Demon Bewitched

by Jenn Stark

  Cressida ordered the removal of the filter, and once again, the glamour of the creature on the screen changed drastically. This time, instead of a demon covered in spikes, she was faced with a fire drake. A slender white-hot creature made of fire, drakes were among the most instantly deadly of demons, used for killing entire swaths of the damned. They were of less benefit in the mortal realm, and Cressida grimaced. She didn’t want to go through another summons to pick up a demon of greater worth.

  To her surprise, the elderly lawgiver strode forward. “How in the world…” she muttered, peering at the screen. She slanted a glance to Cressida.

  “Explain to me the nature of the summoning spell you made,” she ordered.

  “It was in accordance with the ancient ways.” Elysium surprised Cressida by chiming in. “We followed the exact prescription in the grimoire for the summoning of consorts.”

  “Did you mention Ahriman by name?”

  “No,” Cressida said. “I had no interest in him knowing of our plan before we were ready to execute it.”

  “Then he doesn’t know that you have one of his own here?”

  Cressida blinked. “I’m sorry?”

  “Fire drakes are very specialized demons. We took notice of the ancient ones you drew out with your summons, but ascribed that merely to your strength as a new high priestess. But a fire drake, especially one as powerful as this one, whom we did not identify until this moment, that is something else again. That will take more study.” The old woman’s gaze slanted to Cressida. “And more control. You will drain him of his life force first. We can’t allow his power to go unchecked.”

  Cressida barely avoided expressing the disgust she felt as she studied the limp and flaccid lizard, lost in drugged delirium on the bed. “So you’re saying we should keep him?”

  “Keep him?” snorted the elderly witch. “Trapping a fire drake makes you one of the most powerful witches in all the covens. You’ll be famous when word of this gets out—assuming he doesn’t overpower you.”

  “Word of this will never get out,” Cressida muttered. “And he won’t overpower me.”

  She hoped.

  Cressida turned away from the snakelike demon and focused on the third screen. “Jim Granger.”

  The screen on the wall wasn’t the only thing to snap to attention in the room. Beside her, Dahlia stiffened as a man’s figure took form in front of them. Unlike the two demons, he hadn’t touched any of the food or drugs that lay before him. Instead, he sat on the edge of his bed, fully clothed, staring down at the spiked cross he held in his hands. He looked like nothing more than a man consumed in prayer, though his lips didn’t move. Nothing moved, in fact, until a brief flash fell from his face and splashed off the bright silver crossbar.

  Cressida’s brows rose. Jim Granger was crying.

  “Remove filter,” she ordered.

  Granger was human, not a demon, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t shield his true nature from the world. The witch’s spell worked differently on humans than it did on demons, but it still worked. A moment later, Jim Granger’s psychic ability was laid bare for the witches to see. And what they saw was something remarkable. A line of gorgeous crystalline bursts of light extended through his body, from the ruby red of his base chakra to the stunning purple light of his crown chakra. The crown chakra stole the immediate show, scattering its lights around the room and indicating Jim Granger was a psychic of impressive strength. But it wasn’t the most powerful of his chakras.

  “Who is this man?” murmured another of the lawgivers, and Cressida could well understand the surprise in her voice. She glanced at Dahlia only to find her captain staring at Granger with an equal level of surprise. Surprise…and something else too. Something Cressida couldn’t quite define.

  The lawgiver was waiting for a response, however, so Cressida stepped smoothly into the gap. “He was the most powerful Connected we could catch in our net when the pentagram was compromised. He is easily replaced if need be.”

  “No.” The lawgiver’s rejection of that idea was quick and absolute, but it also wasn’t alone. Dahlia had spoken as well, her voice soft and strangled. An admission, Cressida suspected, Dahlia hadn’t meant to make.

  “He’ll do well enough,” the lawgiver continued. “We’ll be seeing more of this level of Connected, not less, I fear. It will be good to study someone who has clearly been affected by the recent increase in magic. You can sense he is struggling to come to grips with his abilities. We can use that struggle to our advantage.”

  “Agreed,” Cressida said, more to get the lawgiver to shut up than anything, as she sensed the flare of irritation surging from Dahlia. For some reason, her captain had connected with this human, which explained why she’d chosen him out of all the psychics in Storm Court—some of whom Cressida expected were quite a bit stronger than Jim Granger.

  And yet there was no denying the power she could see on the screen, particularly in the bright, pulsing green star in the center of the man’s chest.

  “Stefan,” Dahlia announced, making Cressida smile. She too had obviously been focusing too hard on Jim Granger’s heart chakra, wondering what its unusual strength could mean, and she wanted the other witches’ attention off the man.

  Nevertheless, Cressida dutifully turned her attention to the fourth screen, frowning as it snapped to life.

  There was no one in the room. Cressida straightened, ordering another view, then another, but nobody was there. Not at the table filled with food, not collapsed on the bed, not at the ornate writing desk, not—

  A loud rap sounded at the door to her apartment.

  “Room service,” Stefan of the Syx called out.

  Chapter Six

  Stefan grinned as the door swung open on the palatial penthouse room. He might be the prisoner of the Scepter Coven, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have resources.

  These witches needed to understand that.

  “Demon.” The witch who stood at the door wasn’t Cressida Frain, she was about three generations older. She stared at Stefan from the depths of a gray cowl and made no move to grant him entry. She also made no move to take him out at the knees, and Stefan could tell at a glance she had the power to do so. Unlike most humans, witches were impervious to a demon’s ability to read minds unless they specifically gave their permission. Sort of a gift with purchase that they got after crossing over the Sisterhood bridge. But women were women no matter how powerful they got, and Stefan, for good or ill—okay, mostly ill, in his experience—understood women. Like anyone, women liked to be given credit where it was due, yet all too often, that credit was swept up by someone else.

  “Hellraiser.” He nodded back. The woman’s eyes lit up, then narrowed, but she still didn’t move. “You don’t have to be shy. I can smell the fire and brimstone on you, but I didn’t see you on the floor at Storm Court. That means that you were either helping to spell from afar or using the energy of that spell for your own purposes. Very crafty of you. But I guess craft is what you guys specialize in.”

  With a decidedly unladylike snort, the witch stepped back. “You think very highly of yourself, Syx.”

  “If I don’t, no one else will. Hazard of being the scum of the earth.”

  She didn’t say anything to that, but the look in her eyes grew, if anything, more speculative. Stefan wasn’t sure he liked what he saw in the old woman’s expression, so he nodded to the brightly lit room off the foyer. “You’re not going to force Cressida and me to hook up in front of an audience, are you?”

  That merited an eye roll. “I don’t think the high priestess fully understood what she was doing when she caught you in her net. I don’t envy her her future.”

  Stefan’s brows went up with that. “Is telling the future one of your party tricks? Because I got to tell you, I have a lot of questions.”

  “Go,” the old woman said, but it was clearly more difficult for her to keep her mouth in its narrow, disapprov
ing line, and Stefan noticed she didn’t immediately follow as he stepped into the bright parlor. “Idiot.” The word floated softly on the air behind him, almost too faint to hear. Almost.

  To his surprise, the elegant, feminine space of the inner apartment was occupied by only one woman, Cressida Frain. He looked around, taking note of the empty screens, the gathered chairs. There’d definitely been a gathering in this room up until a very short time before.

  “Was it something I said?” he offered, leaning against a wingback chair as Cressida turned to look at him. It was only due to his thousands of years of advanced training that he didn’t react to seeing her up close and personal for the first time in a well-lit room.

  She was stunning. While he’d picked up on the red hair and porcelain skin in the nightclub, now Stefan could see that her eyes were a snapping green, her lips blessed with a deep rose hue that she managed without any apparent makeup. Her lashes were dark and lush, and her brows arched defiantly as he stared at her. She also radiated a psychic energy unlike most any human he’d ever met, and he’d met his share of powerful psychics over the millennia.

  As busy as the Syx had been in recent months, he hadn’t given much thought to the value of tracking mortal sorcerers. But seeing Cressida Frain, he found himself wondering how many other humans were out there running around, thinking their abilities had been augmented enough to face the dangers the world offered them. Stefan was a demon and Cressida a witch, but unless he was standing in her magical pentagram, she didn’t have the kind of power over him she thought she did. Unless she’d created a pentagram that extended the length and breadth of New York City’s West Side.

  Probably something he should figure out sooner rather than later

  Then Cressida folded her arms beneath her understated but still quite impressive breasts—he’d missed them in his first survey, so he made up for lost time—effectively distracting him. “How were you able to get out of your room?”

  “That sounds an awful lot like something my mother would say, and believe me, that is not the vibe you should be going for here.”

  “You don’t have a mother. You’re a Fallen angel turned demon.”

  “And, what, you know everything you need to know about the horde? Because you sure as hell need an update on your ‘How to Train Your Demon’ chapter. Fortunately, I’m happy to help.”

  Cressida’s jaw tightened. “While I appreciate your need to turn everything into a joke, it’s neither necessary nor especially appreciated right now. I need to understand how you broke through our wards. Happily, as my consort elect, you are bound to answer me.”

  “Fair enough. I like being tied up as well as the next person.” Stefan ambled forward nonchalantly, but he didn’t miss the powerful tug of Cressida’s compulsion spell on him. That answered that: there was a pentagram under the city, large and effective enough to contain a demon or three. Had it always been there? He wasn’t a huge fan of New York City, but he hadn’t avoided the city on principle, at least up to this point. Or was this simply the go-to pentagram that the witches of the Scepter Coven carried with them, packed up with their bedknobs and broomsticks?

  Either way, Stefan didn’t feel like fighting the compulsion, not for this particular question.

  “I got out because your little witch spells are pitched to a demon of a different color,” he explained. “Boltar and Zeneschiah are sealed up nice and cozy, but I’m a member of the Syx. You can be excused for not knowing exactly what that means, beyond the obvious superhero-like skills and spiffy haircuts.”

  “I know you’ve been chosen to take down the worst of demon kind,” Cressida snapped.

  “Correctamundo. By extension, that means I can also take down any mortal who sets about controlling demons, kind of a ‘let’s save the humans from themselves’ corollary. Pretty much any connection you have with the horde gives me leverage against you.”

  “Leverage,” Cressida echoed.

  “Yep. Which, I got to say, makes me a little surprised that your buddy Marcus was down with pulling me in as one of your bachelors. Because I gotta tell you, if it comes to sheer hocus-pocus ability, I got the rose ceremony all wrapped up.” He grinned. “Come to think of it, I got everything wrapped up no matter what the criteria are.”

  Cressida raised one of her perfectly formed brows. “You think so?”

  “I think you’ll be very interested to find out,” he assured her. He didn’t miss the flash of annoyance in her eyes, but neither did he miss the rise of color in her cheeks, the blush of—what? Irritation? Embarrassment? Arousal?—making her that much more attractive to him. He wondered if it was possible that this was part of the compulsion spell. Was Cressida actually manipulating him as some sort of seduction gambit? The idea pleased him far more than it should. He needed to dial it down a notch.

  “Very well, next question. How much do you know about why you were summoned here?” she asked.

  Once again, Stefan felt the pull of her compulsion spell, and once again, he found himself not willing to care. He weighed his options. He needed her to trust him, but more than that, he needed her to confide in him. The archangel had been clear on that point. Whether he went along with the Scepter Coven’s game and helped Cressida take out Ahriman or simply delivered him up to Michael, he’d not only lock down his own redemption, he’d get all the Syx closer to their Independence Day. He needed to make that happen.

  To do that, he needed Cressida Frain.

  He gave in to the compulsion. It was easy to do. “I know enough to be dangerous, I guess you’d say. You drew to you some of the most powerful demons in the northern hemisphere, dangling humans as bait for it to look realistic. Once you got a quorum, you picked a couple out of the crowd. You also snagged a random human, for reasons I have yet to figure out, but rest assured, I will.”

  “You think very highly of yourself.”

  “I get that a lot. Anyway, after poking around the barest amount, I pulled a name out of the air I hadn’t heard since I was a wee little demon trussed up in flame-retardant blankets. The kind of badass monster even we were taught to fear in the fiery cradle. Ahriman.” He lifted a hand as she sharpened her gaze on him. “Before you ask, I don’t know as much as you do about the guy, since you all seem to have a hard-on for him, but I know enough. In the beginning, there was the Light and there was darkness, and darkness had a form and a face. It was a form and face not pleasing to God, so when he created Earth and all its wonder, there was no place for such a creature.”

  “He should never have been allowed to exist,” Cressida said, her voice harsh.

  “Yeah, well. Creation is a funny thing. It grows in the gaps, and it never forgets. So when the opportunity arose for angels to be tempted into interaction with humans, God allowed it. Welcomed it, in fact. There was so much He wanted to teach his children, so much He wanted them to understand. And so His Fallen did so teach, and did so interact with the children of God, and eventually, some of those angels gave in to the temptation of the darkness that they found on Earth, allowing that darkness to swell and take physical form in their hearts.”

  “Ahriman.”

  “Yep. The black beast himself, caught in the lining of God’s finest creation, and waiting for his chance. When sin was first created, Ahriman was there to embody it, and with each new transgression, he grew in power, until God turned His angels on themselves in the first angelic war and the Fallen were banished from Heaven. After that, Ahriman disappeared into mist and magic, never to be seen again.”

  “Until now.”

  Stefan made a face. “Maybe, maybe not. The attack on the witches in Serbia was in his name, but the demon himself didn’t actually make it to the field. So you can’t actually know he was the architect of that particular atrocity.”

  “You’re wrong,” she snapped. “The witches who survived claim they heard his name howled upon the legion who attacked them. And while your tale makes one heck of a bedtime story, it’s
not quite the one we tell within the covens.”

  Stefan spread his hands. “I await my education.”

  “In the beginning, there was light and there was darkness, there was good and there was evil, there was night and there was day. And each balanced out the other. The grace of the Goddess encompassed all. Each energy had its place in the warp and weft of the world, and each knew and honored its place. Until the energy of darkness sought to overcome that of good. And that energy took the form of a demon. Not any demon, but one that was made up of all the evil that has ever been or ever would be. Ahriman.”

  “This guy really needs a better press agent.”

  “Because the Goddess creates nothing in a vacuum and there is always a balance that may be restored, the Scepter Coven, first witches among all witches, was given the tools to eventually return Ahriman back to the Goddess. Such a battle was not to be undertaken lightly, however. The reality was that if the Scepter Coven failed in its attempt, Ahriman could then potentially destroy the covens, for their strongest sword would have been blunted. Once the witches were defeated, one of the last barriers to controlling demon kind would be removed. After that, only the Dawn Children would remain—and there are precious few of those.”

  Stefan grimaced. The Dawn Children were also not as strong as they thought they were, though good luck getting them to believe it. What was it with humans’ belief in their own invincibility?

  “So let me guess, you needed to wait until such time that the witches could reasonably be stronger than the greatest demon who ever lived. And that time is now.”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Cressida said. “There’ve been many opportunities over the years, many witches and coven leaders who have grappled with the decision about whether to go after Ahriman. In the end, it’s never been worth it. He’s very strong, but he’s been relegated to the dregs of society. He doesn’t venture too far out of his hole, in other words. We didn’t feel the need to go scrabbling after him…until he came after us.”