My Demon Warlord

by Carolyn Jewel

  Salvador shouted warnings in a bizarre combination of English, Spanish, and Aztec, and his sworn joined in. In the meantime, the mage was losing it, bending over, hands clamped over his ears.

  Annoyed, Kynan grabbed Salvador’s shoulder and dead-dropped him just to get him to shut up. The dead drop prevented Salvador from accessing his magic. The mage fell to his knees and clutched his middle with both hands. Who wouldn’t panic, losing his magic without warning? Kynan leaned over him. Life would be so much simpler if he could just terminate the guy and be done with it.

  He tapped Salvador on the head. “He’s like me. One of us.” Meaning Tau wasn’t a danger. That was mostly not a lie. “So, chill, my friend, there’s no danger.”

  Salvador nodded, and once Kynan was satisfied the kid had control of himself, he released the dead drop. After a deep breath, the mage pointed at Tau. “Is he friendly?”

  “Hell if I know.” Now that he understood what had caused his wards to react as if there were magehelds massing outside, he relaxed. In future, he’d have to adjust his wards to account for Tau’s particular ability. “He’s not a danger. Does that help? Tau. Are you friendly?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Salvador bounced on his feet but stayed calm. Good little baby mage. “No one would tell me before.”

  “He’s not an enemy, how about that?” How had this puny young mage known Tau was here before he did?

  Quentin wavered, staring eyes blinking rapidly. To one side of the man, Moeletsi Tau smiled, as real and solid as any demon in his physical manifestation. Quentin settled into passivity. Humans rarely reacted well to an indwell. Quentin was a loser as far as ability went, but Kynan couldn’t blame him for going nearly catatonic.

  Tau pressed three fingers to his forehead. “Warlord.”

  “Moeletsi?” Winters wasn’t faking her astonishment. Yeah. She hadn’t seen that coming, either.

  “Nikodemus sent me to be of all possible assistance.”

  Fucking Ashley started panting again, and another ward shriveled at the center. Salvador had reacted oddly to her, and Kynan had to respect that. Precognition and sensitivity; he’d said Ashley was going to die.

  Winters sucked in a breath as Kynan leaned over Ashley and demanded, “What the fuck are you?” He blocked out everything else and gave the human woman his full attention, the way he’d examined the magic he’d found outside. She flickered at the edges the way the other layered magic had. His sworn churned to life.

  Ashley blinked several times. Sweat trickled down the side of her face, and her eyes practically rattled in her head. “I’m fine. Everything is fine.”

  “Hold still.” He passed a hand over her, flexing his magic as he did. His skin rippled up and down his spine. To his nonhuman vision, she continued to flicker. He touched her collarbone and pushed the tip of his finger into the shimmer.

  Underneath that odd glint was a layer of magic. The hell? He peeled back that layer and exposed another layer, then another. The last didn’t come away like the previous two because it had been anchored in the very cells of her body. Ashley flinched, and pinpricks of blood appeared on her skin where he separated the magic from her body. The hooks went deep, mimicking a de minimis core of magic. Enough that she could pass for a magic user. Oh shit.

  He motioned to Winters and Tau. “Get over here. Have you ever seen anything like this?” he asked when they were close enough to see the abomination of magic sustained by Ashley’s blood and marrow.

  “I have not,” Tau replied.

  His sworn howled when he peeled away a larger area. The roots had been anchored in bone and threaded upward to her carotid and jugular. More pinpricks of blood appeared, and her eyes rolled back in her head. Had he not grabbed her upper arm, she would have fallen.

  “It’s killing her,” Tau said.

  Winters tipped her head to one side. “That is. . .barbaric,” she said in a low voice that resonated with anger. Justifiable.

  “Where’d you find this one?”

  “Telegraph Avenue.” There was nothing exceptional in that. Telegraph near the Berkeley campus was rife with the exact population that tended to include borderline magic users. The homeless, the substance-addicted, people with mental health issues. Just like Ashley.

  “If you wanted to plant someone I’d find interesting,” Winters said in a tight voice, “Telegraph Avenue would be perfect.”

  Tau said, “She will die if that magic remains so.”

  “I think she’ll die if he takes it off,” Winters said.

  Kynan nodded in the direction of the misfits gathered at the other side of the room. “Check the others, Tau.”

  Instead of an objection about abusing her precious newbies, Winters brushed a finger over the hole he’d exposed in the layered magic that had been embedded in the woman. The center of his chest pulsed once as Winters probed. Ashley shuddered hard. “It’s hooked into her heart,” she said. “Keep her still.”

  “I’m trying.” He adjusted his grip on the woman.

  She lifted Ashley’s hair and inspected the back of her neck. “What’s under here?” Kynan pried up the layers at the spot. Her mouth got hard. “Her spinal column, too.”

  “Fucking magekind,” he said. He peeled back more of the layers.

  She snatched back her hand when the magic he’d separated from Ashley shriveled like paper tossed onto a fire. A spray of sparks appeared in the air overhead, and every ward within twenty feet deformed.

  The human grabbed her throat, eyes bulging, struggling to breathe. Blood erupted from her nose and eyes. Her legs gave way, and if Kynan hadn’t had a grip on her upper arm, she’d have hit the ground hard enough to break something.

  “Jesus fuck.” He shoved Winters away. “Stay back.” Whoever had done this must have set a trigger to kill the woman if more than some set amount of the layering was removed. He let Ashley down gently and looked over his shoulder. “Tau, are they clear?”

  “These humans do not have that covering magic.”

  He looked back at Ashley’s inert body. Blood trickled down one side of her mouth, and her pupils cycled between pinprick and fully dilated, then stopped. His sworn came to life, shrieking warnings. If not for his promises to Nikodemus, he would have pulled every atom of additional power from them that he could. Magic that obscene often had its own life. The fact that Ashley was down didn’t mean they were safe.

  Across the room, Salvador moaned softly. “Dead. She is dead. Dead.”

  Kynan headed for the pile of personal possessions in the entryway. LaShawn made the mistake of looking directly at him. He didn’t push because that would get him in trouble with Nikodemus and Winters both. At this point, however, he didn’t trust any of the newbies. Poking at the boundaries of his oaths wasn’t a good idea, but if LaShawn, the wanna-be escapee, felt the pull and wanted to play, was that his fault? He held her gaze. Ashley’s belongings resonated with the magic that had been hooked into her, but wouldn’t it be interesting if LaShawn lied to him? “Which purse is hers?” He kept looking at her. “If you know.”

  “The blue one.” LaShawn blinked several times. Innocent as a fucking lamb. Kind of disappointing.

  “Did she bring a coat?”

  “The Warriors jacket.”

  “Anything else I should know?” he asked before he broke eye contact and snatched the jacket from the peg it was hanging from.

  “I don’t like her.” She rubbed her arms. “She gives me the creeps.”

  The only thing in the jacket pockets was a local transit ticket. He tossed the jacket and picked up the denim purse covered with Ashley’s magic. He fished out her wallet and found her ID. Ashley’s face smiled at him from a California ID card. There wasn’t much else. A few dollars, a prepaid debit card for people who didn’t have bank accounts, another transit card, old receipts. He held her keys while he checked the rest of the contents. Lip balm, a pair of cheap sunglasses, a smaller bag containing tampons. None of the tubes were disguised containers
for something else.

  Her keys were less boring than the other stuff. He detached a tiny container of powdered ruby from the D-ring and dropped everything else on the floor. He held it up. The exterior was scratched and cloudy from wear. He concentrated until he got the echo of the mage who had once handled this. No surprise, it was one of the four who’d been keeping watch on the house. The smaller, dark-haired mage. Garzon, who’d been in San Diego with Giuseppe Infante.

  He crushed the container and incinerated the remains in a fiery burst. A shower of tiny sparks spread through the air and slowly faded. Salvador’s magic surged, but Winters talked to him in that soothing way she had, and he calmed down right before Kynan was about to dead drop him and let it hurt a little extra.

  “Is she going to be okay?” Jing-Mei took a step toward Ashley, but Tau gave her a firm nudge backward.

  In Cantonese, Kynan said, “One more move, and you’re dead.” He wasn’t feeling tolerant at the moment. They were all pains in his ass, the lot of them. “Winters. Get them under control.”

  “Moeletsi,” Winters said. She rubbed a hand over her face. “Please. If it’s safe, take them to the Baker Street house.” Harsh Marit had a house in San Francisco that was used more or less as a boardinghouse for wayward demons and magekind sworn to Nikodemus. A very, very exclusive house in an exclusive neighborhood of the city. Perfect. There would be plenty of others around to keep an eye on the newbies.

  “A wise idea,” Tau said.

  “I don’t want to go anywhere with him,” Jing-Mei said. “I want to go home.”

  “Don’t we all,” Kynan said.

  Winters was pure patience, and he wished he understood how she managed that calmness. “You can go home when there is someone to see you get there safely. In the meantime, if you don’t go with Tau, I can’t guarantee you’ll be alive in the next hour, let alone tomorrow.” Her attention slid to Ashley. “I hope I don’t need to remind you of the unpleasant consequences of breaking the promises you made when you agreed to come here.”

  “What about Ashley?” Jing-Mei repeated the question in Cantonese.

  Kynan answered in English so they’d all get it. “What about her, witch, is she came here to do harm.” In his best bullshit voice he said, “We’ll make sure she gets the help she needs.”

  “Kynan,” Winters said with familiar exasperation, “you’re not helping.”

  “I wasn’t trying to help.”

  She shot him a poisonous look. “Would you please?”

  He grunted, and per usual Winters ignored him.

  “Get them out of here, Tau.” None of the misfits looked happy, but they didn’t have to be happy to leave, only alive. “Go with Moeletsi. He’ll be sure you’re safe. I’ll come by when it’s time for you to go home.”

  Ten minutes later, Tau had herded the misfits out of the house, and he and Winters were alone. His promises to Nikodemus kicked in harder yet. Fucking directives. About now he was in agreement with his sworn. Kill all the magekind who would do something like this.

  He went back to Ashley and hunkered down. He incinerated the three rubies he found in a front pocket, then turned her body over and continued his examination. He yanked up her shirt and disarmed a magic trap constructed over the valley of her lower spine. This kind of dampening magic was difficult to achieve. In this case, the magic had been anchored in her vertebrae. More layering and obfuscation. What a fucking mess. A cloud of orange and green sparks rose and slowly died away to reveal a black carbon sheath. Kynan removed the bone-handled knife and held it to the light.

  “Haven’t seen one of these in a while.” He tapped the bottom of the handle. The end cap popped open, and he cupped a hand underneath to catch the pewter vial that dropped out.

  “No,” Winters said in a voice that shook with rage.

  Thick gold wax sealed the mouth, and he ran a finger along one of the curses etched in the metal. Pahlavi script, a precursor to the Arabic that had eventually replaced written Farsi. “Neda Sessani’s work.”

  He could see Sessani clearly, her beauty, the crease that appeared between her brows when she concentrated. The smile that twisted her mouth when she’d suggested to Magellan several ways in which rape might succeed in breaking his most prized mageheld. Sessani hadn’t touched him, but she was the reason he had trouble with sexual positions that involved him being on his back. He resheathed the knife and shoved it in his back pocket.

  “I’m guessing the attacks on Nikodemus were meant as a distraction from what was going to happen here.” The vial contained the paralyzing agent the magekind used on a demon they intended to enslave. The knife would be used to supply enough blood to permanently seal the bond. He knew of several magekind who used such a knife to shave the demon’s head afterward.

  “Get rid of it.” Winters spoke with a curtness he rarely heard from her. She knew what this meant. The poison. The knife. The fact that the instruments had been hidden on Ashley’s body. “I don’t want that in my house. Not any of it.”

  He frowned. “I don’t understand how anyone believed she could take a mageheld.” What he really meant was that he didn’t understand how a dying human tricked out to look magical could ever take him mageheld, because he didn’t have any doubt that had been the plan.

  Winters drew enough power to raise the hair on the back of his neck, and when he turned to look, he saw the dead human twitch.

  CHAPTER 5

  Maddy reared back when Ashley sat up faster than she expected. Every other time she’d encountered a demon in possession of a corpse, the bodies had not been particularly fast or agile. Animating dead tissue wasn’t easy. This mageheld, however, closed the distance between them with astonishing speed. Before she knew it, Ashley had one hand around the front of her throat, squeezing hard.

  The problem with fighting a dead body was that inflicting damage achieved nothing. The body couldn’t feel pain. A strike of heat flashed along her side and sizzled upward, pulling her magic off balance. Three wards went off and smoking holes the size of golf balls appeared in Ashley’s torso, to absolutely no effect. The mageheld indwelling in Ashley wasn’t trying to kill her, it was attempting to take possession of her will.

  Despite the distraction of Kynan drawing a massive amount of power and the panic of being unable to breathe, Maddy focused and reached for her magic. The mageheld battered at her awareness, seeking ingress. The slightest crack, and she’d be vulnerable. She formed a blade from particulates in the air, gave the magical weapon an edge, and brought it down, lopping off Ashley’s hand.

  Kynan reached in and peeled back the fingers still choking her. He shoved Ashley backward and that stopped the attempted indwell. In that half-second while Maddy gulped air, Ashley twisted her other arm up behind her, no doubt searching for the knife that had been concealed there. The body’s face contorted into an uneven and uncanny approximation of dismay and anger.

  Ashley went after her again, relentless, vicious, and with enough power that Maddy wondered whether they were facing another warlord. She drew magic until her skin felt tight. Like all free kin, Kynan was cut off from mageheld demons. With Ashley a magical nullity to him, he did not know what the mageheld was doing. She did.

  This time, not quite an indwell. Now, the mageheld was going after her bonds with Nikodemus and Kynan. She deflected the attack, but the center of her magic went off balance again. Nothing she couldn’t handle.

  “Get back, Winters,” Kynan said. As far as he could tell, the mageheld wasn’t attacking. His imperative struck a chord in her, but honestly. She wasn’t sworn to Kynan, and their bonds weren’t closed and never would be. Those warlord tricks weren’t going to work on her. She sent a punch of focused air into the dead woman hard enough to make her stumble.

  Maddy wasted no time locking down the host body so it couldn’t move more than an inch or two in any direction. Confined behind a barrier of energy and contorted into an unnatural position, Ashley writhed against the constriction. The enslaved dem
on was, for the moment, trapped by Maddy’s magic and the lifeless body.

  Maddy leaned close. She’d seen a mageheld in possession of a dead person before, but the sight still made her skin crawl. “Fight your orders. All you have to do is hang on long enough for us to get the right personnel here. We’ll get you severed, that’s a promise.”

  One-handed, Ashley began a series of gestures, awkwardly done, so Maddy didn’t immediately recognize what the mageheld was attempting. She might have stopped it sooner if she had. The gestures were old magic from the days when process held sway over function. Gestures focused magic energy the way tai chi and similar systems of movement focused human energy. The effect could be powerful, but these days most magekind favored the use of pharmaceutical-based rituals. Much easier to master than the gestures. Deliberate, focused motions were useful in situations like this. The only possible way gestural magic could work for the mageheld if he had access to human-based magic.

  “Winters.” Kynan’s voice sounded a million miles away. “He’s siphoning off the magic hooked into the Ashley’s body.”

  Her awareness of Kynan disappeared. It was startling, the loss of her connection to him. Her chest turned ice-cold. The mageheld sent another push at her center, that same awkward indwell-like incursion into her mind. Maddy’s constriction of Ashley’s body vibrated but held, although the mageheld ended up with more room to move. Its gestures became more precise, and the resulting magic took on a sharp, cutting focus.

  Pain ripped through her, taking her breath. When she could breathe again, the air was thick as mud.

  Kynan’s attention whipped to her, his eyes glowing. She straightened, reasonably certain she hadn’t doubled over or screamed the way she wanted to. Showing demons a weakness was never a good idea. This mageheld, warlord or not, was strong enough to exploit even a small miscalculation.