Hollywood Demon (The Collegium Book 6) (12 page)

Mark sat back, having emailed the counterspell and the thinking behind it to Gilda. He raked his fingers through his hair, ruffling it, thinking, regretting; conscious of sexual frustration as well as anger with the Collegium and the damn demon. He still had the taste of Clancy on his lips, or was that his memory?

He glanced at the ladder and swore, his mind too vividly recalling the picture of her against it. How perfect her breasts had been when he’d unbuttoned that prim shirt, and her natural, sensual arousal and how it had stoked his.

Damn!
He got up and headed for his room. The only solution for his immediate problem was cold water, lots of it. He changed, jogged outside and dived into the pool. He was on his third lap when he felt someone watching him. He surfaced and blinked the water out of his eyes.

“I…uh…” Clancy, wearing a loose t-shirt over wide-legged black trousers, stood wide-eyed. “I thought I’d exercise here on the lawn in the sun.”

“Go for it,” he invited, treading water.

She stared at him for a moment. Did her gaze linger on his shoulders? Then she turned away, crossed to the patch of lawn and began stretching.

Mark groaned to see her flexibility, and kicked off into a race-speed lap. Finally, he was tired enough that he halted with one hand on the pool edge and sucked in some much needed breaths. Automatically, he looked toward the patch of lawn and saw Clancy deep in concentration as she moved through a Taekwondo form. Power and control. So much power. Was she even aware of her strength, personal and magical? He had the sense that although she’d outgrown her shyness, she still underestimated herself.

A demon lord had run from her earth power. That was no small achievement. Faust certainly hadn’t run from him.

Mark planted both hands on the pool edge and hauled himself out.

Clancy froze mid-form and simply stared at him. Her gaze tracked the water running down his body to puddle at his feet.

Despite his muscles burning from all the swimming, his body hardened under her gaze. He reached for a towel, to dry himself and to hide the evidence of his arousal.

Clancy continued with her exercises.

He dried off while observing her. She was right. If they got involved things would change. But would change be such a bad thing?

He strode into the house and into a hot shower to wash the pool water off. Shampoo stung his eyes. He rinsed, dressed and hesitated. He didn’t know what to do. He checked his phone, but the only messages were business-related and could wait. Gilda hadn’t acknowledged his emailed counterspell. It was precisely what he’d expected, but it still left a sour feeling.

He walked to a window that overlooked the pool. The lawn beside the swimming pool was empty. Clancy had gone.

The next time they met, would she expect him to behave as if he hadn’t kissed her, hadn’t sucked her breasts, had only just stopped himself from stripping her naked and doing his best to make her scream with pleasure?

“Clancy.” No longer the girl he remembered. She was a woman learning her own strength. She appealed to him on more than just the physical level. She was honest and real.

His gut muscles clenched as a thought struck with the speed of a rattlesnake. What if she didn’t want to get involved with him because he lacked magic? She had power, even if she was ambivalent about embracing it. He had money and connections, but not in the magical world. Perhaps she wanted someone who could match her strength. In magical terms, that could never be him.

“Grandma! I promised Mark we’d stay on the estate for a couple of days. Just till the demon is caught, banished, whatever it is Gilda intends to do with it.” It was Sunday morning. Clancy was awake and dressed, and contemplating a morning watching re-runs of old cartoons on television. Outside, a fine rain drizzled down. Inside was warm and cozy.

Doris stood before her in the kitchen, dressed to go out. Her raincoat was a cheerful yellow, worn open over a flouncy red skirt the color of her hair and a snug purple sweater. “No demon is keeping me from Mass.” Doris folded her arms. The plastic of her raincoat crackled.

Clancy put her mug of coffee down beside the empty cereal bowl. She wasn’t going to be able to talk her grandma out of this one, but Faust had run from Clancy’s blast of geomagic, and she’d had all night—in between thinking of Mark—to consider why. Her grandma was also a geomage, but a minor one, and two geomages were better than one. “Wait. I’ll go with you.”

Doris smiled. “I’m leaving in five minutes.”

It was the smile that convinced Clancy she’d been had. Doris wanted Clancy to go to church and she’d found a way to make that happen. Clean jeans and the long sleeve pale blue t-shirt she wore would be fine. Clancy combed her hair into a quick ponytail, added lip-gloss, and looped a silver necklace over her head. She quickly laced her boots, and was still shoving her arms into the sleeves of her vintage leather jacket as she descended the stairs.

Doris gave her a head to toe look and nodded. “You should wear more color.” A silver crucifix hung outside her sweater. So Doris, too, had taken precautions against demonic attack.

Clancy gently pushed her out the back door. Precautions or not…“Let’s just hope we don’t meet the demon, and that Mark doesn’t discover we’re gone.” She checked that the phone hadn’t fallen out of the pocket of her jacket. If there was trouble they might need to call someone.

Trouble waited for them at church. Not real trouble, but Clancy hadn’t expected so many of Doris’s friends to remember her. Hugs and kisses, questions and comments came from all sides.

“Boyfriend? Babies?”

“No, and no,” she answered, hanging onto her smile. She was grateful to slide into the pew Doris always sat in and hear the chime of bells that meant the mass was about to start. The familiar service flowed over and around her. She stood and knelt with everyone else, and even sang along with the choir. Something in her relaxed. Whenever someone caught her eye, they smiled. She realized that Doris’s friends hadn’t been questioning her to make her feel inadequate. They were simply asking the usual kind of thing to show interest and, in their way, to make her feel welcome. It was her own insecurities that made her feel attacked.

She smiled at her grandma, who beamed back.

They had coffee afterwards with anyone else who could spare the time and wanted some company. The rain had cleared and people stood or sat in the courtyard beside the church. This time, Clancy was prepared and steered the conversation and questions to the topic of Doris’s friends’ health. Since they were elderly, there were significant health issues, and enough of them were willing to talk about their problems that Clancy only had to smile and nod. She drank dishwater-flavored instant coffee and, as she and Doris were walking back to Doris’s car, had the privilege to hear deaf Mr. Bentham proclaim, “Clancy was always a good girl.”

And his friend, Mr. Illych’s response. “Nice ass, too.”

Clancy laughed, Doris giggled, and the drive home was easy and relaxed.

Until they met Mark just inside the front gate. Doris braked sharply, and Mark came around to Clancy’s passenger-side window. “Where have you been? I tried phoning you.”

He hadn’t shaved and the sunlight glinted on his blond stubble, emphasizing the hard line of his jaw.

Oops.
“We were at church. I turned off the phone during the service, and then…I forgot to turn it back on.”

His glare scorched her.

“We’re fine, Mark.” She tried to reassure him.

“Are you? Well, Rivera isn’t,” he snapped.

Cold dread punched Clancy in the gut. She unclipped her seatbelt and clambered out of Doris’s car. “Has Faust…?” What had the demon done?

“Gilda phoned me thirty minutes ago. She woke me. She wants me at Rivera’s yoga studio.” His jaw tightened, his final words coming from between gritted teeth. “I couldn’t find you.”

“I’m sorry,” Clancy began.

“My fault. I wanted to go to church,” Doris said. “I didn’t think the demon would attack us.”

And it hadn’t. It had attacked Rivera.

“I’ll go with you,” Clancy said to Mark. She met his furious, resistant gaze. “You’re not going alone.”

He spun on his heel and strode to the garage.

She gave Doris a shrug and a wave, and hurried after him, hearing her grandma’s car continue slowly on to the cottage. She scrambled into the warded SUV as Mark revved it. She was still buckling up as he reversed, turned sharply and roared toward the open gate. One glance at his severe expression and she had to know. “Did Gilda say anything else?”

“She said I might be right and that Faust is taking a personal interest in me.”

Clancy shuddered. No one wanted to be the focus of a demon’s attention. “And Rivera? What did Faust do to her?”

He took his gaze briefly from the road to look at her. Fear and regret haunted his blue eyes. “Gilda wouldn’t say. She hung up.” He looked back at the road, hands strangling the steering wheel. “And then, I couldn’t find you.”

“I’m sorry, Mark. Truly. Doris wanted to go to church, and I thought we’d be safe, and safely home, without you even knowing we were gone.” She twisted a finger in the silver chain necklace around her throat. “We both wore silver as a protective against evil and to use against the demon.”

If that impressed him, it didn’t show.

She watched the streets of Beverly Hills flash past too fast. “I was thinking about things last night.” She’d been obsessing on how she’d behave the next time she’d encounter Mark. Well, events had overtaken that worry! But she’d also considered other things. “Faust didn’t want to engage with me. When I broke open the circle of summoning, he fled. Nobody runs from me, so it had to be the nature of my magic.”

He slowed the SUV to a legal speed.

She was careful not to sigh an audible breath of relief. “It was there in your books of magic, in the principles that underlie how the alchemists believe magic is structured and bound. I’m a geomage. My magic is earth magic. We, humans, are all made of earth, and to earth we return.” It was an echo of the old religious words:
ashes to ashes, dust to dust
. “But demons are different. They’re not from this realm, and they’re not created from the Earth. I think demons are antipathetic to geomagic. Possibly it erodes some of their presence in this realm.”

“Would Gilda know this?” Mark asked. He’d ceased strangling the steering wheel; interest crowding out anger.

“I’m not sure.” Clancy recognized the street they were turning into. They were almost at Rivera’s yoga studio. “You’d think she would, except mages operate in silos at the Collegium. We receive a broad training in magic in the first few months, but then we all specialize. With demonologists responsible for all things demonic, and demons avoiding geomages, maybe no one has considered that geomagic is destructive in some way to demons. Before Faust, I’d never encountered one.”

“Most people don’t,” he said absently as he parked, then switched off the engine.

They sat a moment in the silence.

“I really am sorry Grandma and I left without telling you. I promised we wouldn’t go anywhere, but she wasn’t going to let a demon stop her going to church.”

He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I can hear Doris saying that. All right. Let’s go face whatever this new nightmare is.”

She smiled at him then. Not because it was humorous or because she wasn’t dreading what they might find in the studio, but because he’d forgiven her.

“Don’t scare me like that again,” he said seriously.

Her smiled died. She put a hand on his knee. “I won’t.” Then she realized how instinctively she’d touched him—and after she’d been the one to draw a line in the sand between them. She snatched her hand back.

“If you’re wondering.” His quiet voice stilled her embarrassed fumbling with seatbelt and door handle. “You have my permission to touch me any time. Anywhere.” And when she met the intensity of his steady gaze. “I did some thinking last night, too.” Then he got out of the SUV without saying anything more.

Tantalizing!

However, one glimpse of Gilda’s expression as she opened the front door of the studio pushed all personal thoughts out of Clancy’s mind.

Gilda looked grim. She took in Clancy’s presence, then obviously dismissed her. Gilda’s attention was for Mark. “Brace yourself.”

That couldn’t be good.

A “closed” sign was taped to the front door. Gilda shut it and led the way along the corridor to the room Rivera called her private retreat, the room in which she’d summoned Faust.

“Rivera salted the circle of summoning,” Clancy said, instinctively protesting what they might find.

“Alek cleared it, too,” Gilda said. Alek had to be her demonologist colleague. “Unfortunately, Faust didn’t fully manifest. Instead, he offered Rivera a bargain.”

Clancy glanced at Mark. That was what Faust had done with Phoebe, Mark’s dead fiancée, the one who’d tried to trade his soul for hers when Faust came to collect it.

Mark was expressionless.

He’d said Clancy had touching privileges, but now wasn’t the time for even a quick, I’m-here brush of fingers.
But I am here.
Whatever waited in Rivera’s private room, he wouldn’t face it alone. Clancy centered herself in her magic.

“Rivera consented to the demon’s temptation.” Gilda sounded annoyed.

“What?” Mark rocked to a halt, thunderstruck. Demonologists all knew to never, ever agree to a demon’s bargain.

Clancy had a more immediate question. “What did he tempt her with?”

“See for yourself.” Gilda stepped aside from the door to the retreat room, but she positioned herself where she could watch Mark’s face.

He walked into the room and his whole body flinched.

Clancy hurried to peer around him.

Another man was already in the room, presumably the Alek Gilda had mentioned. The man was about forty, slender and dressed casually in dark trousers and a gray knit sweater. His black hair was graying at the temples. He watched their entrance, but was obviously alert to any movement from the woman seated on a chair in the corner.

Rivera.

It had to be Rivera, but it didn’t look like her.

“Phoebe?” Mark asked softly.

The haunted, haunting question whispered through the room.

Yesterday, Rivera had resembled Phoebe. Their noses had looked alike, and Clancy had frivolously guessed at a shared plastic surgeon. But now—now the resemblance was uncanny. Rivera didn’t just look like Mark’s dead fiancée. She looked as Phoebe had looked seven years ago.

“Good morning, Mark.” Rivera tipped her head up to meet his appalled gaze, and her gesture was Phoebe’s characteristic head toss. Blonde hair rippled.

“Oh God.” The exclamation ripped out of Mark. He turned away and dry heaved.

Clancy put a hand on his back, rubbing a circle, as she tried to control her own revulsion.

Rivera stood, but without yesterday’s grace. Her clothes hung on her oddly.

Too big
, Clancy realized. These were Rivera’s clothes, but her body had changed. “Is she—?”

“Rivera’s not possessed,” Gilda said, while Rivera herself pouted. “It was Alek who pointed out the resemblance to me.” Sympathy shone in the chief demonologist’s eyes as she observed Mark who’d ceased dry heaving, but remained bent over, hands on knees. “Rivera, herself, said she chose this.” Disbelief thinned Gilda’s voice.

Rivera stared from Mark’s pose of utter rejection to the older woman’s disgust. Her gaze connected with Clancy, who cringed to see Phoebe’s face on the failed demonologist.

Failed
. That was the key. Clancy, who’d failed and been demoted as a geomage within the Collegium, understood something of Rivera’s motivation. Perhaps Clancy’s understanding, and her horrified, reluctant sympathy showed on her face because this time it was Rivera who flinched away.

Of course Gilda couldn’t understand the temptation Faust had offered Rivera or why the woman had taken it. Gilda had never failed. She was the Collegium’s chief demonologist, powerful and confident in her power.

But Clancy could guess how the demon had seduced Rivera. Quietly, with the slow solemnity appropriate to a funeral parlor, Clancy sought for confirmation. “Faust appeared, didn’t he?”

Rivera, so like Phoebe, shook her blonde head. “Just his voice.”

Just a voice, not enough to challenge Rivera; not enough, evidently, to spook her into warding the demon out. Faust had been clever. He had insinuated himself subtly, taking advantage of Rivera’s shaken sense of failure, her powerlessness and loss. And Rivera had listened when the demon had offered her redemption.