Read Online Demons are Forever: Confessions of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom by Julie Kenner - Free Book Online Page B

just nodded sagely, as if she’d been contemplating the character of good and evil her whole life.
    “How do you know?” she asked after a moment. “I mean, unless they look like those monsters we saw, how do you know who’s a demon and who isn’t?”
    I’d been wondering when she was going to ask that. Wondering if she’d been seeing demons around every corner, in the faces of her friends and the people she passed on the street. Honestly, that’s not all that far from the truth. Demons are around us. All the time.
    Fortunately, they’re mostly incorporeal, which means they’re just floating around in the ether, wishing they had a human body.
    “But sometimes they do,” Allie said, after I explained all of that. “Have a body, I mean.”
    “Right,” I acknowledged. “They can do that a couple of ways. They can go the old-fashioned possession route, but that’s no fun because the whole head-spinning Exorcist schtick doesn’t really blend in with the general population.”
    Allie managed a smile. “No, I guess it wouldn’t.”
    “Possessions are a priest’s problem. But your dad and I were Hunters. We went after the demons who managed to blend in.”
    “How?”
    “By taking over the shell of a newly vacated body. The soul goes out, the demon goes in.”
    A combination of fear and disgust filled her eyes. “Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying that after I die, my body could be—”
    “No, no,” I assured her. “A demon can’t inhabit the body of the faithful. Our souls fight. There’s only a tiny window of opportunity for the demon to slip in. Miss it, and the body is just a body. Nothing more.”
    That, actually, was why demon infestations tended to concentrate on places where their odds increase. Hospitals are number one. And in San Diablo, the demons have laid a serious stake to the nursing home.
    “But if they do slip into a body,” I continued, “then they can walk around like you and me, and nobody’s the wiser. Or, at least, nobody except a Demon Hunter.”
    “Which is exactly what I asked in the first place,” she said. “How come you can tell but nobody else can?”
    I gave her the CliffsNotes version of Demon Spotting 101, running through the various tests on which a Hunter relies, with breath being first on the list.
    A demon’s breath is beyond putrid. But in this day of Listerine strips and Trident White gum, even the nastiest breath can be masked.
    A better test is holy water, but it can be awkward trying to douse a potential demon to see if the water burns. And, of course, a demon can’t walk on holy ground. But like the saying goes, you can lead a demon to church, but you can’t make him walk inside.
    Or something like that.
    “So once you’re sure,” Allie asked, “then what? You get ’em with the crossbow?”
    “That’s one way,” I said. “But to kill a demon you have to get him right in the eye.”
    “Ewwww.” She scrunched up her face, appropriately grossed out. “And then they’re dead?”
    I shook my head. “No. But then they don’t have a body anymore.” The only way to truly kill a demon was to cut it down while in its true form. But once encased in a human shell, demons very rarely revealed their true nature. Allie, in fact, was one of the few who had seen a true demon and lived to tell about it.
    She turned her attention back to my trunk. “So to kill the demon, you have to get close enough to jam that through its eye?” she asked, pointing to my stiletto.
    “Or learn how to throw it accurately.”
    She looked at me with respect. “You can do that?”
    “Yeah,” I said with a small laugh. “I can’t make a chocolate cake from scratch, but I can nail a demon from twenty paces.”
    “Pretty cool,” she said.
    Indeed.
    I was grinning when I took the knife from the trunk, explaining how Eric had given it to me for our third anniversary. He’d had it custom made, and it boasted a double-action release system. What I didn’t tell her was how