Hollywood Demon (The Collegium Book 6)

by Schwartz, Jenny

  “I really am sorry Grandma and I left without telling you. I promised we wouldn’t go anywhere, but she wasn’t going to let a demon stop her going to church.”

  He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I can hear Doris saying that. All right. Let’s go face whatever this new nightmare is.”

  She smiled at him then. Not because it was humorous or because she wasn’t dreading what they might find in the studio, but because he’d forgiven her.

  “Don’t scare me like that again,” he said seriously.

  Her smiled died. She put a hand on his knee. “I won’t.” Then she realized how instinctively she’d touched him—and after she’d been the one to draw a line in the sand between them. She snatched her hand back.

  “If you’re wondering.” His quiet voice stilled her embarrassed fumbling with seatbelt and door handle. “You have my permission to touch me any time. Anywhere.” And when she met the intensity of his steady gaze. “I did some thinking last night, too.” Then he got out of the SUV without saying anything more.

  Tantalizing!

  However, one glimpse of Gilda’s expression as she opened the front door of the studio pushed all personal thoughts out of Clancy’s mind.

  Gilda looked grim. She took in Clancy’s presence, then obviously dismissed her. Gilda’s attention was for Mark. “Brace yourself.”

  That couldn’t be good.

  A “closed” sign was taped to the front door. Gilda shut it and led the way along the corridor to the room Rivera called her private retreat, the room in which she’d summoned Faust.

  “Rivera salted the circle of summoning,” Clancy said, instinctively protesting what they might find.

  “Alek cleared it, too,” Gilda said. Alek had to be her demonologist colleague. “Unfortunately, Faust didn’t fully manifest. Instead, he offered Rivera a bargain.”

  Clancy glanced at Mark. That was what Faust had done with Phoebe, Mark’s dead fiancée, the one who’d tried to trade his soul for hers when Faust came to collect it.

  Mark was expressionless.

  He’d said Clancy had touching privileges, but now wasn’t the time for even a quick, I’m-here brush of fingers. But I am here. Whatever waited in Rivera’s private room, he wouldn’t face it alone. Clancy centered herself in her magic.

  “Rivera consented to the demon’s temptation.” Gilda sounded annoyed.

  “What?” Mark rocked to a halt, thunderstruck. Demonologists all knew to never, ever agree to a demon’s bargain.

  Clancy had a more immediate question. “What did he tempt her with?”

  “See for yourself.” Gilda stepped aside from the door to the retreat room, but she positioned herself where she could watch Mark’s face.

  He walked into the room and his whole body flinched.

  Clancy hurried to peer around him.

  Another man was already in the room, presumably the Alek Gilda had mentioned. The man was about forty, slender and dressed casually in dark trousers and a gray knit sweater. His black hair was graying at the temples. He watched their entrance, but was obviously alert to any movement from the woman seated on a chair in the corner.

  Rivera.

  It had to be Rivera, but it didn’t look like her.

  “Phoebe?” Mark asked softly.

  The haunted, haunting question whispered through the room.

  Yesterday, Rivera had resembled Phoebe. Their noses had looked alike, and Clancy had frivolously guessed at a shared plastic surgeon. But now—now the resemblance was uncanny. Rivera didn’t just look like Mark’s dead fiancée. She looked as Phoebe had looked seven years ago.

  “Good morning, Mark.” Rivera tipped her head up to meet his appalled gaze, and her gesture was Phoebe’s characteristic head toss. Blonde hair rippled.

  “Oh God.” The exclamation ripped out of Mark. He turned away and dry heaved.

  Clancy put a hand on his back, rubbing a circle, as she tried to control her own revulsion.

  Rivera stood, but without yesterday’s grace. Her clothes hung on her oddly.

  Too big, Clancy realized. These were Rivera’s clothes, but her body had changed. “Is she—?”

  “Rivera’s not possessed,” Gilda said, while Rivera herself pouted. “It was Alek who pointed out the resemblance to me.” Sympathy shone in the chief demonologist’s eyes as she observed Mark who’d ceased dry heaving, but remained bent over, hands on knees. “Rivera, herself, said she chose this.” Disbelief thinned Gilda’s voice.

  Rivera stared from Mark’s pose of utter rejection to the older woman’s disgust. Her gaze connected with Clancy, who cringed to see Phoebe’s face on the failed demonologist.

  Failed. That was the key. Clancy, who’d failed and been demoted as a geomage within the Collegium, understood something of Rivera’s motivation. Perhaps Clancy’s understanding, and her horrified, reluctant sympathy showed on her face because this time it was Rivera who flinched away.

  Of course Gilda couldn’t understand the temptation Faust had offered Rivera or why the woman had taken it. Gilda had never failed. She was the Collegium’s chief demonologist, powerful and confident in her power.

  But Clancy could guess how the demon had seduced Rivera. Quietly, with the slow solemnity appropriate to a funeral parlor, Clancy sought for confirmation. “Faust appeared, didn’t he?”

  Rivera, so like Phoebe, shook her blonde head. “Just his voice.”

  Just a voice, not enough to challenge Rivera; not enough, evidently, to spook her into warding the demon out. Faust had been clever. He had insinuated himself subtly, taking advantage of Rivera’s shaken sense of failure, her powerlessness and loss. And Rivera had listened when the demon had offered her redemption.

  Not redemption as most people understood it. But redemption as an escape from failure. He’d shown her how to escape herself, to leave behind a life that hadn’t met her expectations. People fled things all the time, but Faust had guided Rivera’s panicked, despairing flight from herself. If she had failed as a demonologist, she could be someone else.

  “You had failed,” Clancy said compassionately, as Mark straightened but still refused to look at Rivera. “Yesterday, Faust tore away your confidence in yourself as a demonologist. You could have chosen, instead, to focus on your yoga studio. You’re a success. Beautiful.” Clancy almost choked on the word, it was so wrong with Rivera having changed her face and form for Phoebe’s. The woman had been beautiful before. However, now, wearing a dead woman’s form, she was grotesque. “But your ordinary life wasn’t enough. You wanted what Phoebe had possessed. Celebrity, wealth.”

  Rivera had wanted to be part of the charmed circle, a Hollywood insider. She’d wanted—

  “Mark.” Rivera sat back on the chair in the corner. “I want the fairytale. I want to be part of a perfect couple. I deserve to be.”

  “And what do I deserve? This?” Mark’s gesture rejected Rivera standing before him. “That fairytale you want was a nightmare. An endless nightmare that won’t let me go. You took on the form of a woman who sold her soul to a demon.”

  Phoebe’s face, so wrong when the woman wearing it was Rivera, expressed exaggerated puzzlement. It was a mask, and Rivera hadn’t learned to wear it. Even her tiniest movements were clumsy. But the urgency of her emotions came through. “No. No, you loved Phoebe.”

  “She betrayed me.”

  It was as if Rivera didn’t hear him. “And now, you’ll love me.”

  No, he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. Her transformation was vile and wrong.

  “You’re sick.” Mark turned to Gilda. “Has Faust twisted her brain?”

  Alek answered, cool and composed, although Clancy jumped, having forgotten his presence behind her. “Not in the way you mean. Rivera made a bad decision. The consequences are drastic and, as far as we know, irreversible. I doubt she believed she could, or meant to, so radically change. Now, she doesn’t know herself. Her psyche is trying to build a new narrative to handle it. If you were to rescue her, love her—”

>   “Love her?” Absolute, utter revulsion from Mark.

  “No, I know you can’t. I’m trying to explain,” Alek said.

  Rivera put her altered face in her hands and began to cry

  Gilda’s practical voice ignored the emotional quagmire. “What disturbs me is this demonstration that the demon you call Faust can alter human flesh.”

  “Is this a new demonic talent?” Clancy had no idea. Her legs felt rubbery. Whatever she’d expected to encounter in the yoga studio, it hadn’t been this. She wanted to lean against something. She retreated a step toward the wall.

  Mark’s arm shot out and pulled her against him. Apparently, he needed her.

  Rivera wailed.

  “Stay with her,” Gilda said.

  Clancy glanced at the chief demonologist, and belatedly realized that the command was for Alek to guard Rivera.

  Gilda gestured for Mark and Clancy to exit the room. They sat on the chairs outside the door. Gilda stood. “In all the boasting Faust did yesterday, did he as much as hint that he could alter human flesh?”

  Mark rested his elbows on his knees, head hanging down. He felt sick and disoriented. “No.”

  “You should have warned him what he’d see,” Clancy challenged Gilda.

  “She couldn’t.” He didn’t look up. The bamboo flooring was pale and blonde, like Rivera’s new Phoebe-hair. He struggled with nausea. “Gilda wanted to observe my reaction in case I was in this with Faust.”

  “With him?” Shock reverberated in Clancy’s voice, raising it an octave. She bounced up. “We’re victims.”

  “Yes, I think you are.” A judicious tone from Gilda.

  Mark was beyond caring what she thought. He wanted—needed—to leave.

  The ground beneath him rumbled. “Clancy.” He said her name as warning and reassurance.

  Whatever she heard in his voice, she reached back and gripped his hand, pulling him to his feet. “We’re leaving.”

  “Good. It’s not as if you could help,” Gilda replied.

  He felt Clancy’s magic gathering like a storm, and gave her hand a tiny shake. The important thing was that they leave. Gilda’s rudeness, her ruthlessness, didn’t matter. He had to put space between himself and Rivera.

  “That woman!” Clancy exploded as the front door shut behind them. To their right, the café’s courtyard was filled with people talking and laughing, the scrape of chairs on the paving and the clink of cutlery. Jazz music played softly. The earlier rain had gone, but not before washing the dust off everything so that colors were brighter, the air fresher.

  And behind them, inside Rivera’s studio, was the devastation a demon could create.

  The shadow of it clung to Mark. He beeped the SUV open and climbed in. “Do you want to go home or—do you mind if we go to the beach?” He needed the wild openness of the ocean. “I can drive you home first.” The way he felt at the moment, he didn’t care if Faust did come after him, but Clancy needed to be safe.

  “The beach suits me. Clean air.”

  They were on the same page. He felt dirty. “If Faust turns up…”

  “It would only be to gloat,” she said.

  Since he thought she was right, he said nothing else, but drove toward Palisades Park, stopping where they could walk down to the beach. There were people exercising, but not so many that they couldn’t be avoided. It was possible to talk privately.

  A golden retriever raced past, romping with its owner.

  “I love those dogs,” Clancy said randomly. “Goofy, friendly. Great with kids.” She watched it till it was out of sight, her expression wistful.

  She was probably thinking of that ordinary life she’d come home to achieve. Demons weren’t part of that ambition. But this experience, horrible as it was, would have been even worse for him without her.

  He watched the waves rolling in, with the wind buffeting him from the north. He stood to block it from her, and she gave him a small, sad smile of acknowledgement. It jerked a confession out of him.

  He’d told her so much, more than he’d thought to share with anyone. But not this. “Yesterday, you said I had to forgive Phoebe so that I could let her go, and so, cut the tie Faust is using to torment me.”

  “I guess I said something like that. I’m no expert, though, Mark.” She took a deep breath. “And what we saw today. Rivera. I don’t know if anything would make Faust forget his interest in you. Rivera’s transformation was aimed to hurt you.”

  “It succeeded.”

  She linked arms with him.

  Her sympathy almost silenced him. The storminess of the ocean was easing some of the storm in his heart, and he wanted to let things go. But he couldn’t. He was in the middle of this. Drowning in it. “It’s not so simple as forgiving and forgetting Phoebe. Most of those first intense loves crash and burn. People move on.”

  She looked up at him while the wind whipped her brown hair into a mess. She put up a hand to keep it out of her eyes.

  “Kissing you, yesterday. You’re real, Clancy. Genuine. And you were right. You deserve a man who can be totally there for you.”

  She dropped her hand and let her windswept hair hide her face.

  He brushed her hair to one side, his fingers lingering against the softness of her skin. “When I look back, I have two equally painful realities to choose between. With Phoebe, either I fell in love with a woman who’d sold her soul for celebrity status. Or, loving me and being loved by me wasn’t enough, and she sold her soul for something I couldn’t give her.” His mouth twisted as he asked the question that had tortured him for seven years. “Did I fail her?”

  “No.”

  He released her and turned away. Too easy an absolution was worthless.

  She moved in front of him, forcing him to look at her.

  He shook his head, feeling worse to see her empathetic pain. “You accused me of not being over Phoebe, of not letting her go. I don’t love her, but how can I let her go? Not when…do you know what selling her soul means? Do you know where her soul is now, what she’s suffering?”

  Clancy flinched. She hadn’t considered Phoebe at all, not as another victim. She’d dismissed the woman too readily as a villainess, but…the answer to his question was that her soul was in Hell. In Hell! No wonder Mark couldn’t let Phoebe go.

  “I’ve been searching for an answer.” His expression was bleak, old anguish etching lines in his face. “Has a soul ever been redeemed from Hell?”

  She’d been to church that morning, but religion had no answers. Her training in magic provided no answers. “I don’t know.”

  “Nor do I,” he said in a low voice. He gazed out at the ocean. “Her body is dead. I saw her die. Phoebe’s mom arranged her cremation. I went to the funeral service on crutches.”

  Clancy remembered. She’d seen his wounded image all over the media at the time.

  “But what if she’s still aware? What if something that is Phoebe is trapped somewhere, being tortured by Faust?” The question was certainly torturing Mark.

  “We’ll ask Gilda,” Clancy said.

  “I’ve asked. I asked her predecessor. They say her soul is gone and to consider her dead.”

  She had no words or comfort to offer. Mark strode along the hard-packed sand of the beach, and she hurried to keep up with him.

  “And now, to see Rivera looking like Phoebe…” He ran.

  Clancy watched him. He attracted attention. He wasn’t in exercise gear, but in a jersey shirt and jeans, his boots thudding on the sand. He ran to escape his thoughts, but they’d go with him.

  She felt the thunder of the geo-forces here and flowing beneath the ocean floor. Her magic wanted to reach out to Mark, to save him somehow.

  But who they really needed to save was Phoebe’s soul, trapped in Hell. Was it even possible?

  Chapter 9

  While Mark ran, the clouds returned, darkening the day and lowering the temperature. Clancy tucked her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket and turned h
er back to the wind, but she was still cold when he came back to her.

  “Sorry.” He was breathing fast, but otherwise his hard run didn’t show. He tugged her hands out of her pockets and warmed them between his. “I should have left you the key to the SUV.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  His mouth compressed, denting the skin at the corners. He didn’t argue, though. He simply walked fast with her back to the SUV and switched on its heater.

  “Mark, I’m fine.”

  He shook his head, unconvinced. Instead of putting the SUV in gear, he stared out the windscreen. “I keep seeing her. Rivera, Phoebe.”

  “Do you want to go back to the studio?” Clancy thought it would be a bad idea, not only for him, but because Gilda didn’t want them there. Now that Clancy was colder and calm, she couldn’t believe how nearly she’d challenged the Collegium’s chief demonologist.

  “No. Let’s go home.”

  Good. She had questions, but not ones she wanted to ask Mark. She’d save some for Doris. Questions like whether Doris’s elderly priest friend could exorcise Rivera’s face and body back to its original state? However, given Gilda’s contained freak-out over it, Clancy suspected it was a new and unwelcome demonic achievement.

  How would Rivera cope with no longer resembling herself? How could she explain the change? Had even her fingerprints changed? What about her DNA? How deep was the transformation?

  Standing by the cold Pacific Ocean, Clancy had had too much time to think through the broader and panic-inducing consequences of the transformation Faust had achieved.

  The demon had bragged yesterday of contracting humans to lend their bodies for demonic possession. But now it seemed demons might be able not only to enter random people’s bodies, but to alter them out of all recognition.

  Demons could soon be walking among them, looking like the President of the USA or a trusted doctor, like anyone at all. They would wreak unbelievable havoc.

  Perhaps, now, Gilda might take seriously Mark’s research and the counterspell he’d drafted. On the other hand, perhaps she’d totally ignore him to call in her preferred, Collegium experts. After all, this was a potential global catastrophe: demons wandering Earth freely.