The Demon-Eater: Hunting Shadows (Book One, Part One by Devin Graham Page A

scraped his palm against something sharp, as he was searching
for a handhold. Grumbling a curse, he slid down a foot or so,
before finding his grip again and pulling himself back into a
climb.
    Pitsville truly was a
trash pit of a city. It was a city without many of the funds for
the technological advances of other, larger—and wealthier—cities.
But it did not exactly take an advancement in technology to build a
fire and burn down its mountains of trash every so often. That was merely a lazy
disposition.
    When the hunter reached
the top of the trash heap, he slid down the other side, not even
bothering with handholds. Once again, he found himself consciously
trying not to think of what things laid just beneath the trash's
surface, which probably did even less to take his mind from
it. Glass? he
wondered, then nearly laughed at himself. He would chase a demon
through an alleyway in the slums, but place some broken glass in a
pile of trash and it would give him pause.
    The hunter reached the
bottom a moment later with the click of his heels upon the cobbled
street. He stood up straight and patted off his tailcoat and
breeches with his hands, his mouth turning downward in a frown.
Though it was dark, he suspected his suit was ruined with grime.
And...yes, there it was, a rip in his sleeve. A true shame it was,
since this was his best suit—his only nice suit, in fact. He would
have to buy a new one.
    The thing just had to make its presence
known in the middle of a flaming ball . He had actually
been having a grand time, too. However, even grand times did fall a
bit flat when the decaying body of a demon jumped from a ballroom
balcony, brandishing the severed head of the event's host amid an
audience of squeamish nobility like some moralless loon. It had
been a demon, so a lack of morality was to be expected; but had the
thing really needed to flaunt the deed?
    “ It could have killed the
man in secret,” the hunter muttered to himself, advancing slowly
through the alley, making as little sound as was possible. He had
already made quite the raucous climbing his way over the heap of
garbage. I would have found out about the
death anyway, and after the fun. But, of course, there is no such luck
for me.
    Lord Placent, the host of
the ball, had been a kind man—even for a lord and probably because
he had only been a baron, and not so corrupted by the thin air the
other nobility breathed in regularly from their towering
pedestals—and it truly was a pity he had died this night. Even
still, the death was at a flaming inconvenient time.
    The hunter's eyes slid over the gloom,
moving from shadow to shadow, searching. He could not completely
trust his eyes in the dark; every mound of blackness could be just
another pile of trash, or it could be the demon. Added to that, the
stench of the trash did well to mask the stench of decomposing
flesh, so he could never be sure if he were still a distance away
from the demon. Or standing right over top of it.
    He leaped to the side as
something to his right fell to the street with a hollow clink , a sound like a
rolling glass bottle following after. He already had his sword
drawn and pointed toward a shadow hunkered up against the
wall.
    “ Please, sir,” the figure,
shrouded by shadow, begged in a rasping voice, slowly scooting on
his backside along the wall, away from the hunter. “I don't have
nothin'. Just a beggar.”
    In the wan moonlight, the hunter
caught the beggar's eyes flashing hungrily to his pockets, then
back to the tip of the sword he had pointed toward the beggar's
throat. All thoughts of stealing vanished from the beggar's eyes in
an eye blink.
    The hunter flicked the tip of his
sword in the direction from which he had come.
    “ Leave,” he commanded in a
harsh whisper. The beggar was already scrambling toward the trash
heap the hunter had only just slid down from. The grimy,
skeleton-of-a-man seemed to care a lot less about what laid beneath
that garbage, as he pulled