Wicked Words

by M. J. Scott

  "This is real life, not a rom-com. We're not going to kiss and make up. My magic doesn't improve things between us, just puts us squarely back where we were."

  "So you're just going to ignore your feelings for him?"

  I nodded vigorously. "I'm not an idiot, Lizzie. There's no point in pining after a guy who’s never going to let himself love a witch. So you need to not say anything about this around him, okay? You can tell Cassandra another time."

  "She's probably going to figure out there's a connection, you know," she said.

  "I'll deal with that part when I come to it." I fixed her with a stern look. "You can mock me all you want in private, but keep it zipped around Damon."

  "I'm not mocking you. I think you two should work it out. He seemed to make you happy. When I first met you, you were dealing with a lot of crap, but you still kind of glowed around him."

  I had? No. Don't think about that. Don't think about the little bump of joy that had filled me every time I'd seen him or the way his mouth tasted or...

  "Thank you for being a hopeless romantic, but in this case, you need to focus on the hopeless part and not the romance part. Damon and me, we're past tense and going to stay that way. Got it?"

  She sighed. "All right. But only because I know this is stressful for you, and we all have enough to deal with. Not because I think you're right."

  I'd take that for now. Hopefully once she saw that Damon remained uninterested in me, she'd give up her mad ideas once and for all. I just had to grit my teeth for however long that was.

  And however long I had to keep working with the man to sort out curses and imps and assorted nonsense. Now that my magic was back, there was little chance that Cassandra would let me out of helping with this case, even if I begged. Not if this was going to tie back to my demon as my gut was suddenly insisting it did.

  Which, damn it, might mean my mojo was back in more ways than one. I relied a lot on instinct in my work. I'd been missing that feeling of having a hint of heading in the right direction for months now. I may not have really noticed it until I'd taken on my client and tried to use it for something actually productive, but now that it was back, I was all too aware that it had been missing and I'd been off my game for a long time. I'd been blaming it all on grief and guilt and anger. But it seemed that maybe my magic being blocked had something to do with how weird I'd been feeling, too.

  I pressed my lips together, biting back a curse.

  "Everything okay?" Lizzie asked as the sound of Damon's front door clicking shut and footsteps announced that Cassandra was about to join us.

  "Fine," I said and tried to look like I meant it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  About half an hour later, I stood in the garden near the shed and tried to ignore my skin crawling as Cassandra inspected the patch of ground where Damon had fallen.

  We'd watched the footage from Damon's security feeds—apparently imps photographed just fine—over cups of strong tea. After that she'd asked Lizzie a couple of questions, inspected my hands—not saying anything more than that about my magic reappearing—and shooed us all out to the garden.

  "What's she looking for?" I asked Lizzie, who was watching Cassandra with a level of focus that made me think she was looking at the energy fields rather than Cassandra herself.

  Which reminded me that now that I had my powers back, maybe I could see the energy fields, too. Or maybe I should just leave that to the experts.

  "Trying to see what they used to set off the summoning," Lizzie said. She leaned forward, as though she wanted to see better, but didn’t move closer. "Whatever it was, it was clever. They've covered their tracks nicely."

  Curiosity got the better of me. I reached for my magic, hoping it would respond. Then squinted, dazzled by the blaze of swirling blue around Damon. Cassandra and Lizzie glowed, too, but they were trained and knew how to hide their auras, so Lizzie’s pink and Cassandra’s green were much fainter. Damon had no power, but emotion was energy, too, and he was obviously agitated, the color spiking around him.

  I pulled on what I remembered from Cassandra’s initial lessons and tried to block him out. I didn't completely succeed, but he receded to a dull glow, leaving me with an afterimage burned on my retinas as I blinked to clear my vision.

  I couldn't see much that looked out of place in the garden among the faint hum of life that surrounded each of the plants and trees. The shed itself didn't glow, whatever it was made from magically inert.

  Finally Cassandra straightened. "There's something faint here. But whoever set this was smart. The spell mostly burned itself up when Damon triggered it. There's not enough here to trace or look for any sort of signature."

  "Where does that leave us?" Damon asked, blue surging brighter.

  Cassandra moved away from the shed. "We have the footage of the imp—if that's what it was. That will be helpful."

  "How?"

  "Because there are some things that most humans wouldn't be able to summon," Lizzie said. "If it's one of those, then we're probably looking for a lesserkind."

  Cassandra nodded. Neither of them looked happy at that thought.

  "That's like an imp on steroids," I said to Damon.

  "Not quite. More like a..." Cassandra wriggled her fingers. "A minor demon, perhaps. That's not quite right either. A lesserkind can never be as powerful as a demon, but they're descendants from the same branch of whatever hell-plane family tree demons come from." She looked at Damon. "We will ward the garden for you again," she said. "And Lizzie and I can make sure there aren't any other triggers lurking, but that's about all we can do until we get more information. You were going to get your team to look at your employees. Did they find anything yet?"

  Damon shook his head. "Not yet. Not that I've heard. We have a lot of employees. Unless you can narrow it down?" he asked Cassandra.

  "If it's a lesserkind summoning, then the most obvious connection will be to look for anyone with a link to your static filter," Cassandra said.

  "And if it's not?" Damon said.

  "Then your security team has more work to do." She tipped her chin up, one hand tugging down the sleeve of her mustard-colored linen shirt. "I assume you'll be telling them about this?"

  "I'll tell Mitch when I get back to the office," he said. "He isn't going to like it. He wasn't happy the last time you were all involved."

  "He doesn't have to like it," Cassandra said sharply. "He just has to not interfere. And I told you the last time that your team would do well to recruit someone with some magical expertise."

  "We've been busy with other things," Damon said. "And security experts with magic seem to be a little scarce on the ground. At least in the private sector."

  Cassandra regarded him for a moment. Then turned her gaze to me.

  "Oh no," I said, shaking my head firmly. "Personal security is not something I know anything about. Nor do I know anything about—" I stopped and flapped a hand back at the shed. "—this kind of thing. I have my own business to run. You must have contacts from the Cestis. If you want him to have a witch on his team, you can do some magical headhunting for him."

  "We're getting off track," Lizzie broke in. "We have more important problems to fix than finding Damon extra staff. We need to clear the garden, and then we need to research." She turned to Damon. "Can you send a copy of the security footage to all of us?"

  "Of course." He pulled out the small datapad. "Give me a minute."

  We watched as he waved up a holoscreen, typed a message, pulled down the file we wanted, and sent it. It only took a minute.

  Lizzie's eyes lit up at the sight of the datapad. "I want one of those," she said.

  "I'm pretty sure neither of us can afford them," I said. "I'm not even entirely sure that one is available to the public."

  "It's not," Damon said. "We're doing a collaboration on something with Legacy, and they sent me a prototype."

  My eyebrows lifted. Legacy was the most successful survivor of the post-Big One tec
h upheaval. With half of California in disarray and other parts of the world hit hard by similar natural disasters and climate events, there'd been alliances and takeovers and restructures throughout in a number of global industries. Legacy was made up of parts of several OG tech companies that had wanted to spin off data devices into a new direction and needed more funds than any of them could muster alone.

  They'd been successful—more than successful. They now dominated the datapad market in the same way that Righteous dominated VR. Were they working on VR for datapads? There were simple systems available already—more augmented reality and meta-holo—but nothing approaching a true VR system. Maybe now that interface chips were becoming commercially viable, that would change. In which case a project between Righteous and Legacy made sense.

  "Damn," Lizzie said. "It's pretty."

  Damon grinned at her as he shoved the datapad back in his jacket.

  "Pretty won't help us find imps," Cassandra said. "Let's get this garden checked out, and then Damon can have the rest of his day back while we research some more."

  "Maybe I could help with the research," he said. "I mean, I do have a whole tech empire at my disposal. I know my way around data."

  I hid a smile. "How are you with a card catalog?"

  He looked blank.

  "The Cestis research library is analog," I added.

  For a moment his expression turned genuinely horrified. "It is? Why?"

  "Lack of funding," I said before Lizzie or Cassandra could interrupt me. "At least that's what they told me."

  His brows drew down. "I thought the Cestis was a global organization? How do you run a global organization without tech?"

  "We have tech," Lizzie said. "We just, er, don’t use it for everything." She glanced at Cassandra, expression more than a little exasperated.

  Cassandra hmmphed. "Many of the materials in our library are very old and exceedingly fragile. They could be destroyed by over handling. Impossible to scan them safely."

  "Oh, there are ways around that," Damon said.

  Cassandra gave him one of her disapproving glares. “I hardly think the kinds of artifacts we hold fall within your area of expertise.”

  He waved her off. "We did some VR installations for the Met a few years ago. One of them explained their conservation processes, which includes digitizing collections. Making digital reproductions of all kinds of original objects. Including documents. The whole project was fascinating."

  Cassandra stared at him like he’d grown a second head. Lizzie coughed.

  "What?" he said. "I'm one of their big donors. They tell me stuff. And we needed to know what they were doing to build the displays. We might have even suggested some improvements to their processes. They've made copies of things now that they thought they would never be able to."

  "The Cestis take donations, too," I said. "Save lives, not art. Or something. Or, you being you, do both because you have the cash."

  At least I hoped he did. His finances could have taken a hit along with Righteous. But he didn't seem to have made any adjustments to his lifestyle that I had seen. So I figured he was doing okay.

  "Why don't you show me your library, and I'll see what we can do?" Damon said.

  Cassandra shook her head. "The library is off-limits to anyone without magic. Anyone not approved by us."

  He turned one of his killer smiles on her. "You approve of me," he said. "I can't help with the magic part, but you can trust my discretion." His smile widened. "After all, I trust yours. And even if it's not digital, four sets of eyes are better than three. Unless it takes magic to read whatever you want us to read?"

  "Nothing I'd give to either of you is going to require magic, no." She sounded almost offended, as though the thought that she might give idiots like us more than we could handle was ridiculous.

  Did that mean that some books in the library did require magic? Note to self. Do not randomly touch anything in there. Avoid ending up as a smoking blob of ash on the floor.

  "So I can come?" Damon asked, still working his smile.

  "Only if you agree to do as I say," Cassandra said. She didn't look entirely happy about it, but maybe she'd decided it might be worthwhile having him involved.

  "Of course." He dipped his head in something close to a bow.

  Cassandra snorted. "Your charm is wasted on me, young man. So, let's get to work." She nodded at me. "Maggie can help me clean up after the imp. That will give Damon a chance to check in with his office, and Lizzie can call the others and see if anyone else is free to help." She fixed me with a stern look. "I suppose you've forgotten the ritual we used on the imps last time?"

  "I remember it required a couple of buckets." I was about to ask Damon where the laundry room was when something else occurred to me. "Do we need to save some of the ash for anything? Last time we just...disappeared it."

  "This isn't magical CSI," Lizzie said. She blew her bangs out of her eyes and shook her head at me. "We don't have a secret lab hidden away."

  "Well, you have a secret library," I said. "It's not an entirely unreasonable idea. I thought maybe the ash could help identify it."

  "The footage from the security cameras should be enough," Cassandra said. "I don't think anyone's ever written a book about the composition of imp ash. I doubt any one witch ever comes across enough imps in a lifetime to do so." She peered at me again. "You're running well above average for someone who's not in the business."

  The Cestis business, I assumed. I held up my hands. "Not by choice. I'd be happy to never see another one of those things again in my life."

  Cassandra looked as though she didn't think that was likely to be my fate. "We’ll deal with the cleanup first, and then we can start working on how to stop any more appearing."

  Damon, it turned out, had a well-stocked laundry room—especially considering that only one person lived in his house—and we found several metal buckets to fill with hot water. Cassandra produced a small metal case that looked like a cross between a very old-fashioned doctor’s bag and the type of high-tech security cases I'd seen clients use to transport very important information. It took a palm scan and Cassandra's voice to open it, the lid concertinaing up and out, revealing three foam-lined trays of things in tiny vials and jars. They had labels, but the tiny print was symbols and short combos of letters rather than full words.

  Some sort of code, I guessed. Cassandra plucked four of them out without even glancing at the labels and carried them, and the bag of salt she'd also taken from the car, over to the ring of scorched earth where we'd left the buckets.

  "Right," she said, pushing back her sleeves and passing me a pair of gloves. "Time to take care of this. Give Damon's gardener a fighting chance to regrow some grass here. And while we do that, you can tell me how you managed to fry another imp when yesterday you couldn't even light a candle."

  "That would be easier to do if I knew," I said, snapping on the gloves. I bent over the nearest bucket and poured in a few handfuls of salt. That much I remembered from the last time we'd done this ritual. Salt was used for wards and for banishing. Anything that involved blocking magic, sending power away, or obliterating it altogether.

  "From the video it looked like you succeeded when the imp went after Damon," Cassandra said.

  "Not you, too," I muttered.

  She ignored that, passed me one of the vials, and instructed me to add three drops to each bucket. The scent from the oil within was bitter and green. I knew I should ask what it was, but I wasn't ready for a magic lesson just then. Then again, it might distract Cassandra from talking about Damon.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "Feverfew," she said.

  That left me none the wiser. Herb lore hadn’t been part of my hasty preparation to fight the demon, and the name didn't ring any bells from the bits and pieces Sara had taught me. I tucked the name in the back of my mind and carefully dripped the oil, then recapped the vial.

  "Good," she said approvingly as I passed her the
oil back and opened the next one she handed me, asking what that was, too. After we'd mixed everything together, the aroma rising from the steam reminded me of a garden beginning to grow after winter. Green and strong. No sweetness or perfume to it. Powerful but vaguely unsettling. It didn't quite mask the still acidic rotten smell that wafted from the ashes every time the breeze flirted our way entirely, but it was an improvement.

  Cassandra leaned down, holding her hands over the buckets and muttering under her breath. I half saw, half felt the subtle wave of power she released. The mixture in the buckets bubbled, and the steam briefly flashed a ghostly green.

  As she straightened she said, "Don't worry, I won’t try to make a match between you and Damon. I'm not Lizzie. I don't think men really change their spots, and I think that one did you the courtesy of telling you the truth before either of you got too far in."

  I bit back the “It would have been nice to know a bit earlier” that rose in my throat, limiting myself to nodding.

  "So no, I think you'd be far wiser to give the man a wide berth. But from what we saw with the imp, it's clear you may have some untangling of feelings to complete first. Not to mention trying to figure out what's trying to kill him." She nodded down at the steaming scorch mark.

  "You think it would have killed him?" I hadn't had time to stop and think about what was happening. Now, the memory of the creature's teeth and claws and the thought of them tearing into Damon made my knees feel wobbly. The green scent rising around me caught in my throat, and I swallowed hard, hoping I wasn't going to disgrace myself by barfing into the buckets we'd just so carefully prepared.

  "It looked as though it had violence on its mind on the video. Imps usually do," Cassandra said as she picked up one of the buckets and pointed at the other one.

  I lifted it with fingers suddenly sweaty and clumsy.

  Cassandra walked to the opposite side of the scorch mark to me, then frowned, studying my face. "You've gone pale again. Are you feeling all right?"

  "I don’t even know how to answer that," I said honestly. "Can we just finish this, and then I might be able to start figuring it out?"