The Devil You Know (29 page)

Alex fidgeted. “Who’s there?”

I bit my lip and squeezed Jacq’s hand under the table. “I thought you knew my intentions. You have my love, my heart, soon my body. What more do you want, Detective?”

Van grinned and answered Alex, “Cate.”

Biting her cheek, JJ said to Fera and Mynx, “This isn’t going to end well.”

Fera smirked. “I’m with you on that one, sister.”

Mynx snorted. “I second that.”

“Yes?” I turned to Van expectantly, but he wasn’t talking to me.

“Your heart can be enough.” Jacq’s voice was husky in my ear. “It’s certainly more than I hoped for…more than I deserve.”

I turned back to Jacq, confused. “But there’s something else. I feel it.”

Jacq hesitated. “Yes.”

Frightened by the fear in her eyes, I clenched my jaw and had to loosen it to ask, “Well?”

Car bounced up and down. “Cate, who?”

“Cate, Cate, she’s at the gate,” said Van in a singsong voice.

Jacq leaned in close. “I’m not sure where to start.”

Impossibly more confused, I asked, “Where to start with what?”

Van, gaining volume and momentum: “Cate, Cate, don’t make her wait.”

Jacq’s lips were so close they touched my ear. “With telling you what you mean to me.”

Fera sighed. “That wasn’t so bad.”

Mynx looked concerned. “I don’t think he’s done.”

Van ad-libbed, “Cate, Cate, she likes cake.”

I smiled at Jacq. “Start wherever you like, though I would recommend somewhere more private.”

“Later then.” Jacq chuckled in my ear, sending a pleasurable tingle down my spine. The fear in her eyes, though still present, had dimmed.

“This is an odd story,” said a frowning Alex to Carlin, who nodded.

Van’s head bobbed up and down. “Cate, Cate, she’s so great.”

Contemplative, JJ turned to Fera. “Ten bucks says she kills him.”

Fera laughed. “No way, that’s a sucker’s bet.”

Worried, Mynx looked at the drunken Van. “I think I’ve heard this before.”

Car got into the spirit. “Cate, Cate, she’s great!”

Van grinned largely with bright white teeth and nodded emphatically. “Cate, Cate.”

Alex’s and Car’s heads bobbed also. “Cate, Cate.”

Everyone else at the table went silent, waiting with equal amounts of dread and anticipation.

Van was singing now. “Cate, Cate, she’s so great. She makes me want to m—”

Shocked, Gem and I clamped our hands over the demon’s mouth. His head rocked back with the force of it.

Forks clanging as they dropped into their plates, Kathryn, Nana, and Helena all cried at once, “Vanguard!”

Echoing, Alex and Car sang, “She makes me want to…?” They paused, looking to Cassie and Gem.

Stunned, all of the adults but Van and Brit looked from one to the other in desperation. Brit laughingly answered, “Communicate.” She bobbed her head. “She makes me want to communicate.”

Alex and Car smiled. “Commun-ablicatee.”

Fera snorted. “That’s fairly accurate. Can’t seem to get anyone to shut up around here.”

“That’s not the word!” Van mumbled past the hands over his mouth then licked my fingers.

I jerked my hand back. Gem did the same. We gave him withering glares, wiping our hands on our pants.

Mouth free, he said clearly to me, “Is this not an acceptable rhyme? I thought the poet quite clever.”

My face was hotter than the sun. “Poet?”

Embarrassed, Mynx looked at me. “Did I mention I showed him the pay-per-view channels?”

Jacq managed to grab my plate and move it right before my head thumped onto the tabletop.

Goddess bless and keep our souls
, I prayed. We still had dessert and coffee to go.

Van reached for the ice cream. “Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?” asked Alex around a shortbread cookie.

Mouth full of ice cream, Van managed to say, “Bevis.”

I thumped my head a few more times for good measure, rattling the silverware.

This family gave new meaning to the term
dinner from hell
.

* * *

March 17
^th
, 1727

During the night, a late, unexpected winter storm settled over the land, laying a thick layer of fresh snow on the stone and wood fortress standing at the base of the mountain. The snow’s crusty surface, white and pure, twinkled in the morning light. Hours moved, the sun rising over snow-burdened trees in a shadow-casting pendulum. No sound was heard. Not a soul, man or animal, stirred to disturb the scene. Like the gods and goddesses of the people who had lived here, the animals had fled this land.

Others had not been so perceptive. And so the snow, like a wedding dress on a corpse, had become a beautiful adornment on a grisly ruin. One whose fall had come too late for the sanity and security of all within the fortress’s walls.

When the sun was near the end of its downward climb, the guardian’s fighters arrived. They trampled the snow with their heavy boots, skirting the silent village and taking the dark citadel with little effort. The large wooden gate and pike-crowned fence had long since been abandoned, leaving the alchemist’s home open to all who dared enter.

The inner sanctum, the house within the heart of his fortress, was also unguarded. From the strong smell of aged death, the fighters thought they knew what awaited. They thought they were prepared.

Even the harbingers of the devil himself could not have prepared for such as this.

The sword-wielding men and women pulled their cloaks tighter, shielding their mouths and noses, if not their eyes. Level by level, they opened doors, breaking them down if necessary, moving quickly from room to room, searching for survivors. There were none. And from the condition of the bodies, there had not been any for a very long time.

Many of the rooms had one or more occupants decaying in their beds. Some had eyes and mouths open, frozen in eternal screams. Others lay undisturbed, passing into death in peace. It had been a silent, slumberous, seemingly indiscriminate massacre. One that could be committed by only the darkest, most foul of spells.

In the midst of her guards, the white-haired Cassidy LaFortuna strode, directing them unerringly to the darkmirror. Its distress had called to her for weeks, but the alchemist had thoroughly hidden himself and the portal by which he summoned his dark fleshy feasts. Or at least he had until days before when something had changed and his protection spells had fallen. Still, the fur-clad witch and her people moved with caution. The gate was no longer open, but that did not lessen the danger.

Cassidy directed her two most valiant warriors to follow her, leaving the rest to guard her daughters. She had dared not leave them at home, lest this moment of weakness be a feint to draw her away so the alchemist could steal her children. She had learned the hard way that a guardian or her offspring were a prized commodity for some.

Finally, they reached the lowest level and the wooden door that barred the alchemist’s laboratory. Finding it unbolted, their unease increased impossibly more. Swords drawn, her guards entered first.

All that could be heard was the creaking of heavy wood and stone above them.

Though brief, that moment without sound, without the clash of steel or blast of magic, seemed interminably long. Then her men shouted for her, their voices raised in alarm. The cold knot in her stomach said that whatever lay on the other side of that door would be much worse than the battle she had expected.

Sword in one hand and a green orb of magic in the other, Cassidy entered, quickly scanning the room. Tapestry-covered walls rippled with magical depictions of demon horrors. Glass bowls and beakers, filled with countless unknown compounds, littered the chaotically arranged tabletops. Some steamed over burned-out candles, their multicolored sulfuric fumes clouding the air. Stacks of tumbling books and jumbled tools were crammed here and there between pots of ingredients so black and rare their names had been struck from the common tongue.

All this Cassidy absorbed in the blink of an eye, quickly moving to where her men huddled over something near the large black gate at the far wall. One stood sword at the ready. When he stepped back, she gasped, catching her first glimpse of what they guarded. Cassidy had once been trapped on the other side of that mirror, damned to be a demon lord’s mistress. She’d endured great torture, had seen horrible cruelty, had even born a half-demon child, yet she had never thought to see such as this.

The man they had come to punish, to make pay for his sins—the undead sorcerer who had once been her brother and the traitor who had sold her into slavery, the one who had killed all those upstairs who had once served him faithfully—was already dead. Kneeling over the corpse, head bent, was the killer, the alchemist’s blood still on its small hands. The room was dim, its magical sconces fading from lack of renewal. She squinted. The figure was dirty, bloody, and clothed in rags with numerous bruises and bite marks. The small form looked up and she had the urge to laugh.

The sorcerer who had killed so many, who had made even the mightiest Otherworld creatures tremble, had been killed by a
child
…a boy, if her eyes told her correctly. Though that was more guess than fact as the child, starved near to death, was little more than a bag of bones. Cassidy had no doubt her brother’s death had been well-deserved, if likely too brief. But what the boy, blood still smeared across his lips, had done afterward was a sign of a mind as broken as his Master’s.

One of the guards spoke, telling her of the gruesome thing the boy had been doing when they had interrupted his dinner. But the explanation was unnecessary. The bite marks on the dead man’s face and the large sections where flesh had been carved out were hard to miss.

What sort of desperate hunger…what sort of foul desire would drive one to do such as this?

Cassidy stepped forward, fist tight on her sword. “What’s your name, boy?”

He shook his head, the hungry madness in his black eyes briefly overcome by confusion and fear.

“Answer me,” she demanded.

He shook his head again then opened his mouth, revealing a black hole where his tongue had been.

Tongue had always been her brother’s favorite.
Cassidy’s stomach clenched and her heart fell, her mind knowing well the tortures the boy had suffered. But her once-kind heart had been hardened years before and she steeled herself to finish the task, watching as the hungry madness slipped back into the boy’s gaze. No quarter could be offered here. If let live, the child would grow into his dead Master’s shoes. That future was laid in his crazed eyes.

The boy’s mind swirled with dark images of pain, hunger, and loss, but even a rabid animal knows death when it approaches. Unable to beg for mercy, he bent his head. He’d been so close to living through the day, to gaining enough power to finish his second task, only to face death again, making everything he had done and suffered for naught. To most it would seem unfair. But he was so broken that there was nothing left in him now. Even the voices, his constant companions and comforters for so long, had left him. He did not feel the bloody tear that ran down his cheek, leaving a pink trail through months of grime and dust.

Cassidy raised her sword high, whispering, “May the goddess keep you in her peace and grant you a mercy in death that you did not find in life.” Her sword fell.

An amazingly strong hand shot out, grasping Cassidy’s wrist, arresting her with a painful grip just before her arcing blade could severe the small bent neck. Cassidy turned to see her youngest daughter, black eyes unblinking, dark-gold hair much darker in the dim light.

“Lucine,” Cassidy hissed, fighting to look past the features that belonged to her daughter’s cursed father. “You have no right to stop this. Return to your sister and Sati.”

“I have every right,” Lucine said evenly. “He is mine. The Fates have decreed it. As such…” Her voice was more forceful, more defiant now, her eyes glinting with a determination her mother had never seen. “I say you cannot kill him.”

Lucine’s older sister, Cordelia, and their keeper, the old gypsy druid Sati, entered hurriedly. Stooped within her heavy furs, Sati shuffled forward as quickly as she could, her bones twisted painfully with the cold.

“’Tis true. I have seen it.” Sati’s voice warbled with weariness. She raised her fist to her mouth, coughing a deep wet sound not present before their journey over the mountains to this place. “Though I be unsure to what respect, he
is
hers to care for, hers to teach…hers to kill when that time comes.”

“I will fix him,” Lucine said, her black eyes still unblinking.

Ignoring her daughter, Cassidy searched Sati’s face. The old druid had served her family faithfully for many years. She would not lie. That understanding left a bitter taste in Cassidy’s mouth.

Cassidy had lived a long life of faithful service. And for the first time in those many years, the pale-haired guardian wanted to damn the three demanding goddesses and do what she knew in her heart was right. Her daughter was mistaken. There would be no fixing this one. From this moment forth, anything he might become would be a shattered reflection of what he could have been.

Cassidy had the eerie feeling that sparing his life would cost her much more than she was willing to pay. But that future might never come to be, while it was a certainty that spiting the Fates would bring an unpleasant outcome.
But would letting the boy live be the lesser of two evils?
Goddess, she hoped so.

“Very well.” Cassidy lowered her sword with great difficulty. Her men did the same. “But I wish to never see his face again.” Cassidy’s pale eyes met her daughter’s dark ones, and Lucine nodded, understanding.

His banishment meant her own.

As if a sign, one by one the low sconces flickered out, taking their light with them. Breaking eye contact, Cassidy whirled about and left the room, all but Lucine and her charge following close behind, their fates forsaken to the darkness.

Behind Cassidy, her daughter’s voice whispered, following her into the approaching night, “I
will
fix him.”