“Elyse Shimizu told me in grade eight.”
Leo crossed her arms. “Well, it was over by grade eight and a half, smarty pants, so nah.”
Maybe I couldn’t have everything I wanted, but having this? Having them? It was pretty damn good. One more pitcher and sloshy happy Nava would make her appearance, making the what-the-fuck’s-going-on call to Rohan so much easier.
I kicked off my shoes, curling my toes into the grass and feeling no pain. So when my phone rang in my front pocket and I recognized the international number, I answered with, “Go away. I’m on my break.”
“There’s no rest for the wicked,” replied a man with a French-Canadian accent.
“Seriously, Pierre. I’ve already protected the good people of my city today.” Pierre had been my main contact at Brotherhood intel since the assignment where I’d been lead hunter tracking down this demon called Candyman.
“Bon. You’re warmed up.”
I scowled at the phone, mouthing “Orwell” at Leo and Ari.
“Hang on,” I told Pierre. Brushing off my brother’s offer to come with me, I pushed through the crowd and out the back exit of the temporarily erected fencing onto the beach.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Pride parade. Ouch.” Half-jumping over the hot sand, I beelined for the nearest log and sat down, scrunching my feet until I hit wet, cool grains. “Okay. What demon would the Brotherhood like me to dispose of?”
“What do you know about Gary Randall?” Pierre said.
“He’s a demon? Sweet! I’m on it. One less asshole hockey player in the world.” I’d gone through a phase of crushing hard on those boys. It hadn’t gone well.
“Tu me gosses.”
I snickered. Pierre lived in Jerusalem and he and I had never met; still, I’d quickly become one of his favorite people, since not only was I a fellow Canadian, but thanks to my years of French Immersion I was well-versed in Québécois expressions. I knew exactly how the fucker was insulting me, which we both found hilarious. Between that and the way I’d handled the Candyman assignment, I’d gained his approval.
“What about Gary?” I said.
“Watch the video footage,” he said. “Right before Randall trips into the path of the oncoming car, he stops to speak with some woman. You can’t see her face in the video and there isn’t any other CCTV footage that caught her on tape, but there’s a flash for a frame and then she’s gone.”
“Demony. Do we know what they talked about?”
“No. The cell phone video was too blurry to lip-read and there was too much ambient noise from the street to hear the conversation.”
“Sounds suspiciously tidy.”
“His doctors are saying his career is over. Could be an honest case of drunk and unfortunate, but if not?” It came out as “’onest” and “hunfortunate.” Pierre tended to both drop his “Hs” on words that started with that letter and add them on words that didn’t need them.
I jacked up the volume on my phone because the beer garden crowd had gotten riled up at the opening strains of “Born This Way,” their enthusiastic singing drifting across the beach.
“Draw out the demon,” he said.
“Oh, sure, throw me to the wolves, Pierre.” I watched a tiny crab scuttle across the sand. “I’m the most unappetizing target for that kind of demon. I have a few hundred devoted Instagram followers, but that hardly makes me famous.”
“Remember when you were Lolita?”
“Hell, no. I’m not playing Rohan’s groupie again.” I was barely playing the role of his girlfriend these days.
“Camme toé.”
“I’m calm. This is me being calm.” My voice rose with a tinge of hysteria.
“You don’t need to be Lolita. Our working theory is that this demon was attracted to Gary’s cockiness. A groupie who’s now the girlfriend? You’ve gone public with the relationship and it’s the perfect opportunity.”
“I haven’t–”
“Your friend Blair.”
I checked my Twitter notifications which had exploded with messages from people asking if Blair had been talking about me, since her next tweet was a photo of Ari and me in the parade that I hadn’t seen her take.
I kicked at the sand. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! “That was like four hours ago and I wasn’t even mentioned. Jesus. Are you stalking my friends?”
“We’ve monitored all mentions of Rohan for years. We had to in case his fame exposed the Brotherhood. You should be pleased. You’ve created the perfect way to draw this demon out.”
I hunched over, my shoulders curling forward and my knees clasped tightly together. Everything Pierre was saying made sense, especially in light of this mission. I could behave like a giant diva on Ro’s arm and probably attract the demon’s attention fairly easily. That level of obnoxious was fun for about five minutes, but living it 24/7? I’d done it in Prague and it’d been hell. The thought of doing it again made my skin crawl.
“Look, how about…” I cast about for an alternative. “Um. Okay. Rohan is writing again. He could do a bunch of interviews. Talk about his solo career. Slam the band. That’s douchey.”
Pierre made a dismissive noise. “Even when Rohan acted his worst at the height of his fame, this demon never came for him. Why would that work now? But with you, we have a unique opportunity. We need you.”
I scrubbed a hand over my face. The Brotherhood had never claimed to need me–officially or otherwise. Part of me preened like a cat hearing them acknowledge my worth, however, Blair tweeting a vague tweet was one thing. My relationship, if there still was one, was so fragile right now that deliberately seeking out criticism and a demon to shred it to pieces was insanity.
But they needed me.
I swore silently. “I’ll help you find the demon, but not like that.”
“Forget it.”
“Pierre, I still want to be on this mission.”
“Don’t worry about it.” His voice was cool and he hung up without our usual teasing.
I flung my phone on the sand.
“Nee? What happened?” Ari and Leo had shown up, wearing twin expressions of concern.
I shook my head, unable to trust my voice. My feet worked just fine, however, so I let them carry me across the sand and into the ocean, not stopping until I was deep enough to submerge myself and lie about where the salty water on my face came from.
Chapter 5
One suck-ass sleepless night and a rushed breakfast later, hundreds of magic icy needles pierced my skin and stabbed my organs. I bit down harder on the strap of leather between my teeth, sweat dripping off my temples and running down the back of my neck.
“Anything?” Dr. Gelman’s face hovered above mine.
Moaning, I strained and bucked under the magic enveloping me.
She clicked her tongue and shut it down.
I spit out the strap, my breath coming in harsh pants. “I hate you.”
Gelman loosened one of her shirt cuffs with a delicate flick of her wrist. Thanks to her last round of chemo, her lung cancer seemed to be in a holding pattern. It wasn’t better, but it definitely wasn’t worse, and seeing her not looking like a walking skeleton never failed to make me happy. She’d managed to gain some weight, and her hair, while now totally white and still short, had lost its patchiness.
“Hate me all you want. Do you feel any sign of Lilith?”
I closed my eyes, exploring every twinge and ache from the crown of my head down to my baby toes for a more sinister explanation than what she’d subjected me to. I pressed my hand against my sternum and opened my eyes. “I sense a box. Maybe the size of my fist, lodged here.”
The box didn’t hurt. It was just there, floating. I have no idea whether my clear visual of it as matte black and seamless was thanks to my magic or an overactive imagination.
She tapped my breastbone. “Here?” I nodded. “This is where I detected the wisps of dark magic,” she said. “Lilith’s essence is locked in that box. Now that
you feel it, you can monitor it.”
Not use the magic or get Lilith out, just tell whether or not everything was super about to go to Hell. My life had become one long limbo.
“Given that spells are the basic cable of magic,” I said, “and that’s what Ro used to knock Lilith out, you’d think getting her out of me would be simple.”
“Nothing involving Lilith is simple.” Gelman placed her hands on my shoulders, sending a healing warmth inside me to relieve all the pain she’d inflicted.
My magic Domme.
“What’s left to try?” I shakily pushed myself up into a seated position, rubbing my arms to get the blood flowing.
The past few weeks, my Mondays had been a series of standing appointments with Gelman as she tried all kinds of things, magic-based and not, to deal with my unwanted guest. Today’s attempt had involved extreme cold. It didn’t suck as hard as the herbal concoction that had left me with debilitating stomach pain and grossness running out of both ends of me, but still ranked pretty high on the unpleasantness scale.
“There is one form of stimulation you could try. Pleasure yourself and–”
I clapped my hands over my ears. “La. La. La. La. La.”
“Don’t be childish. I assume you have a vibrator and if not, you have working hands.”
“Stop talking.” My cheeks were burning and I couldn’t meet her eyes.
“Have you been avoiding masturbation because you’re concerned about Lilith? I understand your fears, but a powerful orgasm might shake her loose. Then I could transfer her to another vessel. We could do it in a controlled situation, where you’d still have maximum privacy. Do you want help finding stimulating material?”
I twisted the fat gold band with the engraving of a hamsa around my finger. “Ohmigod! I’ve masturbated, okay? It didn’t wake her. End of subject.”
“All right.” She slipped on a sweater. “That’s enough for today. I’ll make some tea.”
I scuffed the floor with my toe. “Did you make scones again? Because I think I deserve them.”
“Your mother deserves a medal for dealing with your petulance.”
I took her arm, the two of us moving slowly. “Yeah, thrilled you’re getting along so swimmingly. You were supposed to bond over witches. King David. A whole host of subjects that didn’t involve yours truly.”
“But you’re the most fun to discuss.” Gelman led me up the basement stairs into the kitchen of her sister Rivka’s house.
Sunshine flooded the long, narrow space which flowed into an open-concept living room, the backyard beyond visible through the glass sliding door. Rivka had a fondness for white–the walls, the furniture–but kept the space from feeling cold with brightly colored cushions, a fat, fluffy throw rug, and an enormous photographic print of a spice market.
I filled the kettle with water while Gelman busied herself laying out all the goodies, including the buttermilk blueberry scones.
My visits with her had three components: Wizard School, Torture Time, and Snacks.
Wizard School was progressing nicely, with my witch magic coming along in leaps and bounds. I could portal reliably and had mastered eliminating memories, which was how I’d been able to make Ilya forget about meeting me. I’d even learned location spells, which weren’t spells at all but a type of infusion magic. And that was in addition to all the training and studying I was still doing as Rasha. In comparison, university looked like a vacation.
It wasn’t all learning about infusion and elimination magic though. Gelman, a scientist and a witch, was using me as her guinea pig to investigate how magic and science intersected based on Maxwell’s Laws of Electromagnetism. Yes, she’d drilled me in the stupid name. Case in point? Today’s new unit, testing whether or not I could cloak myself with electromagnetic fields that would deflect light from behind me to the front of me like an invisibility cloak.
The answer was a resounding example of how to suck hard. I could call up the electromagnetic field, but then I sat there like an electric flashlight doing a snap-crackle-pop impression.
After growling at me about my tenth failure, Gelman had moved on to Torture Time. When she’d finished working out her jollies–I mean, testing her theories on how to resolve the Lilith situation, involving my pain and/or humiliation–it was time for the best part: Snacks.
We generally puttered around making our tea, and only once we were nestled in the cozy booth eating did we fill each other in on any new developments regarding Sienna, the witch community, and the Brotherhood. Though I had yet to be rewarded with rugelach.
“How hungry are you?” I asked, eyeing the multiple platters of scones, cookies that were not rugelach, and bagels that she was laying out. “I mean, I can always eat, but that’s a bit much even for me.”
The doorbell rang.
“Oh, look,” she said. “Company.” She raked a critical glance over me. “You might want to wash up.”
I flicked off the switch on the kettle. “What have you done?”
“You wanted to meet other witches.”
“With some warning.”
“Get over it. We don’t have the time. The sooner we have more brains working on finding Sienna, the better.”
“I hate it when you’re logical.” I ran a hand over my wrinkled clothes. My hair was limp and my make-up had been sweated away. “You couldn’t tell me before your little sadism session?”
“I didn’t want to listen to you whine. Be nice or I’ll stick you in a Faraday Cage.”
The first time she’d uttered that threat, I’d stared blankly at her, so she’d launched into a long-winded explanation that made me go from clueless to glazed over.
“You could have saved me ten minutes of my life and given me the tl;dr version that it was a dealio that nullified electricity,” I’d said.
She’d stared at me in confusion.
“Tl:dr. Too long. Don’t read. Like ‘in summary.’”
“I know what it means. My stupefaction is your childish reduction of the cage to a ‘dealio.’”
Then I’d gotten glared at for a full half hour. Ah, memories.
“You can’t say that every week and expect me to be scared,” I now said.
“I’m wearing you down, making you think it’s an idle threat and then bam! I’ll surprise you.”
“Funny.” I grabbed my purse off the counter, grateful I’d kept the travel make-up kit that my mother had given me before the Pride parade, which, come to think of it, had seemed like an odd return to our old passive-aggressive dynamic. “You told Mom, didn’t you?”
“You’re welcome.”
The doorbell rang again and I bolted for the upstairs bathroom. By the time I’d made myself presentable, four new women were waiting for me.
As one, they turned from the dining room table to inspect me.
The black woman closest to me was maybe five years older. A total fashionista, she could have been a model in her designer mini-dress and bling. She certainly had the attitude for the catwalk.
Next to her was seated an elderly Indian woman with a sleek silver bob and a sharply tailored business suit.
The other two women were seated across the table: a fiery red-head, probably in her early thirties, dressed in the latest post-apocalyptic chic with a partially-shaved head and a very cool Monroe piercing above her lip, and a middle-aged Asian woman with her hair pulled into a ballet bun, wearing an ankle-length sundress with a delicate floral-patterned scarf knotted jauntily around her neck.
Gelman did the introductions. “Raquel, Shivani, Elena, Catalina. This is Nava.”
“Hi.” I shook hands with each one in turn, making sure to maintain eye contact, my grip firm. I may have been a bottom feeder in the witch hierarchy, but I wasn’t going to roll over in their presence.
“Come here, cariña.” The Asian woman, Catalina, kept my hand tight in hers, drawing me around the table.
“Catalina is head of the Mexico City coven and an expert in spellcasting,” Gelm
an said.
“She’s also not letting go of me,” I muttered.
Catalina stood up and placed one hand on my chest and the other on the small of my back. A wave of warmth pulsed through me, coming up short like her magic had hit some kind of wall. My entire body jerked, the way my leg did when the doctor tapped my knee.
“It’s as you feared, Esther,” she said in her melodic Spanish accent.
“Feared?” I did a double take. “You told them about Lilith?”
Gelman didn’t even look repentant. She flicked the stainless steel lighter engraved with her initials she always seemed to have on hand, even though she no longer smoked. “What, you thought I’d keep quiet? That elimination spell I gave your Rohan was basic, but very efficient. It should have drawn Lilith from your body. It didn’t. I called them here to help us find out why.”
“We knew why! Lilith was just too strong. We’ve been over this.”
“Another reason to finish what Tessa started and get rid of hunters,” Raquel said. “Rasha bumbling around above their pay grade, messing with spells they have no business casting. It’s dangerous.”
“Oh, good.” I glared at Gelman. “You told them everything.”
“They needed to know how, why, and who was involved.” Flick. Flick. Flick.
“Yeah. Her Rasha boyfriend,” Raquel rolled her eyes. “Real magical genius.”
I exhaled to a slow count of ten. Witches and Rasha had always hated each other, always been convinced that the team they played for had the best grasp on magic. Yelling at Raquel wasn’t going to prove my point. An image of David with his slingshot flashed through my mind.
When faced with an impossible task, change the rules of the game.
“How do you kill a sakacha?” I asked, drumming my fingers on the table. “Any idea?”
“A what?”
I took the empty seat next to Gelman, placing me next to Raquel. “A seven-foot tall wooden snowman demon whose kill spot is inside it. It’s not on Google so you better know what you’re facing, otherwise your death is going to be pretty painful. Because of its iron pincers. It totally has those. They can snap bone–” I snapped a gingersnap in half and Raquel flinched. “Like it’s nothing. I’m getting the crash course on demons, but if I hadn’t had some of those men in my corner, I’d have been dead in minutes. I respect that you have me and every Rasha beat on the magic front, but give them their due; they’ve trained their whole lives and studied like mad to kill these things so you don’t have to.”
The Unlikeable Demon Hunter Collection: Books 1-6: A Complete Paranormal Romantic Comedy Series Page 118
