Wicked Words

by M. J. Scott

  I'd spent quite a bit of time “if only-ing” that one myself since I'd found out that was what she'd done. And some more regretting what happened between Damon and me. Maybe I needed to learn from him and lock all that away somewhere.

  Though he was the last person I wanted to ask to teach me how.

  Fortunately Lizzie arrived to dump an armful of books between us before our conversation could continue. "Demonkind mugshots, volumes 1 to 5," she said cheerfully. "That should keep you busy for a while."

  She was right about that. The books were thick. Cassandra had said there were at least ten thousand different kinds of imps. So I could only assume there were more volumes to come.

  "Mugshots?" Damon said hopefully. "Photographs?"

  Lizzie shook her head. "Nope, drawings for the most part. I was paraphrasing."

  "Will you be helping?" I asked, hoping she'd correctly translate this as "I'd rather not sit here doing this with Damon." Which was a long shot given her view on our relationship.

  "Cassandra and I are going to be neck-deep in summoning and trigger spells. See if we can work out how the spell in the garden shed might have worked."

  "Cassandra said that would be easier if we knew what kind of imp it was," I said. "If you help, we might find that out faster."

  "Maybe, but no harm working the problem from both directions." She pointed at the books. "Enjoy. Yell if you find your creepy pale friend." She headed back to join Cassandra.

  I narrowed my eyes at her retreating back as I reached for the nearest book. Volume 1, according to the neatly lettered spine. Prosaic brown leather, faintly worn, and the edges of the pages had yellowed slightly. Obviously old. I didn't want to damage it. Lizzie hadn't told us to wear gloves or anything though, so maybe it wasn't too fragile.

  Using my fingertips, I cautiously flipped it open, supporting the front cover as I lowered it down to the table. The title page had a border of swirls and flourishes in black ink that was turning red-brown with age. The title read simply Demonkind I. No further explanations offered. I guess whoever wrote it assumed that if you were allowed to read the book, you probably didn't need them.

  I turned the page gently. No table of contents or index. Just a half-page drawing of an imp. Whoever drew it had been skilled. Even sketched in careful strokes and shadowed with tiny lines, the creature was creepy. Tall with bony features beneath a dark skin—the illustration was black-and-white, so I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be black or dark gray or some other shade. Arms that bent at too many angles ended in hands more like clawed spikes. Beside it were a few lines of neat text, but the words were in what I thought was Latin. Somehow the need to learn Latin had never come up in my education.

  But then again, if I could read the descriptions and stopped to do just that for each picture these books contained, it would only slow down the search. What mattered was that this creature did not look much like the one I'd killed in Damon's garden. I flipped the page, then another, then another.

  Beside me, I was dimly aware that Damon had started a search of his own. Good. Less talking was good.

  I flipped another page.

  By the time I reached the end of the book, my eyes were already sore. And my brain was full of images that I wasn't happy about. Imps and whatever else these things were came in a dizzying variation of bodies that ranged from gross to truly frightening.

  Nothing quite as primordially terrifying as the demon was, but that had been more than just its appearance. Something about its presence had bypassed all sensible thought to hit the part of the human nervous system that still remembered being a small helpless thing that other things with teeth and claws would kill without blinking.

  These were just pictures. They couldn't hurt me. They might make my nightmares less pleasant, of course, but I'd lived with nightmares so long that they were normal in a weird way.

  Damon closed the book he'd been looking through and sat back in his chair.

  "My kingdom for a tagging system," he muttered. "There has got to be an easier way."

  He was right. There should be. Even without stopping to read anything, it had taken us over thirty minutes to get through the first volumes.

  "Well, you could build a time travel machine and go back and fund the Cestis better so they had microfiche, at least. Of course, you'd have to figure out how to convince them that digitizing all this was safe, as well." I didn't doubt that if he set his mind to it, he could talk Cassandra round. After all, his kingdom could buy a lot of tagging systems. And his charm could probably pay for even more. But that didn't help us here and now.

  "If I could build a time travel machine, we wouldn't be sitting here in the first place," Damon said. But then he sighed and reached for the next book.

  Asking exactly what he would do with a time travel machine seemed like a bad idea, so I did the same.

  The second volume was just as gross as the first. But still not helpful. There were a couple of lighter imps, so I noted the page numbers. Before I could worry about whether Damon and I might have to go through the fifth volume together, Lizzie reemerged with another armful of books.

  "Any luck?" she asked.

  "Not really," I replied. Damon shook his head, too. "How about you?"

  "Cassandra has a few ideas. But I'm mostly of book-fetching duty at this point, so I can't tell you exactly what they are. Happy reading." She turned and headed away again.

  The book on top of the pile was volume six. There didn't seem any particular need to go in order, so I took it. The text of the first page actually looked printed rather than inked onto the page. I got about halfway through before a pale imp caught my eye.

  "Does this look about right?" I said to Damon, pushing the book in his direction.

  He pulled out his datapad. "I have the footage. We can check."

  Of course he had the footage. I wouldn't have been surprised if he was able to project a whole 3D image of the thing from his garden and map it somehow against the picture to do a full image match.

  But we didn't need anything that sophisticated. Whoever had drawn the creature in the book had been accurate. It wasn't exactly identical once we lined the screenshot against the drawing, but if they'd been together in a freaky demon monster lineup, I would have labeled them as the same species or whatever the right term was.

  "We have a winner," I said and picked up the book. Lizzie and Cassandra were sitting at one of the desks in the stacks, heads bent over another book. They looked up as I approached.

  "Find something?" Lizzie asked.

  I put the book down on the table and tapped the page. "This one."

  Cassandra pulled the book closer, studying the picture.

  "What does it say?" I asked.

  "Still an imp," Lizzie said absently. "Not common."

  "Is ‘still an imp’ good or bad?"

  Cassandra looked up from the picture. "Well, it means it was sent. Or someone set it up to be summoned. Which is consistent with what the traces from the spell in the shed tell us. It says here..." She leaned closer and squinted. "Contagious. I think. It's not quite clear."

  "Contagious?" Lizzie said. "That's weird."

  "Is anything about these things not weird?" Damon muttered.

  Lizzie pointed at the picture. "Well, imps mostly just try to eat your face off if they're attacking you. At least the ones we usually see. Not sure there's much point in them infecting you with something when they can kill you pretty easily. I mean, look at the claws and teeth on it."

  I didn't look. I didn't need the reminder.

  “Are they saying this one does more than that?”

  Cassandra hitched a shoulder. “Hard to say. There’s nothing else here. It could be contagious, or it could work with sickness somehow. Or it could be the language means something closer to venomous. Or poisonous. This note is from a few centuries ago.” She tapped a notation at the top of the page.

  "Well, it didn't touch either of us, so I guess it doesn't matter," I said. "A
nd we cleansed the ashes."

  Cassandra nodded at that. "Yes. And we can do some more to reinforce that cleansing if we need to."

  "Does it help you figure out who summoned it, knowing what kind it is?" I asked.

  "There’s nothing here about that either, to say how common this kind is. Or what it takes to summon one.” She peered at the image. “The remnants I felt in the garden made me think human magic. Which is possible given it's an imp."

  "Humans can summon imps?"

  "Sometimes. And they can definitely set a trigger spell to help make a target for something else doing a summoning. This one is large though. And the contagion thing is unusual. If it's some sort of stronger imp, then it's more likely to be a lesserkind controlling it. Or a demon using a witch who is far gone into its control."

  I didn't like the sound of that. "Why far gone?"

  "The sort of power it would take to bring a stronger manifestation over would burn out most humans," Cassandra said. "It's not like a binding. It takes a lot more power. For a witch to funnel that much power from a demon, they would have to cede total control to it. At which point it's safe enough to say that they’re really no longer a person. More a person-shaped home for the demon to walk around in."

  The thought of that made me want to gag. "Why would anyone do that?"

  "I doubt many people set out to end up that way," Cassandra said. "People are foolish. They think they’ll be able to control what they give to the demon, to resist it. Most of them cannot. Which is why only fools dabble in such things to begin with." She looked at me. I met her gaze. Yes, my mother had been a fool who had bound her only daughter's powers to a demon. But I had no desire to follow her in her footsteps.

  She'd paid dearly for her choices in the end. And I'd had the love and care of my grandparents to help me heal the worst of the scars from my childhood with her from the time I'd turned thirteen. True, the last of her legacy had only come to light when I'd accidentally broken the bond with the demon, and I hadn't yet truly dealt with that final betrayal.

  Then again, perhaps she had cared for me a little. Whatever she'd done to bind me to the demon, she’d also kept it from influencing me in any other way other than siphoning my magic. I hadn't turned into the kind of mindless demon meat suit Cassandra was describing—and no, no thinking about what a close call it might have been or I'd risk losing my lunch right here in the library—and the Cestis had declared me free from demon taint twice now.

  My mother had been powerful. Possibly as strong as Cassandra or Lizzie. Why she'd chosen the life of a grifter and to be the kind of witch who preyed on the hopeful or the hopeless, selling them love potions or luck spells and taking their money for years, was something I would never understand. Maybe it was the only way she could play out whatever her plan for me had been or get whatever the demon paid for me. But she hadn't lived long enough to reap whatever reward she thought she was earning.

  "So we're looking for a person?" Damon asked.

  "I think a person most likely set the spell in your garden," Cassandra corrected. "But it's unlikely they're working on their own."

  He pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, grimacing.

  "Which brings us back to working out who wants to get to you," I said. "And Righteous."

  Lizzie nodded agreement.

  Damon shook his head. "Just when I thought things were getting back to normal."

  I flinched. Just when he'd fought to bring his company back from the disaster my demon caused the first time. He could tell me he didn't blame me all he wanted, but it was hard to see how he could feel anything else.

  Cassandra looked sympathetic. "We will start there. You have a good team working for you. If Mr. Angelico will cooperate, then hopefully we can narrow down a list of people to talk to. In the meantime, we’re also talking to our networks. See if anyone has noticed any unusual activity."

  How unusual would something have to be to stand out from whatever the Cestis had already been dealing with?

  As if she could sense what I was thinking, Lizzie rubbed her arm, flexing her fingers.

  Cassandra pursed her lips. "But I think all of this can wait until the morning. Lizzie and Maggie need to rest. I need to speak to the other members of the Cestis. Damon, I would recommend you go to a hotel for the night. I would prefer to check your home one more time before you stay there alone. Choose one you haven't stayed in before."

  "We have suites at the Riley campus," he said. "I don't usually stay there. They're more secure than a hotel would be."

  "Perhaps. But it seems likely that someone who is targeting you will be watching the place you work," Cassandra said.

  Damon nodded. "I understand that. And I'll think about it."

  Cassandra nodded. "It is, of course, your decision. Just be careful. Lizzie will let you out. We can reconvene at your office in the morning."

  Chapter Eighteen

  "Christ, I could eat a horse," Damon said as we emerged blinking into the golden light of early evening.

  "Me, too," I said. Then regretted it. I didn't want him to think I was angling for an invitation.

  "That place is..." Damon turned back to look at Cassandra's house.

  "Weird? Archaic? Fascinating and terrifying?" I offered.

  "I don't know about fascinating," he said, "but yes to the others."

  He didn't fool me. The man didn't like magic, but he'd been interested in what we'd been doing. Beyond the horrified curiosity of a techno geek trying to assimilate that a global network could operate without his favorite toys and gadgets. I knew what his face looked like when something caught his attention. Because once upon a time, it was the expression I'd seen when he'd looked at me.

  But there I went thinking foolish thoughts again.

  "It's definitely lacking in snacks," I joked.

  "Yes. I guess they save their money for the books," Damon said. "I wonder where they buy them."

  "Some sort of magical dark web?" I said. "Or maybe not the web if Cassandra's aversion to tech is the norm. Maybe those weird little spooky bookstores you see in fantasy films are based on real places."

  "I don't know how weird and spooky they'd be," he said. "Those books were old. They can't be cheap. Maybe the magical booksellers are making bank, and that's why Cassandra doesn't have money to digitize the whole thing."

  "Maybe she thinks this is safer," I said lightly. "We can't all be billionaire uber-geeks who think tech holds all the answers.”

  His mouth twitched, but I couldn't tell if the expression he was hiding was a smile or a wince because he'd put his sunglasses back on.

  "You could let the billionaire uber-geek buy you dinner," he said.

  What the heck? I opened my mouth to answer and then closed it again as confusion rushed through me. Swiftly followed by a spike of “Yes!” that almost made me step toward him, pulled in his direction by emotions too dumb to know when to quit.

  "I’m not sure that would be smart," I said after an awkward pause as I tried to think of a better answer.

  "Just dinner," he said. "You have to let me say thank you. You did save my life today."

  The first time he'd taken me to dinner, there'd been stupidly good steak and wickedly expensive scotch, and the night had ended in scorching-hot sex. Three things that sounded hard to regret, but I did regret them. Well, not so much the steak and the scotch because I wasn't dumb enough to pass those up when offered, but the sex had been...a beginning all too soon ended. A regret to add to the tally of regrets that had dogged the last year.

  That tally wasn’t going to get any higher if there was any way to avoid it.

  "That still doesn't make it a good idea. You, me. Together."

  "I'm not talking candles and low lighting," he said. "One of the UC professors told me about a great taco truck near the marina where they built that new park."

  He knew I liked tacos. Or maybe he'd forgotten and had just picked them at random. My stomach hadn't. It rumbled at the thought, and he
grinned.

  "That's one yes. What does the rest of you say?"

  Tacos weren't sexy, I told myself. And they were fast. I could eat and leave. Get out with my stomach full and my emotions no more ruffled than they already had been today. Simple, right?

  "I think Cassandra wouldn’t want us hanging around in the open."

  "She wants me to be unpredictable. I don't think anyone is expecting me to go for dinner at a taco truck in Berkeley. I've never been there before. Ji-Lin said they were really good."

  Right now the tacos didn't even have to be good. I just needed them to be hot and edible.

  "Well?" Damon asked, as though he could sense my resolve crumbling.

  "One hour. I have...things to do." Now that I had my magic back, I wanted to take another stab at my client’s problem. See if the solution suddenly leaped out at me.

  But I didn’t actually have to do that right away. So, as excuses went, it was weak. But it seemed so was my willpower when it came to Damon. It didn't matter what truth I knew or how much logic I tried to apply to the situation. Not when my heart still wanted to leap when he smiled at me and the scent of him in the warm afternoon air made my mouth water for more than fast food.

  So I would indulge myself. To a point. Let myself have an hour to pretend we could perhaps be friends. Friends who ate tacos in the summer twilight and had magic-free lives and no complicated past.

  Normal friends.

  Since magic had come back into my life, I wasn't sure I even knew what normal was anymore. Didn't I deserve a taste? Even if it was a lie?

  "Things?" Damon said.

  "Work. I'm sure you do, too."

  He nodded. "Yes. But food first. One hour. It's a deal."

  Forty-five minutes later, I had a belly full of near perfect fish tacos, a half-drunk so-called Tijuana Iced Tea that I was beginning to suspect featured more tequila than one might expect from a cocktail poured by a business operating on taco truck margins, a sunny spot on the grass near the waterfront, and an increasing reluctance to stick to my own time limit.