Hollywood Demon (The Collegium Book 6)

by Schwartz, Jenny

  “Not yet.” The woman smiled. She stayed in the basement, while Clancy and Mark saw themselves out. Evidently, they weren’t the only travelers expected.

  They walked through the sunroom on their way out, weaving a path through Oscar’s partly finished paintings. They were portraits. Excellent ones. Even without fees for using his portal, Oscar could have made a living from his art. An elderly couple smiled gently at one another on a large canvas. A smaller square canvas portrayed a cat curled on a newspaper.

  It reminded Clancy of her own artistic ambitions. It was possible to run parallel lives of magic and painting.

  Something to consider after they’d rescued Phoebe.

  Inside the SUV, she turned to Mark. “Tell me.”

  He pulled into the heavy LA traffic, driving with barely half his attention, heading back to the estate. “I had three hours to sit and think while feeling the demonology spells scour through me. I realized that even though I lack the power to manipulate it, my tiny spark of magic doesn’t prevent me being sensitive to it.”

  He shot her a quick glance before the traffic demanded his attention. “You don’t get it. I’ve spent seven years tracking Faust and feeling guilty because I lacked the magic to retrieve Phoebe’s soul from Hell, or to prevent Faust taking it. I couldn’t convince the Collegium to help, and the non-Collegium demonologists I hired all failed.” He paused. “Rivera was the first I hired just to banish Faust. The other demonologists fed me various lines of trash about calling Phoebe’s soul home.”

  Clancy felt cold at how many years of disillusionment and frustration he’d endured.

  He thumped the steering wheel. “I wasn’t a complete idiot to fall for their spiels. There was some truth in what they said. Remember, last night, I read you those paragraphs from the seventeenth century heretic priest. He posited Hell not as a place of punishment, but as a realm antithetical to our own. What if demons aren’t evil? What if it’s simply that those we encounter on Earth are the ones with the really bad judgement to attempt to break the rules and enter our world?”

  She unwound her scarf which was too warm here in LA and scratched her neck. “I don’t see how that helps with Phoebe.”

  But Mark was confident of his reasoning. It sounded in his voice which had life and hope, again. Determination rang in it. “Her soul doesn’t belong in Hell. Faust must be holding it there, somehow. But not quite in Hell. That’s why the demonologists I hired couldn’t find Phoebe’s soul in Hell. Faust is using her human soul as his bridge to this world. That’s why he can manifest at will. She’s the means of opening Earth to him.”

  “That’s quite an hypothesis.” It took Clancy’s breath away. Phoebe’s soul as a bridge between realms. The traffic ground to a halt as she thought. Mark didn’t interrupt her. “On Saturday, at Rivera’s studio, everything Faust told us about coding and demonic tourism, and then, his transformation of Rivera’s flesh…”

  “Is both true and a distraction,” Mark concluded as the traffic started moving again. He signaled for a side street and detoured around the road works ahead. “Sitting in the demonology department’s workroom, watching them struggle, it was as if…it was like what you just experienced regarding Jeremy.”

  “What? How?” He’d lost her. Shocked her.

  “You didn’t realize how much power you had, or if some part of you did, you buried it. You had more reason than me—and I’m not claiming that I have magical powers I’ve just discovered—but I’ve spent seven years obsessed with how magic could defeat a demon and save Phoebe. It hasn’t. Calling Phoebe’s soul out of wherever she is stuck between Earth and Hell isn’t about hammering at the problem with raw magic. It’s about using what I do have.”

  He showed all the fervor of a new religious convert, or a man about to run down the road shouting, “Eureka!” Then again, running down the road would probably be quicker than their current, stalled-again progress.

  Since they were stationery, he rested an elbow on the window and looked at her. “Faust has used our own fears and insecurities against us. Rivera is the obvious example with her transformation. But Phoebe…I think she’s holding herself in Limbo. She’s stuck in despair, believing that she can’t escape, even believing that she deserves her suffering. I have to call her home. Demons terrify us so that our fear defeats us.”

  All of which might be true, but Clancy didn’t think rescuing Phoebe’s soul would be as simple as Mark, in the fervor of his revelation, hoped it would be. On the other hand, it was obvious that she wouldn’t be able to talk him out of whatever he intended to try. And, she had her own sudden insecurity to combat. “How do you intend to call Phoebe’s soul? Through your love for her?” And if he loved Phoebe still, what had Clancy shared with him, yesterday? She’d felt so close to him.

  “I don’t love, Phoebe.” He rejected the idea immediately, but not with the sort of over-statement that would make her think that he protested too much. Instead, he sounded as if it were an option so unlikely as to be instantly discarded.

  The tension of rejection that had tightened Clancy’s muscles relaxed.

  “I’m not going to use an emotional tie at all,” he continued. “I felt Gilda failing to catch the signature of Faust’s presence through me. I want something concrete. Like to like. It was the porter’s paintings that gave me the idea.” The traffic started moving again, painfully slowly accelerating to two thirds of the speed limit

  Oscar’s paintings?

  Understanding dawned. “Portraits.” She considered the idea. It had a long history. Paintings that possessed and enchanted their owners were legendary and powerful.

  “Photos,” Mark said. “It all comes back to the old knowledge, the one that my great-grandfather wrote into his spell, that photos steal a person’s soul. Faust has frayed that original spell. I intend to work around it to steal back Phoebe’s soul using one of her photos.”

  “How?”

  “A homeopathic spell. From the infinitesimal trace of Phoebe in the photo to the reality of her trapped soul. If I open the path for her, she can return. She’s the bridge between our realms.”

  And Faust would be defending that bridge. But Clancy stayed silent. She was puzzling over Mark’s thinking, adding to it, altering it. “If this is about calling Phoebe back into a likeness of herself…”

  “Rivera!” He swung the SUV in a screeching U-turn.

  “She’ll never agree to it,” Clancy warned.

  “She’d just be a channel for Phoebe’s soul. It wouldn’t possess her.”

  Clancy shivered. She would never consent to such a procedure. The wrongness of it… “How can you be sure Phoebe wouldn’t try to stay?”

  “Gilda’s a demonologist. They have exorcism skills. If Phoebe tries to stay, Gilda can kick her on. Hell, Rivera could do that herself.” The road to Rivera’s yoga studio was only moderately busy. Mark planted his foot on the accelerator.

  Clancy folded her arms, hugging herself. She felt cold despite the warm sweater she wore. She’d shed her leather jacket before entering the car. It slithered off her knee as Mark took a corner too fast and sharp.

  “Sorry,” he said laconically. “We have to beat Gilda to Rivera. Who knows what summoning and banishing Faust through Rivera will do to her appearance. She might revert to her old self.”

  “If she’s lucky,” Clancy muttered.

  He halted joltingly at a red traffic light. “I’m not heartless, Clancy. But I’ve lived this nightmare for seven years. If I can free Phoebe’s soul, I’ll be free, too.”

  “At what price?”

  He looked at her.

  “Even magic has a price, Mark.”

  “I’ll pay it.” He shifted into gear and drove through the green light. “I’ll pay any price.”

  Rivera’s yoga studio looked too damn normal. The café beside it was quieter on a Monday than during the weekend, but a few people were eating lunch in the courtyard.

  Clancy told herself that the sense of darkness hanging
over the studio building was the shadow of a cloud. The day was patchy. Sunshine then clouds. Rain before bedtime.

  Mark ignored the “closed” sign and hammered on the front door.

  “Why would she even be here?” Clancy asked. “She’ll be at home.”

  The door opened. Alek, the demonologist they’d met here last time, blocked the doorway.

  Mark pushed past him. “Gilda said she’d meet Rivera here where Faust last manifested. Rivera?”

  “Why are you here?” Alek shut the door with a bang. He followed Mark down the corridor, ignoring Clancy completely. “Gilda phoned. She said you have no connection to the demon—apart from your obsession with it.”

  “I don’t have a connection, but Rivera does.” Mark found Rivera in the small kitchen, sitting at a table, drinking a cup of tea. The air smelled of peppermint.

  Clancy moved just inside the room and leaned back against a wall. The fridge was at her elbow.

  “Rivera.” Mark pulled out a chair and sat on her left at the small, square table.

  A smile twisted Rivera’s Phoebe-mask face. She replaced the cup she drank from precisely in its saucer. “You grimace when you look at me.”

  Mark’s back was to Clancy and the doorway. She couldn’t see his face, but she expected Rivera was right.

  “Alek has been working with me.” Rivera hitched up the gaping collar of the yoga shirt she wore. Her clothes on her transformed body were too large. Phoebe had been slender. Elven, the gushing media had called her. “Would you believe Alek is a psychiatrist as well as a demonologist? I get shrinked—shrunken?—two ways, body and mind.”

  Mark leaned forward. “Rivera, I need your help.”

  Alek pushed off from the counter he’d stood against, watching, and sat opposite Mark at the square table. “Whatever you’re planning…no.”

  From her position by the door to the kitchen, Clancy heard the front door open. The long central corridor enabled her to see who entered: Gilda, with two men who carried bags, probably filled with demonology equipment.

  Gilda noticed Clancy peering out of the kitchen. “What are you doing, here?”

  “Rivera, please, listen to me.” Mark grasped the woman’s hands. His back was to the doorway, Phoebe’s to the side wall where a calendar and whiteboard hung, and Alek’s back was to the sink as he faced the door. The empty chair at the table had its back to the empty space in front of the window that looked out to nothing more exciting than the rear fence.

  Rivera looked down at Mark holding her hands, and her mouth twisted, thinning the pout of her Phoebe-lips. “You must want something badly.” She glanced up as Gilda and the two men entered the room, and her gaze flickered back to Alek. She withdrew her hands from Mark’s hold. Her fingers trembled as she wrapped them around her teacup. “Way to make a girl feel outnumbered.”

  Clancy locked her hands behind her back, one hand gripping her other upper arm. The tension in the room was skyrocketing, and Clancy was none too certain any of them were doing the right thing.

  Gilda put the bag she carried onto the empty chair. “Rivera, you agreed to assist us.” It wasn’t just a reminder or a conversational opening gambit. Gilda glared at Mark. “You should leave.”

  The two men who’d entered with her crowded the doorway, making Clancy feel squashed. If she felt she couldn’t breathe, Rivera had to be near breaking point.

  “I need your help,” Mark said to Rivera. “With your resemblance to her, I can call Phoebe back from Hell with a homeopathic spell.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Gilda snapped.

  Mark turned on her. “I’m not. Faust is using Phoebe’s soul as a bridge from Hell to our realm. To stop him we need to rescue Phoebe’s soul.” He outlined his reasoning, being more concise than when explaining it to Clancy on the drive from the portal.

  Listening, Gilda put her bag from the chair to the floor, and sat.

  Alek protested. “Gilda, you can’t possibly think this is a good idea. Rivera’s psyche might never recover.”

  While the demonologists and Mark argued, Rivera’s gaze unexpectedly searched out Clancy squashed in her corner by the refrigerator. “Should I do this?”

  Rivera’s question silenced the whole room.

  Mark swiveled in his chair to stare at Clancy, to whom the question had been so obviously directed. His frown ordered her to say yes.

  Clancy looked past him to Rivera in her Phoebe-transformation. “No.”

  “Clancy!” Mark’s shout was a cry of protest at her betrayal. His chair toppled as he stood, and he caught it one-handed. “This is Phoebe’s one chance.”

  “I knew Phoebe in high school,” Rivera said quietly. Not that anyone was paying her much attention. Everyone was talking at once, giving their opinion of what needed to be done. “Two foster kids, abused by the system and out to survive.”

  Alek got up and grabbed Gilda’s bag, unzipping it. “I’m here because I agreed to do a summoning and banishment. Nothing more, but that has to be done. So let’s do it.”

  “It could mean losing Phoebe forever,” Mark shouted. “You’ll banish Faust but he’ll keep his bridge. All of his plans will continue.”

  “I say we summon this demon,” one of the unnamed men had a deep voice. It rolled through the room. “And we force the bastard to tell us his plans and to free this Phoebe you’re concerned about.”

  “Well.” A new voice made itself heard. “As amusing as this all is, there’s no need for such fuss just to talk with me.” Faust manifested by the window.

  Gilda moved fast, leaving her chair to stand and face the demon.

  Clancy felt stifled. She was breathing brimstone. All of the demonologists were murmuring spells, their magic thick in the air.

  No, not all the demonologists. Rivera sat silent and still. She even dropped her gaze from Faust to stare into her teacup.

  Magic boiled in the air. To give the Collegium its due, it trained its mages well. The four Collegium demonologists joined their magic and flung it at Faust. The power of the banishment spell howled and ripped at the room, making the walls shudder.

  Faust stood at the focal point of the blast—and smiled.

  “Mark?” The voice came from Rivera, but it wasn’t hers. Rivera, for whatever reason, possibly to honor an old friendship, had contacted Phoebe herself. She was a demonologist and she’d forged this connection.

  Clancy hadn’t heard that tone, the caressing intonation on Mark’s name, in seven years.

  The voice was hesitant, but real. Phoebe was present.

  Faust lunged for the table, and the demonologists’ magic held him back. They mightn’t yet have managed to banish him, but they could and did block him. Alek’s narrow face paled with the effort.

  “Hold him,” Gilda barked, and fumbled for something in her bag.

  Phoebe-in-Rivera’s-body and Mark ignored all of them. Phoebe smiled sadly. “I’m grateful for this chance, Mark, to explain and to set you free.”

  He choked. That was what he wanted to do for her.

  Clancy reached for the geo-forces that ran deep underground. If the demonologists couldn’t banish Faust, then, perhaps, she might be able to at least chase him away again. Mark needed this time with Phoebe.

  And Phoebe needed it, too. Tears leaked out of Rivera’s eyes as she looked at Mark. “I always felt like a fraud. That one day you’d see the real me—and I guess you did. I tried to trade your soul for mine.”

  He clasped her hand, and Phoebe-Rivera’s fingers clung to his. “You were scared,” he said.

  “Out of my mind.” Phoebe gave a hiccoughing laugh and took a shuddering breath. She tossed her blonde hair as she’d done in her movies and fashion shoots, flirting with the camera.

  But this time, Clancy saw the bravado behind the confident gesture and her heart broke a bit.

  Evidently, so did Mark. “I forgive you, Phoebe,” he said, his voice strong and sincere.

  Phoebe-Rivera shook, her skin crawled and her bones re-s
haped.

  Clancy tore her gaze from that horror to discover what was happening in the battle between Faust and the demonologists. For Rivera to be losing the transformation, Faust’s power had to be loosening its grip.

  The demon knew it, too. He shrieked and leapt like a ferret after a mouse, intent on attacking Mark. Mark who was completely oblivious, focused on Phoebe-Rivera.

  I have to protect him. Clancy’s geomagic surged, but was pushed aside as other magic, demonologist magic, exploded.

  Gilda raised her hands and Faust rose, suspended, then spiraling faster and faster. Boom! In mage sight, the room shimmered copper and blood. Then cleared.

  Faust was gone.

  “Banished,” Gilda said as she collapsed onto her chair.

  “He’ll return.” Mark’s voice was gravelly. He scrubbed his hands over his face.

  At the head of the table, Rivera had her own face and form again. She sat straight, tears streaming down her face, seemingly unaware of Alek taking her hand and talking soothingly.

  “Phoebe is free.” Mark moved clumsily, like a paralyzed man recovering. He reached Clancy and drew her into a tight hug. “You were right. I shouldn’t have asked this of Rivera.” He twisted to look at Rivera. “But thank you.”

  “I did it for Phoebe. She had everything I wanted…and then, to be trapped by Faust.” Rivera shuddered. “He was using her. Too many people used Phoebe. I’m glad you loved her.” And then, Rivera was gone, and a door, probably to her private retreat room, slammed.

  “I’ll stay to be sure she’s okay and that Faust doesn’t return,” Alek said.

  “He’ll be too weak for a few days,” Gilda said, but she wasn’t arguing. She looked terrible, too, exhausted. “Mark, I apologize. It was only when Phoebe freed herself that Faust’s power collapsed. He was using her as…well, bridge mightn’t be the correct term, but it’ll do. We need to talk about your counterspell.”

  “Tomorrow.” He walked out with Clancy.

  Sunshine had never felt so good. She tipped her face to it. The geo-forces beneath her flowed and reached to her, comforted her like a cat stropping against her legs.