Demon Hunter (The Collegium Book 1)

by Jenny Schwartz

  “Faith Olwen.” The voice was whiskey, rough and smooth, a stroke over the senses.

  “Kill her,” Nancy demanded.

  The demon laughed, head back, enjoying some private joke.

  Steve jolted forward, and stopped as Fay’s hand hit his chest.

  “Wait,” she said.

  Gilda, the head of the Demonology Department, ignored her. She strode forward, the words of banishment unrolling with practiced ease even as she gathered her power.

  The demon ceased laughing, but amusement lurked in its voice. “You are an improvement over Angus, aren’t you?” But then it lifted one hand and Gilda slammed up and back, losing consciousness as her head hit the back wall.

  “Not her.” Nancy was single-minded. “Kill Fay.”

  Steve snarled.

  “Settle your fur, cat,” the demon said. “Nancy ceased to compel me years ago.”

  Nancy stopped glaring at Fay to stare at the demon.

  It raised an eyebrow and looked back at her.

  Fay felt nauseous as the ugly story took shape. Nancy had summoned the demon, binding it to the sun disk. She had brought this evil into the heart of the Collegium. And it was a powerful evil, a demon strong enough to have no need to possess a human body. It could maintain a form in this world.

  And for years she, Fay, had walked past the sun disk and the demon, unknowing and unaware.

  Richard, her father, had lived with it daily.

  Of the others, it was Lewis who understood first. “Everybody out!” He turned on the senior members with such ferocity that they retreated before him. He picked up Gilda, shoved her unconscious body at two of the more robust senior members and pushed the whole lot from the room by sheer force of personality. “Go!”

  “Clever man,” the demon said. “It’s a shame you burned out your powers saving those children, Lewis. I could have used you.”

  Used him? Full understanding hit Fay like a hurricane, and like a hurricane it brought devastation. She ignored the demon and whirled on Nancy. “You stupid woman.”

  “Not stupid.” The demon remained urbane. He could have been a host at a an upmarket art gallery, one hosting a billionaires-only private auction. “Merely self-centered. It makes her easy to manipulate.”

  “Mano, I own you,” Nancy warned. Her hands were claws, fingers curled with tension.

  “No, pet.” And the endearment was anything but caring. It was supercilious, possessive, dismissive and definite. “I own you.” The demon smiled, turning to Fay. “I’m grateful you resisted the urge to remove her years ago. She has been useful to me.”

  “I’ll bet.” Fay struggled, her mind spinning with the problem Lewis had recognized and done his best to minimize. The one which meant trouble for all of them.

  Behind the door to her father’s office, Richard ought to have felt the storm of power. He ought to have emerged, fighting. Moderate though his own powers were, he held the oath-ties of all Collegium members, and through them, could usually compel their magic to add to his edicts. He could banish the demon.

  But Nancy had screwed up that protection. She’d perverted it, under the demon’s guidance.

  Now the damned creature smiled at Fay. Smiled as if they were allies, lovers.

  Steve stepped close, his hand flattening against her back. He was warm, alive, real and loving.

  Nancy dashed for her desk, grabbed a visitor’s chair, pulled it up to the wall and dragged down the sun disk. “Mano, I compel you—”

  The sun disk melted and flowed into a new shape; into the form of a bronze pair of handcuffs. They closed about her wrists.

  She gaped at them, mouth open, eyes popping. When her gaze lifted to the demon there was fury there, and betrayal.

  “She’s a very ordinary lover,” Mano said. “It’s fortunate for me that Richard is satisfied with such a boring mistress.”

  “You bastard.” Nancy bared her teeth.

  “She’s insatiable though.” The demon was tormenting her, enjoying it. The creature strolled across to Nancy and in an obscene mockery of a lover’s touch, unbuttoned her jacket and explicitly caressed her breast.

  What shocked Fay was the instant look of desire that darkened Nancy’s eyes.

  The demon hadn’t lied. It had controlled Nancy for years. And through Nancy, it had gained intimate contact with Richard. That had been the path the demon had taken, weaving its magic through Nancy, through Richard, and so gaining access to the oath-ties and power of the Collegium. It would have taken it years to subtly build that control.

  Oran, the demon she’d banished two days ago, had been right. The Collegium was infected.

  That was why Lewis had ordered the senior members out. Their magic was tainted with the touch of the demon.

  That left the three of them. Lewis had no magic power for the demon to harvest. Steve was were and immune to magic. And Fay? She was their best chance of banishing the demon.

  It smiled at Fay as it caressed Nancy’s breast. “Sometimes, just to stay interested in fucking her, I’d imagine she was you, Fay.”

  Nancy whimpered, a harsh, hurting sound. She jerked away from the demon, and it let her go.

  “You know the Collegium won’t let you stay,” Fay said. “They’ll cut you from their oath ties, whatever the price.”

  “I know.” It was sly and satisfied. “I have taken nearly all I can here.” Its flickering smile focused on Nancy. “Nearly all.” The demon licked its lips.

  Fay reached for her knife.

  No human sacrifice was as sweet to a demon as the human who summoned it. Nancy would be the demon’s final death within the Collegium.

  Its bright eyes locked with Fay’s. “Consider her my farewell gift. You won’t miss her.” It extended a hand and Nancy moved like a sleepwalker into the thing’s embrace.

  “No,” Fay said. “No more deaths. I banish you,” she began.

  The demon tightened its hold on Nancy, on its hostage. “Fighting you, Fay, will be as good as fucking you. And maybe I’ll get to do both.”

  Steve roared and changed to leopard in mid-leap. He couldn’t kill a demon, but he could get Nancy free of it.

  The demon had taken human form and it dripped human blood after Steve charged through the thing’s magical warding and slashed a massive paw, claws out, down its face.

  Steve pulled back, dragging Nancy with him, and leaving a path torn through the demon’s warding for Fay to follow.

  The path he’d slashed saved her from having to expend precious power creating it.

  She had a fraction of a second to appreciate his tactic before the demon slammed at her, shedding its human form for the infinitely more mobile and difficult to corral incorporeal body. It was incandescent flame roaring from floor to ceiling.

  Steve abandoned Nancy to Lewis and returned to Fay; staying out of her way, but staying close. He waited, his massive leopard body strong beside her. They both watched the demon with calculating eyes.

  Here and here. Fay marked the demon with her knife and with her magic. But the damn thing only drew on the Collegium’s oath-ties. She could feel the human magic surge into it and heal it.

  It was the puzzle that had kept her still and silent, giving all her attention to it, until Nancy was directly threatened. Fay frowned, shifting her knife from hand to hand, concentrating on her combat moves as she tried to gain time. How did she cut the demon’s perverted ties to the Collegium? It couldn’t be banished till she did. And she couldn’t let a demon this powerful loose on New York. She had to tackle it now.

  Disastrously, though, the demon had been laying its plans for years—even if her own sudden separation from the Collegium had accelerated matters. It knew and was prepared for anything she might do.

  But it wasn’t prepared for Steve.

  A were in the Collegium was unheard of. That was how Steve had gotten close enough to break the demon’s warding. It hadn’t prepared for an attack from a being immune to magic.

  “Steve! Chang
e,” she shouted as the demon’s flame body whirled tighter and tighter, the inner core glowing white.

  Steve blinked back to human and she threw him her knife, the knife she’d spent years honing and pouring magic into. The knife that could rip reality and tear a path to hell.

  There was one way to cut the demon’s ties to the Collegium. Oath-ties had the power of blood. The demon had perverted them via intimacy. Fay would be even more direct. The President of the Collegium was her father. His blood ran in her veins. And she had power that was just hers. She could sever the demon’s control of the oath-ties, if she gave her life for it.

  But she couldn’t give the demon an instant’s warning or it would vanish. It was playing with them now. Secure, as it thought, in its power over the Collegium. But it would flee if it thought itself truly threatened.

  Fay wished she had one last chance to kiss Steve and tell him she loved him.

  Instead, she leapt without hesitation into the heart of the demon’s fire.

  Chapter 18

  It hurt. Oh God, it hurt. Pain blazed through Fay’s body and burned into her heart. Agony tore into her, and still she concentrated. This wasn’t physical pain, no matter how her body translated it. This was pain on the magical plane and she could fight through it, just long enough to do what had to be done.

  She found the oath-ties to the Collegium, saw them knotted and twisted in the demon’s grasp, coiled around its hold on this world.

  She was inside the demon. In its being, where no human should be, and she had only an instant before the wrongness of it and the intense power she was expending to achieve the impossible gave out and claimed her life. Everything had its price, even magic. She grasped the oath-ties, felt them pulse with her father’s blood, and pulled.

  The demon screamed, not in pain, but in rage.

  Fay fell.

  Steve gutted the demon’s fiery body, stabbing it with Fay’s knife, cutting hard enough to rip a dozen universes apart, and sent the damned creature screaming back to hell. Steve had been fast, as fast as only leopard reflexes could be, but Fay had been faster.

  “Stubborn, brave woman.” He picked her up from the scorched floor and stood, cradling her in his arms.

  She made him happy. Happy in ways she hadn’t even guessed. He’d admired her for years, claimed her as friend, and nearly lost his mind when she’d taken him as lover. He hadn’t meant to ever let her go—no matter what his grandfather said, what the world said, whatever the hell happened.

  But she had taken that choice from him. She had died for strangers.

  She had left him.

  He howled, a long eerie cry of a hunting cat. He wanted to tear the Collegium apart for taking her from him. If it didn’t mean letting her go, he’d do it, too.

  The door to Richard’s office opened and the man who should have been Fay’s father, her protector, the man who should have fixed this whole damn mess before it started, walked out.

  Steve snarled.

  “I hold her,” Richard said.

  Steve stepped back, angling Fay’s body away from her father. “You destroyed her.”

  “No.” Lewis approached carefully, evidently aware of Steve’s need to kill something. One demon wasn’t enough. “He says he holds her. Richard holds Fay’s lifeline. Mages can, for family.”

  “For blood,” Richard said. He looked at his daughter. “You’re right. I destroyed her. I let myself be compromised.” His expression was ravaged. “But even when I didn’t understand, when I didn’t know what was happening, even when I failed everyone else—I never let the demon touch her.”

  Richard opened his hand and a ball of golden light glowed. Like a conjuror he rolled it to his fingertips and pressed it to Fay’s forehead.

  The light glowed brighter, brighter, and vanished.

  Fay opened her eyes.

  Fay opened her eyes and saw her dad standing there. But only for an instant, and then, Steve was kissing her and she was kissing him, and she was lost and found, and alive!

  The demon was gone. She felt it in the freedom and lightness of the atmosphere. She and Steve had won, working together.

  “Never again,” he said roughly against her mouth. “We’re never doing that again. You’re never doing that again. I won’t lose you.”

  A shriek of rage interrupted them. Nancy beat her cuffed hands against the desk. “Gone. It’s all gone. He’s gone. I’m the one who’s lost everything.” The cuffs cut into her skin, blood beginning to drip. “I have nothing. I have nothing!”

  Richard caught her hands, halting the self-harm.

  She hit him then, slapping his chest, becoming hysterical so that he locked her in his arms and forced stillness on her.

  “Put me down,” Fay said quietly to Steve. The demon was gone, but not the heartache and devastation it left behind.

  He set her on her feet but kept her locked against him, her back to his chest, his strength surrounding her.

  “I resign,” Richard said.

  Fay looked at her father, really looked. He was the man who’d lost everything: family, respect, and his position in the world. She’d felt the moment he placed the kernel of her life force—that he’d held safe through the years, the tie that was just theirs—against her forehead and brought her back. He had lost so much, but she’d gained something today. As fraught as their relationship had become, he was her father and he loved her. “Where will you go?”

  Richard shrugged. “I’ll stay for the inquiry the Collegium will need to hold, and then, there’s always a need for magic somewhere.”

  “You’re a fool,” Nancy said.

  “Yes. I trusted where I shouldn’t, and became obsessed with my own power. If I had let others in, the demon’s influence wouldn’t have been so absolute. But you helped with that, didn’t you, Nancy? You helped to isolate me.”

  It was true. His trusted secretary hadn’t mediated between the President and the Collegium. She had split the two.

  “And all for power,” Fay said aloud. For power, Nancy had summoned a demon and unleashed this nightmare. And the demon had played. It had used the Collegium to collect other demons, ones bound by humans, to act as its own slaves.

  There would be a merry time in hell for it, and Fay was glad.

  The decision as to Nancy’s punishment wouldn’t be so simple, but at a minimum they’d have to take her magic from her so that she could never summon another demon.

  Fay looked at Lewis, standing silent to the side. It would be his decision. Had he realized? “Lewis, you’ll have to be the next president.”

  He jerked, head swinging from studying Nancy to frown at Fay. “I have no magic.”

  “Exactly,” Steve said.

  “Devil’s balls,” Lewis swore.

  Fay was sympathetic, but realistic. “The senior members actually listen to you, and for a while, everyone will need the reassurance that with your burnt out powers you can’t use their oath-ties to the Collegium against them.”

  “As I did,” Richard said. “For myself and for the demon’s entertainment.” He released Nancy who had stopped struggling and now stood in a stillness evocative of despair, her head bent. He stepped back from her. “At least my stubbornness helped in one way. I was so determined that no one would get me out of the presidential office that I refused to open the door to Nancy’s demands. Then by the time I realized the demon was there, I understood the cascade of consequences my pride had allowed. I knew I had to stay in the office and not make the situation worse. But now I can go. Sorry, Lewis. Fay.”

  Impulsively she grabbed her dad’s hand. They stared at each other because there were no words. She’d come to challenge him and remove him from office. He’d saved her life.

  He nodded once, uncomfortably, and walked out.

  Steve put his cheek against her hair, offering comfort. “There’ll be time, later, to build a new relationship.”

  “Yes.” She turned in his embrace and hugged him.

  He addressed L
ewis. “We’re going. Fay’s wiped. I’m taking her home.”

  “I’ll need Fay’s report, tomorrow.”

  “You’ll have it.”

  “Fay.” Lewis’s voice halted them as they walked out. “Thanks.”

  She glanced back over her shoulder.

  Nancy had slumped into a chair. Whatever had animated the woman, whatever metaphorical demons had driven her, she’d broken.

  “Fix things, Lewis,” Fay said. “That’ll be harder than anything I did.”

  They left, with Steve phoning a were friend to come and drive them home. “Because you’re in no state to take the subway and my leopard couldn’t cope with that many people.”

  Bad enough was the horde of people waiting in the Collegium foyer when the elevator doors opened.

  “Go up,” Steve said when they shouted questions at Fay. “Lewis will tell you what happened.” And in a low voice. “Poor bastard.”

  The crowd surged and rushed the elevators and stairs. Richard must have taken another way out, or he’d have been caught earlier in the crush of curiosity. Steve pulled Fay free of it, his sub-vocal growl undoubtedly triggering atavistic wariness in the others and keeping a small clear space around them.

  It made Fay feel safe.

  In the car, she borrowed Steve’s phone to contact Yolanthe. She was too tired to risk portal travel, but her mom needed to know she was okay. The conversation was short and vague with Steve’s friend listening. “We’ll visit as soon as we can. Yes. I love you too, Mom.”

  Steve smiled at Fay as she handed him back his phone. “Love you too, Fay.”

  She gave him an uncharacteristically shaky, tears-threatening, smile.

  He unbuckled her seatbelt and hauled her into his arms. “Always, Fay. Forever.”

  They barely made it into the penthouse before stripping off their clothes.

  She needed him. Craved him. And told him. She begged him; no longer needing to be brave or independent. “Make me forget everything. Make me know I’m alive.”

  His kisses were feral, almost biting. “You are, Fay. You’re with me.”

  The back of her knees hit the wide, low sofa and she let herself fall, trusting in his hold to keep her safe as he twisted her sideways, along the length of the sofa.