Slaying Monsters for the Feeble: The Guild Codex: Demonized / Two

by Marie, Annette

  “Yes, but—”

  “Oh hell.” She shot me a disbelieving look. “No wonder he’s in a snit.”

  A guilty, anxious squirm awoke in my belly. “What do you mean?”

  “You have to ask? Come on. You two made a deal, and you can’t just add new terms or conditions to it on a whim.”

  “How else am I supposed to stop him from murdering people?”

  “I don’t know, but Robin …” She shook her head, her blond ponytail swinging. “That horned asshole is going to be complete misery to deal with now. Your promise to send him home was the only thing keeping him in check.”

  “But I will send him home as long as he—”

  “Yeah, but he won’t trust you anymore.” At my confused look, she sighed. “It’s a power thing, Robin. If you have the power to change the deal and he doesn’t, that makes the deal worthless. Changing your promise is the same as breaking it.”

  Your promises mean nothing. Zylas’s furious accusation.

  Deep, icy cold settled in my gut, making itself right at home like it intended to stay awhile.

  “Ah, here’s the turn off!” She slowed the car as the highway doubled back on itself in order to continue up the side of the mountain. On our left, a short gravel offshoot split in a Y-shape, with one track heading uphill and one descending the mountainside.

  She waited a minute with her signal on, craning her neck to watch the oncoming cars. When a gap in the traffic opened, she gunned it across the highway and angled toward the downhill road where a gate, bolted with a chain and boldly marked with a Private Property sign, blocked our passage.

  She shifted into park, hopped out, and jogged up to the gate, leaving the car door hanging open. A moment of fumbling with the chain, then she shoved the gates open.

  “Wasn’t even locked,” she announced as she dropped back into her seat and shut her door. “Great security. At least it isn’t snowed in up here.”

  The car bumped along the gravel, the vibrations rattling my teeth. My nerves grew, my stomach twisting unhappily and that pit of ice unchanged. Once we were done here, I would make Zylas understand that I hadn’t betrayed my promise. I’d only wanted to …

  … to control him by leveraging the one thing he really wanted.

  Oh crap. That’s what I’d done, wasn’t it? No wonder he was furious.

  The gravel road went on and on, the car’s constant bouncing shaking me down to my bones. Towering conifers stretched toward the gray sky, the forest dotted with bare-branched deciduous trees awaiting spring, and snow-dusted grass bordered the road.

  Amalia slowed, then turned onto an even narrower, bumpier track. Tree branches smacked the car’s sides as we rolled deeper into the wilderness.

  The track ended abruptly. An old pickup truck with a Yukon license plate was parked in front of a log cabin with a steeply peaked roof. The blinds were drawn across the small front windows and a pile of rusting junk was stacked against a sagging shed. Once, the cabin’s log walls had been stained dark but weathered patches spotted the wood like a disease.

  Amalia pulled up beside the truck and cut the engine. I pushed my door open and climbed out. The mixture of dirt and stunted grass masquerading as a lawn was frosted white, and a blast of icy wind blew snow into my face.

  Tugging my sweater over my hands, I shut my door with my elbow and faced the cabin. My heart hammered, fear competing with anticipation.

  Amalia joined me, and together we marched up four rotted steps to the crumbling front porch.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Silence answered Amalia’s knock. She waited a moment, then hammered the door again. Were we wrong? Was no one here? But the truck …

  A thump from inside, then a clatter against the door. “Who’s there?”

  Even muffled by the door, I recognize that slightly wheezy voice.

  “Oh, no one important,” Amalia called sarcastically. “Just your daughter.”

  Another clatter, the clack of the bolt, then the door cracked open. The first thing I saw was the muzzle of a gun. Uncle Jack flung the door open the rest of the way, his beady eyes darting past us.

  “Are you alone?” he barked. “Were you followed?”

  “I’m not an idiot, Dad. Would you mind not pointing that thing at us?”

  He raised the large hunting rifle, the stock braced against his shoulder, and squinted at his daughter. “How did you find me?”

  “Ugh.” Amalia bulldozed forward, forcing him to backpedal. “We’re coming in.”

  I crossed the threshold after her, my nose wrinkling at the lingering odor of sweat, stale coffee, and damp mold that permeated the musty air. Though the blinds on the tiny front window were closed, the space was bright and open—one huge room with a kitchen, dining table, and living area, all arranged to face huge windows that filled the back wall, rising all the way to the twenty-foot vaulted ceiling.

  Once, it had been a beautiful cabin, but years of poor maintenance had weathered the comforts it offered. However, no amount of neglect could dim the view beyond those windows. The mountainside dropped away, revealing a sea of snow-dusted green that swept down toward the distant city.

  “You’re disgusting.” Amalia’s furious rant broke into my awed staring. “Look at you. Look at this place. Ugh. What have you been doing these last five weeks? Lying around like a fat slob?”

  Uncle Jack, still holding the rifle, flinched under his daughter’s admonishment. Unshaven and greasy, he looked like the most likely source of the old sweat smell hanging in the air. A stained t-shirt hung off him, and despite Amalia’s “fat slob” remark, he seemed to have lost weight. His infernus hung around his neck, an unfamiliar emblem etched in its center. All summoners were also contractors; as I’d learned during my research, summoning a demon required a demon.

  “Amalia,” he began cautiously, “I’m—”

  “Your next words better be a damn good explanation for why you haven’t contacted me in weeks. I didn’t even know if you were alive!”

  Another flinch, which surprised me as much as his slovenly appearance. The Uncle Jack I remembered had been domineering and superior, even with his kids.

  “I didn’t contact you for your safety, Amalia,” he muttered. “I … I made a terrible mistake.”

  I slid my hand into my coat pocket. Withdrawing my mother’s two letters, I unfolded the one she’d written to Uncle Jack, strode up to him, and stuck the letter under his nose.

  “Does your ‘terrible mistake’ have anything to do with this?” I demanded coldly.

  He took the letter, surprise crossing his features before they crumpled with unmistakable grief. “We … we should sit down.”

  Amalia opened her mouth, took another look at her father’s expression, and stomped to the sofa. She unzipped her coat, threw it over the armrest, and dropped onto a cushion, legs crossed and arms folded. She glowered expectantly.

  I removed my top layer and sat beside her. As we faced him, our solidarity was enforced by our matching turtlenecks, the hex-patterned fabric running from just below our chins to mid-thighs.

  Leaning the gun against the armchair across from us, Uncle Jack lowered himself into the cushions. His stare was fixed on my chest, where my infernus lay atop my shirt, gleaming silver.

  “You …” he whispered. “You stole the Twelfth House demon?”

  “I didn’t steal it.” I rubbed my thumb across the pendant. The Vh’alyir emblem was emblazoned across it, and since Uncle Jack had seen the grimoire page, he must have recognized the symbol. “I made a contract with the demon after your Red Rum clients tried to use me as a bargaining chip.”

  “A bargaining chip?”

  “I’d been talking to the demon almost since the day I arrived,” I revealed baldly. “But let’s not get off track. You’re going to explain that letter. Right now.”

  Uncle Jack frowned at me—taken aback by my assertiveness, maybe?—then looked down at the letter.

  “Did you even care?” The fu
rious accusation burst from me. “Or did you sit back and wait for her to die so you could have the grimoire? She begged you for help!”

  “I called her the moment I finished reading this letter,” he whispered. “I thought she was wrong. How could anyone have found her? But she was asking for help and …” His shoulders bowed forward. “I thought, if we started talking again, then maybe this time I could convince her to show me the grimoire.”

  My fists squeezed so tightly my fingernails cut into my palms.

  “But I wanted to help too!” he added quickly. “If she was right, then we were all in danger. We talked for over an hour that night, and we agreed to meet the next evening. I was there, right at seven like we’d planned, and I waited at the restaurant all … all night, Robin. I waited …”

  The same icy pain as that horrible night washed over me. “But they never arrived.”

  He blinked, his eyes shining wetly. “It was almost midnight when I got the call from the police … about the accident …”

  “And you finally got what you wanted.” Venom coated my voice. “You had the grimoire all to yourself. And you didn’t waste any time summoning the demon names from it, did you?”

  He didn’t even deny it, merely nodded.

  Amalia slumped back in the sofa, one hand pressed over her mouth. “My god, Dad.”

  I unfolded the second letter and held it out. He heaved himself out of his chair and took it, already reading as he sank back down. He turned the page, glancing over the back, showing no surprise.

  “You’ve seen that before,” I said quietly. “It was in your safe in your garage, wasn’t it?”

  “Where’s the rest of the letter?”

  “Destroyed before I could read it. Where did it come from, Uncle Jack?”

  “It was tucked in the front of the grimoire.” He stared down at the two pages of his sister’s handwriting. “I guess I’ll start from the beginning, so you can understand.”

  “The beginning of what?”

  “Demonica.”

  Amalia and I exchanged bewildered looks.

  “Your mother wrote it right here. We were the first … the first summoners.”

  Silence settled across the room.

  “Anthea Athanas.” He leaned back in his chair. “The very first sorceress to ever summon a demon, and the mother of all Demonica magic. Our family has carried the grimoire for millennia, recopying it every few centuries. All twelve demon names are from her original grimoire. All summoning rituals are based on her original spells.”

  The first summoners … my ancestors were the original summoners? We had invented Demonica?

  “Anthea trained her children and several apprentices in summoning and gave them each a demon name. Over the generations, her descendants spread Demonica to other sorcerers, revealing more names but keeping the best, most powerful names to themselves. These days, only a handful of summoners know the Second and Third House names, and the First House was lost in the early 1900s …”

  “Until you got the grimoire,” I growled.

  “The widespread use of the other names devalued them overtime—as much as a demon name can be devalued,” he continued as though I hadn’t spoken, “and acquiring the rare first three Houses became a Holy Grail for other summoners. The Athanas family was too famous, reputed to be the only summoners with all twelve names. The others hunted us, and the Athanas summoners began to die out.”

  Those who covet power nearly wiped our family out of existence, my mother had written in her letter.

  “By the second World War, the Athanas family was down to three. Diandra, your great-grandmother, fled Albania and dropped the Athanas name. She emigrated to North America, married a sorcerer, and decided the only way to hide the grimoire was to give up summoning entirely.”

  “But you’re a summoner,” Amalia blurted. “And you want me to be one too.”

  “By the time Sarah and I were born, our family had shifted away from not just Demonica, but Arcana too. Sarah could barely create a simple artifact and devoted her time to translating grimoires for other mythics.” He sat quietly, the seconds sliding into a full minute. “I wasn’t satisfied with that. I wanted to be a powerful summoner like our ancestors. I wanted riches and recognition, not obscurity. We didn’t need to bring back the Athanas name or flaunt all twelve Houses, but we could still become summoners.

  “Our parents wouldn’t even consider it, but Sarah and I used to talk about it. She didn’t care about money, but she wanted to translate the entire grimoire—which hasn’t been done since before Diandra’s time—and learn our family’s history. We imagined summoning a demon from each House and being the first humans in centuries to see all twelve lines.”

  My head spun, my mouth dry and heart thudding loudly.

  “When your grandma died, Sarah inherited the grimoire. I was already secretly apprenticing with a summoner, and Sarah began translating it the day she got it.”

  He let out a long breath. “I don’t know what changed her mind. A few months later, she told me we couldn’t use it. She said we couldn’t summon demons, any demons, and that we had to lie low and protect the grimoire.

  “I was furious … this was my dream. I asked her to give me a name, any name, so I could start my career. She refused. She wouldn’t explain why, only that the grimoire was too dangerous and we couldn’t attract attention to ourselves. She switched to a sleeper guild a few weeks later and stopped practicing magic entirely.”

  “You always told me she was a summoner and had cheated you out of your fair inheritance,” Amalia said accusingly.

  “Every Athanas descendant is a summoner, whether they practice or not. And I did feel like I’d been cheated.” His guilty stare turned to me, and I frowned back at him—then realized why he looked so ashamed.

  “You …” A sick feeling washed over me. “You kept my inheritance from me as revenge, didn’t you? You were punishing me for what you thought my mom had done to you.”

  He cringed, then sighed bitterly. “Sarah and I were no older than you two girls are now when we went our separate ways. She said as long as I insisted on practicing Demonica, she couldn’t associate with me. I said as long as she refused to share the grimoire, I didn’t want anything to do with her. We went on with our lives for years and years, then …”

  “Then you got her letter,” I guessed.

  “And she died.” He rubbed a hand over his greasy forehead and stubbly hair. “The grimoire was finally mine. I could take my career to the next level and become a famous summoner like I’d always wanted. And, of course, I would protect the grimoire too. It would be safe with me …”

  “You tried to sell the First House name to Red Rum,” I pointed out angrily. “How was that protecting the grimoire?”

  “That was a mistake. A stupid, greedy mistake. Robin, I thought the grimoire had been forgotten. I never thought anyone would tie me and your mother to the legends.” He exhaled unsteadily. “But I’d already made my biggest mistake, long before I ever touched the grimoire.”

  I stared at him coldly. “What was that?”

  “Claude,” he whispered.

  My heart felt like a block of lead, weighed down by sickening trepidation that had no outlet; the terrible consequences had already played out.

  “I don’t know if he was already searching for us when he befriended me years ago, or if he heard me complain about my sister cheating me out of our family’s priceless Demonica grimoire.” He gripped the arms of his recliner, knuckles white. “He never asked about the grimoire or Sarah. How could I have guessed it? Even after … even after Sarah …”

  Uncle Jack buried his face in his hands and a hoarse sob wheezed in his throat.

  “He killed my parents, didn’t he?” My throat was so dry the words hurt. “Claude killed my parents.”

  Uncle Jack lowered his hands from his face, his eyes damp and haunted. “I never suspected him, not until the demon escaped last month. He demanded the grimoire, and when I refuse
d, he tried to force me to give it up.”

  Amalia folded her hands together in her laps, fingers squeezing tightly. “I’m surprised he didn’t kill you.”

  “He didn’t know where the grimoire was. I never let him near it, you see. I copied individual pages and sent them to him. He’s never seen the actual book.”

  Well, at least Uncle Jack had been smart about one thing. I unclenched my jaw before my molars cracked, pain and grief and fury forming a maelstrom in my lungs.

  “I’ve been hiding here ever since,” Uncle Jack said heavily. “I knew he’d be watching you, Amalia. I didn’t want to give him any reason to think you knew where to find me.”

  “Who is Claude?” she demanded. “His demon is in an illegal contract.”

  “His demon is Second House,” I added darkly. “He has all the demon names now, because of you.”

  “Not all of them,” he corrected. “A demon name is made up of three parts: the name written in the demonic language, the House’s sigil, and the proper pronunciation. Claude only has two of the three for the Twelfth House. I never let him see how the name is written.”

  Claude had told me he had all the names, but maybe he’d been stretching the truth. If he couldn’t summon the Twelfth House himself, that explained his offer from weeks ago—the invitation to join with him. He’d wanted access to Zylas.

  “I don’t know who he is,” Uncle Jack admitted. “I can’t investigate from here, but I’ve confirmed ‘Claude Mercier’ is a fake identity. He appeared about six years ago. That’s all I know.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut, drowning in a torrent of emotions. Claude had murdered my parents. That knowledge shifted the axis of my world. Suddenly, my grief wasn’t alone. It had been joined by an equally powerful, scorching need for justice. For revenge.

  “What about the Twelfth House?” I asked him hoarsely.

  “What about it?”

  “Why is it special? Claude told me his goal is to get his hands on a Vh’alyir demon.”

  Uncle Jack tensed. “How do you know that name?”

  “I found the scanned page on your computer before the house burned down.”