Demon Bewitched

by Jenn Stark

  “I need you to tell me every truth you know about Ahriman,” she said. “He’s a demon as ancient as time itself, and the legends about him are long and twisting.”

  Stefan shrugged. “That’s the downside of legends, yeah.”

  “I also need to understand how mortals can kill demons, beyond those who act as agents of faith, like the exorcist.”

  Stefan’s brows climbed. “Demons in general, or Ahriman in particular? There’s a difference. And you witch types don’t typically kill demons, last I heard. You use them.” More to the point, he didn’t like the idea of spilling his candy to Cressida on this score, whether or not Marcus was listening in. There were some things humans didn’t need to know.

  “You don’t deny it can be done.”

  He could feel the compulsion of honesty on him, and irritation whispered through him. He didn’t like being ordered to do anything, particularly by magical means.

  “It most definitely can be done.” It was only the truth, and as Cressida had pointed out, he was bound to tell the truth. He dragged his hand down the swell of her breast and spread his fingers wide against her belly, kneading the soft, rounded curve of it. The movement was incredibly intimate, and she froze beneath his hand, her mouth tightening in surprise. “The descendants of the Fallen and humans can do it, princess. Straight-up humans, that’s a different story. Those who pull it off have the might of God on their side, like the exorcist does. But another human lining up right beside them, doing the exact same move? No dice. The demon lives.”

  “What of the children of humans and demons—demons, not the Fallen?”

  “Those are spawn,” Stefan said matter-of-factly. “They aren’t blessed by God, and they usually don’t survive the pregnancy. If they do, they generally don’t turn out too well, though they have their chances. There’s no joy in that path, princess, but if you really want to give it a try, we can see how it goes.”

  He moved his hands down to grab the edge of her gown, then pushed it up her thighs. He could practically feel need coiling within her, and it called to him, an answering desire building as his cock stiffened further. This was going to be a really long night.

  “But there would be no point in us having sex, is what you’re saying. Your seed would bear no fruit within me, no matter how much you filled me up.”

  Stefan could feel the blood draining out of his head at the images she was conjuring—all of that blood pooling in points farther south. “Well, there’d be plenty of point. It just might not make a baby. If you don’t have a problem with that, I certainly don’t. Anything else you need to know?”

  Cressida blinked quickly, as if she’d lost the thread of the conversation. Stefan took advantage of her hesitation to brush his fingers against her legs once more. He inched the hemline up farther, nudging her legs apart. They opened easily, exposing creamy flesh that looked far too soft for the roughness of his hands as he pressed his fingers into her thighs, probing the sensitive skin. When he dragged one thumb across her sex, the moist, delicate skin shuddering beneath him, Cressida stiffened beneath his touch, panic crossing her face. If he didn’t know better, he would almost think…

  No. There was no way the high priestess of the Scepter Coven could be a virgin. He was almost certain that little milestone had to be reached before they were even allowed to take higher office. Marcus should’ve unlocked that achievement well before they’d started preparing for this little level of Whack-A-Demon.

  “Will you sacrifice yourself for me to banish Ahriman?” Cressida asked suddenly, and he supposed the question was important enough that anyone would excuse a little breathlessness. So he could be excused for taking his time to answer it. He brushed his thumb the other way, then shifted his hand up, his fingers unerringly finding the nub of nerves at her center. He hovered directly over it, not touching, as he pretended to consider her question.

  “Probably not,” he said at last. “Anything else?” As she opened her mouth to speak, he dropped his finger the bare fraction of an inch to brush against her. She sucked in a breath that sounded more like a startled gasp.

  “One more thing,” she said, when she could manage speech again. “And this is nonnegotiable. You must swear fealty to me for the duration of our marriage.”

  “Our marriage? I kind of got the idea that wasn’t a real thing.” Stefan longed to touch her with his tongue, to taste her, but he didn’t want to tip off Marcus. Not yet. The guy might be an idiot, but even he would be able to figure out the sound of his supposed betrothed getting the best oral sex of her life while he was sitting in a dark room somewhere, huddled beneath his earphones.

  “The requirements of the sacred grimoire have been met,” Cressida countered, reclaiming his attention. Her cheeks were flushed, and energy seemed to leap from her, electrifying the air. Once again, Stefan had an almost irresistible urge to sweep her into his arms and pleasure her till she begged for mercy. That definitely would get picked up by Marcus’s bug. “The marriage doesn’t need to be consummated for it to be real.”

  “And that’s a crying shame, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Well, yes—I mean no.”

  Stefan smiled. “You certain about that?”

  Her eyes widened, her lips parting—

  And then…

  All hell broke loose.

  There was virtually no warning for the hellspawn’s arrival, but Stefan heard them the barest breath before Cressida did, heard them and went flying through the air, hitting the first wave of demonic insects with a snarl of fury, and—

  And then he was caught, ripped out of Cressida’s chambers and once more suspended in the ephemera of space and time, the vise grip of the archangel around his neck.

  “Will you stop doing that!” he protested, shifting and twitching in the gray netherworld between Earth and the abyss. Mortals who knew about the veil thought of it as a thin net separating Earth from the endless realms of spectral creation, but it was both more and less than that. It was—a nothingness. A moat of endless fog. And it was Michael’s favorite spot for his little fireside chats with the Syx, chats Stefan had managed to avoid for most of his term as a demon enforcer. He very much wanted to go back to avoiding them.

  “No, I will not. You must let her stand on her own,” the archangel said, punctuating his command with a burst of electricity that nearly fried Stefan’s nerve endings. The torque around his neck shattered into a dozen pieces, but Michael didn’t so much as glance at it. “Cressida has been building her power for the past twenty minutes. She needs to be tested.”

  “I hate to break it to you, buddy, but I’ve been with her all that time. Whatever she’s been doing for the last twenty minutes, it wasn’t building her power.”

  “Perhaps not intentionally, but that doesn’t change the fact that she was drawing on an energy source heretofore unknown to her.”

  Stefan grimaced. “Okay, that I can buy. But in case you didn’t notice, those demons attacking her in her cute little New York apartment are hellspawn. As in the insect swarms of hell. There’s no way she’s fought them before. They’re going to sting like a bitch if she doesn’t protect herself.” He stared at the archangel. “Do not tell me you dropped those on her ass.”

  “I didn’t. They were summoned by someone else in the coven. To test her.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “She will never know her own strength if you step in unnecessarily,” the archangel continued, talking over him. “How long do you have to exist among humans before you will finally understand that? They cannot evolve unless they put themselves into the fire willingly. She’s ready for the test. You must be ready to let her take it.”

  Stefan scowled. “Duly noted, after I take out the hellspawn. Maybe it’s not her being tested here, maybe it’s me. I haven’t had to deal with the little ankle biters for a long time either.”

  That stopped the archangel, and Stefan pressed his point. “While we’re up, what’s this shit
with Ahriman? Do you seriously want me to let her stand in front of him when he shows up? Because she’ll be one crispy human if I let her do that, and that’s going to be on you, not me.”

  Michael regarded him stonily. “You told her you wouldn’t sacrifice yourself for her.”

  “I won’t be sacrificing myself. I can kick Ahriman’s ass without her help. But she doesn’t need to know that.”

  “You may not, in point of fact, be able to defeat Ahriman alone, even with the witch’s bond to aid you,” Michael countered. “You’ve never faced a demon that strong.”

  Stefan placed a hand on his heart, staggering back. “O ye of little faith. You wound me.”

  Michael rolled his eyes. “Very well, you may protect her with your strength and your fire should she confront Ahriman. But your primary goal must be to destroy the—”

  A scream cut across the veil, cutting him off. A vaguely “Stefan!”-sounding scream.

  “That’s my cue,” Stefan said, and he hurtled back to Cressida’s side.

  Chapter Eleven

  Cressida stood in the center of her apartment, fury rolling off her in waves as she worked dual spells of attack and self-protection. The demons should never have gotten this close to her. She was high priestess of the Scepter Coven, and there were so many layers of wards on the coven’s New York fortress, most of which she’d set herself in a flurry of redundant spell casting, that even the idea of hellspawn hitting her inner sanctum strained credulity.

  Yet here they were. The insects of the underworld. She’d never seen them in the flesh before, but the sacred grimoire considered them one of Ahriman’s first lines of offense. Smaller than she would have expected, faster, and there were so many of them, it was all she could do not to get dizzy trying to track them as they whirled around the room. She didn’t miss the fact that half were gradually getting closer to her—while half were pressing outward, looking for any means to escape her apartment.

  No way was she going to allow them to roam through the rest of the floors in this building, none of which were as well warded as hers.

  “Hold!” she shouted, and five points of fire erupted to life at the edges of the room. It wasn’t real fire, but its spectral nature made it no less intense. The creatures reacted immediately, recoiling from the five points of the pentagram, perfectly contained. But that meant all of them were headed directly for her.

  Who’d summoned these horrible creatures? They flew like they were born to, not as part of some affected glamour. They were also horribly misshapen, long and slender, their joints distended into sharp angles capped with sharper prongs. She was instantly put in mind of Boltar, his body covered in spikes. Had the dampening spell they’d laid upon him failed? Had he summoned these creatures? Or was Zeneschiah to blame? He was the presumed foot soldier of Ahriman himself, to hear the lawgivers talk. And surely—surely it wouldn’t have been Stefan, right? For all that he’d disappeared, surely he wouldn’t have sprung these creatures on her and fled.

  Right?

  It didn’t matter. They were here now, squealing at such a high pitch that Cressida flinched back every time one got too close to her face.

  “Begone,” she ordered in Latin, then Sumerian, and then Akkadian, but the demons paid her no heed. She could feel power building inside her, and she knew her capabilities and her potential for greater strength—why couldn’t she command them?

  Then the first one breached her wall of protective fire, raking across her face. The pain was so abrupt, so intense, Cressida staggered back—and that was all the invitation the other creatures needed. They pounced on her in a fury of wings and claws, scraping, tearing, rending, and worse than that, they focused all around her head, some of them small enough they flew into her mouth as she inhaled to issue another spell. With a bleat of real fear, she doubled over, putting her arms above her head. She knew—knew she was stronger than any of the other witches in the building—but there was one wielder of magic she suspected was stronger than her, one she hadn’t seen since the onslaught of this attack. Cupping her hands over her face, she cried his name.

  “Stefan!”

  Nothing happened, and a renewed flare of panic scorched through her. What if Stefan had been the one to summon these creatures in the first place? What if she hadn’t been directing the last thirty minutes between them, the way she’d thought she’d been, but he’d been running the show? She’d wanted to conjure up a deeper magic, leveraging the demon’s obvious bent toward overt sexuality, and he’d seemed completely on board with that plan. But was he on board because he was planning to dupe her? Had she truly misread him that much?

  Another of the stinging creatures assaulted her mouth as she drew breath to scream again. Pain hissed across her lips as they were slashed by what felt like a firebrand. The strike was so unexpectedly intense that tears sprang to her eyes, and she grabbed the offending creature with a darting swipe, focusing all her anger on it—

  It dissolved in a puff of smoke.

  The air suddenly snapped around her, like a sheet flapping in the wind, and Stefan’s joyful laughter cut through the whirring, biting cloud of insects. “Boom! You got there before I even told you. I knew you could do it!”

  Another birdlike creature bit her in the shoulder, and Cressida snarled with rage, batting it away. The moment her hand connected with it, the demon exploded. It was larger than the thing that’d attacked her face, so instead of shattering into dust, it burst into an oily residue of black goop and ashes—these things were definitely demons, but exceptionally small and nasty demons.

  “Why—How—?” More of the creatures leapt on her, and she had to work to keep her focus on rage, like a lick of fire exploding moths that got too close.

  “Hellspawn don’t need an invitation,” Stefan offered helpfully. She tried to focus on his voice, but he was too far away from her, and she dropped to her knees and began sweeping her arms wide, keeping her mad burning hot and bright. With each square foot she cleared, it seemed that half again as many of the creatures flooded back toward her, nipping at her ears, her cheeks, her bare shoulders—and the even softer skin they could easily latch on to through the fine mesh of her nightgown. She’d wanted to surprise Stefan, to catch him off his game. She’d wanted—if she was being honest—to surprise him so much that he would throw her back on the couch and make love to her before he even fully understood what he was doing. But this was a demon, a Syx. Of course she hadn’t taken him by surprise. Instead he’d turned the tables almost immediately, driven her to a level of sexual need that’d nearly made her explode…and then all hell had broken loose.

  And now she was fighting off the horde in a nightie.

  “Dammit!” One of the creatures latched on to the soft skin of her heel, and Cressida howled in real pain as it sank its pincers into her.

  A second later, something ripped it free. “I like those feet,” Stefan growled, and she rolled over on her back, shielding her face as a blast of heat rolled over her. For the first time since she’d ordered the hellspawn to remain within the pentagram, she could draw a deep breath, albeit a very smoky one, as Stefan practically exploded with fiery rage, incinerating every demon caught in her thrall…which was a lot of them.

  The burst of fire blew out almost as quickly as it started, and Cressida sat up automatically, looking around. Stefan stood with his back to her, and she gaped. This wasn’t Stefan as she knew him in his beautiful glamour, but a Stefan encased in a broken, shattered body—not twisted and gnarled and grotesque, but horribly abused. His back was covered with crisscrossed scars that looked like they went all the way to the bone. Parts of his skin were bleached white from acid; while other sections were black as tar. He had no hair, and his ears had been cut from the sides of his head—

  Then he turned, and Cressida blinked. His glamour was back in place—minus the torque, somehow—his black hair swept back, his dark eyes flashing with desire, his smile once again brimming with confidence. He
was…perfect. Absolutely perfect.

  “Hello, beautiful.” He grinned, his manner so relaxed that she inexplicably wanted to burst into tears.

  Instead, she whirled away, trying to compose herself as he approached her.

  “Where’s the torque?” she rasped, and Stefan halted behind her, snorting with satisfaction. He clearly didn’t realize what she’d seen beneath his careful glamour, and she didn’t want him to know.

  “That was deactivated right after the hellspawn showed up. Consider it an extermination special—two bugs for the price of one.”

  Cressida sagged with relief. Marcus couldn’t hear them, then. Had he detected the swarm of hellspawn? Surely not. Surely, her head of security would have already been here, no matter what privacy the ancient grimoire demanded be given to the high priestess and her consort, if he’d thought her life actually at risk.

  Wouldn’t he?

  Stefan’s next words were impossibly gentle, drawing her focus back. “Whoa, you got the crap bitten out of you,” he said, whistling.

  He wasn’t wrong. Cressida gasped as she held out her hands, turning them over. The skin on her arms alone was marred with easily two hundred bite marks, some of them bubbling with a fizzing sort of goo. She lifted her hands to her face, remembering all the attacks there, suddenly rigid with mortification of how she might look.

  “My face,” she whispered, and Stefan took her hands before she could touch herself, chuckling as she jerked away from him. A few tears leaked from her eyes, stinging against the slashes, and her mouth started to tremble despite her best efforts to keep it still.

  “Relax, princess. These are the marks of hellspawn. They hurt, but they’re not permanent. And anything wrought of a demon, I can fix faster than your fancy spells. Which is a good thing, or ain’t no way you’d be getting your cleaning deposit back.”

  “But—”