by Jenn Stark
The head lawgiver stayed on the ground.
Cressida raised her voice in another spell and—and if Stefan was hearing correctly, he would almost swear the trees were taking up her cry as well. The trees and the remaining spell casters, staggering to their feet to raise shaky hands and trembling arms—but singing. Once again singing the song of the Scepter Coven, first among all witches, calling down the very stars to defeat their ancient enemy.
Ahriman didn’t even pause to register the combined might of the Scepter Coven beneath him. He drew in a mighty breath, ready to rage anew, and barely seemed to notice as the first gloriously perfect star of heaven rained down upon him—and exploded.
And then the sky rained glittering fire.
Stefan was knocked flat by the sonic boom that shot out in all directions from the ancient demon as he blew into a million pieces, and he curled over on the ground, barely coming up to his knees against the raging fury of light and sound. The entire grove had taken on an air of unreality, the spells of the coven mingling with the energy of earth and sky to reverberate in endless, undulating waves of power. Not sure whether he should laugh or cry with exultation, he drew in a shattered breath, staggered upright--
And saw her again. This time legitimately, he knew in his bones.
Standing in front of him was woman—the human woman—who’d cursed him for his callousness, then taken her own life in her misery and despair.
“Elisha?” he gasped, not believing his eyes. But while before the distracting illusion of the demons had shimmered and varied, a construct of magic that could not hold its place, this young woman looked solid. Real. As vibrantly human in this moment as the day he’d carelessly turned away from her, six thousand years before.
She was more beautiful than he remembered her, her face as pale as alabaster, her dark hair caught up in ornate combs, her features small and delicate. And she was so young. “That can’t be you,” he stammered. “You…can’t be here. You can’t.”
Elisha stared back at him, her eyes haunted with sorrow, her smile infinitely sad. “My beautiful Fallen,” she said, her words no more than a whisper, but carrying to Stefan as clearly as if she were shouting down at him from on high. “You were my heart, my love, my life, and my—”
“I know,” Stefan moaned, reaching for her in death the way he could have in life—should have, and didn’t. “Your death. Beautiful child of God, I was your death, and…” he swallowed, the truth striking him with a force that almost drove him once more to his knees. It wasn’t the forgiveness of the archangel or even the Father that he had scorned, in the end. It wasn’t even the forgiveness of this fragile human, though he at last understood her adoration for the gift it was, now that Cressida’s love had pierced his heart. It was the forgiveness of another soul he’d never earned, one that made his very bones cry out in anguish. “I was your death,” he whispered again.
Elisha merely shook her head and took his outstretched hands in hers.
“No, Fallen,” she said solemnly. “You were my lesson. I know that now. Nothing more, and nothing less.” She squeezed his hands. “I forgive you. But so much more than that, fair light-bringer, I beg of you—forgive yourself, Nur-ayya Dadanum. Forgive yourself.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Cressida stood in the shadows, beneath the trees she’d brought back to life and who’d then become her own living, singing army, tears trickling down her face.
Her ears ringing with the explosion, her body still vibrating with the waves of power coursing across the sacred grove, she could see nothing but Stefan and a woman of almost transcendent beauty speaking together, Stefan on his knees, the woman standing. She watched Stefan bow his head as the woman placed her hands upon him, almost in benediction. It was perhaps the most beautiful and devastating thing she’d ever seen.
“The picture of grace, I would say.”
Cressida jumped, then cast a sidelong glance at Jim Granger. The exorcist’s gaze was on the scene in the clearing, and his smile was weary but relieved. The smile of a man who’d seen too much, and who would take any grace he could.
“How is she here?” Cressida asked.
“She’s here because Stefan needed her to be, more than he needed life itself. You could say he needed that young woman to show him compassion even more than he believed he needed the Father’s compassion, and so the Father, in his generosity, brought her to him.”
Cressida slanted the man a skeptical glance. “The Father? Or would it be more likely his boss, the archangel he spoke about? This seems like a trick he would pull.”
Jim Granger chuckled, not unkindly. “You’re as cynical as Stefan is, but perhaps understandably so. You’ve been treated even less well by your mentors than he has.”
She twisted her lips. “I don’t know, I haven’t been forced into battle over and over again for several thousand years to maybe get one shot at redemption. A redemption it now seems he’s received.” She couldn’t help the way her voice shook when she looked back to the center of the clearing, or the choked gasp in her throat when she realized Stefan had gone. He deserved to be wherever his redemption had earned him, she knew. Whether that was back with his fellow enforcers or in the exalted tiers of heaven. She refused to look at the sky, though the urge to do so was powerful. Would it be enough to know that Stefan would be up there, gazing down upon her? Would it be enough never to see him again?
“No. But what have you faced?” Granger’s words were quiet, gentle. But he knew, Cressida thought. During the highest point of the battle, the information that Marcus had spewed out toward her had flowed on the circuits traveling between all the consorts caught up in their sacred bond—including Stefan and Granger. He knew.
Still, there was healing to be found in speaking the truth aloud. A truth she’d both never and always known on some level, she supposed. A truth that both shamed and exalted her.
A truth that was curiously hard to admit, in the end.
“Head lawgiver Fraya didn’t rescue me, that day in the hospital,” she whispered. “She stole me. My parents were witches who’d fled the coven.”
“Their accident?”
“Was no accident.” She shook her head, her throat constricting. “It was all arranged. All because they didn’t want me to grow up a witch. They wanted it to be my…my choice. But Fraya had seen something within me that she craved, even when I was a baby. A strength she could twist. Use.”
“And she was right about that strength.” Granger nodded. “For all that she was wrong about everything else.”
Cressida pursed her lips together for a long moment, unable to speak. In her minds’ eye, she could see only her shiny black shoes, her pretty dress. She could only remember the need to be quiet—so quiet. To not say a word. Now she knew why that silence had been necessary…and why she hadn’t objected when the familiar, kind-eyed head lawgiver had come for her on that terrible morning, holding out her arms, telling her it would all be okay. Smiling at her.
“Where will your path take you, high priestess?” Granger murmured at length, recalling her attention. “Your coven needs you too.”
“I know it does,” she sighed. “Marcus is—I don’t know. Caught up in the destiny of his master, I suppose. I don’t know how long he’s been under the sway of Ahriman, or who was the first to lead whom between him and Fraya. They both led critical elements of the coven, though. Most of the lawgivers died from the effort of protecting the coven. Those who remain are all quite junior. It will take time for them to adjust, to step up into their new roles.”
“It will take time. And it will take leadership. You’ll be there for that.”
“Yes,” Cressida agreed. “I’ll be there.”
Once again, she felt an unreasonable urge to glance at the sky, though there was no more reason for Stefan to be there than here beside her. Instead, she turned to Granger, her own smile wry. “And where will you go? You’re my husband, you know. I need to know the
se things.”
“I never expected to be married.” Granger chuckled. “It was…an education. But I’m not meant for coven life. I’ll retrieve my cross, then be on my way.”
Cressida blinked, noticing for the first time that Granger didn’t have his trademark weapon. “But where—”
“Exorcist!” From the crowd of coven spell casters and soldiers, a witch broke free, covered nearly head to toe in black goop. She held a staff in her hand equally covered, and she lofted it high. “It worked! She was throwing spells to help the demon, and this worked!”
Cressida didn’t even bother to hide her grin as she side-eyed Granger. “You let her use your weapon?”
“She believed in it more than any who touched it, and she was being set upon mercilessly by the horde. In the end, I don’t need any instrument forged by man to do God’s work. If He wills it, it is done. The rest is party tricks.”
“Uh-huh. And yet you gave your party favor to a woman you barely know—a witch, no less, who doesn’t believe in your God.”
“My God isn’t so small that he begrudges those who would find their own paths to Him, no matter how twisted those paths may be.”
Cressida nodded as Dahlia started heading their way. She didn’t envy her friend the exorcist’s goodbye, as gentle as she knew Granger would be. Being left was never easy, no matter how good the reason.
Cressida turned and headed deeper into the trees, giving Granger and Dahlia their privacy. She didn’t stop moving until she reached a small break in the forest, and sighed as she stepped into a soft spill of moonlight. Almost against her will, she found her gaze lifting past the tops of the trees and into the starry night. Through some trick of the shadows, the eternal brilliant light smog of New York City couldn’t quite hide the starlit sky. She sighed, angrily rubbing away the few tears that dared make tracks down her smudged cheeks, and tried to center herself, so that she might hear the quiet, grace-filled voice of the Goddess.
“You really make a guy work for it, don’t you, princess?”
That wasn’t it.
Stefan stood motionless as Cressida made her way through the trees. He’d felt her every movement, his lungs expanding with hers as she took in a steadying breath, his own eyes itching as she’d wiped tears away. He didn’t know how long the symbiotic connection was going to last between them, but he found he didn’t hate it as much as he would have expected.
“How long have you been there?” she demanded, clearly working to keep her voice steady. She still refused to look at him.
“Long enough to see Granger practically get knocked down by your new head of security. You guys are going to have to do a better job getting into the city, though. I don’t think Granger is an upstate New York kind of guy.”
“And what kind of guy are you?”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Stefan knew she regretted them—but he didn’t. He grinned alongside her and looked up at the stars. “I don’t know. I guess I’m the kind of guy who gets around a lot.”
She snorted, but before she could pass him off with a witty retort, he kept going. “I’m the kind of guy who’s spent six thousand years raging at the unfairness of not being forgiven—when I was never even willing to forgive myself. Not once. It didn’t matter that the human’s death wasn’t by my own hand, I…I knew I contributed to her pain. I’d earned my damnation. But pride blinded my eyes to my own path to healing. To peace. I didn’t want to see the way through, because I didn’t want to change. Didn’t want to admit I needed to change.” He rubbed the edge of his jaw where Elisha had touched him. “Change…isn’t so bad, it turns out.”
“Will you see her again?” Cressida asked, and he didn’t miss the hollowness to her tone. Her dismay should have dismayed him, but it didn’t—far from it. He felt an almost unbearable lightness in his heart unlike anything he’d ever experienced before.
“Elisha? No,” Stefan said.
“How can you know that for sure?” Cressida looked at him for the first time. “If I’d fallen in love with you and had the chance to see you again, I’d find a way. She did once. She easily could again.”
“She could, except that wasn’t Elisha standing there.”
That caught her. “It wasn’t?”
Stefan smiled. He always forgot this about humans. They could believe in the most unreasonable thing, yet consider the slightest of divine acts the stuff of myth and fairy tales. “No, Cressida. The image you saw wasn’t Elisha but my memory of her. Beautiful and strong and full of life. That’s what I needed to let go. Elisha fell in love with me and I left her, not realizing the impact of my actions, not realizing the frailty of the human heart. And so I hurt her—more than she could bear.”
“And you paid for it,” Cressida said, her words barely audible.
“I did…but I didn’t learn from it, until now,” Stefan countered. “And I truly have been blessed by the journey it took me to get here, though I would’ve never seen it that way.”
Cressida’s lips twisted. “I wouldn’t see it that way either.” She cast her gaze heavenward again, her mouth twisting into a grim smile. “You follow a harsh taskmaster.”
“Oh, I don’t know. He has a sense of humor too,” Stefan murmured. He lifted a hand, and a spark of flame jumped from his fingers, lighting the shadows between them in a flicker of purple and red. Cressida glanced over, a smile teasing at her lips as she watched the flame, and Stefan leaned closer. “And after all, he brought me to you. That has to count for something.”
Cressida couldn’t help it. As always, the demon found a way to make her laugh, and she hiccupped a choked breath and shook her head. She lifted a hand to wipe away a tear, then shivered when Stefan caught her fingers and held them close. The touch of his hand against hers was an indescribable feeling, but she wanted to be able to describe it, wanted to somehow freeze this moment and remember it for the rest of her life.
“What are you thinking, princess?” Stefan murmured, and Cressida blinked at him, surprised to find her vision still blurred with tears.
“I’m thinking how lucky I am,” she said, her voice wobbling as Stefan’s brows shot up.
“Lucky?”
She smiled ruefully. “Yeah, lucky. How many women, witches or otherwise, can say they fell in love with a demon, who then turned around and helped her find the strength to defeat the ancient nemesis of her people, a creature of great and terrible power? I mean, that’s—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Stefan tightened his grip on her hand. “Back up there a second. Say that again?”
Cressida sighed, her pulse leaping as Stefan stared at her with his dark eyes limned in fiery red. “Well, see, there was this demon, and he ended up helping me defeat—”
He cut her off, his gaze impossibly intense. “Before that.”
“Oh,” she said softly, her heart thudding a bit more heavily as heat skated through her. “You mean the part about how much I’ve fallen in love with him? How I plan to look up at the sky every night and count a million stars, hoping that one of them will be one he looks up and sees too? How I hope I can remember every tiny little detail of his smile, his laugh, his stupid jokes—and the way he literally set me on fire? That part?”
“That part’s a good place to start,” Stefan said. He shifted closer to her, not letting her drop her gaze. “You might want to add the bit that it’s the high priestess of the Scepter Coven who’s given this demon back his heart, though—his heart, and his reason for living. And that she might as well let go of her dreams to watch the stars at night. Because she’s going to have to keep her focus on leading the coven that killed that ancient nemesis of hers. I understand that’s kind of a big deal in witchdom.”
Cressida nodded, tightening her jaw as he recalled her to her responsibilities. “I know—”
“And besides all that, this demon of yours, he’s going stick right by your side, princess.” He held her hands tight, another burst of red-and-pu
rple flame flickering high. “Not just in your memory, not just in your heart. But here, with you. Whenever you need me. As long as I’m not in the midst of pounding some demon into the ground, I’m completely yours.”
Cressida sucked in a quick breath, searching his eyes. “But how can you make that promise? You’re sworn to the enforcers, to the archangel. That doesn’t all change because of me.”
But Stefan merely gave her a crooked smile, his eyes dark and unrelenting.
“I think you underestimate the powers of the high priestess of the Scepter Coven,” he said softly. “Everything changes because of you.”
He pulled her into his embrace, and Cressida felt the strength of his arms around her, the heat of his skin against hers. And somewhere, far off in the heavens, a quiet, knowing laugh drifted among a million stars, and words were spoken that Cressida could barely hear, framed as she was in the prism of Stefan’s love. “She is your redemption, Nur-ayya Dadanum. Accept, and you will be forgiven…”
“Oh, I accept,” Stefan sighed into the stillness that followed. “I totally and completely accept.”
Then his lips came down on Cressida’s, and spectral fire leapt and danced around them, brightening the sacred grove once more.
~~~
Thank you so much for reading DEMON BEWITCHED. The adventures of the Demon Enforcers continue with DEMON ENSNARED, coming this summer!
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Demon Ensnared
Coming next from Jenn Stark!
Six thousand years ago, one of the mightiest Fallen in all the heavens heard the call of a human in need...and turned away, preferring to choose eternal damnation than face the truth of his own shattered heart.
