The entity in the circle pushed at Cash’s mind again, but his rage protected him. The creatures touch recoiled from his burning hate.
It hid in the circle. What if there was no circle?
With one claw he lashed out and ripped a hole in the carpet, tearing a single rune out of the magic circle.
And then he could see it. He could see Tamsin, beautiful and dying.
Perched on her chest was a giant black cat wearing a six-pointed crown of midnight black, shining with star. The cat had its face pressed to Tamsin’s and it was stealing her breath and her soul away.
With the outer circle disrupted, all hell broke loose.
Alarms sounded in the dorm.
Barbed tentacles of black and purple slammed out of the demon’s back in an instant and lashed at Cash. Burning ooze welled up through the floor.
And Tamsin’s breath was so shallow. Her heartbeat was dangerously slow. Cash couldn’t let her die.
She’d summoned a demon, Cash recognized. And a nasty one. This wasn’t the kind that the pack pulled through on special occasions into the Spirit Wilds to practice on. No, this was serious. This was a Demon Prince of Erebus.
It hadn’t fully manifested yet. The cat was just a tiny part of its true form. But if it devoured Tamsin and her gifts, it could enter the world with all of its horrible bulk. And if that happened, they could say goodbye to Penrose.
Even Cash-the-Beast knew he couldn’t fight the demon alone. He needed allies. And he had just the right people in mind. He howled again, but this was the howl of pack to summon his true friends to his aid. But who would come? Who considered themselves his true friends? His advisor? His First Year roommate? The squirrel spirits that yelled at him every day on campus? One of the dozens of women he’d slept with?
Were any of them truly his friends, his pack?
Cash fought the tentacles, trying to get near Tamsin. But it was no use. There were too many. For every one he bit off, two more sprang up to take their place and grappled him.
Tamsin’s heart was slowing.
He was going to lose her. And then the demon would devour him. And all of Penrose. And then what?
His bones broke, snapping under the tentacle’s ever-increasing strength. The closer Tamsin got to death, the stronger the demon became.
Cash healed and fought and his bones broke again. And he healed and fought.
He couldn’t keep this up all night.
24
Interlude: Rye to the Rescue
Interlude: Rye
There was a foul smell in the air, like someone had microwaved a fish again, but Chester swore it wasn’t him.
Rye believed him. Rye tended to believe everyone until they gave him a reason not to.
The game they were playing was one of Chester’s own creation. People on the hall dismissed the RA as a damned cop (Cash) or another fascist emblematic of the Penrose desire for control over chaos (Gray) or that skinny weirdo who smells like old soup (Hannah). But Rye knew better. Chester wasn’t an RA because he hated pranks or desired order, he was an RA because it meant free room and board. And with six siblings, his parents needed every financial break they could get.
Rye believed that if you looked for the good in people, you would find it.
His master used to tell him that, right before slapping him in the face with a stick.
Life at Penrose was very different from life in the village.
Chester had designed the castle defense game and animated the little soldier pieces. He was hoping to launch a crowd-funding campaign for a mundane version to sell to the mass market. Rye had agreed to help him test it for a night. What else was he going to do? Crowley had been in a foul mood for days and was in no state for visitors. The deep scratches on his arms and legs attested to that.
He wanted to tell Tamsin about Crowley. He’d almost told her earlier that night, but she’d seemed very focused on her concentration ritual. It could wait.
But he hated keeping it a secret from her.
He’d told Gray once, but the funny little man hadn’t been listening.
And truth be told he was still working to break down Cash’s barriers. They were friendly, but they weren’t friends. Not yet. They would be.
Rye hated secrets. He hated the weight they put in his heart.
In the village, the word for them was the same as the word for poison.
He needed to tell Tamsin about Crowley, of course.
But even more so, about what had happened to his sister.
“Hey, Rye Bread!” Chester called out. “It’s your turn. Are you there?”
Rye offered Chester a smile. His master had insisted he practice smiling before he came to North America. He said everyone there smiles all the time, and not just when they are happiest. So Rye, too, must learn to smile all the time so he can fit in.
His master had been wrong about so many things.
The rules of Chester’s game made no sense to Rye. But if he was being honest—and he always was—he had put very little effort into understanding them. Chester’s other players could try and win. Rye would do what seemed most fun at the time.
He picked his wand up—it was such an ungainly tool compared to his paints—and moved his little soldier men deeper into the woods opposite Chester’s castle.
“What are you doing?” Chester asked. “You’re supposed to be attacking!”
Chester’s friends laughed. They all thought Rye was some big, simple farm boy from Russia. They didn’t know what he knew. They hadn’t seen the things he had seen. He let them underestimate him. It wasn’t a lie to do so. It was strategy. His master would appreciate the difference.
“I still find the wand a strange tool,” Rye said. “Back where I come from, we do not have wands. We have symbols and words and fingers and spit. Wands can be lost. They can be broken. It is much more difficult to lose a finger. Though, of course, not impossible.”
He nudged his miniatures with his wand again and they chopped down the toy trees at the edge of the game board. The other players were assaulting Chester’s castle head on, like fools. They were doing what was expected of them and following the rules as written.
Rye had a Slavic heart. He grew up speaking Chinese and Russian and trading with people of both countries, but his heart was the black heart of Russia. He knew this. No one in the world had a heart like the Slavs.
There was a difference between being honest and following the rules. One had nothing to do with the other. Rye strove to be honest. He cared nothing for rules.
Chester was drinking from an enormous glass mug that he had trouble holding. Liters of Mountain Dew sloshed within.
Rye’s turn came again. His soldiers fashioned a catapult from the trees of the forest. No one paid him any attention. They assumed he was just confused. The other players tried to batter down Chester’s front door. Chester’s defenders poured oil on the attackers and set them alight. The miniature men screamed out in agony.
It was Rye’s turn again. Chester was gloating. He would not gloat for much longer. Rye tapped his soldiers with his wand and they fired the catapult. A rock the size of a golfball flew up and off the table, sailing through the air. The players’ faces were comical as they watched it.
They had underestimated Rye. Everyone did.
The catapulted rock struck its intended target: Chester’s oversized mug.
Glass and liters of Mountain Dew rained down on Chester’s castle, crushing and drowning the miniatures within. There were no more defenders. The castle was Rye’s.
In one strike, he had won.
Chester’s face reddened. “That’s not fair!”
“This is war, my friend. What is it your people say about war and fairness?”
The other players were snickering and mopping up the spilled soda from the game board.
“Okay, a new game then,” Chester said. “But this time you defend the castle.”
Rye was about to agree, when he heard the howl. It see
med to come from within his own heart.
He didn’t understand how he knew, but he knew it was Cash. His friend needed him.
Rye was up and on his feet when the first tentacles reached up through the floor and grasped at his ankles. The thorns on them shredded his skin.
“Get everyone out,” Rye yelled to Chester. “Sound your alarms. There is a demon present.”
It was coming for Tamsin. He could feel it. She was too perfect for the world, and so the world was going to do what it did to all perfect things.
A demon, Rye thought, just like the one took Dynara all those years ago.
“Come with us,” Chester yelled. “Those things will kill you.”
“No, my friend. But they will wish they did.” Rye crossed his arms and touched the sigils etched into his biceps. They were each half an enchantment, but when he touched them both the spell became active.
It was a spell of his own devising. He’d made it after his sister had been taken. It had taken forty weeks to perfect it and another month to get the tattoo right.
The spell began at the sigils and rolled down his body, covering him completely in living iron. It moved with his skin but protected him completely.
The tentacles of the demon shriveled where they touched him. Nothing made of spirit matter could abide the touch of iron. Iron has no spirit. It is anathema to demons. And Rye had made himself into a man of cold iron.
The tentacles fled before him.
He ran out of the common room and crashed through the opposite wall. He moved faster than he expected. He hadn’t used the iron skin enchantment in years. He’d forgotten how strong he was inside of it. He was at the end of the hall in a second. Purple-black ooze pooled on the carpet like demonic ectoplasm, but where Rye stepped it sizzled and boiled away leaving a burned scar.
In another tenth of a second he was in his room.
Tamsin hadn’t been performing a concentration ritual.
She’d lied to him.
The perfect girl had summoned a demon.
What had brought her to such a desperate place? Why hadn’t she told him?
The room was destroyed. The demon’s tentacles flailed around like a tornado, ripping the carpet and couches to pieces. Cash’s refrigerator had been sliced neatly in two. Gray’s curtains and clothing and bed were in tatters. And Rye’s paintings were little more than kindling.
But surely not all paintings? Crowley’s painting must have survived.
He couldn’t see past the tentacles. But that just made them easier to hit.
Rye swung a punch into the writhing mass and everywhere his iron skin touched, the tentacles shriveled and died. He flailed about, grabbing and pinching each of the blackened whiplike appendages until he saw Cash, held motionless and being crushed under a hundred of the constricting tendrils.
Rye leapt onto his friend. His iron skin melted away the demon’s form and freed his friend.
But it also burned Cash.
Cash looked monstrous, with a face more wolf than man. His back was elongated and he sported massive clawed hands and feet. It reminded Rye, absurdly, of a drawing he’d made as a child when someone asked him to draw a kangaroo based only upon his master’s description.
“Hello, friend,” Rye said. His voice was loud and metallic.
Cash writhed under him, his skin blistering and smoking wherever the two men touched. Cash was more spirit than man in this form. And Rye was his poison.
Rye pushed himself off of his friend and turned to regard the demon. The writhing cloud of tentacles was smaller now and they shied away from his metal skin. Somewhere, beneath the blackness, was Tamsin. Rye knew it.
“You have one chance, demon. Return to your land of misery and darkness now. Leave Tamsin alone and return to her what you have stolen. Or I shall destroy you utterly.”
The demon shuddered.
It was laughing.
In Rye’s mind flashed images of his sister, Dynara. He saw the clawed hands ripping her from his grip and dragging her down into an endless black hole. It was the day that the demon took his sister. It was his greatest shame.
He staggered for a moment. The sight of her face again, clear and terrified, was too much to bear. He almost lost his grip on the iron skin spell.
The tentacles launched out again, but not at Rye. They grabbed at every object in the room and hurled them at him. Pillows and half a couch and chunks of carpet pelted him and blinded him. He braced himself against it. He could withstand the barrage, he knew. Until, that is, he took a refrigerator right in the face. It was too heavy and his concentration had been broken. Rye lost his footing and toppled backwards, landing right next to Cash. In an instant, the demon piled every bit of debris in the room on top of him and pressed down.
He was pinned. He had no leverage at all.
He could not move.
He had sigils that could help, painted on his body. Sigils for moving through walls. Sigils for telekineses. But to activate them he would need to turn off his iron skin. And if he did that he would be crushed to pulp in an instant.
Rye was trapped. The demons had won again.
The last thing he saw before the demon smothered his face in Gray’s dirty laundry, was Cash being crushed against the floor under a mountain of black burning tendrils.
25
Interlude: Gray to the Rescue
Gray was out the door of the Dragon Hill Inn and running before he even realized it.
It was a sudden jolt in his heart that grabbed him—Cash was howling. His friend was in trouble and how many friends did Gray really have left?
He’d lost most of his friends when his uncle stole his fortune and title. And more when he and Esmé split. William wanted to be friends and still asked for him at the club. But that ship had most definitely sailed.
Any other friend he’d ever had he’d stolen from, cheated them at cards, slept with their girlfriends or embarrassed them mortally. It was Gray’s most tragic fault—he couldn’t resist proving how smart he was, even if it meant losing friends and alienating people. Magic made things easy, yes, so the only thing that mattered was besting other mages.
But at what cost?
Who did he have left that he could call a friend?
Tamsin.
Rye.
And Cash.
And when your last friends call out for help, you run. You run as fast as you can.
He had to run at normal speeds until he crossed the runic shield. There were strict rules about doing magic in the open near townies and the school had eyes everywhere. But once he crossed the shield, no rules applied.
With a flick of his wand his clothes changed from the beer-soaked jeans and t-shirt to his normal, fabulous attire. Nothing felt quite so good as enchanted silk on the skin. Well, nothing except someone’s else skin. Or lips. Or tongue.
He carefully pronounced the charm for Deborah’s Astounding Punctuality, a useful little spell that lengthened your stride so that every step jumped you forward seventeen feet. He nearly collided with a tree, two bicyclists, and a very angry looking squirrel before he arrived outside the dorm. The spell was a bit hard to control.
With his wand he cast the oldie but goodie, Eyes of the Unseen and revealed the hidden world of spirits. Something sticky and horrid had happened to his dorm. Goo was spilling out of all of the top floors. It reminded him of when the family lost their estate and moved into a little flat in Toronto for a summer. His father was a stubborn man who insisted that if servants could learn to cook then by Merlin he could too. The microwave and the aftermath suggested that perhaps cooking was more difficult than he had been lead to believe. The way that poor microwave had looked—Wilde House looked now.
Gray tapped his wand on his lips as he thought. What could he do? He knew hundreds of spells, hexes, cantrips, incantations and rituals, but none were particularly well suited for big gooey demon emergence atop a six story building.
He stood outside, frozen with indecision.
&n
bsp; The sound of Cash’s howl still rang in his ears.
“Oh well,” Gray said out loud to one of the angry squirrels watching him. “Best try and muddle through.”
He summoned a cloud of iron filings to float around him like a shield. It wouldn’t keep him safe from any serious attack, but the iron would repel the ooze pouring down the stairs and kept the tendrils off. It looked like a swarm of particularly agitated bees. But the focus of maintaining the shield made him sweat uncomfortably. Physical magic wasn’t his strong suit and keeping the enchantment up was like holding a staring contest with the sun.
And then there were the six flights of stairs to contend with. Because only a fool would take the elevator in an emergency. There were charms to leap up those stairs in moments, but he’d need to drop the iron shield to do it, and that seemed like a particularly bad idea.
But what choice did he have? He charged up the stairs as fast as he could.
The ooze receded before him. The tendrils of demonic essence withdrew, but amassed in the shadows. If he faltered for a moment, they would seize him and that would be that. His handsome and muscular and dashing body would be reduced to meaty chunks smeared on the stairwell wall.
Gray noted, not for the first time, that he had a streak of dark humor that emerged in times of stress.
He could turn back. He could sit this out. He’d never wanted to be a hero or to be anyone’s savior. Indeed, the Gray who had been with Esmé would have mocked anyone who ran headfirst into a demon-plagued building as a damn fool. But here he was. What had changed him?
By the time he reached the topmost floor, his head was pounding and his lungs ached. Holding the shield spell for so long felt like he’d been slowly hammering a spoon through his forehead.
Light Up The Night: a Reverse Harem Urban Fantasy Romance (Lick of Fire Book 2) Page 13
