Free The Demon Abraxas by Rachel Calish

your body mend itself more quickly. And I can teach you.”
    “I don’t make deals with the devil,” she said.
    “I am not anyone’s devil.”
    She turned away from him. In the valley below, the scene faded and the wind blew sand in great mounds to obscure it all. She was alone and the air turned cold.
    Her eyes opened on a white ceiling and sunlit window. According to the clock, she’d slept a good six hours and she felt surprisingly well-rested. It was late morning now and she had an agenda. Before evening, she wanted to be closer to seeing the summoners in jail and this thing out of her head.
    After that dream she couldn’t go on toying with the notion that she was just losing it from the trauma. She wasn’t sure if the thing was actually talking to her or if her own mind was interpreting the experience for her, but either way it was time to assume she had some kind of spirit creature in her. In her life she’d seen a few incidents she considered miraculous and felt the presence of something supernatural and awe-inspiring, so it was possible there were other forces she didn’t know about, but this wasn’t how she planned to explore that part of the world. She had two goals now: get rid of the thing in her head and bring the guys who’d put it in her to their personal experience of hell.
    The smell of frying bacon drifted up from the kitchen and her stomach growled. She pushed herself up. The dream remained so clear she expected to see sand on her toes, but they were clean and taped at the base where the gauze bandage stuck to her foot. Scrunching forward, she peeled the tape away and looked at the sole of her foot. Many small scabs dotted the pink landscape, but it didn’t look nearly as raw as it had at the hospital. The man in her dream of the desert said he could make her heal faster and that seemed to be true. She pressed the tape back into place and swung her legs over the side of the bed.
    Although her bedroom was sparse, it was one of Ana’s favorite rooms in the house. As the only girl in her family, she’d gotten her own bedroom at an age when her two brothers still bunked down together. If not for the mystery of girlhood, it would have been a point of great contention. Of course her bed was an old, strange-smelling mattress in a walk-in closet, but late at night when her family was asleep that bed was all the comfort in the world to her. Alone in the dark she could think anything she wanted and imagine a life in which kids didn’t stare at her and her raggedy brothers, and talk about them in undisguised whispers. She could dream of a time when her oldest brother Mack didn’t take out his rage on her and Gunnar. Through college and after, in her apartment, she always loved having her own room and being in her bed.
    Ruben had the bigger room on the other side of the hall with a grand bed and two huge armoires, plus a makeup table, dresser, and matching bedside tables. He was always the refinement to her carelessness. They’d met three years ago when she was dating his former roommate. He seemed to like living with lesbians, though he was a lot better with home repair than she was, so it wasn’t from any mistaken notion about her butch skills. If she had to guess, she’d say he liked living with someone who never competed for his attention and had a completely different set of values about what was attractive. Her relationship with his former roommate hadn’t worked out because of the restlessness that killed most of her intimate relationships, but she’d come out of the deal with Ruben and that seemed like a more than fair trade.
    They’d lived together for just over two years now and she only regretted it on the nights when she heard loud sex from his bedroom or when she had to limp up basement stairs without a railing. He’d bought this house as a foreclosure and restored most of it himself, but he had a bad habit of leaving the fix-up jobs ninety-five percent finished. Ana was about ready