American Demon

by Kim Harrison

  I exhaled, feeling my breath shake. “Here we go.” It was going to work. I could feel it. The hard part would be living with having mixed demon and elf magic. Sorry, Al. Deal with it.

  “Ta na shay, obscurum per obscuris. Wee-keh Wehr-sah, ta na shay,” I said, my words fast but assertive. Strengthening my hold on the ley line, I snapped my fingers.

  Gasping, I jumped at the sudden burst of line energy. On the table, the pentagon unfolded, shifted, and the ghostly points of an undrawn ten-pointed star misted into existence. At each point, a candle that never existed flickered, each with a distinctive auratic shade.

  “It worked!” I shouted, then jumped, catching back a shriek at the crash of the door.

  “I gave no permission to continue,” Hodin all but barked as he strode in. “I felt a line drop.”

  “Since when do I need your permission?” I said, but he was right. He was spotting me.

  Knowing it as well, Hodin took a breath to yell at me. And then he stared, eyes on the table. Lips parted, he closed the distance between us, narrowly missing the hole in the floor.

  “Um,” I murmured, my thoughts on mystics as I searched Jenks’s smiling face.

  “You’re good. He knows his stuff,” the pixy said, jerking a thumb back at Hodin.

  “You got it to work.” Hodin rocked to a halt, shocked. “What did you do?”

  But I’d used elven magic, and he wasn’t going to like it.

  “Of course she got it to work.” Proud as if he’d done it himself, Jenks alighted on my shoulder, hand near his sword, struggling to not slip off the dusted silk.

  “You don’t want to know,” I muttered. Something, though, wasn’t right with the last two candles. The flames looked like they weren’t even there. I leaned to look closer, but my attention jerked up and away when Hodin reached for my hand, eyeing the pricked tip and bloodied thumb.

  “You lighted it with your blood,” he said, letting go. “We tried that already. What else did you do?” But when I was silent, Hodin’s expression went ugly, probably thinking I was going to keep it from him.

  “She asked for the Goddess’s attention, Home Slice,” Jenks said proudly. “Duh.”

  Horrified, Hodin stepped back, his eyes widening as he searched my outlines. “Did . . . ?”

  “Jenks says the mystics aren’t swarming,” I blurted, unable to pull myself out of my embarrassed hunch. “He watched me the whole time. It worked. Your fix worked. She didn’t recognize me.” Worked. It was a funny way to describe mutilating my ability to jump the lines.

  Hodin looked at what I’d done, eyebrows rising when he noticed the last two odd-flamed candles, and then his expression emptied. “Close it. Shut it down. We are demons, not elves,” he demanded, and Jenks’s wings clattered.

  “She got it to work, moss wipe,” he said as he darted from my shoulder, and his dust made the unreal candles sputter and flare. “What the firefly ass is your problem?”

  My face was cold. “There’s nothing wrong with the Goddess. She used to be Newt, for crying out loud.”

  “Close it!” he demanded again, posture stiff. “Or I will.”

  Fine. My chin lifted. I wouldn’t feel guilty about this. “Ta na shay, ut omnes unum sint,” I said belligerently, and with a tweak on my thoughts, all the candles but the original vanished.

  Hodin blew my All candle out, then used his sleeve to wipe the glyph away.

  “Chicken,” I said, but my lips parted when he took the chalk and snapped it in two. “Hey! Knock it off.” I stood, and he grabbed my arm, looking as if his thoughts were so full he couldn’t decide where to start. “What are you going to do?” I said as I pulled away. “Tell Dali on me?”

  “You used elf magic,” Hodin sputtered.

  “So?” I backed up an angry, frustrated step. “The Goddess is in charge of demon and elf magic whether you like it or not. And by the looks of it, she’s tired of letting the demons wallow in their pity party. She’s not siding with any of her children anymore. I think she knows you aren’t strong enough to survive a rebirth of the elves, so if you want to find your place in reality, you’re going to have to use all your magic, not just the piddle pat you allow yourselves, and to do that, you’re going to have to get off your high horse and ask for her help.”

  “Piddle pat?” Hodin said, and my eyes narrowed, head tilted to look up at him.

  “Piddle. Pat,” I said into his suddenly startled expression. “You can’t rule the world from fear and live in it anymore. You gotta use all the tools in your toolbox to get along. I can help, but not if you’re going to hang me from the tree I dig you out from under.”

  Jenks’s wings tickled my neck, and I stifled a shiver. For a moment, I thought Hodin was going to storm off, but then he took a step back. Head down, he whispered, “I can’t.”

  “That’s a load of crap.” But I froze when his eyes met mine. He was afraid.

  Embarrassed, I glanced at the table and back to him. “Why not?” I asked. I knew about fear.

  “Because I asked for her help, and she said no,” he said, a flicker of betrayal in him.

  My shoulders slumped.

  “And because of that,” he continued, voice iron hard, “I was made a slave to the elves, her favorites, for an eternity. I’d still be trapped if the two worlds hadn’t collided.”

  It was what I figured, but the more I thought about it, the more that last misfire felt like a slap from the Goddess. “The same elves who can’t do crap right now,” I said, reaching to touch his shoulder.

  Hodin jerked back, and my hand fell. “This lesson is over,” he said, and the basket of ley line paraphernalia he’d brought vanished.

  Angry, I pushed out from between the couch and the table. “This is not a lesson,” I said loudly, pointing at the table. “It’s a lab session, and it’s not over! If you leave, I’ll be working alone,” I said, allowing a touch of fear to enter my voice. “You want to sit on the couch and sulk, fine, but you’re not leaving until I’m done.” I lifted my chin, not caring that he was mad. I could take whatever he dished out. “What else you got to do today?”

  His eyes narrowed . . . and then he sat with a huff. “You’d be surprised how I fill my day.”

  He’s going to stay? I thought, exchanging a glance with Jenks. “Yeah, well, today you’re filling it sitting on my couch,” I said, shocked he hadn’t left. “I need a spotter. Spot me.”

  “What a whiny baby,” Jenks said from my shoulder, and I huffed my agreement.

  “I want to try this with one of the generic candles,” I said, taking up the snapped chalk and sketching a new, closed pentagon with its ten bisecting lines. “See how much freedom we have now that we know what the Goddess wants,” I added as I massaged more blood from my pricked finger and smeared it on a birthday candle. “And you can just deal with it,” I shot at Hodin, but he was busy brooding, knees crossed as he scowled.

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t be so worried,” Hodin said tightly. “Sloppy. You aren’t even bothering to make an All candle.”

  “I don’t have the time,” I snarked back, angry. “And if there is one thing that Newt understood, it was a lack of time.”

  “Ah, Rache, should you be spelling angry?” Jenks asked, and I brushed his dust from my front before it could find my pentagon.

  “Ta na shay, you crazy bitch,” I muttered as I set the candle in the center. “Ta na shay, obscurum per obscuris. Wee-keh Wehr-sah!”

  I shouted the last, clapping my hands and jerking when a wave of energy ballooned out, pushing my hair back as it flowed past me. Crap on toast, I knew better than to spell angry.

  “It worked!” Jenks crowed, and I looked at my hands, horrified as they tingled. But it was just from overload, and the sparkles vanished to leave me shaken. “Look. It’s exactly the same.”

  Hodin frowned, his image wavering through th
e shimmering protection bubble he’d snapped around himself. His eyes went to the table as he dropped it. His expression shifted to disbelief and then to something I couldn’t name. “Huh,” he muttered as his knees uncrossed.

  Eleven candles burned, ten at the points, one in the middle, their colors more shades than a rainbow. Not only had it worked, but it had worked well. “Hodin, are there too many mystics?” I said as I thought I felt the Goddess laugh.

  “No,” he said, and I began to breathe again. Something had shifted. I heard it in his voice. He’s worried. About me?

  “Rache, how come those last two are black?”

  I looked at the spread, brow furrowing when concern pinched Hodin’s eyes. The last two flames weren’t missing, but they weren’t there, either.

  “Maybe it’s outside my vision,” I said, and Jenks shook his head, slipping from me to hover beside Hodin. “You?” I asked Hodin, and he shook his head as well.

  “They’re burning black,” he said, chilling me. “It’s not smut. It’s baku damage. How many times have you been attacked?”

  “Two,” I lied, and Jenks rasped his wings. “Okay, three,” I added. Sure, this was exactly what I had been hoping the curse would do, but seeing the damage reflected in my soul’s expression, a thread of dread wound about my heart and tightened. “But I’m not sleeping anymore, so it doesn’t matter. I’m not going into seclusion. Hodin, help me here. I can’t hide in a hole and wait to fall asleep and kill the person I love.”

  Hodin was silent, and slowly I sank down to sit across from him, the bells on the scrumptious robe he had given me jingling. I wasn’t begging for his help, exactly. But if he left, I’d be on my own. That was when I usually did something stupid in my efforts to not fail.

  Hodin’s lip twitched. Silk robe rustling, he stood to look at the pool table. “We need to set them all up at once. My workbench at home isn’t big enough. But that is.”

  Relief filled me, but Jenks rose up on a column of angry red dust. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Cool your draft, Home Slice. We already said no.”

  “I’ll smooth it over with Ivy,” I said as I stood and followed Hodin across the sanctuary, the tiny bells on my sash jingling.

  “It’s old slate.” Hodin ran his hand across the pristine felt. “From an even older lake. Laid down before I was even born. Do you know how rare that is?”

  “Which is why you’re not going to twist any curses on it.” Jenks touched his sword hilt as he hovered before Hodin, and the demon lifted his hand from the felt and turned to me.

  “We need to compare them all at once,” Hodin said. “I’ll fix it once we’re done.”

  “I need this, Jenks,” I said, but what I was thinking was that a pool table was a small price to pay for demons to consider bringing the Goddess into their magic. Not to mention maybe keeping me from killing Trent.

  “Oh, Tink loves a duck. Ivy’s going to kill me,” Jenks moaned, darting back when Hodin said a word of Latin and the table was engulfed in a shimmering bubble. When it cleared, the bumpers were gone and a gray table with six holes at the corners and on the long sides remained.

  “I don’t understand your reticence,” Hodin said as he sketched six pentagons down one side with an incredible precision. “There’re better uses for such large measures of slate than gaming on.”

  “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,” I said as I inched closer. “My dad taught me algebra at our local pool hall.” My arms crept up around my middle. Sure, I’d twisted the curse twice with no mystics showing, but this was six, all at once.

  Hodin finished and straightened. “You’ll have to introduce me to it someday.”

  “Deal.” I went back to the couch for the vials of blood, silent as I set them up in a row on the denuded pool table.

  “You should anoint the candles to minimize contamination from my aura,” I said, shifting to make room when Hodin came forward. “Here,” I added, setting a handful of unused styluses down. “You can probably invoke them all at once.”

  “Me?” Hodin’s reach faltered. “I’m not contacting the Goddess. You do it.”

  Jenks’s wings fluttered against my neck to send a shiver through me. “You want Rachel to do it?” he protested. “And risk she attract the Goddess’s little helpers? What a whiny sack of spider snot.”

  “I’ll do it. They can’t see me,” I said as I strengthened my hold on the ley line. “Ta na shay,” I said as I took the first candle he handed me. “Ta na shay, obscurum per obscuris.”

  My heart pounded as I paused the curse midtwist while Hodin finished anointing the rest. “Ta na shay, obscurum per obscuris,” I said again at the next glyph, feeling my hold on the line deepen. A faint tingling in my fingers gave me pause, but Jenks would tell me if it was the mystics, and I followed Hodin down the table, setting the candles he anointed.

  Done, I exhaled, thinking this was either very clever or was going to hurt really bad. “Wee-keh Wehr-sah, ta na shay!” I said, clapping my hands and stumbling at the line drop.

  “Watch it!” Hodin exclaimed, catching my elbow, and Jenks took off from my shoulder.

  “Jenks, move,” I said as he hovered before me, presumably looking for swarming mystics. “I can’t see.”

  “It worked,” Hodin said as he let go of my elbow. “Look at that.”

  “Wow.” Sash jingling, I waved Jenks out of the way. All six pentagons had opened and twisted. All had the ghostly candles, and all of them had that same gap, some with two candles, some with three. Worried, I looked past Hodin to my own spread still glowing on the table by the couch. Hodin had said the damage wasn’t permanent, but it was like finding a hidden cancer, black and ugly.

  “Interesting.” Hodin fingered his chalk. “Let’s see the aura spread from the people we know weren’t infected by the baku.”

  Infected? Hodin quickly sketched six more pentagons on the other side of the table, this time using the anonymous donors’ blood to set the candles and his own to light them. Uneasy, I followed behind him, beginning the curse anew. With each “Ta na shay, obscurum per obscuris,” my connection to the line grew deeper with wild, unreliable magic. I was shaking by the time I got to the last. Jenks gave me a worried thumbs-up, and I took a moment to steady myself.

  “Wee-keh Wehr-sah, ta na shay,” I said, locking my knees before I snapped my fingers.

  My breath hissed in through my nose as the line surged and an unexpected warming wash of tingles cascaded through me. I blinked, shocked at the almost carnal sensation of pleasure rooting its way down and through me until it finally dissipated. What the hell? I unclenched my hands, gaze shooting to Jenks. Wings humming, he shrugged, but it was probably at my sudden flush rather than at any stray mystic. The Goddess, apparently, was pleased with me.

  “Did it work?” I asked, wishing my ears weren’t so warm.

  “Admirably.” Hodin crouched before the first. “They are perfect.” Smile rising up to include his eyes, he beamed at me. “We seem to have a working curse.”

  “Good.” My arms went around my middle. It was what I had wanted. But now there was no denying that I’d been attacked. And if I’d been attacked, then Zack was probably telling the truth about Landon’s goal. The only difference between me and the poor slobs in jail was that I’d woken up.

  Hodin’s thoughts must have been similar, his smile fading as he looked across the sanctuary to my own auratic spread. “You should be in seclusion.”

  “I’m its target. I’m not sitting this one out,” I said, scowling. “As long as I don’t fall asleep, I’m good. You said the damage will mend. Let’s get on with this, okay?”

  My words were confident, but I knew Jenks could see through them, making me flustered as I rounded the table to stand before the six spreads belonging to the incarcerated Inderlanders. “Some of them aren’t as bad. I bet you could put them in order of attack by the amount of h
ealing already done.”

  Interested, Hodin flipped through Ivy’s notes. “This is the earliest attack,” I said as I read them over his shoulder before pointing to a glyph with two candles showing black.

  Head bobbing, Hodin squinted at them. “You can almost see a hint of color.” He rose, and Jenks, who had been hovering close, darted back. “This one here,” he said, pointing. “He was the last. Am I right?”

  I looked at Ivy’s cheat sheet and nodded. “It’s healing?”

  “Of course,” he said, and Jenks’s dust shifted to a relieved gold. “Auras echo the soul, and the soul is self-mending.”

  “Or self-destroying,” Jenks said as he landed right in the middle of the spell and stared at the black-flame candle. “Tink loves a duck, that’s weird. Don’t go to sleep, Rache. You don’t want to lose any more of your inner shells.”

  “Well-done,” Hodin said softly, almost to himself, and then his eyes came to me. “Well-done,” he said again, louder this time.

  I flushed at the real pleasure in his voice, and he studied the table. “It might need some tweaking, but I’d say there’re enough examples here to register it,” he said.

  “Tweaking?” Jenks rose up from the table. “You mean like trying to get it to work without laying down some love on the Goddess? Good luck with that.”

  Hodin gave Jenks an acerbic look, then waved a hand to lightly circle the entire table. “Register it, Rachel,” he prompted.

  “Evulgo, Rachel Mariana Morgan,” I whispered, and then I shivered, feeling a slight tug on my chi as the curse registered. “I wish you were in the collective,” I said, and Hodin’s circle fell with a sharp, startled tug on my awareness. “So you could get credit for it,” I added.

  “I did very little,” Hodin said, and Jenks flew back to his lamp, trailing a sour green dust.

  “You stayed with me,” I said, and Jenks swore something inaudible. “It was your curse I modified. I could never have come up with this on my own, only build from it.”

  Hodin was silent, and then I flushed, figuring it out. It had nothing to do with him not being in the collective. The curse needed the Goddess, and he didn’t want his name attached.