Personal Demon (7 page)

“You’re a witch,” he said. He picked up the sheathed athame.

Ivy flinched, and knew he felt it. His arm tightened a bit. She had the odd impression of comfort, when she knew it had to be a threat.

“Does it hurt you for anyone but you to hold it? Are you bound to the blade?”

“Please put that down. I don’t want it to get broken,” she said. “And it’s not mine. I don’t know how it got into my bag.”

He tilted his head as he studied her. “Not a lie. Not exactly the truth, either.”

“I have no reason to tell you anything,” she told him.

“You really weren’t aware of being followed last night, were you? By someone else, that is. Someone meant you harm last night. Other than me, that is. I don’t much like vampire hunters,” he added, almost apologetically. “I do not approve of amateurs, you see. You think you know what you’re doing, but it always leads to heartbreak.”

“Usually not vampires’ hearts?”

“Precisely. You mortals need to leave enforcement to the professionals.”

Ivy laughed harshly. “Oh, yes, I know all about your Laws of the Blood.”

“Not
all
about them, I’m sure.”

“I know that they protect vampires, not humans. And will you please put that knife down? It’s not silver. It’s not meant to kill vampires.”

“You’re very well educated, aren’t you?”

He’d been drawing her out to discover how much she knew. And she’d just babbled dangerous knowledge to him. Dangerous for a mortal to know, about the Laws, about how to fight his kind. When had she gotten so stupid, so easy?

“Just how deep inside my mind have you managed to squirm?” she demanded.

“Don’t scream rape,” he answered. “You’re babbling because I’ve snatched you, scared you, and chilled you, putting you at a psychological disadvantage. Your psychic defenses are quite strong.”

Crazy as it was, she took some pleasure in his compliment. Yep, he was so messing with her mind.

“Why would anyone be following me?”

Then she thought about it, and the answer made her sick. Literally. She began to retch as she remembered those kids murdered out in DeKalb.

The vampire took his arm away. She bent over, her arms wrapped over her stomach. She shook with dread but did manage not to throw up even though her throat and mouth filled with bile.

“I take it you figured out who that man was?”

Damn, the vampire sounded smug! She was tempted to tell him. But what business was it of some out-of-town vampire if her magical community was under attack? That two
innocents were already dead? If he’d spotted someone coming after her, that was fine. Maybe he had saved her from a witch murderer. That was yesterday. Now it was her responsibility to track down that killer, to lure him out, get him to come after her again.

That was what the obsidian blade was for. The memory of everything said and done during the hag-blade ceremony rushed back, like the blade itself stabbing into her brain.

She gasped.

He held her face in his hands. “Yes?” There was concern in his voice when she would have preferred sarcasm from this strigoi.

She’d been tasked with taking out this threat. What she must do wasn’t any of this stranger’s business. For once, the danger to psychic mortals didn’t come from vampires. She wasn’t going to reveal that her people were being stalked by some hidden force. She wasn’t going to reveal that they were more vulnerable to this force than to mortals’ usual enemy.

And there was a chance he was somehow involved, even if he was a vampire. Had he really saved her? Or was it part of a game? Was he involved in the deaths, using a mortal slave to gather in her people, and using the victims as sacrifices for a black spell? Every now and then, vampires did get into that kind of nefarious crap. Maybe this wasn’t what Aunt Cate thought it was. Was this foreign strigoi hungry for a new source of companions and using her to try to get to the rest of her familia? Or did he want them all drained and dead? They’d certainly make tasty victims and be a huge energy source for whatever he was conjuring.

“You’re thinking so much you’re making me dizzy. Looking at you is like watching a disco ball. Aren’t you dizzy?”

He was right about that. Ivy tried to work back to the beginning.

“What are you doing in Chicago? Does Ariel know who you are?” she asked him.

He smiled. It wasn’t the bone-melting grin but an insincere quirk of his wide mouth. “I am a simple tourist.”

She laughed. “Nobody’s a tourist this time of year.”

“Point taken. The weather is miserable, yet here I am. And I believe I said I was the one asking the questions.”

Ivy lifted her chin defiantly. “Well, ask something.”

He got up and looked at the window before turning back to her. Ivy considered making a run for it while there was some distance between them.

Then he asked, “What would you like for breakfast?”

W
hen they had first met, all those long years ago, the Master demon had not worn a human body. The Master had first appeared to his nineteenth-century self as a vague human shape made of fire and smoke. The Master came to him first as a voice calling out of a pub’s fireplace. Despite this different time, this different body he wore, he had no trouble remembering the very moment the Master had first called upon him. He was sitting in a house in Chicago and remembering that wonderful night in a London slum.

He’d managed to find a thin slice of room at the end of a bench nearest the pub’s fireplace. The room had been so, so crowded. All those people got on his nerves. The smell of spilled beer and unwashed bodies, usually unnoticed, was suddenly sharp and disgusting in the back of his throat. The loud babbling of voices—Polish, Yiddish, mostly English, thick with the accents of London, Wales, Ireland. Whitechapel’s residents congregated in the pubs and on the streets
because they were too poor to have any choice but to mix, but they all hated each other. They were all strangers, and all suspicious. But he remembered there had been laughter that night. Lots of it, from all over the crowded taproom. He didn’t look for sources of the merriment. What if they were laughing at him? He kept his head down, his attention on his watery pint.

Then the voice whispered, just at his left elbow. But there was no one between him and the fire when he looked to his left.

A log cracked, fell to ash on the hearth, gave out a final, pulsing glow before it faded. Maybe that was the source of the noise. But then the fire
looked
at him; there was no mistaking that it wanted
his
attention.

The fire spoke for a very long time, and he listened.

No one else heard or saw anything. Not surprising, of course. No one ever noticed him, which was just the way he’d always wanted it. It was also the way the fire wanted him to be. A shadow. A ghost. It made him smile to know that the fire understood.

When the fire said,
Take me home
, no one noticed him lean over the hearth and scoop all the ashes he could into his workman’s apron. No one noticed him leave.

They found a woman with her throat cut later that night, but no one noticed him.

He spilled the woman’s blood on the ashes in the apron; this offering set the demon purring. It told him to call him Master. The Master made promises, then gave hope. He taught, the demon master taught him oh so much! Life, death, how magic and transformation required both. The greater the transformation to be, the darker the sacrifice needed. He and the demon master changed and grew closer with each surge of energy brought by the fear, the pain, and the death.

Newspapers and gossip on the street said all the
gruesome death was about sex. He was offended, but the Master laughed and said let them think that—sexual titillation and sexual terror make the dark magic stronger. So he made every murder more sexually gruesome, slicing away breasts, ripping out vaginas.

The goal was for the demon master to gain power, ultimate power, over the world. The demon would use that power to open doors between worlds. That was what the demon claimed he could do once the blood power was his.

As for him, the mortal servant, loyal, loving, fervent in his service, he was promised demonhood himself. His mortal body would be peeled away. His soul would be clothed in immortal demon skin.

And the effects of dark magic had begun to grow in him, change him. He was becoming purified—

Then that interfering bastard came along and unceremoniously killed him. Just like that. There’d been no meaning to it, no purpose. Just—death.

“Darkness. For so long.”

Even this new body and new purpose did little to help the pain of being lost in the void, growing colder and colder as the dark magic faded. The Master had gotten to him just in time. He lived again, but the pain was still fresh enough to make his throat so tight with anguish he could barely speak.

The remembered darkness was around him even though he knew he was seated in a town-house living room. Alone, even though he was surrounded by others.

The demon put a hand briefly on his shoulder. He gasped and opened his eyes. The impression of fingers burning into his skin would show up as red marks on his shoulder. Marks of ownership, marks of belonging. The touch of pain broke him out of the darkness.

“Focus,” his Master said. “You were flashing, weren’t
you? It happens to all of us, even me. It’s all right. We must remember who we were before we took over these forms.”

“I—yes. Back then—I failed you.”

“No. Your body was murdered.”

He shook his head. “I failed you last night, and tonight.” He’d been so certain, so confident, happy when he went on the hunt. “She wasn’t at home, or anywhere else I searched for her. I don’t know what happened to the bitch. But I did something that will scare her,” he added. “The fear will grow in her, give the kill a stronger burst of energy when the time comes.”

“You came back clean-handed, didn’t you, Jack?” Ted asked. “It’s so easy to sulk when we haven’t made a kill.”

“I know I do,” John said. He rubbed his flabby belly. “I eat too much, too.”

Dick just laughed. He laughed too easily, stupidly. He slapped John on the back. They were seated close together on the couch. “You’re funny.”

John certainly liked to think he was. He and Dick had bonded, called themselves local boys. It was because this pair had terrorized Chicago at different times that the Master had the idea to reanimate their lost souls into modern bodies. For the irony of it as much as the terror potential, the Master said.

All four of them came out of a database the Master’s human host had compiled. Technology combined with magic. He’d studied to find the perfect tools. Their souls were conjured back to the world, into host bodies, bound to serve the Master who’d made them again, as the Master’s host body also served the demon spirit.

Jack was the only one who had served the Master before.

The other three claimed they looked up to Jack. Jack was their role model, their hero, even though they each had more kills to their credit than he had during his original efforts. The pair of
local boys
resented Ted. He was an outsider. But
then, Ted was smart, handsome, charming. At least Ted claimed he was charming.

Jack didn’t see it. He didn’t trust Ted. Ted was sneaky and ambitious and selfish. He’d warned the Master about Ted.

The answer had been a laugh, and a reassuring burning touch.
He’s a tool. It’s always going to be just you and me, Jack.

His name wasn’t Jack. It had never been Jack, but there was no fighting the history of the name, the reputation equaled by no one else. In his nineteenth-century life, he had worn the sobriquet with pride. Jack the Ripper.

“Too bad you aren’t living up to your reputation lately,” Ted said.

Once again, Jack was drawn out of black reverie. He hated that the other murderer was right.

“No teasing, boys,” Master said. “There’s a ceremony to perform. Go wait in the basement.”

John, Dick, and Ted left the living room. Downstairs, the altar waited, the tools for warding the place for privacy were laid out. So were the vessels waiting to be filled with the death energy the demon’s servants had gathered from their recent kills. The demon would drink that energy. His power would grow. But some of the energy would be set aside for the great purpose that only the Master and Jack knew about.

Jack waited at the Master’s side while the Master watched the trio go.

The demon sighed. It was an odd, haunting sound. The Master shook his head. “I wish some of Manson’s kids were available. Think what we could be doing with that crew if California hadn’t changed the death penalty law?” He walked toward the basement stairs, graceful and beautiful. “Time to feed my soul. Don’t worry, my friend,” he added with a backward glance. “You’ll bring me your special offering tomorrow.”

C
hristopher was totally surprised when his pert little prisoner recognized where they were in that vast city the instant he led her out of the front door of the empty building.

He watched as she looked the place up and down and gave a short laugh. “I remember when this used to be a second-run movie theater. The place is haunted,” she added with a look at him.

“I didn’t notice,” he answered.

“Me, either. But maybe the vampire in the room scared the ghosts off.”

“Most ghosts are people’s overactive imaginations,” he scoffed. He looked her over critically. “Although I’ve heard tales of very bad witches conjuring souls up out of the pits of hell.”

Someone who possessed an athame such as this young woman carried might be a very bad witch indeed. It was
hard to believe that someone who appeared so delicate and cute and had a mind strong enough to fight strigoi control could be counted among the black ones. Then again, being able to fight him was a clue, wasn’t it?

“Do you know many ghosts?” he asked her.

“Not a one,” she replied. “Besides, you don’t
know
ghosts. Most apparitions are just traumatic energy imprinted on a place—ghost appearances are only endless reruns. Like the History Channel.”