My Demon Warlord

by Carolyn Jewel

  For a mage without much power, the layer of magic was thick, the tracks well-defined at the interior. The edges though, that bothered him. Where he expected to find the usual rough, thinning edges, he found dense magic that hinted at complexity that ought to have been beyond this one’s abilities. He swept his muzzle over the area again.

  He probed deeper, and the signature of the apprentice thinned and stretched and merged into the signature of a different mage. Okay then. He was right. This wasn’t what it seemed. He concentrated and confirmed what he was finding. Layers of magic. Not one mage, but two—one apprentice, one trained. He revisualized. First the apprentice, then the other one, and still the images would not stabilize. He selected for time and that helped.

  Kynan had personally encountered the German mage who’d first proposed the overlay technique two hundred and fifty years ago. The idea had not been well-received by human magic users of the time, but Magellan, in addition to sending Kynan to kill the German, had ordered him to retrieve every notebook and journal in his possession. Two years later, Magellan had mastered the technique, and shared it with one other human—his lover at the time, a witch named Neda Sessani. As far as he knew, Sessani had gone back to Persia.

  The thing was, Magellan had never shared unless he had no choice. The killing rituals he’d invented had spread only because they required more than one mage. But this? Whoever had done this had either known the German or Magellan, or they’d reinvented the technique on their own. And refined it. What were the odds of that?

  He sat on his haunches and contemplated that. The traces were compact because both the mages had stood without moving more than a few centimeters in any direction. He continued his examination. Underneath the second layer was another layer, this one suggestive of a mage of significant abilities.

  More than one.

  More than two, even.

  The first, second, and third layers were so precise that he had to wonder why anyone would put such effort into what amounted to watching grass grow. He continued his examination. There were more than a dozen layers that switched between the first two mages, then—yes. Definitely a third mage and a fourth, a witch. He couldn’t get a firm sense of the witch. Disguising the presence of multiple trips by a single person was not trivial. Disguising four of them? Inconceivable. Yet four of the magekind had been here and had kept to one track. They’d made the same movements through space in a choreography that required preternatural precision. Each and every time, they’d put their bodies into the exact same geo-spacial coordinates as whoever had preceded them.

  By definition, a mage or witch who could execute an overlay was not an apprentice. Kynan continued sifting through the particulate residue, concentrating on the outer area where it would be easier to find entry to the interior. He worked deeper, carefully, cautiously. The signatures separated, and he peeled through the top layers vertically and horizontally until he was certain. Two mages. Now a third. And a fourth. A witch, much clearer now.

  He reached farther into the residue. Now that he knew how to look, separating the layers was easier. He thought he recognized one of the mages from when he’d been in San Diego. An Argentinian apprentice by the name of Denis Garzon, if memory served. The other two he didn’t know. They weren’t any of the Russians known to be in Northern California. The Polynesians, as Winters had suggested? The Tamils? Any of the groups aligning against Nikodemus would be interested in spying on them.

  He returned to the layered magic. Three mages and a witch, merging into each other with disturbing precision. Even that loser Garzon had managed the trick. Of the other two mages, one was taller than the compactly built Garzon. The third was a sandy-haired man who looked Slavic. One of the Russians after all? Fourth was the witch. Dark-haired, elegant, apparent age of twenty-five. Her he knew. Fucking Neda Sessani. If Sessani was in California, she was keeping a damn low profile. Wherever she was calling home, the fact was that she had been here hardly an hour ago. If she was in with the Russians, that meant nothing but trouble.

  He committed each of the signatures to memory because anyone, magekind or kin, who was a potential threat to Winters or who threatened Nikodemus’s delicate peace, belonged at the top of his watch list.

  From the sidewalk in front of Winters’ house, he called Nikodemus and reported what he’d found. While he did that, he reassessed the occupants of the house, but nothing leapt out at him.

  “Not good,” Nikodemus said.

  “Of the four, Sessani is the dangerous one.”

  “Agreed.”

  “This smells like a setup,” he told Nikodemus.

  “Could be.” He sounded like he didn’t give a shit if it was. He did, but it wasn’t anything new, being the target of magekind offended by the idea of demons and magekind living in peace. “Nothing in the rules says they can’t stand around doing nothing.”

  “I know.”

  “It wasn’t an attack. From what you say, Maddy’s house wasn’t even in their line of sight.”

  “They didn’t want to be seen.”

  “So? They didn’t do anything. If they’d engaged with her at all, we’d know. Your wards would have reacted.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Nothing I can do about that.”

  “The only thing bigger than taking out Winters,” Kynan said, “would be taking out me. And here’s Winters and me in the same place. What would you do if you were here instead of me?” Scenarios abounded, none of them comforting. “If I wanted to inflict maximum harm and doubt, I wouldn’t just end her. I’d make a point first. If you can’t hold her, that sends a hell of a message. Break her oath to you, and the impact is bigger than just killing her.” He kept his back to the house. Winters lived in a nice area. Not a lot of magic users to ruin the neighborhood. “I’d keep her alive long enough for the loss to ripple through all the hierarchies. Then I’d kill her and leave the mutilated body where you’d find it. With an audience.”

  Nikodemus didn’t respond right away. Kynan waited.

  “I need you with me,” Nikodemus said at last.

  “And?”

  “And you set aside your issues with Maddy. You keep yourself under control. Get in there now.” The imperative in the instructions ripped through him. “You make goddamned sure she stays alive and well.”

  Kynan headed for the front door before Nikodemus finished the sentence. Phone still to his ear, he went in without knocking. “Inside,” he said. “Are we good now?”

  “As long as Winters is alive and mine.”

  His uneasiness turned red hot. Not a good mental space for him to be. Around Winters he needed every shred of his control.

  Her house had a small entryway where people hung coats and dropped purses and keys. The area opened to the living room. When he looked around, five misfit magic users were gaping at him. They hadn’t been doing anything with whatever fucked-up ability they had. Nothing here but the normal levels of magic you’d find in the home of an extremely powerful witch.

  “Kynan.” Winters stood and touched three fingers to her forehead. Polite. No intent behind the motion. He tried not to stare, but how could he not? She was in jeans, a button-down shirt, and shoes with skinny heels. He never knew what the fuck to say to her, and lately he knew even less. He didn’t say anything. He lifted his phone away from his ear and put it back so she’d know he was in the middle of something.

  As she headed for him, one of the two mages in her group couldn’t look away from her ass. Fucker.

  As usual, he had a lot of dirty thoughts about her, especially since she’d touched her forehead. He liked that even when she didn’t mean it. Memories and fantasies both. Black hair, brown skin, a hooked nose that made her striking. No one could look at her without feeling the one-two punch of her strong features and physical delicacy. He never could. What demon didn’t want a taste of a witch with that kind of power? Not fucking many. He’d had his taste, and he wasn’t getting more.

  “Status.” That was N
ikodemus in his ear.

  He lowered his voice. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “You recognize any of them?” Nikodemus meant the newbies.

  “No. Should I?”

  “Let me ask a few people if they know what Sessani’s been up to lately. I’ll get back to you.”

  “Sure.” He was aware the newbies were watching him intently. Fucking magic users.

  “Nobody threatens Maddy.”

  Mostly that was an old joke between him and Nikodemus, but right now, he didn’t think it was funny. “Be specific unless you don’t mind a high body count.”

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Winters frown. He ignored her, but this close, she was an inferno to him.

  “Protect her with your life,” Nikodemus said. “You’re authorized to sanction anyone who gets in the way of that directive.” A sanction was an assassination approved by Nikodemus.

  “Fuck me,” Kynan said.

  “Clear enough?”

  “Perfectly.” He disconnected, at that moment not happy at all. To the phone, he said, “Like I have any goddamned choice.”

  CHAPTER 3

  What did you say to someone who’d once tried to kill you as painfully as possible? Or to someone who had, not kindly, turned down an offer to be friends with benefits? Nothing continued to be the best choice. And nothing, unfortunately, wasn’t an available option.

  Maddy stayed halfway between Kynan and the others, arms crossed over her chest. With as much power as he was holding right now, she was ready and willing to protect her newbies. She cleared her throat. “Glad you made it.”

  He put away his phone, unaffected, as far as she could tell, by her passive-aggressive greeting. She hated that he was so good-looking. Kynan’s physical manifestation was perfect. Not her type, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t admit he packed some heat. She compartmentalized around him. Those messed-up times when they ended up in bed didn’t exist. If she didn’t shut out those recollections she’d be a constant wreck around him. They weren’t fuck-buddies—more like fuck-enemies. The fucking part positively could not bleed into the rest of her life.

  She dreaded the two weeks when it was his turn here. Her newbies never understood the danger they were in from someone who looked like him. By the time they did, it was too late, and someone always got hurt. Usually a woman with stars in her eyes. He couldn’t be persuaded to downshift his attitude.

  She reminded herself he’d come in, phone to his ear, after loitering outside for nearly an hour. Then he’d strolled in talking about high body counts.

  With a deliberately hostile gaze, he glanced around, eyeing each of her students long enough for the more sensitive ones to react. He’d have assessed her latest group of newbies long before he came in. He was just working the fear factor because he was an asshole. She was glad they weren’t buddies of any kind.

  “Everyone.” Winters faced the others and used her lawyer voice. He hated when she talked about him in that tone, so using it was particularly satisfying when she had the chance. Opportunities to give him a hard time didn’t come often enough. “This is Kynan Aijan. As we discussed, he’s sworn to Nikodemus. A warlord in his own right, so due respect, please.”

  She glanced at him. A sardonic smile curved his tender mouth, and he stood with his weight on one leg, thumbs hooked into the pockets of his grungy jeans. His dark gray T-shirt wasn’t tight-fitting, but there was no hiding his sculpted body. The sullen edge to his expression should have made him look petty but didn’t.

  “A demon.” Jing-Mei Ying was a slender woman she’d found selling counterfeit purses in the Lake Merritt section of Oakland. She sounded awed and doubtful at the same time. “He doesn’t look like a demon.”

  “Yet he is,” Maddy replied. “As you’ll soon learn.”

  Just about every magic user she found and brought here had social and psychological issues. The magekind tested all their children for magical ability at three, keeping and training only the ones who passed. The rest they adopted out or flat-out abandoned. Her newbies were almost always the survivors who’d failed. Without any training, they rarely coped well with the eventual manifestation of their magic. More often than not, they ended up on the streets. Or dead.

  She tried to help the ones most at risk, but they were an unpredictable lot and often difficult to work with. Too many disappeared before she could get them to agree to work with her. They were unreliable and often maladjusted young women and men with substance abuse problems. Working with them required patience and control. Kynan had both, but he hated human magic users too much to care about their feelings. He just wanted them to leave him alone, and it showed in everything he did here.

  “Can we get on with this?” he said. “I’m clubbing tonight, and I don’t want to miss all the hot chicks.”

  She ignored him and asked each of her group to introduce him or herself. Quentin was the oldest at twenty-seven. In classic mage fashion he thought a little too much of himself. As with many of the high-functioning street mages, his success in his profession, in his case, financial management, was almost certainly due to his stunted, buried magic. Jing-Mei’s counterfeiting venture kept her housed and fed. She drove a BMW and moved a lot of product because of her magic-driven talent for persuasion. Ashley was a recovering addict in her mid-twenties whose abilities had so far remained completely latent. The magic was there, but Ashley was unable to access it. Sadly, the only thing atypical about her was the recovering part. Maddy had removed eighteen-year-old LaShawn from her pimp and gotten her into safe housing, a GED class, and a recovery program. LaShawn was smart. Really smart.

  The fifth member of the group was another mage. Salvador was a rarity: a magic user born to vanilla parents. He was from Southern California and a sophomore at Cal. Not yet twenty and so far a straight-A student.

  “Have a seat, warlord.” She kept her lawyer tone because she needed distance and to maintain her authority.

  He’d fooled her that day. She’d believed he was a beautiful demon male passing for a college boy who wanted to play. She wasn’t ashamed of what she liked in bed, and in her experience demons had a lot fewer hang-ups about sex. The truly stupid thing was she’d heard all the rumors. That Kynan Aijan wasn’t real. That he was real and enslaved to Magellan. That he was real and busy killing as many innocent humans as he could. That he’d killed Magellan in spectacular fashion. She hadn’t expected to run into him, and she hadn’t known he’d look so young. She just hadn’t believed a demon could hide anything from her, up to and including his warlord status. He’d made her pay for that mistake. Just like she had made him pay for his.

  Kynan took a chair as far from her newbies as could possibly be considered polite. For the next hour, all he did was sit there looking bored. For a while, that’s all she needed from him. Her students had to learn how to identify a demon and, eventually, how to make contact. The upside to having Kynan here was that he was high intensity. Her newbies always caught on quickest when he was here.

  As expected, Jing-Mei and Ashley were too distracted by Kynan’s looks to concentrate. He didn’t help things by smiling at them like he was hoping to get lucky later. Of the women, LaShawn had the most success with the assigned tasks because she wasn’t interested in flirting with Kynan.

  Quentin was lazy. He expected everything to be easy for him. Maddy could be patient—she had to be—but she wasn’t hopeful that Quentin would learn more than how to boil water. Salvador got the hang of things quickly, and it made him cocky. His hard work made up for the cockiness. Eventually, she was satisfied they’d managed to get the basics of identifying the divine reaction of a magic user to one of the demonkind. “Kynan, can you ramp down a little now?”

  Without looking at her, he did. Still slouched on his chair, he pulled out his phone. From the movement of his fingers over the screen and the annoying beeps and music, she figured he was playing a game. Every so often, he let his magic surge, and she’d frown at him. He ignored her. Of course.<
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  “Warlord.” She used the honorific to remind the others that Kynan was not a typical demon. “The point is to make it harder for them to sense you, not easier.”

  “Sorry.” He never looked away from his phone. She went back to working with her students.

  A few minutes later, his phone pinged, and the motion of his fingers changed. Answering a text. Ping. Reading. Then responding. He gave the screen such a dirty grin that she said, “Tell Iskander I say hello.”

  He turned just his head, and her stomach did a somersault. His eyes had turned faintly bronze. Yes, he could pass for human, but he wasn’t trying hard now, and she reacted. She couldn’t help it. His attention returned to his phone. “He says hi back.”

  “All right, Ashley, would you—”

  Salvador shot to his feet, and, contrary to her specific instructions, he was hot with magic. If he’d had even one magekind parent, he’d have passed their ridiculous test, no problem. Kynan looked up from his phone, eyebrows arched. His magic stayed steady. Salvador slapped a hand to his chest. Hard. “What is that?”

  With a smirk, Kynan said, “Well, well, well. The gangbanger makes contact.”

  “Very good, Salvador.” She clapped and tried not to be glad that Quentin was put out about Salvador beating him. “Excellent work. Sit down, please.”

  “He isn’t human.” Salvador lunged toward Kynan, then aborted the motion. Kynan didn’t react, but he drew more power than he’d been holding before. Salvador started panting.

  Her three witches put space between them and Salvador. Women were better than men at a lot of things, including sizing up a situation that could turn dangerous. They had to be. A woman who couldn’t tell when a man was edging into violence sooner or later ended up in the ER or the morgue. Quentin didn’t do anything. He didn’t even move closer in case Salvador lost it and needed to be restrained. What’s more, Quentin showed no sign of responding to the magic ricocheting through the room. The witches certainly were.