a rush of sadness, and realized that he was trying to drive me to despair. He was persistent, trying to drive negative feelings into my head. Elsa appeared at my side.
“That’s a demon, Olivia. Can you feel him trying to drive a wedge through your soul? Block him out.”
Once again, I practiced using my breath to lower a blind over my mind’s eye and closed off my nervous system. Soon, I began to feel like myself again. The demon turned away from us and looked out the window.
“He gave up very easily,” I said.
“He probably knew he had no chance with you,” was Elsa’s reply. “Demons, in general, are a lazy lot and do not like to work hard. I think he knew better than to test your will.”
“Are they always grey?” I asked as we made our way out of the train station.
“Always. You must have a soul, or some connection to humanity, to give off an aura. Remember that. Grey is the absence of color. As servants of the devil, they have no humanity left inside them, and therefore give off no color.”
“Wow. That is scary. What would have happened if he’d succeeded?”
“You would have left the train feeling like your life was not worth living,” Elsa said ruefully. “Demons are responsible for a lot of the suicides you read about that happen in public—the stories about people who jump into the path of a moving train, or leap from the Golden Gate Bridge. Their deaths are often incomprehensible to the people who know them. Now you know the reason for their actions.”
I shuddered slightly as we rode the escalator up from the bowels of the subterranean train station, trying to shake off the gloom of the demon and Elsa’s story. Would that have been my fate, too, had Elsa not appeared? Would I have been doomed to toss myself over a bridge when Stoner was done with me? I didn’t want to know.
We exited the station at 16th and Mission. From there, we moved west, walking through the crowds on Valencia Street. There were dozens upon dozens of bodies moving through the neighborhood. I held still, allowing myself to feel the energy of the people passing by.
“Don’t lock on to it or try to absorb it, let it move past you as if you were browsing titles in a book store,” Elsa said.
If I had been in a bookstore, the floor would have been a mess. It felt as if I was bumping into everyone who passed. A jolt here, a jolt there, I was being brushed by anger, anxiety, sexual longing, happiness and true love. Each time someone passed, they tickled my senses. I began to regulate it, as if searching a radio by turning a dial. I concentrated, focusing my mind to pull in from one person but not the next. A rainbow of colors passed behind my eyes, and I was enjoying my newfound skills until something began pressing on my skull again.
I looked up, trying to find the source of the pain and found myself staring into the dark green eyes of a man with long hair and a nose ring, whose piercing gaze seemed to be picking at my head. It was a very specific kind of pressure, but it came with not a trace of emotion.
“Elsa that man over there is trying to force his way into my head.”
“Vampire,” was all she said.
“Vampire,” I replied. “In the Mission?”
“Especially in the Mission,” she said.
“He is picking at my skull like a woodpecker.”
“Make him stop.”
I closed my eyes and forcefully shut him out. He smiled, saluting me with two fingers as he passed.
“He doesn’t give off any emotion,” I said as he passed. “Only that pecking sensation.”
Elsa laughed. “Vampires don’t feel emotions the way humans do. It has something to do with the absence of a beating heart. If you ever get to know a vampire well, you will learn to read their feelings more closely.”
“Wow, a vampire and a demon, all in the last hour in San Francisco,” I said, shaking my head. “I never imagined it was possible.”
“And now?” Elsa asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said honestly. “But I do know that everything I thought I knew has changed.”
“That is a good beginning,” Elsa said, putting her hand on my arm. “Let’s go find a place to meet Lily for dinner.”
We settled on Bar Tartine, a quaint bistro on Valencia Street. Lily arrived at about 5:30 looking exhausted. Seeing her made me