Gene Doucette - Blog Tour Part II

Posted by Postado por Dulce on às 17:50 | |

Gene Doucette - Blog Tour Part II

Gene Doucette - Blog Tour Part II

Posted: 17 Apr 2011 05:00 AM PDT

Below is an excerpt from author Gene Doucette's book 'Immortal.' This is he second stop at the New Author during his month long blog tour.

In which Adam contemplates a prior encounter with a demon.

Demons are not—as has been so often assumed—supernatural minions of some higher (or lower) evil deity. They are not supernatural at all, any more than pixies, iffrits, or vampires. Or me. They're just another race—or underspecies, as my unnamed nemesis called them.

This is not to say demons are in any way capable of being nice. Not at all. Demons are the worst combination of big, strong, and nasty on the planet. Worse even than dragons, because dragons were just animals and animals don't have enough self- awareness to be evil. Demons do. They understand money and they understand violence and they don't care about much else. Also, unlike dragons, they managed to avoid extinction, possibly because something deep in the cavernous recesses of most demon brains is the understanding that survival and secretiveness go hand in hand.

But keeping a low profile is only one reason demons still walk the Earth. Another is usefulness. They're the ultimate mercenaries, and really come in handy during wartime. Alexander the Great had ten demons on retainer when he conquered most of the known world. Hammurabi had twenty-five. Genghis Khan had thirty, and rumor had it he was one himself. (I don't believe the rumor—a demon would make a lousy general—but I never met the Genghis Khan, so I could be wrong.) The biblical Goliath was also a demon, which should tell you plenty about the accuracy of that little story, because it'd take a hell of a lot more than a stupid slingshot to take out a demon. (David actually lured Goliath under a cliff face and had some friends drop a big rock on him.) I wouldn't be a bit surprised if a few of today's governments had one or two demons on the payroll, although with modern weaponry their talents are really more useful to drug cartels and the like.

It is notoriously difficult to kill a demon. Their skin is much thicker than human skin (but not as hard as dragon hide), they don't burn easily, and if they have a heart nobody has been able to figure out exactly where it is. At the battle of Troy I saw a demon run through with a pike three times in three different places and keep on coming. It took twenty men to hold him down and two working with heavy battle axes to cleave his head from his shoulders.

You've probably seen one. I don't know how they move about in today's world because I haven't laid eyes on one for over a century, but I know they usually favor baggy clothes and hats to obscure their obviously non-human features. You might be thinking professional American football would be a good place to find a few, but I don't think it's violent enough for them.

The really extraordinary thing about demons is that they don't rule the world. They reproduce normally—I've never seen a female demon, but I know they exist—and they were around back when it really wasn't all that hard to take over the world. Pretty much everyone took over the world at least once back in the day. I even thought about it a couple of times. For some reason it just never seemed like there was enough of them to truly dominate. Why there are so few demons in the world was one of the questions I posed to the only demon I ever had a face-to-face conversation with. Unfortunately, he was not all that forthcoming.

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