Wicked Words

by M. J. Scott

  "We don't always get what we want," Cassandra said. She turned back to me. "You're strong, Maggie. Untrained, yes, and we've respected your wishes and left you alone to lick your wounds. But right now, we could use some help. I think you owe us that much, don't you?"

  I froze. Damn it, she was right. I did owe them a debt. But I didn't want to pay up. "Even if I wanted to, I couldn't," I blurted before I could think. "I can't do magic."

  Lizzie dropped her teacup.

  Ten minutes later, I'd cleaned up the mess while trying to answer a rapid-fire series of questions from Cassandra about what I meant by "couldn't." Apparently my answers didn't convince her that my magic had vanished.

  We’d moved to the tiny kitchen, and I was staring at the candle Cassandra had placed in front of me like it might bite me. Lizzie sat opposite me, looking pale and nibbling on a cookie. She'd tried to get a few questions in herself but had eventually ceded the floor to Cassandra.

  "Light the candle," Cassandra said, fixing me with the sort of gaze that brooked no argument. How someone who looked basically like Mrs. Claus—all round cheeks, silvery hair tied back in a fat bun, and curves—managed to be so goddamn intimidating at times was a mystery I'd yet to solve.

  I stared at the slim white taper. "It won't work. I haven't done magic since—" I clenched my teeth. I still couldn't let myself remember too much about that day. Because all I saw was my best friend lying in a pool of blood.

  Dead.

  I straightened on my stool to hide the shiver that skulked down my spine, stealing the moisture in my mouth and leaving me unable to complete my sentence.

  "Maggie Diana Lachlan, you called lightning to kill a demon. You can do this." Cassandra pointed at the candle. "So do it."

  Lizzie smiled encouragingly, giving me a sneaky thumbs-up with her good hand. I ignored her and stared at the virgin white wick. I knew the theory. See the energy fields, change the energy fields, and, hey presto, flame.

  But the white candle was only white. I saw wax, not energy. Just like I had the night before.

  "Breathing will help," Cassandra said in a slightly kinder tone.

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, trying to remember what it felt like to use magic. Trying to find that spark within, that sense of energy surrounding me. But there was only darkness behind my eyes, and all I felt was an echoing coldness.

  Empty.

  I opened my eyes and nothing had changed. The candle was still just a boring white cylinder. No slight shimmering colors to show me the energy field. I couldn't even see auras around Cassandra or Lizzie, and they were two of the four strongest witches in the country. My shoulders slumped. "This isn't going to work."

  "Have a cookie," Lizzie said, shoving a plate of Cassandra's oatmeal cranberry toward me. "Maybe you need a sugar fix."

  "It would have to be one hell of a fix," I said, but I took one anyway. Cassandra might be terrifying when she chose to be, but she made damn fine cookies.

  "You've really done no magic at all for nine months?" Cassandra asked as I chewed. The Cestis didn't take magic lightly, and neither Cassandra nor Lizzie would use magic for anything completely frivolous, but I could tell she couldn't imagine not doing anything with your power for so long.

  I shook my head, then swallowed. "No. Didn't try. Didn't want to. Ask Lizzie."

  Lizzie nodded in agreement but didn't add anything, avoiding getting dragged into the mess by taking another cookie. The sugar fix seemed to be doing her more good than me. Her skin was starting to show a hint of color again.

  Cassandra frowned. "And you didn't use your—" She waved a hand in the air vaguely. "—whatever it is you do for your job?"

  "No, I took a break from working. As I'm sure Lizzie told you."

  Lizzie was the only member of the Cestis I'd spoken to since Nat's funeral. Mainly because she'd refused to take "no" for an answer. She found me after I moved out of the apartment Nat and I had shared in SoMa, kept checking up on me, and then eventually moved herself in once I'd begun working on the house. I figured she was reporting back to the others, but I'd needed the company. Someone to distract me from the gaping hole in my life where Nat—and, as much as I hated to admit it, Damon Riley—should've been.

  Someone who could understand what I'd faced. Someone who knew the creatures who haunted my dreams were real, not just nightmares.

  Lizzie had apparently decided I needed supervision. Or a friend. Or both. Whichever it was, it was hard to get rid of a witch who didn’t want to be gotten rid of. Lizzie was young, but she had stubborn for centuries.

  Cassandra frowned at the candle. I tried to look like I was concentrating on it.

  "And now you're working again but having trouble? Are you sure you're not just out of practice?"

  I reached for another cookie, shaking my head. "I've always been able to fix computer stuff. My gran used to have this ancient datapad she refused to upgrade. I kept it running. My friends all had me tweak their systems. I kept my grandad's tech, which wasn't much better than Gran's, running, too. I aced every computer-related class I ever took. But now I just can't seem to get a fix on the problem like I used to." I bit into the cookie again, focusing on sugar and cranberry tang. The taste took my mind off the unsettling incense-oil-wax smell that permeated Cassandra's store, even here in her tiny upstairs rooms. The smell of magic.

  "How long have you been back at work?"

  "Almost two weeks."

  Cassandra's frown deepened. "Well, if you’re telling the truth and your magic is blocked, you could well have bigger problems than not being able to do your job."

  Suddenly the cookie tasted like dust. "Such as?"

  "Without your magic, you're vulnerable."

  My skin went cold. "Define 'vulnerable.'" I put down what was left of the cookie, hoping my hands wouldn't start shaking. I'd asked the question, but I had a pretty good idea what the answer might be.

  "It depends on what's causing your block. You could be shut down tight, or you could just be blocking access to your power for yourself. Which would leave it wide open to anybody else. Have you noticed anything strange happening lately?"

  I knew what "strange" was code for. Demons. My hands clenched. "Wait a minute, you think I could be possessed? By what, a carpentry demon?"

  Lizzie snorted. "That would be chill. Also, handy. Though you'd think a carpentry demon would improve your skills."

  I relaxed a little at that. If she thought I might be possessed, she wouldn't be making jokes.

  "I'm not the one who hammers her own thumb with alarming regularity," I retorted. Not that I hadn't, too, in the beginning. I'd occasionally helped Grandad around the house, but teen Maggie had been far more fixated on computers than hand tools. I'd only remembered the barest basics when I'd started renovating. But I had a reasonable idea what I was doing now. Mostly.

  Sure, I hired contractors for the complicated things, but putting in hours on the house myself saved both my money and my sanity. Without the renovation to focus on, I wasn’t sure I would have survived the first few months after Nat had died.

  I'd ignored the house for a long time. I still had trouble thinking of it as mine, not my grandparents'. But turns out that renovating the house I'd grown up in—despite all the memories of Gran and Granddad and the still sharp flashes of grief for them—was less painful than dealing with my guilt about Nat.

  I was sure that Lizzie's initial motivation for stepping in to help me had solely been her worrying I might do something stupid. But while she worked hard, she wasn't naturally gifted in DIY. But the two of us muddled through, and nothing we'd built had fallen down. Yet.

  Cassandra scowled at both of us, holding up a hand. "This isn't a joke. Maggie was bound to a demon for years without anyone knowing about it."

  "She killed the demon," Lizzie protested.

  "She killed its physical manifestation. I'm sure it's alive and well back in the demon realm."

  What? My throat tightened, and my stomach flipp
ed. I clapped a hand to my mouth, not sure I wasn't going to throw up. That was a tidbit of information that no one had bothered to tell me. The demon that had once had my power to feed on was alive? Alive and well and probably pissed at me?

  I shivered as the demon with its bloodstained aura and dead eyes floated into my head. I could smell its screwed-up scent, choking with rot and filth as though it stood before me. Lizzie was the one who had to deal with garbage in our house because even the faintest whiff of decay could make me gag these days.

  I had to swallow hard and do some of the deep breathing my therapist taught me before I could talk. "I can't be bound. There's been no ritual. Definitely no mysterious illnesses with memory loss."

  As near as the Cestis had been able to determine, it seemed Sara—my late unlamented mother—had bound me to the demon just before my thirteenth birthday, before my powers had a chance to make themselves known. At least, we assumed it was her. She'd also done her best to make sure I had no memory of the ritual. Her best had been very, very good.

  If only her morals had been, too.

  Unfortunately she died not long after I turned thirteen, and I never knew what she'd done until a series of weird events last year led to the binding being broken and the demon expressing its displeasure about that.

  Which had led to where I was now.

  Screwed again.

  "Demons aren't the only threat you might face," Cassandra said calmly. She held up a hand as I opened my mouth to protest. "I'm not saying you've been bound again, I'm saying that, if you can't defend yourself, someone with your power is a tempting target. And you don't have to be bound if the demon can just possess you. You know they find it easier to get through the barriers of anyone who is...not themselves."

  She meant depressed or otherwise mentally ill. I didn’t know if I'd have met the definition of clinical depression over the last nine months, but I'd definitely been to some dark places.

  Knowing that a demon could have been waiting for me in one of them made me want to puke all over again. The fact that I hadn't seen any sign of a demon didn't matter. If my powers had gone, perhaps I wouldn't. After all, demons preyed on humans when they could. It was rare for one to make it through to our world from whatever hell realm it was they came from, but even from there they used their influence to spread misery and pain here. Had one of them gotten to me again? "How do we know one hasn't?"

  Cassandra and Lizzie exchanged a look. One that made me uneasy.

  "We have the house well warded," Lizzie said eventually.

  "Very well warded," Cassandra agreed.

  "I know that," I said. "Wait, what do you mean by 'we'?" I'd assumed Lizzie was keeping the Cestis informed about how I was doing. I didn't think any of them had been near my house.

  "You were tangled up with a demon," Cassandra said. "You didn't think we were just going to wave goodbye and leave you on your own, did you?"

  "You've been to my house?" I asked Cassandra.

  "Early on," she said. "Lizzie thought it might be easier if we kept out of sight. One of us comes by now and then to check nothing has frayed if Lizzie wants a hand. And I live in Berkeley, after all."

  I'd forgotten that. Or chosen not to think about it, maybe. I turned back to Lizzie. "And you never thought to tell me any of this?"

  She shrugged. "You never asked. You've been fairly clear that you didn't want to hear about magic."

  "But if the house is warded, how could anything have gotten to me?"

  "The house is warded. You're not," Lizzie said. "At least not completely. The bracelet is a shield of sorts, but it's not a full ward. It was easier at first when you didn't go anywhere much without me. But you do now. Nothing has pinged any of the wards at the house. That's a good sign. That's what we were worried about in the beginning."

  I suppressed a shiver, not wanting to think about exactly what might have come after me. "Wouldn't I have noticed if someone had put the whammy on me at the hardware store or shopping for groceries?" I hadn't really been venturing far from home until I'd started working with this new client. But they made titanium custom parts for manufacturing machinery that I couldn't imagine a demon could use to possess someone. Their systems were fancy, but they weren’t based on the kind of virtual reality tech the demon had exploited last time.

  "Maybe not. Not if it was something subtle," Cassandra said. "One would hope that a direct attack wouldn't have passed you by. After all, you know what imps look like."

  "You haven't been out wreaking havoc nightly," Lizzie said, her tone cheerful. "Another good sign."

  "But you can't know for sure? You didn't set wards to check if I'd been possessed?"

  The two of them exchanged another look.

  "It's not really possible," Cassandra said. "The wards protect you and keep things out. But they wouldn't register if you were being...influenced."

  I didn't like where this was heading. "So what are my options?"

  Lizzie's mouth twisted. "You know the drill."

  I did. Two choices. Let one of the Cestis try and read me and see if they could spot the signs of me having a demon running my brain, or stick my hand in a bowl of demon stone.

  Both options made my skin crawl. Demon stone was partly responsible for Nat's death. And after having a hidden demon passenger tucked away in my head for years, knowing my thoughts and feelings and secrets, I liked keeping my mind to myself.

  "Can't I just jump in a baptismal font or something? Dowse myself in holy water?"

  "That's vampires, dear," Cassandra said. "And it only works in stories."

  I stared at her, hoping like hell she meant vampires only existed in stories rather than that they existed and holy water did nothing to stop them. But it was entirely possible she meant vampires were real. The sum total of what I knew about the magical world was probably about a trillionth of what Cassandra held in her head.

  What I did know scared me silly. Anything was possible. Including all the bad things.

  Which meant I could have a demon inside me. I was beginning to regret the cookies, the food sitting uneasily in a stomach turning rapidly to acid.

  "You could just let me read you," Lizzie said.

  "That's not necessarily a wise idea," Cassandra replied. "Not if Maggie has a passenger. Safer to let Radha do it with the rest of us shielding."

  Passenger. Aka demon. I ducked my head, trying not to let them see how freaked out I was.

  Which left me staring at my fingernails. When I’d taken the job, I'd filed them short and painted them a neutral pale pink to hide the fact that they'd been neglected for months. A blood blister bloomed on my thumb where I'd dropped a brick on it several days earlier, and my fingers sported calluses and fading scars from various renovation mishaps. All in all, my hands looked pretty beaten up. Which matched how I felt. What I wanted right now was to disappear, lie down somewhere soft, and not think about anything until I stopped feeling like I was the universe's favorite whipping girl. I didn't care how long it took.

  Sadly, I couldn't afford that option. I wouldn't be able to afford many options at all if I couldn't sort out my work problems. I needed to know why my magic had disappeared. But I wasn't ready to leap straight down the path of "a demon is eating your magic again, Maggie." Especially if that meant facing demon stone.

  I lifted my head and met Cassandra's gaze. "I'm not possessed. I'd know it."

  Sympathy flashed in her gold-brown eyes, but her expression was stern. "I'm sorry, Maggie, but we can't just take your word for it."

  I swallowed hard. Tried to sound calm. "Surely Lizzie would've noticed something?"

  "Not if the creature has been biding its time. And we might not have sensed it with everything else going on. There's a lot of noise right now."

  Noise. Magical noise, I had to assume. Stuff that had been happening since I'd killed the demon? That they hadn't been telling me about?

  "What exactly has been happening?" Time to woman up and face the full extent of the catastro
phe I'd caused. People were getting hurt again. As Lizzie's sling attested to. I might have been able to ignore the fact that she'd been very busy with secret witch business on and off during the time we'd been roomies, but I couldn't stick my head in the sand forever. I probably owed Lizzie an apology for not asking her what had been happening before now. But damn it, I didn't want all the complication the magical world seemed to bring with it. I wanted to be normal. The trouble was, I wasn't.

  Lizzie sighed. "The quick version is that when the demon fried, all its bonds to the world—to the people it had been feeding from other than you and to whatever imps and afrits and lesserkind it was controlling—snapped and recoiled and caused some havoc. Plus all those imps and afrits were set free to do whatever they wanted. What they mostly want to do is destroy, eat, kill. So we've been tracking them down. We're mostly done."

  "That sounds...bad." I'd tangled with imps a couple of times, but then I'd leveled straight up to facing a demon. There hadn't been much time for learning about demonkind other than how to try to defeat the one who was after me. If I was remembering correctly from the basic information Cassandra had given me back then, afrits were smaller and less problematic than imps. Lesserkind were more of a problem. They were smarter and more powerful. But also, I thought, maybe they were uncommon?

  "It's not great but not terrible. We've been busier than usual. That happens sometimes," Lizzie said. "Luckily, it's mostly been imps and such. If there were any lesserkind hanging with your demon, then there's been no sign of them. Which is good."

  Cassandra's lips pursed. She didn't seem to agree with Lizzie's assessment. "It would be easier if we weren't shorthanded. We have help, of course, but Antony was a loss."

  I winced.

  "I'm sorry, Maggie. Nobody blames you, but he is missed," Cassandra said, her tone gentler.

  I blamed me. And I was sure that, on some level, the others did, too. I stared down at my hands for a moment, fighting off a wave of guilt and regret. "What are you saying?"

  "It would be useful if you could help, as I said earlier. But for that you need access to your magic. So. We need to find out. Soon. Now, if I can arrange it." Cassandra reached for her datapad.