by Jenn Stark
He squeezed her fingers lightly. “I’ve got a feeling you’ll do just fine. But we have to get you back to the coven. The summons has begun, and Ahriman is making his move.”
“What? What are you talking about?” Cressida scrambled off the bed as Stefan stood, then looked about wildly for any stitch of the suit she’d been wearing. “Um…what’d you do with my clothes?”
“Those are destroyed, and we can’t go back for more. Marcus’s goons will be all over your apartment. We’ll make a pit stop at your new clothier’s, then take you back to the coven chambers.” Stefan cocked his head as if he were a spaniel testing the wind. “Marcus is…unusually pissed. Or excited. It’s difficult to tell which.”
Cressida grimaced. “Well, you took me out of the circle at the end of what should have been a triumphant battle of the high priestess and her consorts turning back the demon horde. That probably interrupted his narrative.”
“Then as much as I’d like to keep interrupting it, let’s get him off his rant. But Cressida…” He stopped and regarded her with an expression she couldn’t quite understand. “Know that this test of you and your coven is yours to undergo. I can help protect you from outside forces, but I can’t protect you from each other.”
She squinted at him. “What are you talking about?”
Instead of answering, he reached out and pulled her close. Instantly, Cressida felt the whoosh of smoke surround her. They were moving too fast for her to draw oxygen, far too fast for her to process the images flashing in front of her eyes. When she tried, she became instantly queasy, and that wasn’t helping anyone. Was this how demons traveled naturally? If so, it was no wonder they didn’t feel bound to one place.
Focusing on not throwing up, Cressida screwed her eyes shut and held her breath, bursting out in startled exclamation when she staggered forward onto solid ground again. Her eyes popped open, and she recognized the elegant, understated, and quietly lit chamber of the shop where she and Stefan had spent time the previous evening.
“What’s this? We don’t have time for—”
“Shh…” Stefan turned her once, then again. She felt a quick brush of his hands over her body, and then another blur overtook her, and they were off again. This hop was far briefer, leaving her swaying drunkenly between Stefan and a wall—but back in surroundings she understood. They were outside the chamber that held the coven circle, and the chanting coming from the room beyond was unmistakable.
“I know that prayer,” Cressida muttered, her jaw going tight. “By the Goddess…you’re right. They’re summoning Ahriman—here. They can’t do that.”
“Hold up there, Sparky,” Stefan warned as her fingers twitched with heat. “We need to think this through.”
“But they can’t summon him here. It’s too soon. We’re not prepared, and we’re inside. They can’t—”
“Cressida, wait—”
But she wouldn’t wait. The summons of Ahriman was a moment she’d been preparing for practically her entire life. She knew how it was supposed to go, Marcus knew how it was supposed to go. But there he was at the head of the circle, his hands lifted in exultant prayer. This was all wrong! Cressida burst into the great hall of the Scepter Coven, fury boiling over within her. They were supposed to be summoning Ahriman in the sacred grove within Central Park, beneath the open sky and with the power of the full moon to sustain them. The energy of the earth below and the stars above was essential to ensure they met the great evil with the highest strength possible.
“Sto—!” she commanded, but a hand slapped over her mouth almost as soon as she’d spoken, a hand she knew too well. It had struck her down and lifted her up more times than she could count since she was a little girl.
“Where did you go?” hissed Fraya, her voice harsh and demanding in Cressida’s ear. “I tried to stop Marcus, but he refused to listen. After you disappeared with the demon, he strode forward, invoking the rule of consort in a time of war. And he has begun the summons! Ahriman is coming.”
Fraya took her hand off Cressida’s mouth, and Cressida turned to her, shaking. She’d never seen her mentor so alight with frantic energy. Her eyes were wild, her skin flushed.
Cressida understood exactly how she felt. “But we’re not ready. Our strongest spell casters aren’t assembled here. They’re waiting to join us in the sacred grove two days from now. We aren’t in our rightful place!”
“Marcus decreed there was no time left and—” The head lawgiver shuddered. “He’s right. Ahriman is stirring. I can feel it in my bones.”
“High Priestess Cressida!”
Marcus’s accusing voice shouted over the gathering chant, and both Cressida and Fraya froze—the head lawgiver’s hands clamping down on Cressida’s arms in sheer, reflexive fright. Cressida tried to break free, but she was too late, and a moment later, she was roughly pulled from Fraya and hauled forward. She shook off the grasp of Marcus’s foot soldiers with a wave of her hand—he wasn’t the only witch with power here—and straightened as several of the chanting coven members turned to her with wide eyes, their voices still raising the sacred words. Stefan was nowhere to be seen, but she couldn’t think about him—he’d wanted her to get here with all haste, and then he’d wanted her to wait. Where was the sense in that?
There was no time left for waiting. But Marcus was out of his mind if he thought they could face down Ahriman in this closed-in space.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. Marcus merely opened his arms wide, somehow including her in the chant that swelled up to the ceiling, shaking the walls.
“You have returned to the moment of your greatest triumph,” he cried, making her blink. Her what? Did he think he was somehow doing this for her?
The chants rose to a more fevered pitch, and Cressida took a few more steps forward, close enough that she could hiss at Marcus with a modicum of privacy, “This is all wrong! Ahriman can’t fill this enclosed space. We need the earth and the sky—and the strength of the spell casters, who even now are gathering in the sacred grove. We must go there.”
“Then take us there,” he countered, sweeping his arms out to take in Zeneschiah and Boltar and—Cressida blinked. Stefan now stood with the other demons, surrounded by three witches at the far end of the circle. Though Cressida now understood how easily he could overpower the witches, he didn’t make a move. Instead, he watched. Waited. Exactly as he’d attempted to direct her to do.
But everything was confused, and Marcus kept on shouting. “You have before you three demons of great strength, and they can move us to the sacred grove. They await only your command!”
Cressida’s eyes snapped wide. He was right, of course. Stefan had just transported her over a great distance in exactly the same way, but instinctively, she could see the flaw in Marcus’s plan. Stefan was the mightiest demon present, and he’d only had to move one woman. There were easily fifty witches here. Calling on the demons to use that kind of power… “They’ll be drained dry of their energy,” she protested. “They’ll be of no more service to us.”
“That is their service. They’re your consorts—let them earn their keep.” Marcus reached out, and Cressida saw him mouth a spell that was lost beneath the chanting cry of the coven members. She might hold the power and the rule of the coven, but he was its greatest spell caster. Why had she not recognized the danger in that before now?
A bright surge of energy filled the space as the demons were dragged forward, clearly against their will. Boltar and Zeneschiah stared around with wild, desperate eyes. All traces of their earlier drunkenness were gone, burned off in the heat of the battle against their own kind. They knew what was coming—knew it, and feared it. But they couldn’t seem to stop it.
Her gaze swung to Stefan. To her surprise, he allowed himself to be pulled even with the other demons, offering no objection. Instead, he stared at Marcus, his gaze filled with a dark, disgusted rage.
Impotent rage.
Could he also
not break Marcus’s thrall?
“Marcus, you have to stop,” Cressida warned.
“The sacred grove!” Marcus shouted, and he thrust his arms high.
The reaction in the demons was immediate and absolute. They staggered back, their arms flinging wide, and the smoke that had surrounded Cressida when she’d been swept to her childhood room now poured into the coven’s chamber. Though they kept reciting the words of the summoning spell, the chants of the witches began sounding more like terrified screams. Marcus had either trained them well, or they were as bound to this moment as she was. She twisted around, seeking any means of escape, then the smoke rushed up and surrounded her. She couldn’t see, she couldn’t breathe, and a moment later, she found herself moving through space exactly as she had with Stefan.
Well, not exactly. The transporting of the entire coven on the backs of three demons, even three exceptionally strong demons, immediately showed its strain. The trip took longer than the space of one full breath, and Cressida felt the air burning in her lungs to escape, the need to breathe crawling up her throat like a living thing. By the time they reached the clearing of the sacred grove in the thickest stand of trees in Central Park, the effort had taken its toll. The witches sprawled out in ungainly fashion, dropping to their knees and sucking in great lungfuls of oxygen, their chanting all but petered out.
The echoes of their cry hadn’t, though, and Cressida drew in her own steadying breath as she straightened, trying to get her bearings. The call was carried high by a new group of spell casters—not all the ones she’d summoned, but many of them. Of course, Marcus would have ordered them to their positions, those who’d already arrived in the city. Would it be enough? Her mind raced through the calculations the grimoire had demanded, then her gaze shot to the sky. The moon was not yet full! It wouldn’t reach its strongest state for another forty-eight hours. What was Marcus thinking?
There was nothing for it, however. The spell was spoken, the die was cast. The fresh spell casters helped their woozy coven members to their places, and voices both shaky and firm rose in greater strength from the heart of the sacred grove. If there were any vagrants or police officers anywhere close, they’d notice something strange about the space—a coolness to the air beyond even what the blustery late night should bring—but they wouldn’t hear the cry of the Scepter Coven. Their magic was far too old for that.
There was another problem, though. Of the three demons, two were now slumped at Marcus’s feet, their bodies already becoming more fluid, as if they were sinking into themselves—while the third…
Cressida couldn’t stop her startled cry as she saw the chains now binding Stefan. What devilry was this? The thick, clearly spelled restraints draped the demon so heavily, he’d buckled to the ground, and spikes were driven into his feet. Beside him, also on his knees, his mighty cross in his hands and his head bowed as if in prayer, was Jim Granger.
Cressida gaped. The lawgiver stood just behind Marcus and the tableau of demons, but not three feet away, Dahlia was struggling furiously against three of Marcus’s foot soldiers. What had he done here? What trap had he laid for all of them?
“What is this?” she demanded. Clearly, this had all been carefully planned. But how…and why?
“Your consorts have completed their service with you. Their work is at an end,” Marcus announced, his voice taking on an edge of almost feral joy. He turned to the exorcist. “Release them from this earth, gentle father,” he fairly spat in his excitement. “Or I’ll do it for you.”
Granger looked up, and for the first time, Cressida saw fury in the older man’s gaze. “It is not for you to direct the will of God, witch,” he retorted, and though his words were spoken low and tight, they carried easily to Cressida beneath the rising cry of the spell casters’ chant.
“Then I will release them back whence they came—broken, battered. They will not go to their maker, but to those who will treat them far less kindly. It makes no difference to me. They’re no use to the high priestess in their weakened form.”
“You have no right,” seethed Cressida, striding up to him.
Marcus turned to her, his face alight. “I have every right,” he countered. “I am your wedded husband, consort to the high priestess of the Scepter Coven. It’s my right by rule of law.”
“They are also—”
“No longer your playthings.”
The voice was Stefan’s, but it sounded long and labored, and Cressida stared at the mighty warrior of the Syx as he lifted his head. In the space of bare minutes, he’d been bloodied to a pulp, struck through with enough spelled spikes to slow even his colossal strength. Was this how humans would be forced to control demons, she wondered suddenly? Through blood and rage and pain?
But Stefan kept talking. “Demons of this earth are among the foulest creatures the Lord ever had the forbearance to let draw breath,” he growled. “But there are those gentle children of God who would give them a run for their money. No more. They will return to their judgment now.”
His hands had been spiked together and driven into the ground, linked by a short chain. But he could move his fingers.
Three feet away, the limp bodies of the demons exploded, coating the witches around them—and Marcus—with steaming black goop.
Marcus leapt back, but with a sweep of one hand, his robes were clean again—pristine white, in potent counterpoint to her fiery red leather warrior’s gear. Cressida gaped down at herself for the first time. Red leather?
With an exultant cry, Marcus regained her attention. “And now it is done!” He turned on her. “Complete the spell of Ahriman, High Priestess. Let the new age dawn for this coven and the world.”
Cressida swung her wild gaze from Marcus to Stefan, who refused to look at her, and then to the head lawgiver, whose face remained bright with energy and purpose. Her mentor nodded resolutely, and Cressida squared her shoulders. This was the task for which she’d been brought into the coven. This was her purpose in this lifetime. After all these millennia of terrorizing the witches of this earth with the threat of his return, Ahriman would now be forced to play his hand. Play, and lose, with the might of the Scepter Coven arrayed against him.
She turned in a tight circle, taking in the faces of her coven sisters and brothers, all of them with their arms outstretched, their throats working, raising their voices to the still-growing moon. The timing wasn’t right. The death of the demons at her feet wasn’t right. The binding of Stefan and the ridicule of the ex-priest wasn’t right. But none of that mattered now. What mattered was that the very stars of heaven seemed poised for battle and the wind itself had stilled, waiting for her to unleash the most unholy of creatures into their sacred circle.
The time had come. And Cressida of the Scepter Coven needed to step into that moment.
She lifted her voice to the heavens and called Ahriman forth.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the next moment came, and still nothing happened.
Cressida kept her arms outstretched, her chin up, frozen in the position she’d been taught so carefully throughout the long years of her life in the coven as she repeated the ancient words again and again. It had all come down to this. The endless lessons, the memorization of spells, the strengthening of her mind, her spirit. The sparring with Marcus, her constant companion in listening and recording and learning the chants in all their twisting permutations. He’d always been right there, bent equally to the task beneath the stern eye of the head lawgiver, as dedicated as she was until his own studies of spell casting drew him into other, darker grimoires.
All for the good of her, he would say. All for the good of the coven.
But Marcus wasn’t shouting now. As Cressida’s eyes strained toward the heavens, she finally came to the awareness that he wasn’t standing either. Instead, he knelt on the ground, his head bowed, his hands crossed over his chest in deference, his eyes on the dirt and grass—not on the skies, not on
the blessed moon. Not even on Cressida, whose own command shimmered in the air above the wild chanting of the spell casters…casters who were now crying out the timeless words in a somehow different order than she remembered, the words of the spell not at all reflecting the ancient cast and cadence she knew so well that to hear it spoken otherwise awakened a wrongness in her very bones.
And then Marcus started laughing, the sound low, and rich…and insane.
“You have played the role of consort, as you were bound to play it, High Priestess,” he declared. “And now the time has come for you to sacrifice yourself to our cause.”
In the next breath, the demon Ahriman blanketed the sacred grove with pain.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Stefan fought against his restraints like a wild man, shocked at how strong they were. Not as strong as he was pretending, of course, but still, pretty damned strong. When he had burst through the veil into the sacred grove, responsible for so many humans at once it made his head spin, he’d instantly seen the beauty of Marcus’s plan. The two weaker demons hadn’t merely been drinking themselves into a stupor for their own personal pleasure these past few days, they’d been poisoned. Systematically and thoroughly, since practically the moment of their arrival. Stefan hadn’t even noticed because he hadn’t been paying attention. Had Marcus known that he would’ve been so entranced by Cressida that he would have ignored the plight of his fellow demons?
Probably not. More than likely, Marcus had planned on poisoning three demons over the space of the last forty-eight hours, not two. He only needed them to live long enough for this last act or something similar. And then, their use at an end, he would discard them as witches had been discarding demons since the dawn of time. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t upset Stefan, but in this instance, he made an exception. When he’d sent the demons to their ultimate judgment, he’d done so with the faintest brush of benediction. If it was in the Father’s mind to show mercy, then mercy would be shown. He was sure the lists of sins committed by Boltar and Zeneschiah were long and horrific, but as the exorcist had said, they were still God’s creations. It had always been the Father’s plan to receive them back again.
