Twenty Demons

 

Cult 

When Ivanka was five years old, her father took her to a private mansion on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. It wasn’t a party. It was an initiation.

The society had no official name—at least none that was ever spoken aloud—but everyone in the room knew what it was. Senators, CEOs, a couple of A-list actors whose faces you’d recognize from the cover of People magazine, even a Supreme Court justice or two over the years. Old money, new money, Hollywood money, political power. They all wore the same rings, the same subtle lapel pins, and they all answered to her father back then.

That night the little girls and boys who hadn’t gone through the ritual yet wore black. Those who had survived it wore red. The highest ranks wore white.

Ivanka was dressed in a simple black velvet dress, no patterns, no bows. Her father knelt in front of her just before they led her away.

“You will do this,” he said, voice calm, almost kind. “If you don’t, I’ll have to kill you myself. You understand that, don’t you, sweetheart?”

She nodded. Five years old, and she already understood.

They put her in a windowless room the size of a prison cell. Concrete floor, one flickering bulb overhead. In the middle of the room was a six-month-old baby wrapped in a white blanket, asleep on a metal table. Next to it lay a black-handled knife wrapped with a red silk cord.

At midnight the lights went out completely. A clock on the wall chimed twelve slow times.

She never remembered picking up the knife. She only remembered closing her eyes, the weight of the blade, and the soft sound the baby made when it woke up—just once—before it didn’t make any more sounds at all.

Four men in porcelain masks came in afterward. They worked quickly and quietly, cutting, grinding, mixing. When they left, they took the knife and left behind a stone mortar full of something that looked like raw hamburger and a silver pitcher of blood.

The door locked. It would not open again for seven days.

She cried herself to sleep the first night. By the third day the hunger was worse than the horror. On the fourth day she crawled to the mortar on her hands and knees and ate.

By the seventh day there was nothing left. Not a drop. Not a scrap.

When they finally opened the door, her father was waiting. He looked down at the empty vessels, then at his daughter’s blood-smeared face, and smiled like she’d just aced a spelling test.

“That’s my girl,” he said.

Later, in a different room lit only by black candles, they stripped her down and carved runes into her skin—back, arms, thighs, the soles of her feet. The cuts burned like fire. Five demons were called that night and bound to the fresh scars. One for every year she’d been alive.

They weren’t invisible spirits. They had weight, heat, wet mouths. They fed on flesh and blood and bone. And every year on her birthday, another one was added.

Now she was twenty. Twenty demons followed her everywhere, seen only by her. They rode in the empty seats of Ubers, stood behind her in coffee-shop lines, perched on the edge of her bathtub while she brushed her teeth.

Most of the time she kept them fed. D.C. and New York have no shortage of people who disappear without making the papers—dealers, pimps, worse. The demons liked those best.

But sometimes they got impatient.

She was on a luxury coach from D.C. to Manhattan, the kind with Wi-Fi and leather seats, sipping a complimentary sparkling water and pretending to care about the rom-com playing on the little screen. Normal people laughed around her. A guy in a Mets cap told a dad joke. A woman live-tweeted her bachelorette weekend. It felt good to pretend, just for a couple hours, that she was one of them.

Then the strongest of the demons—the one that had been with her the longest—leaned over the seat in front of her. Its face was a wet red ruin with too many teeth.

“Hungry,” it rasped, voice like meat sliding off a skewer. Its eyes, black and shining, moved across the passengers one by one.

Ivanka didn’t look up from her phone. “Not these,” she whispered. “We have rules.”

The demon hissed, a sound that made the hair on her arms stand up.

She sighed, slipped in her earbuds, and turned the music up loud enough to drown it out.

For now.

The bus rolled north on I-95, and twenty invisible things rode with her, licking their lips.

To be continued..