How I write: draft of chapter one

In parts one and two of this little series of mine, I explained how I generated an idea, turned that idea into the framework of a story, and then built that up into an outline.

In this part, I’m going to show you the revised draft of the first chapter, so you can see what is — and what isn’t — the same from the outline. In the next part, I’ll talk about those changes in detail and why they occurred.

Enjoy!

Chapter One

The demon was one floor above me, moving toward the north side of the governor’s mansion. It was fast and strong. I hadn’t seen it yet myself, but the account I’d gotten from the ICE agent who’d almost been possessed by the damned thing was enough to convince me it was tough, and that getting rid of it wasn’t going to be easy.

After all, that’s why I’d been called.

“Have you made contact yet?” ICE Special Agent Tony Ramos’s voice rattled into my head through my Bluetooth earpiece. Tony was the guy who’d dragged me into this with a call to my secure cell phone about an hour and a half ago.

“Not yet. Keep your pants on, Tony. I’ll keep you informed.”

“I still think you should have an agent with you.”

I sighed. “Lavernius almost got rolled by the thing, and he’s your top guy for this kind of shit. I don’t want to worry about your guys getting possessed or disemboweled while I’m trying to get rid of it. This kind of thing’s a one-man job and you know it.”

“Simmons, I really think you need–”

“How many guys did you send in with Lavernius, Tony? Tell me that.”

The silence that greeted me was all the answer I needed.

“Talk to you in a bit. Now let me do my job.”

I worked my way down the dark hallway toward the staircase at the end. ICE and the governor’s security detail had cleared most of the building with the efficiency of a bomb evacuation squad (the official cover story was a potentially dangerous gas main leak); there wasn’t anyone close to my location, including ICE agents. I preferred it that way. Ramos didn’t, but that was too damn bad. I work on my own terms or not at all, even for ICE.

Being a freelance security consultant — especially one with my unique talents — has its privileges.

I passed what I guessed were offices and conference rooms for the rank and file staff members and household workers. I saw meeting tables with papers and empty Styrofoam coffee cups scattered across them like corpses abandoned on a field of battle; the soul-sucking gray fabric of office cubicles; lots and lots of laptops; large black speakerphones; a handful of printers; and a stove-sized copier machine. Pretty much the required components of any office — government or civilian — nowadays.

I kept going until I reached the stairwell.

Up a floor and into another darkened corridor. There was an odd smell here. Not from anything people had left behind, like food that had gone bad, but from the demon. I could sense the supernaturalness of it, like the scent of ozone in the air before a storm hits. It was setting off a slight tingling sensation on my low-level ward tattoos (which had been done in clear ink so that my designs couldn’t be seen and copied by others; I’m paranoid like that). The solid silver ring on my left forefinger grew warm, letting me know I was getting closer to a Celestial being, even one as low on the ladder as a demon.

I was in a portion of the mansion used for storage. The plush carpeting, rich wallpaper patterns, and detailed trim and moldings from the floors below were missing here. This level of the mansion was plain in comparison. Not exactly shabby, but definitely lacking the finery of the other floors. The carpeting was worn, with shiny ruts visible where wheeled carts, or maybe mop buckets, had passed countless times. Scuff marks and dings showed in the drywall that never would have been permitted to remain on the public areas. And forget crown molding, chair rails, or decorative sconces.

The location charm caused the silver ring to warm to the point of being hot. It was somewhere very close. I dispelled the charm, paused, and listened.

It was being pretty goddamn quiet for a demon. Usually those things were stomping about like Godzilla on a Tokyo bender, growling, snarling, smashing shit that got in their way or smashing shit because they were too clumsy and stupid not to smash it. But this fucker was as silent as a ghost.

I wondered if Ramos was right about what was up here. Lavernius Jackson had told me in no uncertain terms that what he’d faced — and just narrowly escaped — was a demon, though he couldn’t identify the particular species.

I’d been understandably incredulous.

“It tore down my Nero Ward like it was fucking paper, man,” Lavernius had said to me at the ICE command post in the mansion’s security office. He was a wizard with lots of training in African magic and shamanistic rituals. I think he also had a master’s degree in economics. “It was fast, like a goddamn gazelle.”

“Gazelle’s don’t look much like demons,” I’d said, more to be a smart-ass than anything.

“Hey, fuck you. I know my shit, Simmons. I’ve taken down two dozen demons in my time, but I’ve never faced something like this. Never even read about anything like it.”

“The stuff they write about demons in Cosmopolitan and People isn’t all that accurate. Just a hint in case you’re thinking of broadening your reading horizons.”

“Simmons, fuck you–”

“John, stop being such a dick and help us out here,” said Ramos. “Unless you’re just stalling because you don’t know what to do, or you’re afraid to go in, in which case you can get the hell out of here right now.”

I held up my hands. “All right, all right. I’ll knock it off.”

Jackson glowered at me with a simmering anger. “What else do you want to know?”

“What’d it look like?” I figured maybe he could tell me something useful instead of making excuses for why he’d fucked up.

His gaze dropped to the floor, and he ran a big hand across the smooth brown curve of his shaved scalp. He had the sleeves of his crisp white shirt rolled up above his elbows. His arms were huge; he obviously spent a lot of time at the gym. “I don’t know. I’m pretty sure it hadn’t materialized a physical body.”

“Oh, come on, Jackson.” I tried to keep the annoyed and condescending tone out of my voice, but failed miserably. What can I say? I have no patience for this kind of crap. “You’re saying a demon with no corporeal presence ripped through a Nero Ward? They need to have bodies to be that strong, dude. Demonology 101. You really do need to read more.”

“Why don’t you cut him a little slack, Simmons?” said ICE agent Amanda Evanston. She was Ramos’s partner, a slender black woman who kept her thick hair pulled back into a tight softball-sized sphere at the back of her head.

“Because what he’s saying doesn’t make any sense, that’s why. And if you want me to take care of your little demon problem, then I need information that doesn’t sound like total bullshit.”

“Yeah, I know they need bodies,” said Jackson. “I know it doesn’t make sense. All I can tell you is what happened and what I saw.”

“I’m guessing there’s no video surveillance of it?” I asked.

Ramos shook his head. “Typical Celestial signal interference. It passed a couple of the cameras but the feeds just turned to static.”

Typical. I knew there was almost no chance of capturing a picture of it, but at least ICE had the presence of mind to check. I needed to reassure myself I wasn’t dealing with total idiots. Ramos was okay; a little stiff, and with the typical Fed arrogance they somehow hardwired into every agent when they passed out their guns and badges, but he knew his head from his ass and had some decent contacts in the Celestial and supernatural communities. He didn’t like to share intel with me, but he did from time to time, which was more than I could say for some of the other Feds I’d dealt with.

Evanston was too new for me to have a read on yet, though I was pretty sure she didn’t like me. I didn’t give a shit — not being liked by Feds wasn’t on any list of things I cared about.

Jackson had a decent reputation in the circles I ran in, but this was the first time I’d met him. I have to admit, I was disappointed at some of the amateurish bullshit he was trying to peddle. My take was that he’d panicked or otherwise totally screwed up and was spinning out a CYA story as fast as he could, not realizing I knew goddamn well that what he was saying didn’t make any sense. That made it seem like he didn’t think much of me, which in turn caused me to ride him hard and generally be an asshole to him.

But as I said, I didn’t care what Feds thought, so …

“All I saw was a kind of gray smoke with flashes of red light in it,” said Jackson. “About my size, maybe a little bigger. It rushed toward me out of one of the rooms — I didn’t catch which one — and ripped right through my Nero Ward. It might have slowed it down for a second or two, but even an Enzetti-level demon should have smashed against that ward like a fly on a windshield and bounced into next week. This thing just flowed across it and then bit its way through.”

“If it was a big blob of gray smoke, how did it bite the ward?” I asked.

“Not literally, but that’s the impression I got. I could see the smoke sort of pinch down on itself, and then the Nero began to collapse. It was the damndest thing.”

“I bet. How’d you get away from it?”

“I triggered every Celestial countermeasure I had and ran like a motherfucker.” He showed me his rings, charmed watch, and the countermeasure containers attached to his belt, which looked like flat bands of silver with intricate etchings on them.

Sure enough, every one of them was triggered. I could see the residue of the spells and charms they’d contained; it was high-grade stuff, pretty potent.

If he’d really panicked over nothing, he’d set off the supernatural equivalent of a ton or so of TNT. You never set off everything at once.

I didn’t know what to think. I wasn’t so sure anymore that he’d panicked over nothing. He might have fucked up a little, but no one who got to his level made that kind of mistake. It just didn’t happen. And the countermeasures were rigidly failsafed against any accidental triggering. You really had to want them to go off for them to trigger.

I decided something was going on that was stranger than I’d first thought.

“All right,” I said. “Let me get my gear, and then I’ll head in.”

# # #

I turned slowly in the hallway, knees flexed, muscles tensed to react at the slightest provocation, my own wards cocooning me in layers of defensive charms. I was ready for whatever might –

The sound of a bell ringing (an auditory charm that no one else could hear) let me know that the mortal danger tattoo on my right forearm had tripped.

I ducked just as the demon rushed toward me from a darkened room to my left. It crashed into my wards, which together were far stronger than Jackson’s single Nero Ward had been.

The demon latched onto the outer defensive layer, and I’ll be goddamned if it didn’t start to chew.

It looked just like what Jackson had described — a thick column of gray smoke with an almost greasy texture to it, as if I were looking at something comprised largely of suspended drops of oil. There were indeed tiny red pinpoints of light flashing inside it, like a series of malfunctioning LEDs.

It backed away from the ward and assumed a more recognizable shape — one with horns, a tail, and arms. The red pinpoints of light had clustered into the head to form two glowing eyes.

The demon smashed back into my defenses and began to not only chew on them, but tear at them with its claws.

It was using very potent power to attack. In a couple of seconds my outer ward was going to fall apart.

I didn’t have any more time to think about what the fuck this thing was or how it was doing something it should not have been able to do without a corporeal body to channel its power.

Right now I had to focus on staying alive for the next sixty seconds.

I’d ducked so fast when it lunged at me that I’d lost my balance and had to extend my hand to the floor to keep from falling over completely. I shot upright into a low crouch and released the auto-exorcism charm I kept in one of my own belt loops. (They were handy, inconspicuous, and could hold a lot of charms and spells.)

The demon flared backward in anger, momentarily losing its hold on the outer ward, which at this point was little more than tatters; even if the demon didn’t touch it again, the defensive sphere would collapse in a couple of seconds from the damage it had endured. I couldn’t afford to remake it — the rest of the defenses would have to hold until I could finish this.

“Simmons, what the fuck is going on?”

“Too busy to talk.” I clicked off the Bluetooth earpiece. The last thing I needed was to be distracted by Ramos jabbering at me.

I retreated down the hallway a few steps to give myself some space, then triggered my second — and last — auto-exorcism charm. At the same time, I invoked a powerful cage spell. I didn’t have this one pre-stored in my belt, so I had to fashion it through a spoken incantation. I dumped a lot of power into it in the hope that it would be enough to trap this thing until I could figure out how to expel it from the mortal world.

The exorcism charm hit first and seemed to hurt it. The demon’s form lost cohesion for a moment, expanding and thinning out as if a depth charge had been exploded deep inside it.

But in a few moments its smoky shape started to contract and re-coalesce. Before it regained all of its strength, I finished the cage spell incantation and hurled the magic toward it.

The spell slammed into the demon with a concussive force that knocked me back a step or two. I was startled by the strength of the impact. It wasn’t a physical collision of two material things, like a car slamming into a wall; this was a more ethereal thing, a coming together of wizard magic and Celestial essence. They were powers from vastly different sources, with one designed to contain the other, so there was going to be some violence when they struck one another. But the violence should have been contained in the spiritual and magical realms, with very little bleed-over to the physical world.

That there was enough energy to push me backward surprised the hell out of me.

I immediately had to pour more magic into the cage. The demon was thrashing about madly inside the invisible sphere of binding magic, ramming my spell with its horns and tearing at it with its claws.

The cage was strong enough that I had a minute or two to think. I crouched down and tapped my knuckles together, an odd little habit that helped me concentrate.

This was a very unusual demon, though unlike Jackson, I’d heard about this kind before: a Veticus. At least I was pretty sure that’s what it was called. It had been a while since I’d studied demon lore.

A very rare, very unusual kind of demon who could have both a physical and non-corporeal form simultaneously. The oily smoke manifestation was its body here in the mortal world, just present enough that it could draw on the added strength demons gained when they donned bodies; but it also kept a portion in the Celestial realm, which meant it could also draw power from that world, power that was usually locked off when it had a fully physical body.

Shit. This was a problem.

Expelling the demon from this world was not going to be easy. The normal exorcism charms weren’t going to work. They simply couldn’t draw enough power to push a demon this strong out of the mortal plane. It had a toehold in both realms, which gave it an unusual amount of leverage against magic trying to force it out.

“Who the hell called you here, and why?” I wondered aloud. I didn’t expect it to answer, and it didn’t. It was too busy trying to tear down the cage.

And was having some success. I had to figure out something fast.

The amount of magic I was pouring into the cage was significant. I couldn’t keep it up too much longer without draining myself to the point of exhaustion. I wouldn’t be able to work any more magic for hours, maybe days. The demon would be free, and I’d be defenseless. Not good.

“I guess I need to use one of the big guns,” I said.

I straightened from my crouch and took several deep breaths. I was going to have to speak a Word of Command. Words of Command could only be spoken in Yehennu, the Language of Creation. It was a Celestial language, used mostly by the Angelic orders or beings, but there were others that used it on occasion.

But not human beings. Ordinary mortals weren’t able to speak it. A person trying to speak Yehennu would have the same probability of success as if they tried to speak in neutrinos, or radio waves. it just wasn’t possible.

If it could be written down on some material that a human could see (which it can’t; not in this world), they wouldn’t be able to comprehend it, and there was a good chance it would irreparably fuck up their minds, like staring into the eyes of a Gorgon and the heart of the sun at the same time. There was no way you were walking away unscathed.

I was probably one of a handful of people on the planet who could speak it, thanks to my father. Not that I’d ever met my father, or wanted to. Well, I did want to meet him, but only when I had the means of killing him. But that’s a story for another time.

The problem with speaking Yehennu was the collateral damage. It couldn’t be helped. It was just too damned strong, and there was no way of dialing it down to manageable levels. It wasn’t designed to be used in the mortal world, any more than a blowtorch was designed to remove fingernail polish, or a Mack truck to thread a needle. Using Yehennu here carried all sorts of unintended consequences, most of them bad.

It also beat the shit out of me to speak even a single word. Even my bit-more-than-human body could barely take the strain.

But I was going to have to. I didn’t see another option.

The demon was almost out of the cage. A tendril of the oily smoke had broken through and was pulling itself out of the spell like a chick breaking out of its egg.

It roared at me, a deep, really pissed-off sound that shook the whole floor.

“This is probably going to hurt me a whole lot more than it’ll hurt you, so fuck you,” I said.

Then I spoke the Word of Command.

It felt like my bones were set on fire with magnesium flares. Agony at the core of my being. White light, the light of Creation itself, filled my vision. I heard a distant roar, but I couldn’t tell if it was the demon or an audible remnant of that long ago moment when all of the universes came into being. The echo of … everything.

The white light flicked off like a burst light bulb, and I blacked out.