Personal Demon

by Susan Sizemore

  “With lots of marshmallows,” Ivy added as Paloma came around from the back of the counter to give her a hug. Paloma, like many of the familia, helped out at the store in addition to having a career of her own.

  “You’re cold.” Paloma held Ivy at arm’s length and looked deep into her eyes. “Cold inside and out. Your English vampire again.” Not a question.

  Ivy couldn’t complain that he wasn’t her vampire although she had a hot, stomach-clenching reaction to the statement. As long as he was giving her trouble, he was hers to deal with.

  “At least you’re not so cold now,” Paloma said with a knowing smile. “You’re blushing.” She took her hands off Ivy’s shoulders and pointed to the door at the back of the shop. “Aunt Cate’s waiting upstairs. I’ll be up—”

  The telephone on the counter rang, at the same time that Paloma’s cell phone sounded its “Witchy Woman” ringtone. Ivy left her cousin to handle the sudden excess of physical communications and headed for the stairs to Aunt Cate’s apartment.

  No comforting cocoa was waiting for Ivy at the top of the stairs, but four mortal women and one vampire were gathered around the low central table in Cate Bailey’s living room. Ivy recognized Aunt Cate’s human guests as priestesses of area covens. None were familia, but they were all powerful witches. And they all turned worried gazes toward her. One of the women looked at her with eyes red from crying.

  Ivy stopped dead, and all the cold rushed back. All her senses jarred and jangled with their grieving pain. She instantly forgot her own concerns. “What happened?”

  “Sit down,” her aunt said. “Please.”

  Ivy slid into the nearest empty seat. She saw that a deck of divination cards was set between a pair of tall beeswax candles. Her aunt’s black dagger was also lying on the table, unsheathed. This wasn’t Aunt Cate’s regular athame, but a leaf-shaped, six-inch-long piece of flaked obsidian set in a bone handle. Ancient. Dangerous in its own right. This was the blade she used for serious work, dark work. This was the hag’s blade.

  Ivy couldn’t look at the black knife for more than a moment. It still sent a shadow creeping over her soul.

  Hungry bitch, Ivy thought.

  Something deep was going on here, something bad. She wanted nothing to do with it.

  Aunt Cate caught her gaze, held it. Her voice was low and grim when she spoke. “I’m sorry, Lilith.”

  Ivy barely kept from gasping at the sound of her secret name. She didn’t look at the vampire and other priestesses, not wanting to show how uncomfortable she was with their sharing this chip of her personal knowledge.

  “I wouldn’t have called you to join us if I didn’t need your special gifts.”

  As solemn as everyone around her was, Ivy almost laughed. “You didn’t call me,” she said. “I came by because I need to talk to you.”

  “I called you three times. Didn’t you check your voice mail?”

  Ivy shook her head. “I never have my cell on at work and—Wait a minute, what happened?”

  She became uncomfortably aware of the attention on her from the women she barely knew. Something was so very wrong. Something to do with her. And the hag. She shuddered.

  She’d come to talk about the English vampire, but she doubted the others were here for that reason. These women weren’t involved with monitoring strigoi activity. They were from the magical enclaves in DeKalb, to the west of Chicago; Evanston, just to the north; and Aurora, also west of the city. There weren’t nests of vampires in any of those towns. A few vampires lived in Elgin and Schaumburg, but the concentration of the area’s strigoi lived in the city.

  “What happened?” Ivy asked one more time.

  “Jimmy Marsh’s body was found today,” the priestess from DeKalb said. She wiped tears away with a tissue. She shook with a sob before she could pull herself together and say, “His girlfriend is still—most of his girlfriend is still missing. Her right hand was found in his mouth. They were new to the craft, just learning to control their talents.”

  Ivy’s soul twisted with horror. She’d been vaguely aware of news stories about a pair of missing Northern Illinois University students in DeKalb. It was horrible to hear the gruesome details. Even worse to find out the victims were part of the magical community.

  Vampires, was Ivy’s first thought. But she backed off on the accusation right away. The bodies of vampire prey were never found. But—

  Could it be that maybe English vampires didn’t know that?

  “The community is under attack,” one of the other priestesses said. The one from Aurora. “The threat crawls through my dreams.”

  “I feel it like black smoke. It is starting to gather over the city,” Aunt Cate said.

  “Demons,” said the one from Evanston.

  Ivy flinched at the word.

  Lawrence gave her an apologetic look.

  “We don’t know that anyone supernatural is involved,” Aunt Cate said sharply. “Not yet. Our people might be being targeted by someone out of simple, mundane human evil.”

  “That’s why we came to you, Cate,” the Evanston priestess said. “To find out where we have to look for this monster—among strangers, among supernatural folk, even among ourselves.”

  There was some protest after the woman added that. An argument began between the priestesses from Evanston and Barrington. Ivy found herself holding the grieving woman from DeKalb, patting her shoulders comfortingly. They all went quiet at the sound of steps on the staircase, relaxing when Paloma entered the room.

  “Locked up and warded,” she announced. She took a seat on the couch. “I did the regular protection spell, and Karen did an energy circle. She’s standing guard downstairs.”

  “Then we will begin,” Aunt Cate said.

  Everyone settled quietly back in their places. Lawrence turned out the lights. Paloma murmured a spell to add another layer of privacy to the ritual as she lit the candles.

  Ivy knew very well that any normal person could walk into the room and ask them what the hell they were doing. But anyone with the slightest bit of psychic ability, maybe a tenth of the population, would react very differently if they tried to approach. The mental equivalent of an asthma attack would be the least reaction they could expect. Anyone with the slightest control over their psychic abilities would sense the barriers and stay out of the danger zone.

  “Join hands,” Cate said.

  Ivy linked hands with the women on each side of her. When she closed her eyes, she was able to feel the ribbon of energy that passed through each person, joining them, sealing them into the ceremony.

  But what was the ceremony? What part was she expected to play? Group magic wasn’t exactly her—

  “Ow!”

  Ivy’s eyes flew open to see a thin line of blood welling from a cut on the inside of her left arm. She hadn’t noticed when the hands holding her tightened, but she couldn’t break away when she tried to pull her hands back.

  Ivy took a deep breath, forced herself to relax, did not throw a dirty look at her aunt. If her blood was necessary, she had to accept the rationale for it. But she sure as hell wished she’d been asked first.

  But it was the sort of magic that needed a hint of darkness, a bit of pain. Not black magic, but that night Caetlyn Bailey was stepping into shades of gray. It had to be very serious for her to do so.

  Since she’d made herself part of the circle, Ivy accepted her duty to participate, and obey. But she still wished they’d asked.

  Her aunt dabbed blood from Ivy’s arm onto a square of gray silk. Then she wrapped the deck of cards in the silk. After a while, Cate began to lay out the cards in a complex pattern. Ivy grew dizzy when she saw the colors of the first card, dizzier with the next, and passed out the moment the last card was put on the table.

  Even though she was unconscious, she heard the questions. Something came through her and used her voice to answer them.

  chapter five

  God damn, I hate when that happens!”

&nb
sp; “Don’t swear,” Aunt Cate told Ivy.

  Since she had not taken in vain the name of the great Goddess they worshipped, Ivy didn’t see how it was swearing, but she said, “Yes ma’am,” just to keep the peace.

  Aunt Cate was always irritable after a major working.

  “And don’t be facetious; it’s not as if that has ever occurred before. I’ve never performed blood magic on y—”

  “I was joking!” Ivy shot to her feet. “Trying to cut the tension.” She rubbed the cut on her arm, aware of dried blood and the remnant of—something…wicked this way comes? “You’re not the only one stressed out by this, you know!”

  Paloma looked up at Ivy. “Your eyes are glowing.”

  “Trick of the light,” Ivy answered, but she blinked a few times. Were her eyeballs warm?

  “I was joking,” Paloma said. “Trying to cut the tension?”

  The area priestesses were gone. Only family members remained in Aunt Cate’s living room. Ivy had found herself seated opposite Aunt Cate when she came to. Cate Bailey looked as burned-out as Ivy felt. The candles were snuffed out on the table, the cards neatly stacked between them.

  Their gazes met, now that they’d stopped snarling at each other.

  Ivy glanced at a clock across the room. Another late night. What had happened to her own life recently? And what was she doing there in the first place?

  “I think it’s time I went home,” Ivy said.

  “I think it is,” Cate said.

  Lawrence drew Aunt Cate to her feet. He smiled when she made a snarling sound. “Come on, hon. It’s time you got to bed.”

  Paloma insisted on cleaning up the cut before she’d let Ivy leave.

  Something niggled at Ivy as she went downstairs. Something about the room had been wrong after the ceremony, hadn’t it? It wasn’t just that the others were gone and that she and Aunt Cate weren’t themselves. She didn’t think any of the furniture had been moved, but something was missing. Why did she think it was important?

  Ivy reached the shop entrance and traced a sign in the air that would let her out without any magical alarms going off, then repeated the sign to rebuild the warding spell. She didn’t immediately walk away from the magic shop. Somehow she knew that the itch in her head telling her something significant was wrong was important.

  Her mental cataloging of the room circled back to the table. Candles, cards…

  “Knife.”

  Well, of course Aunt Cate put that awful, ugly, dangerous thing away as soon as she could. Ivy pulled up her coat sleeve and touched the cut on her arm. It had a Band-Aid on it, but it still ached. She hated that her blood had touched the thing. It made her feel like she was still connected to the obsidian athame. Like it was with her…

  “Oh, crap.”

  Ivy plunged a hand into the depths of her big black leather purse. And her hand closed on a narrow, solid object she knew shouldn’t be there. She wrapped her fingers around the smooth hilt and slowly pulled the thing out of her purse, hoping it was something other than an ancient, obsidian, sacrificial knife.

  No such luck.

  At least the obsidian athame was safely resting in its heavy deer-hide sheath. She so did not like the way it felt in her grip.

  Natural.

  Ivy shook her head. She glared at the shop door, hoping to stab her anger all the way through the magical barrier, and told her aunt, “Oh, no. I don’t know what you want of me, but I’m a vampire hunter, not a—”

  “Ah, there you are,” the English vampire said, his lips very close to her ear. His warm breath brushed intimately across her cheek.

  She gasped, would have screamed.

  His hand covered her mouth as he grabbed her from behind.

  At least it wasn’t raining. Christopher turned the collar of his leather coat up against the cold night air as he followed a faint scent of energy. Not that he was used to any other kind of air; night was all he had. He took in deep breaths of American November. With the better weather that night, there were more pedestrians on the street.

  He glanced at window displays as he walked along and came to the conclusion that the people around him were Christmas shopping. It surprised him, because he didn’t think their Thanksgiving holiday had been celebrated yet.

  He shrugged. Oh, well.

  The longer one lived as a strigoi, the less mortal holidays meant. It helped to check a calendar regularly, so as not to make any stupid mistakes about dates important to the mortals strigoi needed to hide among. Protective coloration was a very powerful survival device.

  There was one holiday his kind celebrated, Blessing Day, Blessing of the Knives to be formal about it. But since Christopher didn’t live within the cultural context of a nest, he sometimes forgot about Blessing Day as well.

  “It’s a moveable feast. Especially if you’re a mortal running from the knives.”

  He grinned as he walked along. His gaze moved over the people he passed. For a time he tried to pick out someone who might be an eligible choice for the annual sacrifice. Tell me your sins, he thought at one or two with dark enough auras to draw his attention. Not that any nest leader would expect him to bring along snacks for a Blessing Day party, even if he was invited.

  But this frivolous nightdreaming interrupted his concentration. Stupid of him. Just because he was only tracking a mortal was no reason for him not to take the hunt seriously.

  He took himself into the nearest coffee shop, ordered a double espresso, then sat down with his back to the wide windows showing the people passing by outside. He didn’t need to look with his eyes, but with his inner vision—inner hearing, taste, smell, intuition, experience. To give it a proper explanation—with magic.

  He sipped strong coffee and pulled his mind back to his goal.

  Was searching out a mortal vampire hunter really the best way to go about this? Were his own keen instincts being fooled into thinking the woman was important because he’d liked the way her body had felt next to his? What she’d told him was puzzling, intriguing, but did it have anything to do with his mission?

  He held the small espresso cup to his nose and breathed in the rich smell of the brew, using the aroma to clear his mind of every mortal distraction around him.

  Christopher conjured up every word the woman had spoken to him the night before, the tone of her voice, the certainty of her beliefs. Righteous. The girl had been bloody righteous, so very sure of her noble purpose. Her firm muscles and female heat added sharp seasoning to his memory.

  Well, he wasn’t dead, just a bit different. It was perfectly healthy to enjoy the charms of a healthy young woman.

  But back to duty.

  Her purpose made no sense to Christopher. The unchangeable rules of behavior between strigoi and mortals had been set for thousands of years. The rules favored his kind, as they should. The woman gave the impression that she was only one of a group of psychic mortals fighting against those rules. Rebelling might be the correct term.

  We can’t have that, now, can we?

  Any normal mortal was potential cattle, but psychic mortals formed the small pool of cherished beings chosen as slaves, companions, future vampires.

  There seemed to be a group of those psychics in Chicago, all too aware of their fate and struggling against their inevitable future.

  Just what did the Enforcer of the City know about this cabal? Was he, perhaps, allowing a mortal rebellion? To what purpose? It was a dangerous game if his plan was to allow those mortals to think they were winning for a time before casually striking them down.

  Strange, very, very strange.

  But then, investigating the strange was Christopher Bell’s profession, his avocation, and his hobby. Curiosity was his greatest strength.

  While speculation raced around in his head, Christopher swam through the coffee steam, waiting for the flower scent to put in an appearance. He knew it would if he didn’t try to push for it. And, eventually, a thin line of rose and jasmine came up before him. He finishe
d the last drops of espresso and went back out into the night.

  The scent led to a two-story building in a neighborhood with a mixture of flats and upmarket stores. And then the scent abruptly disappeared. He focused on the ground floor of a building occupied by a small shop, still open when Christopher arrived. She was in there.

  He didn’t try to follow his prey inside. Magic pulsed within and without the building. He saw rippling auras in coruscating shades surrounding the place, layers of color, scents, ripples of blue-and-green electricity. With those wards up, there was no entry for one of his kind without permission from the owner. The place was a magical fortress.

  “Very pretty, too,” he said, and made a long leap to the roof of the building on the other side of the street.

  He took a seat and crossed his arms. He waited, watched, sensed, and listened, hoping something interesting happened before it grew close to dawn.

  He didn’t try to probe the magical shielding across the way. He didn’t want to take the chance of being noticed. He studied the neighborhood. Traffic was thin on the road, fewer and fewer cars going by as the night progressed. A pizzeria on one corner was busy with foot traffic, people going in and out. It smelled wonderful.

  He watched several customers with fragrant pizza boxes walk by below. All of them crossed to his side of the street instead of passing directly by the shop. They didn’t know they did it. Even if the majority of people didn’t respond to direct magic, most could be influenced a little if a psychic field was strong enough. This field said stay away, and the pedestrians complied.

  Curiouser and curiouser, and all that.

  A little after nine o’clock, lights in the buildings on either side of the magical establishment quickly began to go out. Christopher read a wave of sleepiness coming over the people in the neighboring flats. A natural reaction of mortals to night, nothing magical about it.

  A woman came out of the shop, looked carefully up and down the street. She almost looked his way, but Christopher hid behind his own mental shielding. Instead of looking up, the woman began to whisper and make circular gestures that left a trail of invisible silver light in the air, sealing the building completely from psychic interference. Once the shield was in place, she stepped back inside and closed the door. It faded from view. Now, the building didn’t exist at all even though Christopher knew it was there.