Daemon Hunted

Daemon Hunted

The Cultivating Wizard: Book 1

By

Brock Walker

I grasped at a small aspen tree, the smooth trunk enough to give me purchase as I pulled myself the last few steps up the incline, a few rocks and loose scree sliding down the ridge behind me. The air bit my lungs, cold and crisp, with each inhalation of mountain air. I could see again, woodland stretching around me, the treetops in view now broken by the occasional cabin roof. Civilization. It should have been enough to soothe my fraying nerves, but it wasn’t. It only made my heart start pounding more.

The sun was falling out of view, descending behind a nearby mountain ridge. It sent a shiver up my spine that had nothing to do with the cold. Bad things happened in the dark, particularly in the wilds of the woods.

Predators sought prey.

Tonight might be worse than most, but I hoped I had more time. I looked back at the rough animal trail I’d followed back towards town itching to run back down it and search through the night, but I was spent. My gut felt jittery, in part from what I’d seen, and in part that I hadn’t been able to find what I was looking for.

Someone or something had been taking people from the woods. There were several missing persons, and two confirmed attacks and deaths. The details in the news had been sparse, forcing me to make my own way into the woods.

What I’d discovered left me sick.

I wiped the back of my hand against my sweaty brow, then started down this side of the ridge, careful to not let the carpet of dead pine needles, built up over decades, slide beneath my feet.

I’d found the crime scene associated with the second missing person, and with it proof, at least enough for me, that it was a supernatural predator. The local police wouldn’t be able to handle it, but I sure would.

I grit my jaw, annoyed as I stepped over a fallen log covered in moss. The police may have suspected all the missing persons had been murdered or seen evidence of foul play at various sites. Unfortunately, that pertinent information hadn’t hit the local papers until three days ago and has spurred me into further action. If they had been honest, I would have come looking more quickly and possibly could have stopped the creature earlier. Now I was playing catch up because they had kept key details hushed from the news, in order to not cause a panic. I’d searched hard and found the first known attack site around noon. Since then, I’d been in a foul mood, and the brief perception of the horror the victim had felt would be with me for some time.

Whatever was killing people was vile, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a half dozen people more people missing in the woods no one had noticed yet. I tried to relax my jaw, knowing that anger at the police was not going to help anything. But the fact was the murders and disappearances would probably break some kind of record for the state of Idaho.

And I knew it wasn’t done.

My fraying nerves weren’t for my own safety, but for those I’d been, and might be, unable to protect. The creature could attack me right now and I felt confident I could end its reign of terror no matter what it was. It was one of the perks to being a full fledge wizard. One of the few.

Grumbling, I continued at an angle down the ridge using another animal trail. The highway would lay somewhere ahead through the dense trees. After another quarter of a mile I found it, a sliver of sunlight still poking over the hilltops. I made better time on the flat land beside the main road and made it to my temporary home after another twenty minutes of hiking. The Sugar Loaf Inn wasn’t anything special unless you counted the attached gas station as a feature that most inns didn’t have. My hiking boots easily traversed the white rock graveled parking lot as I approached the store front.

I entered the gas station and plastered on a smile when I saw Phillis, the gas station attendant for the night and owner of the Inn.

“Pulling a late night I see,” I said, as I made my way to the three fridges which held drinks.

“You are as well,” Phyllis said with a note of congenial grumble that only someone working a night shift can convey. “But someone’s got to do it, even at my age. It’s hard to find good workers on the mountain these days. Things are getting far too expensive and most of the houses and cabins nearby are vacation destinations rather than homes.”

I grabbed water from the fridge, the chilled plastic felt wonderful in my hand, and I knew it would feel even better for my parched throat. “I hadn’t thought about that. It’s getting bad in the city too—Finding good help that is.” My reflection in the glass didn’t temper my mood. I was dirty with dust and grime which was nearly hidden against my tanned face, my generally short beard was a little too wild, my brown hair a little too shaggy. My blue eyes radiated my frustration, looking wild and untamed. I looked like the last person you would want to stumble upon in the woods which was not the persona I wanted to evoke to Phillis. I took a breath and tried to let my worries, stresses, and anger go.

Phillis nodded, “How’s your room been, do you need anything?”

I had several dislikes about the space, but they were more structural and intrinsic in nature. The room smelled, the bed was lumpy, and the air felt stagnant without multiple windows that would open. My single window showed the parking lot, and at an angle, I could see the fuel pumps and little else. But it was cheap, and my room was the furthest from the store on the end of the row of rentable rooms, which was the best option considering my aura and power were harsh on technology, a point made ever clearer as the halogen bulb above the cashier’s desk began to flicker and pop. I needed to hurry, and there was no way I’d tell Phillis my actual complaints anyway.

“Nope, it’s been great,” I rushed. “I’m still planning on staying for another two or three days.”

“That’s good to hear, and you can stay as long as you like. I’ve had several canceled reservations… given everything going on.” Phillis gave the otherwise empty store a look over. “In all my days,” she mumbled, “We’ve never had animal attacks like these anywhere in the forest.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sure they will catch them,” I said, my voice growing poisonous before I realized I might have inferred too much as even I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on. “—whatever the animal is.” I amended, with a calm confidence that seemed to settle Phillis’s mind. I saw her relax, her tight shoulders fall ever so slightly and the worry behind her eyes lessen. I realized she might have fears about the creature herself. Her husband was out of town, which could have caused the reaction. But it might have simply been the financial issues her inn was facing due to travel slowing down in fall even further aided by the deaths discouraging travelers.

I knew the terror would pass because I was going to nail this creature or being and make it pay for all the damage it had done. This was my home, my area of responsibility. And I wasn’t about to allow any creature to come and wantonly kill inside of it.

I paid for my drink, grabbing a protein bar at the countertop to add to it. Phillis rang up the total and I paid in cash. Walking outside the little bell on the door chimed my exit. I walked down an anciently poured sidewalk, its edges marred with breaks and cracks from the many winters it had endured. I passed the only other room that I could tell was occupied. A white Honda sat outside, and a woman sat inside the room, reading a book at the small table. She’d been at it every time I’d passed, to the point I figured she hated the woods, or people, or anything that wasn’t a romance novel. But tonight, her husband or at least significant other, was present. Based on the fishing gear now attached to the top of the car I figured the trip was more for him than for her.

I unlocked my room’s door with the actual physical key the inn rooms used and stepped into the dark. I knew better than to turn on the lights if they still worked. I’d have to leave a hefty tip for Phillis to cover any inconsequential damages my stay might have caused. I let out an exacerbated sigh as I considered my dwindling finances and turned to close the blinds. The room truly in darkness, I muttered “Ignis” with a small effort of will, and several candles I’d carefully stationed around the room sparked to life.

I sat down at my own small table set against the window which was strewn with maps. The chair was uncomfortable, but it would only take me a moment to mark out the sections of forest I’d searched and the crime scene I’d found. I knew the rough area of the second attack, which was nearly eighty miles away through the forest as the crow would fly. It had been on a hiking trail I was familiar with. Now that I’d had a chance to look at the first site, and use a few spells, I was certain it was dangerous and mostly likely supernatural, but I knew little else.

I marked each update carefully with a pen and shaded in the searched area with a colored pencil. It felt refreshing somehow to be able to mark the section off, despite what I’d found. I also marked out a few notable caves, or areas that might someday be useful to me, or in hunting for similar threats, should the need arise. I wasn’t always meticulous like this, save for my artificery when it got around to it, but having good maps would save time later. Done with the updates, I planned the route I would take tomorrow. My mentor and friend Fren would also be able to magically contact me once I was in the deep woods if he had any other ideas of what might be afoot.

Once my plans were set in stone, I made my way to the shower and got ready for bed, more than eager for some sleep and rest. The water was hot and welcome and I eagerly let it clean away my foul mood.

I stepped out, feeling better, and after putting on new boxers I went to my bed to complete the last item of business before I could go to sleep. I set out a black tourmaline palm stone. The stone itself wasn’t any different from any other of its like, but for a wizard, especially one with my affinities for earth and fire, a stone like this worked amazingly well as an anchor for a spell.

I summoned my will, the threads of various powers flowing into the rock as a secure branching point to create a ward that would alert me of danger, guard my location, and protect my sleep. I thought about meditating to consolidate my physical gains from hiking all day but given how small they were likely to be, and how fatigued I felt. I skipped that task and lay down, quickly drifting to sleep.

***

I walked down a darkened hallway lit by flickering industrial halogen bulbs; the building was cloaked in silence so thick you could cut it with a knife. I gripped my wizard staff—attuned to work for just me—and pressed forward. Adding insult to injury, the hallway was cold, and my fitted jeans and t-shirt did nothing to stave it off. With each exhale, my breath frosted in the air, making ghostly gouttes of white smoke. I’d been in dreams like this before and knew I’d be in them again unless I managed to outsmart the predator that was hunting me.

Blip.

One of the bulbs above me burst, its fleeting increase in light reflecting off the pale grey-painted brickwork of the impossibly long hallway before dying. The glass shattered around me on the floor. I took care with my bare feet as I walked forward, not wanting to step on the broken glass.

Blip. Blip.

Two more winked out in the distance behind me, the tinkling of glass hitting tile drawing my attention. That section of the hallway fell into utter darkness. As more began to flicker I cursed and ran, trying to stay in the uninterrupted light. It was futile, as more bulbs began to pop and crack, faster than I could keep ahead. The shadows slowly overtook me. In this dreamscape, the hallway could run forever, I couldn’t.

I summoned my will and crushed down the instinctual fear of the dark as it swept past me. My shoulders tightened as I imagined what new pain, torture, and possible death I might face from the blackness around me. It was difficult to manage my emotions after the seeming hours of torment I’d already experienced. My heart raced and my eyes twitched towards every imagined movement in the black.

Daemon relished fear.

“Come on out! I’m not going to do this all night,” I yelled into the empty, otherworldly dark.

A mad feminine cackle of laughter circled me, as if an invisible ghost flickered about at inhuman speeds. Despite my focus and gathered will to maintain the conscious thought that this was all a dream, the hairs on the nape of my neck stood on end.

Fear can be like that.

It overrides logic, overrides your basic decision-making; even for someone like me trained to overcome the mind tricks of creatures who haunt the night.

Nothing about this felt like a dream. It felt real, and with it, so did everything else including the fear. I felt bruises forming on my feet from running barefoot. I felt the shivering cold slice through the fabric of my clothes. I felt the worn wood of my staff in my palm.

The voice of the daemon was the worst. It felt more real than anything else. When she killed me, it always left a more lasting impression. It felt… more substantial. I shivered for the reasons that might cause that, but this daemon didn’t have any claim on me or my soul.

I gathered my will. Come on Cal, you’ve trained for events like this.

Hell, wizards like me were some of the bests at withstanding mental attacks. But I was young, and this daemon was clearly ancient. I had no idea how it had discovered me—again—much less broken through my ward. It shouldn’t have been possible to reach me in sleep.

The oppressive cold suddenly shifted, and I began sweating. I felt exhausted, like I’d run for miles in a sauna. The hallway began to reappear as small trickles of firelight erupted around me. Where the roof had previously met the top of the walls, the fuel source for the flames was recessed beyond where I could see, as if the walls were hedges that didn’t quite reach the high roof, leaving a space above them that light could pass through. The light source was pure flame, and I could occasionally make out the tips of flickering fire as it licked higher at the ceiling now composed of stone.

Despite trying not to worry, my mind made me reflect on the now-changed hallway. I couldn’t get the image out of my mind of a stone kiln, or ancient oven. It was like I was trapped inside one that slowly stretched on for miles as the small flames increased the temperature in the enclosed space.

The firelight increased, as if running on propane with the gas slowly being turned up. As it did, it revealed more of the space around me. I stood in a subterranean catacomb of sorts. The floor and walls grew more defined as I focused. The ground was made up of strange round steppingstones set in a mud-like mortar. My forehead broke out in beads of sweat as the fires increased in intensity, the flames easily visible as they licked towards the ceiling. I saw the sides of the path were not made by hedges, or a low wall of stone; they were stacked bones. Skulls, femurs, and other less definable bits jumbled and packed tightly together. I would have been hard-pressed to fit my hand more than a few inches deep anywhere in the pile with how tightly they had been fit together.

Not that I’d want to do that anyway.

The visible skulls, devoid of flesh, all seemed to indicate agony and horror at the time of death. The black sockets of their eyes were dark and foreboding, their mouths open far larger than a humans ever should or could in life.

“The shit I have to go through,” I muttered as I realized my clothing was gone and I was now naked. Even my wizard’s staff had been taken from me, though in the waking world mine had been gone for some time. I’d yet to find a replacement wood I could use to craft a new one. “You’re never going to control me this way. I won’t succumb to fear!” I shouted into the confined space, knowing it was only half true.

There was no answer.

The daemon hunting me was sinister, calculating, patient. All things I didn’t want in an enemy. There was nothing else for it but to march down the pathway. As long as I didn’t lose myself to fear, or agree to any contracts with the daemon, I was safe.

I hoped.

One of the pavers broke and my foot collapsed into it with a sharp stab of pain. It forced me to let out a hiss of agony between clenched teeth. I looked down and realized the pavers weren’t stone, they were skulls buried in mud and I’d broken through the top of one with a careless step. I exhaled a long breath at the pain and resisted the urge to curse into the nightmare. I wouldn’t give the daemon that satisfaction.

I refocused my will.

I wasn’t here. I wasn’t injured. My foot wasn’t bleeding onto a disgusting floor. I wasn’t surrounded by the dead in a subterranean grotto heating up like a furnace. This was all part of my mind. I was being assaulted by a being from another dimension, but it couldn’t actually hurt me, not here. Not unless I gave in. I definitely wasn’t leaving a trail of my blood on the ground that could be used by dark magic against me.

“None of this is real,” I whispered, the words becoming a mantra to help me keep my focus as I walked.

“You stole from me,” a whispered voice hissed, and despite my best attempts, I jumped. When a voice like hers, dripping with hate, whispers in the dark behind you— you're bound to have a visceral reaction. I grew tense waiting for the knife point to enter between my ribs.

“Yeah. About that—” I said, taking a large gulp and turning to look every way. None of this is real, I thought, but my pounding heart wasn’t listening. My feet itched to run. “You’ve said that before, but I don’t know what you mean? I never—”

A shriek rang out and a skull nearby shattered as something unseen crushed it. The bone fragments were thrown out like daggers. I summoned my will and forced it into a shield. Energy surrounded me which flashed green as the bone fragments skittered off its surface like shrapnel.

I dropped the power, exhausted. Far more exhausted than the shield should have made me feel, but it distantly remembered it wasn’t the first one of the night. Regardless, I’d rushed and made this one more powerful than I’d needed.

“You took one of mine!” the feminine voice shouted, dragging out the last word in echoes that rang about the room.

That made me pause. The Daemon had never given me details on how I’d offended it before. I still didn’t know what that meant. I’d never killed one. I surely didn’t have one in me. I had also never bound one to anything I owned or crafted. No daemon was subservient to my will... and Fren surely wasn’t a Deamon­—I at least felt certain of that, though the Tribunal might disagree with me.

“I haven’t—”

She appeared then, as if to silence my denial. Gripping my jaw with her red-toned skin, my bones ground together painfully in her hand. Which is imaginary here, I tried to remind my aching self. Her eyes were mesmerizing black obsidian lit by faint red sparks deep within. She was tall and lithe. Her hair was straight black, spilling down her back to her waist—I could see, because she lifted me up like a child’s stuffed toy, high above her head as she bared her teeth and glared daggers.

She wore dark leather armor but was mostly unclothed, her red hued skin glowing in the firelight. Two horns sprouted from her forehead and delicately circled the sides of her skull, each glinting in the firelight. More fire began to swirl on the floor under her legs and bare feet as the hallway seemed to widen like the maw to the world of the damned. The dancing fire ignored the flesh of her skin, clearly bound by her will, anger, and desire.

It made me scared, and I knew I was losing this battle of wills. Fire was damn hard to control, and it spun out below us with a will shaped by the daemon. A daemon not even directly focused upon it. The flames formed a ritual of burning embers unlike any I had ever seen on the skull infused floor. The finished pentagram marred with runes and flows of energy lacked a circle around it the way I might use one, but it was so large we both fit easily in its center.

“I will not have you defile what I created,” she whispered menacingly. Then she reached a sharpened nail forward—and slit my throat.

I felt it.

All of it.

Dreams save you from some things, but not others. Animalistic panic filled me as my lifeblood flowed out, covering the woman. She smiled, glorying in my agony. Worse, I didn’t die. I remained conscious as the blood spilled. Cold pain traveled from the tips of my fingers, my toes, to the crown of my head, as if the escaping blood was being replaced with a poison. I felt as if my consciousness, my vitality, my will, and my very soul were being siphoned away.

I shook, terrified.

This daemon had already done things that shouldn’t be possible. This whole event, and the dozens before it, shouldn’t have been feasible. What was my actual death among all that?

She smiled, as if reading my mind. My blood dripped down her face and off her sharp, white canines. Her eyelashes were thick and wet, pushing aside my blood as the black orbs of her eyes considered me.

“I will find you. I promise it.” She breathed almost lovingly and reached a hand forward. I saw a sigil of some sort, made of my own blood and flame written across her hand. She pressed her palm to my chest and pain lit my skin like a poultice of salt, lemon juice, and battery acid pressed to a wound.

The daemon laughed as I slowly lost consciousness.

I came too in my cheap hotel bed.