Sword Bearer (Return of the Dragons 1)

There was another scream, and I struck again, and this time I felt the demon give way, and I turned, and she lay there, steaming, on the ground, her body losing shape, melting.

Her face was solid, though, and for a moment, beautiful.

She looked at me and said one word: Herr. Then, with a flex of a blue claw, she was gone forever.

I rushed to my mother, and crouched beside her bed, put my ear to her mouth to listen. I listened for her breath in the room gone silent.

“Mother!”

But she didn’t move. Her face was motionless, her eyes shut. I turned to my father, and listened there too.

“Father!”

The demons were gone, now. So what was wrong with them? Why wouldn’t they wake up? I kicked out and smashed my foot into the wall. Bad idea.

I bit my tongue to avoid crying out in pain.

That was when Kara put her hand on my back.

For the first time, I didn’t want her to touch me. I brushed her hand away, but she was insistent. She put it again on my shoulder.

“Anders.”

“What?”

“They’re still alive, but they’re hexed, Anders. There’s nothing we can do now.”

“There must be something. If I could just talk to them for a few minutes. My father, he opened his eyes, before, and talked to me.”

Kara shook her head. “That wasn’t your father, you do realize that, don’t you Anders?”

I shook my head. “I need to talk to them, just one last time.”

Kara frowned. “We can’t talk to them now. But at least they are free of demons.”

Woltan shook his head then. “They’re not free of demons. Just free of major ones. Look at them both with your third eye.”

I felt like telling Woltan where he could look with his third eye. It wasn’t his parents he was talking about. But I closed my two eyes and looked with my third anyway.

Woltan glowed a bright, clean orange, Kara a bright clean yellow, Kalle behind her was yellow with a circle of orange around him. I looked down at myself glowing a dark orange, the color extending into my sword, with just a small yellow spot where Carolina must be.

I looked at my father, then. He had a faint orange glow about him; he looked no more than half alive. But there was something else, and I tried to capture it. There was some other color in him, or on him, and then I saw it.

I gasped.

Little red points of light covered my father’s skin. There must have been hundreds of them.

I moved forward to look at one with my two eyes, and it looked like a pimple. I looked closer, probing with my third eye, and saw, just under the skin, what looked like a tiny insect. A tiny red demon insect, buried just under the skin.

Talk about skin problems.

I looked at my mother, and saw the same thing. They were both infested, covered with demon pimples.

It was disgusting.

I spat on the floor. “Are they dangerous?”

Woltan nodded. “They certainly aren’t helping them any. I’ve read about them, but never seen any. These are demon spawn, demons but a few days old. As they grow they will feed, sucking the blood and life force of their hosts. What looks like a pimple now will soon be the size of a boil if left there to grow. If that weren’t enough, they let dark wizards track their victims. We need to get rid of them, now.”