Toying with Destiny

 CHAPTER ONE

TWO YEARS LATER:

As I sat behind the tombstone it occurred to me that I spend far too much time in graveyards.  Given the fact that demons were drawn to places such as this, in order to feed off the energy of the poor souls buried in such locations, it would make a hell of a lot more sense to avoid them.  After all, my job was to protect the living, not to seek out demons who fed off of dead souls.  Once again, however, I found myself on demon territory without a treaty.  If this kept up, I was going to have to seriously start questioning my sanity and that was not a good sign for a Sensitive.

The fact that I was here trying to find out who was responsible for a series of zombie raisings might justify the risk, but  that didn't mean I had to be happy about the fact that I'd been sitting here for almost five hours and had yet to see anything other than the fog.  Thinking that it might be time to give up for the night, I stood, stretched, and then bent to pick up my bag.  Standing back up, I froze as I heard the first unexplained noise of the night.  I looked my left, where the noise had come from, and saw blurry figures in the distance.  Hurriedly bentding over, I began to make my way quietly in that direction, being careful to stay behind cover as much as possible.  Maybe the tip I'd recieved about this location was going to pay off after all.

Once I got close enough to make out the figures, I crouched among the shadows to take in the scene.  There were five hooded demons, positioned as if standing at the points of a pentagram, though there didn't appear to be one etched into the ground.  In the center of the demons stood another creature altogether.  I wasn't entirely sure, but I thought it might be a Djinn.  It was man shaped, but covered in scales.  The color of the scales was hard to make out in this light, but they seemed to be brown.  It's eyes were red and seemed to glow in the dark, like cat eyes but with a bit less reflection.  When it moved it's mouth, I distinctly saw two large fangs and I couldn't help but compare them to the fabled fangs of literary vampires, allthough I knew that real vamps were fangless.

If this was a Djinn, it was my first, and I tried to recall what little I knew about them.  I seemed to remeber that there were three distinct classifications among them based on their appearance.  This one would be a member of the second class because it vaguely resembeled a snake grown to the size and shape of a man.  I also rembered reading that they possessed magical abilities, although I wasn't exactly sure what that might mean.  Magic tended to vary greatly from species to species and I had no way of knowing just how powerful the magic of a Djinn might be without further research.

Given how little I knew about them, I couldn't begin to guess why one might be involved in the raising of zombies.  Once raised, zombies fed off of the living until they were laid back to rest.  A zombie couldn't create others of it's kind.  When they fed from a human, the human simply died.  There was no power to be gained and no new recruits with which to build an army.  The only results that I could see were bloodshed and chaos.

Suddenly the Djinn raised it's head and a forked tongue slipped through its lips.  Fearing that the creature might have caught my scent, or perhaps a hint of my power, I reached for the knife strapped to my right side.  The handle was make from the bones of a holy woman and the blade was silver mixed with bone dust from the same source.  One of the benefits of owning this knife was the fact that it could magically mask my presence as long as it was in direct contact with my skin.  Not that I would suddenly become invisible, it just made it more difficult for anyone to locate me based on scent or power.  In my line of business, where dealing with demons and other creatures with enhanced senses was an everyday activity, it came in handy.  The fact that power called to power had all to often made it difficult to get near any supernatural creature, without being discoved.  So you can see why I'd be grateful for the protection my knife offered.