“But when the ritual happened, it was my magic that burst free.”
“Because your magic is innately stronger. It overpowered his.”
I rubbed my temples. “Even so, why didn’t I get all my magic at once?”
“The induction ritual freed it, but that ritual is designed to only call out the magic bestowed upon Rasha.” She shrugged. “That’s what you got.”
“The elimination magic pertaining to killing demons. Right.”
“Give your magic time to fully manifest and stabilize.”
Sienna pushed the door open, letting in the hum from the floor polishers outside. Her scrubs were printed with teddy bears and she’d changed the beads on the ends of her dreadlocks from blue to glittery green. She saw me and groaned. “My day is complete.”
“Happy to brighten your world. Anyhow, Rabbi Abrams is totally a candy sneak which can’t be good for his diabetes.” I babbled on, while Sienna placed her hands on Dr. Gelman’s chest and closed her eyes.
“I have a nurse on this ward, you know,” Gelman said. “She’s lovely and takes very good care of me.”
Sienna finished her magic treatment before responding. She opened her eyes, shaking out her hands. “She doesn’t have my vested interest. I lose you, I lose the best rugelach around.”
I clasped my hands under my chin. “You make rugelach?”
“She does.” Sienna headed for the door. “If you want any, next time spring for something better than crappy hospital store flowers.”
Dr. Gelman frowned. “Why didn’t you want her to know?”
I made sure Sienna had disappeared down the corridor before answering. “I get the impression she hates the Brotherhood.”
Gelman snorted. “To put it mildly.”
“For all intents and purposes, I’m still Brotherhood.” My Rasha ring glinted under the lights. Was there a way to get this stupid ring off me if I wasn’t Rasha?
“You’ll need to be trained in the full extent of your infusion and elimination magic.”
“Are you offering?” Having Dr. Gelman as my mentor was my dream.
“Depends. There’s a test to verify you are a witch and not a mutant Rasha.” Gelman nudged me with her blanket-covered foot. “This is where you come in.”
“Shouldn’t this have happened before you welcomed me to the club?”
“I was trying to make you happy. You so desperately looked like you wanted to belong.”
I rolled my eyes. “What kind of a test?”
“Enough questions. There is a test. You will take it.” Gelman plucked a flower out of the vase beside her bed. Not from the bouquet I’d brought. Mine were at least all alive. “Restore the azalea to its natural beauty.”
“Is most infusion magic healing?” How boring. I exhaled in a hard “oomph” like I’d been punched in the gut. My lungs started bubbling, going at it like a pot of water on full boil, getting larger and larger, pushing everything else inside me aside. I was going to pop.
“I’m infusing your lungs with air. Blowing them up like a balloon. Does that feel very healing?”
I flailed around until she released me, then rubbed my chest. “Can I learn that?”
“We’ll see.” She squeezed my hand and warmth unfurled inside me, taking the pain away.
The azalea sprig had only a single white-tipped pink bloom, brown curling one shriveled edge. I carefully took the wilted piece of compost…
…and two of its three remaining petals fluttered to the ground.
“Brilliant start.”
Everyone was a critic. I wasn’t warm and fuzzy at the best of times so pulling some latent Mother Nature instinct out of my ass didn’t exactly come naturally. I waved my finger over the flower like a wand.
“Say ‘abracadabra’ and I’ll stab you,’” Dr. Gelman said.
“Like that plastic cutlery’s gonna inflict hella damage.” I scrambled for a different plan. “You’re not such a bad little flower. You just need a little love.” The words had worked for Linus and the Christmas tree. Thinking good vibes, I sent the tiniest spark of magic into the sprig, hoping that might jump start it back to life.
Its last petal fell off.
“Let’s table this for now.” Figuring that electricity was at the heart of all things and perhaps the flower simply needed a good long soak, I infused the sprig with a constant low-grade stream of magic. “Did you know about Lilith or what the painting implied? Any of it?”
“No.”
I peeked in at the petal. Nada. “Could Lila be the one binding demons? Even if she’s part demon or whatever now, she was a human witch at some point so she could have both red and blue magic giving us the purple. She’s got to be massively powerful.”
“She’s not a demon.”
“She has to be. Mahlat was her daughter and Asmodeus her grandson. Weird though. That would have made him only a quarter demon, but his power was immense. He was like demon royalty, not some wannabe. And he didn’t dissolve into gold dust when I killed him like other halflings do. Like his own two spawn did.”
“Lilith isn’t an ordinary human.” Gelman adjusted her blankets. “By the time she’d birthed Mahlat, she was already suffused with dark magic. If Mahlat and her sisters presented as full demons in every way that counted, then I imagine the demon and dark magic formed a genetic mutation resulting in this superbreed of creature. And remember, David already had Rasha magic when he slept with Mahlat and had Asmodeus. The mother of Asmodeus’ offspring must have been a regular human.”
“Insanely powerful mutant demons. That’s terrifying. But what about Lila feeding off my sexual memory like a succubus?”
“No, Nava.” She cut off all further protest. “Lilith is not a demon. It doesn’t work that way. There is no spell to make a person part demon. You can’t be turned or bitten. The only way she could still be alive is through magic so dark I don’t know how it hasn’t killed her.” Her brows drew together. “No one else has ever survived its practice for very long.”
I opened my fist again but there was only the same flowerless stem. “Everyone is so certain they know how this all works. Except when they don’t.”
“I do. Lilith offered to find you the witch. She never would have done so had she been the one binding those demons, and you can be sure Malik would have known if it was her.”
“But she isn’t helping me.” I glared at the azalea, frustrated with my lack of a name, a lack of answers, a giant fucking lack.
Gelman poured herself some water. “She isn’t helping you because you refused whatever price she put on the job. Yes?”
I raised startled eyes to hers and she nodded. “Your Rasha may not have understood your coughing fit, but I did. Lilith is not the one you seek.”
“Then who is? Your leads aren’t panning out but someone has to know something about the bindings. I’m a witch. Introduce me. Get me into the community so I can actively investigate.”
“Give me a week to get through this final round of chemo. If I haven’t found anything then I’ll bring you in.”
“Like a witch debutante. I’ll start shopping for my gown.”
“You’re impossible.”
Sweet Tooth 911. Orwell had texted me.
I tossed the azalea sprig onto her bed. “I have to go.”
“Nava.”
I waved at Gelman over my shoulder.
“Nava.” More insistently.
I turned and she held up the sprig. A single green bud had formed. She tossed it to me. “You’re a witch. And probably a damn good one with enough training. But more importantly, you really are part of our group, and we’re going to find whoever is betraying us.”
Us. I tucked the precious bud behind my ear. “Yeah. We are.”
“Are we sure this was Sweet Tooth?” I said to Rohan and Drio. I’d texted them the second I’d left Gelman’s room and they’d gotten there first.
“They fucked themselves to death.” Drio moved away from the rooftop ledge so I could
take his place. He handed me the camera. I knelt down to get the best angle, loose rocks digging into my bare knees, and peered through the telephoto lens. “Holy hell. They look like they were torn apart by wild animals.”
The crime scene bedroom on the sixth floor of the building across from the roof I stood on was destroyed. This wasn’t an overturned lamp or shit knocked off shelves during a bout of crazed sex with red scratch marks and a couple of hickeys. This was every photo and stick of furniture smashed, holes in the plaster with blood smeared at the edges, and–
“Fuck me!” I shoved the camera at Drio. “She’s got a chair leg stuffed up her vagina. She’s impaled on it.”
“To be fair, his dick broke off, so…” Rohan said.
I grabbed the camera back.
“It’s in the far corner,” Ro said.
I swung the lens over. “That’s not a lumpy sock?”
The cops and the coroner left the room, missing the appearance of the oshk. The one with the female face. She flowed over to stand directly over the victims for a moment, her expression downcast, and blinked out.
“Visitor.” I told them about the oshk.
Drio packed up the camera case. “That thing needs a tracking chip.”
“Oh. What about a location spell?” I tossed him the lens cap that had fallen on the ground.
“Rasha can’t do those,” Rohan said.
Drio snickered. “You’d know. The Passover dinner,” he told me. “But he’s right. It’s not something you cast. It’s something witches do and I’m not bringing any witches into this.”
“Too late,” I said. “Ta da!” I threw jazz hands, giving him my brightest smile.
Drio gave me his Torture Time smile in response and blurred out. Ro jumped in front of me with a winded omph as he collided with Drio, who flickered into place.
Ro grabbed Drio’s arm, wrenching it up behind his back. “Not happening.”
Double checking that Rohan had Drio secured and was calming him down from the bombshell I’d dropped, I moved to the far end of the rooftop and phoned Dr. Gelman to ask what I needed to do.
Gelman explained that location spells were misnamed because there wasn’t a spell, it was elimination magic. Removing the distance between a single item and its source, like a hair and a person’s head or a prized possession and the owner. It didn’t work on compounds, so I couldn’t use the Sweet Tooth. However, if the oshk had left any secretion behind in the crime scene room, that would work.
“What do I do with it?” I said.
“You ask Sienna really nicely. I’m going in to chemo and you can’t pull this off without training.”
“I portalled. Isn’t this the same idea?”
“You portalled under extreme stress. Try it now and get back to me. Besides, this may be the same idea, but it’s far more complicated to execute. Sienna’s still on duty. Bribes work. She likes sambuca.” Gelman hung up.
“Ack!”
Drio had flash stepped to stand directly in front of me.
I fumbled my phone.
“You’re more powerful than me?” he said.
I bounced on the balls of my feet. “You gonna try and take me, suckah?”
He chucked me under the chin again. This was starting to be our thing. “Training is going to be fun.”
“You’re a weird puppy. You know that, right? Can you zip on over to the crime scene and check for oshk goo? You got gloves? Something to collect it in?”
Drio rummaged in the camera bag, snapped on a pair of latex gloves and dumped a thin filter out of its case. He flashed out.
And then there were two.
I fiddled with the flower behind my ear. “Sorry I didn’t get a chance to tell you first about Gelman confirming me as witch.”
Rohan jammed his hands in pockets and shrugged. “That’s the least of the shit between us.”
My lack of a protest lasted a second too long. He gave a bitter laugh and turned away. Only a few feet separated us physically. Emotionally, we were across a chasm I didn’t know how to breach.
My phone rang. It was my mom and I debated ignoring the call but it couldn’t be worse than this pained silence. “Hi, Mom.”
“Can you come over?”
I gripped the phone. “Did something happen?”
“No. Why would you ask that?”
It’s not like you call me for social visits. “No reason.”
Drio returned and shook his head. Damn. No secretion and no bribing Sienna necessary.
“I can come now.” I stuffed my phone into my pink capris. “Gotta go.”
Drio ignored me and Rohan nodded. There was no goodbye kiss.
I stewed on that fact for the entire drive over to my parents.
A charred, slightly sour smell hit me when I unlocked the front door. My knotted-up stomach lurched because the one time Ari had let the coffee burn off, Mom had torn a strip off him. My ass nothing was wrong.
I turned off the coffee maker and put the carafe in the sink to cool. “Mom?”
No answer. I ran through the house, searching, my panic escalating, and images of her dead on the floor whipping through my thoughts.
She was sitting at her desk in her study, her back to me.
“Mom? Mom. Shana!” I shook her shoulder.
She blinked at me. “You got here quickly.”
“You could have burned the house down. The coffee maker.” I clarified at her blank stare.
“Oh.” She stood up, but I pushed her back down.
“It’s handled. Thanks for giving me a heart attack.” I peered at her screen to see what had had her so engrossed. It was open to a search on witchcraft in Judea. “You know you can’t publish anything on that, right?
“What? Oh. Yes.” She closed the laptop. “Have you considered the possibility that you’re a witch and not Rasha?”
I pressed a hand to my heart, my relief that nothing bad had happened supplanted by a rushing in my ears as she regarded me with professional curiosity and not an ounce of maternal concern. “Uh, yeah. Turns out I am. Ari doesn’t know yet, though. This other witch I know confirmed it.” Mom didn’t say anything and I kept babbling. “I think you’d hit it off with her. She’s in the hospital now, but I’ll introduce you when she gets out. She’s a physicist.”
“Maybe she’ll influence your academic choices,” Mom said dryly. Goody, there was the mother I knew, and well, knew. She opened her desk drawer and handed me a letter. “If you don’t confirm your registration by the end of the month, UBC will force you to withdraw. I’ve pulled all the favors I can.”
I took the letter, not bothering to complain that she’d opened my mail. “No one asked you for any favors.”
“From what I understand, most of the Rasha have degrees. You won’t get anywhere within the Brotherhood with your high school diploma.”
I stuffed the letter in the back pocket of my capris. “I won’t get anywhere because I don’t fit the definition of ‘brother.’ Aside from that, I think the only real criteria is staying alive and I’m not dead yet.”
“Don’t be so morbid.”
“You’re right. It’s all sunshine and rainbows fighting demons.”
Mom slammed the drawer shut so hard that I flinched. “You think I don’t worry every single day about my kids dying?” I shrugged. Mom muttered something under her breath about me.
“I’m not going back to school. Not now. You can bask in your golden boy’s achievements.” A tight smile on my face, I spun around. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
“What ‘golden boy?’ Nava, stop.”
I froze, conditioned to obey that sharp tone. I forced out a breath to the count of three. “Ari. It’s what you always called him, right?” I didn’t mean to sound so bitter. I mean, I was, I just hadn’t intended for her to hear it.
A fleeting sadness crossed my mother’s face. “Nava,” she said. “He wasn’t my golden boy. He was my golden-haired boy. The same way you were my raven-haired girl.
You and Ari shortened it to Golden Boy and Raven, when you were about three. You told me they were your superhero names.”
I wrapped my arms around my chest. “Nope. No memory of that.” Mom pushed me out of the room. “What are you doing?”
“Disabusing you of this ridiculous notion of yours that Ari is more important to me.”
Mom forced me down the stairs and into the TV room. She pulled an album off the bookcase, quickly flipping through the pages. “Here.”
The photo showed me as a preschooler, sitting in our kitchen on top of a pile of candy. “Yeah, the year I went as a crow.” Good haul.
“The year you went as a raven.”
I took the album from her. “Are you sure?”
She glared at me. “Yes.”
“Why did you stop calling me that then?”
“Because you’re the most stubborn child imaginable. I don’t know what your brother had done to set you off, but you stomped in one day when you were about seven and announced that name was done.”
I sat down hard on the sofa. Those were pretty much the exact words I’d said to Ro when I’d told him to stop calling me Lolita. That part was plausible but… I bit my bottom lip. “You treated Ari like your golden boy. My entire life.”
Mom sat down next to me, fiddling with her wedding ring. “When Rabbi Abrams told me about your brother, I cried for three days.”
“Because you were proud of his big destiny.”
She tucked a curl behind my ear. “Because I was terrified. How could this tiny baby fight demons? Would I,” her voice cracked, “outlive him? I swore to enjoy every second I had with him.”
I ripped a tissue out of the box on the coffee table and blew my nose. “Never mind that you had twins.”
“You had Ari and you had dance and you seemed so together, I didn’t need to worry about you.” She reached past me for her own tissue and her Chanel perfume teased a memory from when I was little of falling asleep in her lap all the times she and Dad had stayed up late playing cards. How she’d held her cards with one hand so she could keep me snuggled against her chest with the other.
I blew my nose again.
“Sweetheart. You suffered the fallout of my fears and I’m so, so sorry.” She gripped my hands. “The day you realized you couldn’t keep tapping and accepted your place at UBC? My heart broke for you.”
The Unlikeable Demon Hunter Collection: Books 1-6: A Complete Paranormal Romantic Comedy Series Page 105
