Free Woman King by Evette Davis

confident, so I decided to
try something more challenging. This time I locked on to a slightly
disheveled homeless man, his belongings piled high on the seat next
to him. I focused in on his coloring and saw something odd. He gave
off a grayish color that looked like smog hovering over the hills.
As soon as I tried to read his emotions, he turned around to face
me. He knew I was trying to read him. Although he smiled at me, his
behavior was anything but friendly. He began to press back, sending
some very dark emotions my way. I felt a rush of sadness, and
realized that he was trying to drive me to despair. He was
persistent, trying to drive negative feelings into my head. Elsa
appeared at my side.
    “That’s a demon, Olivia. Can you feel him
trying to drive a wedge through your soul? Block him out.”
    Once again, I practiced using my breath to
lower a blind over my mind’s eye and closed off my nervous system.
Soon, I began to feel like myself again. The demon turned away from
us and looked out the window.
    “He gave up very easily,” I said.
    “He probably knew he had no chance with you,”
was Elsa’s reply. “Demons, in general, are a lazy lot and do not
like to work hard. I think he knew better than to test your
will.”
    “Are they always grey?” I asked as we made
our way out of the train station.
    “Always. You must have a soul, or some
connection to humanity, to give off an aura. Remember that. Grey is
the absence of color. As servants of the devil, they have no
humanity left inside them, and therefore give off no color.”
    “Wow. That is scary. What would have happened
if he’d succeeded?”
    “You would have left the train feeling like
your life was not worth living,” Elsa said ruefully. “Demons are
responsible for a lot of the suicides you read about that happen in
public—the stories about people who jump into the path of a moving
train, or leap from the Golden Gate Bridge. Their deaths are often
incomprehensible to the people who know them. Now you know the
reason for their actions.”
    I shuddered slightly as we rode the escalator
up from the bowels of the subterranean train station, trying to
shake off the gloom of the demon and Elsa’s story. Would that have
been my fate, too, had Elsa not appeared? Would I have been doomed
to toss myself over a bridge when Stoner was done with me? I didn’t
want to know.
    We exited the station at 16th and Mission.
From there, we moved west, walking through the crowds on Valencia
Street. There were dozens upon dozens of bodies moving through the
neighborhood. I held still, allowing myself to feel the energy of
the people passing by.
    “Don’t lock on to it or try to absorb it, let
it move past you as if you were browsing titles in a book store,”
Elsa said.
    If I had been in a bookstore, the floor would
have been a mess. It felt as if I was bumping into everyone who
passed. A jolt here, a jolt there, I was being brushed by anger,
anxiety, sexual longing, happiness and true love. Each time someone
passed, they tickled my senses. I began to regulate it, as if
searching a radio by turning a dial. I concentrated, focusing my
mind to pull in from one person but not the next. A rainbow of
colors passed behind my eyes, and I was enjoying my newfound skills
until something began pressing on my skull again.
    I looked up, trying to find the source of the
pain and found myself staring into the dark green eyes of a man
with long hair and a nose ring, whose piercing gaze seemed to be
picking at my head. It was a very specific kind of pressure, but it
came with not a trace of emotion.
    “Elsa that man over there is trying to force
his way into my head.”
    “Vampire,” was all she said.
    “Vampire,” I replied. “In the Mission?”
    “Especially in the Mission,” she said.
    “He is picking at my skull like a
woodpecker.”
    “Make him stop.”
    I closed my eyes and forcefully shut him out.
He smiled, saluting me with two fingers as he passed.
    “He