I missed my girlfriend.
CHAPTER 7
Upon arriving at my apartment, I discovered that I was not going back to bed anytime soon. Sofie was curled up in the middle cushion of my couch, looking for all the world as if she slept there every day. She did not. The witch-turned-cat lived with Trixie.
“Where’s Trixie?” I demanded, slamming the door shut behind me.
The cat blinked wide greenish-yellow eyes at me and yawned. I was ready to shake the answer out of her when she finally spoke. “At home in bed.”
“Then what the hell are you doing here? You scared the shit out of me!” I snarled, collapsing on the sofa beside her with my coat still on. As the adrenaline rushed out of my system, I found that I was so tired my body had begun to shake. The world had become a nonstop roller coaster and I longed for nothing more than a turn on the merry-go-round. Leaning my head back, I closed my eyes, willing my body to relax just a bit before I dragged myself back to my nice dark bedroom.
But I wasn’t going to get the blissful nothingness for a couple hours. Sofie moved beside me, her small, lithe body barely making indentions in the cushions as she walked over. She climbed into my lap and sat on my legs. Out of habit, I lifted my hand and gently scratched the top of her head. It had taken a little while, but I’d finally gotten over my hang-ups about treating the witch like a cat. If she was going to eat out of a cat food bowl on the floor, use a litter box, and lounge across every surface like she owned it, I was going to scratch her head every once in a while.
“What’s going on, Gage?” Sofie demanded, half purring her question.
“There’s a lot going on, Sof,” I sighed, dropping my hand back to the arm of the couch. “You’re going to have to be a little more specific than that.”
“Trixie. The elf. The woman you’re attempting to date, and rather poorly I might add.”
I glared down at the large Russian blue feline in my lap and briefly thought about punting her across the room. Even as a cat, the witch could get on my nerves. Hell, I think she’d gotten better at it since she’d been cursed by another witch. Stuck living among the rabble of the world, Sofie had seen it as her lot in this existence to manage my life—particularly my social life.
“What about Trixie? Did she send you here to talk to me?”
“No. I came to talk to you because she refuses to tell me what’s going on.” The cat rose up on her hind legs while pressing her front legs against my chest so that her face was now inches from mine. “For more than a week, she has made all these strange phone calls and been packing up her things. I’ve stuck by my promise to you to stay out of her head, but you need to tell me what’s going on.”
My stomach sank a little at her description, but then I wasn’t that surprised to hear of her preparations. I had hoped that Trixie might give me a little more time, but things kept getting worse instead of better. Could I really blame her? No, I thought, mentally sighing. “Trixie’s pregnant.”
“Oh!” Sofie looked genuinely surprised, or rather as surprised as a cat could look without the same human features. “Is that because of Gaia fixing that mess I made?”
“I like to think that I had something to do with it as well,” I snapped, but my anger slipped away almost as quickly as it appeared. “But yeah, Mother Nature helped too.” God, I was tired.
“Well, I’m sure this was something of a surprise, but it doesn’t seem as if either of you is particularly happy about it.”
“No, actually, we are happy.”
“Then is she planning to move in with you? Is that why she’s been packing?”
“No.”
“I don’t—”
“Trixie is planning to go back to her own people. She’s leaving Low Town.”
“I don’t understand. Why? I’m sure the doctors here could handle a pregnant elf just fine.”
“It’s not safe,” I murmured, wishing this conversation was finally over. It was like Sofie was determined to pull small strips of my flesh away with every question she wanted me to answer, and I was so exhausted from thinking about this.
“Low Town is safe enough.” Sofie dropped back to sit on my lap and I could easily imagine her frowning up at me. “Well, it’ll be safe as soon as the killer has been captured.”
“No, it’s not safe because of me.” Groaning, I picked up the cat and dropped her on the couch beside me before getting to my feet. I wandered into the kitchen and started preparing the coffeemaker. It was becoming clear that sleep was not going to happen today.
“Gage?”
“It’s because I’m a warlock. It’s because . . . I’m working for the Towers.”
“She can’t hold that against you! She knew what you were before you started dating,” Sofie argued angrily as she trotted into the kitchen after me. She jumped up on the counter. I immediately picked her up and put her on the floor again. Witch or not, I wasn’t going to have a cat on my kitchen counters. It was bad enough she liked to sprawl across my coffee table while watching TV.
“Yeah, well it’s different when it comes to a baby. She’s willing to take the risk herself, but not when it comes to the life of our child,” I explained as I filled the carafe with water.
The coffeemaker was old and one of the most basic models. No frills and no fancy gadgets to let me grind my own beans or whatever people did. All the same, I loved my coffeemaker because when I needed it, it produced liquid love filled with scalding heat and caffeine.
“But what about your rights? Don’t you have a say? Are you just going to let her leave?”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. I see her point. It’s been dangerous to be around me. The Grim Reaper, Simon’s attacks, the half dozen Tower attacks this fall, Reave, and now I’m involved in two different murder investigations. My life has become a natural disaster. The president is going to send in the National Guard at any second!” I took a deep breath and hit the on button. “You can’t safely raise a baby in a mess like that.”
“So you’re just giving up?”
I flashed her a weak smile as I reached up into the cabinet to grab a mug. “I never said that. I’m still trying to figure things out. I need to either fall off the Towers’ radar completely . . .”
“Or?” she prompted when I fell silent.
“Or I get rid of the Towers.”
“Even if I thought you could get rid of the Ivory Towers, I don’t necessarily think that it would fix everything. What about all those kids born with abilities? Part of the reason the Towers were erected was to give some guidance to those kids for their own safety.”
Bracing both my hands on the counter in front of me, I stepped back, stretching the muscles in my legs and my back. After I was sucked back into the Towers in September, I’d started going to the gym again, more as a way of burning off some of my anger and frustration than to get in shape. The recent chaos was keeping me away from the gym now and I felt stiff. If I could spend an hour on some of the machines, the fog from my head would finally clear.
“I don’t have any answers, Sofie. I wish I did, but I don’t,” I straightened and folded my arms over my chest as I watched coffee slowly drip into the carafe. “But I’m looking.”
“Is there anything I can help with?”
I hesitated. This wasn’t something I could take to Gideon. Sofie was far from the straight and narrow, doing some nasty things in her past with magic. She might have my answers.
But she was trying to mend her ways. She had even shown remorse about trying to kill off all the elves by making them infertile. The cat was also becoming far too tight with Gideon and I didn’t need her running off to tell Gideon what I was sure he had already begun to suspect.
It didn’t change the fact that I needed answers and I couldn’t exactly trust the source that I was using. Demons might not be permitted to lie in some strange twist of fate, but they were tricky bastards.
“I have a question about the symbol you saw on the wall down in my basement,�
� I started, trying to sound nonchalant. I kept my eyes on the steadily filling carafe while watching Sofie out of the corner of my eye.
The cat stood in the doorway to the kitchen and gave a little shudder. “That’s some nasty business, Gage.”
“You’ve said that before. What kind of nastiness am I dealing with? I got the symbol from Simon when I was studying under him. What kind of magic was Simon dealing in? Something forbidden?”
The cat sat on the carpet for a moment and then stood, pacing away from the kitchen and then back. If she had been a normal cat, it would have looked like she was begging for her bowl to be refilled, but Sofie killed that image when she opened her mouth. “There are few things that are forbidden within the Towers. I’m sure you know that.”
“Suspected it, but I liked to think the council had enough sense to draw the line somewhere,” I muttered.
“There are a couple forms of magic that were forbidden, and in general no one mucked around in them because they were too hard to control.”
“Death Magic.”
Sofie stopped, her head whipping around to face me. “Yes, but how did you know about that?”
“Long story. What about the symbol? It’s not Death Magic.”
“No, it’s not and it’s not technically forbidden. But it is extremely dangerous. I’ve heard of more witches and warlocks getting killed for messing with it. It never ends well.”
“You’re stalling.” Grabbing my mug, I filled it with freshly brewed coffee and sipped it. The precious liquid burned my tongue, the roof of my mouth, and all the way down my throat like I had just sucked down lava, but I welcomed it. The warmth seeped into my limbs, fighting back aches and pains. In a few minutes, the caffeine would start turning the gears in my brain. By the time I finished this cup, I’d be back to human status and could actually take a shower without drowning.
“The symbol opens a sort of doorway for a demon. That’s what’s guarding your basement,” she said cautiously, as if she was expecting me to freak out, and maybe I would have if I hadn’t already done that at Simon’s.
“Is it capable of coming all the way through the doorway?”
“No, it’s more complicated than that. It can’t come into our world, but it can send bits of its power through. It remains tied to the symbol. From what I’ve read, the demon’s power fills whatever open space it has. The larger the room and the longer the doorway is left open, the more powerful the demon becomes in our world. Your basement isn’t too large, so you’ve been able to manage it with minimal problems. Anything larger and I’m sure that it would have killed you.”
Unless it wanted something.
Simon’s rooms were easily three times the size of my basement and the demon had been running loose in those rooms for months. It would have been able to crush me in a heartbeat if it had wanted to, but it didn’t because it needed me to do something. It needed me to destroy Lilith.
“Gage, are you listening to me?” Sofie snapped.
I shook my head and smiled down at her before taking another drink of coffee. My mind had wandered for a second. “Sorry, Sof. I drifted off.”
“I said you need to get rid of that symbol. Change it to close the door permanently and then paint over it. You don’t need to be messing with that stuff. It’s dangerous.”
“More dangerous than dealing with the Towers every day? More dangerous than hunting down some psychopath bent on murdering pregnant women?” I demanded, nearly shouting.
Sofie didn’t flinch. She didn’t blink. “Yes. Yes it is.”
I made a dismissive noise as I topped off my mug and carried it into the living room. She didn’t understand. I was risking my life every day to maintain some semblance of peace and quiet in Low Town while people were constantly fighting to tear it apart. I was on the cusp of losing the woman I loved as well as the child she carried. I needed to make this city safe for her. And the power I’d been searching for was finally at my fingertips.
There had to be a way to tighten my control over the demon so that it couldn’t lash out at me. There had to be a better way to tap that power so that the Ivory Towers could finally be taken down. I just had to figure out how I was going to do it, preferably before Lilith came to steal me away.
“What would happen if you put the symbol in the middle of a street?”
“Chaos. Total destruction. I can’t imagine there’s a warlock or witch powerful enough to shut the door again once it was opened.”
I nodded, holding my mug between my hands as I sat on the edge of the couch. I’d suspected as much. This had a high likelihood of ending in disaster if I went down this path. Sofie was right in that I needed to close the door at Asylum and at Simon’s before I made things worse. But just the idea of walking away from this choice left me wanting to scream. If I could control the demon, I could finally get rid of the Towers and keep Trixie. Yet, if I lost control, I’d destroy the world.
“You’ll get rid of the symbol, right?” Sofie demanded, hopping up in the coffee table so that her face was now only inches from mine. Her wide eyes stared into mine and I could even feel a small push in my brain as if she were either trying to read my thoughts or simply give me a mental shove in the right direction.
“Yeah, I’ll take care of it. As soon as things settle down.”
“Sooner than that, Gage,” Sofie said in a warning voice. “Go to the parlor early today. It won’t take long to shut down the spell and cover it up. Less than an hour. I can help you.”
“Yeah, I’ve got it,” I murmured as I raised my mug to my lips again, draining half its contents. “Look, I’ve got to jump into the shower before I head to the shop. You can just stay here today. Or move in. Whatever,” I finished with an absent wave of my hand. Pushing to my feet, I started for the kitchen. I’d fill up one last time before hauling my sorry carcass into the shower.
“You’re giving up?”
Turning, I gave the cat what I hoped was my best cocky smile. “Me? Give up? Never. I’ll figure something out.”
Sofie didn’t look particularly reassured, but then emotions are hard to read on a cat. What she looked was worried. But what was there to worry about? I could handle this. So what if I had to take down the Ivory Towers in order to have my own personal happily ever after?
I had hung myself in my living room so I could beat the Grim Reaper. I’d spent an afternoon with Mother Nature and held the soul of my son so I could save the entire race of elves. I could find a way to stop two killers from destroying Low Town while keeping my girlfriend and our unborn child safe. The only problem was that I had to find a way to do it without involving demons.
CHAPTER 8
Pushing through the day with only two hours’ sleep was no easy thing. My body ached in a dozen places, my eyes burned, and my concentration was shit. I was beginning to think that my age was catching up with me a little bit. I was a whole hell of a lot closer to thirty now than I was to twenty. When I’d first opened Asylum, I could tattoo from midday until three in the morning, and then go drinking with Parker and Bronx until about sunrise. I’d catch a few hours of sleep on the couch before jumping in the shower so I could do it all over again.
Now I was dodging too many creatures eager to kill me while worrying about my girlfriend and paying the bills. Dear God, I was even starting to sound old.
The first few hours in Asylum passed slowly, but I was grateful that my scheduled appointments were on time. I’d completed the sketches earlier in the week so all I had to do was actually stir any required potions and fire up the tattooing gun. After a while, the combination of the steady buzz of the machine and the inane chatter that drifted about the shop as I worked settled my frayed nerves so that I found a shallow pond of inner peace to sink into.
I loved tattooing. Well, maybe not as much as using magic, but there was a comfort in holding the tattooing gun in my right hand and etching a design I’d created along someone’s flesh. I think at first I’d pursued it because potion stirring was
something that I was good at. During my time in the Ivory Towers, I had learned a great deal about the magical properties of different ingredients. When it came to stirring a potion for love or luck or just good old-fashioned revenge, I was a natural. It was the actual artistic side of the tattooing that I was forced to work at. That challenge combined with the idea that I was actually helping people with my magical knowledge made it possible for me to finally accept that I’d been born a warlock.
After I opened my own place, a deep sense of security and peace hit me. But it lasted for only a few days. The temptation to set up a secret spot in which to do magic was overwhelming and the basement was perfect. While I’d managed to hide it from my tattooing mentor, I’d never been able to completely stop using magic despite my initial belief that I’d be able to stop cold turkey with no problem. Geez, the world had crack addicts with more self-control than me. I’d gotten better, but it was a struggle every day to not tap into the energy in the air to do the simplest of things.
And now I was back with the Ivory Towers working as a spy and a part-time guardian. I couldn’t even spot where I’d veered off my original path anymore. Hell, I couldn’t even see my original path from where I stood.
Serah popped into the shop around three in the afternoon, carrying two large coffee cups from the coffee shop down the block from Asylum.
“Come on back,” I called as I let up from the pedal for a moment. I watched on the little security camera as she stepped around the glass case before I started the tattooing gun buzzing again, turning my attention back to the siren’s hip I was working on. Charise was one of my regulars. I had completed a series of roses and vines along her lower back, placed the kanji for love on the back of her neck, and now I was doing a pair of dragonflies on her narrow hips.
“Oh! Sorry! I didn’t realize!” Serah gasped as she entered the main tattooing room.
Lifting the tattooing gun from Charise’s flawless pale skin, I looked up to see Serah blushing brightly, quickly turning away to head back toward the lobby. I swallowed back a chuckle. What the TAPSS investigator had not been ready for was the fact that Charise was wearing a little pink tank top and matching pink bikini-cut panties so that I could easily get at her hips.
Demon's Vow: Part 2 of the Final Asylum Tales (The Asylum Tales series) Page 10