Demon Born Magic (Ella Grey Series Book 3)

by Jayne Faith

  He shook his head. “I’m not sure, but the place looks kind of ragged, like upkeep stopped a while ago.”

  We were alone on the road in a particularly dull stretch of desert highway when something ran out in front of us.

  Rogan jammed on the brakes, swearing. The Jeep fishtailed on the sandy pavement, and skidded to a stop about twenty feet away from a man standing in the middle of our lane.

  “What the . . .” I leaned forward, squinting.

  He was just standing there, unnaturally still. Then he raised an arm and crooked a finger in a beckoning motion.

  “Shit,” I muttered, unbuckling my seatbelt. I reached for the door handle.

  Rogan grabbed my arm. “Wait, what are you doing?”

  “It’s a zombie,” I said. “I’m betting it’s one of Zarella’s. Pull off to the shoulder, and I’ll go see what it wants.”

  I got out of the Jeep, slammed the door, and unfurled my whip. I reached for earth magic, added a filament of fire, and pushed some of the power down my arm and into the whip.

  Properly armed, I stalked toward the zombie. I stopped about eight feet away from it, and over to the side. The zombie sidestepped out of the way of potential traffic, too.

  “What’s up, buttercup?” I called.

  “Ms. Grey, good morning to you,” the zombie said with Zarella’s voice, its jaw moving in a way that was only a little puppet-like but still enough to give me the willies. “There is something you should know about your family.”

  With an eye roll, I spread my arms. “Right now? I’m a little busy here.” Not to mention it was damn cold out.

  The Jeep idled behind me, the headlights lighting up the zombie’s vacant eyes.

  “I’ll make it as quick as I can. I believe you will find this interruption worth it.”

  I made a rolling motion with my free hand, indicating he should get on with it.

  “I will cut right to the heart of the matter,” the zombie said. “You and your brother were conceived for a specific purpose.”

  I blinked. “Huh?”

  “You and your brother were experiments. Your mother and father conspired to create a person uniquely powerful, a hero of the ages who could sew the big rips closed for good. You were the failure. Your brother was the success. However, your mother had regrets and decided to hide that fact from everyone.”

  My mouth dropped open, but no words came for a few seconds. “What in the hell are you talking about?” Anger roughed my voice.

  Heat rose to my face in a flush of irritation. Why was Zarella screwing with me now of all times?

  “If Jacob Gregori were to find Evan, your uncle would have his greatest prize. The one thing he’s been seeking to atone for his sins,” he said slowly and clearly, as if loading each word with importance.

  “Stop talking in riddles,” I spat.

  Zarella knew Jacob was my uncle. I clenched the handle of the whip as my pulse pounded.

  “Your brother holds the power—the right kind, and in sufficient quantities—to close the rips permanently,” he said with surprising patience. “But it would require him to sacrifice his life. Your uncle would be more than willing to kill your brother if it sealed the rips. He’s willing to pay any price. Jacob will do everything he can to get your brother.”

  I took a shaking breath as my brain chugged to try to make sense of it. Jacob wanted Evan and would kill him in the name of closing the rips. That was the critical thing here.

  “Does Jacob know where my brother is?” I asked as calmly as I could.

  “If he did, he’d have Evan already.”

  “With all of Jacob’s resources, how can he have not found Evan?”

  “Some of us have been ensuring that he didn’t.”

  My breath stilled. So if all of this was true, Zarella had his own reasons for keeping Evan away from Jacob. Foreboding tightened its chilly fingers around my heart, slowly squeezing into a fist.

  “Why would you do that?” I asked. “What could possibly be your motive?”

  The zombie tsked. “So suspicious.”

  With a motion so quick it was only a blur, I raised my right hand and gave a little flick, cracking the whip about a foot in front of the zombie’s nose. It didn’t even flinch.

  “Tell me now, or I take your pet’s head off,” I warned.

  “Some of us believe in the joining of dimensions. We believe that chaos and darkness are a natural part of the order of things. We do not want it suppressed. Ergo, we desire the rips remain open,” he said, and even through the zombie, I could sense the pleasure in the words Zarella spoke.

  A writhing shiver worked itself over my scalp and spiraled down my spine.

  If Phillip Zarella wanted to keep the rips open, that was reason enough to side with my uncle . . . except for the part about sacrificing my brother.

  Other implications of Zarella’s information tried to crowd into my thoughts, but I had to keep focused. I had to get Evan. I had to protect him.

  “Perhaps I owe you my thanks for keeping my brother hidden from Jacob, if what you say is true,” I said. “But you clearly have your own reasons for what you do, and I’d be an idiot to put my complete trust in you.”

  “You may not have a choice, if you want to keep your brother alive,” he said.

  “That remains to be seen.”

  I flicked my whip again, this time sending fire magic crackling down its length. Sparks flew off the end as if it were a downed live wire.

  The zombie nodded once, pivoted, and sprinted off into the desert.

  I coiled my whip as I returned to the Jeep.

  “Are you okay?” Rogan asked, his hands gripping the wheel, and his tawny eyes focused and steady as he watched my face.

  “I’m not sure,” I said truthfully.

  I repeated my conversation with the zombie word-for-word, as best as I could recall it. I needed someone else to know what I was facing, even if it meant exposing things I’d rather keep hidden.

  “You’re Jacob Gregori’s niece?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Surprise,” I said dully.

  I closed my eyes and ran my hands down my face.

  Rogan blew out a low whistle. “That’s a lot to take in.”

  “If any of it is true.”

  He went silent, chewing his lip.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I think the part about protecting Evan may be accurate. There have been rumors for the past few years among underworlders, talk about Zarella and others like him guarding someone important. Sinister and very hush-hush.”

  “What do you mean by ‘others like him’?”

  “You remember I told you the underworld is a mix of people. Some good, some not so much. Some straight out of a nightmare.” He hesitated, his eyes darting to the windshield to stare down the highway.

  “Yeah?” I prompted.

  “It’s one of the rifts within the underworld. There are the ones like Zarella who’d be thrilled to see more chaos unleashed on our world, and, well, the rest of us who aren’t insane.”

  I snorted an unexpected laugh but quickly sobered.

  “So maybe Zarella bringing me into the underworld has something to do with his wish to keep Evan out of Jacob’s hands,” I said.

  “Could be.” Rogan checked for traffic and then pulled off the shoulder and back onto the highway.

  I cast one last look off to the right in the direction the zombie had gone. I saw a tiny figure moving in the far distance, toward what I wasn’t sure. Sagebrush and thin patches of snow stretched out for miles, with a backdrop of snow-tipped mountains.

  As the tires on the highway lulled us into our own separate thoughts, I played my conversation with Zarella back in my mind.

  You and your brother were conceived as experiments. Your mother and your father conspired to create a person powerful enough to sew the rips closed. You were the failure. Your brother was the success.

  Evan and I were experiments? Could there be any shred of truth to
that?

  I searched my memory for everything I could recall about my father, which was, of course, filtered through my mother because he died when I was very young. I replayed random scenes from my childhood. It had always seemed as if my mom loved me and Evan. I couldn’t remember anything that might have hinted she’d had us only as science projects.

  Zarella had said she later regretted something, though, and out of that regret had protected Evan.

  I tried to imagine the conversations between my parents before they had me. I tried to picture them talking about creating a child with specific magical gifts, ones that would be powerful enough to close the rips. And after I was born, how did they even know that I was the “failure?” Magical abilities didn’t kick in until puberty, and by that time my father was long dead.

  My thoughts jumped to what the dragon had said when I’d asked it who had taken Evan five years ago. Someone of my own blood. Jacob?

  I was trying to fill in blanks with too little information, which was a pointless exercise in insanity. Yet I couldn’t help my spinning thoughts.

  I needed to know the truth, but who could I ask? My parents were both deceased, my grandmother gone, too. Jacob and my brother were the only living relatives I knew about. Evan wouldn’t know any more than I did. Jacob was the only option, but I wished there was someone else, anyone in the world who knew the whole story.

  My thoughts spiraled over to Evan. If Jacob wanted my brother, how in the name of the universe would I keep him safe? Was I delusional, thinking I could bring him back to Boise and my home, which was mere miles from Gregori Industries?

  I took a long breath in as the weight of the world seemed to begin to settle on me. I looked at Rogan. “Should I leave Evan there?”

  He flicked me a glance, frowning. “What?”

  “Maybe I should leave him where he is. If Zarella is telling the truth, he and his cronies have managed to keep Evan out of Jacob’s clutches. If I get my brother out of the vampire den, how long before Jacob realizes he’s with me?”

  “Could you really do that? Just walk away, knowing where Evan is?” Rogan asked quietly.

  “Maybe, if I’d discovered he was in a good place,” I said. My visions of Evan’s slack body rushed into my mind’s eye. “If I knew he was happy. But if I leave him where he is, he’ll probably die anyway. He’s not living any sort of life in a vampire feeder den.”

  “I think you have your answer,” he said.

  A new, even more disturbing thought pinged like a tiny bell in my head. Why had Zarella kept Evan alive all this time if he was a threat to what Zarella and his buddies wanted? He must have some plan of his own for Evan.

  All I wanted was to give Evan a chance at a normal life. But one thing was becoming frighteningly clear: my brother was a prize in a dangerous power play I didn’t fully understand.

  Rogan and I passed the next several miles in silence. He turned off at a rest area.

  “Could you take over? I need to focus on my spies for the rest of the way.”

  “Sure.” Maybe taking the wheel would be a good distraction.

  We got out, let Loki run around for a minute in the dog area, and then Rogan and I switched seats.

  Rogan sank into trance with his eyes closed and his body so still he appeared to be sleeping. After about forty-five minutes, he took a deep breath and shifted in his seat.

  “They’re definitely restless, but obviously with the sun up they haven’t made a move to leave yet,” he said. “It’s a little hard to tell what’s going on inside, but I think we need to go in while it’s still full light outside.”

  I squirmed a little. “Makes sense, but I hate the idea of storming the castle in broad daylight.”

  “I know, it goes against our instinct to use darkness as cover, but the sunlight gives us an advantage over the vamps. If they try to attack or pursue us outside, they won’t be able to put up much of a fight.”

  “You think we’ll be able to surprise them at all?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Hard to say. We’ll have to park at a distance, though, if we want any hope of gaining that edge.”

  Shit. In my visions it looked like Evan was barely capable of standing under his own power. A full-speed sprint away from the vampire den? I puffed my cheeks and blew out a long breath.

  “The turn-off is coming up.” Rogan pointed at an exit marking a town that was little more than a truck stop.

  We stopped for a fuel refill, and then he gave me directions that eventually took us to a one-lane dirt road that looked as if it hadn’t been graded in a decade.

  I shifted the Jeep into all-wheel drive, but Rogan had me stop only about twenty feet down the dirt road.

  As I killed the engine, I looked at him in question. “How far are we from the compound?”

  “About five miles,” he said.

  My heart sank. “There’s no way my brother will make it from there to here. I’m not even sure he’ll be able to walk without help.”

  “I’ve got a plan,” Rogan said. “It involves some, uh, demon flight.”

  My brows shot up. “What?”

  “I’m going to command a few arch demons. I’ve been holding the minds of three of them, one for each of us. They’ll pick us up, fly us here to the car, and drop us off.”

  He pointed to the hills in the distance, and I stretched my awareness in that direction. It took a moment, and I was rusty with my necro senses, but I felt them if only faintly. The presence of three distinct arch-demons.

  A grin spread over my face. “Nice. Creepy, but good thinking.”

  I let my senses range around our area and picked up the presence of many smaller minor demons. Most of them were concentrated at a point northwest of us. Rogan’s pet spies around the compound, I assumed.

  Part of me expected a twinge that would tell me the reaper was watching, too, but it didn’t come. I could feel it there in the center of my chest along with the black stones, which still felt lodged behind my breastbone.

  Loki stuck his face in between me and Rogan and whined, as if prompting us to get on with things.

  I scratched behind Loki’s ear and peered around him at Rogan.

  A dark smile spread across his face, and his tawny eyes glittered in the light of the mid-day sun.

  “Let’s roll out,” he said and reached for the door handle.

  Chapter 19

  ROGAN AND I took off at a jog in the direction of where I’d sensed the cluster of minor demons. Loki loped along easily beside us.

  Running through the open desert in broad daylight set my nerves on edge. But as Rogan had said, this was the time of day the vampires would be sluggish, and the sunlight gave us a weapon against the vamps. We moved in silence for a while, both of us breathing in rhythm to our footfalls.

  “What do you make of the lead vamp?” I asked Rogan.

  “He’s powerful. Older than most.”

  “But not VAMP1 old?”

  Modern vampires had been infected with VAMP2, a virus unleashed when the first Rip split Manhattan. VAMP1 was the strain that had infected the original vampires of Europe and all of their descendants. Most of the new generation of vampires was like Jennifer Kane—rendered docile with an implant and able to live more or less normal lives. But some had evaded capture and remained rogue, reliant on the blood of their victims for survival.

  “Nah,” Rogan said. “But even so, I think we’re in for an exciting fight.”

  That was an understatement. In the world of vampires—in most of the supernatural world, actually—age meant strength. Enhanced powers. Cunning, and skills of survival.

  “Good thing we get this little warm-up run before we have to face him, then,” I said mildly. I punched the air with jabs and a hook like a boxer psyching herself up for the big fight.

  Rogan grinned.

  “You’re kind of looking forward to this, aren’t you?” I asked.

  “Like a teenage girl going to her prom.”

  I laughed outri
ght but flicked another glance at his profile.

  “Why?” I pressed. “This isn’t your fight.”

  He went a good dozen paces before responding.

  “I’ve spent decades looking for ways to die, and I failed,” he said frankly. “I figure I might as well make use of my immortality. You know, use my powers for good.”

  Immortality. My stomach dipped as the word seemed to hang in my mind. I pushed it away. This definitely wasn’t the time for meanderings of philosophical thought.

  I reached out with my necro senses, searching for a minor demon away from Rogan’s flock. I knew he was keeping an eye on things, but I wanted to look for myself. Finding what I sought a couple of miles to the south, I probed into the energetic center of the creature’s mind until I felt it give into my control.

  I took a few stutter steps as my sight blurred and darkened. My right eye shifted to necro vision as seen through the creature’s viewpoint while my left stayed as it was and kept me from stumbling over the uneven ground. I blinked several times as my brain adjusted to the double vision.

  I sent the creature into flight toward the compound, which gave me a bit of time to work through the dizziness and make sure I kept my feet under me. Running and controlling a minor demon at the same time pushed the limits of my coordination and necro abilities. I couldn’t even imagine how much focus it took for Rogan to hold the minds of three arch-demons, umpteen minor demons, and run along beside me like it was all a stroll in the park.

  Just to see what would happen, I reached downward for earth magic. I caught a small strand of it for a split second before I tripped over a stick.

  Rogan was there, with one hand clamped around my upper arm and the other on my waist. One of my knees hit the ground, but he pulled me upright before I could go sprawling.

  He gave a low chuckle as he let go of my arm and reached down to brush off the knee of my pants. “Trying to get fancy, are you?”

  I gave a breathy laugh that got lost in my panting. “Kinda stupid, I guess.”