Queen of Wands-eARC Read Free Page A

“Everything else will wait.”
    * * *
    “You’re not crazy,” Sharice said after Barbara’s, to her own ears, unintelligible report of the recent events. “You’re just getting new Gifts.”
    “Gifts,” Barbara said with a snort, sipping the herbal tea. “Gifts.”
    “Gifts,” Sharice replied, nodding. “Gifts aren’t easy, girl. That’s why the All doesn’t give them to everyone. You already had Channeling and Projection, which is so rare it’s almost unheard of. I had to look it up in some really obscure tomes.”
    “Projection?” Barbara said.
    “When you shot The Dark One in Louisiana,” Sharice said, refusing to use the demon’s name. “You Projected your White God’s power into the bullets. Very rare.”
    “And the sword in Roanoke,” Barbara said, nodding. “But this is…”
    “Oh, these are normal Gifts, dear,” Sharice said, chuckling. “I think you might have gotten more than your fair measure, as usual, but they’re quite normal. Sight and The Ear.”
    “Sight?” Barbara said. “I don’t see…” She paused and realized that she could see a glimmer around Sharice. She shook her head and it went away. “At least I don’t think I see auras.”
    “You’re able to suppress that one, I see,” Sharice said, dryly. “But, yes, you’ve got the Sight. I’ve heard its common for the White God’s acolytes to see the lesser infestations. That’s what you’re seeing.”
    “The…things on people?” Barb said. She’d seen even more in the trip to North Carolina. In one restaurant they seemed to be on every shoulder.
    “Lesser demons,” Sharice said. “Ever heard the term ‘I’ve been wrestling with my demons’?”
    “But that’s…”
    “Not always a metaphor, dear,” Sharice continued. “In far too many cases it’s quite real. They are drakni, the lesser demons that possess people all the time. They come in a variety of flavors and can be a real nuisance. They can even be deadly if they work through humans. Ted Bundy was covered with the things, what your people refer to as a Legion. And more had sunk into him. Most serial killers are their playthings. But drakni have to have something to latch onto in the first place. There must be the psychological and mystical equivalent of a shoulder. Most people have them, but for drakni, it needs to be…broad. They can’t work with nothing.”
    “And they can’t be stopped ?” Barb said, aghast. “I saw dozens of them just in this one trip! Are you saying…”
    “Thousands, millions of people who are possessed?” Sharice said, sadly. “Yes. I am. And, no, there is nothing we have found to wipe them out short of killing them one by one. And that requires something that’s very hard to get; full Belief and agreement on the part of the possessed. Try going up to one of those people you saw and saying, ‘You have a demon on your shoulder and it’s getting into your soul. I can get rid of it, but only if you give your soul to the Good Lord Jesus…’”
    “Ouch,” Barb said. She was not a proselytizer. She believed in the doctrine of Witnessing, being the best Christian you could be every single day and converting by example.
    “I’d suspect that more than one of your Christian screamers truly has the Sight,” Sharice said, sighing. “They are quite serious in their intentions if they do. The problem is separating them from the ones that simply use it as a metaphor. But that is your one new Gift.”
    “That I can see demons and not be able to do anything about them?” Barb said. “How is that a Gift ?”
    “Well, you can see demons, even if they’re not manifest,” Sharice pointed out. “Remolus would have left a visual clue to someone with Sight. You would have been able to detect him in Krake the first time you saw him.”
    One of her previous investigations had involved a serial killer who was stalking science fiction conventions. She had had to deduce who it was at one convention by a process of