Read Online Demon Games [4] by Steve Feasey - Free Book Online Page A

silently disappearing into the skies overhead. He didn’t bother to look up; even if she was directly overhead, he knew she’d be invisible to him now.
    Hag’s new residence was almost identical to the one the vampire had visited years before: a ramshackle and dilapidated affair which looked as though at any moment it might fall down around the ears of its occupant. It sat at the edge of a huge burning sulphur pit, and Lucien turned for moment to watch the almost invisible blue flames licking across the blood-red surface. Noxious fumes filled the air and he quickly turned away and pushed at the door.
    If anything, the stench that hit Lucien as he crossed the threshold into the sorceress’s house was worse than that outside. The air was thick with the reek from whatever was cooking on the pot-bellied stove – a truly unpleasant smell, sickly sweet and cloying, as if something rotten and putrid had been boiled up.
    The old woman was hunched over the stove, her back to the vampire. She made a grunting sound, waving her visitor towards two chairs that sat facing each other in front of an ornate fireplace in which a huge fire burned. Without a pause she continued the low murmurings of her spell.
    Lucien eyed the shadows behind the sorceress, looking for the creature that guarded the old woman so fanatically that she could call visitors into the house without even turning round to see if they posed any threat. He saw it in the corner, and the thing looked back at him from baleful eyes as black as the shadows that hid it.
    Hag had grown the mandragore a very long time ago, nurturing the plant root with milk and blood and honey until it had eventually taken on life. It was usual to free the mandragore at this point, but Hag had kept the creature chained down in a vat of milk, adding blood and honey each day for a further year until it had grown into the enormous thing that glared back at the vampire from the darkness. It was the perfect guardian for the sorceress: mandragores are almost impossible to destroy, and are ferociously loyal to their creators. But Hag had grown the creature for more than just its brute strength and durability – demons are unable to enter the place where a mandragore resides, so Hag slept well in the knowledge that her home was off-limits to the vast majority of nether-creatures that might wish her harm.
    Lucien had seen the creature before, but he was still taken aback by its appearance: more tree-like than anything else, thick, muscular limbs hung down from a body that was coarse and bloated like the bulbous root it had been grown from. A horizontal slash below its eyes served as a mouth, and it opened this now in a threatening gesture that treated the vampire to a view of the black emptiness within. If a mandragore screamed, every living thing in the vicinity would be killed, but Hag had removed her sentinel’s voice a long time ago.
    Hag tut-tutted in the creature’s direction, and Lucien couldn’t help but smile as it lowered its massive head, looking at the floor between its feet like a scolded child. It slipped further into the shadowy corner of the room, sulking.
    Lucien moved away, glad to be able to put some distance between himself and that terrible smell. He took one of the seats and waited.
    He looked around. Like the outside, the interior of the place was exactly how he remembered the sorceress’s former dwelling, and he briefly wondered if this might not actually be the same house uprooted and transplanted to a new spot. The shelves were crammed full of jars, boxes and bottles of every size and description. Stacked up on the floor were cages containing live animals. From small rodents to larger animals like cats and dogs, the menagerie was a miserable one, and the smell of fear that came from the creatures added to the stink of the place.
    The old woman swore and kicked at the stove, making some of the boiling mixture spill out of the pot on to her foot. She issued a fresh string of