The Demon-Eater: Hunting Shadows (Book One, Part One

This is a work of fiction. All characters and
events portrayed in the book are either the product of the author's
imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2016 by Devin Graham

All Rights Reserved.

Cover design by Devin Graham

Cover image Copyright Anchiy and Copyright
Geraldas Galinauskas, used under license from Shutterstock.com

Visit the author at:
www.thefictionist.com

Table of Contents

The
Demon-Eater

Book One, Part
One

D
evin
G
raham

This book is dedicated to you, reader, for
giving it a shot. Thank you.

Author Note:

Please note that this is
part one of four parts which, together, make up the first book in
the
BONDFORGERS
series. I will publish each consecutive part
monthly.

Once Book Two of the series is completed, I
will combine all four parts into one complete manuscript making up
Book One.

Find a mistake that
slipped past me? Or just didn't like the way I handled something?
Feel free to contact me via the contact form on my website
at:
www.thefictionist.com
and
perhaps find yourself in the acknowledgments of the full-length
Book One.

Without further ado, happy readings.

P
ROLOGUE

NIGHT HAD LONG SINCE
FALLEN
and the one flickering streetlight
did little to illuminate the long, narrow street, still damp from
the previous night's rainfall. A strange chill was carried on the
breeze, intermingling with the summer heat, and the foul stench of
decay pervaded the air all around, clinging to the atmosphere just
as the humidity caused the hunter's clothes to cling to his
body.

Although...

The hunter removed his bowler hat,
welcoming the slight breeze, which played among the strands of his
matted hair. He tilted his head upward and closed his eyes,
concentrating on the smell of rotted flesh. Breathing deeply of the
fetid air, his nose instinctively crinkled. That smell, strong as a
pelt to the gut, might have made any other man fall to his knees.
But not the hunter. He was accustomed to it, after so many years.
That was, he was as accustomed to the stench as every other man was
forced to become accustomed to his own waste.

His nose ever sniffing, the hunter
turned in place, making a complete circle. He continued, as though
to make another full circle, then stopped suddenly.

The hunter cracked a smile. His
particular line of work—if one could truly call it a line of work
at all—did not allow for many smiles, and so he had learned to take
them wherever he could.

He lowered his head and opened his
eyes, finding himself facing the tenebrous mouth of an alleyway.
The putrid decay wafted out from that baleful opening just slightly
stronger than it was anywhere else. Staring into the interminable
darkness of the alleyway, the hunter frowned. He was not at all
fond of going into shadowed corners of any kind when hunting a
demon, especially when the hot, near-palpable odor of decomposition
was contained to the area, trapped by the walls of the narrow
passage.

Derelict buildings loomed lopsidedly
on either side of the alley, many of their windows boarded up,
making them seem abandoned. They were not all abandoned, he knew,
from the little snatches of flickering candlelight he caught wanly
shining from behind some of the boarded windows.

An alleyway somewhere in the middle of
the slums, such as this, was even worse. He was not afraid of the
danger; he was afraid of where his thoughts went in the silent
dark. No, the hunter had grown bored of danger a long time
ago.

The man replaced his bowler hat atop
his head, then rested his hand on the hilt of his dueling sword
fastened at his hip—which he had only just learned this night was
not fashionable for a lord to wear at balls; canes were the fashion
now. He could never keep up with the trends of the nobles, as often
as they changed.

With his other hand, he felt at his
revolver pistol, hidden in a holster beneath his suit jacket. He
probably would not use it. Too loud. But he liked to know it was
there. It was a gift, after all.

A murderous demon in a
dark alley,
the hunter thought.
Fun.
He started forward
and was quickly enveloped by the shadows.

The alley was narrow and cramped with
trash and questionable puddles, but the way remained straight, with
no branching paths nor doorways through which the demon could have
gone. Forward was the only direction...for the most
part.

The hunter paused at a
large heap—more a small mountain, really—of trash clogging the way,
like a pile of logs might dam up a river.
A particularly smelly dam,
the
hunter thought, frowning.
Looks like, for
now, the way is up.
Planting one foot as
firmly as he could in the heap, and finding as well a grip as was
possible with his hands, he began a sloppy ascent. As he climbed,
he hummed a soft tune to himself—something he had heard on a
phonograph recently; music was another thing changing almost as
quickly as high society's fashion, becoming more lyrical and
strumming than instrumental—in an attempt not to think of what
things laid carelessly tossed into the mountain of garbage to which
he clung.

Rusty needles?
he thought when his footing was knocked loose and
he scraped his palm against something sharp, as he was searching
for a handhold. Grumbling a curse, he slid down a foot or so,
before finding his grip again and pulling himself back into a
climb.

Pitsville truly was a
trash pit of a city. It was a city without many of the funds for
the technological advances of other, larger—and wealthier—cities.
But it did not exactly take an advancement in technology to build a
fire and burn down its mountains of trash every so often.
That
was merely a lazy
disposition.

When the hunter reached
the top of the trash heap, he slid down the other side, not even
bothering with handholds. Once again, he found himself consciously
trying not to think of what things laid just beneath the trash's
surface, which probably did even less to take his mind from
it.
Glass?
he
wondered, then nearly laughed at himself. He would chase a demon
through an alleyway in the slums, but place some broken glass in a
pile of trash and it would give him pause.

The hunter reached the
bottom a moment later with the
click
of his heels upon the cobbled
street. He stood up straight and patted off his tailcoat and
breeches with his hands, his mouth turning downward in a frown.
Though it was dark, he suspected his suit was ruined with grime.
And...yes, there it was, a rip in his sleeve. A true shame it was,
since this was his best suit—his
only
nice suit, in fact. He would
have to buy a new one.

The thing just
had
to make its presence
known in the middle of a
flaming
ball
. He had actually
been having a grand time, too. However, even grand times did fall a
bit flat when the decaying body of a demon jumped from a ballroom
balcony, brandishing the severed head of the event's host amid an
audience of squeamish nobility like some moralless loon. It had
been a demon, so a lack of morality was to be expected; but had the
thing really needed to flaunt the deed?

“
It could have killed the
man in secret,” the hunter muttered to himself, advancing slowly
through the alley, making as little sound as was possible. He had
already made quite the raucous climbing his way over the heap of
garbage.
I would have found out about the
death anyway, and
after
the fun. But, of course, there is no such luck
for me.

Lord Placent, the host of
the ball, had been a kind man—even for a lord and probably because
he had only been a baron, and not so corrupted by the thin air the
other nobility breathed in regularly from their towering
pedestals—and it truly was a pity he had died this night. Even
still, the death was at a
flaming
inconvenient time.

The hunter's eyes slid over the gloom,
moving from shadow to shadow, searching. He could not completely
trust his eyes in the dark; every mound of blackness could be just
another pile of trash, or it could be the demon. Added to that, the
stench of the trash did well to mask the stench of decomposing
flesh, so he could never be sure if he were still a distance away
from the demon. Or standing right over top of it.

He leaped to the side as
something to his right fell to the street with a hollow
clink
, a sound like a
rolling glass bottle following after. He already had his sword
drawn and pointed toward a shadow hunkered up against the
wall.

“
Please, sir,” the figure,
shrouded by shadow, begged in a rasping voice, slowly scooting on
his backside along the wall, away from the hunter. “I don't have
nothin'. Just a beggar.”

In the wan moonlight, the hunter
caught the beggar's eyes flashing hungrily to his pockets, then
back to the tip of the sword he had pointed toward the beggar's
throat. All thoughts of stealing vanished from the beggar's eyes in
an eye blink.

The hunter flicked the tip of his
sword in the direction from which he had come.

“
Leave,” he commanded in a
harsh whisper. The beggar was already scrambling toward the trash
heap the hunter had only just slid down from. The grimy,
skeleton-of-a-man seemed to care a lot less about what laid beneath
that garbage, as he pulled himself up and over as though he had
done it a hundred times before.

Sheathing his sword, the hunter turned
from where the beggar had been atop the mound and started on his
way again. He encountered little more than the eerie sounds of
night—the occasional pattering of feet, belonging to no one he
could see, or the loud scraping of a pipe dragging the ground
somewhere in the distance—as he walked.

The noises could have been
placed in his mind by the
others,
of course. They did enjoy picking the strings of
his mind, making already ominous settings all the more terrible for
him. The
others
could do no more than manipulate the sounds of his
surroundings—occasionally the images, also. Other than that, he had
pretty good control over them.