Jed

Born into a dead-end smattering of prefab homes off a desert highway, Jed knew from an early age that he'd do anything to escape. Rebellion ran strong in him; if you told him to do one thing he'd surely do the other. By twelve he was stealing money for cigarettes, by fourteen he was disappearing into the desert for days on end, and by sixteen he'd found an idol in the form of a neighbour, a bizarre man in a broken-down trailer among the scrub who had an awful lot of promises to make about power.

In the dim of that filthy trailer he learned everything that the strange man could teach him, catching animals at dusk to gut on the eclectic altar under his mentor's watchful eye. Jed seemed to have a knack for it, deciphering meaning from signs with startling clarity, speaking to the dead like a casual phonecall, treating astral projection like a jaunt to the store. The dark figures who flitted along the walls and stared into the windows at him hardly perturbed him any more. Everything seemed to be going perfectly, so when his mentor offered him 'the experience of a lifetime', as he put it, Jed didn't think twice about accepting it.

His mentor apologized to him with just a few words that fateful night, as Jed sat impatiently in the coyote-blood circle they'd drawn up together under a new moon. As it turned out, power had a cost: the things Jed had been learning were but the tip of the iceberg, and what his mentor had discovered beneath the surface had been paid for far too dearly. It was time for the mentor to give up that path, but the beings he'd contracted with wouldn't let him off for free. There was a price, and Jed would be payment.

Jed would wake days later, forced to start his life anew as the pawn of Orias, a demon of transformation who whispered all manner of secrets into his ear. His mentor had long since fled town; Jed himself would be presumed dead, chased away from his own home by parents who didn't realize the gangly coyote that skulked about was their own son, unable to communicate. He'd stay trapped in that form for the next few years, until Orias finally felt he was cowed enough to be useful.

By the time his humanity was returned to him, Jed had learned much. Working for Orias was a strange affair; he was sent to perform seemingly unrelated thefts, attacks, message delivery, and the occasional torment of some poor soul, interspersed with days and weeks of no orders at all. Jed lived on the move, switching readily between his human and coyote shapes, sometimes a horrifying in-between if the situation called for it. But even as he was living his vagrant life, the thought always lingered in the back of his mind that he'd escape .... it was only natural to crave freedom over hearing that sickly sweet voice in his ear.

The funny thing about demons is, they're always much smarter than people expect. So Jed was not surprised when Orias seemed to make him an offer out of the blue--a little test, a trial perhaps, a gamble even. Jed was smart, capable, arguably among the most useful of Orias's assets; but the demon was willing to play fair for once. All he had to do was complete one little challenge--cross the desert, no holds barred--and if he came out of his trial by fire alive, he'd be granted any bargain he wanted, provided the losing conditions were equally fair. Jed didn't hesitate. He staked his freedom on eternal servitude, survive the desert and escape Orias or fail and be his puppet forever. Deeply amused, Orias accepted.

Jed doesn't like to talk much about what he saw in the desert. The things he went through on that journey remain silent scars across his body, snags and clawmarks and strange spidery marks that he's perfectly happy to never explain. The year that he was gone--to the day, in fact--will haunt him forever, but he does his best to put that behind him now, enjoying his freedom. Of course, no demon has ever liked to lose, so it's only smart for Jed to stay on the move, skipping town at the first sign of trouble and keeping track of how long he's been still. He makes his money doing odd jobs, sussing out the occult-gone-wrong and offering, for a price, to set it right. Divination and aura-reading are quick change, but he considers more difficult tasks like exorcism and soul-retrieval to be his specialty. When the money can't be made, he takes his coyote form to go digging through the trash and catching wildlife on the road. He's eaten more roadkill than he'd like to admit.

But these days he's got another reason to be on the move. A certain angel, Shalo, would be in an awful lot of trouble if the wrath of Heaven caught up with them. Far be it from Jed, now trying (and failing) to right his own ship and lay off the sin, to leave such a specialty case to the whims of fate. But as he tries to find somewhere to leave Shalo for safekeeping, he's increasingly wondering if he's willing to give up this little dove at all ....