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  Demon Master Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Pierce

  Book design and layout copyright © 2019 by Daniel Pierce

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

  Daniel Pierce

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  Demon Master

  Book 1 from the Demon Master Series

  Daniel Pierce

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Epilogue I

  Epilogue II

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  About the Author

  1

  Florida: Ring

  “You may kiss me now,” she stated in a voice devoid of music, but I knew the invitation, like my costume, was a lie. She was pretending to be human. I adopted the look of just another lonely, awkward snowbird, my own costume that had brought me to this intimate second with her, inviting me closer with a flicker of her brow. I bought in, leaning toward her in the alcove of a cheesy hotel that advertised in French and English.

  We were a mismatched pair because she saw what I wished: a slouching, white-bread tourist being rewarded by the gods of fate with the company of a pale, elegant woman whose body filled her sundress flawlessly. Other couples and groups passed us in a late night rush between the bars and gathering places of the beach. It was cool for November. A single set of footfalls clattered nearby, interrupting our moment. It was a woman dropping her keys and swearing in lightly-accented French. With a metallic tinkling, she picked them up and moved off into the night, leaving us alone again.

  Reaching out, I took the hand of the woman I was with, seeing she was beautiful but tired under her makeup. A halo of dark curls was pushed back from her oval face with hair combs that were deeply burnished red, gleaming like rubbed bone.

  She had approached me in a bar an hour earlier as I sat alone nursing a drink and reading a paperback. I dress with purpose when I become someone else, leaving a riot of clues about being a tourist. I mute my ego and become subservient to an affectation of absolute mediocrity. A cheap, tacky sweatshirt and new deck shoes completed my identity, unsure of my surroundings and far from home. I avoided anyone who made eye contact until she sat down, sliding into the space next to me and settling quickly. She was very still except for her eyes. They were alive, but brittle and hooded.

  “Senya,” she introduced herself when she calmly sat in my booth without invitation.

  There was no uncertainty in her motions as she drank one glass of wine while asking a mechanical litany of questions. Where was I from? Did I have family with me? Was I staying nearby? She delivered these in a throaty accent that was purely Eastern Europe, all while flirting with me in a listless way. I played the role of the lucky bastard, and when she asked me to leave with her I fumbled awkwardly to the door.

  And now here we were, in a shadowed place with the wind and water muted. Alone, or as much as you could be in public. She pulled me to her and I inhaled her scents of red wine, foreign tobacco, and the lingering grit of the ocean. She opened her mouth and circled me with her arms, warming to the moment as we kissed. I felt her body begin to flower from our contact, and I winced with regret as my hand whispered upward, burying the slim knife I had silently palmed deep into her ribs. She buckled and tried to pull back, but my arms locked on her like heavy stones resting in earth. Her eyes never opened as the poisonous blade wrecked her spirit, the silvered steel shooting through her without mercy, cutting the bond to her body forever.

  Immortals are always surprised when they die. She was no different, judging by her open-mouthed, hiccupping sigh as I lowered her spasmodic body, eyes fluttering, to the concrete of the hotel patio. In seconds, she began to sublime, her ashes fleeing upward with tiny blue points of moonlight that left her dress an empty outline. I stepped back, looking at the dust of Senya, and began to turn away. In that instant, two obscenely fat moths fluttered down and began to delicately scatter her remains with their feet.

  I have learned that killing immortals causes changes in my body. Maybe another executioner could learn how to fly, read minds, or bend a metal rod with their hands. I tend to think that each immortal death makes us better at what we know. For me, I grow faster, more confident. I know I am something more after fourteen years of killing their kind.

  I still can’t fly, but one thing is certain. I’m very good with knives.

  2

  Florida: Ring

  Arriving home, I parked then stepped through the door to find all three of my housemates spread over the living room and kitchen. Home is a single level duplex built in the 1950s. To the left sat Risa, her legs pulled up on a chair at the kitchen table. Her earbuds leaked music that belonged in a Lebanese nightclub. Despite a fearsome intellect, her taste in music was on par with a cheesy disco rat. She was a compact, dusky girl with enormous black eyes and curly hair that she keeps short. Her full lips were moving slightly to the music as she pored over her laptop. A glass of wine sat next to her hand, her fingers tapping lightly on the table. I could see she was scrolling through an internet message board of some sort. One browned leg hung down, her toes just touching the floor. Risa was not tall, but her intensity made her seem imposing, especially when one questioned her musical choices. I know from experience.

  “How’d it go? Anything?” She looked up and reached for her wine.

 
I tossed my keys on the table and opened the fridge.

  “Wally bought some beer. It’s in the door,” she offered.

  “Thanks, got it. Ale? We’re moving up.” I took an appreciative sip of our upgrade.

  Usually, we drank like we were still on a budget in college, swilling cans of beer so foul, a person could strip paint with it. I glanced over at the couch before I spoke. Wally was stretched out with a bowl of popcorn balancing precariously on her bare stomach. Her long legs were split like tanned twigs, one on the coffee table, and the other thrown across the sleeping form of our enormous Great Dane, Gyro, who had achieved the same superior state of relaxation.

  Both were snoring gustily. With a snort, Wally launched the popcorn bowl onto the floor and resettled, mumbling. When standing, she was a California blonde out of central casting. Her long hair hung artfully, without effort. Her green eyes and freckles were perched on a flawless face and a full mouth of perfect teeth that she flashed during her nearly constant smile. For women who looked like Wally, life was a long stretch of free food, men fighting to hold doors for her, and glares from women as their husbands walked into parking meters when she passed by. We exploited her carefree attitude and stunning looks at every turn.

  Waleska Schmidt snored on the couch in a haze of popcorn burps and the smell of our giant dog, and I swigged my beer and laughed.

  We three had met in college while I dawdled on government money after four years of self-discovery in the United States Army. With my presuppositions in hand, I had joined after the death of my parents only to find that I had rarely been so wrong about anything in my life. The army was filled with dedicated people who carried a wide range of skills abroad and within our own borders. I found that I was average at taking direction, decent with guns, good under pressure, and able to kill with little lingering emotions.

  I exited the army a man, when I had entered as a loner with no team-building skills. When my four years eneded, I returned to begin a relationship with the two women who would be my partners for what I hoped would be the remainder of my life. I am 6’3”. I left the army at two hundred pounds of muscle, and I had the good fortune to inherit my mother’s Norwegian looks and blue eyes with my father’s crop of black hair. After serving, I was an adult, even if I also found out that whatever my flaws, being scared isn’t one of them—under any circumstances.

  Except, maybe when I take Wally’s last beer. Or piece of cake. Or any food, now that I think of it.

  “Ring, you smell like salt. Beach?” Risa brought me back to our discussion.

  “Yeah. I camped at a booth in Vince’s and read. I didn’t wait long. You were right about the place. I think your idea to read the missing persons reports from Canada will pay off big.”

  Vince’s is the bar that tourists frequent most on Hollywood Beach, as it offers the requisite cheesy nautical décor and ice-cold beer. Risa had combed French-language newspapers from Canada in hopes of finding a lead on where immortals were working in our area. We simply look for the unusual. Missing persons, sudden divorces where one partner never returns home, anything that seemed off. We followed it all. Since tourists were a moveable feast to immortals, we spread our search accordingly. We read every major online news site from the northern United States, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

  Risa had drawn the short straw and learned French, since it was her idea to comb the Quebecois media for tips. We all learned a second and third language in order to make collecting information that much faster, but Risa had a true gift. To her, language was the key to tracking the undead or undying. I don’t know if all immortals are bad, but the ones we kill certainly pass that test.

  I settled on the chair in what Risa called my debriefing pose as she began to add to her running compilation of files, which ranged from readily available sources to items she acquired less honestly. She was not above hacking an email system or server in order to get at information we needed. I looked straight ahead and told her of the beautiful East European and her odd accent. Risa stopped me occasionally, asking for an additional detail.

  “Senya?” she asked, her hands poised over the laptop’s keyboard.

  She typed what facts we knew of the woman I had met and dispatched. And so our personal database grew with each encounter among the undying.

  “East European. Pretty. Pale complexion. She wasn’t from peasant stock—” I paused, considering. “She was a bit more highborn. Turned in the last century, I think. I saved her hair combs because they look like heirlooms.”

  I fished them from my pocket and set them carefully in front of Risa on the table.

  She stopped typing and made an appreciative noise. “These are very old. They look like . . . red jade?” she questioned me, turning one comb to see every angle in the light.

  “It’s carnelian,” Wally announced. She had risen from her nap and was standing with her head cocked at the edge of the kitchen floor, considering the rich red material of the combs. She plucked one of the combs and looked at intently.

  “Hand-worked. Very old. Look how smooth it is, yes? The more I see, I think it is very, very old. Maybe even late Roman.”

  While Wally continued to coo over the loot, a slight tremor shook my hands as the act of killing an immortal began to take hold in my bones. Sometimes after a kill we would feel invigorated, chatty to the point of being a pest, or aroused, but, after some more violent, personal kills, needy and awash with depression. It depended on exactly what we had contacted. Tonight, I felt an intense mixture of uncertainty. Risa held out her hand to me, saying to Wally, “We’re going to sleep this off for a while,” in a soft tone.

  For all her intensity, Risa had always shown Wally and me the highest compassion when we were left with the emotional wreckage of killing an immortal. Her gentle side was freely given to us when we were most vulnerable, a hidden vein of ore in a mind that was deep and prone to cool reason. Wally patted my shoulder and gave me a one-armed hug as she turned to reclaim her part of the couch from Gyro. I followed Risa closely enough to smell the rosewater perfume she wore and decided that the comfort of her room was exactly what I needed to rid myself of the veil that Senya had left behind. She closed the door and turned off the lamp in one motion, moving through the darkness with a certainty that the kill had left me wanting. Her arms welcomed me on the bed and, very shortly, I couldn’t even remember what the waves had sounded like an hour before as her mouth met mine in a heated rush.

  The bed was soft, but she was softer, all curves and warmth and welcome as I lowered my head to her breasts, the nipples rising to meet me. Her hand pushed my pants away and then my shirt, and in seconds, only the warmth of each other worked against the swirling fan overhead. Her tongue was a hot, darting presence as we kissed, the curls of her hair framing my face as I slid my body over her. Like a flower, she let her legs spread, then smiled as I dipped my head to taste her.

  As always, she was ready. I flicked my tongue over the soft inner thigh, then worked my way west, then east, and finally came to rest in the middle as her hands twisted my hair while she hissed in pleasure. Risa came quickly, and then again, tremors running along her legs like the rumble of a distant train, and she lay very still for a moment, her breasts rising and falling as her heart returned to something like a normal pace.

  “I can’t decide,” she said, her voice thick and low.

  “About?”

  “Where I want you,” she said, then moved down and took me between her lips, tongue spinning around my shaft in lazy circles. Since Risa doesn’t speak with her mouth full, the question was answered. She let her mouth settle around me, then pulled away with suction that verged into pain it was so perfect, the hollow of her cheeks cast in shadow from the small bedside lamp.

  “I think, well—”

  “Hmph,” she said as I came, her lips clamping tight around me. When it was over, it was my turn to make my heart stop racing, and Risa’s smile greeted me from the crook of my chest and arm. “Mouth tonight.
Definitely mouth.”

  3

  Florida: Ring

  It was late morning when I woke up, feeling good for many reasons, not the least of which was the soft tangle of Risa the night before. The buzz from the immortal had gone to work on me immediately, and was received seamlessly into my muscles. I felt clear-headed and quick. It had been worth the ugliness of an act of murder, although that may sound crass. It helps to stay focused on what immortals do to humans and how, in many cases, they willingly leave their original body behind. Some turned for vanity, others for power, and many from sheer vindictiveness. Sociopaths all too often found the lure of a long life of wanton sin to be irresistible.

  I opened the back door and walked outside, Gyro right beside me. The grapefruit and orange trees swayed in the morning breeze, and the air smelled like salt from the canal running behind our house. Gyro stretched out and drooled on my bare foot, his enormous paws raking grass as I scratched his deep chest. While Gyro considered barking at the ducks across the canal, I began swinging my arms to see how I felt. It was good. Beyond good, actually. Senya must have been older than I had judged, and the killing her—and stealing the life force she held—felt a lot like becoming immortal, one cut of my knife at a time.