Tymely News
Work In Progress #10: She Seeks Peace #2 (September 16-20)
She Seeks Peace is volume 4 of Ashen Blades.
You can read a short description of She Seeks Peace to learn more or you can read short summaries of each day's writing on Mastodon
Here's links to the rest of my blog entries on She Seeks Peace, in chronological order:
Chapter 3: The Dollar Owed
Reggie steps into his dark office and sits down, pouring two glasses of cheap whiskey (prohibition is on, so the stuff he can get is garbage quality). He pushes one glass across his desk and offers it to Silver Dollar, who he's certain is in the room.
Silver Dollar sits down, but refuses the drink.
They discuss his reasons for killing her men and he drops the name of his client's father. Johan Mitchell was beaten nearly to death by one of Silver Dollar's street-level enforcers and Reggie was hired by Mitchell's son to get the demon-mobster to pay the medical bills.
Silver Dollar refuses and backs away into darkness, just as expected, so Reggie screams, "Now!"
The Hunter enters and shadow-steps behind Silver Dollar, swinging a baseball bat at maximum strength, while Reggie opens fire! Silver Dollar's head more or less ends up all over the room and the Hunter's bat shatters (the reason she doesn't use one in battle, ever again).
Reggie drops six demons with precise shots to the head, in just seconds, but then comes across a big problem: the next customer is bulletproof, with an insect's armored exoskeleton! He's actually a scarab beetle demon.
The Hunter hurls a 180 MPH fastball at the demon's head, concussing it, though her baseball explodes from extreme conditions it wasn't designed for.
The Hunter tackles the insect demon, since it fell down, and tries to kill it with bare hands and demonic strength, while Reggie ducks a demon diving for him, resulting in the attacker going out the window.
That leaves three demons still in the room, who are busy trying to sneak out, since their boss is headless, on the floor.
Reggie offers the three a rare chance to survive, if one of them will lead him to Silver Dollar's money stash (his client needs the cash for those medical bills).
All three volunteer. Reggie needs only one, so he tells them to sort it out among themselves and they scuffle for dominance, fighting for the chance to stay in the human world a little longer.
Meanwhile, the Hunter can't hurt the demon, because its armor is too thick! It gets up with her latched onto its knee, which she's hammers with her fists, trying to bust the kneecap. Having failed to harm her with punches and kicks, due to the protective spell surrounding her, it tries to bite her.
She looks up, sees the open mouth and Reggie's stolen pistol appears in her hands! She fires three shots into the unarmored interior of its mouth!
The brute falls over, badly hurt, but not killed, so the Hunter fires two more shots in each eye, finishing it off.
The scuffling demons finish sorting out the pecking order, so Reggie shoots the losers, promising the winner he won't kill them if they leads the way to Silver Dollar's money.
Reggie takes a moment to call HQ, using code phrases based on 1920's slang to arrange for a cleanup crew and inform them he's headed out. The codes are necessary, because telephone operators of the time were notorious for eavesdropping.
Before they leave, the demon that went out the window attacks, flying in the window. The Hunter uses the last round in the pistol she stole from Reggie to put it down, so Reggie gives her a full box of ammunition.
The captured demon takes them to Silver Dollar's brothel, which is full of demon prostitutes, most of whom run away.
He leads them to the main office and the money safe.
Reggie asks the Hunter to "do the honors" and the demon protests about the fact they had a deal.
Reggie reminds their prisoner the deal was that Reggie wouldn't kill them, having never said anything about the girl not killing them.
The Hunter kills the demon and smashes the safe open, before going out to get the demonic prostitutes.
The cash Reggie's client needs is delivered in the morning, while Reggie takes a little for expenses and the rest is given to the Order of Ash and Smoke, to fund their war on demon-kind.
Chapter 4: Lunar Night
The Hunter pauses the recall of happy memories with sadness, because she can't think about Reggie without pain. She's never really dealt with her feelings, but looking up at the Earth, she's surprised she has no issue with being on the moon.
It turns out that life energy from the Earth pools on the moon during the lunar night.
As she considers how much she loved Reggie and how wrong she'd been about how unstoppable he was (he died off-screen at the beginning of the series), she finds her mind drawn to the day he died.
Meanwhile, a demon races across the surface of the moon, collecting the pooling life energy to sustain himself.
He's been there for about three-thousand years, as a result of a failed mission to establish a demon outpost on the moon.
They used the moon energy to open a portal, but it didn't last very long, stranding them there. The demon ate his men to survive, then adapted to living off the energy pooling on the moon.
The demon has become little more than a black mist that senses the disturbance in the life energy field produced by the Hunter and rushes toward her.
He hopes to hitch a ride off the moon, just like it tried with Apollo 17, the astronauts of which ran away from him, then left the moon, never to return.
He crests a hill and sees the Hunter from behind, considering himself lucky she's facing away from him.
Chapter 5: The Hounds
It's 1942 and the Hunter now looks fifteen years old. She's wearing a long, black coat that was a gift from Reggie to mark twenty years as partners.
Reggie and the Hunter are on their last case together, a kidnapping. The Hunter approaches an old house with a suitcase full of money, intending to use it as a trap to make an opportunity for a rescue.
There's some argument from the thugs in the front yard, then she's allowed in, to meet Otto Vogerath, the demon-monster that kidnapped the client's daughter.
Vogerath is the Hunter's demonic arch-nemesis, though she didn't know that at the time.
He arranged the meeting as part of his overall plans, which are explained in previous books. His goal for the day is testing some magic he thinks will allow his minions to get past the spell protecting the Hunter from harm.
He admits to violating the kidnapped girl until he got bored, followed by eating her. The Hunter tries to shoot him, but he dodges dang fast (rattlesnake speed).
Vogerath is surrounded by hell hounds, which are juvenile demons (imps), summoned into the bodies of rottweilers, making them more vicious and stronger than ever. They're also atypically loyal for demons, which is the reason he used to favor them.
He orders, "Get her!"
The hounds rush the Hunter, but instead of meeting their doom by altered probability, they're cooked alive. Annmarie, the Hunter's mother, was a powerful fire witch in life and now lives on as a protective spell surrounding the Hunter. With probability magic blocked, she uses her old standby: high-intensity fire magic.
This feat is all the more spectacular, because hell hounds are normally quite resistant to heat and fire.
Three hounds die on the spot, two are scorched and one is blinded by its eyeballs getting fried.
The blind one seeks help from Vogerath, who kicks the injured hound in the face and reminds it of its orders. The hound is angry and lays into Vogerath with its teeth, grabbing him by the ankle, only to shake him back and forth by it!
The Hunter laughs at this so hard, she doesn't even try to kill them and lets the other hounds escape into the back yard, which is fenced.
The thugs from the front yard burst in, so the hunter crushes the guns of the two humans, while the others try to shoot her, resulting in their weapons melting!
She shoots the demons and leaves the terrified humans alone, then sneaks past the hound tearing his master to shreds, to deal with the others.
She finds them stupidly milling around and concludes dogs never were that bright, shooting them to make sure they harm no one.
She's about to end the demon and his not-so-loyal hound, only to hear Reggie shout, "Not today, boys!"
She forgets the demon and rushes to one side of the house, leaping to see over the fence, while her partner takes on too many thugs!
The Hunter leaps to his aid, going from the back yard to the sidewalk in a single bound, but she isn't fast enough and Reggie is shot in the chest, putting a pair of holes in one of his lungs!
The Hunter's eyes glow blue and she loses herself to a berserk rage, blacking out!
When she comes to her senses, the demons are all dead and their blood flows through the street, while the human thugs run away.
This isn't explained in the novel, but the Hunter lost her marbles from seeing her best friend shot and her inner demon managed to exert greater influence over her than ever before.
That's the first hint of the struggle for dominance with her inner demon/second personality in this novel, which was a major plot element of the previous two stories.
Looking at Reggie, she wishes she'd learned first aid, but puts pressure on his wound, to slow the bleeding.
Reggie pushes her hands away and says, "Too late", because he knows he's a goner.
She tries to express herself, but the curse gets in the way, though Reggie seems to understand, saying, "I…love…you…too."
Reggie dies and the Hunter yowls like a cat for nearly two minutes straight, at a volume that leaves the neighbors terrified.
She breathes and looks at her blood-soaked hands, then yowls even louder and longer, causing the neighbors to vow they're moving in the morning.
The Hunter sees cop cars crest a hill and bolts, because she really hates cops, leaving only a trail of tears in her wake.
After running for a long time, she pauses to discard her new coat, because the sleeves are soaked in Reggie's blood and she doesn't ever want to see it again, first using it to wipe her hands clean.
Within a few weeks, she starts wearing gloves all the time, because every time she looks at her bare hands, she sees Reggie's blood, settling on a pair of finger-less, black opera gloves.
The observant reader of the previous books will note that she's almost never been seen without a pair of gloves and this explains why.
Switching back to the perspective of Vogerath, he limps away, having just finished off his hound. He's flees the scene for similar reasons, not wanting to deal with the complication of police.
As he walks into the night, he vows, "No more hounds!"
This explains why we never see him use hell hounds again, despite the fact he used to heavily favor them for minions.
Chapter 6: Two's Company
With Reggie's story complete, the Hunter realizes she never mourned him properly, because she stuffed her feelings and moved on with a new detective, like one might buy a kitten immediately after losing a much-loved cat. It wasn't healthy and she's finally ready to face that fact.
Just when she's starting to deal with the facts and consider how what she's learned applies to Simmons, she hears a strange voice in her mind, asking for help.
She turns and looks on the moon demon, unsure what it is. She initially tries sniffing it, only to remember there's no air on the moon.
She uses the demon-locator spell she's seen Verda use many times, reasoning that even with her lack of skill for witch magic, she should be able to locate a demon that's right in front of her.
She forms a necklace with a quartz crystal on the end from solid shadow and tries the spell out.
Amusingly enough, the necklace is initially drawn like a magnet to her own body, the closest demon.
She tries again, making allowances for her own presence, and the necklace is drawn to the moon demon.
Having confirmed the creature is a demon, she leaps to the attack, accidentally launching herself into the sky, because she's very strong and the moon's gravity is weak.
She tumbles for a while, trying a few forms of magic to slow herself down, before settling on air magic, using it like a set of thrusters in her hands and feet, like Iron Man.
The demon keeps up with her the whole time, still asking for help she refuses to give, though it does start making threats.
She hurls her sword at it, but nothing happens. Realizing its ghost-like nature, she reasons it may be immune to the very physical things the living spell protecting her can do.
She tries burning it with ultraviolet flame, her unique combination of witch fire and demon magic, but it has no effect.
In the end, she decides to deal with it like an elemental spirit.
She ends her tumble through the sky with a shadow-step to the surface, then shoots off a bunch of fire magic, like fireworks, to draw the demon to her new location, while she braces to mentally attack it, though she needs it to speak to her telepathically to make her plan work!
The demon attacks and bites her, saying how tasty her blood is, though it doesn't finish the sentence, because the Hunter hauls it inside her subconscious mind.
Inside, we switch to the demon's perspective, who hears a girl's voice calling out in a creepy fashion as he runs around the shadowed void that represents the Hunter's mind.
After playing with the demon for a little bit, the Hunter and her other personality, the Eighth Deadly Sin, Willful Insanity, corner the demon.
Insanity holds it, while the Hunter kills it with her wakizashi.
Back in the real world, the demon explodes into mist that's drawn away by the vacuum of space, leaving a two-inch hole in her space suit!
She desperately tries to patch it with magic, while her air and blood vent into space, incidentally sending her rolling around the landscape like a spinning flower firework! Her patch fails and her magic clothes can't fix it fast enough!
She'd shadow-step away, but with her mind in turmoil, that could send her anywhere in the universe.
In the end, she opts to enter the pocket dimension inside her top hat, which is currently in the shape of her space helmet.
Her body and clothes vanish as a black mist that flows into her helmet, while it turns back to it's usual form.
The hat ends up rolling for a while, before coming to a stop.
Chapter 7: Three's a Crowd
The hunter spends a short time in her hat, healing from her injury, while her little friend, the kitten demon Mashu'ra, and the ghost of her father, Jake Watson, ask why she ran away from home.
She wanted to be alone, which she clearly won't get in her hat, so she departs as soon as she's able.
Insanity steps from the shadows at the edge of the hat's interior and tells them, "She’s just trying to think things through. If you fools had left her alone, she could have have done that here, but you had to go and make demands of her time and energy."
They both apologize.
This chapter isn't over, but I ran out of time on Friday, so I'll continue on Monday.
Future Plans
Monday will start with a chapter back at the New York City HQ for the Order of Ash and Smoke, where the head of the Order, Verda, will end up dealing with an intruder. As the Order's best witch, she takes them on with magic.
Wrath, one of the seven arch-demons, will break in, smash his way through every defense the Ashen Blades can muster, even besting Verda in a magical duel, leaving her so exhausted, she passes out. Ironically, he doesn't finish anyone off, because he doesn't care about the Ashen Blades or the war with humanity anymore.
He'll break into the room that houses Lust (another arch-demon), who was captured in the previous book. He wants advice on romance, because he's infatuated with the Hunter, who was the first to ever beat him in a fair fight.
She hears his story (taking twenty to thirty minutes) and requests being freed from her cell in exchange for her advice.
Wrath will agree, just as Verda comes to and charges into the room, hitting the demon with every bit of energy she can muster for a telekinetic punch based on air magic, probably with the backup of Lara (the wife of Simmons). Wrath will end up in a decaying, elliptical orbit for a fair chunk of the book, unable to get himself down. I'll have to do some research on orbital periods to get the timing right, but I think his orbit will take him past the moon, for something akin to a gravitational slingshot back to Earth.
Meanwhile, Lust will be moved to a location that hasn't been compromised.
Eventually, Wrath will hit the atmosphere like a shooting star (though totally unharmed) and seek out Lust, because he still needs her advice.
Tags: writing, work-in-progress, ashen-blades