Demons and DNA (Amplifier 1)

by Meghan Ciana Doidge

  “Socks,” Christopher murmured, shocked when he spotted me. He was still in his pentagram, still safe. I could see Aiden standing motionless from the corner of my eye, but didn’t look at him.

  I retrieved my second blade, taking a moment to glance down at myself. My T-shirt and sundress were ruined, torn and bloody. Both of my arms were burned. My face and neck felt the same.

  I turned to scan the yard, carefully rotating my wounded arm, stretching and keeping the tendons loose as my magic caught up to healing my shoulder.

  Paisley romped around us, trampling each disintegrating demon corpse in turn.

  The burns on my arms, neck, and face faded to a dull ache. Energy flooded through my limbs, healing me with magic I’d stolen and claimed for myself so long ago that I couldn’t remember who I’d drained it from anymore. Couldn’t remember if any of those Adepts, all forced on me by the Collective, had died under my touch.

  “Is that all you’ve got?!” I cried into the dark night. Then I laughed, loud and clear, reveling in the destruction I had just wrought. My soul forever tainted with all the darkness I’d consumed, whether by command or simply to survive.

  Christopher chuckled behind me.

  I turned, finally looking back at Aiden.

  He swept an inscrutable gaze over me, head to toe, then back up again.

  Yes. I was more than simply an amplifier.

  “Those blades need sharpening,” Christopher said, scrubbing his foot across the edge of the pentagram seared into the grass and effortlessly breaking the seal.

  Aiden frowned.

  And yes. Christopher wasn’t just a regular clairvoyant either.

  “Were you being blocked?” I asked. Even with all the directions he had called out to me, Christopher had been unusually quiet during the skirmish.

  He shook his head. “Not specifically. Demons are always difficult to read. The snatcher more so.”

  “It was passing in and out of dimensions,” Aiden said, stepping out of his own pentagram, though he didn’t power it down. “I thought … it was carrying you with it, Emma?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded, but then didn’t vocalize whatever else he’d wanted to say.

  “Socks is difficult to kill,” Christopher said.

  Aiden grunted.

  “We need to figure out a way for you to practice,” I said. “If we’re up against a summoner. The winged enforcers were particularly nasty. Maybe with Paisley attacking me?”

  Christopher shook his head, his tone remote. “I know her too well. And so do you.”

  “How do you know you aren’t simply telling Emma what she’s already going to do?” Aiden said, thoughtful. “If you see the immediate future? How do you know you won’t distract her at the wrong time?”

  Christopher eyed Aiden coolly. “You’d prefer that Emma get hurt? More than she was already?” He walked away, crossing through the crumbling remains of the demons toward the garden.

  “He didn’t,” I said, watching the clairvoyant and speaking without thinking. “Once. As an exercise. He wrote down what he saw instead. I didn’t move where he would have moved me. It took me a week to walk again, even with the best healers money and influence can buy.”

  I was watching Christopher as he inspected his garden fence for damage — specifically at the spot I’d crashed into. But at Aiden’s continued silence, I glanced over to find the sorcerer staring at me intently.

  “Under whose supervision?” His tone was rough, and heavy with some emotion I couldn’t quite identify.

  I had said too much. Exposing the tender parts of my past, along with Christopher’s. Something about the sorcerer loosened my tongue. As well as other parts of my anatomy.

  I stepped away, climbing up the patio stairs and through the open French-paned doors into the kitchen.

  Aiden swore under his breath, then called after me, “Thank you.”

  I glanced back at him. My heart thumped once, painfully, at the sight of him through the open doorway, bathed in the soft light filtering out from the kitchen.

  “You assume all of this is meant just for you.” I wrestled with my reaction to his … beauty? Charisma? “And it might be just the witch playing with you. But based on the unfinished business Christopher has seen in his cards … I think maybe you’ve gotten tangled up with someone who’s decided to strike at us, coming through you.”

  “Never …” Aiden’s voice was husky with the same darkly tinted emotion. “I would never bring harm to you if I could help it.”

  “We’ll know either way soon enough.”

  “I’ll reach out tomorrow, make my … position clear. I shouldn’t have delayed. I shouldn’t have stayed. I just …” He cast his gaze around the kitchen, not finishing his thought.

  Giving him space to assess the situation for a moment, I turned to the sink to clean my blades. The ash was easily brushed away, but Christopher was right. I needed them sharpened. I just didn’t wield the magic necessary to do so myself.

  Maybe the past few days had all been about Aiden rejecting the witch, and I was just paranoid. But no matter how personally beguiling I found the sorcerer, I was having a difficult time believing that any witch would risk the ramifications of such a summoning — the power drain, the chances of having the demons turn against her, or drawing the attention of the powers that governed magic in the Adept world — just because he’d spurned her.

  But then, I didn’t understand people or relationships terribly well.

  Stepping through the patio doors, Christopher slipped past Aiden and crossed into the kitchen. He pulled a foil-covered casserole dish out of the fridge, placing it on the counter beside the stove and preheating the oven. “Put this in for thirty minutes covered, then thirty minutes uncovered.”

  “Where are you going for an hour?”

  “It probably won’t be an hour. But I need to feed Paisley.”

  We kept a supply of raw meat in the fridge in the barn for Paisley. Normally, she fed herself. Eating dinner with us was just a fun game. But Christopher meant she needed live prey. To heal properly.

  “I can do it,” I said.

  He sniffed at me. “You stink of demon. And your clothing is about to fall off you.” A grin flashed across his face. “Though the sorcerer would certainly like that show.”

  “Where are you going to take her?”

  “She wants a cow.”

  Paisley didn’t actually talk. But as far as I had deduced over seven years, if she thought about what she wanted long enough, Christopher eventually picked it up in a vision. “Do you have the money?”

  He nodded. The Wilsons, our neighbors to the west, owned cows.

  “You’ll shadow her?” I definitely didn’t want the demon dog’s evening cow hunt to draw attention. “And double-check that the demons didn’t stray off course?”

  “They didn’t. The witch obviously had them tightly bound. Plus, you would have felt it.”

  “You would have seen it. But you’ll do a circuit anyway?”

  He nodded. “And I’ll leave money in the mailbox for the cow.”

  A full-grown cow was expensive. “She earned it,” I whispered, fairly certain that the snatcher demon had come close to killing Paisley. We had no real way to train her for such confrontations, not until they happened. Paisley had gone up against demons only once before, when she and Christopher had rescued me from the contract job in San Francisco. The sorcerers attempting to hold me had thrown their entire magical arsenal at us, including a few summoned pets. We had chopped through them all, taking the summoners’ heads when the demons were vanquished.

  Christopher swiftly crossed through the back patio doors and into the yard.

  Aiden crossed paths with the clairvoyant, setting his baseball bat on the kitchen island and staring down at it. Its carved runes were devoid of magic now.

  I poured two glasses of water, sliding one across the quartz counter toward Aiden. He reached for it.

  I snagged his wrist,
holding him tightly enough that he’d know it would be difficult to break my grasp, but not hard enough to hurt him.

  He lifted his piercing blue eyes to meet my gaze, a curl of a smile softening his grim expression.

  My heart pitter-pattered. I ignored it. The situation had moved way beyond what I could justify simply because I desired him sexually.

  His smile faded, but he didn’t try to pull away.

  “Azar,” I said. Magic prickled under my hold, my empathy triggering some reaction from his dim power. “That’s something you might have mentioned.”

  “Myers,” he said mildly. He felt tired, drained. As expected. But also frustrated. Confused. “There was no way for me to know that my parentage might be important to you. Or why you think it’s even relevant right now.” He paused, evidently waiting for me to fill in the blanks for him.

  I didn’t.

  He huffed, his exasperation clear even without my feeling it through our empathic connection. “The witch … Magenta has nothing to do with my father. He made it very clear that I wasn’t worthy of being his son, many years ago.” He waved his free hand, though his piercing gaze remained glued to me. “The demons, the games, are beneath him. If he wanted me, he’d come himself. He wouldn’t lower himself to acting through a witch.”

  I nodded, trying to align Aiden’s version of his father with what little I’d gleaned of Kader Azar myself. “You took your mother’s name? At birth?”

  “No. I chose to, myself. A few years ago.” Nothing felt devious in his answers. Though I wasn’t overly skilled at using my empathy — I rarely chose to touch anyone, for obvious reasons — it usually detected lies reliably.

  “Emma Johnson.”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you so named by your parents?”

  “No. My passport.”

  He nodded, as if he’d already expected that answer. “Christopher calls you Socks. Only using the name Emma when he remembers to do so. So the nickname is older than the passport.”

  “Yes.”

  He twisted his hand in my grip gently.

  I loosened my hold.

  He slipped his forefinger and middle finger across my inner wrist, so that he was holding me as much as I was holding him. Our arms stretched across the kitchen island, hovering above the counter.

  “Are you sure the empathy doesn’t go both ways?” he murmured, his gaze locked to mine.

  A flush of desire curled within me. My own. But I could feel his steady resolve under his weariness, and his … ease.

  “It doesn’t,” I said.

  His lips curled. “Have you practiced? You’ve obviously trained with the swords. That was masterful dual wielding. A skill it not only takes years to perfect, but you need the magical fortitude to back it.”

  “Either that or having both swords in hand from a very young age.”

  “How young, Emma?”

  I didn’t answer. I wanted to withdraw my hand. But I had questions of my own that still needed to be asked.

  “Did your father send you here?”

  “No. I haven’t seen him in over five years.”

  “What do you know of the Collective?”

  He tilted his head. “Nothing. Not by name.” That was the truth as far as I could tell. “Is that what you’re researching?”

  He meant the grimoire. “No.”

  The oven pinged, proclaiming itself to be up to temperature. I tugged my hand away from Aiden. He tightened his grip, then let me go. But not before I caught a flush of frustration through the empathic connection.

  I put the casserole in the oven.

  “When did you meet the mighty sorcerer Kader Azar?” he asked, sarcasm laced through his words.

  I turned to look at him, to watch his reaction. “Seven years ago. I rescued him. He’d been kidnapped.”

  Aiden laughed. “I doubt that anyone would be capable of doing so.”

  “Yet I pulled him from a building, fought my way through dozens of shapeshifters, and buckled him into a helicopter.”

  He frowned. “You’re a mercenary? For hire? Since your early twenties?”

  I wasn’t. “Is that difficult to believe?”

  “Not at all. You’re obviously so much more than an amplifier with a secondary touch of empathy. But …” He waved his hand offishly. “I would have heard of you, of someone of your power.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that statement, so I didn’t.

  He dropped his gaze to the baseball bat on the island, running his fingers along it thoughtfully.

  A comfortable silence stretched through the kitchen, almost as if it was carried by magic. I wanted to linger within it. Instead, I remembered to set the timer on the oven for thirty minutes, then crossed toward the hall. Christopher was right. I desperately needed a shower. The conversation could be continued over dinner.

  “I was useless out there tonight,” Aiden said, not looking at me.

  I paused in the doorway to the hall. “The pentagrams would have held, had I been overwhelmed.”

  He laughed harshly. “I doubt it. And it’s becoming obvious that the clairvoyant didn’t need my protection either. Though I didn’t think it possible for someone to see their own future.”

  “He doesn’t. But he sees mine, and … we’re tightly bound enough that it allows him to understand his portion of that future. He usually arms himself, if I’m going to have trouble.”

  Aiden nodded, falling silent.

  I turned away.

  “Shall I come with you?” he asked archly.

  I glanced back at him.

  His lips stretched into a tight smile that wasn’t reflected in any other part of his expression. “To the shower.”

  “Payment for services rendered?” I asked mockingly.

  His shoulders stiffened, but he tilted his head casually. “If you wish.”

  “And the witch? The summoner? Magenta. Is that how you paid her?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “The snatcher had to be bound with blood … or semen.” I let the statement fall softly between us. “And there are only a few spells that drain magic as thoroughly as yours has been drained.”

  “Are you accusing me of being a whore, Emma?”

  “No, Aiden Azar Myers.” I deliberately combined his chosen name with his father’s surname in order to emphasize my point.

  He frowned darkly.

  “I’m accusing you of being power hungry,” I continued. “And willing to do whatever it takes to insinuate yourself with an Adept of power.”

  “Such as yourself.”

  “Well, I imagine you would have deemed Christopher more difficult to seduce.”

  He clenched his hands, then deliberately relaxed them, spreading them across the smooth quartz counter. His voice was low and deadly when he spoke, sending tiny shivers of desire through me. “You were the one who came up to the loft, Emma.”

  “Yes.”

  He gave me a look that indicated he required more of an answer than that.

  I ignored it. I had no idea why I was accusing him of anything. Or why his sexual connection to the black witch who had used him bothered me.

  “Magenta has nothing to do with us, Emma,” he said. “And when I’ve healed, I’ll deal with her. Then I’ll come back and prove it to you.”

  “If I invite you back. You did just cause a lot of damage to Christopher’s garden. And we’re going to owe the neighbor a cow.”

  He laughed, seemingly surprised that he did so.

  I turned away before the conversation took another turn.

  “So …” he called after me, teasing now. “Still a no on the shower, then?”

  From halfway up the stairs, I laughed. “Take the foil off the casserole if the timer goes off before I’m done. And put it back in for another thirty minutes. Please.”

  He laughed quietly to himself.

  I hustled to my bedroom, grabbing clothing and actually internally debating inviting him into the shower with me.
I had no idea what that would be like — not only being intimate with someone enough to stand naked with them, but also being able to simply accept them for who they were in the present moment.

  To disregard what had brought Aiden into my life and simply accept that he was now part of that life seemed irrational. But didn’t I want to be accepted on the same level? Hadn’t I wanted him to see me vanquish the demons, and still want me? Didn’t I want him to know all about my past and to not care about any of it because he wanted me in the present?

  Me.

  Not my magic.

  Not Amp5.

  Me.

  Emma Johnson.

  I was more than simply a name on a passport now.

  I climbed into the shower alone. Any decision about being intimate with the sorcerer was about more than sharing a bed, sharing a shower. Being intimate with me meant sharing magic. And though he hadn’t admitted it outright, Aiden was interested in accumulating power. Maybe even addicted to it.

  I didn’t want to be anyone’s addiction. But I was actually starting to realize that I was becoming open to the concept of building something, building a life with someone of my choosing. A choice in partners.

  Except that choice, that intimacy, that trust, would have to go both ways — and I didn’t think Aiden Azar Myers was capable of such things. Just as I didn’t think I was truly capable of it. So that left us with me in the shower, him in the kitchen, and our pasts firmly wedged between us.

  Before I went down to dinner, which smelled incredible wafting up the stairs, I emailed Aiden’s full familial connections to Ember Pine. It felt underhanded to do so for some reason, but I didn’t doubt that the sorcerer had sought out the same information on me and Christopher when he requested a passport and credit card from his own lawyer.

  He, of course, wouldn’t have dug up more than our passport information — the same level of detail that Ember’s first inquiries had gotten on him. But I already knew that attaching the Azar name to Aiden would garner many more details.

  My chest still felt heavy after I hit send, though. Regular people learned about each other in the present, didn’t they? That was the natural state of things.

  I combed out my wet hair and reminded myself that there was nothing natural about me, and that I had Christopher, Paisley, and even the other three to protect. The regular way of doing things wasn’t an option.