The Demon Side Read Free Page B

of the bed and watched Etta sleep. I was no longer worried about how to get Dad out, after seeing how he reacted to Etta when she was screaming for me to get out of her. He would do whatever it took to keep his daughter safe and sane, even if it meant leaving a fifty thousand dollar investment in the middle of the night.
    Etta would be a slight challenge. I would probably have to physically hurt her or threaten her life, which is against the celestial laws of staying on Earth among the living. I could drive a person crazy enough to kill themselves or their families as long as no part of me ever physically touches them in a way that could permanently harm or taint them. The penalty was steep: your soul being banished to an eternity in Purgatory. I wouldn’t take the risk. As long as I kept my distance, there would be nothing anyone could do.
    The only way I could get complete access to everything this girl feared was to do a walkthrough while she slept. So many walkthroughs in one day was tiring. The deeper you go, the more exhausting it is. Demons don’t sleep, but we still need downtime, the same as everything else in the world, to regain our energy. If I became fatigued while inside her, I could get trapped there, which would obviously be dangerous for the both of us.
    That’s where the idea of possession comes from. A Demon pushes too hard and traps himself in a body. The whole puking up split pea soup while a person’s head rotates three-hundred-sixty degrees is all a crock. Yes, we can make people do things they normally wouldn’t, but we can’t defy human capabilities. As for the convulsions you see in movies, those are real. That’s a good sign the Demon is dying. Except we don’t die the way a living person does. If we get deprived of energy long enough, our physical form disintegrates and our souls go straight to Purgatory. The human body at its fullest potential can only feed us for about a week, and it can never give us enough strength to exit the body. It doesn’t matter how much fear you try to generate in the person or how many priests their families call; the end result is always the same. Our disintegration slowly burns our victims from the inside out, which explains the mystery of human spontaneous combustion. The Demon dies, taking the human with it.
    The buzzing of the alarm down the hall was annoying, but even more annoying was the rock n’ roll station of Etta’s radio. Why did she torture her ears? Even with the racket going on between alarm clocks, Etta didn’t budge until her father came in the room.
    “Time to get ready,” John said, using a typical drill instructor roar.
    Etta moaned as she pulled the covers over her head.
    “Up and at ’em. You have school today and I have to get to work. Maybe we should talk to Medical about changing your Seroquel dosage. You seem to be sleeping through everything now.”
    Etta sat up in bed, rubbing her face. She hadn’t realized I was standing there. From the bright light beaming on Etta’s face, I knew John had opened the drapes to let the morning sun brighten the room. Briefly, I thought she looked angelic in her long white T-shirt. The moment was quickly shattered by a strange tingling in my stomach, like a million maggots crawling inside of me. I was weakening. Grabbing my stomach, I turned toward the closet to access the attic, but walked inside of Etta.
    Her thoughts were happy ones, of an average looking guy six-feet-tall, with shaggy blond hair and large green eyes. His complexion held an olive tint, but his black clothing made him look almost spectral. Whoever this guy was, she obviously had a crush on him. Hopefully, it would be a boyfriend at school who would come to the house. I would use him against her. As useful as this new information would be, I could not dig any deeper. My energy seemed to be draining quickly.
    Then in a blink, Etta was in front of me. She must have walked through me when I turned my back. But why would she do