A Legacy of Daemons

by Camille Bacon-Smith

  “Pappiiii!” A little girl squealed but didn’t let up her reckless dash into Matt Shields’ legs until she bounced off and landed in the dirt. A joyful amber light glittered in her eyes.

  That had been one huge lie.

  Chapter 65

  THE HOST OF ARITON HAD MERGED in quorum, but the blue flame of Badad’s Prince burned low in the vast dark, beset by no normal battle but attack from every quarter.

  Azmod pressed forward, flaring indignant green in counterpoint to the light of Paimon’s anger smoldering in amber flame. Azmod had its own bitter feud with Ariton, forged in an eternity of battle and its own more recent grudge against Badad, whose son had bested Azmod’s lords and had been allowed to live.

  Ariton had never planned to keep its bargain, made as it was through a half- mad monster, Magot jeered, attacking in white flames shot with silver, and somewhere a galaxy exploded, suns formed from the dust and caught fire, but the Princes didn’t notice. Astarot’s indigo pressed and harried Ariton’s blue light, igniting knots of energy in the second celestial sphere, igniting worlds in the material plane. Ariton had no allies in this, not even Oriens, whose fire the color of blood and rust licked out, tore bits of blue flame away.

  Badad heard and felt and tasted battle as the vortex of the host ripped away his sense of self as a daemon lord, his separate thoughts and voice swallowed by the host-mind as it drew him into the unity of his Prince. No human kept a bargain made with a captive daemon lord—Astarot tore away blue flame, flung it into the darkness—no half-daemon monster survived its heritage with its sanity intact. Badad’s son was no exception. What honor had a monster to bind its word?

  Paimon believed the lies—he felt it in the touch of the attacking Prince’s mind—because Evan had not freed his daemon lords when he took possession of Donne’s strongbox. And all the Princes of the second celestial sphere stood with Paimon against Ariton, because Badad had not reduced his twisted offspring to ash when he’d had the chance, because Lirion had shared a human bed with Badad’s monster, and had not murdered it in its sleep.

  For a moment Badad embraced the growing singularity of the host-mind—then he felt himself repelled, rejected by his own Prince and torn away by green-and-silver flame, by indigo and rust and the gold of Amaimon, who was Ariton’s ally in all but this.

  Despair! Badad would destroy all of the material sphere to regain the mind of his Prince, his host-cousins.

  In the solitude of his own thoughts he found a flicker of blue flame he scarcely recognized as Lirion, trembling and alone in a universe of Princes. Although they were separated from all their kind, he would not merge with her, because he would not share the pain and terror that flickered in her light. But he saw the truth she couldn’t hide from him. Her bargain for the box had damned her. If Evan died, it went to Bertrande LeRoux. No choice in that, without the old woman they would have lost the box to Cyril Van Der Graf. But Bertrande LeRoux had ceded her rights to the Church. The Princes could not murder Evan—they needed him to control Donne’s spell—but Lirion was banished to the material sphere, forever, if he didn’t keep his end of the bargain.

  None of it was true. Evan had not betrayed Ariton’s bargain with Paimon. Lirion had not chosen her human lover above her Prince. But “wait” had no meaning in a place where time did not exist.

  “The monster belongs to me.” Paimon reached a careful tongue of flame and stripped blue light from the very center of Ariton. “His world”—another fading strip of blue light fell away. “His universe.” Ariton said nothing as the Princes fell upon him, tearing at the essence of blue flame until there was nothing left but drifting tongues of fire as the host scattered, wailing, into the darkness.

  Then Paimon turned its baleful notice on Badad, dragged him in, and forced a merge that made him a prisoner obliterated in the group mind of an enemy Prince. “Where is the boy?” The host picked the knowledge from his thoughts and with it the knowledge of time, and gave him back the torture Paimon would inflict upon his son.

  But time echoed through the mind of the Prince, and Badad’s memory of midnight, that felt like home even in the material sphere. Paimon thrust him away, disgusted, but the threat followed him. “Until midnight, then. But no one may warn him. He honors his bargain, or he does not.”

  With that he flung Badad into the material sphere and Lirion after him, screaming as she fell, into the late afternoon sunshine flooding the walled garden of home. Their only home, now, unless Evan fulfilled his contract with Matt Shields. In her human form, Lily said nothing. She wiped tears from her cheeks and went into the house, but she wasn’t in the living room or the study, and he didn’t follow her upstairs. Couldn’t read her thoughts in human form and he was glad. He picked up his book, but put it down again. Paimon said he couldn’t warn Evan, but that didn’t mean he had to sit here and do nothing.

  Chapter 66

  “SHE’S NOT MINE,” SHIELDS SAID TIGHTLY, but he leaned over and scooped up the little girl one-handed, like they were both used to the drill. A woman Evan didn’t recognize followed, gave Shields a glance, but she didn’t take the girl, just stood with her back pressed against the doorjamb, bare arms crossed over a lime-green camp shirt.

  “That’s Marina,” Shields made the clipped introduction with just a darted glance in her direction. Marina Sanchez. Once he had the name Evan saw the resemblance—her father’s dark eyes, her sister’s hair, but shorter. He’d expected less hostility—she’d driven Matt to the bus to find him. So here he was, found, and she was examining him with distaste carving a groove between her eyes.

  “Why did you bring him here?” She wasn’t talking to him.

  “The box.” His answer had made Marina Sanchez angrier. The little girl in his arms sensed the dangerous mood and squirmed around until she could bury her face in his shoulder. Shields craned his neck to get one of her little ponytails out of his nose.

  “I thought you had a deal.” She was talking to Shields again, but Evan was getting tired of explaining himself anyway. “I’m not backing out of anything. But it has to be safe for the rest of us.” It didn’t help that his explanation wouldn’t hold up under close scrutiny. Yeah, the planet. But that wasn’t why he was standing at the edge of the New Jersey Pine Barrens instead of sitting in his own chair at his own desk back home with Matt and friend long gone.

  He had to get Sid Valentine off the agency’s back, which meant finding out what killed the Donnes. The answer was in this house, and he’d come here with Matt Shields and his strongbox in tow to find it. At least, that had been the plan when he left the FBI office in New York. The little girl in Matt Shields’ arms had just complicated that plan by an order of magnitude. “If she’s not yours, then whose?”

  Marina Sanchez flinched but pressed her lips together as if she was afraid of what might come spilling out if she let the words come.

  “Grey’s,” Shields said, which explained Marina Sanchez’s flinch and dimmed the halo he’d been polishing on the way down. But it didn’t really answer the question. The amber flames in the child’s eyes had to come from somewhere. If not Matt Shields, he was left with just one option. Made him flinch too, and the daemon saw it.

  Marina Sanchez pushed off the doorjamb and turned her back. But, “You might as well come in the house,” she said before she disappeared inside. Evan followed, his thoughts scattered. The mad daemon lord trapped in Grayson Donne’s box. Lily. He hadn’t thought it possible.

  Sometimes he imagined, not the Lily he knew carrying his baby, or a kid with the wild light of Ariton in its eyes, but sometimes, that a Lily wholly human could love him. They’d have babies and preschools and a van with car seats in the garage. Awake, he knew he wouldn’t trade Lily’s spirit for any mortal gain. Knew himself well enough to know he couldn’t settle for a purely human life anymore or bring a child into the world cursed with his own dual nature. But in his dreams.

  Children like him didn’t live. Not sane.

  Marina Sanchez led him
through a sunny and neat kitchen he scarcely noticed, except that Alba Sanchez was making iced tea over a stainless steel sink, into a living room gleaming with polished wood floors and overstuffed furniture, cottage-y and comfortable in ocean colors. Carlos Sanchez sat in a rocking chair in front of a window with flowered curtains pulled back to let in the afternoon sun. Missing person number three. Check.

  Evan dropped into a fat blue club chair, rested his head in his hands for a minute while the pieces of the puzzle tumbled in his head. Matt Shields had put the little girl down and carried the strongbox in from the car. The box had stopped screaming, but Evan felt storm clouds gathering around it. He figured if the daemon got out of that box they’d be picking bits of the solar system out of the Andromeda Galaxy for the next billion years.

  He still needed answers to the questions that had brought him here—what had killed the Donnes, father and son—but they came second to the big one he hadn’t known about until now. “The girl—”

  “Katey,” Shields said. He put the box on a driftwood coffee table and sank into the corner of the sofa. Katey crawled up next to him, tucked herself under his arm, and stared suspiciously at Evan.

  “If she’s Grey’s, that makes her Donne’s heir.”

  Shields tilted a shoulder, half a shrug. “He didn’t live long enough to acknowledge her, so she has no legal standing unless we fight for it, which we won’t do. It would require DNA tests anyway, and Katey’s wouldn’t stand up to human scrutiny.” He gave the little girl a wry smile that she returned with an answering amber light in her eyes.

  She was damned cute, but it made Evan a little ill anyway. “The box?”

  Shields set the girl on her feet, gave her a pat that set her off in the direction of Marina Sanchez, who hadn’t sat down.

  “Shall we help Tia Alba make dinner?” she asked, and followed as Katey made a run for the kitchen.

  Shields watched as she went, let his shoulders slump when the little girl’s high voice rang out, “Tia Alba!” But he waited until Marina returned before he answered the question.

  “We don’t know. Maybe we’ll have to wait until she has a son.”

  Evan couldn’t think about generations of monsters, like him but not his, now. Not as something that little girl might be forced to do or that she might one day choose. He needed professional distance, or he’d get up and walk away from Matt Shields and his girlfriend in a box and his contract with Paimon and leave them to sort out their own mess. Which was about as deadly an idea as he’d ever come up with.

  Shields was still working through his options when Evan surfaced from—whatever it had been. “Maybe her heritage changes the spell. Or maybe, if we own the box between us, we can release the spell. We just don’t know. And then there’s Katey to think about. Only once in the history of your world has a child like Katey made it to adulthood sane.” Shields didn’t say who that had been, kept Evan’s secret, and by extension his father’s. “Your ad said, ‘cases involving the occult handled with discretion’. I thought maybe after we’d dealt with the box, you’d have some insights on that.”

  Only once. Evan wondered about Sched’s giants, but he didn’t mention them. They weren’t relevant anyway. No one had forced Sched. They’d had each other and a nearly empty planet to shape to their own intentions. But, “I know the case you mean,” he said, hiding his own identity in a fiction of objectivity. “He didn’t grow up sane. Someone convinced him it was the only way to stay alive, but reports say he spent the first twenty years of his life confused and terrified. And pretty much crazy.”

  Katey had looked neither, and Evan’s heart ached, because he’d never had that strength and happiness as a child—didn’t now, sometimes—and because he couldn’t see how Katey would stay that way when Matt Shields went home. With all the best will in the world, the Sanchez family couldn’t stand between the child and the forces of the second celestial sphere, not the ones that would want to destroy her or the ones that would shape what she was in two universes. “I can’t help you.” He knew what Matt was asking, and it killed him to say it. But he had no choice. “That other case belonged to a rival faction.”

  “I know.” Shields looked away, neither of them willing to pursue the politics of Princes with humans in the room. It made Evan a little sick that he put himself on the daemon side of that line, but he’d put himself there when he’d made the deal.

  “One thing at a time. Just get us free of this box.”

  And that put Evan right back on the human side of the equation. “When I have some answers.”

  Chapter 67

  CARLOS SANCHEZ HADN’T SAID ANYTHING yet, just watched, maybe seeing too much. Evan wouldn’t ask that question—what did Sanchez guess about Evan himself—because he refused to deal with the answer, but he had plenty more. Math had never been his strongest point, but it didn’t take Einstein to count to three.

  “Three years ago, Grayson Donne pulled you out of his box and sent you to deliver his library to Cyril Van Der Graf,” he said to Shields. “Then he died. That much is true. Everything else has been a lie. So why don’t we start with Grayson Donne’s breeding program? Katey’s what, three years old?”

  “About,” Shields confirmed. He clamped his jaw down tight, but the fire was building in his eyes. Evan had almost forgotten Marina Sanchez, until she turned and made a dash for the kitchen.

  “What’s wrong, Mami?” Katey’s voice, rising with anxiety, floated through the doorway, then Alba Sanchez said, “Mami has something in her eye. I think she wants us to catch some minnows in the bucket for her.”

  When the screen door had slammed closed behind them, Marina Sanchez came back, sat on the footstool next to her father. “I don’t want Katey to hear any part of this. None of it is her fault.” She glared at Evan as though he’d wanted to accuse a toddler of—what?

  “I know that. I don’t want to hurt her—I won’t hurt her. But if we succeed tonight, she’ll be hurt.” No one was looking at him now, and he figured they already knew that. Matt Shields wasn’t just a guy who had taken the place of her dead father—he was the only thing standing between a three-year-old girl and the forces of the universe and her own nature, the like of which had once driven Evan mad. He let out a long sigh, tried to tangle his fingers in hair that wasn’t there anymore and pulled his hand away liked his head was on fire—nothing like advertising his unease.

  “Grayson Donne’s breeding program. You said the old man couldn’t, and Grey wouldn’t. So what changed that? And how did both of the Donnes wind up dead in the middle of it?”

  “Donne was old,” Shields gave a little shrug, as if the answers should be obvious. “And nobody every accused him of a healthy lifestyle. He was seventy when Grey was born, and that cost him Lily’s ruby.” His smile was cold, but he didn’t fill in the blanks. Grey’s mother was dead.

  “A hybrid was harder to manage.” Shields voice held no emotion, which was just another kind of lie. But the emotions of a daemon lord seldom offered comfort, so he was glad not to know this time.

  “Simpson’s wife carried her own. They knew in theory it was possible—there have been stories for centuries. Marnie Simpson liked trying, and she wanted it, was willing to do whatever it took to hold onto that child. Donne hadn’t considered it until then. Then he wanted one for himself. He spent years looking for a female relative—there was a third cousin out in Colorado, but she turned out to be sterile. Grey was at Yale.” Evan didn’t bother asking why the cousin from Colorado hadn’t claimed the estate. He figured they’d find her bones with the rest of them in Donne’s graveyard.

  “That left Kady. No one had ever bound a daemon lord to a female form long enough to give birth to a living half-human child. Donne couldn’t have done it without the house—you’ve been there, you know the place.”

  Evan remembered the house built as a pentagram, the eight-sided room bound in seals and spells, with shackles and blood at its center. “There was no escaping it,” Shields said, and
Evan shuddered, remembering that too, his daemon nature caught in the complex spell worked into the parquetry seals that covered the floor, and Grayson Donne’s shackles on his wrists and ankles. If he hadn’t been half human, if he hadn’t found the mechanical escape latches worked into the design, he’d have been trapped there again. But—

  “You said Donne couldn’t, and his son wouldn’t.”

  “Donne couldn’t. He was as sterile as that third cousin from Colorado by then, but he tried until even Viagra didn’t help, then he called Grey home. But Grey refused.”

  “I remember that night.” Carlos Sanchez spoke softly, not facing his audience but staring into the forest outside his window. He wept openly now, Marina’s hand clutched in his white- knuckled grip. It had to hurt, but she didn’t free her hand or stop her own tears. “They had a furious fight in the back garden—I think if Mr. Donne hadn’t needed Gray to produce an heir of some kind he would have murdered him right then. He forbade Grey to see Marina again and ordered me to drive him back to Yale.”

  “I was away at school,” Marina added, rubbing her free hand across the knee of her jeans in a compulsive gesture Evan recognized—wanting to be clean when the feeling of dirt was all inside. “If I’d been there, he would have killed me. I was just another obstacle to him.”

  Matt Shields in his daemon form would have torn her to pieces, but the cautious panic that hunched his shoulders meant he’d managed to keep that secret from her.

  “It gave him the idea, though.” Shields picked up the story, left the humans in the room to their grief. “He forged a letter from Marina, asking Grey to meet her in the garden, and sent Kady in Marina’s form to meet him there. Kady brought him back into the house, into Donne’s room, and did as Donne had commanded. Gray left not knowing what he had done, left Kady trapped there in human form, carrying a human child she could not escape. That’s when she started screaming. I was locked up then.” In Donne’s strongbox. Evan felt the blood leave his face, rubbed at the half-healed bruises to bring it back. Oh, God. He tried to pity the daemon in the box, but all he could think of was Lily. He would never. But, God. Lily.