After changing into my comfortable pyjamas, I collapsed into bed, seeing the celestial’s dead eyes flash before me. I groaned, pressing the heels of my palms into my face. Cut that out.
My phone’s ringtone blared. Someone had tracked down my new number. Wonderful. I let it ring out, shifting uncomfortably. My skin felt sticky with the residue of cold sweat. I rolled out of bed and trudged to the bathroom. I turned on the shower, then grimaced as cold water doused my outstretched hand. For a second, I daydreamed of luxury hotels and room service, private taxis and first class flights. The perks of being a Grade Three celestial soldier were fine indeed, if you didn’t mind the demons. I bit my tongue as the water turned scorching hot, then freezing cold, then settled on a sort of equilibrium. I shouldn’t be thinking about going back to the guild again. Those days were behind me, with good reason. Gav and Mr Roth had a dozen capable, qualified celestials to give the job to. They didn’t need me.
He was new to the celestials. Barely a child. And the demons killed him. I breathed in and out, fists clenched tightly against the cracked tiles on the wall.
Blackness seeped between my knuckles, like blood.
I jerked back, my heart pounding. Not blood, but brimstone. Residue from the summoning, maybe, or from when I’d touched the body. Wait—my hands had burned when they touched him, but now no mark remained. Just brimstone. The only remaining trace of demonic fire.
The killer was demonic… and the celestials’ all powerful demon detectors hadn’t picked it up at all.
Damn. Maybe we were in more trouble than I’d thought.
The netherworld will rise. You will burn, celestials.
Chapter 3
I gave up on sleep at dawn, figuring I’d go for a run to calm down my mind. I couldn’t train with the celestials or afford a gym membership anymore, so running was my only outlet.
Tugging on a tank top and jogging trousers, I hesitated before sticking my phone in my pocket, set on silent mode. Gav’s latest message—if you change your mind, you know where to find me—flashed onto the screen, but I shut it down.
I ran a few laps of the neighbourhood, then fell into autopilot mode, my thoughts steering back to last night. The screaming, the smoke pouring from the victim’s skin, burning anyone who touched him. It was well known that some demons came from infernal dimensions, but I’d never heard of one that could make a celestial spontaneously catch fire from the inside out before. Of course, that was likely why nobody could solve the crime.
As soon as I tuned into the world again, I realised my pace had carried me right past the pub where I’d been last night. I stopped on the kerb, looking around. No sounds disturbed the early morning aside from a few birds. The celestials had surely searched the crime scene last night, but nobody was around at this hour.
I’m going to regret this.
I slipped into the alley, past the brimstone-covered wall where I’d summoned Dienes, and followed the same path as I had last night. My feet slipped in puddles, and water soaked through the underneath of my shoes. The rain would have washed away any evidence, no doubt.
I reached the wall, and halted. Sooty black marks ran in trails down the wall like inky tears from the rain, only forming words when I took a step back.
They will burn the sin from you, celestials. All will fall.
My throat went dry. The words hadn’t been there before. So—had the killer been back, in the few hours since the celestials had last been here? I hadn’t got a look at the wall before the celestials had unceremoniously dragged me off to their base for an interrogation, but surely someone who’d been back to see the crime scene would have taken note. Seriously weird.
It’s impossible. Things like that don’t happen, with no explanation. Not in a rational world, they didn’t. Admittedly, working for the celestials required making allowances for levels of weird most people wouldn’t take at face value, but a murder of one of their own? No wonder they were willing to contact even me to ask for help.
Dark trails ran down the wall. However the marks had got there, I’d bet my celestial sword the origins weren’t human. Which meant the demon was still at large in this dimension. Any celestial could banish a demon, but solving a case like this required figuring out what type of demon it was, where it’d come from—and how it killed. Not to mention who’d summoned the damn thing in the first place. No ordinary amateur, that was for sure. Most demons couldn’t damage someone without touching them. But the only residue that remained in the alley was on the walls. I brushed my thumb over the edge and sniffed. Yeah, definitely brimstone. It meant netherworld, but gave no more clues about its home dimension.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. Gav. He’d asked me to show him if I found anything.
I snapped a photo of the wall and sent it to him. He wouldn’t berate me for going back to the scene of the crime—at least, I hoped not. He probably knew I would. I was still a celestial, whatever I’d been doing for the last two years. Look, I said. I’m at the crime scene and these words appeared on the wall. They weren’t there last night, right?
I can’t see anything, came the response.
My photo quality was less than ideal, so I sent him another, clearer, picture, with the message—Ring any bells?
Come in and we can talk.
I looked down at my feet. My shoes were soaked in water, but streaked with odd brown patches from the puddles I’d walked in… right next to the crime scene. Wait.
Demonic summonings left residue behind. I couldn’t smell anything other than brimstone, but if any traces remained, I did have a contact who was an expert at sniffing out demons who’d decided to skip over into another dimension for a bit. The odds of the demon coming from the same realm I’d contacted last night were low, but I’d spoken to Dienes right before the killing. If anyone knew, it’d be him.
I put a fair amount of distance between myself and the murder site before I found another alley, where I used my celestial light to burn a pentagram onto the wall.
“Hey, Dienes,” I said, as the little horned head appeared between the bright lines of the pentagram.
“Seven hells, what do you want this time?” He pouted at me. “I was sleeping.”
“You don’t do anything except sleep. You’ll be fine. Besides, it’s urgent.”
“Ooh, well that changes everything.” He crossed his arms and looked at me expectantly.
I didn’t just keep contact with him because of his handy links with certain species of trouble-making demons. There wasn’t a demon type he didn’t know of, at least in theory. In his dimension, the bad demons had mostly died out in the war with the celestials, from what I’d gathered. But he was a more up-to-date source of knowledge than the celestials’ archives.
“It’s secret celestial business,” I said. “I have a question. Would you be able to identify the demon this belongs to?” I pulled off my shoe, balancing on one foot, and showed him the ashy black substance on my heel.
He stared at the shoe without taking it. “What have you done this time?”
I steadied myself against the wall with one hand. “Someone died, Dienes. A celestial. And I found this at the murder scene. It’s a demonic killing. It can’t be anything else.”
I was aware of the irony of questioning one of said untrustworthy demons for information on his bloodthirsty kin, but I was fairly sure he wasn’t even from the same dimension as the killer. Dienes was a lesser demon, anyway. He’d only come to me in the first place because I’d accidentally opened a way into the wrong dimension and one of his kleptomaniac friends had swiped my purse.
Dienes’s brow crinkled, then he withdrew. “Looks like ordinary mud to me. And brimstone can mean any dimension, or demonic species. You might want to be more specific.”
Telling him the details would breach the celestials’ confidentiality agreement… if I still worked for them. Which I didn’t. “Fire demon,” I said vaguely. “Higher than a Grade Two, with non-standard abilities.”
“No
n-standard?” he echoed. “If you mean a different ability to setting things on fire, that’s kind of the definition of a fire demon.”
I sighed. “Yeah, figures. Anything powerful crossed over from your dimension lately?”
“Not that I’m aware of.” He sniffed. “You celestials make no sense. Someone was killed by a demon. Why do you need to know which? You kill them for a living.”
“Er, to stop it happening again? Because the way he died was horrible and weird. His eyes were burned out, like he caught on fire from the inside. Have you ever heard of that before?”
“No,” he said. “And I’d like to keep not hearing about it, thanks.”
“Dienes.” I narrowed my eyes. “Come on. Cooperate with me. You know as well as I do that a demon who slays celestials is bad news.”
In his world, we didn’t exist. Celestials and demons alike had perished in the war, leaving only minor demons and humans living alongside one another. It wasn’t a bad outcome, all things considered, but I still preferred ours. We were a stable world, one in which the celestials had won the war centuries ago and the humans had been able to get on with building civilisation without demons rampaging around and ruining things. Of course, the humans in this dimension had done enough rampaging around and murdering and conquering one another anyway, but that was beside the point.
He peered outside the pentagram. “Did it happen here?”
“No. You really think I’d summon any demon at a murder scene? I thought that was demonic residue.” I waved my shoe at him. “It was on the floor at the murder site. No mud there.”
“And no traces of a summoning?”
I told him as succinctly as I could. When I reached the part with the screaming, he swore so loudly, I lost my balance on one leg and accidentally put my shoe-less foot in a puddle.
“What?” I said. “What did that mean?”
“One of the demonic dimensions is making a move in your realm.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? I didn’t think you were interested in this world.”
“I didn’t say I was. The demons have one goal: wipe out all celestials. Your world is a difficult target because your ancestors wiped out the arch-demons long ago. Do you have any idea how few worlds reach that point? Most fall at some time or other.”
All will fall. I shivered. “I learned that crap at school. Celestials are the only thing standing between peace and destruction, was what they told me. I might not have been a model pupil, but I’m damned good at killing any rogue demons. And that one’s walked right onto my turf.” I shoved my damp foot back into my equally damp shoe. “So I’m going to stop them. I’d just appreciate a bit of direction before I go poking my nose in.”
“You should stay out of this,” he said. “I thought you weren’t a celestial, anyway. Not anymore. You told me. Several times, in fact.”
“I’m not,” I said. “Doesn’t mean I want a demon killing the others without teaching it a lesson.”
“You,” he said, “really need a hobby.”
He might have a point. And I’d sworn not to get involved. But I literally didn’t have anything better to do today. Sometimes I wondered if he was as lonely as I was. Which was kind of pathetic. I was the one who’d cut off all contact with my fellow celestials when I’d left. It was easier than hearing Rory’s name come up in every conversation, and the flood of guilt every time, knowing I’d failed to stop him dying. Because I hadn’t been there.
And I might have caused it.
Why had I decided confiding in Dienes was a good idea? I’d scouted out the only clues. I’d go and see if Gav had made sense of the words at the crime scene yet.
And decide whether it was worth shackling myself to the guild again to stop a repeat of what’d happened to Rory.
The guild was oddly subdued for this hour in the morning. Usually, everyone was wide awake and ready to face the mountains of paperwork that followed any mission. A blanket of quietness lay over the nondescript red-brick building that lay behind a high spiked fence separating it from its neighbours. The layout was more like a school than a workplace, which made sense because it used to be the guild’s academy for new recruits before the old guild was destroyed by a demon four years ago.
After I’d scanned my celestial mark, the glass doors opened automatically into the entrance hall, which was filled with people milling about and talking in hushed voices. I felt like I’d interrupted a funeral, and wished I’d sneaked in the back way when several people looked in my direction.
Nobody was more awake than Lydia, who skipped over to me and beamed.
“Devina!” she said delightedly. In the past, we’d exchanged few words other than ‘hi’, but she spoke that way to everyone. She was a poster example of a model celestial soldier, radiating goodness as bright as her blond highlights even when everyone else was panicking.
“Hey, Lydia,” I responded.
“You’re back!” she said, for all the world like we were in an emotional reunion at an airport, not a murder investigation. “It’s so good to see you.”
“Uh-huh.” I sidestepped her and made my way across the lobby. Lydia and I had been in the same year during our novice training, and considering every time I’d heard her name it’d been in phrases like “you should be more like Lydia”, I should perhaps have built up more of a sense of resentment than I had. But it was hard not to like someone who could also take off a demon’s head from ten feet away. Right now, however, her cheerfulness was a grating contrast to the memories stirred up by my entrance here, and stopping for a chat would inevitably involve an unwelcome trip down memory lane.
“You know your shoe’s wet, don’t you?” she called after me.
“Yep,” I muttered, turning left into the corridor.
I rapped on Gav’s office door, moving aside as a group of novices ran by, exchanging theories about the murderer. Apparently, instead of keeping the case details casual so as not to freak everyone out, the guild leaders had opted to go down the “terrify all the novices with every gory detail” route.
“What’s she doing here?” whispered one of them. “Thought she quit.”
“Thought she killed Rory…” The male recruit trailed off as I glared daggers at him. “Nice to see you again, Devi.”
Ugh. Samuel Groves. He still wore his novice badges, so he must be retaking first year yet again. Despite being several years older than the average recruit, he apparently hadn’t outgrown his terrible mullet haircut. I’d had the unwelcome job of having him as a shadow on a demon hunting job and he’d nearly got me killed. And then asked me out.
“I see you haven’t improved your personal hygiene, Sam,” I said to him. “Or your taste in haircuts.”
Laughter followed from the novices.
“So you’re the Devina Lawson?” asked a blond novice of around twenty. “What’re you doing here?”
“She’s come to find your vamp boyfriend, Louise,” said one of the others. “Told you you’d get into trouble.”
“Quiet,” she hissed. “She’s here for the killer, right?”
“I’m here to help with the case,” I told them. It was none of my business if she was really dating a vampire, but trying to impose a bunch of rules on people often led to them doing the opposite. This batch of novices, given their rainbow-coloured hair and outrageous outfits, seemed determined to flaunt every rule in the celestial handbook at once. When I’d been a novice ten years ago, we weren’t even allowed to swear in class. I was glad they’d loosened up a little. Maybe I’d been a good—or bad—influence after all.
The door opened. “Devi,” said Gav. “I’m glad you came in.”
“You knew I was coming.” I walked in after him, closed the office door behind me and scooted over to the desk, planting myself in the chair.
“Why are you dripping water everywhere?”
“Slipped in a puddle. What did you want to discuss?”
“The photo you sent me,” he said. “The words… they wer
en’t there at the crime scene last night. The killer must have been back in the early hours of the morning. Maybe to unsettle us.”
“Apparently, it’s working.” I was glad he believed me, if just so I didn’t feel like I was losing my mind. “So we have a message which apparently appeared from thin air, and someone who died without any trace of who actually did it… anything new?”
“We’ve examined the body, for a start,” he said. “There’s no doubt his death was demon-related, which means it’s up to us to solve, not the police’s magical affairs branch. It’s also clear that the demon in question never physically touched the victim. The forensic evidence shows that, at least.”
“Damn. Are you sure? I mean, he caught fire. That’s not usually something that occurs without a prompt.”
“It seems he caught fire from the inside out, by some kind of demonic magic we haven’t seen before. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence of what type of magic. It’s not one any of us at the guild have ever encountered.”
“Plus he’s a celestial,” I added. “Most minor spells wouldn’t affect him. Vampire bites barely tingle, were bites never get infected… I can’t even think of a demon we’re vulnerable to.”
Not that anyone, even the celestials, knew every demon in existence. But most of the time, for a demon to cause physical damage, the attacker had to be touching the victim, or at least be close by. That should narrow our options—in theory.
“Precisely,” said Gav. “No footprints or other traces were found at the scene, human or otherwise. The peculiar thing is the lack of residue which would accompany a summoning. Brimstone, yes, but not where we’d have expected it to be. I can only assume that the demon in question wasn’t summoned anywhere near the site of the actual murder.”
“Damn. You’re right.” Come to think of it, demon attack sites usually carried a weird stench, too. I’d been too focused on the screaming celestial and the fact that I was being arrested to notice its absence.
Celestial Magic (Celestial Marked Book 1) Page 3