Supernatural Syndicate: A Limited Edition Collection of Magical Mafia Stories

by Thea Atkinson

  "Then why do you look so old?" she asked. "Are you dying?"

  Her words could have been a hammer on my skull.

  I was aging. I should have realized it earlier.

  The demon didn't just want to take over my body; it wanted to be free.

  And if it shed me, then a century's worth of years was going to catch up to me.

  And that could only mean one thing.

  My death.

  10

  I should have realized the demon wouldn't be satisfied with taking over my body this time. I'd been a fool to think it would only want a few years of carnage. No. It wanted out. It wanted its freedom. Being held against its will had made it spiteful. That was why it had waited when the stone that tethered it to me was obviously broken enough to offer it ample space to wriggle out. It planned to use my weakness to leap completely free.

  And that meant I was going to die. It was both a relief and a terror. Relief that I wouldn't murder countless innocents and terror at what waited for me when that last breath whispered out of my lungs.

  I sat back, defeated. Now that I knew what was happening, I didn't have the energy to do more than roll onto my haunches.

  "You win," I said and waved her away. "I'm dying."

  My head hung between my arms as I planted my hands on the floor.

  "Go tear up your contract," I said as I looked, really looked at the clotting puddle beneath me. I sniffed and smelled my own excrement in the fluids. I'd nicked my bowel before during a fight back in the eighties. I knew the smell. My nose crinkled in offense.

  "Go get your contract before he changes his mind."

  I heard her moving but didn't look up to see if she was going for the door or for a weapon to finish me off.

  I found I couldn't hold myself up anymore. My teeth ached as the demon wormed its way through the last of my tissues. I wondered when the blackness would start. When the death rattle would take me. I wondered if the demon would wait till the last second to leap or if it would cut through me to deliver the last, killing blow from within.

  Whatever it had planned, a hundred years of hatred and festering bitterness might make that a painful last moment.

  "You really think he's going to give me my contract?" the witch said. "You're really that stupid?"

  It took a surplus of energy to lift my gaze to hers. The blue of her eyes swam in front of me like an icy river. "I didn't live this long being stupid, woman," I said.

  She sucked the backs of her teeth as she inched closer, close enough that I could smell the magic on her, the candy floss smell of all fae. I could see a thready scar at her hairline so fine it might have been a gossamer thread tying her glamor to her body.

  "Horatio offered you the chance to buy my contract," she said. "He said nothing about what I'd get if I won."

  I had to lower myself to my forearms because my shoulders ached. When I did, her arms went round my upper back, helping me down without me completely collapsing. It was too compassionate an act. My eyes stung in light of the fight she'd just put up.

  "You won," I said. "He has to let you have your contract. He has to free you. Why else would you fight?"

  Her laugh was bitter. "You say it like you think I had a choice. He has owned me since I was two. He'll own me until I am older than the demon trying to wriggle its way free of you."

  "You see that, eh?" I said, feeling the weariness pull up over me like a blanket.

  "Everyone sees it," she said. "It's like a a photo with double exposure." She shivered and I felt it tremble across my shoulders as she held me. "But it doesn't matter. Horatio owns me. I do what he says." She didn't have to say anything about consequences if she didn't. She didn't have to.

  "He'll only maintain possession if I lose," I said.

  She could have just given in. It would have been so much easier.

  "And then I would have a new master," she said quietly and I slumped onto my side at the words. For her, would there have been a difference? One master or another. She had fought for her life and intended to die at my hand rather than be a possession any longer. But she wasn't about to go down without a fight. She'd said as much, but I'd been too mired in my own concerns to listen.

  "I'm not used to doing good," I said. "I don't think about others as a rule. I'm sorry," I mumbled and was surprised I meant it.

  I heard her move again but didn't feel anything until I realized she had lifted my head onto her lap.

  "Thank you," she said. "For trying. Doesn't matter why."

  She sighed deeply, no doubt waiting for me to die so she could go back to her indenture. A thought crossed my mind that she might try to kill herself now that I had failed to do it and that she was still a slave to the fae-kin boss.

  I sagged into her lap. I was still afraid, but I thought it might not be so bad to die in someone's arms. A lifetime ago words might have tripped over my tongue as I sat in the same position she had, holding onto a dying man or woman. Words I'd not uttered in a century: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and in our hour of...

  I fumbled around, trying to move my hands, but they refused to obey. I wanted my crucifix. Broken or not, whether I had abandoned the faith or it had abandoned me, I wanted it. It had been with me all these years. An entire lifetime. Taken from my mother's bedpost as she died. Wrapped around my neck as I'd sought the order and a reason for pointless death of innocents. I'd worn it beneath my cassocks as I was ordained. I'd kissed it at night as I prayed for my mother's soul.

  It was the crucifix I used to exorcise a demon from a mother during her lying in, to purge the evil so it wouldn't jump into the soul of the innocent harbored within her body. My cross had held that same demon at bay for mostly all the decades in that century that followed. I didn't deserve to have it in my grasp as I breathed my last, but I wanted it. I wanted to think of my mother, of that last mother, of that babe I'd sacrificed myself to save.

  It was the one good thing I'd done in my entire worthless lifetime and that crucifix was the thing that stole my faith in the end. I wanted it.

  She must have felt me fumbling because she dug her hands into my pocket for me. She made a thoughtful sound when she pulled it out.

  "This is what you wanted of me?" she said.

  I didn't nod. I couldn't. I just looked up at her and she met my gaze with razor sharp insight in her face.

  "The magic is leaking," she said and turned it over in her hand. "Powerful magic. Fae, I think."

  I swallowed my response. Spasms started working my muscles.

  "It's a binding spell," she said. "One borne of blood and shame and human sacrifice. The darkest of magic. Someone died for this spell. Someone gave up all they were for it."

  She splayed it over my chest, but I didn't feel it make contact. I was numb inside and out.

  "If I fix it, it will mean you win," she said.

  I blinked at her. Was she offering to spell it? Right then and there?

  I only had the strength to exhale a breathy yes. Anything. Anything to stay alive.

  She laid both hands on the cross and hummed as she closed her eyes. I felt a soft warmth against my chest where the cross lay.

  And then all hell broke loose.

  11

  The demon heard her and it was ready to fight tooth and nail to abandon its prison and leave me dead in its wake. To her credit, Vivianne kept her hands steady over the stone despite the thrashing of my body as it gave itself to the demon. Powered by blood magic, she'd said, the worst kind of fae power, where someone had to lose themselves to cast it. She'd have no way of knowing that I'd been that first casualty.

  The second was Rosario. She'd given the best of herself to spell it for me. It had cost her and I had let her pay the price because I wanted to live.

  Like I wanted to live now.

  But the demon did not want me to survive. It tasted its freedom and it wanted to leap. I seized in Vivianne's lap, my body arching painfully upwards, my legs splayed out in a wide V. My heels
dug into the floor of the cage and I felt each impact of my shoulders against the floor. I wasn't numb anymore. I felt every damn lancing jolt of pain the demon razored through me as it fought her attempts to keep it shackled.

  Through it all, she murmured her magic through fingertips and palms, letting her body do the work. The demon shrieked loud enough it shook the cage. I knew everyone below had started to back off because I heard them yelling in warning to each other. Get away. Back off. It's coming. Take cover.

  Take cover. It would do no good when the demon escaped. Fae, shifter, incubus, human alike would quake before it. Legion was its name and legion was its power.

  Some Kindred probably eddied forward, drawn to the darkness of the power that lent me strength and immorality. I lived so long as the demon inside me remained tethered to my soul.

  But I could feel Vivianne winning. The pulse of her magic finally saturated enough of the stone that I felt it warm my core. My skin began drawing together in painful gathering puckers that made me want to scratch at the edges. I felt the granulation of my tissues, that glistening and bubbled healing that worked its way from inside out, knitting me together even as the demon's rage grew to a toxic case of poison ivy slithering over my skin, inside my viscera, coiling into my throat.

  But it backed away as she advanced. I felt its retreat like you feel a sudden clearing of your sinuses. I gasped at the shock of breathing again without effort. The clarity burned. It brought tears to my eyes.

  She smiled down into my face, encouraging me to hang on. Through the blur of water, I could see the black curtain of her hair swing aside to show her eyes had become lit from within. All golds and yellows and muted shades of sepia swirled in them. Her full lips were set in a tight line. The gentle curves of her throat moved like slow ebbs of water in a bloated river. I wanted to draw my thumb along her jawline, touch the pulse that throbbed beneath her skin, visible and alluring.

  She caught my eye as her palms pressed harder against the stone, driving it deeper into my skin. It dug in painfully but I held on, just like she said. I pinned my gaze to hers.

  "Almost there," she said but it sounded like almost was a lot closer than a moment or two. The shift was palpable. She knew she'd won. It was evident in the pressure against my chest, one moment hard and demanding, the next releasing just enough that I didn't feel my heart hammering against the crucifix.

  "Hold on, Hale." Her voice a rasp as though something had burned her throat. "Hold--"

  I tried, but something slipped past the barricade right at that moment. I bucked backward in spasm. Something had hold of me from inside. A pincer grip right at my solar plexus, twisting hard enough that I felt my connective tissue tangling and drawing everything tight. She let go a cry of surprise. Then of pain. The whimper rose and shifted in tone.

  A word slid through my clenched lips. "Stop," I said. "Let go." I tried to squirm away from her touch. "Let go; it has you."

  It had us both. I wasn't sure how it had found the strength beneath her assault, but I knew it planned to leap free and it wasn't just going to abandon my body when it did. It was going to take her. It would use the bridge she'd created to do it. All that power, all that magic in one body. It could have her and its own magic and oh the wonderfully deviant and evil things it could do.

  "The price," I said, fully aware that the demon had grappled for her soul and that she was fighting hard not to let him have it. "The price of the magic. It's too much. Let go."

  But she didn't let go. She doubled down. The pressure of her hands intensified even as she moaned in pain and protest. I thought of the blood we'd had to spill, Rosario and I, in order to bind the spell, to lay down the barricades to keep the demon from undermining the magic. I gasped beneath the weight of her hands. We hadn't spilled blood as was demanded for such dark magic. She was vulnerable.

  She was going to fail.

  The crowd below began murmuring their rapt attention. Someone sent a flare of magic up to coil around the cage. Light flecks, like snow, fell on my face. Such a peaceful sensation against the violence of what was happening in those three feet of contact.

  "Stop," I said. "Let go. It's too much."

  Something tugged free from within. I knew a second, no more, and the demon would evaporate, pour itself into the thread of connection. It would fill her. It would steal all she was and leave her a hollow shell satisfied with nothing but death and pain.

  I couldn't let that happen. Not again. Rosario had to be contained for a decade to recover from the sacrifice of the blood she'd spilled to save me. I never recovered. I was nothing. A worthless, greedy immortal killing to fill a hole in me carved out by the spell. I would never be what I once was.

  I couldn't--wouldn't--see that happen in her. Not now. Whatever had happened here between us, the compassion she'd shown me, was too precious to contaminate.

  I wouldn't let her pay that price.

  I found the strength to pull myself free of her hands and roll sideways. I curled into a ball, holding the demon there in the cradle of my solar plexus. Whatever was left of the demon, whatever a vestige of evil that still had roots in my soul, it was enough that the demon couldn't exist without it.

  I prayed to a god who had abandoned me that the demon would risk it all to tear it free.

  "Take me," I said with my face planted in the floor. The metal of the cage stank of magic and it tasted of blood. My lips grazed the floor as I spoke and heard again the man I was at thirty two. Cocky, arrogant. Brought low by pride. I could exorcise any demon. I had the hand of God on my soul. Who would dare try me. What evil beast had the gall to disobey.

  I sobbed into the floor as I curled tighter around the last bit of rooted evil. "Take me. Leave her be."

  A century ago, those same words uttered to save an unborn infant. Uttered once more like a prayer because that god who had abandoned me would never hear.

  "Damn you, you unholy thing, come back."

  A shudder, no more. With a chest tightened by fear, I lifted my head to search for the witch. A moment where I caught Vivianne's eye and I thought her mind had gone. They were milky white, glazed over with power. But was it the demon's or hers?

  My answer came in a heartbeat. She thrust her arms wide. She bowed backward, arching her chest so sharply I thought her back might break. Something had her. Something powerful.

  When she said my name, I almost got to my feet to obey her voice. It called to me. It hooked me and compelled me to obey. And I would obey. Whatever it was, I was hers.

  "Hale Saint," she said, with smoke and hellfire in her voice and I realized she had dove with me into the depths of hell to find the roots of that evil being, that she had the last tendrils of power in her grip.

  "Hail, Saint," she intoned. "You are joined. This demon, this saint, these two through one stone, never cracking, never broken, never vulnerable until she who casts the spell wills it."

  A great and mighty magic indeed. It rushed me with the strength of a hurricane. Those below called out for their own magic to shield them as it swept over the cage. That was when I noticed her hands were covered in blood. It ran in thick, viscous streams down her wrists. Blood. My blood. We had spilled plenty of it in the cage. I wanted to laugh at the absurdity.

  Even the crowd below fell silent when she called out the words I'd forgotten were the bargain.

  "I concede," she said. "I give up."

  Then she collapsed like a spent bag of flour, and the Kennel erupted in roars and cheers.

  When the door was flung open, Rosario was gone. In her place stood the fae-kin boss and he looked most mightily pissed. I didn't even have the heart to be angry.

  I pushed myself to my feet, my cross clutched against my chest. Before I shoved it into my pocket, I had closed the distance to the witch. She was out cold but she was alive. Her chest rose slowly but steadily.

  She was so light I barely felt her in my arms as I scooped her up. I swung to face Horatio.

  "You heard her," I said. "
She concedes. I win."

  His mouth pressed into a hard line. Whatever was beautiful about fae no matter the gender, he was not attractive in that moment. But he waved his hand with a flourish. The contract that appeared hung in the air between us.

  "Sign it," I said, ignoring the fact that it was not paper and seemed to be made of flesh of some kind.

  "We don't sign papers like some primitive human," he said with a peevish tone that indicated exactly how pissed he was for making a bad bargain. "Indentured fae contracts are in our blood and body."

  I was mere feet away from him. The cage had lowered all the way to the floor. Beyond its bars, I could make out Kindred of all sorts collecting and paying out in magic. I noted no one looked happy.

  "Whatever it is you have to do, do it," I said.

  He sighed heavily but gestured with a flourish pretty enough a dancer could have made it to enthrall an audience. I supposed there was an audience watching, all of them eager to see what the dark fae would do to unbind an Indentured fae. I might have been curious to see for myself in another circumstance, but for now, I just wanted it over.

  Vivianne moaned as her neck arched up off my arm as I held her cradled, but she didn't wake as the mark on her skin peeled away from her skin. I watched the branding, now an opaque reddish bit of flesh instead of the black inky thing it had been on her neck, rise in front of me.

  It hovered in the air just above her head, a filmy thing that made my stomach clench in disgust for the thing it represented.

  I waited for what seemed an insufferable amount of time while he gathered his showmanship for his audience below. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore.

  "End it," I barked at him.

  With a shrug he waved at the parchment. The vellum sailed toward me and I cringed without meaning to. I didn't want the thing to touch me.

  "Not me," I said, letting my revulsion for it slip through my lips. "Her. Give it to her."

  He rocked back on his heels in surprise. For a moment, I thought he'd refuse.