CHAPTER 1
My name has always felt like a warning.
Prophetic and foreboding at the same time.
There are demons inside you, Legion.
Not one or two, but Many.
We are many…
I get it. It's not a good start to life, I do agree. But at least I understand it, this demon thing. Because most people think demons are entities. Ghosts. Evil spirits.
But that's not what they are at all.
Demons are regrets. Mistakes. The time you spent off the path because even though you knew—you fucking knew—you were goin' in the wrong direction, you went anyway.
That's what a demon is. It's a mistake that turns into a regret.
And it comes due, the consequences of these mistakes.
Always. They always come due.
I wake flat on my back. My eyes crack open slow, like they're weighted with lead. The world's a blurry smear, and I blink twice, three times, strugglin’ to focus on anything solid.
Light cuts through the wooden slats above me in sharp, dusty beams. Grain dust hangs suspended in the air, swirlin’ like smoke in the morning light. Each particle catches fire in the sun—thousands of tiny stars drifting in slow circles. I've seen this ceiling before.
I smile despite the pounding in my head.
This place. This goddamn place.
Outside the silo, there's a faint sound threadin’ through the quiet—the distant buzz of a dirt bike's engine winding up and down the hills. The sound hits me in the chest harder than any fist.
That sound meant freedom once.
My first bike was a piece of shit Honda with faded plastics and a bent clutch lever, but she ran. Fifteen years old with nothing but that bike and a pocketful of hard-earned cash I'd scraped together nickel by fucking dime.
Most of the time I worked the feed barn. Stackin’ fifty-pound bags until my shoulders burned, sweepin’ out corn that stuck to my sweat-soaked skin. Sleepin’ in the loft some nights when things got too bad at home.
Builds character, hard work like that does. But more importantly, if you're fifteen and a boy who just wants to be a man, it builds muscles. I was always lean, but after that year in the feed barn, I was a monster.
In the spring and summer, I picked up work at the grain co-op. Sweepin’ out grain bins in a dust mask, sweatin’ in ninety-degree heat. Shovelin’ out pits when they got plugged up because no one else would fuckin’ do it. It was a terrible job. But it paid. Spring and summer in Drybone was like a salve over the burn of winter. It soothed ya. Made you forget about the minus-forty windchill comin’ around the corner.
Then there was the livestock auction in the fall—sortin’ calves in freezing wind, moving cattle with hot shots, walking through frozen shit.
And at the end of all that character building that gave me muscles, was the dirt bike.
It was everything to me that summer.
I can still hear it in the distance. Just for a moment, I'm fifteen again. Counting out six-hundred and seventy-five dollars in hard-earned cash. A fist-full of wrinkled bills I'd hidden in a coffee can under the trailer. That feelin’ I got when I kick started the engine the first time was somethin’ like clarity.
Somethin’ that was mine.
Bought and paid for.
Somethin’ no one could take from me.
I blink again, harder this time, trying to clear the fog from my head.
