Parmatus. Not Matt Shields. And Kadylon—the box had started to scream again. He had to think of them by their true names if this was going to work.
Paimon was standing at the center of the pyramid when Evan opened his eyes. Amber scales rippled in tongues of amber flame. “Vermin,” the Prince rumbled, and plucked the cedar from the ground where Matt Shields sat curled around the daemon child.
“Necessary,” Evan warned the daemon Prince. “If you hurt her, the contract is void.”
“So you remember your contract.” Paimon threw down the tree. The earth shook and Evan reached for a handhold to steady himself, felt scales instead of bark across the palm of his hand. Not a tree, then.
“Ariton.” He gathered himself and made a formal bow, first to his own Prince, who glowered above him—that had been a leg he’d grabbed for balance—and then to Paimon. Both Princes towered above the forest, and the storm clouds still shot angry bolts of lightning at him, but he couldn’t think about that now or he’d curl up in a gibbering ball of terror.
“We have a contract,” he said instead. He’d thought about this part too. Summoning spells had to follow certain sound patterns to work, so he’d used the one he knew, a contract language of its own that did the least harm of the ones he thought might work. The books also had spells to release daemons. Historically, none of them worked very well for the humans involved, but once you had a daemon’s attention, you could use any language you wanted. Legal was best, because they were a legalistic bunch. So he didn’t bother with the mystical mumbo jumbo now that he had them. They had a contract, and he spelled it out, starting from the language that protected the house. Hoped he hadn’t forgotten something that got him killed, but he thought he had it.
“Before we begin, I need your oath to take no retribution on this world or the life it sustains, or the universe it resides in. Your own enemies are your business, but your oath, to deal with them in the second sphere. Don’t make it our problem.”
“The child is our business.” Paimon’s words rolled like thunder. Matt Shields—Parmatus—stood up, the child in his arms.
“No,” Evan said, and briefly closed his eyes. He’d known since the moment he’d seen the amber light in her eyes that he’d die before he gave up another child like himself to the monsters of his nightmares, had known this would probably be the time. Come to it, he wasn’t as scared as he’d thought he’d be.
But Matt Shields said, “No,” as well. Then, because it was impossible for a daemon lord, even one bound to the material sphere, to defy his Prince, Shields said, “She’s Donne’s legacy. We need her to set us free.”
“She’s the closest relative Donne had.” Evan explained. He’d worked that out, figured he could keep them all alive until he broke the spell on the strongbox, but now he had to make a bargain for the life of Paimon’s little monster as well. “I can’t break the curse on the box without her. And I won’t break the curse unless I have your oath that she will not be harmed in any way after the contract is satisfied.” He thought he’d get an argument from Matt Shields, but the daemon lord stuck out his jaw and held on to Katey. “It’s fair,” Shields said, close as he could come to rebellion.
Paimon said, “It’s midnight. You belong to me, human. Your own Prince has rid himself of you. Free my lords or die screaming. I’ll eat your agony like ancient sins.”
The threats didn’t bother him much—Evan was used to that, and figured he’d make it out of these woods on his own wits or die trying: same old, same old. But Princes never ceded rights to their own. He’d thought he’d gotten past that with Ariton. Apparently not.
“Penalty for a broken contract, but no contract has been broken here.” Ariton had not spoken until now, and when he did, he rumbled with Brad’s voice, which Evan found more comforting than was reasonable under the circumstances. “Ariton’s own monster invoked the conditions of the contract before midnight. Paimon’s monster required further negotiation.”
“Paimon will not negotiate.”
“Just as well,” Evan snapped, “Because she’s not negotiable, and she falls under the contract as given—no harm to this world or the life it sustains. As long as this world sustains her, she’s covered. But, good faith, moratorium is declared on the question until we free your daemon lords.”
“Until my lords are returned to me.” Paimon agreed to nothing but a five-minute wait.
It would have to be enough. Evan started the simple ritual to release the daemon.
“Parmatus, come forward. Bring the child with you.”
Parmatus did. Didn’t have any choice, given the binding, but he seemed eager enough to do it and Evan smiled at Katey, held out his arms. “Your papi needs our help. Will you help me free your papi?” She stared at him with her wide amber eyes and he asked, “Do you understand?”
Katey shook her head, no, but she held out her arms to him and clung to him when he took her up on his hip. He carried her to the box where wax melted into the ruffles of Kadylon’s white dress and bent on one knee, Katey propped on the other.
“Goodwill,” he said, and to Matt Shields, who waited with tension darting flames in his eyes, “Same agreement as we had before.” Paimon had already sworn, but Matt Shields had taken the oath conditional on his binding to Donne’s strongbox. This would be for keeps. “Do you swear not to harm this world or the people who live in it, or their connections freely given? Do you swear to take no retribution on this world or the universe it resides in? Your own enemies are your business, but only to the extent you can limit the damage as previously sworn?”
“Yeah. I swear.” Shields had started to sweat. Evan pretended not to notice. He smiled at Katey and pressed her hand lightly over the iron lock on the strongbox, covered it with his own.
“Repeat after me,” he said, and she did, though she struggled with the unfamiliar names. “Parmatus, of the host of Paimon, and excepting only your oath to do no harm, you are free of this spell. Iron and oak have no power over you. Go where you wish, bound only by the will of your Prince, as it has always been.”
Parmatus disappeared with his own thunderclap. Katey burst into tears, and the box wailed as if the world was coming to an end—or would when Kadylon got out of there.
Paimon said. “You have kept only half your bargain.”
Chapter 76
“PARMATUS WAS EASY, because he wasn’t crazy,” Evan explained, though he suspected that wasn’t true. Parmatus was just crazy in a different way that made it easier to deal with him. Paimon didn’t seem nearly as happy with his daemon lord, but that was Paimon’s problem. Evan still had the daemon in the box to worry about.
“She can’t take the oath.” No question what the oath was; Paimon had already taken it. “And I can’t release her without it.”
Lightning fell around them, amber, but also indigo and gold and green. Of course, the green of Azmod, Evan’s personal enemy, waiting for a chance to avenge old grievances. From off to his left he heard the crack of a pine tree hit by lightning, the snap of flame catching. Katey sobbed snot into his shirt, and he figured it was going in the trash after tonight. But he still had a daemon to free, and quickly, before a forest fire did what twenty-some years of enemies in the second celestial sphere had failed to do—turn him into a little pile of greasy ash.
“You’ve taken the oath,” he said to Paimon. “Swear now that your daemon will honor that oath, and I will set her free.”
“And if she is, as you say, mad?”
“Azmod can give you pointers.” Omage, Azmod’s daemon lord, had been mad as a hatter by human standards, but sly and sadistic with it. He figured Azmod hardly noticed, but that Prince took offense anyway and blasted something. Evan heard the whoosh of flame rising in living sap and ducked his head, figured he didn’t have long until the fire got to him.
“If I free her, can you absorb her into the host before she can do any damage? Can you get her out of here and honor your oath?”
Paimon stared down a
t him, three eyes baleful above the treetops. “I can.”
Not exactly a promise. “Do you swear?”
More hostility, but the forest was already burning.
“I swear.”
Evan peeled Katey away from his shirt. “It will be shorter this time. Can you do it?” She shook her head, no, but held out her hand and he took it, smiled as comfortingly as he could under the circumstances, and once more pressed their hands together against the iron that bound and locked the oak strongbox. Then he adapted on the fly.
“Kadylon of the host of Paimon, and excepting only your Prince’s oath to do no harm, you are free of this spell. Iron and oak have no power over you. Go where the will of your Prince commands you, as it has always been.”
Paimon had sworn to take her up, but he hadn’t said when. Wind rose with the sound of an approaching freight train, stirring up the fire burning in the pines and forming a visible funnel that enclosed them but could not penetrate the ritual pyramid. The lock on Donne’s strongbox turned a dull, angry red. Katey screamed in pain and Evan snatched their joined hands away. Not quickly enough—the glowing iron had branded her tiny palm with the seal that bound the lock.
“Oh, my God, baby.” Evan didn’t know how to comfort her, couldn’t make it better, and there was no escape with a tornado right on top of them and the Princes of the second celestial sphere surrounding them.
The strongbox had protected them from Kadylon’s madness, but not any longer. The seals and defenses of every iron band pulsed with an angry glow and oak slats crisped and blackened around the edges. Something—Kadylon, he assumed—screamed one high, piercing tone that knocked him back on his heels. And then the box exploded in a storm of splinters.
Evan curled protectively around the little girl—Kadylon’s personal monster—felt a splinter the size of a dagger carve a chunk out of his side. A hail of smaller slivers jabbed him with a hundred or more bloody cuts, and he was pretty sure he had another fucking concussion, but he held on.
Kadylon rose on a desperate shriek, shredded the white dress. The wind snatched up the tatters of ruffled cotton, added them to the sticks and leaves and pine needles and a mouse or two whirling over their heads. Centuries of faces she’d been made to wear twisted in a column of amber flame at the very center of the whirlwind—the beauties and grotesques that generations of Donnes had forced on her. He saw the girl with the pale chocolate skin who had walked naked in Grayson Donne’s garden, and Marina Sanchez, the face she’d worn when Grayson Donne forced a human child on her.
Katey peered over his protective elbow, called, “Mami,” through her tears, and Kadylon attacked.
Evan felt his arm break, but he had another one, and he’d already made his choices. Didn’t mean he wouldn’t fight back.
“WE HAD A BARGAIN! YOU SWORE!” He screamed to be heard over the freight train of the wind, but Paimon just looked down at him with that baleful three-eyed stare.
“So I did, monster. But as you say, she is mad.”
Kadylon was proving that by trying to reach Katey through his back. She’d already torn a strip off him, he could feel air on raw muscle, knew she’d reached bone. Paimon might limit the destruction, he thought the tornado might be doing that, but a couple of half- human monsters were just collateral damage, conveniently rid of.
Except that Evan was not a child, and he’d done the homework years ago.
“I know your NAME! ” Almost hoarse now, he still shouted above the havoc around them. “I KNOW YOUR NAME! ”
Kadylon reached fingers of flame through his torn flesh, wrapped around verterbrae, and Evan said, “Kadylon of the host of Paimon, you have been summoned by the Honor and Glory of God . . .”
No need for volume, he just needed the words, but his voice grew stronger as the binding took shape. Words had their own power. “By this I demand your oath: that whenever and every time you shall be summoned, by whatever word or sign or deed, in whatever time or place, and for whatever occasion or service, you will appear immediately and without delay.”
She stopped pulling bits of him apart to reach the girl, but the binding hurt like hell, and Evan shared that pain, pulsed with it in the flames she had wrapped through his body. He figured it for a close call, whether he passed out before or after he finished the binding.
“You will obey the commands set for you in whatever form they shall be conveyed. In all things, my will shall become your will, and I will you to stop. Swear.”
Kadylon tore away from him, but the binding had her and she left all his bits in place. Bleeding in strange places, but all there, and once this was over he would gather himself up and put the worst of it back together.
Now he had to put and end to this with Kadylon, who twisted like a tormented thing, which she was. His fault, and he leaned over, threw up in the underbrush, not making a good showing of it. Couldn’t wipe his mouth without letting go of Paimon’s, child and he wouldn’t do that if it killed him. But he brought his head up, said, “Swear.” And hoped that none of the Princes heard him whisper “I’m sorry,” because he’d already shown enough weakness, and Ariton hadn’t stepped in, had just watched like the rest of them.
But Paimon rumbled, “Enough,” like thunder, swallowed up Kadylon and her desolate screams in a rage of amber flames. “The Princes are not finished with you,” he vowed, and vanished, taking the storm of Princes with him.
Kadylon hadn’t sworn, but Evan called, “I release you, I release you,” after her. He could do that much, having won. More or less. If he didn’t do some patching, he was going to bleed out right here. If he didn’t do it fast, they’d burn to death anyway.
Chapter 77
HE DIDN’T KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT anatomy to do a thorough job of it, but he managed to seal the worst of the bleeders and struggle to his feet anyway. His back hurt like hell, but he didn’t have time to deal with it—staggered to the stream and dunked them both because sparks were already landing in the clearing, but that was no way out. The stream wasn’t big enough to stop the fire even if he could manage the rushing water with a kid and a broken arm, which he couldn’t. Turned and ran with his good arm wrapped around Katey and the broken one tucked into his shirt for support.
The fire had spread, arching from treetop to treetop and forming rivulets of flame along the ground, eating the undergrowth. There was no way out, and running just meant heading into burning scrub pine whichever way he looked. Evan could feel the heat of it blistering his skin, hear the fizz and pop of sap exploding and the crack of flame. The fire was sucking the oxygen out of the air damned fast, replacing it with thick black smoke. He coughed and coughed, which got him bleeding again in places he hadn’t mended yet and made his broken arm hurt so bad he’d have cut it off given a sharp enough knife.
They were pretty much surrounded, and he figured they were going to die here anyway, after all his efforts to keep the kid alive. They had one way out, something he hadn’t done until he was nineteen and driven crazy by drugs and booze and captivity and torture. Hadn’t done it with a body until later than that. Certainly never contemplated trying it with a small child not of his prince in his one good arm. Give me a choice, he thought, but knew he didn’t have one.
“Close your eyes,” he said, “I won’t let you go, no matter what.” And then he moved into the second celestial sphere.
There was a war going on—the princes moved fast where grudges were concerned, but he figured it wouldn’t last long. Paimon owed Ariton, and Azmod might be insulted but even princes couldn’t hide the truth from each other here. Evan just hoped it didn’t cost Ariton the host-debt he’d earned for his prince. He thought they’d make it through while the princes were occupied with their own affairs, but Katey was attracting attention. So he got out quick, just ahead of a curl of amber flame that reached for the girl.
He brought her out under the pentagram in the front office of the house on Spruce Street because, child or not, she belonged to a foreign prince. She was still sniveling
a bit, but appeared to have hit overload before their last jaunt. So she hadn’t quite noticed that they’d been turned inside out and back again passing between the spheres. Vaguely he wondered if the blood smears on her dress were his, or whether she was hurt worse than he’d thought. Had to get her to a doctor. But she wasn’t the only one in shock, which came as a surprise, right before he passed out.
Chapter 78
BRAD SAT BEHIND THE ANTIQUE Hepplewhite desk and considered the blood soaking into the carpet. “Do you suppose we can put another one on Matt Shields’ bill?” he asked the room at large. Lily shaped her preferred body out of thought and air, answered, “He’s not here to object, and the rubies are in the safe. Is he dead?”
The second “he” meant Evan. Brad peered over the desk, considering the question. Two human shapes making a mess of his new carpet, not just one. “He’d better not be. He’s still got to answer for that.”
“Why did he bring her here?” Lily was on the far side of caring, almost gone already, but she peered down at the girl as if she were trying to solve a puzzle with some of the pieces missing.
Brad followed her gaze and shrugged. He’d read that the helplessness of the young was supposed to resonate with humans. Didn’t do a thing to him. Then she opened her eyes, the amber flames of Paimon stirring as she looked around the strange room.
The hairs on the back of his neck came to attention. He remembered something Harry Li once said to him about Evan—“Danger, Will Robinson.” Still didn’t know the reference, but he recognized danger when he saw it. Katey Sanchez, or Shields, or whatever they called her, might be young even by human reckoning, but she’d made it through the second celestial sphere alive and no worse off than when she entered it, which warranted some thought.
“She’s Paimon’s problem, not ours,” he argued anyway, and wished Evan would wake up. He needed to do something about this before it escalated into an incident between Princes.
The little girl crawled out of the protective hollow that Evan had curled around her before he lost consciousness and used her one good hand to try to wipe at the blood and soot smeared on her torn white dress. She seemed upset that it didn’t help, but climbed up on her knees on a guest chair and stretched her damaged hand across the desk to him.
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