by Jenn Stark
“We don’t have much time,” Dahlia prompted. “You mentioned something about an exorcist in the grimoire?” Dahlia prompted.
“Yes.” Cressida turned toward Granger again. “In one of the more celebrated battles of our history, a witch summoned a demon—who then possessed her.”
“Ouch,” observed Stefan.
Cressida ignored him. “An exorcist was called in to extract him from the witch, but the thrall in which she held the demon made it nearly impossible. Dahlia, can you find the passage?”
“Searching for it,” Dahlia murmured, and Cressida glanced to Granger. “Have you ever worked with a coven?”
“That would be no,” he said, shaking his head. “In the situation you describe, I’d first have the witch end her spell, though. She’d have to trust me to handle the demon without her magic.”
“It’s…that’s weird,” Dahlia muttered. “It’s not coming up.”
“Let me think…” Granger tilted his head. “Look for promissio infernalis in your grimoire. It should be in the same section as your requirement to wed a demon.”
“Do it,” Cressida said.
“Infernal promise.” Dahlia nodded. “That sounds familiar.”
She sat back a moment later. “Nothing. And nothing with the modifier Infernal that speaks to our issue here.” She shook her head. “That’s so strange, though. I feel certain I’ve read something about an infernal promise pertaining to a demon spell before. But this search function is inviolate. If it was there, we’d find it.”
Granger frowned. “Very well. Look up contractus daemonium instead. There should be several instances.”
Dahlia bent forward, only to jerk back a second later. “It’s there, but it’s listed only once.” She bit her lip. “In the section describing the termination of the coven, how it will be destroyed at the end of days.”
A loud knock crashed at the door to the suite, making them all jump.
“High Priestess Cressida!” demanded Marcus Frost. “Are you hurt? Captain Dahlia!”
Chapter Sixteen
“This has been a mistake from the beginning.”
Cressida regarded Marcus across the table, startled at the change in the man. After he’d dispatched Dahlia and his guards to return Stefan to his cell—and keep him there—he and Cressida had returned to Cressida’s apartment. Now they were sitting together, almost touching but not. It was their most comfortable position, and had been for almost the past ten years, since they’d evolved from childhood friends into a strange awareness of each other. An awareness that, at least for her, had always hovered somewhere between attraction and affection, without ever quite moving forward to love.
Marcus, clearly, had never even reached the point of attraction.
And even her own attraction to her fated consort was something she needed to rethink, given the way her body had responded to Stefan the night before. She should be ashamed, she knew. Though there’d been no formal declaration between her and Marcus, he’d been her staunch supporter since she’d first entered the coven. Looked after by the head lawgiver who’d found her and bonded to one of the youngest male witches ever accepted into the coven—a foundling, like herself—she’d formed the unit of security with Marcus she’d desperately needed as a child. Never once had Marcus been presented to her as a brother, so their relationship had never taken on that level of familiarity…but when they’d hit puberty and had grown in awareness of each other, they hadn’t naturally paired off either. There was simply a comforting knowing between them, an understanding that everything would work out the way it was meant to work out when the time came.
That time was now, yet everything was going wrong.
“You were attacked by hellspawn. We’re still trying to track down how they even got past our barriers, let alone who summoned them. No one in the coven would dare, but outside…” His voice trailed off. He seemed fixated on the attack portion of the previous evening, though she hadn’t kept anything from him other than the most intimate moments of her time with Stefan. It was enough that the coven knew she’d welcomed the demon into her apartments. No one needed to know anything more.
Marcus, for his part, hadn’t asked about Stefan at all, other than quizzing her on the Syx’s ability to take out the insect horde. He’d not seen the mesh shift she’d worn before Stefan. There’d been so little left of it after the attack, she’d happily incinerated the remainder. She told herself it was to ensure that no poison left from the biting creatures remained on the fabric to harm her, but that wasn’t the only reason, if she was being truthful. She also didn’t want anyone to know about that shift or the way Stefan had touched her when she’d worn it, or especially about her physical and emotional reactions when she’d accepted that touch.
But the hellspawn attack seemed to fascinate and horrify Marcus by turns.
“Those creatures are so ancient,” he said, sagging forward in his chair, his elbows on the table. His silver-blond hair was tousled and his normally young-looking face creased with a worry she’d never seen him express before. He prided himself on presenting a mask of benign indifference, no matter the trouble or the odds they faced. There had been threats to the coven before Cressida had ascended to high priestess. Marcus had served as chief of security for years by then, shepherded into the position by the head lawgiver Fraya despite his young age. He’d kept them strong; he’d kept them safe.
He’d never encountered hellspawn, though. She had, and with Stefan’s help, she’d taken them out.
“We have nothing in place to deal with such creatures without drawing on the services of a demon. And we can’t rely on that. Not now, with the horde so undependable. We would need to amplify our own strengths to be able to summon them at such short notice and put them to work destroying the creatures.” He glanced back up at her. “You say the demon did so willingly?”
“He did,” she said smoothly. “Of course, he was under my compulsion. I don’t know how much that affected his decision-making ability.” It was a lie, of course, but she was getting better at lying, it seemed, even to Marcus.
He made a face. “The best thing to do is to test the same process out on one of the other demons, but they are tainted stock as well. They’re operating under the compulsion of the marriage ceremony. So it would need to be an external demon.”
“We don’t need to bring another demon into the mix,” Cressida countered sharply. “I think we’ve got more than enough to deal with as it is.”
“And you weren’t hurt?” he asked her again. He seemed unable to move past that point either, but Cressida couldn’t give him the satisfaction of the full answer. She’d been chewed up and spit out like a dog toy, but Stefan had healed her, inch by glorious inch. That simply wasn’t something she was prepared to explain to Marcus.
“I wasn’t injured,” she assured him. “Any slight bites or scratches were gone by the time I cleaned up. I think the magic I was wielding to deflect them helped with that process as well.”
“It makes sense.” Marcus blew out a breath, then glanced at her with a lopsided smile. “You know, I half expected to feel your compulsion on me after the cup ceremony. I haven’t at all, not even echoes from when you directed the demons to do your bidding. I would have thought there would be more connection between the six of us because of the ceremony.”
Cressida chuckled. “I would think the last thing you would want would be to access the thoughts and emotions of another human in my thrall, let alone the demons.”
“Purely as a point of curiosity. There’s nothing in the sacred grimoire about how the members of the retinue should interact with each other, merely that they’re all expected to support the high priestess. One way or another, I’ll assure you that support. I’m just sorry I wasn’t there to protect you when the hellspawn struck. We can’t trust the demon to react like that again, to protect you so completely, without the proper compulsion spell. Those creatures should never have come through
the veil.”
She nodded, but she had bigger worries. Before them rested her computer, with its own copy of the grimoire. Cressida’s was set to go poof later tonight, a situation she didn’t worry so much about given that Dahlia had a backup. But now it seemed like the grimoire was incomplete.
She gestured to the screen. “What do you know about this demon contract language?” she asked. “If I’m reading it correctly, the breaking of the contract between witch and demon pretty much ushers in the Apocalypse for our coven. But I feel certain I’ve read other sections of the grimoire that stated how it could be done.”
Marcus grimaced. “You’re mistaken, I’m sure. A witch must always stay in control of her demon. Always. There’s no precedent for her giving up that control because the demon would kill her. Period.”
“And if that happens?” Cressida pushed. “Would the coven truly be at risk?”
“Well…no,” Marcus allowed. “I’ve asked the lawgivers before about this point. In the event that one of the demons turns on the high priestess and kills her or incapacitates her, Goddess forbid, an auxiliary fail-safe spell is triggered to contain the demon—freeze it in place. Then coven leadership would go to the next strongest witch in the room, who would immediately assume control of the demon once more.”
“So there can be no true partnership between witch and demon,” Cressida said thoughtfully. It was a lesson she’d learned as a very young girl, one of the first lessons, in fact. Yet now, it seemed…flawed. Incomplete.
Marcus’s response was absolute. “No, there cannot. A witch controls a demon and then either sends it to the Goddess or returns it to whatever hole it crawled out of. That’s it. Demons and witches cannot work together any other way.”
“And the exorcist passage?” Cressida prompted.
He blinked at her. “The what?”
“There was an old story of one of the coven being possessed by a demon she’d summoned. And—”
“Oh—that.” Marcus grinned, startling her with his sudden change in demeanor, as if he’d suddenly remembered an old joke. “That’s a straight-up error, but we’re on it. We’re retranslating sections of the grimoire at the lawgivers’ request. You wouldn’t know because you’ve only just become high priestess. Elysium Gray was overseeing it.”
“Retranslating,” Cressida echoed. “Why?”
“Apparently, it’s fairly routine. The ancient verbiage has gone through several translations over the centuries, and the lawgivers want it to better reflect the original Sumerian. Along the way, certain stories are turning out to be later additions, not part of the original codex. We’re archiving those as we find them.”
It sounded reasonable, and yet Cressida couldn’t help a natural resistance to Marcus’s offhand manner. But she didn’t have time to quibble over the ancient book anymore.
“You have to be right,” she said. “I thought we were on to something, something that would explain the need for the demon-witch connection. It just doesn’t make any sense otherwise. The spells required to take down Ahriman require the strength of the coven, nothing more. And if simple demon energy was required to make this spell stronger, then so be it—we could have summoned a demon. There was no need to wed one.”
“It seemed like a simple thing to do,” Marcus said ruefully. “Setting it up the way we did, obeying the letter of the law without truly dirtying your hands. It seemed the easiest way to follow the ancient edicts without you being debased by a demon.”
Cressida kept her expression perfectly neutral. What she’d done with Stefan had been about as far away from debasement as she could possibly have imagined. “Well, it’s done. The coven seems completely mollified, and they’re preparing for the attack on Ahriman. The grimoire says only that the consort must be present. Once again, there’s absolutely no specific indication as to what he does other than stand there and look pretty.”
Marcus smiled. “Well, you can rest assured I’m going to be doing more than that. We’ve summoned the best spell casters of our order to New York. They’re assembling at the full moon in the sacred grove as the grimoire requires.”
“Sacred grove,” Cressida muttered. “Yet another foolish detail. We should have consecrated ground at headquarters long ago. It’s far too dangerous meeting the way we are in Central Park. It is not as if the land is given over to primeval forest the way it once was.”
“The location has the weight of centuries behind it, and our confrontation with Ahriman will take place on the night of the full moon,” Marcus said, shrugging. “There’s some magic that even the march of technology and science cannot overthrow.”
“Fair enough.” He was right, Cressida knew. The gathering of the Scepter Coven’s strongest spell casters, fresh from their strengthening ceremonies in the hearts of their ancient community, would bolster Cressida’s efforts significantly. All she had to do was call the magic that they willingly offered up and direct it like a spear directly toward Ahriman’s heart. Though the creature was an ancient demon and probably didn’t even have a heart, the center of his power remained the same. With the heart destroyed, the creature’s power would be dramatically diminished. If he lived at all, he would be a husk of his former self. The covens would be safe. “We’ll do what we have to do and then take our place as leaders in the fight against the demon horde. Once Ahriman is destroyed, we can start expanding our efforts from securing the covens to protecting the world at large.”
“What about us, then?”
The question was so soft, Cressida almost thought she hadn’t heard it, and she glanced sharply back to Marcus. He watched her, his eyes steady, his hands flat on the table, the way he did when he had an important point he wanted to make to the coven leadership or when he was concentrating hard on a spell.
“What about us?” she ventured.
“With the death of Ahriman, there will be no need to maintain the retinue. We’ll send the demons back beyond the veil and release the human. The joint marriage will be annulled.”
Cressida twisted her lips. “I never wanted to call it a marriage. That was the wording the lawgivers kept insisting was appropriate, but this is no marriage.”
“Should it be?”
Cressida blinked at him. “What are you talking about? I’m not truly going to marry a demon.” The very thought made her blood rush in her veins, and without wanting to, she summoned a picture of Stefan in her mind. Beautiful and vulnerable, lying on her bed, his eyes pressed shut in concentration, his body quivering with need. She’d never felt more powerful than she did with him beneath her, and it was a power that scared her. Scared her and drew her at the same time.
“What? No.” Marcus’s voice was sharper, irritated, and she blinked back to the present, refocusing on him. “Of course you’re not going to marry a demon. Even thinking such a thing is tantamount to heresy, grimoire or not. I’m not asking about a demon, and before you deliberately confuse the issue further, I’m not asking about the exorcist either. I’m asking about us. What we’ve talked about for all these years. What we’ve dreamt of. There must be a ceremony we can undergo immediately after severing your royal retinue, binding us together.”
“Oh.” Cressida’s eyes flared wide, and she would never have predicted the flurry of emotions roiling through her at Marcus’s words. Because of course he was right. They had discussed this so many times in their plans for the future. Plans that included defeating Ahriman once and for all. After the demon had fallen, all that would be left would be for them to take the coven into a bold new chapter of its power, the malevolent force of Ahriman transferred to the positive, life-giving creed of the Scepter Coven.
No other company was strong enough to bend Ahriman’s energy to its will. No other company was strong enough to force it through the prism of their spell craft and then direct it to the service of witches everywhere. The horde that now ran rampant across the earth would feel the power of their magic and would know they had destroyed Ahriman. The
y would cower and scatter, but they would eventually be rooted out, never to defile the Goddess with their presence again.
It would happen, and Cressida would be the tip of that arrow, her spell casting the cleaving edge that sliced through the filth of the horde. But that wasn’t what Marcus was asking about specifically. And she knew it.
Had the attack of hellspawn triggered this? Was he truly worried about her…or, even more than worried, was he coming to recognize that he had feelings for her?
And why wasn’t she happier about that?
She turned to him and smiled, forcing her words not to sound hollow. “Of course I want us to move forward, the moment that everything is settled with the coven and we’re free to pursue our own lives again. Lives that we’ll share as we lead and protect the witches of all the covens, not only Scepter. There will be much work to do, and I can think of no other person I’d rather be doing it with than you.”
“Truly?” he asked, and there was the first sign of vulnerability in his eyes that Cressida had ever seen. She stuffed her own unruly emotions back into their box and took his outstretched hands.
“Truly, Marcus,” she said. “The Scepter Coven needs strength, and we will be that strength. Again, there’s no other person I’ve ever imagined standing beside me to complete this journey that we began so long ago. We’ll go forward together and take the world by storm.”
“The cycle will be unbroken,” he breathed, and squeezed her hands hard, then turned away in time for Cressida to blink away the first beginnings of a tear.
Chapter Seventeen
Stefan pushed himself from his position against the wall as Marcus left. He could tell the moment Cressida realized he was there. The stiffening of her spine until the point it was about to crack seemed a good indication.
“How long have you been listening?” she asked, her voice completely neutral. He didn’t know the witch all that well, but he suspected she was annoyed. That made two of them.
