Portals were rare, scattered through the world, and enabled near-instantaneous travel between them. A porter handed a person into the in-between, and the porter at the site where the person was to emerge, hauled them out. The whole process took ten seconds, maximum. But those few seconds were completely disorienting.
Porters possessed a special magic talent. For them, the in-between made sense and they could navigate it. For everyone else, it had neither up nor down, vision kaleidoscoped, and sound had no meaning.
The Los Angeles porter was an artist in his late fifties, dark-skinned and gray-haired with an anxious frown. His artwork and three half-finished paintings filled the sunroom at the back of the house through which Clancy and Mark entered. He’d evidently been told to expect them. Otherwise his look-away spells and other protections would have had Clancy and Mark driving past the 1920s bungalow that covered the portal, unaware it was there.
“Sorry to rush you,” he said, having introduced himself as Oscar Tsonga and wiped his hands on a clean rag. “My niece is having her first baby and the whole family is rushing to the hospital.” He galloped down wide wooden stairs to the basement. The portal shimmered silver and faintly pink in the center of the floor. “Paul,” he shouted to the New York porter. “Handing through Mark and Clancy.”
“Go on, then.”
Oscar rolled his eyes, gripped Mark’s hand, and Mark stepped into the silvery pink pool and vanished.
“I hope your niece has a healthy, happy baby,” Clancy said.
“From your lips to God’s ears.” Oscar handed her through.
The New York porter was nowhere near as pleasant. Paul O’Halloran was a bit younger than Oscar, and a sleaze. Like most people, even those with magic, Clancy had seldom used a portal. Travelling that way was rare and expensive. However, the couple of times speed had been of an essence to get to Collegium headquarters, she’d been forced to deal with Paul. Even his hand felt slimy. She released it as soon as she was safely out of the portal and inside the basement beneath his short-stay hotel.
“Thanks.” Mark was equally brief. He caught Clancy’s elbow and had her moving up the cheap concrete steps while her head was still spinning from the chaos in-between.
She scrubbed her hand against her jeans, then paused in the main hallway by the front door to put on her jacket.
Mark shrugged on his coat but didn’t button it.
They had to walk a couple of blocks and they’d be at Collegium headquarters.
She wrapped her yak’s wool violet scarf around her neck, and he opened the front door. New York’s winter chill and smog engulfed them. They dodged around other pedestrians equally as morose and hurried. Once, Mark slipped and had to grab at a streetlight.
Her boots were sturdier than his shoes, but Clancy still watched how she walked. Her breath fogged on the air. “Who wouldn’t rather live in LA than here?” she asked with a half-laugh.
Mark showed no humor. “You made the right choice.”
She’d chosen to quit the Collegium and come home. Now, she was heading back to where she’d never been good enough. If Mark had serious doubts about the wisdom of his actions today, she had minor squaggles—regrets and apprehension mixed.
The Collegium suddenly loomed in front of them. To the mundane, non-magical world, it looked like any other modern building built of glass, steel and concrete. Slipping into mage sight, Clancy saw waveringly the magic woven into and warding it. Mundanes knew the Collegium as a think tank on international affairs. The cover story was a solid one and Collegium staff put effort into maintaining it, often hosting conferences and meetings on the premises. On the public floors, that is.
Walking beside Mark, she climbed the front steps and the automated glass door slid open, inviting them in. The air was warm and dry. Clancy glanced straight at the reception desk, but her friend Thomas wasn’t on it. She didn’t know if she was glad or sorry.
Mark shrugged off his coat, folding it over his arm as he walked to the desk.
The woman at it, late fifties and exceedingly well-groomed, assessed him and Clancy trailing behind him. “Good morning. May I help you?” Her name badge read, “Suleen”.
“Good morning, Suleen. My name is Mark Yarren. Ms. Gilda Ursu is expecting us.” He didn’t introduce Clancy and he didn’t mention Gilda’s title of chief demonologist. A wise move, the latter, given that mundanes might overhear him.
“Mr. Yarren. Yes, Gilda said to expect you. Ms. Ramirez?” Suleen looked beyond Mark to Clancy. Evidently she’d been briefed. “Gilda requested that Mr. Yarren meet with her alone.”
Clancy felt hot in her jacket, flushed with the change in temperature from the street and from what felt like a snub, even if her rational side suggested that Gilda simply wanted to keep the summoning spell simple. She loosened her scarf. “I’ll wait here.” She smiled at Mark who seemed inclined to protest.
He scanned the foyer, taking in the mix of chairs, tables and more comfortable lounges and armchairs, as well as a small, self-service coffee bar. “If you’re sure.”
“I expect I’ll find someone I know.” Not all her memories of the Collegium were bad ones. She had friends, here. “Good luck.”
He nodded, and walked off to the bank of elevators to press a call button.
Suleen watched him enter an elevator and the doors close. “Neville requested that I inform him of your arrival.” Some of the receptionist’s perfect manner eased. Clancy, in a sense, was one of the Collegium family, even if she’d attempted to divorce herself from it.
“Great,” she said sourly in response to Suleen’s news.
A glimmer of what might have been sympathy crossed the receptionist’s face as she reached for the phone.
Clancy wandered off a short distance. No point in sitting down. Neville would request her attendance via Suleen.
So she was surprised when Suleen replaced the phone and merely smiled at her. Two minutes later, Clancy had her answer. Neville, himself, emerged from an elevator.
Anger that she’d buried overnight rose up in her at the sight of his self-assured expression and shabby, comfortable clothes. How dare this smug man, so sure of his importance, discuss her with Jeremy. “Neville,” she said in lieu of a more congenial greeting.
“Good morning, Clancy. I’m glad to have this chance to talk with you. Shall we grab a coffee?”
Mark rode up in the elevator to the floor the demonology department occupied and exited to a very ordinary corridor, the kind that might be seen in any college or university. Flyers were pinned to a noticeboard, advertising various events and someone trying to re-home a hamster. A guy barely twenty hurried up wearing jeans and a concert t-shirt over a long-sleeved white t-shirt. His red hair was too long and looked like it needed a wash. Student, for sure.
“Mark Yarren? This way.” The kid hurried back the way he’d come, and Mark followed.
They stopped at a closed door, the guy knocked, and Gilda shouted, “Come in.”
The kid opened the door, Mark stepped past him, and the kid closed the door, staying outside. Once inside, Mark could see why. This was a demonologist’s workroom, and set up for high level magic. His own magic was minimal, but even he saw the powerful magics shimmering up from the pentagram and circle drawn on the floor.
He couldn’t help but remember how badly a similar summoning had gone for Rivera. “Good morning, Gilda.”
“Morning.” She introduced him to two other men in the room.
He shook hands without bothering to memorize their names or faces. Since no one offered to take his coat, he draped it over the back of a chair against the side wall.
“Actually, that’s the seat we’d like you to take, Mark.” Gilda pushed up the sleeves of her brown sweat suit top worn over jeans and sneakers. Evidently, this was her work uniform. The two men wore business casual.
He unbuttoned his jacket, hitched the knees of his expensive suit, and sat.
Immediately, the candles at the five points of the penta
gram ignited.
“Let us begin.” Gilda began chanting.
Clancy and Neville sat down at a small table in the foyer with their coffees, and she felt the privacy bubble he enveloped them in. Great. She really wasn’t going to like what he had to say. So she went first.
“I’m not going to train with Jeremy,” she said defiantly.
Neville sipped his latte, and regarded her thoughtfully.
She resisted the temptation to fidget. She could sip coffee just as noncommittally. She tried it and burned her tongue. She put the cup down. “I know you and Jeremy discussed my lack of control of my magic. He told me, yesterday.”
“We did, among other things.”
Clancy ignored that ominous rider, among other things. She had her own statement to make. “I won’t train with Jeremy. I don’t think he’s the right teacher for me.”
“And you’re beyond that stage,” Neville said, shocking the fight out of Clancy. He set his latte down. “Besides which, you’re quite right. Jeremy would not be a good trainer for you.”
Was that sympathy in her old boss’s eyes? The coffee she’d just drunk churned sourly in her stomach. She braced herself as he continued.
“In fact, what Jeremy and I discussed was that you have more power than I realized. And since that discussion, I’ve learned that you chased off not just a demon, but a demon lord.” He sat back and considered her. “Many geomages stumble at channeling their power in a manner that attacks rather than brushes past demons, whose very nature is antithetical to our earth magic.”
Clancy nodded, only half-aware of doing so. That matched what she’d found in Mark’s books about geomagic. On the other hand, she hadn’t realized her efforts against Faust were in any way extraordinary. She’d thought that Doris and Jeremy could do the same.
Neville rubbed the back of his neck. The collar of his olive shirt was old and limp above his gray sweater. His ancient khaki corduroy trousers were hidden by the table. “I’m an old man with an established way of doing things. I taught my approach to magic to Jeremy, and it suits him. But I am not a fool. You have as much or more power than your brother.”
She went cold with shock.
“My regret is that here at the Collegium we failed to help you discover and control it. You’ve been left to do that yourself. I advised Jeremy to monitor your development. I did not tell him to interfere.”
“Or to train me,” she concluded, groping dimly for what he implied.
Then Neville stated it outright. “Sibling rivalry.”
“No. I’ve never competed with Jeremy, never challenged him.”
Neville smiled, faintly, experienced and rueful. “Maybe he wants to keep things that way.” He got up arthritically, moving slowly. “I’m sorry, my dear.” He abandoned his coffee half-drunk and walked away.
The privacy bubble burst with his departure. The babble of other conversations, the scuff of feet, the hiss of the coffee machine, a chair scraping, all intruded, and bounced off Clancy’s preoccupation. She was locked inside a world of hurt.
Doris had been gentle. So had Neville, in his own way. But neither could mitigate the pain of the truth they delivered. Jeremy—
Oh, thank God. There was Mark striding toward her. Clancy jumped up, thrusting aside her own issues. “Did they—” just in time she remembered their partly mundane audience.
Mark understood what she meant. A muscle pulsed by the tense line of his mouth. “Faust didn’t turn up.”
“But…” But Gilda was the Collegium’s chief demonologist. She had the skills, power and resources to control any demon…didn’t she? Clancy checked her watch. Her conversation with Neville hadn’t been long, but over three hours had gone past.
Mark shoved his arms impatiently into the sleeves of his cashmere coat. “It didn’t work. They don’t have Faust’s true name, and his tie to me is evidently weaker than they thought.” He adjusted the collar of his coat, wrenching at it. Then his frown deepened and focused. “What’s happened? You look stricken.”
An archaic, poetic, but apt word. She was stricken. Struck to the heart. “Nothing to matter. Not now.”
He held her jacket for her as she fumbled to put it on. “This damn place.” He was furious and impatient, but his hands were gentle as he untucked her hair from the collar of the leather jacket.
“It’s not the Collegium’s fault.” She meant to stay silent, but the truth escaped her. “Neville thinks I have more power than Jeremy.”
“Do you?”
She gasped. Her answer had so many implications, not least because then she couldn’t hide from her decision.
Mark clasped her hand, giving it a tiny, comforting shake. He didn’t press her to respond. Perhaps her gasp had told him everything?
They walked to the exit. The foyer was busy. It was lunch time in New York, late morning back in California. The hurrying crowds parted around them. If any were people Clancy knew, she didn’t see them.
Mark waited till they were outside and descending the steps. He had his own concerns, demonic ones, but in the comparative privacy of the street, he addressed hers. “You didn’t realize your power. Okay, you were young, learning. But, why didn’t anyone else recognize it?”
“I think Grandma knows. She told me I’d have to choose.” Clancy shivered.
He stopped near a small, hole-in-the-wall bakery.
It smelled heavenly, or should have. Clancy had the sensation of a wave cresting and about to crash over her.
“To choose,” Mark repeated. “To continue to be less than you are so that Jeremy can be more than he is.”
The wave broke, flooding her with pain, but releasing her from that awful feeling of being locked away. That’s what shock did to a person. Mark had broken the metaphorical glass of her prison, and rescued her.
She laughed shakily, without humor. “Put like that it sounds ridiculous.”
“So do most family dynamics.”
She leaned her head a moment against his shoulder because he had truly understood, and he’d given her the respect of trusting that she could handle a starkly honest discussion. The pain of Jeremy trying to contain her power so that he could inflate the importance of his own was less than the fact that she and her family had colluded, even unthinkingly, in that action. “If I try to change things…it’s not just magic. There’ll be family dramas.” Her parents would side with Jeremy. She accepted that. Her whole life had been shaped by that knowledge, however subconscious it had been. “I don’t want to take California from him.”
“But you could?”
She recalled the geo-forces flowing to and through her in the chamber beneath the cottage—and Jeremy’s reluctance to enter it. “Yes.”
Mark nodded, and changed the subject. “We should eat, hungry or not.” He bought them both savory pocket breads and they ate as they walked slowly back to the portal.
Oscar, the Los Angeles porter, wouldn’t be there to receive them, but he’d said he was calling a courier to fill in for him. Couriers were people with the talent to navigate the in-between, but without a portal of their own.
They halted at the corner of the street where Paul O’Halloran ran the New York portal. Mark screwed up the wrapper from his bread and tossed it in a trash can. “At some level, you knew.”
“Pardon?” She had half her bread still to eat.
“You came home saying you wouldn’t use your magic, not at all. Part of you knew that you couldn’t use your magic and remain subservient to Jeremy. Your greater power would be exposed.”
“Subservient. Nice word.” Not. She threw her uneaten bread into the trash can.
Mark stared at a pigeon pecking the sidewalk near them, its feathers fluffed against the cold. “It’s amazing the truths we hide from ourselves. Power, and the fear or lack of it, warps our thinking.”
Okay. Now, she didn’t think he was talking about her.
Nor did she think Faust would be obliging enough to shelve his demonic plans while she dealt
with her emotional crisis. So she made a huge effort and squashed down her churning misery. “What happened when Gilda attempted to summon Faust?” It was an invitation for Mark to share his thoughts.
“Nothing. I sat on the fringe as Gilda and two colleagues attempted spell after spell. I felt the spells move through me.”
“Really? Ugh.” Demonology was an awful magic.
“It was an interesting experience.” He shook his shoulders, as if shrugging off the memory. “We need to get back to LA. I have a theory that I want to put into practice, and I need to do it before Gilda does summon and banish Faust.”
“But you said she couldn’t contact the demon.”
“Through me.” Mark gave her a darkly sardonic look as they closed the distance to the portal. “Gilda has some preparations to make, but then she’s also returning to LA. She’s going to latch onto Faust via the traces he left of himself in transforming Rivera.”
Clancy halted at the door to Paul O’Halloran’s short-stay hotel. “But last night Gilda said Rivera is too fragile for a summoning.”
The disillusion in his blue eyes darkened them to indigo. “Apparently, circumstances have changed.”
“But Rivera would still have to give her permission if they want her involvement.”
He pushed open the hotel door. “If Gilda offers Rivera even the smallest hope of getting her own body back, do you think she can refuse?”
It was ruthlessness so sharp and calculated it verged on cruelty. She hurried after Mark as he strode to the stairs down to the portal. “Do you think you can save Rivera?”
“No.” He halted on the stairs and turned to look up to her. “But I think I can rescue Phoebe’s soul.”
Chapter 11
Clancy and Mark stepped out of the in-between into the basement of Oscar’s bungalow basement.
The courier receiving them was a Malaysian woman about Clancy’s age, but shy.
Even in her preoccupation, Clancy had to ask, “Has Oscar’s niece had her baby?”
Hollywood Demon (The Collegium Book 6) Page 15