A Legacy of Daemons

by Camille Bacon-Smith

  “I want them on my skin, like rain,” she said, and grinned at him, hungry.

  “On your skin, he agreed, and parted the zipper, ran his hands up under her breasts and pushed the jacket away, let it fall. She didn’t wear anything under it, and he scooped her up, buried his bruised face in her breasts. She growled low in her throat when his mouth followed his hands and he would have swallowed her whole, but she pulled away, gasping, “Skin, skin.” Then the tight black pants were gone and she was pulling him down, her dark hair spread in a pool among the daylilies they crushed with their bodies. He couldn’t get out of his clothes fast enough, didn’t have the knack of sending them off somewhere in the void the way Lily did when they become inconvenient. But that was okay. Experience told him he’d do anything she wanted: wherever, whenever, however—any ever she chose. But if he could do it without exposing his backside to the neighbors’ scrutiny, that would be good too.

  He’d slipped the ruby into his suit pocket and he drew it out now before tossing the jacket into the azalea bushes, held the jewel to the light.

  And there it was—the reason she’d dragged him into the garden—the ruby caught the sun and fire like a daemon’s soul flashed at its heart. Lily tilted her head to follow the fire in the ruby. “Daemon’s blood,” she said, and shivered, though the day was warm and full of the scent of daylilies and the rich loamy smell of earth.

  “Beautiful,” he agreed. He wasn’t looking at the ruby, so he saw the moment when secrets lowered her lashes. More than beauty, then, but he hadn’t been talking about the damned stone anyway. He didn’t, when it came down to it, find anything beautiful in the price of a daemon lord’s freedom. Not lately. Couldn’t help imagining some pervy old bastard buying pieces of Lily’s soul with bits of stone. Grayson Donne was lucky he was dead.

  “On my skin,” she ordered him, and he didn’t tease, because the need in her eyes was more than sex and crossed with sorrow. She was wearing a few scraps of lace—the bra hadn’t been there a minute ago, but she thought he liked that sort of thing and, yeah, he did. The lace was white, and he set the ruby over her heart, stark as a wound above the pure snow of the lace.

  Then it seemed to melt into her flesh, welling lambent blood with each beat of her pulse, flowing with the light. His imagination. Had to be, product of a guilty conscience. Evan tried to make it casual, but his fingers trembled when he brushed the stone away. Let her think he trembled for her. He did. Just—

  He kissed her where the ruby had lain—kiss it and make it better—red lips on white flesh. He felt the beating of her heart in his kiss, felt it when the rhythm became more urgent.

  “Beautiful,” she sighed, and he didn’t mind the little tug of pain when her fingers carded through the remains of his hair, skimming the cuts and bumps that hadn’t healed yet. Her eyes, when he tore himself away from her breast, glittered with Ariton’s blue fire.

  “You’re still dressed.” She disapproved, and he didn’t care when buttons went flying everywhere. Not like it was the first time—his tailor had threatened to fit his shirts with Velcro. Out of it; the stupid tie was too complicated, so he left it, draped over one shoulder and she was laughing, tugging at his belt, his zipper, and the lacy bits were gone—he’d really have to learn that trick.

  He was usually good at making decisions, but for a moment she stymied him—lips, breast, belly? Behind her knee? Top of her hip? Circling the tastiest bits because all her bits deserved his attention.

  “All that appreciation is flattering,” she said, “but this isn’t a museum,” and tugged his mouth down in a kiss that examined his tonsils and gave him a clean bill of health on his wisdom teeth.

  “Ung,” he answered when they broke for air. He still had too many clothes on and he fought his suit pants, glad for once that he wasn’t wearing jeans. Denim was a bitch to get out of in a hurry. “Want your tits,” he said, and winced at his own utter failure at subtlety, but he wasn’t feeling subtle and her laughter jiggled the objects of his attention in a way that kept his brain so far out of the loop that he couldn’t have coughed up his address at the moment, though he was becoming an expert at Lily’s geography.

  She wrapped a leg around the small of his back, and—

  “Evan? Evan!” The gate didn’t creak, so it gave them no warning. The voice in his garden sent him diving to cover Lily, which he was sort of doing to start with, and she didn’t need his protection anyway. Then his brain kicked into gear, and he recognized the voice. God, no. Harry.

  “Nobody answered at the front. Are you here?”

  Professor Harry Li. Evan had nightmares, in grad school, of showing up naked when he had to present an assignment. Didn’t expect grad school to show up in his garden, though he should have expected Harry. He was married to Lieutenant Ellen Li of Major Crimes, who’d sent Mike Jaworski in with the pizzas.

  “Go home, Harry!”

  “Evan. There you are.” Footsteps on the brick patio, coming closer.

  “Stay there!”

  Lily bit him, just below the collarbone, sank her sharp whites in, to smother her laughter. He twitched before settling into the little pain, dislodging his tie, which fell across her nose. If she’d been human, she would have choked to death on that muffled snort. She didn’t conjure up any clothes, though, not even those scraps of lace.

  “Ellen sent me,” Harry admitted. “She was worried about you.”

  “I’m fine, Harry.”

  “Mike Jaworski disagrees.”

  “Didn’t he tell you that Brad was home?” And then he figured it—Mike was outside the gate, probably waiting in the car. “Tell Mike to go home too.”

  Lily had that dangerous, gleeful look in her eyes. Modesty was a foreign concept, but embarrassing Evan, she had a PhD in that. She let go of the hold she’d had on him with her teeth and sat up, laughing out loud. He figured Harry had a prime view of her breasts between the low azaleas. “Go home or get naked, Harry,” she told him, half a pout, all challenge. “You are spoiling my afternoon.”

  Harry coughed into his hand, doing an awful job of pretending not to laugh. By the end of this day, Evan wouldn’t have a shred of dignity left.

  “I think I’ll go home, thank you, Lily. And Evan, I’ll tell Ellen that I left you in good hands.”

  Could it get any worse? . . . Mike. In the car.

  “Just don’t tell Jaworski.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t promise that. But I will keep him out of the garden. You just go back to whatever you were doing . . .”

  Footsteps, then, going back the way Harry had come. Evan rolled onto the bed of daylilies and dirt beside Lily, staring up into a cloudless sky deepening to indigo with pink around the edges. He’d get the mood back any minute now. But the mosquitoes were coming out—the garden was not going to happen.

  “Evan—” Lily, lips to his ear, a question in her breath. He was definitely getting the mood back. “What did you do with the ruby?”

  Jesus. He’d brushed it from her skin, just wanting the image of blood gone, and hadn’t even noticed where it had fallen. It was a dark stone, on dark ground, and they’d lost the light.

  Chapter 9

  HALF AN HOUR AGO, BRAD HAD BEEN finishing dinner over a game of chess set up on a coffee table in a four-star suite looking out over the China Sea. He’d traded a last speed game for a fresh suit out of his own closet. The speed game was never the way to go with Mai Sien Chong. Now he sat in his tapestried wing chair, assessing his partners and the lingering damage to the private study at the center of the house on Spruce Street. The wreckage was gone but there were still gaps in the furniture.

  Lily sat curled in the corner of the wine-colored leather sofa and Evan perched sideways on the camel saddle in the corner, although the executive desk chair and a second wing-back sat empty. It set him below them, where he belonged, but gave him a view of the whole room, including the door. He looked about how you’d expect given the state of their study. His bruises had turned yellow—B
rad didn’t regret it, not the bruises or the empty space where the desk used to stand. He did miss the desk, though.

  Evan could fix the bruises, but wouldn’t, for reasons he would babble at length if Brad looked like he might listen. Under the bruises, though, he looked pale and a little shaky. He balanced his elbows on his knees, his chin propped on his fisted hands, hiding something. Black dirt grimed his fingernails and the skin of his knuckles. Lily wasn’t showing anything, which warned Brad more than a flame-throwing tantrum that something was up. But she wasn’t worried. So.

  “Where is our Mr. Shields this morning?”

  “Taking in the sights,” Evan dropped his hands between his knees. His upward glance would have hidden his eyes behind a tumble of unruly hair last week. He hadn’t quite internalized its absence and was showing a lot more than he knew. “He called this morning, asked if we needed him. Lily told him ‘no.’ He said he’d check in this afternoon.”

  Not Matt Shields, then. Brad took that in, moved on. “I called Bill about appraising the ruby. Didn’t tell him much, just that it’s big. He can see us this morning.”

  He wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Evan paled even more. The last time he’d seen his son that color, he’d been unconscious and bleeding all over the floor. This time, he sat up, looked Brad straight in the eye, and took a deep breath. This was going to be bad—

  “What time?” Lily pulled a velvet gem bag from between her breasts and held it up so that Evan could see it.

  “How long have you had it?” Air pressure in the room was rising, a sheet of paper abandoned in a corner of a bookcase lifted, fell back.

  “Evan—” Brad couldn’t decide whether to calm him down or watch him blow for the entertainment value. Lily went for entertainment.

  “Since last night. We find things. That’s what Ariton does. It’s why you humans bind us here.”

  “That was never why—”

  Or maybe it had been. He’d gone looking for a father and found Brad, which merited more thought.

  But Lily was going somewhere else with it. “That’s why we’re in this business instead of trading stocks or assassinating foreign dignitaries for multinational corporations. Because we’re good at it.” She tossed Evan the bag with the ruby in it, and he fumbled, caught it in grimed hands.

  “And you didn’t think I might want to know?”

  “That we find things? Check the ad in the phone book.”

  “That you had it. “

  “You didn’t ask.”

  Brad thought there might be an attempt at conciliation in her tone, but Evan didn’t hear it.

  “I don’t ask.” He surged to his feet like somebody’d run an electric shock through his butt. “Asking for something nearly got me killed, so I don’t ask for a fucking thing.”

  It could’ve happened, Brad figured. He hadn’t exactly asked politely, and Lily’d come damn close to ending the experiment of Evan less than two weeks ago. He wouldn’t have stopped her, but when it came to it, they both chose not. Near thing, though, so Evan knew the difference between a simple request and a binding command. Not much difference to a daemon lord, really, between “pass the butter” and “let these humans chain you to a table in a tiny box of a room.” Could that daemon lord say, “No?” That made a difference. Which wasn’t exactly true. He’d rather pass the butter if those were his choices. Close enough, though, and Evan knew it, had been demanding things of them pretty much since they’d met him.

  But Evan never let them know what he was really arguing about—he was throwing his cuts and bruises out there to deflect them from something deeper he thought he was hiding.

  Evan dropped the gem bag on Lily’s lap and headed for the door. “I have work to do.”

  “It was a joke,” Lily said.

  Not about life or death, then. Brad understood hurt pride better anyway. “Where are you going?”

  “Out. I need to get some air.” Between one step and another he was gone.

  “Well,” Lily said, “you can’t say he’s boring.”

  Chapter 10

  HE HAD MOST OF THE SOURCES he needed in reproduction in his own library, but that wouldn’t have solved Evan’s first problem, which was to get away from the house, away from Lily, who hadn’t bothered to tell him she’d found the damned ruby. When his own thorough hands-and-knees search had turned up nothing but bruised flower petals and bent stems he’d figured they were screwed. The rational part of his brain told him he should be grateful she found it. The irrational part was still ringing from the hit it had taken from the edge of a flat-screen computer monitor and not up to a daemon lord’s sense of humor. So he left, heading for the place that had become a second home while he’d been finishing up his degree at Penn.

  Henry Charles Lea’s personal library of medieval and early modern books and papers had become a part of the University of Pennsylvania some time in the twenties. For most collections, that would have meant the books, but for the Lea Library, it meant the whole deal—books and papers, and also the dark wood paneling from the walls and the library cases that held the books, the rolling ladders, and the steep spiral staircase that gave access to a narrow iron balcony on a mezzanine level of more books in the high-ceilinged room. Walking into the collection from the modern library stacks that surrounded it always dropped him a century into the past. The books, more centuries than that. Even for a library that specialized in magic and witchcraft, though, most people used the door. So, appearing out of the air in the middle of a library dedicated in good part to magic and witchcraft probably wasn’t the smartest thing he’d ever done. He was mad enough not to care until the girl with the long dark hair and the short jeans skirt looked up from her book with a suppressed gasp.

  “I didn’t hear you come in.” She twitched her nose to nudge her glasses up and brushed at her book apologetically, as if she’d been caught scattering crumbs rather than reading.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “Not your fault. Happens all the time when I’m working.” Evan thought her ears must have popped from the disturbance in air pressure but she didn’t seem to connect that with him.

  She wasn’t on staff—they all knew him and would have noticed something like an appearance without benefit of the door. In fact, she didn’t look like she belonged here at all—too young to be an independent researcher, and he didn’t think any of the first summer session classes called for the use of the collection, even if there’d been time to get into it, which there hadn’t. “Were you looking for something?” she asked helpfully when he didn’t comment.

  He remembered the grime on his hands, then, from digging in the stupid garden. “The men’s room, actually.” He plastered a look of lost innocence on his face. “I took a wrong turn.”

  “Understandable. It’s that way, I think.” She pointed in the general direction of the door, which wouldn’t have helped if he had been lost. He wasn’t, and found his way easily enough, cleaned up carefully before he headed back to the books.

  She was gone, and he took a look at the book she’d left on the mahogany reading table. Treatise on the Names of the Angels, and Their Various Homes in the Heavenly Spheres. He knew that one. Fifteenth century, and closer than most to the truth as he knew it. Close enough to make him nervous. Summoning spells made up the back third of the book and he determined to check with Maggie in Collections to find out who she was and how she’d gotten access to the collection.

  He took the spiral staircase to the mezzanine and found the book he wanted quickly enough. Magical objects. The Key of Solomon talked about binding demons to chains of fire, a metaphor for hell, he’d thought, until Joe Dougherty had handcuffed Brad to a table in the interview room at Major Crimes. The cuffs had left burns he didn’t want to think about, so he slipped the picture of the strongbox from his breast pocket and spread it on the table. Three iron bands wrapped the box lengthwise and three across its width, with the lock worked into a sigil on the center
band. Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy noted that the number three added power to a binding spell—thread wrapped three times, or in this case, iron bands. The pages were old under his fingers. Not original by any means—those were locked away—but still, a hundred years of researchers had turned these pages. The book smelled comfortingly of dust and age.

  Iron related to fire, and would have been used to both draw and block the escape of a creature that the conjurer thought had come from hell. He didn’t know that it had any effect in particular on daemons without the intent and the words of the spell, though. Sure didn’t stop Brad from driving the BMW, though he might make a case that the transformation from iron to steel robbed the metal of its magical properties.

  None of the references he checked said anything particular about boxes, though oak was considered magical by the druids. He’d have better luck with the sigils at home—download the photo from the online catalog, blow it up, and compare the imprints to his growing collection of pentacles and other signs spanning a millennium or more. Modern conjurers had an advantage over their ancient brethren—they googled their spells when they wanted to reach into another world. But Evan would bet his share of the agency that Grayson Donne hadn’t pulled his spells off the Internet.

  And, he’d bet that Donne had used a fire spell. Iron was the fire metal, and rubies were its stone. Definitely a fire spell. Why was a given: power. But how long had Donne held a daemon lord his prisoner? He kept bumping into the same thought there: Matt Shields had a lot of rubies.

  His temper had cooled before he ever sat down at the mahogany reading table. Nothing but momentum kept him away from home, and he had work to do. He owed Lily an apology, too. Of sorts. If he ever wanted to sleep with her again. It made him uncomfortable to realize that his temper came from the daemon side of the family, but at least Lily understood it. Expected it. But she’d expect an apology too. Daemons had strict rules of courtesy.