As Evil Does Read online

  Once a Demon: Book Three

  As Evil Does

  P.S. Power

  Orange Cat Publishing

  Copyright 2019

  Chapter one

  Looking at the two hospital beds in front of her, where a man and a woman were screaming their heads off in eternal agony, Keeley smiled. She understood what the Federal agents with her were trying to do, which was to use guilt in order to get her to stop the never-ending pain they were undergoing. Even if the two were guilty of murder and terrorism.

  She waved at them, mainly for the sake of her current boss, Will. He loomed over everyone else in the room, being a fit six-six. It was an unconscious act for him to simply take the space he was in. It was almost as if he owned the room, even if it was a shared, semi-public space. His pale skin and suit added to the command that he added to the scenario. She looked a lot more normal, herself. At least at the moment. That was a choice on her part, naturally.

  They both had dark hair. Even the DHS agents with them did, by some coincidence. Though Agent Benning, the man in charge, was balding and going gray at the sides. He was about fifty, so managed to perform a dour and slightly annoyed father act pretty well. Not perfectly, but she didn’t really expect that from a regular Human.

  The man cleared his throat, adding a stuffy flare to the whole thing.

  “We can’t question them, right now. We saw what you did, on the footage, but no one here can undo it. We even brought in Mages for it, if you can buy that. Light shows from their fingers and everything, so I guess that’s real. Only it didn’t work. The last one we brought in told us to go fuck ourselves and walked out, as soon as he looked at them for a second. Do you know why that is, exactly? The Mage wouldn’t explain. He just kind of ran, actually.” The man seemed to be restraining himself from yelling.

  A lot of that, clearly, was that the lovely screams from the two terrorists in the beds was incredibly annoying. For him at least. Keeley kind of liked it, herself. That was a bit odd, but she knew it was true. She was, in a small way, reveling in their pain. A thing she was causing.

  Her hand still out, since she’d been getting ready to speak before the agent had rudely jumped in, Keeley nodded and glanced at Will Dern again.

  “These are the two terrorists that Ambassador Gillhall and myself apprehended last night.” That story was a thing her boss understood. He’d seen the footage from the attack himself, after all. It had been on the news. Nationally. Even with a team getting there while it was happening, eight people had ended up dying in the mass shooting attack. It had been seven the night before, but one of the people that had been hit had died in surgery about three hours before.

  Looking at the writhing pair, who were slaves of hers now, she rolled her eyes. That was to make herself seem slightly petulant to the agents with her. It was done subtly, so that Will didn’t have to call her on it. He wouldn’t later, either, even if it was going to bug the hell out of the two men they were with. A thing which, she knew, wasn’t really fair. They were just trying to do their job and didn’t know how to cope with her continuing torture of the two in the beds.

  “Be quiet.” The sudden silence descended on the hospital room instantly. The screams stopped. Leaving an echo of their distress in the air, since the listeners had grown used to it already. The writhing didn’t. She’d ordered them to both suffer, without dying. They had to keep doing it until she let them stop. It was part of being a slave, like each of them was. Sighing, knowing it was where the conversation was going anyway, she wrinkled her nose. Making herself seem a bit put upon. As if not torturing terrorists was a big deal to her, personally. “The pain is ended. For now. You’ll tell both of these men, and anyone else who speaks to you, the truth. You’ll hold nothing back.” She didn't ask if they understood. They didn’t get to be confused when she spoke.

  It was what being her slave meant, in part.

  Will nodded at her.

  “That should do it. Well, if you gentlemen don’t have anything more for us? We have some matters to look into at the office.” That was in Nevada. They were currently in California, which could make it seem like they had at least a plane to catch. That wasn’t the truth, but it was logical to assume, if you didn't know that line travel was an option. Which the agents really didn’t. At least not in a way that they’d think of it being something useful to anyone they knew or met.

  Benning rolled his eyes, doing it nearly as well as Keeley had. That was impressive actually. Enough that she knocked her opinion of him up a notch.

  “We’re supposed to just ignore the fact that you publicly tortured two people? That’s illegal on a level that… Really, I should probably arrest you, here and now.”

  In fact, he’d been told to do exactly that, by his own people. That had come from the very top, the orders coming in as he and his partner, Agent Merick had left the office an hour before. For the moment they were both pretending they hadn’t noticed it.

  Mainly because Keeley had pretty much ended the ongoing terror attack by herself, the night before. They didn’t know how she’d done it, since there had been no cameras in the restaurant being attacked, but everyone that had lived had mentioned that part to them. That a woman came and made the shooting stop. Using force of a rather physical nature.

  Plus, blood thirsty or not, seeing the Islamic Terrorists screaming in pain had played really well on television. At least in certain circles. Only the Moms of America and the Terror-Left had protested, so far. The Progressives, as they liked to call themselves, doing it because they knew that the people on the beds could have easily been them. Or might be, in the coming years. When it was their turn to kill innocent people, they really didn't want endless torture to be an option on the table for their punishments.

  The first group had done it just because they weren’t evil. They didn’t take pleasure in others pain. At least they managed not to advertise it in public, if they did. Good people were like that, she didn’t doubt. In fact, she knew it to be the truth, having read enough of their minds to get the idea.

  Keeley shrugged.

  “Tell these nice men that you weren’t really in pain and that you were just screaming for fun.”

  Both of the slaves, who were true believers in their imaginary faith, nodded then.

  The man spoke. His accent showed him as being from California, even if he looked right for being middle eastern.

  “That’s right. We like to scream like that. It’s entertaining.” The smile on his face sold the lie well enough.

  The woman, who had splints on her arms and legs, those having been well and truly broken, echoed the basic idea.

  “Yes. There was no pain.” It sounded like she truly believed it.

  Because she simply did.

  The woman, unlike what one might have thought about a jihadi in the United States, was a decently attractive white woman. The thin and fit kind who normally wouldn’t have been involved in mass murder at all. It might not have been kind to say, at least in the PC world that had come up in recent years, but the truth was that attractive women, and to a lesser extent, men, didn’t have to work very hard in life at all. The idea of throwing their cushy position of being adored and cared for away over mere religion wasn’t a thing that most of them would have even considered.

  This one had. It was her own choice, even. Not because of her husband pressuring her or anything like that, either. No, it was strictly due to her hatred of white people, even if she couldn’t admit that to herself, yet. She’d claimed, even in her own mind, that it was all about her abiding love of her faith that she took lethal action. A thing that Keeley knew had never been true at all. Mind reading was handy when it came to things like that.

  The woman was, at best, a middling adherent to Islam.


  The man next to her, in the other bed, was far more faithful than she was. Without his wife having pushed him into what they’d done, along with her now dead brother, he wouldn’t have done it at all. Especially if it had just been because his woman was kind of a psychopath. One with an irrational hatred of people due to their skin color. That idea ran counter to Islam, after all. Race wasn’t supposed to be a thing to them. Their only criteria of worth being that a person, or even a being, believed as they did. If you followed Islam faithfully, you were good, at least under that theory.

  For some reason Agent Benning didn’t seem to be buying the sudden calm and polite behavior from the bed ridden terrorists. That probably meant he was a bit brighter than he looked. Not that Keeley was judging him that way. He was cute, in an average and older way. Easily interesting enough to spend some time with in bed, if the option ever opened up for them.

  Shaking his head, the man grimaced.

  “This is… Fine. So we can’t take you in. Not if you can make people do things like this. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to agree not to torture anyone else like this again?”

  She really wasn’t. Even trying to be a good, or at least a better, person, Keeley wasn’t going to give up a tool like torture just to make a random public servant feel better. Then again, she was an ex-Greater Demon. She could lie and not feel bad about it at all. It was easier than fighting at the moment, so she simply nodded.

  “I was… Let’s just say, a bit worked up last night? They’d attacked my people. Friends of mine, as well as the public… For my people that alone would be enough to get a reaction, like that. The moment I was in that room, it was a lot like they were trying to kill my own family. So I responded in a way that would warn others not to do the same thing. I can refrain from doing that, for now. Unless you need my services that way, in the future?” She meant to torture terrorists, but gently gestured at the two on the bed. “We can even do it peacefully, if you wish. More peacefully, at least. They’ll tell you everything now. Honestly and without coercion.”

  At least any sort that would show up in court documents. They’d even hold to their story that they’d been screaming for their own amusement. Even if berated and ordered under threat of death to say something different.

  The older Agent growled a bit. He didn't really mean it. What was coming off of him was, interestingly, a grudging respect, instead of the mild anger he was showing.

  “Right. I hate this spooky shit, you know that? Normally we’d try and pass this off to the Coalition of Nations, but, no, we can’t do that, this time. Not that it wouldn’t be nice. Terrorists, Human ones, aren’t inside your charter, are they?”

  Will chuckled a bit. It was a dark thing. Deep in tone and almost menacing.

  “Not so much. Still, we had people able and willing to stop an active shooting, who could respond faster than the local police could. You aren’t wrong, it isn’t our job to do that. It’s yours. You just didn’t have the people in the right place to do anything at the time.” The words could have seemed condescending, mean or even like he was flashing them his massive dick, for measuring purposes.

  It didn’t come across that way. It was just the man from Division Six explaining the facts. They dealt with the world in a different fashion and that meant, from time to time that they had resources that the Federal government didn’t.

  A situation that neither of the DHS agents loved to hear about.

  The slightly younger dark-haired man, who was average in almost every way, nodded. Seeming to be slightly put out by having to do it.

  “That’s true. If we have to call on you to do things like this in the future, you can at least keep the obvious torture off camera? Not that I hated that part, myself. It’s illegal as all fuck, so we can’t be seen to allow it. As it is, we’re all going to catch flak from what you did last night. Some. Not that much, I bet.”

  The other agent shook his head then.

  “We need to separate these two, now that they can speak. We don’t want them to plan anything. They shouldn’t have been in the same room to begin with. If they hadn’t been screaming the whole time we wouldn’t have had the hospital insisting they were put down here on the far side, away from everyone else. You might want to lay low for a while, Thomson. Even if we don’t take you in now, even if no one could really take you in, that doesn’t mean there won’t be a warrant for it.”

  There wasn’t one yet, just an order to pick her up for standard questioning. A thing that wasn’t going to work, unless she went along with them willingly. Which, given everything, the DHS men didn’t honestly understand to be the case.

  Will Dern, her coworker, did. Then, he knew her, after a fashion. Who she was and what she could do, if pressed. Not that the government really had the resources for that, most days. If they came at her, they’d probably either die or end up slaves. Which were both things that a good Wise One wouldn’t allow to happen. At least she figured that to be the case.

  He just nodded at the men. Again, even if it was a normal movement, the whole thing came out as powerful and imposing. It meant Will was suddenly in charge of the room he was in.

  “Understood. You have my contact information.” That wasn’t a question, since sharing that kind of thing had taken place nearly twenty minutes before. Standing in the hallway, outside the room with all the wonderful screaming in it. They’d both walked up with cards in their hands, since, even lacking badges, it gave Division Six an air of being legitimate.

  Keeley smiled at the men, more or less meaning it and then walked from the room. That was mainly about preventing herself from simply taking the two other men as slaves, to prevent them from getting ideas about trying to make her life more difficult. She didn't even use any mind control techniques on them. Not other than the part where they were probably looking at her cute rear end as she did it. That was designed to get attention after all. The rest of her was cute enough, but not special. Her butt was nearly perfect. It would have an influence on Human men, even if the ones in the room hadn’t all been straight. Since they all were, that meant everything went silent for about ten seconds, without anyone realizing why, exactly. Except for her.

  In the hallway, using just a bit of magic and a lot more skill than she would have even a month before, Keeley opened a rift directly between the spaces of the hospital in California and the Division Six offices in Sparks. Nevada wasn’t that far away, if you were essentially linking the two places like she was doing at the moment. The warping of space was done delicately, for once. A lot like how Zack, the Line Walker, did such things. Most of her kind simply popped a hole in space using brute force and then shoved themselves along the lines.

  She was skipping that totally, so that there would be no walking or skirting the edge of the world in the silver lands, making what she was doing a whole lot faster. It was, more or less, teleportation. Taking Will by the arm she pulled on him a bit, trying not to snap about what was going on. The man hopped into the air in time, allowing him to skip through space easily. That wasn’t because she was being professional. Will Dern was simply that good at adapting to new things. She did the rest of the work, landing them in a closet. At the end of their office space’s single hallway.

  It was where they normally came in, being their de-facto transport room, so the big fellow was able to step forward and almost instantly turn the brass colored handle, the brown door opening smoothly. Quickly as well.

  Then the large man looked at her and snorted. His face looked just a bit annoyed.

  “That, was bullshit. They can’t prove anything. They just want to use us as a shield, so they won’t be blamed for human rights abuses. Which means that they might just be focused on you, for a while. The fact that the terrorists are denying that they’d been tortured… Well, that will help, as long as they keep doing it.”

  Which was all true.

  Keeley relaxed, using just a bit of magic to create a feeling of calm and collected reason. Most of what she was
doing was down to simply holding the concept of what she wanted very clearly in her mind for a moment. The power used just made that part, the concept, a tiny bit stronger. The mild annoyance from the moment before fading away, totally.

  Keeley let her nose wrinkle, not really meaning it at the moment. The move was cute, without being truly manipulative. Not that she didn’t kind of want to get Will into bed. It wasn’t time for that.

  “True. There was an order to pick me up for questioning, already. I got that from Benning. The fact is that we aren’t a government operation, which means that the DHS doesn’t really know what to do. They want to back us, right now. Illegal torture in the mix or not. The terrorists being seen screaming in pain like that on nationwide television will probably stop the next five attacks. That was my point, when I set that up, by the way. If we could show something similar for what happens after that, for… Call it the next two terror events? If we do that, then we probably won’t have a terror attack in the U.S. for twenty or thirty years.” That wasn’t just her projecting outward, either.

  It was a known thing. A fact that everyone kind of understood on some level. One that even Will nodded about, without having to really consider deeply, as they moved down the tiled hallway toward their offices. They each had a space there in Deep Six. His room was bigger, since he was in charge. Keeley’s was tiny compared to that, but she was the only Agent there who had her own space. The rest had to share. Neither of them were anything to write home about, being meant originally for minor embassy functionaries, not anything more impressive.

  They could have had more room, if they wanted or needed it. The truth was, that day, they simply didn’t. They had thirty-four people in training at the moment. Most of them were something other than Human.

  There had been more, but several of them had been recalled or quit, in the night. Division Six wasn’t supposed to be the CIA or FBI. They weren’t designed or trained to go in and fight like they had the night before. Some of them hadn’t waited to find out that Keeley had been acting on her own. Along with her boyfriend, Ravi.