Devil's Bargain

by Christine Warren

  Alistair Gerrald Eratosthenes Carruthers had been a remarkable storyteller. As a child, Aaron had begged his mother’s eccentric older brother to tell him stories every time the man had come to visit. He’d thrilled to the tales of Alistair’s occult experiments, his magical discoveries, and his adventures as a demonologist and defender of mankind. Of course, at the time, Aaron had been about seven, tops. By the time he hit the ripe old age of ten, his parents had taken him aside and explained to him in words a child could understand that his beloved Uncle Alistair was a total crackpot.

  Oh, the man had been a renowned occultist, a gifted sorcerer, and a devoted researcher in the field of demonology, but he’d also possessed a wide streak of dramatics. He’d often become so caught up in his own stories that he forgot which parts of them had actually—technically—happened. An embellishment here or there was completely understandable, but in the most exciting of Alistair’s stories, the embellishments tended to obscure the facts of the matter. In fact, in the best tales, there was very little fact at all. Once Aaron understood all this, he had treated those stories very differently. He had still asked Alistair to tell them when they were stuck inside because of rain or snow or childhood groundings, but at some point, he had stopped really listening to much of what came out of his uncle’s mouth. Could that be how he’d missed something like this?

  Well, he had no intention of missing anything now. Aaron leaned forward, reached for the corner of a fragile, vellum page, and cursed under his breath. In his excitement, he’d nearly forgotten all the years of his training and touched the manuscript with his bare hands. Some curator of rare books and manuscripts he was acting like. A wave of his hand and a tweak of his will and white cotton gloves appeared on his fingers.

  He’d heard of the Prophecies, of course; he couldn’t think of a single witch, wizard, sorcerer, demonologist, or occult historian who hadn’t. Written by a ninth-century magician living somewhere in what was now Germany, the codex was reported to contain a record of prophecies that had been spoken ages before by a greatly respected oracle of the ancient world. Most experts had long assumed it had been lost or destroyed centuries ago, though rumors of it popping up in esoteric collections or middle eastern caves did crop up occasionally, only to be almost immediately disproved. Aaron himself had written an undergraduate thesis on this very book during his days in the Yale history department. Never, not in his wildest dreams, had he ever expected to see it, to touch it. To own it.

  The knowledge hit him like a shot of single malt, heating his belly with excitement that spread faster than the glow of a good scotch. Uncle Alistair had left Aaron not only his house and his modest life savings, but also his extensive and eclectic collection of occult items. From the skull of Ezekiel of Bramley (a well-known magician, anatomist, and unfortunately poor alchemist who had been killed when the iron demon he’d summoned with the intention of transmuting it into gold had burst into flame and ignited the cottage around them), to the brass dog bowl owned by Pope Eugene III and supposedly blessed by St. Bernard himself, Aaron had inherited it all. Including the library.

  Including the Prophecies.

  God, he couldn’t wait to read them.

  He swallowed a sudden mouthful of saliva and turned to the first page of the codex to stare in wonder at the sight before him. The first quarter of the page was filled by an intricate drawing of a serpent, huge and thick and crowned on each of three massive heads by a pair of wickedly sharp horns and sets of razor sharp teeth. The detail in the illustration almost made him see the gleam of venom on each curved fang and smell the taint of blood and death in each gaping mouth. The serpent’s red-and-black body coiled around an enormous capital letter C, twining in and out of the open curve. Dark smudges of black appeared to spread from its body to stain the vivid blue of the letter. In the background, lush greenery sprang up from bloody soil, but rather than looking alive and fertile, the vegetation managed to embrace and oppress the viewer as if drawing him into the page and suffocating him in moist, humid decomposition.

  As his eyes moved across the page, they caught the first few Latin words, and he could almost hear them echoing in his mind in a deep, rumbling, oily voice. The imagined sound of it made him feel somehow compelled and tainted all at once. It hissed in his ear, until he could feel something inside him shrink back in horror . . .

  Caveo rex malefic—

  Blinking, Aaron drew back from the page and shook his head to clear it. Sheesh. He really had been working too hard. The words were just words, the picture just color and lines on tightly stretched and conditioned sheepskin. If he could read sinister intent into any of that, he clearly needed a break—a few hours of sleep, maybe a shower, and a cup or seven of coffee.

  He pushed back from the desk, a huge, tall affair he imagined his uncle had gotten from either a British headmaster’s office or the Jolly Green Giant. It offered more space than any one person could possibly need, but the lack of drawers on both sides indicated that it wasn’t meant to seat two. Which was a good thing, Aaron decided, since currently every square inch of it was piled with books and papers and mostly empty mugs of the coffee he’d just decided he needed.

  “Good idea,” he muttered to himself and headed up the stairs into the kitchen of the old Queen Anne–style mansion. He would put on a new pot of coffee, stretch his legs for a minute, let his eyes focus on something other than dense reference texts and oddly compelling illuminations. Maybe he’d even check the answering machine or bring the newspaper in from the front porch, just to make sure the rest of the world was still out there. When he was working, he tended to lose track.

  Reaching the top of the stairs, he turned the lights on with a flick of his will, but lit the ancient gas stove and assembled the makings for coffee by hand. There was no rhyme or reason to his use of magic for mundane tasks. He used it when he remembered, or maybe more when he didn’t remember, but he didn’t neglect to use it for any particular reason. He filled the kettle with water and the French press with coffee grounds manually because he liked the ritual of it, but if he’d been in a hurry, he might just as easily have conjured a full mug of brewed coffee with magic. Neither method broke or obeyed any rules; he’d always figured the Elders who made and administered the Laws of Magic had bigger things to worry about than whether or not people with power chose to tie their shoelaces by hand or by wand.

  Aaron raised his hands high over his head and linked his fingers together, gloves disappearing as he pressed his palms toward the ceiling. While he waited for the water to boil, he stretched cramped and tired muscles until he felt his vertebrae realign themselves with a series of satisfying cracking sounds.

  God, that felt good. He let his arms swing back to his sides and reached for the kettle just as the spout began to whistle. The scent that rose from the mingling of water and coffee nearly made him weep with gratitude. Just the fumes infused him with a renewed burst of energy. In a few swallows, he figured he’d be ready to head back downstairs and translate some pages. As he recalled, the last time the Prophecies had been compared to actual events for accuracy had been just after the martyrdom of Joan of Arc. It would be fascinating to see if anything since 1431 had happened the way the oracle had predicted—

  Thump.

  Aaron froze, mug just inches from his lips. What the hell had made that noise? He had heard a noise, hadn’t he?

  Scrape.

  That had definitely been a noise. And it had come from the basement.

  Shit.

  Probably the cat, he told himself. The ancient and portly tabby, who had lived with Uncle Alistair for as long as Aaron could remember, didn’t get around with much grace anymore. Last night while Aaron had been relaxing in the living room and watching a movie, it had attempted the jump from the coffee table to the sofa, and landed on his shoe with an indignant yowl. He hadn’t noticed it downstairs when he’d been working earlier, but it did tend to trail around wherever he was, as if it missed human company. Most likely it had trie
d to climb the stairs and tripped over its own belly.

  Setting the coffee aside, Aaron began to ease back toward the basement door. The noise had almost certainly been the cat, but it never hurt to make sure.

  He really hoped it wouldn’t hurt.

  A burglar would have to be insane to break into this house, he told himself. The only thing that kept it from looking like it had been condemned back in the fifties were the lights he turned on to keep from tripping over the threadbare rugs as he walked from room to room. The lot around it was overgrown; the house’s paint was peeling, its shutters falling, its porch steps rotting. And the battered pickup truck outside that he’d used to haul away the armoire Alistair had left to his sister shouldn’t have raised any hopes. Anyone who thought there was something worth stealing in this dump would have been sadly mistaken.

  It had to be the cat.

  Aaron eased down the stairs, sticking close to the edges where the joists still held strong and were less likely to creak. At first, the walls at the top of the stairs blocked his view of the space below, and he could see little but the pool of golden light cast by the lamp above the desk that he’d left burning when he went upstairs. Then, as he reached the seventh step, the room opened up to his right and he could see what had made the noise.

  He blinked, froze, blinked again, and felt the breath in his lungs seize up like setting cement. In front of the floor-to-ceiling bookcase that lined the back wall of the cellar stood a woman, dressed all in black, with long hair so thick and black he took it at first for some sort of hood worn as part of a disguise. More than the hair told him she was a woman. The position she was in helped, especially where her otherwise loose trousers stretched taut and cozy over a round, heart-shaped ass that should never have been allowed on a burglar. Her indented waist and the sleek curve of her side gave him another clue beneath the snug, long-sleeved knit top she wore. All in all, the picture she presented made him wonder if she wore that body as the chief tool, or weapon, in her arsenal, because if so, he imagined she had to be the most successful criminal since the invention of crime.

  Oblivious to his presence, she scanned the shelves with silent efficiency and the focused air of someone looking for something particular. When she got to the lower shelves, she shifted into a crouch, which simultaneously stretched her trousers even tighter across that mouth-watering bottom and caused the curtain of her hair to shift and the strands to part, revealing to him the curve of her jaw and the sleek, pale shell of her ear. The delicate lines seemed suddenly almost as erotic as her ass, and Aaron realized that if he didn’t draw breath again soon, he’d announce his presence to her by passing out from lack of oxygen and tumbling into a blue-tinged pile of stupid on the floor at her feet.

  The air he sucked in nearly choked him when she stood and turned toward his desk, giving him his first look at her face. Not to mention the front of her body, which sported sweetly rounded breasts accentuated by a gleaming pendant that dangled between them on a thin silver chain. He figured he might have been more distracted by that body if he hadn’t immediately noticed that it was decorated with pockets and straps of leather that seemed to contain a whole host of weapons even more lethal than her figure, including a gun, a compact nightstick, three small throwing daggers, and a pair of knives that appeared at least as long as his forearms.

  She also had a pair of wide, thickly lashed eyes the disconcerting copper color of flame.

  Even as he watched, something must have alerted her to his presence, because she stiffened almost imperceptibly a moment before the gaze from those unsettling eyes fixed on him and went as clear and hard as amber.

  “Well, shit,” he thought he heard her mutter, but then it got very hard to concentrate due to the matte black and lethally sharp dagger she sent hurtling toward his chest.

  THREE

  Lilli cursed her luck, Samael, devil’s bargains, medieval manuscripts, and interfering homeowners all at once, and all without opening her mouth. She should have known it couldn’t possibly be as easy as it had sounded. Even with the hourglass she wore cheerfully marking the time, it had taken her barely more than a day and a half to determine who had Samael’s missing book and where it was likely being kept, almost as if the thief hadn’t even bothered to cover his tracks. Another twelve hours and she’d been able to find out enough about the guy to decide that, even with the ridiculous timeline Samael had given her, she would be able to pull off this job in her sleep. Then, if that hadn’t tipped her off, her sources had told her the thief had died almost a month ago, just days after he must have taken the book to begin with. It played like some sort of cosmic coincidence.

  She didn’t believe in coincidence.

  She also didn’t believe in walking into any situation blind, which was why she’d lived to the ripe old age of twenty-eight still breathing and still in possession of all her limbs. Lilli had done her research on Alistair Carruthers. The man had been born into a very old magical family, but one whose family tree had stopped sprouting much new growth. He had only one sibling, a significantly younger sister, and his father and grandfather had both been only children. As far as Lilli had been able to tell, he had no aunts, uncles, cousins, or other relatives to speak of. He didn’t even have any children, having never married and apparently having been so devoted to his work and hobbies that she hadn’t even been able to find much in the way of a dating history. He’d lived alone and apparently died alone, and judging by the appearance of the house he’d died in, Lilli had assumed no one had very much cared.

  She’d been expecting to find an empty house that no one would mind her breaking into, much less making off with one small book and none of the family silver (okay, a big book, but she wasn’t even going to look for the electronics). She hadn’t expected a tall, lean, rumpled-looking man wearing faded jeans that were worn at the seams, a Ramones t-shirt, a battered flannel button-down, and black-rimmed eyeglasses that made him look like a nerd and a face from a GQ cover at the same time.

  She also hadn’t expected him to try to sneak up on her from the main floor of the house. That was why she threw the knife at him, she guessed. It was reflex. Most of the time, the things sneaking up on her didn’t have her best interests at heart, so she could be forgiven for trying to stop theirs.

  The man on the stairs, though, he didn’t look very forgiving. He looked intent, then startled, then angry as he raised his own hand just as her fingers released their grip on the knife. With the flat of his palm, he slapped at the air in front of him, and her knife screeched to a halt, quivering as if it had impacted on wood and buried itself to the hilt. Only it hadn’t hit anything. It hovered in mid-air for a second, then dropped to the floor with a clatter. Clearly, Alistair Carruthers hadn’t been the only sorcerer to live in this house. Instinctively, she reached for a second blade, and the man on the stairs threw himself toward her with a growl completely at odds with his computer geek appearance.

  The impact didn’t feel very geeky, either. It felt solid and heavy and knocked her ass-over-elbows onto the very hard and dusty concrete floor. Who would have guessed that all that solid muscle lurked under such worn and rumpled cloth?

  Lilli didn’t pause to ponder the incongruity. Instead, she let the momentum of the impact and the fall send her into a roll that should have let her reverse their positions and put the sorcerer on the bottom with her knees planted on his elbows. Somehow, it didn’t happen that way.

  The man reacted faster than a light switch, leaning into the roll until it became a sort of crocodilian death spin that sent them all the way across the floor until the immovable object known as the cellar wall brought them to an abrupt stop. Lilli squirmed to keep herself from being pinned between the man and the concrete. She sent an elbow toward his face, swearing when he jerked back so that the blow that should have shattered his cheekbone bounced off the edge of his jaw instead.

  He countered with hands that moved faster than they had any right to. They reached for her wrists, and she to
ok advantage of the distance his recoil from her attack had put between their torsos, twisting her upper body and planting her hands flat on the floor.

  Lilli braced herself and executed a straining push-up against the weight of his body pinning her legs. She couldn’t get her hips more than a couple of inches off the ground, but that was all she needed. Grunting with strain, she lowered her head and pushed her hips back into his chest, using the leverage to drag her legs free. As soon as she felt the cool air on her calves, she swung her lower body around and flipped herself to her feet, wincing when the pendant swung and smacked her between the eyes. Her movement shoved the man off balance, and he lurched backward with a curse to land on his butt a few feet away.

  Adrenaline propelled her forward. She had her misericorde drawn and the edged blade pressed to his throat before she stopped to think, but not before he spoke a hoarse, curt word. A second later her hand seemed to slip involuntarily, sending the long knife clattering to the floor.

  Jerking back, Lilli balanced herself on her haunches and cast a wary glance from her adversary to the knife and back again. Her blade had been warded, so for him to disarm her would have taken some serious mojo. It also would have required that he cast his defensive spell not on her weapon, but on the hand that held it. She’d remember that trick in the future, and she’d sure as hell be buying herself a pair of warded gloves just as soon as she got out of here. In the meantime, she needed to keep from getting her ass kicked.

  Quickness counted in this kind of situation, and it looked like Lilli had that advantage over her opponent. She executed a quick pirouette on one heel, sweeping the other leg out in front of her and knocking the man’s legs out from under him just as he tried to scramble to his feet. He hit the concrete with a grunt. Shifting forward, Lilli planted her palms on the floor and vaulted herself back onto her feet. She intended to throw herself right back into the fray, but something stopped her.