Yes. The answer resonated deep inside Clancy, coming from the teenager she’d been; observing everything, living on the fringe of the glamorous adult world. Phoebe had been self-absorbed and ambitious. But Clancy had thought the actress’s self-interest had included Mark. That somehow the woman had truly loved him.
“Here’s your coffee.” Bryce pushed the hot mug into her hands.
She hid a wince as she hastily re-adjusted her hold so that her fingers didn’t burn. “Thanks.”
Mark juggled his mug, too, taking a sip before setting it down beside a display of old cellphones and detailed notes on radiation.
Bryce reached back, picked up his own mug, and held it as casually as if the contents were chilled.
Clancy’s eyes widened. The mug had to be insulated…
“So, are you a sceptic?” Bryce asked.
“Um…” And how am I meant to answer that? She didn’t simply believe in magic, she used it! That is, she used to use magic. “I guess I’m skeptical about alien abductions, things like that.”
“Good, good.” Bryce nodded.
“But I’m not an expert or anything,” she added. “I’d have a lot to learn.”
“Mark could teach you.” Bryce glanced at Mark, and his look was almost a leer. “I’m sure he’d be only to eager to teach you…everything.”
Definitely creepy. Clancy shuffled back a step, edging closer to Mark.
“Bryce,” he began, then halted as the fluorescent ceiling lights flickered.
Clancy had half a second to glimpse Bryce’s eyes flash red, then the official sceptic-in-residence lunged at her.
She froze. All of her taekwondo training and, faced with an attack, she froze!
Mark didn’t. He snatched up his mug and threw it at Bryce, scoring a direct hit on the man’s face. Not that Mark waited to see if his aim was true. He grabbed Clancy’s shoulder and hauled her behind him, sending her stumbling back toward the entrance. “Run!”
Hot coffee dripping off his face, Bryce snarled. It had an inhuman, howling edge.
Mark shoved the nearest table at Bryce, blocking him for an instant, turned and pushed Clancy with him out through the maze of displays to the front of the museum. Objects hurtled through the air: old cellphones, chunks of meteorite, anything Bryce could find to throw. And all the time, that infernal howling continued.
As Clancy and Mark burst out of the front door of the museum, the howl became words. “Eat her heart, eat her heart. Take her soul!”
Clancy spun around. Her soul? The Earth rumbled under her feet as her magic stirred to save her.
Bryce ran at her. His face was a terrifying rictus of rage. He seemed to lock onto her, aware of nothing else. Not the pedestrians scattering, then turning to watch, many raising their phones to record the scene. Not the delivery van squealing to a halt on the road just inches from Clancy. And not Mark, who sunk his center of gravity, took one powerful step forward, and tackled Bryce.
Flesh hitting flesh had a thwack sound, ugly and painful. Mark absorbed it and kept on going, driving Bryce back toward the shop.
His friend clawed at Mark’s face. Mark flinched, and Bryce broke free.
I can do this. I can protect myself. Clancy shifted into her fighting stance.
The delivery driver and his co-worker got out of their van, big men both, and hurried to her side.
Bryce howled, spun, and rammed himself at the glass front of the museum. The window shattered.
Mark grabbed his friend and hauled him back.
No blood. Clancy couldn’t see any blood. But Bryce was fighting Mark, struggling to get free.
The two men from the delivery van hurried to help Mark. The three off them restrained Bryce, one of the men dashing back to the van to return with duct tape. They secured Bryce’s wrists.
At that point, Bryce ceased fighting and sank to the ground. His eyes rolled back in his head and he was unconscious.
Mark straightened slowly, leaving the two men on guard, and crossed to Clancy. “Are you okay?”
“I’m shaking.”
He wrapped her in a hug. “Me, too.”
He lied. He was rock steady, strong, and reassuring. Capable. The police arrived, and he handled them. He thanked the delivery men who hadn’t driven on past. He got their names. And he kept an arm around Clancy.
An ambulance loaded Bryce, the paramedics hesitating to shut the door as a female cop emerged from the external door to Bryce’s apartment.
“Psych meds.” She handed over a plastic bag full of rattling pill containers.
“Damn,” Mark said softly under his breath.
It was incredibly sad.
“We’ve contacted his family,” the cop said to Mark, her gaze including Clancy who stood beside him. “They’ll be here soon. They’ll close up.”
They watched the ambulance drive away.
“You can go home,” the cop said to them. “We have your details if we need to contact you.”
Mark dragged his attention from the vanishing ambulance. “Thanks.”
The cop nodded and strode away to confer with her partner.
Clancy and Mark headed for his car. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Bryce was throwing things. Some must have hit you.” He’d shielded her.
“I’m fine.” His pace quickened, then slowed. “Not fine. Not physically hurt.”
She knew what was worrying him. It scared the heck out of her. Neither of them had quoted the actual words of Bryce’s ravings to the police. Eat her heart, eat her heart. Take her soul! And Bryce’s eyes had flashed red just before he attacked.
Bryce hadn’t had a psychotic break. That had been demonic possession.
She waited till they were inside the Rocinante and Mark was reversing it out of the parking bay. “I believe in your demon,” she said. “It was in Bryce.”
“But how?” The question burst out of Mark. “Bryce is such a sceptic. He’d never have sought out a demon, never have invited one into his heart. The demon must have targeted him because he’s a friend of mine.”
As the adrenaline rush of the confrontation faded, Clancy wanted a hot bath, warm clothes and hot chocolate. With extra marshmallows. But the guilt and self-blame in Mark’s voice roused her. “How would the demon even know you would visit Bryce today? Ours was an impulse thing. You said Bryce is a sceptic. A sceptic could treat a grimoire as a plaything and commit himself to a demon without believing that the words he said would be binding. Maybe that’s what Bryce did.”
Mark shook his head. “The demon watched us. It wanted to see if you were important to me, then it attacked you—not me.”
A tremor snaked along her spine as she relived being the focus of that diabolical rage. “But why wouldn’t it attack you since you’re the one assembling the evidence of its presence? Wouldn’t it want to take you out of the picture?”
“It’s enjoying the game.” Mark’s voice was rough with anger. “We’ll see if it likes my next move.”
Chapter 3
Mark didn’t speak on the drive home, and Clancy was completely okay with the silence. He’d scared her with his determination to fight a demon. What was the wretched thing’s name? Faust.
Her thoughts were a random, jumbled mess. She was also thinking how much she wanted a bath. She’d showered on the road trip from New York, halting at truck stops, but she wanted to wallow in a jasmine-scented bath. With bubbles. She longed to wash off her fear and the wrongness of contact with a demon.
Her skin crawled. It had been a demon looking at her through Bryce’s blue eyes. She ought to have paid attention to the weird way he’d held the coffee mug although it must have been burning his skin. Demons didn’t care if they hurt a host body—actually, they reveled in hurting people.
The Rocinante turned off the street into the private road of the Yarren Estate. Passing through the old ward that kept the place safe lifted a weight of tension from Clancy that she hadn’t realized she carried.
She’d been subconsci
ously braced for another demonic attack.
Mark showed no reaction. The gate opened and he drove through, but not to the garage. He drove around it and on to the housekeeper’s cottage, to Doris’s home. “I’ll bring your bag over.”
“I can get it.” She didn’t question why he’d brought her to the cottage and not the house. She was just grateful he had. The old stone building was square and solid, with the deep front porch shaded by the silk tree beside it, its leaves falling in welcome to winter. Clancy’s ancestors had built the cottage during the nineteenth century gold rush, but her ancestors had been there before then. Tongva, then Spanish, with a Mayan line added, travelling up from Mexico. Then had come the Irish, Welsh and Icelandic people from over the seas. All of them had connected with this earth.
The geo-power below the cottage hummed steadily. If she reached for it, it would cradle around her as it had in childhood. But California was her brother’s territory. She flinched from the power. If she wanted to stay here, at home, then she had to prove that she wouldn’t disturb the balance he maintained.
Which reminded her of the Collegium. She stood with the passenger door open and leaned back in to meet Mark’s eyes as he brooded in the driver’s seat. “We need to tell the Collegium about Bryce’s possession. They’ll send someone to exorcise him.”
“The demon will have already gone.” He stared straight ahead, although it didn’t seem that he saw the pretty garden with its late-blooming roses, windflowers and spires of snapdragons.
“Then the Collegium will ensure it can’t return.” She didn’t want to contact the Collegium, either, but it had to be done—for Bryce’s sake. “I’ll phone them.”
“I will.” He looked at her then.
Her heart stuttered at the bleak anger in his eyes.
Then even that emotion was gone. A small smile curved his mouth, apparently meant to reassure her. “Clancy, go in. Have a hot chocolate or something. I’ll tell Doris what happened and she’ll be over. Forget about this. You came back to Los Angeles for your own reasons. Live your life.”
“That’s all well and good…but your wretched demon knows me.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Mark put the Rocinante in reverse. “I’ll keep Faust busy.”
She slammed the passenger door shut, since he obviously wasn’t about to listen to reason, and climbed the couple of steps to the front porch, hearing the engine growl the short distance to the garage and stop. At least he hadn’t driven off to do something reckless.
“Bath first. Worry later.”
In fact, aware that Doris would be instantly at the cottage when Mark told her of their encounter with Faust, Clancy grabbed a quick shower instead of a leisurely soak. She borrowed her grandma’s herbal shampoo, and the scent of rosemary was a sharp, aromatic counterpoint to the horrors of the morning. It smelled like incense.
Hair wrapped in a turban and another towel around her, she opened the bathroom door to find her duffle bag deposited outside it. She hadn’t heard Mark climb the old wooden stairs. She lifted the bag, carried it through to the second bedroom, the one that had been hers in childhood, and dressed quickly in black yoga pants, a plaid pink and cream shirt, and a snuggly soft gray cardigan. She padded downstairs in socks with her brown hair still wet and loose about her shoulders.
Doris had made hot chocolate. “Two marshmallows?”
“Three. It’s definitely been a three-marshmallow morning. Thanks.” Clancy took her mug and slid onto a chair at the round table in the sunny kitchen. Cream colored walls made the most of the light and the worn Spanish tiles on the floor gave the room warmth and character. She faced the same cuckoo clock on the wall that she’d wound in childhood. Except now, marshmallows and cuckoo clocks couldn’t provide quite the same comfort. “It was definitely a demon, Grandma.”
“Mark is obsessed.” Doris stirred her mug of hot chocolate, swirling the melting marshmallows. The puffy curls of red hair that framed her face seemed limper, or perhaps, it was the worry deepening her wrinkles that made them seem so. Doris was concerned. “He believes a demon took Phoebe’s soul.”
“So he told me.” Clancy paused to savor the rich chocolate flavor of her drink. Doris added cinnamon, vanilla and love to her hot chocolate. No other ever tasted as good. “What if Phoebe really did sell her soul to a demon?”
Doris sighed. “We’ve had the Collegium’s best demon hunters out here, twice. They found no evidence of demonic activity—or no more than the usual level of idiots attempting and failing to summon them.”
“Was Fay Olwen one of the demonologists?” Clancy caught a marshmallow with her tongue and let it finish dissolving in her mouth.
“No.” Doris was suddenly defensive.
The marshmallow no longer tasted so sweet. Clancy turned the mug around on the table, studying the pattern of daisies painted on it, trying to phrase her question and challenge tactfully. “Then you didn’t actually have the best, did you? Grandma, a demon infiltrated the top of the Collegium before Fay discovered and defeated it a few months ago. It could have hidden this demon’s presence.”
“Why would it? Demons aren’t known for working together.”
Which was true. Clancy sipped hot chocolate.
“Was it very bad?” Her grandma asked. She meant the encounter that morning.
Clancy put the mug down. It landed with a bit too much force, a minor thud that set the hot chocolate sloshing. “I froze. In the face of an obvious physical threat, I froze. Grandma, I’ve trained for years in Taekwondo, yet Mark had to save me. He pulled me out of Bryce’s reach. He fought the demon in Bryce’s body. Mark even had to push me to make me run. I can’t believe that I froze!” She could hear her voice growing shriller, but couldn’t seem to stop it. This selfish but real concern had been simmering away beneath everything else, and now, in this room where she’d confided so many of her hopes and fears to her grandma, the deepest one spilled out. “I’m a failure at magic, and now it seems I can’t even handle ordinary life.”
“A demon is hardly ordinary. And you’re not a failure. Not at anything, ever.” Doris gripped her hand. “Honey, what did they do to you at the Collegium?”
Clancy shook her head, pulling her hand away and physically leaning away in her chair. “It’s not what they did. It’s how I failed.” She became aware of her huddled posture and forced herself to straighten. “And it doesn’t matter. Not now. Grandma, Mark wants to go after this demon alone.”
“Honey.” Doris closed her mouth. Whatever she’d been about to say, she obviously changed her mind. “Mark isn’t in danger from a demon. There is no demon.”
“I—”
“Just wait. Think about it, Clancy. You didn’t sense a demon before this poor man attacked you. If Mark hadn’t primed you with his talk of demons, would you have accepted the reasonable explanation of a psychotic break.”
Clancy hooked her heels on the edge of her seat and wrapped her arms around her knees. “Bryce said he wanted to eat my heart and take my soul!”
Her grandma sat back in her chair, her face losing color. “Mark didn’t tell me that bit.”
“Mark wants to keep us out of it. Safe.” As she said it, Clancy realized how true it was. Initially, Mark had wanted her understanding. Perhaps he’d even considered her as an ally; an equal, after years of being the kid on the estate. But now, he’d pulled away to protect her and Doris. “I didn’t sense the demon, but isn’t that characteristic of demonic possession?” She frowned, trying to remember a field of magic she’d had little interest in when she studied at the Collegium. “Demons like to possess humans because our flesh hides them.”
Ugh. She reached for her hot chocolate and took a healthy swallow to wash away that nasty thought.
“I have a friend who’s a retired priest,” Doris said. “I’ll have him stop in and check on this Bryce Goodes. Poor soul.”
“Can your friend do an exorcism?” A question Clancy had never thought she’d ever have reason to ask.
“Yes.” Doris finished her hot chocolate, some color returning to her face. “Father Jorge has experience with evil.”
Clancy shivered. Evil. It was a concept most people debated philosophically or relegated to horror movies. But evil was real and it twisted lives.
Mark had lost seven years of his life to chasing it.
“Grandma, how do we help Mark?”
“It’s not Mark who needs help.” The interruption came from the man opening the back door. His voice was biting and the expression in his eyes furious. “What are you doing here, Clancy?”
“Jeremy.” All of her muscles went slack in shock. Her arms released her knees and her feet thudded to the floor. “Hi?”
Her brother ignored her tentative greeting. “I felt the magic you used. I was in the middle of an early tutorial session and I had to break it off to quiet the surge of geo-forces you caused.”
“I’m sorry.” She felt awful. This was why she’d vowed she wouldn’t use her magic. She wanted to stay here, at home, and that meant respecting that home was Jeremy’s territory. The Collegium had awarded it to him. “I didn’t meant to. I was—”
“Good morning, Jeremy,” Doris broke in. “Don’t I warrant a polite greeting, even if you can’t spare one for your sister whom you haven’t seen in over a year?”
He flushed. “Good morning, Grandma.” He crossed the small room, bent and kissed Doris’s cheek. But as he straightened, he scowled at Clancy.
Because he was scowling, he missed the warning look Doris directed at her.
Apparently, they weren’t going to tell Jeremy about the demon.
More secrets. Clancy sighed.
“So, what is your excuse?” Jeremy demanded. He looked every inch the successful hipster with his carefully trimmed black beard, and the tweed jacket over dark brown trousers that was probably a fashionably ironic joke on the old academic uniform. “You know your power is unstable. That’s why Erik kicked you out of Iceland.”
Well, there went one of her secrets: the reason the Collegium had demoted her, and she’d resigned. From independent, roaming sensor of geomagnetic disturbances, she’d been recalled to New York to provide support to more senior—and reliable—geomages at the Collegium.
Hollywood Demon (The Collegium Book 6) Page 4