The Repentant Demon Trilogy Book 1: The Demon Calumnius by Samantha Johns Read Free Book Online Page A

roamed earth, destroying villages.  These were hybrid life-forms created by the magic of an ancient sorcerer.  All the physical forms of this species were killed off by ancient warriors and knights, but their spirit forms still dwell in hell.  The Imps could be called dwarf demons with malformed bodies and pointed ears.  These were the creatures often depicted as gargoyles on Gothic cathedrals.
    Calumnius continued to gaze at his figure standing behind Abigail in the mirror.  How odd it was to see two of her at once.  This was another of the few things that fascinated him on the earth.  There once had been many wonderful things in this world, but the humans had destroyed much of it with their ugliness—or rather they obliterated the view of interesting things by filling it up with their own horrid kind.  As he looked at her, she seemed not as ugly as she had in the beginning.  Probably he had been watching so long he had become accustomed to her appearance.
    He looked at his own eyes—black, liquid pools of mystery.  These were attractive, unlike the human creatures' eyes with pale, vapid, and bland features.  Hers were green, the color of emeralds, and he would have to admit they were both expressive and brighter than most.  He could tell how she was feeling by looking into them.  As he did so, in the mirror, in that moment she looked back at him directly.  He gasped and turned away.  He noticed that she hugged herself and shivered as if she felt his presence or sensed something watching her.  He heard her say, “What was that?” referring to the chill that ran up her spine.
    Casting aside this sensation as mere imagination, Abigail hurried to put on a clean, oversized T-shirt for sleep and jumped into bed cheerfully, turning out the light.  He, Calumnius, whose vision was equally good in the dark, watched as she sat on her mattress with folded hands in prayer.  He read her thoughts to be those of grateful thanks to God for providing a way for her to go on this trip to Iraq.
    It confounded Calumnius beyond belief that she should credit God for this stroke of good luck.  How could it be that she felt such intimacy with a spirit she could not see nor had no firm evidence even of his existence?  He saw her smiling with contentment as she drifted off to sleep, envisioning dreams of artifacts and grimy dirt beneath her nails.
    Calumnius eased beside her bed, and leaning in toward her ear, he whispered seductive messages about Doug Anderson—talking about the feel of his body, his smooth, lovely, tanned skin and taut muscles.  He placed visions in her head of his hidden anatomical features, using her imagination to make it seem real and warm in places where it touched her.
    Abigail startled Calumnius by suddenly rising up straight to a sitting position, looking alert and slightly afraid.  She breathed heavily, eyes wide, and looked about the room as if she again sensed she was not alone.  He began to wonder why his presence seemed to bleed through to her reality without effort on his part.  It had never happened to him before, although he had heard tales of demons being spotted unaware.  Mostly such occurrences were due to so-called “ghost-hunters” who believed they were encountering disembodied spirits.  Abigail was not trying to see him.  Surely she had no desire to see him.
    Calumnius was both encouraged and dismayed by this new development in his relationship with Abigail Rayetta Fitzgerald.  He considered it that, one of the hunter and the hunted.  What could be more intense than what passed between the one who would die a death of the soul and the one who determined her fate for all eternity? If it ends in a good hunt, it would become something memorable that he could ponder in his mind and relive like photos in a memory book—like trophies kept by serial killers.  The easy, quick ones were of much less consequence.  Although he often felt impatience at how long it was taking, he also