Once You Go Demon (Pure Souls) (4 page)

“Good thing you were there when he arrived in Hell to keep his ass in line. Oh, wait, no, that’s right. You managed to allow him to take over the Underworld, giving him a nearly unlimited hellfire power source to use against humanity. And it’s not like you went to great lengths to start correcting all those ancient goat herders when they started bowing down to y’all, did you? Your darling patriarch sucked up that crap like it was Christmas moussaka.”

“My father is a good man!” she retorted, slamming her hand on the table and nearly breaking it in half. “Maybe a little loose in the loins, but he’s always had mortals’ best interests in mind.”

“Especially if that
man
happened to have a nice rack!” Ramiel shot up as well, brimming red. 

Dee had to use every bit of his muscular fortitude to push the two dueling immortals away from each other. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Just shut the fuck up, okay? Don’t make me go all Kissinger up in here. We’re all on the same side. Just bring it down a notch. Or a hundred.”

They stilled, then broke with a huff and returned to their seats as silence filled the room. The ticking of a grandfather clock that stood in the corner timed their détente. Jerry hoisted himself off the ground and sat down with them.

“Ramiel?” Dee finally asked. The angel turned to him with all the warmth of a raging bull. “Is the charm in place?”

“Almost,” Ramiel grumbled. “Only one more rite to perform, but I need all three of you here to do it. Where’s Riona?”

Looking at his watch, Dee frowned. “Yeah, she should have been back by now. I’ll text her.”

“Don’t bother, she’s almost home.” Jerry popped a potato chip from a bag he’d drawn from his pocket as the three others turned to him with begging expressions. He shrugged. “She’s a creature of habit, or haven’t you noticed? Those couple of weeks we were staying over at the gym in your apartment, she walked the same exact route each day. Only variation is how long it takes her to cross the busy intersections. True, different part of town, so her route is a little different now.”

Dee muffled a cough. “You followed her?”

Jerry didn’t look the least bit ashamed. “I was concerned. She’s been dealing with a lot and I didn’t want to risk some scum demon taking advantage of that. Or worse, some scum man. You can read the depression in her aura like a menu at a burger joint.”

The tip of Dee’s tongue stilled as the lock of the front door began to jingle. Sure enough, fifteen seconds later, a windswept and red-cheeked Riona strolled in to the dining room. Four pairs of eyes fixed on her like an omen.

“What?” She examined her coat as she picked lint off the lapel. “I have something on me?”

Ramiel proved impatient. “No, just perfect timing is all. Sit. I’m going to need a drop of your blood to do this last part.”

“That’s a bit medieval, isn’t it?” She took off her jacket and started rolling up her sleeve.

“It is what it is, but it’s necessary for this sort of powerful, binding magic. We’d just sign in black ink on a fancy scroll, but the Big Guy doesn’t really trust in the power of a Bic. DNA, on the other hand, is forever. Give me your fingers.” The angel fished a tiny knife and an alabaster saucer the size of a pinch pot from his sack. Pulling the witch’s hand across the table, he positioned the tip of the blade on her index finger. “Riona, I’ll tell you the same thing Jerry probably said to you during your brief affair: it’s just a little prick, it won’t hurt but a bit, and will all be over before you know it.”

Jerry’s middle finger sprung up. “Fuck you, Ramiel. I’ll have you know I’ve made this woman speak in tongues before!” 

The angel grabbed the one-finger salute and twisted Jerry’s hand, drawing a yelp and more than a bit of enjoyment from inducing pain. “Really sucks being mortal again, doesn’t it, Jer? All that pain and stuff.”

A full crimson drop collected before slowly tear-dropping into the awaiting vessel. When Dee’s blood had been added to the mixture, the angel fished out another, smaller sack. A pinch of dried herbs fell over the blood.

“What’s that?” Riona examined the bowl with a downcast gaze.

Ramiel seemed reluctant to answer, but finally offered up a brief explanation. “Herbs preserved from Eden, and something else that only grows in Heaven.”

“Smells like anise,” Jerry offered, looking over the bowl with a great deal of curiosity.

Ramiel groaned. “It’s
not
anise. Okay, official heavenly magic time. Jerry, Riona, Dionysius, do you hereby invest in me the power as allotted by your blood to protect this house against the boundaries of Hell, such that no minion of the Devil may enter? Understand this enchantment lives with the blood, and the moment one of you passes from this world, so does its protections. Other than that, it can only be removed or the boundaries altered by the power of another archangel.”

“I do,” Dee said.

“I do, too,” Riona offered.

“I guess, though I still think ADT is a better option. They still call the police after the intruder shoots you. Ow, damn, Ramiel, okay. Just making a joke. Yes, yes, I agree and invest and hereby do that shit. Hear ye, hear ye and God save the Queen.”

The angel rolled his eyes as he pushed the penknife to his own finger, letting a clear but viscous liquid collect before forcing it to drip in to the bowl. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the edge of the dried leaves began to blacken and smoke. Despite their meager amount, a cloud formed over the bowl. In its twisting and billowing folds, lightning struck. When the cloud was about the size and shape of a basketball, it exploded outward, like a star being born.

Persephone watched with morbid fear as the smoke passed not just over, but through her brother and his two teammates. It pushed them into their chairs, warping over their bodies, before slamming them forward again. Breathless and gasping, the Pure Souls looked like they had just been forced to sprint a mile in mud boots.

“Well, that’s it.” Ramiel took up the now empty bowl stained with ash and stuffed it back in the satchel, then put it in the box. “Oh, one FYI for y’all. The house is secure; nothing lashing out in hellfire can enter.”

Jerry hoped no one else saw his awkward flinch.

“But there’s a yin to that particular yang,” Ramiel continued.

Dee looked flabbergasted. “You only bring this up now? You sure it wasn’t your destiny to be a used car salesman?”

“Come on, Dee, you know that there’s a bite for every blessing. Anyways, now that the house is a dead zone for demons, it’s a dead zone for magic, too.”

“So no magic, but only
in
the house?” Riona queried.

Ramiel nodded. “Yeah, so you’ll have to handle practicing somewhere outside. Dee’s volunteered the yoga studio at his gym. I think that’s a good idea.”

Leaning back in the chair, she crossed her arms. “Okay, I guess that shouldn’t be too bad. Just as long as I’m careful with my bagels.”

“The yoga studio?” Jerry was clearly not impressed, but after a moment, his expression brightened into sheer, demonic mischief. “Hey, Riona, you ever practiced the pose,
downward facing witch
?”

Chapter 6

Damn it, she missed her car. Normally Dee would have been happy to lend her his, but as it turned out, he had business errands to run that afternoon. Once Riona found a seat on a bench aboard the northbound T-line, covered in equal amounts of duct tape and newspapers, she fished out the slip of paper from her pocket and held it up. Her stomach almost turned when she saw the little hearts with arrows that Jerry had drawn around the address of the occult shop. The guy just didn’t get the clue that she was so off the menu. 

Her iPhone found its way into her hands from her other pocket. The calendar was still up on the screen when she woke it from sleep. A little blue triangle graphic next to December 25
th
marked “D-Day.” It took almost two months for Satan to put a soul through the demonizing process, Jerry had claimed and Ramiel had confirmed. Which meant that the first possible window for Demon Marc’s appearance on Earth was Christmas Day, with the setting of the sun. Happy Fucking Holidays. There
was
a guy coming dressed in red and concerned with naughty versus nice, but he didn’t employ elves and it probably wasn’t going to be her stocking he was looking to stuff.

Dee had glared when she unpacked the one-a-day calendar with a post-it sticking out from that ominous date. Her anticipation, however, grew exponentially with each page she ripped away.  Only thirty-three more shopping days until Christmas, and Riona had one big ticket item on her list: a way to save the demon that she loved.

HEY R, WHO IN THE HELL IS CECELIA?

Surprisingly, even more than assuming Marc’s body, it pissed her off that Jerry had inherited Marc’s cell phone. Whenever the name MARCELLO ANGELETTI popped up on her message log, she felt her heart flutter. Until she remembered the truth, that was. Dee had suggested they get Jerry a new phone line, but that somehow made it feel like the ex-demon’s place on their team was long term. It wasn’t like Dee was plotting Jerry’s death or anything—well,
plot
might have been too strong a word—but the muscle man didn’t exactly leap to Jerry’s aid during the few vanquishing showdowns they’d fronted since his resurrection. Plus, Marc’s contract with One World Wireless didn’t say anything about going to Hell as a reason to release a person from their contract.

She switched over to her message app. IT’S MARC’S MOTHER, WHY?

BITCH KEEPS LEAVING NAGGING PHONE MSGS. KINDA UNDERSTAND WHY MARC WAS SO EAGER TO OFF HIMSELF.

ARE YOU SERIOUSLY MAKING A JOKE ABOUT MARC’S DEATH?

JUST SAYING, NO LONGER HAVING TO TALK TO HIS MOTHER … BONUS TO A BAD SITCH.

The train swayed side to side as it crossed out of the Greater Boston area. The phone buzzed in her hand when another message came through.

SO … SHOULD I CALL HER?

NO! She couldn’t believe he’d even consider it. SHE’D KNOW SOMETHING WAS WRONG WHEN YOU STARTED DROPPING F BOMBS AND CRACKING JOKES ABOUT KATY PERRY’S FUR COAT.  TEXT HER AND TELL HER YOU’LL CALL HER LATER.

BUT I WON’T, RIGHT?

NO, YOU WON’T.

DON’T YOU THINK SHE’S WORRIED? IF I WAS HER SON, I’D WANT HER TO KNOW I’M OKAY.

Did the ex-demon actually give a damn? YOU’RE NOT. LEAVE HER ALONE. WE’LL FIGURE OUT HOW TO TELL HER LATER.

In her mind, she added,
If there’s a reason to tell her anything
. For Riona Dade had a plan, a plan based on a theory. A theory based on conjecture, but conjecture based on the very real and very annoying
fact
that Jerry Romani had found a way to darken her door once more. The gooey connections went thus:

Lucifer was a fallen angel and had once been evicted from Heaven. The men who earned their place in Hell had their souls evicted from Earth; sometimes even twice, if Lucifer sent them back as demons. Surely, then, there must be a mechanism for someone to be evicted from Hell. Jerry had managed it, even though both he and Ramiel claimed they weren’t quite sure how or why. Jerry reported that he’d woken up to find himself at the sharpened end of the Council of Seven’s collective glares. The archangels likewise didn’t know how he had ended up there, or how he’d even gotten into Heaven. A set of instructions about depositing Jerry’s soul in Marc’s expired body appeared out of nowhere, scrawled on the backside of a “Wish you were here” postcard showing pictures of Egypt.

“God sends postcards?” Riona had asked.

Ramiel had grunted and shrugged. “He collects them. Given his status, you know, creating the Heavens and Earth and QVC and everything, we allow him some unquestioned eccentricities. You think he stopped being weird after coming up with marsupials?”

In any case, Jerry’s lucky break wasn’t likely to come through for Marc. Ramiel said with only a few notable exceptions, mostly documented in a little collection of short stories called the New Testament, resurrection was next to unheard of. Even in those instances, it required two things: a disembodied soul and a “desouled” body. Oh, and either the direct or delegate power of the Almighty. Turned out, she’d learned in her late night unauthorized research, that archangels were said to have been gifted with that power, too, but only the Grigori made use of it without direct orders. Jerry’s had been the soul; Marc’s corpse had been the body. Marc still was a soul, but Lucifer outfitted his demons with state-of-the-art get ups. The man she loved would be reborn to Earth of demon flesh. The Keystone vanquished those of demon flesh. The plan was, simply, not to do her job where Marc was concerned. 

And if she could find a body and canoodle one of the archangels into doing something not entirely holy, she was going to upgrade that demon to a mortal body all by herself. Yeah, because God was so sure to answer an until-recently agnostic bisexual in a request to return from the grave her lost love, who in life had been a Catholic priest and would have been forbidden from her anyways and now, by the way, is a minion of Hell.

Her quest for knowledge had her tracking down every method of trans-stratification known to Pure Souls. That included finding out how her loser father’s dagger had managed to send Lucifer on a long vacation. Whatever mojo could vanquish a fallen angel from the Earth, even if just for a period of twenty-nine years, had to have something going for it. Possibly, it could have other uses as well.

So, here was Riona Dade, getting her inner Velma on. At first, when Jerry had given her the address to a little shop in Salem, she’d thought he’d been pulling her leg.

“That whole Salem Witch thing was a farce,” she’d interjected. “A terrible tragedy of mass hysteria for social and political gain. Those poor people who died were as much witches as I am a bearded lumberjack. There’s no way any tourist trap capitalizing off that is going to have anything that helps me.”

Jerry had just clicked his tongue. “Yeah, you’re right. That historical thing had nothing to do with real magic. But the funny thing is what it became for the magical community afterwards. It’s like the witches’ Mecca now, their hill outside Jerusalem. It’s where innocents died for their … Well, of course you and I know magic isn’t a sin, but those poor Quaker Oats folks died in your name. Those pilgrims are kind of like a witch’s Jesus, and the land is sacred ground. Quite a few close-knit covens in the area now. Go, ask for Bunny.”

“Bunny?”

“Don’t let looks—or her name—fool you,” Jerry had warned. “She might be older than dirt, and probably stooped over like a pigeon by now, but Bunny knows her shit.”

And so, here stood Riona Dade, outside a pillbox of a storefront in a strip mall on the edge of Salem, with an eight-inch dagger hidden in the suede bag hanging at her side.

The Crone’s Corner was barely more than a glorified walk-in closet. As Riona stepped in through a beaded curtain and began to survey dozens of herb pouches, cheap Chinese reproductions of sacred symbols, and standard stock of Salem-themed tourist trinkets dangling in cellophane packages from nails, she started to wonder if Jerry had been playing a trick on her after all. When a door at the back of the room opened and a mocha-skinned Amazon stepped out, eying Riona with curiosity and contempt, she was certain of it.