Demon Fire (Brimstone Magic Book 1)

by Tori Centanni

  “I need you to find out what really happened and clear his name,” she said, as if reading my mind. “This whole mess is a pock mark on my family’s good name. When word gets out, this vicious nonsense might threaten my mother’s position. If she can’t keep her own son from breaking the rules…” Savannah trailed off, turning a hand palm up as if to say “so you see.”

  That made sense. The Council was draconian when it came to the rules and archaic in how it blamed people for their family member’s crimes.

  But I was still confused about why she was coming to me of all people.

  “Why aren’t you going to the Watchers?” I asked. “Isn’t this type of thing their job?”

  Savannah sighed. “I’m sure they’ll do their own investigation, but they’re likely to accept the easiest answer. You know how anyone in proximity to demon magic is perceived.”

  I shivered. I sure did. The Council did hold trials for those accused of wrong-doing, but they were often extremely biased in favor of the Council and offered little chance for the accused to plead their case. Once a witch was accused of a crime, it was nearly impossible to clear one’s name. Yet another reason I had to keep my secret. It wouldn’t matter that I hadn’t asked for demon magic: the fact that I had it would be a crime in and of itself, regardless of how I’d accidentally acquired it, and I would be punished accordingly.

  “I don’t know what they’ll find but if any of them wish to do my mother harm and get her removed from the Council’s board… well, you see the problem. Besides, you know how they are. Always keen for a story to demonstrate the dangers of demon magic. My brother could end up the poster boy for their next crackdown.”

  Unfortunately, that sounded exactly like something the Council would do. Use him as an example to prove that even a Board of Magic member’s son was not above the law.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll look into it. But I have to warn you. All I can offer you is the truth. If it turns out Marcus was summoning demons or working with them, that’s what I’ll report back. Whatever I find will stay between us but you have to understand, I might not be able to clear his name.”

  “You will,” she said with absolute certainty. “Marcus was eager and young, but he wasn’t a fool.”

  She stood.

  I stood, too.

  Eyes wet, she thanked me. “I look forward to hearing back,” she said, and left.

  I seriously hoped I’d have good news to tell her. I also kind of doubted it. Then again, if anyone knew how possible it was to accidently summon a demon, it was me.

  Chapter 4

  It was a bad sign when the sky opened up and rain poured down during my walk to the crime scene. June in the Pacific Northwest was jokingly referred to as “June-uary” because after a streak of hot, summery days in May, the temperature usually cooled and the rain started up again for a week or two. By August, we’d all be pining for the cool, wet days of June, but at the moment, everyone was busy complaining that they wanted their summer.

  I personally didn’t mind some cloud cover and I liked a good thunder storm. I just preferred not to get soaked on the street.

  The house Marcus’s body had been found in sat between two better-kept homes with neatly trimmed yards. It was small with a wide porch, the overhang supported by columns that had probably been white once upon a time, though it was hard to be sure through all the grime. Windows flanking the front door were boarded up, but the door was wide open.

  I pulled my brown hair up into a wet ponytail, squeezing all of the water out, and stomped my boots on the porch to clean them off before going inside.

  I entered a living space with scuffed wooden floors and a big brick fireplace. Inside the house was dark, on account of the windows having boards over them, but someone had cast a lighting spell back in the kitchen area. I headed for it. The kitchen counters and sink had an orange cast, the floor tile was a mix of yellow and brown. Very 1970s chic. The appliances were equally old and covered in dust.

  I heard movement down the hall and backed out of the kitchen, drawing my sword. Blood thrummed in my ears as I inched down the hallway past open doors, pausing to check each empty room, until I reached the last room on the left.

  I spotted the body first, lying half in and half out of a circle drawn in blood and salt. His face was turned away from me. I swallowed. The smell wasn’t bad yet, just stale with a hint of mildew, probably more from the house than the corpse, and of course the acrid, smoky aroma of demon. The demon’s body had half-melted into the floor, leaving a pile of black goo, oil oozing out around it like blood. Whatever shape it had taken in life, death had rendered it into an onyx-colored blob.

  Someone came out of the master bathroom attached to the room and I swore under my breath.

  Conor Ramsey. Demon hunter, Watcher, and the last person I wanted to see. Of course.

  He took one look at me and said, “This is a crime scene.”

  “Oh, really? I thought it was a party.” I sheathed my sword. “What are you doing here?”

  “My job. The real question is what are you doing here, Ms. Warren?” he asked. He wore his charcoal gray Watcher uniform, complete with his daggers on his belt. His inky black hair was cropped close to his head, just long enough to allow a stylish wave, and his blue eyes burned into me.

  My heart jackhammered against my ribs. If I were smart—and less hard up for work—I would have cut and run right then. I knew the Watchers would also be looking into Marcus Goldsmith’s death, but the way Conor looked at me, like he could read my thoughts, made me feel naked. Conor was intrepid, smart, and dedicated, and I wanted to stay far off his radar. Working the same case would make that difficult, to say the least.

  Common sense did not prevail. “Funny, I’m doing my job, too.”

  Conor raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

  “I’ve been hired to look into his death,” I said, gesturing at Marcus’ body. “His sister wants to know what happened.”

  “I can save you the trouble. The Watchers will figure that out and report back to his family.” He folded his arms over his chest and glared down at me. For a guy who wasn’t much taller than I was, he sure had a way of using those extra inches to intimidate.

  Before I could argue, I heard footsteps and turned to see a small crew of three people appear behind me. Conor nodded at them. “Let’s get the body and scrub out the remains of the demon,” Conor said.

  Oh crap.

  “You can’t move the body,” I said, blocking the door way, arms akimbo. They were already halfway in the room and I wasn’t exactly an effective blockade. “I need to examine the crime scene before you destroy it.”

  Conor frowned deeply. “This is a Council matter.”

  I turned and glared back at him. “It’s also a murder I’ve been asked to look into. I need time to examine the scene.”

  “You’re not a Watcher,” Conor said flatly. “We have no obligation to let a private investigator poke around.”

  I glared harder and folded my arms over my chest to mimic his posture. “I’m not asking to take the body or anything. I just want a little time to examine things for myself. I don’t see why that should be a problem.” I gestured at the demon. “Unless the Council has something to hide…”

  Conor looked like he wanted to open a circle and send me straight to the Underworld. Instead, he met my eyes and we had ourselves a little staring contest. After a long moment, one of the women behind me asked, “Sir?”

  Conor huffed. “Clear out. We’ll give Ms. Warren one hour to look things over. Sixty minutes exactly. And then we clean up the scene.” He walked up to me, stopping only inches away. I could smell the citrus from his soap or shampoo. “One hour, no more, no less. And you don’t take or touch anything.”

  “Got it.” I dropped my arms.

  He brushed past me, ushering his crew out of the house. I let out a breath of relief. I hadn’t been sure that would work, but I guess Mr. Upstanding didn’t want to be excused of hiding e
vidence. I made a quick phone call and then walked the perimeter of the room. This had been a master bedroom once upon a time, and there were scratch marks where the four posts of a king bed had sat.

  The circle had been drawn in the middle of the room. It had been traced in blood that had turned a rusty color and flaked off in places. Outside the blood was a line of salt. That was meant to keep the circle enclosed and contain any magic—or demons—that appeared inside.

  The body was flopped over the circle, as if Marcus had been standing in the center of it and fallen over, leaving his torso outside it. That was strange: most witches used circles to summon things—spirits, power, and even demons when they didn’t care about the law, but the key to doing so safely was to remain outside of the circle. Standing inside it was asking for trouble. It allowed whatever you summoned to hurt you, use you, possess you, tear you to bits.

  More curiously, the demon had died almost two yards outside of the circle, closer to the corner of the room. The circle had been broken when Marcus had fallen through it: moving into or out of a circle automatically breaks the magical field. The question was, had it been broken before that, and if so, how?

  There was a light knock on the door frame. I turned and smiled when I saw Adam. His pink hair had been freshly dyed so it was especially bright. He wore a light jacket over a bright orange t-shirt the color of a traffic cone and carried a bag of tools.

  “Took you long enough,” I said. Though by my count, I still had thirty minutes before Conor and his crew stormed back in and took over the room.

  “You’re just lucky I was free,” Adam said, before taking in the room. The body didn’t seem to faze him. Adam worked at a funeral home, where his job was to pretty up bodies for services, and he did late-night autopsies and necropsies on supernatural beings on the side, so he was used to corpses. But he coughed when he saw the glop of melting demon, furrowing his brow. When he finally peeled his eyes off it, he shot me a questioning look.

  “Demons who’ve manifested physically dissolve when they’re killed. Their bodies are a good percentage ectoplasm or something so when they die,”—I pointed my palms upward and then brought my fingers down, miming a cave in—“their bodies collapse.”

  “That’s disgusting,” he said, wrinkling his nose.

  He set down his bag and dropped to a knee next to Marcus. He reached to turn him over.

  “Wait. I’m not supposed to touch anything,” I said, eyeing the doorway like Conor would come marching in the moment we broke his ridiculous rules. I was pretty sure they’d gone outside, since I didn’t hear them in the house, but that didn’t mean they weren’t close enough to charge in at any moment.

  “You want me to examine him without touching? I can’t tell you a cause of death that way, darling,” Adam said, giving me an incredulous look, his arm still outstretched toward the corpse.

  “Of course you can touch him, just pay attention to where he’s at so we can put him back.” The Watchers were about to move Marcus anyhow and bring him into Watcher headquarters, so I saw no reason to worry about keeping the scene pristine. I just didn’t want to fight about it. “But you can’t, like, cut him open.”

  Adam’s expression soured. “I do my best work when I can cut them open.”

  “I know, buddy,” I said.

  He turned back to the corpse and pulled him over to lay on his back. “And I’ll need payment.”

  I pulled one of the three hundred dollar bills Savannah had given me out of my pocket and forked it over. Adam shoved it into the front pocket of his skinny jeans and went to work.

  I crept down the hall and made sure the house was, in fact, empty of Watchers. I even inched up to the door and checked outside. There was big black unmarked van parked at the curb, with the gray-clad crew huddled around the open back.

  Reassured they weren’t about to walk in on us, I returned to the master bedroom to do something very risky: I was going to use a tiny bit of demon magic.

  Stupid? Maybe. But in my view, worth the risk. The smell of ichor and demon was already wafting through the room, which should mask my own demonic magic. But I had to be quick.

  I swallowed and leaned against the back wall of the bedroom, closest to the melting demon goo. I closed my eyes and willed the magic into them. When I opened them again, I could see the shadows. I gasped, but Adam, a true professional, did not slow in his examination of the body.

  The dark, demonic shadows, lingering residue of demon magic and the Underworld, were thick in the room. Not just in the circle around the dead demon, though they were concentrated there, but all over. The air was heavy with the remnants of demonic power, shadows crowding out the light. My skin crawled. I swallowed uneasily and blinked until my demonic sight faded and the shadows retreated into the realm beyond normal vision.

  “You okay?” Adam asked, as I stepped closer to look at his work. Marcus’ face was scrapped up on the left cheek, flesh ripped open leaving a nasty gash. Adam was busy rebuttoning the shirt he’d undone to get a look at Marcus’s chest and back.

  “Yeah.” I glanced around. Without the shadow sight, it was impossible to tell how much demonic power hung around us. “Does this room creep you out at all?”

  Adam turned Marcus’ body back over, trying to place it back in position. “There’s a body and a mound of slop you say is a demon, so I guess.”

  “I mean, does it feel off to you? Like does it have bad vibes?” Adam was fully human, not a witch or anything, and I was curious if he could sense the invisible, sinister fog. Sometimes mundanes were actually better than witches and mages at noticing that kind of thing. Maybe because they weren’t as used to the residual effects of magic and therefore any magical energy might give them an uneasy feeling.

  Adam shrugged and gathered his tools, most of which hadn’t been used since he hadn’t been allowed to cut the body open. “I mean, I probably wouldn’t come back if they turned it into a swank little B-n-B or anything. It’s not a happy air in the room.”

  I nodded. Good enough. “So what’s the verdict, doc?”

  “The patient isn’t going to make it.” Adam smirked. I stared. He sighed. “I can’t tell you much without doing the full shebang. He died anywhere from twelve to sixteen hours ago, based on the amount of rigor. Lividity—that’s blood pooling in his body—shows he hasn’t been moved from his side until I rolled him over. There’s a massive bruise on his chest that suggests massive trauma and maybe internal bleeding, and a tiny bit of gunk in his mouth that suggests whatever hit him in the chest punctured a lung.”

  “And that means…” I rolled my finger around in a circle.

  “He probably died of blunt force trauma to the chest. Probably being the key word.”

  “Like maybe a big burst of magical energy.”

  Adam shrugged. “That’s not my area of expertise.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Adam gave me a fist bump on his way out. “No problem.”

  I wasn’t sure that information had been worth a hundred bucks but it was nice to have some idea of when and how Marcus had died, I supposed. Shame I couldn’t get Adam to do a full autopsy. I doubted the Watchers would share anything they found, assuming they even bothered with such a human examination. They were more likely to do a cleansing ritual to remove any traces of magic or curses and send him to his family for burial without so much as a Y-incision.

  I spent the rest of my time in the room alone, trying to imagine what had occurred. What spell had Marcus been attempting? If he was trying to summon a demon, what drove a rich, privileged witch like him to do such dangerous and illegal magic alone in an abandoned house? Had he been alone? If the demon had killed Marcus inside the circle, and then been killed outside, who had killed the demon? Marcus in a final gasp of magic? Or someone else.

  What I didn’t know could fill a small ocean. I needed to learn more about who Marcus was in order to figure out what he might have been doing here.

  I gave one last hard look at th
e room, hoping something might stand out. When nothing did, I left, running into Conor on the porch.

  “Learn anything?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Nothing you probably didn’t already know.”

  Conor’s jaw twitched. He didn’t like that. But I saw no reason to share what little I’d learned when he sure as heck wasn’t going to reciprocate.

  “Good luck,” I said, and brushed past him.

  I didn’t turn to look back but I could feel his eyes on me as I headed for the sidewalk.

  Chapter 5

  I may not have been friends with Marcus, but it wasn’t hard to guess who his friends were. The Council had annual parties where I made appearances—mostly in an attempt to drum up business—but I saw who the prominent witches hung out with. Largely each other.

  I walked briskly down the street, wishing I’d enchanted my sword with an invisibility spell. I’d chosen a spell to sharpen the blade instead, which came in handy when I was fighting against monsters and able to lob off their limbs before they could grab me. But walking down the street in the fading evening light in downtown Everett made me feel conspicuous. I kept the sword against my thigh on the non-street side of my walk and hoped anyone who saw it thought it was a prop or part of some cosplay they didn’t recognize. That was the upside to the popularity of nerd culture these days: when mundanes encountered vampires or faeries or women like me carrying swords, they just assumed a comic convention was in town.

  I turned the corner of my block to see a crow sitting on a bike rack. It fluttered up in the air and flew in to the alley. A second later, a woman in a black, feathery dress emerged. She had dark skin and dark eyes and offered me a look of rebuke.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” Penelope said.

  “Why, is the building on fire?” I glanced behind her at the old apartment building that looked totally intact to me.

  “There were Watchers outside your office.”

  My chest constricted. “What?” I glanced toward my office door. No one was there now.