Every Witch Demon but Mine (Maeren Series Book 1)

by Mercedes Jade

  Elizabeth didn’t have to do this alone. Her family was in her mind, supporting her with their belief in her strength.

  The demon’s shield was bright, but he was foolishly looking up and around for her. He ignored the ground below as he got ever closer to her hiding spot.

  She patiently waited, crouched by a fat tree. Just a few more steps and she would have him.

  He rolled his burnt shoulder, still covered by crispy leather. The smell was nauseating.

  She bet that smarted.

  “Fire witch like you should be serving as a prime feeder. I know a general that would pay—”

  She darted forward and tripped him.

  Ignoring the burn as his fire-shield hit her back, she rolled right into his legs as he was taking another step.

  It bowled him over. Her thinner jacket had melted on contact with his hot shield.

  “Faster!” Her mother clenched the steering wheel and turned hard.

  Jill cheered. “Strike!”

  The demon’s fire-shield flickered. It was all she needed.

  Thrusting into his thoughts, she overrode his reflex to catch himself.

  It happened too fast for him to even realize what had happened.

  He hit the ground with his burnt shoulder and face first. Bigger ones really did fall harder.

  She didn’t give him time to shield again, now in control of his mind. She straddled his legs from behind and thrust his flasher-trench up his back one-handed.

  The birch stake slid in between his ribs with ease as she angled up to his heart. A loud pop drowned out his cursing as his centre chi released.

  Magic shot out of his body, the force of it throwing her off of him.

  The world spun and rang and then went black.

  Mother Knows Best

  Let my foolish daughter be okay.

  “Get up. Breathe.”

  The familiar voice in Elizabeth’s head woke her. It was as if her mother was standing right over her unconscious body to speak, instead of currently driving on the highway. Even the no-nonsense tone her mother preferred was transferred by the lightning telepathy.

  Whether the moon was big and orange or a pale sickle, it was still the moon, just as her mother’s voice always sounded the same.

  Elizabeth had been concussed from the chi release when she staked the fire demon. It had knocked the air out of her as well as dazed her.

  If she didn’t get some oxygen soon, her mind was going back under. Not a good idea when she was vulnerably low on magic and alone.

  She sucked her breath in as her mother had ordered, but pain quickly followed the air. The headache was blinding. Her burnt skin, from where her jacket was melted to her back, felt like it was still on fire.

  “Wow, Butty. Is landing on your ass how you got your name?” Jill asked.

  “Your bedside manner sucks, Glinda.”

  Be okay. Be okay. Be okay.

  Jill’s litany of worry was interrupted when someone knocked on the break room door.

  “I’m fine, geez. Go earn us chips and pop money,” Elizabeth said to ease Jill’s worry.

  “I’m craving chocolate marshmallow cereal.”

  Jill sent an image of a bowl of Count Chocula.

  Mmm . . . sugar in chocolate form.

  “Go bandage somebody. Wicked, out,” Elizabeth told her sister, her stomach rumbling with the after fight munchies.

  There were no more pre-game jitters to blunt her appetite.

  Her mother’s thoughts stayed deliberately calm compared to Jill’s. Turn-by-turn, her mother narrated the directions in her head as she drove her car at a Sunday-morning pace towards the park to pick Elizabeth up.

  She knew her mother probably worried as much as Jill about her, but her mother hid it with solid barriers that kept her fears out of her conscious mind.

  Elizabeth wouldn’t pull down her mother’s walls, guarding her real fears.

  Unrestrained, her lightning would try to read every little electrical signal it encountered.

  That had happened a lot when she was a toddler. It would drain her as she interpreted a hundred simultaneous unconscious thoughts with her power: when to breathe, the exact shade of grey of the lamp post, and how her stomach was gurgling for lunch.

  Her family’s unconscious thoughts, and even the conscious ones they buried, were more than she wanted to handle.

  “Come to the Watson Street entrance, please,” her mother asked.

  Time to figure out which way was up.

  She rolled onto all fours and let her air give her a lift to her feet. It wasn’t pretty, but she was alone in the park.

  A little ball of lightning in her hand let her find the pathway. She stepped very carefully around the pile of ash left by the demon.

  She knew it wasn’t a body, literally burned to ash in an execution like Prince Daemon was rumoured to do to enemies of the crown, but it still made her squeamish.

  This transport ash was supposed to be the clothes and burnable belongings of the demon. The body had turned to pure energy and transported across realms.

  If he had been wearing metal jewelry, then it would have melted a little in the heat of transformation and been left with the ash.

  That was why she used wooden stakes. They were a pain to carve, but wood would reduce to ash instead of becoming partly melted evidence of her crimes.

  The energy of raw magic and the chi of an elemental were able to transport easily through dimensions.

  Ending up naked on the other side was unavoidable when your clothes burned to ash in the human realm from the energy released during chi incineration.

  Machines and other human technologies wouldn’t transport. The only way to get across with clothing intact was to use a spelled portal, but most tech still wouldn’t make it.

  Whether an elemental’s power was released by stabbing the centre chi of the second magical soul around their hearts or drained through overuse of magic in the human realm, the result was the same.

  The chi was sucked into Maeren to replenish. The body’s shell in the human realm was burned to ashes by the heat of transformation.

  Magic recreated the body according to its genetic imprint on the other side. How that exactly happened—Magical memory?—was still a mystery.

  The science of magic was an oxymoron, but that was it in a nutshell.

  Too bad, it still felt like breathing in a crematorium after she dusted a vampire.

  She coughed her way along the path. A dust mask was really an occupational necessity.

  “Please, put out that lightning before a human sees you.”

  Her mother had parked a foot away from the sidewalk.

  Thankfully, traffic usually was light this time of night. Cars were as susceptible to wonkiness around magic as other technology.

  Mom drove as little as possible.

  “Mom,” Elizabeth called, extinguishing her lightning. “Do you have a mint?”

  She probably looked like a drunk teenager with her slight build and the hoodie as she weaved her way towards the car. She had tried to slur her words.

  Mom’s icy tones cut through her act. “There is no one here. Just get in the car before you fall down.”

  Elizabeth spat the nasty demon dust out of her mouth before getting in the car.

  A cup of scalding tea was shoved into her hands before she could get the seatbelt on.

  “Ouch. Cup sleeves,” she reminded her mother, taking an immediate sip.

  The tea burned going down, but her mouth felt clean once more. She held onto the cup and did up her seatbelt one-handed, giving her mother a sneaky glance to judge her mood.

  Straight face. No hint.

  Elizabeth didn't look like her mother. Earth witches tended to be sturdy, and although curvier, Elizabeth’s petite body wasn’t up to earth-witch standards.

  Her mother was tall, with long legs and toned arms like an Amazon. Brunette instead of blonde, her mother wore her hair in an asymmetrical bob that showed off he
r high cheekbones and cool, blue eyes.

  The eyes, Elizabeth had inherited.

  “Those are not book club clothes,” Elizabeth remarked, looking over the fine wool skirt and the blue, silk blouse. It was a touch too fancy.

  Her mother liked fine clothes in general. She didn't wear jewelry and she rarely wore makeup. She always wore heels, which didn't help her driving. She’d wear the damned heels on a hunt.

  They pulled away with a worrisome sputter.

  “Keep it inside, Elizabeth,” her mother demanded, ignoring the comment about her clothes.

  She sucked lightning into her chest, used to the heartburn as she kept it tightly compressed.

  The car stopped sputtering and crept forward.

  “Congratulations,” her mother snapped.

  She choked on another hot sip of tea. That was not a happy tone.

  “Uh, what are we celebrating?”

  Her mother was focused on her driving and so, she didn’t answer right away. When her mother finally did, Elizabeth choked more tea down and re-evaluated her mother’s calm demeanour.

  “Your retirement.”

  “Mom! I was in the right spot at the right time. You can’t expect me to let a demon run wild while I go get the gang together.”

  The car sputtered and she sucked her magic in tighter.

  “This isn’t about one demon. Did you not hear what he told you?”

  “Butty is a lame insult.”

  “Your name isn’t really Buffy, so try not to focus on the irrelevant insult and think about what else he said.”

  He had called her a traitor and the king old, blind and powerless, so not a fan of his royal majesty and witches that staked him.

  She had never met the king, so she couldn’t really judge. He wasn’t that old, however, perhaps in his fifties, which for a vampire was still close to his prime.

  “He doesn’t like the king. Why is that a problem?” she asked her mother, not seeing her point.

  The car turned and slowly accelerated onto the highway ramp. It would take all of her mother’s focus to get the vehicle up to the minimum speed and there would be no rushing her answer until she’d merged.

  “The demon was talking crap because he’s a two-faced jerk. What do you want to bet he’d piss himself if the king sent Prince Daemon after him?” Elizabeth asked, letting her own anger off of its chain.

  The demon had been the real traitor, speaking treason about the king. That kind of behaviour could result in a personal visit from the dark enforcer of their kind’s laws.

  She hadn’t met the demon prince in real life, but even in an edge town, the stories about Prince Daemon were intimidating.

  He was the monster that the rest of the monsters feared.

  Prince Daemon wasn’t old, either. A sexy demon in his prime. If Maeren had the equivalent of Teen Bop magazines, his image would be posted on every young witch’s room—including Elizabeth’s.

  Daemon had impressive attributes as an enforcer that she admired. To be honest, she didn’t even know what he looked like as an adult, having only heard the gossip from other girls at the edge town Maerenian markets she visited.

  Okay, so he sounded like her type.

  Her mother was still merging.

  “The demons are going to keep coming. I can’t ignore it. You can’t ask me to watch while they slaughter us,” Elizabeth said, putting aside thoughts of her girlhood crush to deal with the current crisis.

  This was more important.

  “Humans are not witches,” her mother distractedly replied, flicking off her turn signal, now that she was in the slow lane.

  Wow. It was outrageously prejudiced and completely out of character for her mother.

  They had all made human friends over the years.

  Elizabeth’s best friend had been a human, drained by a vampire when they were only twelve. The vampire that had done it had been their family’s first staking.

  Jill had learned human medicine, so she could naturally use her earth to help humans as well.

  Even her mother enjoyed human company, leading a book club and volunteering at Jill’s hospital.

  Elizabeth’s mouth ran off without her. “Vampires aren’t demons but they're still both bloodsucking dicks—”

  “Language, Elizabeth!”

  “I’m not quitting.”

  “Do you want to save the world?”

  “Yes,” she answered, no hesitation.

  “Which world?”

  She hadn’t thought of it that way. She was a creature of both hell—Maeren—and the human realm.

  “Humans,” she decided as her mother turned into the hospital parking lot.

  Hell could take care of itself.

  “This is my fault,” her mother said with a sigh that aged her.

  They pulled into the front entrance ‘Kiss and Ride’ where Jill was waiting.

  Jill got quietly in, not needing telepathy to read the atmosphere.

  Her younger sister looked a lot more like their mother than Elizabeth, but Jill hid it under scrubs a size too big. Jill was shy and modest.

  There was a bit of a tomboy in her as well, tying her hair back with whatever elastic she found around the house.

  Jill was too busy to do much else and she complained that her long hair was in the way. She had gotten it cut in beautiful layers that brought out her natural waves, but you would never know it with the double-folded ponytails and baseball caps.

  Their mother had encouraged Jill to work at the paediatric hospital, where the children’s recoveries wouldn’t be examined too closely. Jill kept the magic low-level and secretly helped the treatments prescribed by the doctors to work better.

  Elizabeth had been encouraged to hunt by their mother at the same time.

  Lightning was a brute power. It demanded release. Although she used it heavily on telepathy, the power needed purging with something bigger, or else she started misfiring.

  Mechanical failures from lightning trying to escape her blood led to a few accidentally fried electronics on the human side before her mother found a suitable outlet.

  Elizabeth’s power-sucking illusions usually made sure the vampires never saw her coming.

  Warmth tickled her spine as Jill reached forward from the back seat to apply her healing touch. It was only mildly painful as the healing started, so she knew her sister was holding back.

  She quickly filled Jill in on their earlier conversation while they were both using forbidden magic in the car.

  They pulled out of the hospital driveway with a little sputter.

  “You do not understand enough about where you come from,” their mother said.

  “We understand,” Jill replied, speaking up. “If something tries to kill you enough times, you learn to avoid it.”

  “You were a baby when we left Maeren, Jill. Elizabeth wasn’t much older.”

  “We aren’t babies any longer,” Elizabeth pointed out. “Do we really have to argue about how evil hell is? Even you can’t redeem demons.”

  “We were talking about saving the world.”

  Only her mother could say that with a straight face and mean it.

  “The human world,” Elizabeth reminded her.

  “The human world can’t be saved by you staking vampires and demons one-by-one,” her mother insisted.

  That seemed unfair. Why was her mother so upset? It had been one, lousy demon that she had staked behind her back.

  “Doesn’t mean I can’t try,” Elizabeth retorted, not bothering to disguise the pout in her voice.

  The car sputtered again and the prickling from Jill’s healing touch faded.

  “Jill? Unless you want to walk home, I suggest you keep it inside!” their mother ordered.

  “Elizabeth’s back is bad,” Jill informed their mother, but her sister didn’t start the healing again.

  “I am aware.” Their mother’s terse reply was edged with frustration.

  “It’s not a big deal. Magical healin
g can wait five minutes. What is a tragedy is this jacket. I just bought it,” Elizabeth said, trying to inject some lighthearted humour to reassure her sister.

  “You can’t take it with you to hell,” Jill snarked back.

  The car sped up a little faster than necessary to merge on the highway again.

  “What did Buffy do when she was confronted by the First?”

  Elizabeth sighed.

  Jill sighed.

  Their mother thought Buffy was the equivalent of the codec to slayer training—except the monsters that Elizabeth hunted were all too real for television.

  The First referred to the big bad in the series, an original evil that was represented as vampires because the whole series was based on a female vampire slayer. Buffy was the star from which Elizabeth stole her human-realm identity and job description.

  “Buffy got her butt kicked,” Jill responded.

  Both sisters had seen every episode multiple times at their mother’s insistence. The ridiculous errors about vampires made it more of a comedy for them.

  “In the end, Buffy had to bring the fight to the First,” Elizabeth said.

  Buffy had gone through the Hell-mouth to take out the original evil along with a bunch of trainee slayers for one epic fight of a lifetime.

  Elizabeth didn’t have that much backup, even if she counted her sister, who was more of a ‘make love, not war’ type, anyway.

  “Exactly,” their mother agreed. “If you want to deal with the source of the demons…”

  “We have to go to the Hell-mouth,” Jill finished.

  “It is not hell. You know very well it is another dimension. Maeren is the proper name. Please use it,” their mother insisted, not for the first time.

  It had demons. Ergo, Maeren was hell. Buffy had called it hell.

  Their mother ignored the pop culture references whenever it was convenient for her.

  “We already go to Maeren all the time. I’m there twice a day sometimes,” Elizabeth complained.

  “Do you think the source of these demons coming over lives in an edge town that has a trickle of magic?” her mother asked.

  No. That wouldn’t make sense. A powerful demon would want to be closer to the centre of Maeren, where the magic was strongest. Something was sending them out here—but who and where from was unknown.