Free bedeviled & beyond 03 - bedeviled & beleaguered by sam cheever

smaller.
    Celente looked dead on her feet. I knew from personal experience that healing was very taxing. Finally the last couple of inches of wound closed up and Celente straightened, nearly passing out as she tried to turn away.
    I caught her and led her to a chair. “Sit here. Rest for a moment.”
    The woman’s dark eyes glared at me but she did as instructed, probably too weak to defy me. Though it was clear she wanted to.
    I returned to the bed and verified that Emo would be fine. He sat up and I helped him to his feet.
    “Can you tell me what happened?” I asked.
    He frowned. “I saw a human on the ground, writhing and screaming. I ran over to him and asked him if he was all right.” Emo’s dark eyes were filled with horror. “He attacked me, Astra. The human attacked me.”
    “I know. Cheets will turn him over to the Non-Magic Police Department.”
    Emo didn’t seem to hear me. Staring straight ahead with his eyes slightly unfocused he murmured, “What are we going to do if the humans turn on us? We’ll have another Great War.”
    I shook my head, not sure what to say to him. He was right. If the human race turned against all magic users and dark worlders we would have no choice but to fight back. Our fragile truce would end.
    And so, most likely, would the human race.

CHAPTER FIVE
    A Slight Swimming Incident
    The demon flopped around the pool, a child upon its fang,
    Our heroine did bid him go, then dispersed him with a bang.
    I was sipping coffee in my new apartment and watching the human digital news on my information unit. I’d recently moved to the new place when the aftereffects of fighting off an Agar in my old place became too much for me. No matter how many times I’d cleaned the place I could still smell the aroma of garbage wrapped in electrical charges the Agar had left behind. Plus the thing had really screwed up the electrical works while trying to eat me.
    The human digital news was filled with stories of panic and violence from all sides. Reports of magical creatures attacking humans unprovoked vied with reports of panic in the streets and random attacks on everyone the human public even suspected might be a magic user.
    In the city, not too far from my office, a fairy smothered a young witch with fairy dust and then set her apartment on fire by knocking over her ritual candles.
    The human who’d attacked Emo was interviewed on the news and he admitted to killing several of the people we’d seen strewn about the park grounds. He’d marked them, fairly or unfairly, as magic users and killed them for that reason alone. The news reports named several who were as human as the man who killed them. I shook my head, disgusted by the hate that had turned the man into a monster.
    Uptown, several ghouls walked from the city’s largest cemetery and bit the heads off two people who were jogging past.
    Several other accounts of varying levels of violence against magic users and innocent humans caused my heart to speed up with dread and fear.
    The faces of the reporters had a certain pale twitchiness which told me more than anything else that the city wasn’t all that far from total chaos.
    And things were degenerating rapidly.
    Flick’s prophetic question slid through my mind unbidden. Can you feel it?
    I set my coffee down and reached for my cross. Placing it against my forehead I said his name.
    He popped, sprawled full length, onto my divan. His mousy brown hair was damp at the ends and stringy with sweat, his face looked even paler than usual and there was a certain gray aspect to his lips.
    “Are you okay?”
    He shook his head. “Devil’s Plague.”
    I winced in sympathy. Angels are not human and are therefore not susceptible to any of the human diseases. However, that didn’t mean that they never got sick. There were a few pretty virulent strains of illness that occasionally took hold of the angel population. Devil’s Plague, named thus for obvious reasons, was one of them. “Please