No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,59

ta flash me a grin. “Only if you get caught AWOL. No, I can cover for you. Come on. No guns. Too loud.”

I rolled outta my blankets and onto my feet, leavin’ the duty weapon behind and collecting a couple knives instead. My pack was only inches away, so I grabbed it too, figuring we’d get some use out of the rations if we were gonna be up all night. Danny slipped through the other sleeping soldiers like they weren’t even there, an’ I tried not to kick anybody hard enough to wake ‘em up as I followed him.

There wasn’t much distance between camp and cold raw wilderness. I looked up again, tryin’ to orient myself by the stars, but I still couldn’t see ‘em. Once we were well outta camp I stopped to take a better look, then exhaled a steamy breath into cold air. “Danny, where’re the stars?”

“That’s what I need you for.”

“To bring the stars back?”

“To kill the demon that’s hiding them.”

“Dan, there ain’t—there ain’t no such thing as demons.” I stuttered halfway through ‘cause I was thinkin’ of Dandy Andy and all of a sudden wasn’t so sure of myself. “What kinda demon?”

“It’s called—” He looked at me and sighed. “Never mind, you couldn’t say it anyway. A sky demon. It wants to eat the stars, and it starts by trying to make people forget them. It hides them under a blanket of its hair. Once they’re hidden, once people begin to forget, the smallest stars become vulnerable, and—”

“Stars are giant gas balls in the sky, Dan. You can’t eat ‘em.”

“Yeah? Can you not hide them in a clear night sky, either?”

I said a word my Ma didn’t think I should know and rubbed my eyes, hoping I’d see stars again when I was done. But I knew I wouldn’t, and I was right. “Sure, buddy. How do we kill a sky demon that eats stars?”

“Cut off its head so the stars can fly back out.”

“I shoulda guessed.”

Dan looked surprised and I muttered, “I was joking, Danny. That was a joke. All right, how do we find this thing?”

He switched on a flashlight. “Like this.”

Seemed like the whole world lit up, compared to the darkness of a starless night. I reared back, squinting. “Damn, that’s bright.”

“It has to be to make it think it’s a star to eat.”

I s’posed he had a point. We huddled together, back to back, waiting in the cold night air. When I got tired of counting the breaths I could see, I said, “Why me?”

“Because you didn’t go out after the crying demon, and because you listened when I told Dandy Andy to watch himself. And your eyes are grey.”

“What’s that gotta do with it?”

“Silver eyes see ghosts.”

“Oh, yeah, sure, a’course. Forgot about that. What the hell, Danny.”

I felt him shrug. “It’s what my mother used to say. I don’t know if it’s a Korean superstition or if it was just her own because her grandfather had silver eyes. But it can’t hurt to have silver eyes along with me on this.”

“There can’t be a lotta folks in Korea with grey eyes.”

“There aren’t. Now shut up. The demon is attracted to light, not noise.”

I shut up, then swung my pack around to dig out some rations, and pulled them and a flashlight out of the bag. “Hungry? Hell, I got a flashlight in here too. Should I turn it on?”

“Starving,” Danny hissed, “but look. Slowly.”

Just like that, I wasn’t hungry anymore. My skin got cold, not from nerves and not from the air being freezing, but more like a warning of something creepy going on. I peered over Danny’s shoulder.

For a second I thought hell, if that was a demon, I was all right with letting her do what she wanted. She was maybe five feet tall and Korean, ‘cept her skin was white as starlight. Her lips were blood red and her eyes were black as raven wings. Her hair was amazing, black as her eyes and dancing with a life of its own, rising up toward the sky until I couldn’t see what was hair and what was sky. Hiding the stars in a blanket of hair, Danny’d said, an’ I didn’t know how she was doing it but that’s what was going on. She was wearing a midnight blue high-collared robe with sleeves so long they trailed on the ground without leaving any kind of marks. It was wrapped around her torso by black ribbon that sparkled with