Four pure demon families walk this world, rubbing shoulders with you in supermarkets and schools. Sharing a desk in the office or fixing your hot water heater. Lineage matters to all of them. But to Leeches, it matters most. There’s no nobility in an origin tale where a primordial swamp is your mother. They craved
There was a man in a pub in Carlisle — this would have been the late nineties — who held a table for four hours without buying a round and left with three people’s phone numbers, one person’s car keys, and what I strongly suspect was a signed document of some kind. Nobody saw him
I sat in St. Cuthbert’s this morning. Don’t read anything into it. The heating works and it’s quiet before ten. Tazia and I have churches in common that way. There’s a painting on the north wall. Small thing. Oil on board, probably Victorian, probably donated by someone who thought they were being generous. An angel
Before London got complicated, a man came through here on his way back from the city. Salesman. The rolling-suitcase kind. Grumpy bastard. He’d been working in the capital—deals, meetings, the usual churn—and felt he’d been made a fool of. Demons, he said. All through his human network. Hiding in plain sight. Pulling the wool over
Truth is rarely constant in our world. It changes, adapts. Shifts. Beings shift too. But not like in the faerie stories or your latest fantasy novel. Some don’t change shape so much as focus on something new: a cause, a target, a vengeance. It can be planned in advance like on battlefield in Cork or just
