Sunwalker saga, Tome 2 : Kissed by Fire

Chapter One

I remember the first time I saw a demon. Who would forget that, right? It’s actually easier to forget than you might think.

I was crouched behind a dumpster outside of my office as it, the demon, laughed like a maniac while the place burned to the ground. It was pretty much exactly as one might imagine a demon to be: spiky horns, leathery skin, smoke billowing out of its nostrils.

My boss at the time, the Dragon Lady (Not her real name, of course, but protecting the not-so-innocent and all that), didn’t see it. Too busy cussing out the firemen who also didn’t see it.

Of course, that was all before I was attacked by a vampire, died, then came back to life with super powers, so I sort of blew the whole thing off. Hello? Would you want to admit, even to yourself, that you’d just watched a seven foot tall demon that looked something like a giant fire-breathing horny toad burn your office down?

I think not. Talk about a one way ticket to the Funny Farm.

The thing about demons was that most people couldn’t see them. Not because they were invisible or anything, but because people didn’t want to see them. Seeing them would mean admitting the monsters were real.

Granted, there were plenty of demons out there that people could see just fine. That was because they looked exactly like you and me. Only one tiny difference: they had no souls. They looked human, but underneath there was nothing human at all. Most of the world’s most infamous serial killers were actually demons. Word was, Jack the Ripper was a demon. Which was probably why there was a very specific sub-type of demon named after him.

That was the type of demon I was hunting tonight, a Ripper demon. Which kind of sucked. Easy to track a giant red guy with horns and a forked tail, not so easy to track a guy who looked just like every other guy. Until he started killing.

This particular demon had the bad habit of seducing women and then eating them for lunch. Not all of them. Just the juicy bits. He’d left a trail of disembowelled corpses across most of Canada. The Canadian authorities were not pleased, but there wasn’t a whole lot they could do about it. He was on my turf, now.

I’d just entered an alleyway down in one of the dingier areas of Portland when my leg started vibrating. I snaked my phone out of my pocket.

“What?” I hissed. I had no idea how good the demon’s hearing was. I wasn’t about to tip him off because somebody wanted to chat.