by Kat Simons
Angie shook her head. How the hell a public library had gotten a copy of this book was beyond her. Maybe they thought it was a fantasy, a fiction book designed to seem like non-fiction. Like the Encyclopedia of Things that Never Where or the Encyclopedia of Faeries or the dragon version with a similar title. Books designed to be fun and amusing. Not actual recitations of real things that existed in the real world.
The library had gotten that very wrong with this book.
She carefully lifted the volume, wondering if Sebastian had spotted it before now. It was the kind of book demon hunters looked out for so they could get it off the street and safely ensconced in The Bookstore—a magical bookshop that bought and sold just this kind of thing. But they were careful to whom they sold the dangerous books. The proprietor had a good sense of who should and should not possess a book on demonic rituals.
A twelve-year-old human child who seemed to have no magic powers or signs of an otherworldly nature was not someone who should possess this book.
Angie carefully leafed through the pages, letting her gaze go soft and blurred at the edges. She’d read this book before, years ago, when she’d initially gotten involved with the demon hunters. Before she’d tried to pull back and insisted Sebastian and the others leave her in peace. She didn’t need to know the information in the book, the various ceremonies it described, the paraphernalia it outlined as requirements for summoning demons. Even the author of the book understood what was really involved in calling, controlling, and fighting off demons. And it wasn’t all the stuff.
It was will. Pure and simple. The will to do it.
And if a person’s will wasn’t as strong as the demon’s…
The demon won.
Chapter Five
The paragraphs of text, the images printed on the page, all of it blurred together as Angie looked to a deeper level, trying to see what Mara had wanted—or used—this book for. Had she been calling a demon of her own to counter her father’s sick plot?
Without conscious thought, Angie stopped on a page, and a sense of Mara’s agitation filled her. Setting her fingers against the image on that page without looking at it, Angie let the sense of Mara fill her. Shock and hurt. But not surprise? Fear. A lot of fear. But also determination. And…
Angie pulled in a breath, let it out slowly, trying to understand what she was feeling. A sense of expectation maybe. Like Mara knew, before she’d found this image, what was happening? Angie couldn’t be certain. There were a lot of emotions tied into this moment for Mara, and parsing them out proved complicated.
An image sprang up from the sensory feel. An image of an altar in a dark room. An altar topped with an animal skull of some small mammal with horns, a copper plate, a scattering of rune tiles too blurred for her to read the runes, a lantern that appeared to be made from bone, though she couldn’t tell if it was real bone or not, and a few burning candles. A pentagram carved into the wood of the altar and filled in with gold leaf. An open book beside the copper plate. Some dried herbs behind the animal skull. A black robe tossed on the floor near the altar.
The image panned out and Angie saw clearly the circle traced in chalk on a wooden floor. The four cardinal points were marked with additional drawings of pentagrams and skulls and red candles set inside the images.
It was an elaborate set up. A blend of ordinary witchy paraphernalia mixed with the Christian conceptions of the devil. A relatively ordinary type of set up for someone attempting to summon a demon, especially if they believed the demon they called was the devil of Christian lore. The demon hunters saw set ups like this a lot because most humans, in the U.S. in particular, thought all this was needed to summon demons. They mixed their knowledge and myths together and came up with this.
Which was why the image was also in the book. An example of a typical set up for summoning demons.
Angie let her gaze sharpen on the 2-D picture beneath her fingertips. It was, down to the placement of the skull at the precise angle and the way the black robe was tossed to one side, a reproduction of what Mara had seen in real life. The only odd point was the bone lantern. That wasn’t in the image, but it had been something Mara saw on the altar.
Angie frowned. Grant hadn’t struck her as the clichéd summoner of demons. Well, in some ways he was, but maybe she was giving him more credit than he deserved. She’d assumed he’d have enough knowledge to set up his summoning space to his own tastes, not copy them so precisely from a book. But Mara had seen almost this exact image recreated in a dark room. And she’d realized what her father was up to.
Poor kid.
Something still felt off about it all, but Angie couldn’t put her finger on what was bothering her. Not precisely enough to put it into words yet. She’d have to think about this a bit more.
Something to do with stage setting…? The lantern?
She finished flipping through the book, but she knew Mara had stopped on that image and not gone further. Setting the Encyclopedia aside, she moved to the next book down. A fictional listing of different demons. This was the kind of thing writers and artists used for inspiration, not anything that reflected real life. As Angie flipped through the pages, she sensed Mara had realized that about halfway through and put the book down.
The final book in the pile, however, was not a fictious listing of demon types. Somehow, the library had gotten another book that should not be in the hands of ordinary humans.
Where the hell was this library? She’d better send Sebastian to check their stacks for any more of these dangerous volumes.
She studied the cover before picking it up. The title read simply Demon. It was an illustrated listing of the different demon species and the realms the writer had been aware of.
This particular book was an impressive collection of knowledge, as complete as almost anything available. The author had missed only two demon realms in her research, and had only minor mistakes in the lineages. But overall, the book was an excellent reference guide to demons, their realms, and their tactics for escape.
This was a rare book. Only about two dozen copies existed in the world. The one she’d seen at The Bookstore wasn’t even for sale. An interested party could rent it for a short period of study, but unlike a library borrow, they couldn’t remove the book from The Bookstore premises. They had to read and study it in the store. It was too rare and valuable.
And real.
Angie sealed her senses off from the book before touching it. She needed to brace for its impact. She’d handled the version kept in The Bookstore, but the first time had been a dramatic learning experience. She’d nearly passed out after being swamped by too many sensory images—impressions from the blood used as ink, from the sacrifices made to create the book, from the author, from the demon who’d aided the author’s research… So much input it had overwhelmed Angie’s psychic senses and fried her synapses for a good week.
She’d been much more careful picking the book up the second time.
She was equally careful now. Even the cover had the potential to carry a deep psychic imprint. Angie didn’t want to pull in everything. She needed specifics and that meant focus. She put up a mental protection circle around her psychic senses, not unlike the kind of circle she’d draw to keep her safe while working certain kinds of magic. She’d learned that trick in her late teens from a very powerful witch, the bruja who’d been her first real teacher, and it had saved her sanity more than once over the years.
Carefully, she nudged the book around, touching it as little as possible as she angled the cover to show it to Sebastian. He nodded, his expression hooded and difficult to read. Carmen frowned and looked between them without comment. She folded her hands in front of her, her knuckles white as she clenched her fingers together.
Angie returned her focus to the book. The pale leather cover felt strange against her fingers, conflicting with the visual impression of it. Slick and slimy despite appearing dry and cracked. An odd disconnect that made her instincts balk. She nearly
pulled her hand away. The covers for each copy of the book had been made from the skin of a sacrifice—rumored human, but Angie got the sense of something more mundane like lamb or goat for this particular copy—and the title had been branded into the leather with a hot iron rather than etched in with inks or leafing. The faint stink of the blood used for ink made her nose twitch even before she opened the book.
The library tag on the spine looked completely anachronistic against that strange cover.
Angie slowly cracked the stiff spine, keeping the book mostly on the bedside table as she braced it open and began flipping through the pages. She focused on the images, letting her instincts guide her while her psychic senses were controlled. Still, the book was difficult to look at, difficult to touch. More so this time than it had been in The Bookstore, she realized. Either The Bookstore’s magic kept the thing better controlled, or Angie didn’t have as solid a lock on her psychic senses as she’d assumed before opening the thing.
She double checked the mental circle she’d constructed. Still in place and protecting her.
Strange.
She touched the book as little as possible as she continued to turn pages. The images of individual demons were beautifully, horribly well-rendered. The artist so skilled the demons looked like they might come off the page. There was a strange 3-D effect that made the demons appear to move as the pages were turned, too, and that added to the sense that they might reach through the page and grab the reader.
How the hell had Mara looked at this book and not completely freaked out? If Angie had been a normal twelve-year-old this would have given her nightmares.
Though, by the time she was twelve, Angie had seen much worse and in real life, not just a book, so she didn’t have the same reference point as other twelve-year-olds.
The text surrounding the images was mostly in Latin with sections translated into English and French. Angie knew enough Latin to read the book if needs be, but she’d read most of it before. She didn’t focus on the text too closely. And she tried not to focus on the drawings too closely either. She slowly turned pages and waited for something to strike her as important.
When it did, she gasped.
With her psychic senses shut down, she hadn’t actually expected such a strong reaction, but she hit an image and everything in her froze. For a full ten seconds, she couldn’t move even to take her hand from the page.
The image was of a Molder demon, one of the more powerful from a realm full of powerful entities. Anything that wasn’t powerful in this realm—called Belhasten by the author of the book—got eaten.
Molder demons were large, and slim, almost willowy. Some looked skeletal, but with skin stretched over their bones. Their limbs were too long in proportion to their bodies. They were pale, light gray most of the time, though some shaded closer to charcoal. Their fingers were tipped with ferocious, long claws. Their toes similarly tipped. And while they didn’t have venom in their claws like some demons, they could still tear a being apart with ease.
The image in the book had black eyes with a red pupil and was drawn smiling so that the rows of sharp teeth were easy to see. Around its narrow head hung long, tentacle-like hair. And unlike many demons, it actually had rags of clothe hanging around its body and head like clothing. The tattered garments in the drawing were shaded dark and hung on the demon like a cloak or a monk’s robe.
Almost against her will, she reached toward the image and some weird trick of the drawing made it look like the demon was reaching back for her. Its smile seemed to grow, and its teeth looked like they elongated as she watched.
Whoa. That wasn’t really happening. It had to be a trick. The very same image in the book she’d looked through before hadn’t done that.
Her heart hammered so hard she thought Sebastian might hear it. Blood rushed through her veins, and her adrenaline spiked. A faint whisper of sound moved across her inner ear like nails on a chalkboard. She shivered and winced in response, trying to block the sound.
“Angie?”
Sebastian’s quiet voice cut off the strange whisper, giving her some relief from its irritating grate.
“Fine,” she murmured. She sensed him moving closer and raised a hand to stop him. “Give me a minute.” If he got too close right now, her senses would short circuit. She knew him too well to cut him out of her sensory perception. And right now, anything added to her sensory intake risked overwhelming her.
She studied the image, staring at it. Why this picture? This demon? Had this been the demon Mara stopped at? The one she either recognized or had been looking for?
Without opening her psychic senses, Angie couldn’t be sure. Her mundane instincts were on high alert but the adrenaline coursing through her system was fear, fueling a flight instinct she had trouble ignoring. She couldn’t concentrate around that drive to run away, couldn’t pinpoint why this image had stopped her.
She fisted her hands, then reached under her jacket sleeve and gripped the pentagram dangling from her bracelet. Rubbing her fingers around the small circle, she focused on it, on its power, its protective spells, letting that sense of power move through her.
She had to open her psychic senses if she was going to find out why this image had called to her. But everything in her balked at the idea.
Bracing her legs and gripping the pentagram tight, she mentally cut a line through the protection circle in her mind, releasing it and opening her psychic senses once more.
The demon on the page lunged up at her, screaming in triumph.
Chapter Six
Angie screeched and stumbled back from the book as claw-tipped hands reached from the page toward her.
Not possible. Not possible.
The chant moved through her even as her visual senses belied it. But demons couldn’t get into this world through a book. They couldn’t rip from the page and come into this realm.
Unless she’d triggered a spell…
Images bombarded her then, overwhelming her flight instinct, her own self-preservation instincts. Images of blood and death. The stench of rotting flesh mingling with burning meat. Heat and the glass sharp cuts of lava rock. Screams of pain and torment echoed through her head so loud she couldn’t hear above them.
And then the chittering started, that horrid chittering of approaching demons…
She pressed her hands to her ears but that didn’t stop the noise. The demon from the page rose up in front of her inner vision, laughing, its sharp teeth sounding like knives scraping against each other.
“Coming for you,” it said, staring at her. “Angela.”
She screamed. And stumbled away from the vision, coming up hard against something solid and warm.
“I’ve got you,” Sebastian said, his arms coming around her, his deep voice breaking through the cacophony in her head.
She let him hold her upright and turned all her focus and concentration toward cutting off the vision and locking the demon out. Slow breaths scraped over her raw throat. Her fingers pressed so tight against the pentagram charm she was sure she was leaving a bruise of the charm in her skin. She rebuilt the circle, calling up power, beseeching the elements as she focused on drawing that line between her and the danger. She kept her eyes closed, visualizing the blue light as she drew the circle clockwise around her extra-sensory perceptions.
She heard the demon screaming, screeching, knew instinctively it was reaching for her, trying to get to her before the circle closed. She almost wavered, almost lost concentration and dropped the circle.
A will stronger than her own seemed to reinforce her focus. She grabbed onto that will, used it to maintain her concentration. She brought the line around and connected it with the starting point, forming a complete shape. A flare of blue light rose in her mind’s eyes as the circle closed.
And the chaos cut off abruptly, the vision gone.
She kept her eyes closed as she concentrated on slowing her pulse, regulating her breathing. Sebastian’s heat surrounding her,
the faint scent of his aftershave, gave her a solid hold on reality to cling to as she pulled herself together.
Carefully, she opened her eyes and looked at the book. The image of the demon was still in view, though she was several feet away now. She realized with a start the drawing no longer depicted the Molder demon as smiling. It was snarling, its claws raised as if it was scraping at something.
She shuddered.
“You okay,” Sebastian said against her ear.
His voice was pitched so low she was sure only she could hear him. “I’ll explain later,” she murmured back.
“Got the gist,” he said. Then over his shoulder. “No need to worry, Carmen. Happens sometimes.”
“You’re a bruja?” Carmen murmured.
“Witch,” Angie agreed. “Not technically a bruja.”
There were differences in the types of magic real brujas used. Though the word meant witch in Spanish, it referred to a particular type of witch in the witchy community, and Angie liked to ensure that distinction was noted, especially since her earliest mentor had been a bruja. She felt disloyal to her teacher if she didn’t make it clear she wasn’t one.
“Are you okay, Ms. Angie?”
“I’m fine, Carmen. Sorry if I scared you.”
“You aren’t the scary thing in this house.”
Angie snorted at the understatement.
“Can you stand on your own?” Sebastian asked, again quietly against her ear.
She hadn’t realized how much she was relying on him to support her weight until that moment. Embarrassed, she lifted away from him. “Thanks. And sorry if I scared you.”
“Not the first time,” he said, a rueful note in his voice. “Stay back. I’ll sort the book.”
“Take both.” She didn’t have to explain which ones to him. “They don’t belong in a public library.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” he said, though his tone was distant now.
He approached the volumes slowly, keeping the full force of his focus on them. After a moment of staring, he reached out and closed the still open Demon. Very faintly, Angie swore she heard a roar of protest. Or maybe that was just her imagination. She didn’t dare open her psychic senses to find out.