traumatized mind turned into a movie.

  It means I saw it before it happened.

  And that isn’t possible.

  CHAPTER TWO

  If you’ve ever tried to look up psychic visions on the Internet you know that it’s hard to find anything solid. There are thousands of websites dedicated to helping you figure out if you have psychic powers, with such probing analysis as: “do you feel psychic?” And a thousand more debunking the possibility. Not to mention ads for fortune tellers and psychic hotlines.

  I spend my last days of high school trying to convince myself it was some kind o
f coincidence or one of those weird bad feeling things. Except I didn’t have a bad feeling when I fell asleep the night of the fire. Why would it start now?

  Still, I grasp for reasonable explanations. Maybe Alan and I have friends in common and I heard about the party on Facebook or something.

  And despite not even recognizing him, I also knew he had a drinking problem and my brain made a guess. That just so happened to be one hundred percent accurate. Right.

  A few days later, another vision hits me in the middle of the night and I convince myself it’s just a nightmare. It’s of a woman being stabbed on the street and never makes the news, which supports the dream theory. And then there’s another, a man who drowns after falling off his boat. I can feel his panic, his struggle to figure out which way is up, and the burn in his lungs. I can’t find anything about that either, and become even more convinced these visions are just some kind of post-trauma panic attacks.

  But then, while doing the dishes, I have a vision of a tourist falling down the Stone Steps on First Avenue and cracking her skull on the concrete. Her name is Lila Martin and she’s on her honeymoon. She trips over one of those toy rubber balls some kid left on the steps. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so awful. She bounces down the steps in a way no human body ever should, her husband watching in horror, reaching out for her uselessly and then screaming like a wounded animal. My blood turns to ice at the image of her broken body, limbs twisted at inhuman angles on the stone stairs, eyes wide and hollow.

  When I come back to myself, there’s blood and broken glass in the sink. I squeezed the glass I was washing so hard it shattered in my hand.

  The next day, I come home from school to find my uncle on the sofa, eating a bowl of cereal and watching the news as it covers some tragedy downtown. A wedding photo of a happy couple flashes on the screen. The air is vacuumed from my lungs as I recognize Lila Martin. I stand still, staring at the screen so long that Uncle Rick shakes my shoulder. I didn’t even see him stand.