by Julie Kenner
Could somebody have cursed her that way? Why?
She suddenly felt a lot more vulnerable here, alone in Tomas’s apartment, than she liked. She needed to go upstairs and get him. Maybe he’d have an opinion on her theory.
Though how he knew so much, she still wasn’t quite sure. Nor was she sure she wanted to know.
“Stay here, pooky,” she said to Snowball, who was currently sitting on top of Tomas’s refrigerator where it was warm and she had a good view. “I won’t even go inside the apartment—I’ll just knock on the door. That should be safe enough, shouldn’t it?”
Snowball stared, unblinking, from her regal height.
Marcy left Tomas’s place. Head filled with the disassociation of a long time online, and the arcane information she’d found there, she automatically stepped into the open elevator. Just as she did every day.
Only as the grilled doors slid shut did she remember that Tomas had turned the elevator off. On the third floor.
She lunged for the doors—
And everything around her turned to flame.
Part 3
The flame surrounded her. Bright and alive, it wrapped her in its writhing, sizzling embrace. Marcy shut her eyes to scream.
Surprise that she wasn’t hurt silenced her.
She felt the fire, definitely. Her whole body felt hot. Heat scraped across her skin like claws. But she wasn’t actually on fire.
She squinted her eyes open—and found herself staring into a shifting pattern of flame and smoke that formed some kind of sharp, planed face. The edges flickered and flared, so that sometimes it had sharp ears, sometimes horns, sometimes spiky hair, but the face stayed recognizable.
It really was somebody. Something. The fire was its own being.
Sooty eyes with an underglow of red, like cinders, held her gaze. Sharp sparks of teeth, almost too bright to bear, twisted into something resembling a leering smile. Its heat writhed up her legs, down her arms, sharp as a blade.
But some kind of intelligence was holding back, not burning her.
Not yet.
She wasn’t in Hell, she realized. Not exactly. She was still in the elevator.
But she was in the elevator in the towering, all-encompassing embrace of some kind of demon!
You aren’t afraid of me? Its semblance of a mouth moved with its challenge, but that was for show. Like a poor dubbing, the undulations of the living flame didn’t match its words. Instead of hearing with her ears—her miraculously uninjured ears—Marcy was hearing its hiss in her head.
“Of course I’m afraid,” she said, and almost gagged from the heat of its presence drying her mouth. She tried to pull back, but it held her, powerless. “What do you want?”
What else would I want?
“My soul?”
Its black-cinder eyes flared with more red heat. Amusement? Or…
Eventually, it sizzled.
Now it was starting to burn her…sort of. Heat shuddered deeper into her breasts, her stomach, her abdomen. Tongues of flame licked at her bare legs, her bare arms, her neck. She tried to shift position, tried to readjust to its intensity, but it held her fast, closer, hotter.
Tongues of flame singed into her ear—and the creature’s sordid meaning sank in.
“No!” She wasn’t just beginning to panic—she passed panic and was making headway on hysteria. “Oh no no no. And no means no. Absolutely not!”
She shut her eyes to its leering, shifting face and its heat-mottled gaze, but it glowed red through her eyelids. She tried again to struggle free. But how did one escape something that couldn’t even exist?
Could she be imagining this?
She clung desperately to the hope of mere insanity. “I’ve been studying witchcraft!” she gasped, but it made a weak warning. “Witches don’t believe in the devil.”
THE devil? it asked.
She had to peek again, at the sardonic note in the creature’s nonexistent voice, and winced from the brightness of its amused grimace.
You’re no witch, taunted the creature. Magic takes personal power. The one who summoned me, who promised you to me as sacrifice so long ago—his despair gave him power. You’ve not even that. As for devils…
Its laugh shuddered through her, as if the floor itself was moving. You do believe in evil, do you not? Then…
The last came out a roar, its wavering mouth stretching as wide as a portal itself: Believe in ME!
Marcy cringed away—or tried. “No!”
You will believe readily enough tonight, my little mate. You will believe for eternity!
“I won’t!” But she sensed the helplessness of her words even as they whimpered from her lips. She wasn’t a witch. She didn’t have personal power, and really never had. Even as she futilely spread her hands, as if to claw the creature, her fingers met nothing but flame…a flame that was singing her painfully now, fully capable of destroying her in one blast. It held her, licking around her, possessive, licentious—eternal.
Tears that squeezed from her eyes sizzled and evaporated from her cheeks.
Give up yourself. Give up your reality. Give it all…
This was really happening to her, and she was helpless to stop it!
“At least tell me who did this,” she begged, defeated. “When? Why?”
Again the laugh shuddered through her, around her, and she was so very hot, and she couldn’t breathe the searing air around her.
No, the creature taunted.
Then, as if from a distance, Marcy heard some kind of clanging noise. She thought she felt something besides flame on her face. Air? Coolness? Then hands closed on her shoulders—real hands, human hands—and dragged her backward.
Out of the elevator, onto the third floor.
And into Tomas Martinez’s competent arms.
“You could come for individual counseling,” Father Gregory had been saying moments before. “Or you could join one of our groups.”
Tomas, unsettled by how the priest hadn’t been able to see anything unusual in Marcy’s apartment, was barely listening. Were he and Marcy Bridges crazy? The burned red slash on his hand said differently, priest or no priest.
Maybe Father Gregory was just too godly to recognize something that evil…which also said interesting things about Tomas and Marcy.
“It might do you some good to share your challenges with others,” the priest continued over the rumble of the arriving elevator.
Arriving?
Hadn’t Tomas turned it off and put an out-of-order sign on it? He wondered what meddling tenant had been messing with a broken elevator…or one that was supposedly broken.
Then a cage of pure flame rose to the third floor—and someone stood in the center of it, weirdly untouched.
Marcy!
Tomas didn’t stop to think. He tore open the door, iron grillwork burning his palms, and reached into the flame. His hands closed on Marcy’s shoulders and he yanked her clear, backing quickly away.
Only as her arms closed desperately around him did he realize that he wasn’t injured. The grillwork had been hot, but not injurious. And Marcy—
He pushed her back from him, oddly reluctant to do so, but needing to see. She wasn’t burned either. Not at all. Her pale skin had a feverish flush of pink about it, but her brown hair and wide, winsome lips seemed untouched. How was that possible?
Were they really imagining…?
But Father Gregory, Tomas now saw, was staring, horrified, at the flaming elevator. No…he was staring at the creature that the flames created. Fire. Horns. Darkness.
“In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,” the priest said, hoarse, “I command thee to be gone!”
Two coal-like eyes in the midst of the flaming form seemed to spark with unearthly emotion.
“In the name of the Lord and all the saints,” insisted Father Gregory, extending the crucifix that hung around his neck, “I command thee, be gone!”
And in a puff of smoke—it was.
Marcy, with a mew that wrung Tomas’s heart, ducked her head back into his chest. He not only let her, he closed his arms around her, tight. Possessive.
What the hell was that?
And why did Marcy feel so good?
“Thank you, Father,” he said belatedly.
The priest did not say you’re welcome. He was too busy clutching his crucifix and staring at the empty elevator. “Good God.”
That’s what Tomas hoped, anyway.
“You weren’t making it up,” said Father Gregory, bending to lean into the iron cage, looking more closely for signs of fire damage. “This is really happening.”
With a little snuffle, Marcy turned her head so that her cheek, instead of her nose, was smooshed against Tomas’s chest. When Tomas tucked his chin to better see her, she looked confused. Then her eyes widened. “No!”
Tomas looked back—but not in time to stop a spiral of flame, from the center of the elevator, surrounding the priest….
And vanishing with him.
“No!” screamed Marcy again, but it sure wasn’t making a lot of difference.
All but paralyzed, she watched Tomas launch himself into a full-body dive for the priest. Flames swallowed the clergyman too quickly, with an audible pop, leaving nothing to tackle. Tomas landed hands first, somersaulting with his momentum, and crashed into the barred, back wall of the elevator. Then, pushing himself up into a sprawled sit, he swore.
Darkly.
It was Spanish, but Marcy got the gist. She also saw that he was in the elevator. “Get out!”
He lifted his furious tiger eyes, half-lost under long strands of dark hair, to meet her gaze.
“Tomas, get out! What if it comes back?” She reached for him—but from a safe distance, several feet back from the cursed contraption. She wanted to step forward, to pull him out. She wanted to be a person of action, like him.
After her ordeal with the demon, she couldn’t seem to make her feet move.
“Please,” she whispered, hot tears finally welling out of her eyes and down her cheeks without evaporating.
Tomas glared at her a moment longer, then levered himself up. He didn’t leave the elevator. “Hand me my toolbox,” he said, his voice deep with threat.
Marcy didn’t think the threat was meant for her, but when she spotted the big red box sitting beside her apartment’s door, she picked it up—with both hands, and without being able to straighten herself again—and waddled it over to the elevator.
Closer, anyway. Then she kneeled and pushed it the rest of the way with both hands. “Please get out.”
Tomas reached into the box and pulled out a screwdriver, then did something with the number panel on the elevator. Then he exchanged the screwdriver for a hammer—
And he beat the crap out of the thing. Curses flew from his lips with every blow, to match the bits of wire and fuse that flew out of the box.
Marcy watched him, half afraid, half envious. After destroying the workings, he pulled out a rope and threaded it through both the interior and exterior grille of the elevator so that nobody could step into the box without having to dodge ropes, and the elevator itself would have to work very hard to pull loose.
Unless the ropes burned….
As Tomas finally stepped out of the box, and leaped with catlike grace up onto the crossbar that ran four feet high beside the shaft, Marcy’s fear eased…and her envy turned into something more like yearning.
She didn’t just want to be able to do that, she thought, watching the flex of Tomas’s legs and butt under his black pants, watching the easy shift of his chunky leather boots as he kept balance. She wanted that.
Of course, anything would be better than a demon, right?
Tomas jammed a crowbar into the pulley system of the elevator, momentarily finishing his destruction, and looked back down at her, panting. “Son of a bitch,” he said. He had more of an accent when he swore.
Marcy stepped silently back, and Tomas jumped noiselessly back to the floor in front of her and immediately began to pace.
Maybe anything would be better than a demon. But this wasn’t just anything. Or anyone.
Tomas paced like a caged animal, with long strides and sudden turns, finally stopping to face Marcy head-on. “It ate my priest.”
She still hadn’t fully made peace with the idea that the mysterious maintenance man had brought a priest here in the first place. But she nodded.
Tomas kicked the elevator. “It ate my f—” Then he looked down, fisted his hand, shook his head as if chiding himself. “My freaking priest,” he finished.
Marcy swallowed. Hard. “I think I know what it’s after.”
“Whatever it is,” said Tomas, spinning back into more pacing, “it’s not getting it.”
“Good. Because it wants me.”
He pivoted back to her, eyebrows lifting. “You?”
“That’s what it said. Thought. Whatever. It called me its bride.”
Tomas’s glare didn’t waver. “Why you?”
What—was she such a loss that not even demonic creatures of the underworld could want her? “I’m not sure, but I think…someone seems to have cursed me. Someone desperate.”
Tomas leaned closer, eyes narrowing dangerously, and hissed his question. “Because you did what?”
“I don’t know!” All she knew was, she liked this man better when he was holding her so tight that, for a moment, it had felt as if nothing could hurt her. Not even Hell. Now she was backing away from the sheer force of him. “I’m just—I’m trying to tell you what it told me. I read something on the Internet about a curse—how a person can curse someone else as his or her sacrifice in order to gain some kind of demonic favor.”
Tomas stared.
“And I came to tell you,” she added quickly, taking another step back.
He took another step forward and gestured widely behind him, without looking that way. “In the elevator?”
Another step back. “I wasn’t thinking. It was a mistake.”
“You think?”
She bumped into her apartment door. “I’m sorry.”
Instead of stalking her farther, Tomas seemed to draw himself back. He shoved a splayed hand past his forehead, pushing some of the long, loose hair out of his face, and sighed. Tension seemed to ease out of him as he sighed, and his next question sounded almost…normal. “What else did the demon say?”
“It said that I didn’t summon it.” That I have no personal power. She didn’t want to admit that, though. He probably thought it was obvious. “It said whoever did the summoning had power from his desperation, that whoever it was had promised me to it long ago. And it said…tonight…”
She suddenly felt dizzy with the memory of it, of the creature’s sordid laughter, of the way its hot tongues had slithered across her. To her relief, Tomas stepped forward and took her arm, the promise in his burning gaze sending a completely different kind of dizziness through her.
“We will figure this out,” he said.
“It’s not like there’s a help line,” she said.
“We know a lot more now,” he insisted, and kissed her on top of the head. Marcy went very, very still. Was that a big-brotherly kind of kiss on the head? Or could it possibly have meant more?
Surely not. She had no personal power….
“If this really is a curse,” said Tomas, “then whoever cursed you should be able to uncurse you. Right?”
“I have no idea.” And why was it he did?
“It makes sense,” he insisted. “As much as any of this does. So now you just have to think of who you know that might have wanted to make a deal with the devil. Someone you knew long ago. Someone who wouldn’t mind sacrificing you for his own gain.”
“I don’t like thinking any such person even exists!”
“Me,” said Tomas, “I don’t like thinking that our demon friend there exists. But it has my priest, so maybe it’s time to join the program.”
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He sounded vaguely annoyed, and he hadn’t kissed her again. On the other hand, he was still holding her arm. She would take that. “I honestly can’t remember knowing a single person who could have been involved in…in the dark arts. When I first started reading about Wicca last summer, the idea of any magic was completely new to me.”
“Some people hide their involvement,” Tomas said—again knowing more than seemed usual. How did he know this much?
Marcy felt a chill when she realized that, of all the people she knew, he was the only one who’d shown any knowledge of the dark side of magic. Would he mind sacrificing her?
She’d been living in this building, the one Tomas worked at, for three years now.
How long ago had the demon meant by long ago?
“I really don’t know anyone who matches that description,” she lied very carefully, feeling far less safer in Tomas Martinez’s company. To her relief—and maybe a flush of foolish disappointment—when she shrugged her shoulders with discomfort, Tomas stepped easily back from her. No meant no. He smiled a half smile, as if in silent apology for being so forward.
Damn it, she’d liked the forward part. It was the familiarity-with-the-dark-arts part that worried her.
“What I still don’t understand,” he said, as if her ego weren’t bruised enough, “is why you? Not that you aren’t attractive.”
Attractive enough for a demon, anyway? But that was something. “Maybe whoever cursed me just thought I was…convenient.”
“No, that doesn’t make sense.” And yet Tomas seemed almost fluent with the idea. “If you’re trying to land a big business deal, you don’t take your client to a fast-food joint. Marcy, something about you makes you prime rib to a demon looking for sacrifices. But what…”
Then he froze, eyes widening. “No!”
She felt increasingly wary. “No what?”
“You’re not!”
“Not…?” But she couldn’t pretend not to know what he meant. So much for keeping her own secrets. “Okay, fine. So I’m a virgin.”
That was the part of the curse she’d read about that she hadn’t wanted to divulge.