Hollywood Demon (The Collegium Book 6)
Read Hollywood Demon (The Collegium Book 6) Online
Authors: Jenny Schwartz
Hollywood Demon
Jenny Schwartz
Feel the Earth move!
A camera can’t steal your soul—but a demon can! Mark Yarren suspects a demon has found a way around the spell his great-grandfather cast to prevent demons sucking souls through the camera’s lens. Digital photography dangerously omits the silver wash that was photography’s century-old defense against Hell.
Mark is Hollywood royalty, descended from the early Hollywood stars: the studio bosses and directors, the producers and actresses. Now he lives alone in his palatial Beverly Hills estate.
Well, not quite alone.
Clancy Ramirez is back! She’s tried life in New York, in Iceland, and in Hawaii, but she missed California. She missed the grumbling roar of the San Andreas Fault with its leagues-deep molten geology. Clancy is a geomage and she can make the earth shake—or grow still. But California isn’t her territory. She has no place intruding or tapping its energy.
But a demon shackled for a century is breaking free, and Collegium rules, old heartaches and strained family loyalties will break, too.
The Big One is coming.
Table of Contents
Clancy Ramirez jumped down from the 18-wheeler, and reached back for her duffle bag. The heavy throb of the big rig’s engine rumbled like a hungry beast; or like the bear-were who drove it. Try stealing Stewart’s honey and you’d hear just that sound, right before you lost a hand.
“You gonna be all right, girl?” Nearly seventy years old and ready to jump out of his truck and defend her. Stewart was a sweetheart in a flannel shirt, dungarees and a flowing white beard.
“Of course.” Clancy put a smile in her voice and on her face. “I’m home.”
Home
was stretching things. They were in Beverly Hills, at the gates of the Yarren Estate where Clancy’s grandma worked. Not exactly home. And the wealthy, celebrity neighbors wouldn’t be loving this early morning wake-up call from the rumbling big rig.
“Thanks for the lift, Stewart.”
He grunted that little chuffing sound bears make that could mean anything.
She took it to mean good-bye, slammed the passenger door closed, and waved as he reversed the huge truck back down the curving private road. As confident as she was driving a big rig along the highway, she wouldn’t want to reverse it here. She rolled her shoulders, remembering five days of driving; swapping shifts with Stewart as they headed west from New York. The land had stretched out, calling to her with its different energies—shouting at her in the Rocky Mountains—but she’d ignored it. Coming home meant suppressing her magic.
“I will be normal.” She wanted an ordinary life. She wanted family: someone to love who loved her; a dog; children, one day. She was twenty five and she ached to have a place where she belonged.
Stewart reached the road, straightened the big rig, and with a defiant blast of its horn, drove off.
Well, if anyone had missed her arrival, they’d be awake now.
Her grandma was going to kill her.
Clancy sighed. The duffle bag over her shoulder suddenly weighed a ton. Even more daunting was the knowledge that it held all her belongings. Everything else she’d sold or given away before she’d left the Collegium and New York.
She was officially unemployed, homeless and…determined.
Determined! I’m going to build an amazing life.
She’d even sold her cameras. What was a photographer without a camera?
“Free,” she whispered the answer to the quiet morning.
The Yarren Estate began at the road, but it wasn’t fenced till you hit the wrought iron gate in front of her. In between was a landscape of water-wise garden: rocks and pebbles, cacti and a few decades-old shade trees. It was so serene, so empty of people and noise, that she couldn’t resist temptation. The early dawn light had a translucent clarity that she’d never seen in New York. She’d missed it.
She put her duffle bag down by the gate, in the shadow of a rambling bougainvillea. Its purple flowers spilled over the pale yellow stucco wall. Her boots crunched the papery fallen blossoms. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her vintage leather jacket and walked back down the private road a short distance before abandoning it to cross the rough grass, aiming for a towering jacaranda tree.
She’d climbed that tree so often in childhood, swinging from its branches, perching high to think of everything and nothing, to dream. Now, even without leaving the ground, she could see the city stretching out. The view was astounding.
The Earth throbbed under her feet.
She flinched. She was home, and her magic had reached out instinctively to make a connection with the land, but this wasn’t her territory. She hastily reined in her magic, stuffing it down into her center, and ran—not toward her bag, the gate and her grandma, but away. Away from the temptation to answer the earth’s call. The rough grass and tangle of ground covers grabbed for her ankles. She stomped over them, bursting out from the Yarren Estate and onto the public road.
The ward that protected the Yarren Estate snapped closed behind her. Its magic was old and powerful, set by Mark Yarren’s great-grandfather in the 1920s. It was what kept sightseers out even before they reached the privacy fence. She and Stewart had been able to ignore it, driving the big rig through it, because the ward recognized and accepted her from childhood, and Stewart was a bear-were. Weres couldn’t be directly affected by magic so he wouldn’t have even noticed the ward.
Clancy noticed its absence, now. The air had a rawness and, at the same time, smog seemed to burn her throat. Outside a neighbor’s house she stopped running. Its high privacy wall shut out the road, presenting an unfriendly face to the world. She shivered there, feeling ridiculously like the little match girl left out on winter streets to die of cold and neglect. Her fingers were freezing and she rubbed them together.
A fog had come up, obscuring the clarity of the morning.
This was wrong. Unnatural.
She had two seconds warning. Footsteps, suddenly close; moving fast. She spun, grabbed her attacker, and flung him.
He landed hard in the middle of the road. Hard enough that the impact of his landing was audible.
“Ow.”
The unnatural fog cleared, swirling away in a non-existent wind. Standing at a prudent distance, Clancy could discern more and more details of her “attacker”.
For a start, he wore a t-shirt, shorts and running shoes, all in navy blue with a high-visibility slash of neon green across his chest. It was quite an impressive chest, too. Leanly muscled with wide shoulders above and a flat stomach below.
Oh no.
She leaned against the neighbor’s wall as her victim’s face came into focus.
Mark Yarren.
It was twelve years since she’d first fallen in love with him. He’d been her teenage crush. Seven years since she’d last seen him, a young man haunted by tragedy. Now, he was thirty and gorgeous—Hollywood handsome—even as he grimaced in pain.
“Mark, I’m so sorry.” She started forward impulsively.
“Do I know you?” He sat up, looking wary, and looking not just at her. He scanned the empty road as if he expected an ambush.
“Clancy Ramirez.”
That dragged his attention back to her. “Clancy? Doris’s granddaughter?”
There weren’t that many “Clancys” in the world, so her name was likely to jog his memory, but she couldn’t help smiling that he hadn’t forgotten her. Then again, she hadn’t changed that much from when she was a kid. She was still brown-haired, brown-eyed, plain and skinny.
“Hi,” she said inanely, and gave an even more inane little finger wave. It was like she was sixteen and insanely shy in his godlike presence all over again.
He shook his head, as if in disbelief, then levered himself up from the road. He staggered when he stood.
She forgot her self-consciousness and rushed to support him, reminded that he’d taken a heavy fall—that she’d thrown him. He could be badly hurt. She bit her lip. “I’m so sorry. You surprised me.”
“Yeah. I won’t do that again. What was it you did? Karate?”
“Taekwondo.” His chest was warm, hot really, through the thin fabric of his t-shirt. She tried not to notice how much taller than her he was, and how hard his muscles were. “Did you bump your head when you fell? Do you need to see a doctor?”
“I’m fine.” He rolled his shoulders and stretched, wincing.
She stepped back from him. “Well, ah, good.”
And awkward!
She’d hoped to stay a week, possibly two, with her grandma while she sorted out her life in Los Angeles. She needed a job and a place to rent; somewhere small to start with, but then somewhere with a yard. She wanted a dog. She’d intended that Mark wouldn’t even notice that she was there in the housekeeper’s cottage. Now, she had to walk up to the gate with him. At a minimum, she had to collect her bag.
“Do you always throw people who run up behind you?”
She blushed. “No. I’m so sorry. It was…” She couldn’t explain it.
“You were a bit freaked?” He supplied her answer.
“Yeah. The fog came out of nowhere. It felt unnatural. I guess I went into danger mode. Act first, regret later. And I do regret it. I’m so sorry.” Repeating her apology couldn’t hurt. She glanced at him hopefully.
“You did the right thing,” he said decisively.
She blinked at him. “I did?” She stared into his wonderful blue eyes.
How do you tell if someone has concussion?
He grasped her arm. His fingers were long, strong and gentle.
She could almost feel their warmth through her leather jacket.
“We need to get behind Edgar’s ward.” He led her back up the hill and off the road, plunging across the rough grass till the ward once more enclosed them. Then he released her. “There was a demon out there.”
Mark watched the woman in front of him take a cautious couple of steps back.
Away from the crazy man
, he thought, annoyed with himself. Why had he told her the truth? He kept silent with everyone else.
I learned that lesson years ago.
But Clancy Ramirez wasn’t just anyone, nor was she a stranger. She was Doris’s granddaughter, and Doris’s family had earth magic. They were geomages. Given a warning, Clancy could protect herself from demonic attack, so she deserved that warning—especially if the demon Mark was hunting had gotten bold enough to materialize outside his home.
“Damn.” He rubbed the back of his head.
Clancy rushed to his side. “You did hit your head.” A hand on his shoulder urged him to lean down so that she could check him for injuries.
“I didn’t.” But he found himself complying with her demand to bend as her fingers gently parted his hair. Her careful touch felt like a caress.
“There’s no graze, but a bump wouldn’t have come up yet.”
“I’m fine.”
“Hmm.” Her mouth compressed into a thoughtful line.
He noticed how naked her lips were: no lipstick or gloss, just softly pink. Her skin looked equally soft. Bare. A man kissing Clancy Ramirez would taste pure woman, no cosmetics or pretense.
“Maybe we don’t have to tell Grandma that I threw you?” Big brown eyes regarded him hopefully.
He smiled. “No, I don’t think we need to tell Doris that.”
His reward was a blinding smile.
“Great. I’m already in trouble when Grandma realizes that I arrived in that noisy big rig.”
“That was you?” He’d heard the truck and guessed that a neighbor was getting an early delivery of a pool or such like; trying to beat LA’s notorious traffic.
“A friend gave me a lift from New York. We split the driving.”
Clancy’s casual statement made him realize how little he knew the grown woman. She was no longer the shy kid who’d ducked away from people and crowds, but bloomed when given quiet attention.
He glanced at his watch. “We’d better go in and let Doris know you’re here. She’ll be at the main house. She thinks I should eat a cooked breakfast.”
“You disagree?” Clancy glanced at him as they walked to the gate.
“I like toast, but Doris has a new cookbook…”
She laughed. “Grandma loves trying new recipes.”
“She can test them on you as well as me.” He spotted a bag near the gate and guessed it was Clancy’s. He headed for it.
She beat him to it. “I carry my own bags.” She lifted it smoothly, adjusting it on her back with the ease of practice. She said bags, plural, but there was only one. A large one.
He considered the faint challenge…no, defensiveness…in her statement. “May I get the gate?”
Her shoulders relaxed. Her smile was apologetic. “Please. I don’t have the security code. I was going to phone Grandma to let me in.”
“It’s biometric.” He stepped up and the scanner beeped its recognition of his right palm. “We’ll have to add your handprint.”
The gate swung open.
She hesitated. “Why would you add me to your security system?”
He pushed the gate wide so that she could enter, huge backpack and all. “Why wouldn’t I? Doris loves company. The security system already recognizes Jeremy and your parents. How are they?”
