by Ann Aguirre
“Fair enough.” At his gesture of invitation, I served my plate, and he joined me a few moments later.
“I suppose it’s too much to hope for that you’ve solved the problem.”
I offered a rueful smile. “If anyone knows what’s in your books, it’s you. I just hoped . . .”
“Me too.”
But sometimes the situation was impossible. There was only a dark night ending in the grave. Bleak thoughts filled my head as I ate in silence. Eventually it occurred to me that I hadn’t tried to use the touch since returning from Sheol. Maybe it could prove helpful in this regard, assuming it still worked.
“Do you have anything that belonged to Macleish?” I asked at length.
“I do, actually.”
“Let me see it?”
I was astonished when he brought me a gold tooth. Booke lifted his thin shoulders in a shrug. “I told you we fought.”
Metal was generally good about capturing a charge, but this had physically been part of Donal Macleish. I had never attempted to read a glass eye or a prosthetic limb. The fact that their last encounter had been the catalyst for the tooth’s removal might actually prove valuable. I braced myself when Booke dropped the chunk of gold into my palm.
After a bracing breath, I dropped the shields that kept me from indiscriminately reading everything I touched. There came a flicker deep at the core of me, like this ability had gone dormant. At first I thought it wasn’t going to work, and then the flicker became a conflagration. Pain burned through me, a fire in my palm that seared my nerves all the way up to my elbows. Sweat broke out as the vision suffused me. My eyes went blank, and then superimposed images cascaded through my head, along with lightning-fast emotional impressions. Fleeting thoughts.
Kill him. No. Make him suffer.
Two men, struggling. The punches rained between them with unskilled ferocity. One would stagger back and attempt to invoke a spell, only to be interrupted by the other in a desperate charge. Both their faces were bloody, broken noses, split lips. The room reflected the same destruction. Books were strewn about, pages torn loose, spines snapped. Crockery lay in shards, and one chair had been smashed flat, the legs surrounding it like a denuded daisy in the throes of He Loves Me Not.
Bright blue energy streamed from Booke’s fingertips, but before he could complete the incantation, Donal slammed him headfirst into a wall. Which was when Booke lost the fight. I could see he was wandering in and out of consciousness, groggy as hell. Still, he lashed out with a final blow—and that was the one that knocked the tooth from Donal’s mouth.
The vision dumped me on Booke’s kitchen floor. Well, that was new. I didn’t remember ever moving this way before, but I had been in the chair, and now I was on all fours, panting through my open mouth. And I had a new scar on my palm, the final evidence that I’d lost my mother’s magick in Sheol. Her abilities made the touch easier, somewhat less damaging, but that benefit was gone now.
Booke knelt beside me, looking fearful, concerned. “Is it always like that?”
I mustered a half smile. “Sometimes it’s worse.”
“That’s rather awful.” He stroked my hair gently, a paternal gesture.
“Trust me, I know.”
“Did you learn anything useful?” He couldn’t help the hopeful rise in tone. It was human nature to look for the way out, even after you accepted you were fully painted into a corner.
“If I still had my mother’s magick, I could use the tooth and my witch sight to unravel the spell. But since that’s not an option, I need to think about it.”
There might be no way out of this for Booke, apart from my summoning Dumah. And if that was the case, I’d bite the bullet for him. She could devour the spell—maybe—in lieu of our souls and should count it a worthy snack. I just hoped she didn’t want additional payment, as I had shit for collateral these days. Demons didn’t care for cash.
He helped me back into the chair, where we finished our lunch. Shannon joined us a few moments later, looking measurably happier.
“You got in touch with Jesse?” I asked.
“Yep. He’s not thrilled, but I told him we’d be home in a week or two. That’s probable, right?”
“I can’t imagine it would take that long,” Booke said.
The words sent a pang of grief through me. I can’t lose you too, I thought. But I didn’t say it out loud. Compared to some people, I was still rich in friends. I had Shannon and Jesse, Chuch and Eva. Even Kel counted, I supposed, provided I could find him.
You could call him, a little voice whispered.
Shit. Was that the solution? Instead of Dumah, I could call Kel. Maybe he could break the spell . . . without staining my soul in the process.
“You look like you just had an epiphany,” Shan observed.
“Maybe.” My tone was cautious. I needed to consider the ramifications.
An out-of-the-blue summons might get Kel in trouble with his archangel, but the alternative was dealing with a demon. Hm. He’d helped me a great deal, saving my life in the process, and there was definitely a bond between us. I didn’t think he’d mind helping me, if he wasn’t in the middle of some time-sensitive mission. Trouble was, I had no way to verify his status.
“I trust you’ll advise us of your plan before you implement it,” Booke said drily. “In case it is necessary to duck or take cover.”
“Hey, my plans seldom blow up in my face.”
“Seldom?” Shan eyed me.
I pushed out a sigh. “Yes, I’ll let you know when I decide whether I’m taking the high or low road. I can’t do this on my own, Booke, so it’s going to require outsourcing. But I have some options.”
He nodded. “You’ve no idea how grateful I am. I thought . . .” Booke trailed off, unable to articulate his fear.
You thought you’d die alone, an undiscovered corpse in a house full of rats and spiders. The possibility broke my heart. I could do this job, but I didn’t want to.
Every time I ran the odds in my head, success resulted in the loss of a friend.
No More Demons
Have you ever tried dealing with a dog’s bathroom needs when the outdoors isn’t really the outdoors? Butch showed a marked reluctance to venture into that gray mist, even provided we could get out the front door—and we couldn’t. Which left me holding him above the commode, trying to convince him this was a good plan.
To my surprise, he managed the job when I set him on the toilet seat. Then he cocked his head at me, as if to say, Oh, you can accept me spelling with Scrabble tiles, but this is too much for you?
Point taken, dog.
“What do you think we should do?” I asked, as I washed my hands.
He trotted off, and I followed him because he’d never steered me wrong. Oddly, the genius dog was the most normal part of my life. Ironic, when I desperately craved a white-picket-fence scenario; it didn’t look like that was in the cards for me.
Butch met me in the hall, my bag clenched between his teeth. Since it was almost as heavy as he was, he was towing it with adorable Chihuahua grunts. I knelt to get out the Scrabble tiles, as I suspected that was what he wanted. Sure enough, as soon as I scattered them on the wood floor, he went to work with his little paws. When it came, his advice was succinct.
no more demons
“You’re probably right,” I said.
But that left only Kel as an option for breaking the spell. No matter how much information I found in Booke’s library, it was useless to me. I’d had the shortest career imaginable as a witch. Still, I spent another hour among the books, looking for a way that would permit me to solve the problem. Unfortunately, I only had the touch.
By dinnertime, I had given up. As Shannon and Booke put together a meal, I withdrew to the privacy of the guest bedroom we’d shared the night before. Butch slipped in behind me, but since he wasn’t whining, I couldn’t be in mortal danger. I’d take that as an indication that I had made a good choice. No more demons, indeed.
Mentally, I braced myself. The last time I’d seen Kel, who initially scared the hell out of me, because I thought he was a murderer, he had been kissing me good-bye. Obviously, things had changed between us during our time together in Peru. But however sweet and tender those moments, I’d known from the beginning that he wasn’t a viable option for a happily ever after. Most notably because he was Nephilim—half angel—and bound to serve. Unlike humans, he lacked free will.
It felt a little wrong to summon him to do my bidding, but I told myself it wasn’t for me. This is for Booke. So I took a deep breath and spoke the words: “Kelethiel, my true friend, son of Uriel and Vashti, on the strength of your sacred vow, I call thee!”
And nothing happened.
The last time I called him, I’d pulled him out of Sheol itself, a feat that boggled the mind, now that I’d actually been there. Maybe you got the words wrong. I tried again, a couple of variations, but still nothing. I supposed the curse might be hindering him, but I didn’t see how a decaying spell, cast by a mortal practitioner, could block an ability that had crossed dimensions before.
Confused and disappointed, I opened the bedroom door, Butch trotting at my heels. After setting out a dish of food for the dog, I ate in silence along with Shannon and Booke. At least the food stayed down, as had lunch. They could tell I wasn’t in the mood to chat, so they kept the conversation alive on their own. Shannon asked a lot of questions about the war and the Blitz; it was intriguing to get a firsthand account from someone who was still coherent.
As Booke opened a tin of cookies, the air changed, gained electricity. And Kel appeared in the kitchen. He was still tall, bald, and pale; icy-eyed with impressive muscles and arcane tatts that sometimes kindled with magickal light. I stared at him, utterly confounded. That was not how it had worked before. Before I could frame any of the questions bubbling at the forefront of my mind, he took my arm.
“I have an urgent need to speak with you.” He’d never been much on manners or pretending to be normal.
So this didn’t surprise me at all. With a muttered excuse for the others, I let him tow me into the other room. “You’re here.”
A pang of bittersweet memory went through me, but to my astonishment, it wasn’t attached to anything stronger. We’d shared a lovely interlude, but I had no desire to spin it into something else or build impossible dreams around him. The only man I wanted was beyond my reach. Kel studied my features in silence for a moment, and then he inclined his head, as if he read the truth in my face.
“I’m very relieved you called me, Corine.”
“Called,” I repeated. “Not summoned?”
“That’s why I need to talk to you. Do you remember in Catemaco when I said you held the potential for heaven and hell and that you had not yet chosen?”
I recalled the scene well. We had been on the lake, stranded in the lancha, surrounded by feral monkeys. “Yeah, why?”
“Because you have chosen.”
“Surely I would be aware of something like that,” I said skeptically.
“When you fled Sheol, you rejected the demon inherent in your line. Did you not feel it when Ninlil left you?”
There definitely had been pain when I dove through the gate, returning to the mortal realm. But Chance had just died, and I was injured. I hadn’t been entirely sure whether I’d imagined that wrenching pain. To my shame, my head hadn’t been clear while I was in the demon realm. I’d made an unholy bargain to save my friends, which resulted in the demon queen, Ninlil, using me as a meat puppet, doing terrible things while I watched in horror.
“I felt . . . something,” I admitted.
“It’s like an absence.” At that, I only nodded, and he went on, “Which is why I’m glad you called me first. You no longer have the ability to summon or compel demons, Corine. At least, no more than any other practitioner. If you had called a demon without first setting all protections in place—”
“Then they would make a meal of me.” I liked to think I was fairly intelligent, so I wouldn’t have called a demon without all the trappings of ritual. Would I? At this juncture, distracted by the loss of Chance and worried about Booke, I had to admit it was impossible to say for sure.
Hopefully not. Probably not.
“If I didn’t summon you, why are you here?”
“I felt your use of my true name,” he said softly. “It was a tug on my attention, but not irresistible. I had to wrap up a few things and get permission from my archangel first.”
“Oh. He let you come?” Bits and pieces I remembered through the lens of Ninlil’s cruelty. She had hated the archangels with a passion—called them ka, which meant ancient spirits. In her reality, they had started as demons too, until being cast out of Sheol. I didn’t know if that was true, but it was more information than I’d ever gotten from Kel.
“Yes, to recruit you.”
I stared. “Are you kidding? For what?”
“Didn’t you wonder why your causes received such attention?”
Obviously, I had. At first, Kel had been vague, hinting at a destiny and first claiming God had sent him to help me. Eventually, he stopped playing crazy long enough to explain how things actually worked—that his orders came through an archangel, not the high one himself.
“When we first met, you were pretending to be a lunatic,” I pointed out. “So obviously, I took your words with a grain of salt.”
A whole shaker, actually.
“Why did you do that?” I added.
“What?”
“Act so . . .” There were no words for it, but I remembered how he had been in Texas when he escaped prison and hunted me down.
“To make myself comprehensible to you,” he said gently. “You could fathom a religious fanatic. Would you have believed me then if I had said, ‘I’m a supernatural being, impossibly ancient, and I’m here at the behest of my archangel’?”
“No. But I didn’t believe you served the Lord directly either.”
“Yet you’ve heard of people who believe the holy spirit speaks to them, impels them to do things.”
“Of course. And most of them kill people.” I realized I’d just made his point. “Can we talk about my destiny later? I called you to help my friend Booke.”
“I’m listening,” he said.
Apart from breaking this curse, the only other thing I cared about was finding a way to get Chance back. I wanted the life I had been dreaming about since I ran away from Kilmer. If I could make wishes come true, I’d have Chance and my pawnshop, and someday, down the line . . . kids. Just before he died, we’d finally gotten to a place where we trusted each other, despite the demon queen’s meddling. He died for me, for God’s sake. There was no matching him, now or ever.
I choose you, I told Chance silently. Wherever you are.
Kel read my sincerity with a glance. He knew I had accepted the end of things when he kissed me good-bye. As it turned out, I wasn’t always self-destructive. Sorrow darkened his features for an instant, but only that—because he hadn’t been fixed on an impossible dream either. In a life so long, he had learned the value of resignation; and without free will, he could only follow orders and obey, no matter what his heart desired. I wondered if things had ended badly for him and Asherah too, the goddess he loved so long ago. His ship did not sail toward a happy ending.
I studied him, wondering if he could be this detached. My decision meant we’d probably never see each other again. And while a long-term relationship was off the table for oh-so-many reasons, it stung for him to show so little concern over our final parting. What did I want, exactly? I had no idea. Kel pretty much wrote the book on stoic acceptance. But whatever he thought or felt, it was, frankly, irrelevant. And pursuing it wasn’t fair to either of us. It served no purpose to dig into his state of mind just to sate my curiosity. He didn’t owe me a damn thing.
“Will you get in trouble for helping me?”
“I’m not on the clock right now, though I have permissio
n to be here.”
In Peru, Kel had told me he could access his archangel in his head, along with a sort of divine Internet that let him find information that other members of the host knew. If I was interpreting his words correctly, he currently wasn’t plugged in. Which meant we had a little time.
“Okay, here’s the situation.” In as few words as possible, I explained Booke’s problem, and then concluded with, “That’s why I called you. I wondered if you could disrupt the spell.”
He had told me he couldn’t interfere with most human interaction, unless specifically directed to do so, though I was starting to wonder how much of that was bullshit hand-fed to him by the archangel that Ninlil claimed had started life as a demon. I mean, if Kel found out he could do what he wanted without reprisal, it might get ugly for those who had bossed him around for eons. But then, I had no guarantee that anything Ninlil fed me in Sheol was the truth either. An old saying went: there’s his side, her side, and then there’s the truth. That adage fit this situation.
“Under ordinary circumstances, no,” he answered.
“But these aren’t usual?” I hoped not, anyway.
“You said the original caster is deceased?”
I nodded.
“At that juncture, his will ceased to be a factor.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore whether he wanted the spell to last forever,” I guessed. “Since he didn’t have the life expectancy to make his will reality, you can affect the outcome?”
“I can,” he acknowledged.
“Will you? As a favor to me?”
“You realize it’s not a solution. Dispelling the magick won’t restore Booke’s lost years or stop the march of time.”
“I know,” I said softly. “And so does he.”
“There is a way. It requires the blood of a Luren.”
That made sense, given that the Luren were a race of preternaturally beautiful, seductive demons who drank blood. So it stood to reason that their blood would possess certain rejuvenating qualities.
I cocked a brow. “I’m not sure what you’re asking me.”
