Unchained, the Dark Forgotten (2010) (24 page)

“It’s time to go, witchling.”

“Whatever.” What the hell was this thing? Nothing good, if it reacted to the magic. Any number of critters could feel the shove of a banishing spell, but not all of them had to obey it. The heavy hitters just got a big old headache—assuming they had heads.

Goddess
.

She wasn’t sure the circle was going to hold. She dug in another pocket for a second stash of charms, the famous witch grenades. Holly had tucked in an extra bottle of scented oil in case the spell needed a booster. Grateful, Ashe fished it out and set it next to the candle. Then she remembered that the girl ghost had said something.

“Are you the one the spirit is trying to stop?”

Whatever it was rustled, as if it had wings made of old, cracked leather. “She is an annoyance.”

The candle flared bright as it burned down to the first circle of carved sigils, releasing their power into the field of energy formed by the circle. She could feel the cleansing magic humming against her skin.

“Ah, you sting me, little witch. It bites like gnats.” The voice was nasty, sneering and sarcastic. The creature seemed to hump and bulge, shadow on shadow. It might have a snotty attitude, but it was hurting.

“What do you want?”

“I want you to stop!”

And then it seemed to fan its wings, huge and tipped with claws like a great, prehistoric bird. It spread larger, thinner, a film of feathery darkness against the outside of the circle. It was suffocating, like hot, humid air. Moldy. Robbing everything of life.

Ashe felt its power then. Hunger. Angry emptiness. A yearning for . . . she wasn’t sure what. It was like nothing in the world would quite satisfy her. She could consume it all, and the pit inside her would still be there.

Goddess.
This was no ghost. She was in way above her pay grade.

She heard footsteps on the stairs. Reynard! He wasn’t expecting any of this. “Stop! Stay back!”

Ashe jumped to her feet, accidentally stepping on the glass bottle of oil. She felt it break beneath her boot heel, splurting the spicy liquid everywhere. She didn’t have time to worry about it. Ashe drew her knife and ran to the edge of the circle nearest the attic stairs. Using the blade, she drew an arc in the air, making a doorway at the edge of the circle big enough to step through. Darkness spilled across the circle’s chalk line like ink.
Shit!
She crossed through and then sealed the circle again as fast as she could, chanting the spell all over again.

She could see the dome of magic over the circle flicker, struggle to re- form beneath the clinging shadows of the bird-beast.
If I were Holly, I’d just blast it away
. But she wasn’t. Her magic was barely enough to remind the circle to work. And now she was outside with the Thing.

It was oozing off the side of the dome, flowing toward her like malevolent syrup.

“What’s going on?” Reynard asked, coming up behind her.

“I’m not sure, but I think it’s a demon.” She pulled one of the bombs out of her pocket. Like the charms, they were bundles of herbs and minerals wrapped in cheesecloth, but these carried different magic. She pressed it to her lips, then lobbed it at the flowing darkness.

It disappeared as if the dark had swallowed it.

With a new baby, Holly’s magic wasn’t reliable. They’d thought the bombs would be okay. Apparently not.

Crap
.

“Down the stairs,” Ashe said. “Now.”

The stair light went out, leaving them in total darkness but for the spell candle.

Reynard grabbed her hand. “The dark won’t slow me down. Stay close.”

Ashe followed, letting him lead while she fumbled for her flashlight. “Where’s Tony?”

“Who?”

“The owner.”

Their feet clattered on the stairs, Ashe stumbling blindly behind Reynard. Finally, she managed to thumb her flashlight to life.

“Didn’t see him. Door to the stairs was open.”

“Then where is he?”

She felt something cold touch her arm. Wild despair filled her. She felt pain seize her heart, squeezing it under her ribs.

Reynard pulled them through the door and into the forest of novels. He slammed the doorway shut. Ashe grabbed a shelf for support and wiped her face with her sleeve.

“Goddess, what do we do now?”

Reynard grabbed her elbow. “Run.”

Blackness seeped under the door.

“Dammit!” Ashe backed out of the room, fishing in her pocket for a second bomb. She threw it, watching to see what happened. This time the bomb flared, but wavelets of darkness arched over it, pulling it under like a wrecked ship.

Maybe the charms were fine, but the demon was just that much stronger.

Ashe turned and ran. The floor bucked under their feet, sending Reynard to his knees. He scrambled up, but the tall shelves weren’t anchored to the walls. He shielded his face as a cascade of paperbacks tumbled out of a lurching bookcase.

Ashe looked behind them to see the darkness slithering along the floor. Before them was an alley of nineteenth-century fiction, each volume a weighty tome.
Brain damage if one of those suckers beans us.

Inspiration struck. She grabbed Reynard’s hand. “Fire escape.”

But when she looked out the window at the metal stairs where she’d read Nancy’s detective adventures, it was now dripping with demon slime.

She’d seen that particular shade of goo, with those particular flecks, once before. And how many demons could there be in Fairview at one time? She remembered where she’d seen the store’s name before: printed on a white file label on her lawyer’s desk.

D
emon slime was toxic, no two ways about it. Ashe thought about bringing a bucketful and dumping it over the lawyer’s head.

They’d had to crawl onto the slime-coated metal stairs and slither down as best they could without breaking their necks. The second- floor exit was too high to jump, and it wasn’t like they had time to pry open one of the other windows. They were all painted shut.

Which meant plenty of exposure to the toxic goo. They’d run straight to the corner gas station to get hosed off. That probably saved their lives, but not their clothes. Even sprayed clean, they smelled like rotten hamburger.

To add insult to injury, clouds had rolled in and it had started to pour by the time they’d gotten back to the SUV. The seats got soaked.

There was no time to change before making her appointment with Bannerman and her in-laws’ lawyer. Stinking like a pig carcass and high on adrenaline, Ashe wasn’t in the mood for high heels and pearls anyway. She was channeling Bruce Willis from
Die Hard
, and wanted someone to pound.

She made two phone calls en route. One was to Holly, telling her the bookstore was possessed. Without magical backup, Ashe was useless against a demon. Holly said she’d take care of getting an extermination team together right away. In the meantime, she’d send the hounds down to keep the public away from the store.

The other call was long-distance to a hacker Ashe employed from time to time, a guy somewhere in the South operating out of a mobile home. Getting into the land titles database and figuring out who had sold what to whom was a matter of minutes. He confirmed what she’d already guessed: Bannerman had handled the sale of the bookstore when old Mr. Cowan’s estate had been settled. If good old Tony and the demon were one and the same, Bannerman
must
have known. Sure, demons could pass for human for a while, but sooner or later their real nature came out. Why had he sent Ashe on a mission to search out the demon sliming his walls when he already knew who it was? Why not just ask her to kill it? None of this made sense.

When they parked in front of the lawyer’s office, they were, amazingly enough, only five minutes late. She slammed the Saturn’s door and stalked toward the front door of the skyscraper.

Reynard caught up to her in a few long strides. His face was grim, mouth a thin line of tension. “I know your times are different from mine, but I cannot see that they have changed so much.”

“Which means what?”

“Threats of violence won’t work.” His gray eyes held worry. “Lawyers have courts and judges they can use to fight back.”

Ashe tightened her jaw. “Who says I’m threatening? Threats are just warm-up exercises.” She burst through the door to the foyer, leaving a trail of water behind her. “I can’t believe I hired that goof.”

He grabbed her arm. “You made this appointment because you are fighting to keep your daughter.”

Ashe shrugged herself free. “Yeah, and there’s no way that jerk is going to represent my case for one second more. A lawyer is a weapon. I only use clean weapons.”

She saw the flash of understanding cross his face. “I’m not an idiot, Reynard.”

“You’re angry.”

“Anger is just another tool.”

She jabbed the elevator button. There was a sign on the door saying that Bannerman, Wishart, and Yee had moved offices to the sixth floor during renovations. Maybe Bannerman had actually listened to her advice about evacuating because of the demon slime.

Reynard did stop her from bursting through the office door with all the subtlety of a drug raid. The droid behind the reception desk managed a shocked, “Ms. Carver!” as they barged in, but by then Ashe had a long stake in one hand. The woman’s mouth snapped shut with a gulp.

There wasn’t anyone else in the waiting room, just dim lights and the soft, hypnotic rush of air-conditioning. She had no idea if there were people in the other offices in the suite. The place had that clinical, empty feel of a bad sci-fi movie set.

The receptionist dove for the phone. Ashe grabbed the cord and ripped it out of the wall.

“Cover her,” she ordered Reynard. “If she tries to push any buttons, tie her up.”

Reynard nodded. He was no cleaner than Ashe, his hair fallen loose in a wild mass of wet tendrils. His shirt was plastered to his skin, showing off the muscles beneath. He frowned down at the secretary. Her eyes went wide, but a little speculative. Maybe bondage was her thing. Underneath the scowl, Reynard looked like he was having way too much fun.

Good someone is
.

Ashe slammed open Bannerman’s door. He was sitting at the little round conference table that filled one corner of the office. It had four chairs. The second was occupied by a man she assumed was her in- laws’ lawyer.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said brightly.

“Good God, Ms. Carver!” Bannerman exclaimed, falling back in his chair with a look of disgust mingled with fear. His eyes traveled up and down her body again and again, as if staring hard enough would make her disappear.

The other guy just looked confused. “This is your client?”

Ashe advanced on Bannerman like a Valkyrie coming in for the kill. “You know, if you’re going to hide from a demon, it’s going to take more than changing floors in the same building.”

“What are you talking about?” Bannerman cried, looking wildly around.

“You’re up to your ’nads in doo-doo, dude. I went in on a ghostbusting job and, lo and behold, I ended up giving your demon a migraine. The spell wasn’t powerful enough to send it packing, but it got real pissed off.”

“
My
demon?” Bannerman scoffed.

Okay, so he was going to deny the whole biz in front his colleague. Idiot.

Ashe planted herself on the other side of the table, leaning across it to get in Bannerman’s face. “Yeah, whatcha do, sell it a haunted bookshop? Old Mr. Cowan’s place? Demons really hate ghosts, by the way, one of the few types of entities they can’t control, even if they are a thousand times more powerful. Like mice and elephants. Ghosts make them crazy. Ghostbusting gives them a headache. I bet old Tony didn’t know that when he called for someone to despook his new store. My guess is that he’s not that old, as demons go.”

Bannerman said nothing, but his expression went from shocked to calculating.

Ashe leaned in another inch. “He’s our bad guy, isn’t he? Demons always look so nice when they’re playing human. They’re almost impossible to detect at first.”

“I don’t do business with demons.”

“Of course not,” said the other lawyer. “That would be illegal.”

Ashe detected a note of irony in the other man’s voice. He was young and modishly dressed, with the latest in tech toys arranged before him. “Brent Hashimoto,” he said. “I’m here representing the de Larrochas. Excuse me if I don’t shake. You—um—stink.”

“ ’S okay. I got up close and personal with hellspawn. It’s a smelly business.”

Ashe inched yet closer to Bannerman, who bellowed, “Miss McCormick, call security!”

“She’s tied up,” Ashe said grimly. “Or else she’s begging for it by now.”

Hashimoto sniggered, reaching for his camera phone. Ashe raised the stake, and watched him back off with a shrug.

“Good decision.” She smiled.

She turned back to Bannerman. “Now. You promised me that my custody case would get top-drawer treatment if I got rid of your demon.”

She heard Hashimoto inhale.
Good
. “I said I’d do my best, but demons aren’t easy to find and they’re very, very hard to kill. Normally they kill you first. But hey, I was willing to at least check it out and see what could be done, for the sake of my daughter.”

She rested the tip of the stake against Bannerman’s chest, making him gasp. “But you, Chuckles, already knew who it was and where it was. All it took was a rummage in the database of the land titles office. It wasn’t hard from there to find out who handled the sale of the estate for Mr. Cowan’s heirs: Bannerman, Wishart, and Yee, Barristers and Solicitors. The place was sold to one Anthony Yarndice. Tony.”

“So?”

Pushing a little on the stake, she leaned over. “Did you think a demon wouldn’t care about a little spook action? Figured he wouldn’t complain, because demons can’t legally hold property to begin with? Figured he’d take the crap property and be grateful?”