Free The Demon Senders by T Patrick Phelps Page A

buying all that shit someone told you, are you? Tell me you don’t really believe in demons and in your role in the whole ‘good versus evil’ thing. Come on, tell me you don’t believe that shit.”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what I believe.”
    “Who put that crap into your head?”
    “Doesn’t matter,” I said. My surety percentage dropped from a high of eighty percent down to around fifty percent. After all, what Rachel had told me was so fantastic, who could blame me for not buying in? Sure, there were signs something was different about me my entire life, but making the jump from crows following me around to me being a demon sender, suddenly, at that moment, when I had to decide either to kill someone or not, the jump was way too much of a leap for me to take.
    I also didn’t tell him Rachel had told me everything for two reasons: One, if things went badly, I didn’t want him to know I wasn’t alone. He might go looking for Rachel if he was able to take me out of the picture. And secondly, some tiny voice inside my head told me to never mention her name to anyone. Ever. I only tell you about her since, well, it doesn’t really matter anymore.
    “Listen, Mac. You may not remember, but you and I have met before. Long time ago, when you were still a kid. Think back, you’ll remember.”
    “I’ve never seen you before in my life,” I said, though entirely unconvinced of my statement’s accuracy.
    “You were seven years old,” he continued. “You were having a spell with nightmares. Kept you awake most nights. Ring a bell?”
    It sure did.  
    When I was seven, I had a two or three month stretch when I hardly got any sleep. There was this recurring nightmare that greeted me every time I did fall asleep. Same dream every time.
    I was walking, alone, in a harvested corn field that ran alongside a very dark and very long forest. In my dream, the forest was always on my right hand side and my head was cocked towards it. Not sure if I was keeping my eye out for anything that might come charging out towards me or if I was looking for something I had lost. It didn’t matter because nothing ever came charging out of the trees and I never found anything I had lost.
    In the dream, I kept walking until the path I was on turned rocky. As I kept walking, the rocks turned into boulders I had to climb over. At one point, the forest still on my right, the path turned into a stream. I followed the stream for a stretch. After a dream-minute, I saw my mom sitting on a boulder, looking down at a very small, very narrow pool of water. I started to walk up to her when she turned towards me, looked me in the eyes, then smiled. She stood up and jumped straight down into that little pool of water. I rushed over and only saw her left hand sticking up out of the water. I knew it was her left hand because of the wedding ring I clearly saw on her ring finger.  
    Her fingers were splayed open, as if reaching for something. I fell to the ground and grabbed her hand and started pulling with all the strength a seven-year-old could muster. I remember all I could see of my mom was from her elbow up. Deeper than that, the water was a murky gray that prevented any light or vision.
    I grabbed her hand and pulled, only to have her hand slip from my grip, like she was being pulled down by some force deep in the dark water. She reached up her hand again, I grabbed it and pulled with everything I had. As she was pulled down again, her wedding ring slipped off her finger and into my hand. I pulled my hand out of the water and just stared at her ring sitting in the palm of my hand.
    Her hand never came back up again.
    That dream kept me from even wanting to go to sleep for several weeks before my parents took me to a doctor. In keeping with the secret agreement doctors must have, he referred us to another doctor who, in keeping with the code, sent us to yet another doctor. It was the last doctor who suggested my parents