by Jenn Stark
Cressida’s cheeks heated as Dahlia spluttered, “What are you talking about?”
“Meaning if I want to, and especially since you guys aren’t going all demon-block on me, I can interrupt all of Marcus’s electronic surveillance. This isn’t my first rodeo, and it’s not my first interaction with human ingenuity. For the record, Marcus is about a C+ on that scale. His tech just isn’t that great.”
Dahlia turned to him. “You’re wrong. We have access to the best tech in the world the instant it’s available.”
“Well, the best tech you’re aware of, maybe. That’s a far cry from the actual best. But I digress. I’ll go do my poof thing, you do your showing-up-aghast thing, and we’ll see what intel the exorcist can offer. Deal?”
A moment later, he vanished from the room.
Dahlia went instantly to her screens. “I’m replaying the last time you came to my rooms,” she said quickly. “Fortunately, you tend to wear the same outfit most of the time. I appreciate that.”
Cressida frowned down at her tunic and leggings. She’d worn similar clothing since she was a young girl. There were a lot of things she’d done since she was a young girl, come to think of it, patterns so ingrained, the thought of striking out with her own choices had never occurred to her.
Was that…had that been done on purpose?
She shook off the rogue thought. “It’s comfortable.” The moment she said the word, however, she winced. Comfortable. Comfortable for her, or for those who watched over her and guided her steps?
“It also makes my life easy,” Dahlia agreed, missing Cressida’s scowl as she stared at her monitor. “Okay. We’re spliced in. There was a blip in the feed, but now we’re recording live. And there’s Stefan.”
On the screen in Granger’s room, Stefan stood in the center of his sitting area, looking around as if admiring the view. The exorcist emerged from his bedroom, a broad grin on his face. Then he spoke.
Static erupted from the speakers.
“What the hell?”
“He’s jamming the feed,” Cressida said. “Like he told us he would. If we want to know what they’re talking about, we should probably get over there before Marcus does.”
“First, a moment,” Dahlia said, laying a hand on her arm. “I need to ask you something.”
“Of course. What is it?”
Her captain’s face colored as she searched Cressida’s eyes. “Did you do it? Him, I mean? Did you, ah…” She flapped her hands. “Consummate the marriage?”
“I wish everyone would stop calling it that,” Cressida said irritably. “It’s not technically a marriage.”
“Well, technicalities or not, did you do it?”
“I…” Cressida hesitated, the blood rushing to her cheeks. But there was no reason to lie. She didn’t want to lie, actually. She wanted to own what she’d done, revel in it. It had been her choice, and she’d made it. “Yes. I did it. We did it. And I have to tell you, I’d do it again and again and again, if I could. It was an experience unlike anything I’d prepared for. Definitely unlike anything I’d read about.”
“Excellent.” Dahlia grinned. “And you didn’t catch on fire, apparently.”
Cressida stiffened. “You mean metaphorically?” she asked, her words careful, cautious. No use worrying her captain unnecessarily.
“No. I mean in real life.” Dahlia flapped her hand. “Like, actual flames running over your skin.”
“Well, yeah. I sort of did.” Cressida narrowed her eyes as Dahlia flinched. “Why? Is that important? And more to the point, how could you have known to ask?”
Dahlia pointed to the monitor. “Because the exorcist said you probably would. We need to get to him and the demon, right now. Before Marcus shows up.”
Chapter Fifteen
“You’re looking good, exorcist.”
“Not nearly as good as you are, demon.” Granger grinned, eyeing Stefan with clear speculation. “You realize that a demon having sex with a witch changes the playing field significantly?”
Stefan laid an innocent hand on his chest. “I was being compelled.”
Granger chuckled. “Yeah, you keep telling yourself that.” He looked around the room. “When do you suppose they’re going to show up?”
“Any minute. You know this room is wired for sound.”
He nodded. “Sound and sight, yep. I happen to have been an expert in surveillance in a former life.”
“Former life. Would that be the life before becoming a priest, or after?”
“The good Lord grants us but one life to explore to the fullest before calling us back to His embrace and setting our feet on a new, unimagined path,” Granger said. “Who are we to limit the possibilities that His creation affords us?”
Stefan regarded the man steadily. Granger was right, of course, but the man stood too easily with him, too relaxed, especially considering that Stefan was a demon.
The older man smiled. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“I sincerely hope that’s not true.”
“I suspect a small company of witches will be breaking down my door quickly, so all I can really say is this: we’re all part of the divine plan, Stefan. Our choices are our own, but they’re choices we mapped out long before this moment. One million different pathways, one million different steps, one million different yeses and nos—all of them within the realm of possibility, all of them blessed by the Father.”
Stefan snorted. “I can guarantee you there have been some choices in my life that have not been blessed by the Father.”
“Then you don’t give Him the credit you should,” Granger said simply. “All the joy, the suffering, all the intensity of a single human lifetime is the swiftest intake of breath before an exhalation of stunning and powerful love. And we are all loved, Nur-ayya Dadanum, until we cease existing entirely, which only the barest few souls ever do. Yours will not be one of those souls.”
“How did you know—” Stefan’s barked question was cut off as someone pounded at the door, however, which was pushed open a second later.
He pivoted as Cressida and Dahlia entered. He didn’t miss the fact that Cressida’s eyes leapt to him, while Dahlia focused solely on Granger. She shuttered her gaze quickly enough, but not quickly enough to miss a demon’s careful focus. Interesting. The exorcist might think he knew a thing or two about Stefan, but Granger wasn’t the only smart guy in the room.
“Why did you guys even bother to knock if you were just going to break the door down?” he asked, to give Dahlia a chance to collect herself.
Cressida scowled at him. “Sound?”
“Jammed. I could keep blocking visual as well, but you seem to get off on Marcus taking a peek.”
“No, keep jamming it,” Cressida said, surprising him. “I’m here with my captain at arms, and I’ve locked down the floor as a precaution. No one gets in, no one gets out.”
“You’ve been busy.”
“Keep jamming it,” she said again. “It will take him a good twenty minutes to break through the seals. After twenty minutes of no contact, he’s well within his rights to do so. And we’ve got work to do.”
“Fair enough.” Stefan shrugged. “Consider them jammed.”
He watched as Cressida and Dahlia moved forward, Dahlia leaning over the spotlessly clear dining room table. She hauled around a messenger bag he hadn’t at first noticed and placed it on the table, then slid out a laptop.
“Mr. Granger, we haven’t had a chance to get to know each other, and I regret that we still won’t have much time here,” Cressida said while Dahlia was setting up. Stefan nearly bit his own tongue in two trying to keep himself from making a joke.
“I’m the one who owes you an apology.” The sincere dismay in Granger’s voice had them all stopping and turning, especially Dahlia at her computer station.
The exorcist sighed. “There are calls that are meant for young men to answer and those that are meant for older ones. I shouldn’t
have interfered in your challenge, Ms. Frain. I was drawn here for a reason, I thought, but I didn’t realize the reason was my own hubris. I’m sorry if I’ve been a difficult addition to your retinue to explain to your council. I don’t know why I felt so strongly I should be called to step forward, but I did.”
Stefan stifled his snort, but it wasn’t because of Granger’s earnest apology. It was due to Dahlia’s darkly flushed cheeks. The witch ducked her head and kept typing as Cressida stepped forward smoothly.
“Not at all,” she said. “I’m more grateful than ever that you’re here. I think you can help us.”
Granger’s brows lifted. “How?”
“You know demons—specifically the exorcism of demons from their human hosts.”
“I haven’t officially done that work for a long time.”
“Yet you still carry around a spiked holy cross that looks like more of a weapon than an artifact of the faithful. So how long have you been unofficially performing exorcisms?”
Granger’s beatific smile faltered somewhat. “You shouldn’t be able to put me under a compulsion. I have no demon within me.”
“Don’t get too uptight about that, padre,” Stefan drawled. “You can’t walk with my kind for as long as you have and not have some of it rub off on you.” Still, as Granger sputtered beneath the weight of Cressida’s compulsion spell, Stefan performed some recon of his own. He blew out a quick sigh of relief as he confirmed that Granger was not, in fact, possessed. He wouldn’t be the first exorcist to have suffered that fate. Not every demon could be a Syx, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t enjoy blasting their own kind to the other side of the veil if given the opportunity.
Still, Jim Granger was one hundred percent human—if a human who was also ex-priest, ex-military, and, Stefan was sure, a few other exes that he allowed the man to keep to himself for the moment. As a demon, he could read Granger’s thoughts instantly, but, unlike many of his fellow Syx, he preferred to use that ability only when absolutely necessary. Starting with the human he’d ignored all those millennia ago to his own everlasting damnation, he felt the trauma of human emotion at a soul-deep level. He preferred to leave mortals to their own crazy-making thoughts.
“I do have you under a compulsion spell, Mr. Granger, but only to ensure your honesty. I apologize, but please understand. I don’t know you. I can’t trust you. And I need you. Dahlia and I both do.”
Stefan glanced back at Cressida, surprised that she’d tacked on that last, but it seemed to have the desired effect. Granger focused on Dahlia, and this time, Stefan happily and delightedly pilfered the man’s thoughts. There was some extremely suspicious energy going on between those two, and they only barely realized it. What Dahlia might have suspected was a mild flirtation and Granger thought was merely his acknowledgment of the young woman’s beauty and strength, was something far more primal. Something Stefan was pretty sure would explode seven ways to Sunday if they ever got close enough to strike sparks.
“Very well. How can I help?” Granger asked at last.
Cressida exhaled, and Dahlia turned the laptop around to what looked like a search page. Stefan wasn’t a fan of most new technology, but he couldn’t help being interested here. “That’s the sacred grimoire?”
“Digitized,” Dahlia said. “Held locally on my laptop, which is encrypted. I’m not saying it couldn’t get stolen, decrypted, and disseminated…that’s always a concern. But the program has to be reloaded once a week and self-deletes at the end of that week. We have taken whatever precautions we can to ensure its safety while still maintaining access to it.”
A faint beep sounded from Dahlia’s wrist, and she glanced down at her technical watch. “Marcus just pinged me. I’ll respond that all’s well and you’re with me in Granger’s rooms, but you know he’ll be coming here. We need to move this along.”
“Right,” Cressida said sharply. She refocused on Granger. “What do you know about breaking the bond between human and demon?”
He frowned. “I specialized in extracting demons from humans. The bonds that tied them together were unilateral, one way. The demon reached out and gradually snagged a human through a variety of means, then wound his control around that human more insidiously. The first step is always to get the mortal to doubt themselves—their beliefs, their truths, what they know of their universe and the people around them. The second step is to cut the human off from those who love him. A demon cannot operate in the face of pure love.”
“Not technically true,” Stefan pointed out, but Granger waved him off.
“A Fallen who has still kept the essence of his soul is not the same as a demon,” he informed him. “You’re attempting to be redeemed. You don’t count.”
Stefan opened his mouth, then shut it again. He’d never considered it from that perspective, but now that Granger had presented it so baldly, it was an obvious distinction. The Syx had become the Syx because of their own mortification at what they’d done. They’d leapt at the chance to make right what they’d made wrong, their transgressions against God’s children. In return for their immortal service, they were given a strength to level against the worst of their own kind. It took a demon to take out a demon, of course, but the Syx weren’t your ordinary demons. They went after their own kind with a focus and a fervor. There was never any question of an attack being met with love, because they were only going up against other demons. There wasn’t a lot of love to go around.
But a human, fresh off the apple cart, confronted by a demon… Could they turn him back with pure love? Surely not.
As if hearing Stefan’s internal argument, Granger continued. “Most humans don’t have the ability to maintain a state of pure love. It takes a very deep meditation, or a very strong and present emotion. Most of the time, if you’ve been targeted by a demon, you’ve already begun to break down your connections with other people. You’re already at risk, in other words, because you don’t hold love within your heart as a strong and present light. It’s more a memory, a hope, or even a cause for despair because you think, for whatever reason, you don’t deserve it or that it’ll never reach you in the first place.” He sighed. “No matter how much love is out there in the world, there are those who can’t see it. That’s who a savvy demon will target. They only go after stronger targets when they’re incensed.”
Stefan weighed that, nodding. The man wasn’t wrong.
“Once the hold has been established, it goes very quickly. The human withdraws, turns inward, stops taking care of himself. Then, in some cases, begins to actively harm himself—sometimes others too, but mostly it’s more internal than that. The demon doesn’t need to act out as much as it needs to act in.”
“So how do you break that hold?” Cressida pressed. “From everything I’ve read, it’s more a question of going in and forcibly removing the demon from the human or place, literally casting it out. No matter the ritual or specific method, that’s the end goal.”
“That’s the end goal,” Granger agreed.
“So let’s turn it around,” she said. “You have a human who has deliberately summoned the demon and has a demon in her thrall. She’s in control. The demon is subordinate to her. He hasn’t taken all the steps to ensure that she’s alone, afraid, cut off from her society. In fact, in some cases, she’s surrounded by her supporters. But even if not, even if she simply summons the demon in a solo act, she’s the one with power. How does she break that bond of compulsion while not sending the demon back into the hellfire from whence she summoned him?”
“Not to interrupt,” Stefan said drily, “but there’s hella demons out there right now who you aren’t actually summoning from hell. You can pretty much find them at your local Walmart.”
Granger ignored him, focusing on Cressida. “Why would you want to do such a thing?”
“I—” She stumbled, blushing, and Stefan’s gaze snapped to her as well, noting the exact time she seized on a socially acceptable reason for he
r question. He couldn’t read her thoughts, but she was still a woman, and a woman he’d slept with. He could tell when she was lying—or, if not lying, not sharing the whole truth. This would be one of those times.
Still, she pressed on. “I keep turning around the requirements of the sacred grimoire in my mind. On the surface, it appears to require a demon and witch to act in concert against Ahriman. But that’s not the letter of the law. The letter of the law states that the demon is wedded to the witch, and that she draws her power from that bond. But that doesn’t make sense. Every compulsion spell allows the witch to draw power from the demon. So why is marriage necessary? The inference is that this act of marriage propels the demon into a different relationship with the witch, and that is what’s important in the attack on Ahriman. Otherwise, the stipulation of wedding a demon is simply a redirect—something so abhorrent, it was designed to forestall any attempt to go up against Ahriman. Which makes no sense.”
“It’s our sacred duty to overthrow Ahriman,” Dahlia said automatically, as if it were a mantra pressed upon her from birth. Which, of course, it had been.
“It is. And yet no member of the Scepter Coven has attempted to overthrow him in all these long years, in part because of the requirement to secure a demon stronger than me. No witch would dare be so foolish, so instead, I’ve assembled three demons who separately, the coven can manage.”
“As far as you know,” Stefan observed drolly.
Cressida rolled her eyes. “But it’s important to note—these demons remain in the coven’s thrall. The only way they could be truly stronger than me is if I release them, and that’s simply not to be done. Not in the midst of such a dangerous moment as attacking a far stronger demon.”
“What was your original plan, then?” Stefan asked.
“My original plan was to satisfy the letter of the law by wedding the demons, wait until they annihilated each other—or, if they didn’t do that, leave them cooling their heels in their cells under heavy coven spells—and, together with Marcus and possibly the human, if there was any benefit to be had there, confront Ahriman on my own, no demon assistance involved. But now I feel like I’m missing something.”