Pale Demon

“Irritating?” Trent leaned back against my robe, seeming to like being irritating, his fingers laced and his ankle on one knee. The position would have made me look unsure, but on him it was confident. The scent of coconut oil mixed with cinnamon, and he dropped his eyes. Silent, I waited.

“The truth of the matter is I’d rather have you alive and free of the coven than dead,” Trent said softly, glancing up as a torn leaf drifted down. “If you leave for the coast without me, you won’t make it. I still harbor the hope that you’ll someday work with me, Ms. Morgan.”

We were back on familiar ground. Work with me was better than work for me, but how many times did I have to say no? “No—you’re lying,” I said, waving my glasses at him when he began to protest, green eyes looking innocently at me from under his wispy blond hair. “You walked in here all strung out about asking me to go with you to the coast, not the other way around. You want my trust? Try buying it with the truth. Until then, we’ve got nothing to talk about. Bye-bye, Trent. See you at five. Don’t let the graveyard door hit you on the way out.”

I jammed the glasses back on my face and reclined in a huff, ignoring him as he shuffled his feet. For a moment, I thought he was going to stick to his lame claim of city-power benevolence, but then he whispered, “I need to get to the West Coast. I have to have an escort, and Quen won’t leave Ceri. She’s three weeks from her due date.”

Ceri? My jaw clenched, my eyes opening as I looked into the amber-tinted world. I sat up, eying Trent to see if he was lying. There was a hint of compassion there, but most of his expression was peeved, probably because Ceri liked his security officer instead of him.

“Quen won’t allow me to leave Cincinnati unless you come with me,” Trent said, clearly bothered. “He says you’re raw but enthusiastic.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Okay,” I said, swinging my legs to the broken patio again. “I think I’ve got it now. You say you want to join forces to help me—poor little me—but it’s only because Quen won’t let you go by yourself. How come? You planning on speaking out against me if I don’t sign your lame-ass paper? I knew there was a reason I liked Quen.”

“Will you forget about that contract?” he said, starting to look cross. “It was a mistake to try to bully you, and I’m sorry. My need to get to the coast is a private matter. You’re simply a means to get me there. An escort.”

He was sorry? I thought, shocked by the admission. From the wall, Jenks flew up in a burst of orange. Clearly, he’d heard it, too.

“Please,” Trent said, scooting to the edge of his chair. “Rachel, I need your help.”

From the gate came the faint, familiar sound of a metallic click and a puff of air. Behind Trent, a little blue ball at chest height flew right where he would have been had he not leaned forward. It hit the tree, exploding in a familiar splat of sound as a piercing whistle echoed through the garden.

Trent stared at me, then the wet mark, his eyes wide.

Shit, we are under attack.

Two

Trent rose to his feet, stupidly staring at the tree and the foaming yellow mass of magic.

“Get down!” I shouted as I yanked him off balance. He started to fall, and still sitting, I pulled him toward me, bracing myself and levering his weight over me and to the patio on my far side. He hit the hard pavers with a gasp, eyes wide and hair askew. I was already reaching a quick thought out to the ley line in the backyard. Power flowed in, familiar but painful in my rush, and before Trent had tossed the hair from his eyes, the word rhombus whispered through my mind. In an instant, I relived the five-minute process to make a protection circle.

The semi-invisible barrier sprang up around us, me at its center as in all undrawn circles. Trent sat up, his head even with my shoulder. “Stay down!” I hissed, and we both jerked as two more splats hit my circle, their magic making little dimples of color on my black-and-gold aura. Beyond it, the pixies were moving in the graveyard, and I cursed my stupidity. I’d told Jenks to keep his kids centralized, effectively shutting down our first line of defense.

“Jenks!” I shouted as I stood, my circle inches from the top of my head, and reached for my robe, jamming my arms into the sleeves.

Jenks was gone, but his gold-dust trail still glittered, showing that he had flown straight up, getting the sitch. A shrill pixy chirp drew my attention to the front gate. My eyes met the would-be assassin’s, and the attacker ducked.

“There!” I shouted, and more pixies arrowed toward the attacker.

Frowning, I fumed as I tied my robe. “Get in the church,” I all but growled at Trent. “Put yourself in a circle.”

“Rachel.”

I turned, angry as I took in his tightly pressed lips and angry green eyes as he managed to be ticked that I’d pulled him to safety even as the attacker fled. “They were aiming at you, not me!” I said. “Get in the church!”

Not waiting to see if he did as I’d told him, I ran for the gate, gasping as I broke my circle and took the energy into myself. My bare feet were almost silent on the slate path, and my jaw clenched. My splat gun would have been handy right about now, but Al had melted it two months ago and no one would sell me a replacement.

Heart pounding, I shoved on the worn, rough wood of the gate, adrenaline sending it crashing into the bushes.

“Ms. Morgan, look out!” shrilled a pixy, and I jerked back at the puff of air.

“Crap!” I exclaimed as I fell against the fence and the gate smacked back into the door frame. Looking the way I’d come, I saw there was a new splat on the ground between me and the empty lounge chair. Miracle of miracles—Trent had actually listened to me and gone inside. The slightly itchy feeling in the back of my mind might have been him setting a circle. Or it might have been the assassin setting up a trap.

A dark-haired pixy landed on the fence, his hands in fists as they rested on his hips. “He’s running now, Ms. Morgan,” Jumoke said, and I gave him a quick, grateful smile.

I smacked the gate open again and ran through it, Jumoke flying just over my head. A passel of pixies trailed behind, shouting encouragement. The man who’d shot at me was indeed running, and a wicked grin spread across my face.

He was fast. I was faster, and I raced after his slim, dark form as he headed for the street. My fingertips grazed the man’s shirt as we reached the sidewalk, and heart pounding, I fell on him. He had time for one yelp of surprise, and I clenched my eyes against the coming cement.

We hit with a jar that knocked my breath away, and I scrambled for a new grip, sunglasses falling off. “You tap a line … and you won’t … wake up … until next week!” I panted when I caught my breath. Oh God. My elbow was vibrating all the way up to my skull, but he’d taken most of the impact. Scrambling, I put my knee in the small of his back and twisted his arm around his own neck, ready to snap his wrist if he moved. The pixies were everywhere, talking so fast I couldn’t understand them, but I caught the words “intruder” and “Papa.” Just where was Jenks, anyway?

The man wasn’t moving, and after some vigorous “encouragement” he let go of his splat gun and the pixies worked as a team to drag it out of his reach. It looked like mine, right down to the cherry red color. And the blue splat balls? They were almost my trademark.

“You trying to frame me for assaulting Trent?” I exclaimed, and he only grunted. “What you got in your splat balls, Jack? Maybe we should find out together? Real personal like?”

Breathing hard, the man tried to look at me, the anger obvious in his green eyes. Green eyes, blond hair, lanky build, tan: Was he an elf? An elven assassin? Not a very good one, though. And where the hell was Jenks?

The sound of running feet pulled my head up. There was a second man, and I could do nothing. Damn it, he was getting away!

“Are you after Trent or me?” I shouted at the guy under me and, furious, I thunked his forehead into the cement.

The man’s eyes showed his pain. “Why do you even care?”

Huh?

There was a squeal of ultrasonic sound, and Jenks’s kids dropped back to make room for their dad. “Two of them!” Jenks exclaimed, dropping silver sparkles and a zip strip from my charm cupboard to hit the man’s back. “Trent’s in the kitchen. You want me to get her?”

Her? I slipped the zip strip around the man’s wrist and ratcheted it tight, immediately feeling better. “Jack” didn’t move as his maybe-contact with a ley line was severed, telling me he hadn’t been prepared to use one to begin with, but better safe than sorry. I was spared the decision of what to do by the sound of Ivy’s cycle at the far end of the street. Jenks darted away with a second zip strip, leaving his kids to sweetly tell me what I ought to do to the man under me. He moved when the subject of wasps entered the conversation, and I yanked on his arm.

Ivy’s bike slowed as Jenks’s dust glittered over her, then she gunned it, roaring past me and aiming for the woman fleeing over the lawns. Ivy was a tad more protective of me than Jenks, and with a silent fury she ran the woman down, using her foot like a jousting pole. Wincing, I watched the woman take a mouthful of grass as she slid to a front-face halt. Jenks’s children left me, and the woman slowly sat up, her hands in fists over her head as they surrounded her, bright sparkling spots of potential death in the sunshine.

“Kids!” Jenks’s voice was shrill. “We’ve talked about this! Lunkers are a no-kill species! How come you never listen to me like you listened to your mom!”

It looked like it might be over. “Get up,” I said, breathing hard as I eased up on my grip.

The man spun under me, foot and fist lashing out. Jerking up and away, I stood, grabbing for his foot. It smacked into me with a bone-jarring thump, but I caught it. Determined green eyes met mine, and when I went to snap his ankle, he sideswiped me with the other foot.

I gasped and went with it, trying to keep my presence of mind as I fell on the concrete walk, trying to turn it into something graceful. There was a sickening crunch under me. My glasses. Damn it! I’d let go, though, and when I again found my feet, he had stood and was coming at me with a knife.

“Rachel, quit playing with him,” Ivy said loudly, her cycle idling back to us, the zip-stripped woman meekly walking before her with an escort of exuberant pixies holding swords.

“He’s got a knife!” I exclaimed, teeth clenched as I did an X block, then dove under his arm to make him twist his own knife into his side. And there I stopped, breathing hard as I pressed the blade, still in his grip, into him, but not yet breaking the skin. He didn’t move, knowing it was right over his kidney. Jeez Louise, the curtains of the house across the street were moving. We had to take this inside before someone called Inderland Security. The last thing I needed was the I.S. out here.

“You’ve lost, Jack!” I shouted as I pinched his wrist until he let go of the knife, then wrenched his arm up and pressed him into the nearby light pole. “We got Jill,” I said as he grunted, “and no way are you getting that bucket of water in my garden. If you don’t relax, I’m going to bust your crown! We clear?”

The guy nodded, but I didn’t ease up. Spitting my hair out of my mouth, I realized that Ivy had parked her cycle and was coming up the walk with the woman. The female assassin’s hands were in fists, high over her head. Jenks’s kids were working together to shift the knife to the sidelines. Slowly I started to smile. We’d gotten them. Hot damn!

“Hi, Ivy,” I said as she scuffed her booted feet to a halt. “Get the errands done?”

The slightly Asian-looking woman quirked her lips at my robe, smiling as she held up her pharmacy bag. The unmistakable shadow of a second splat gun and several knives showed through the thin plastic. Her lips were closed to hide her small, sharp canines, but her mood was good.

“You want to take this inside or bag them up and leave them here for big-trash pickup?” she asked, her black eyes going to the deceptively empty street. Her pupils were fully dilated despite the bright sun, evidence that she was working to maintain control of her instincts. Being in the sun would help; so would the wind now carrying away the scent of sweat and fear.

“Inside,” I panted. I was out of breath, but Ivy wasn’t. She was six feet of lean, athletic living vampire, dressed in blue jeans, boots, and a tight black T-shirt. It would take more than running down a fleeing assassin on her bike to make her break into a sweat.

“You going to be good, Jack?” I asked the man pressed against the light pole, and when he nodded, I let up. He grimaced as Ivy patted him down, adding another knife and more blue splat pellets in a clear, crush-proof plastic vial to her bag. I held my hand out for the splat balls and I refilled his hopper, fast enough to make Jack’s eyes widen in appreciation.

Clicking the magazine away, I hefted the splat gun, thinking it felt good in my hand. “This is my house,” I said as I indicated the church. “If you do something I don’t like, you’re going to get whatever’s in the hopper, and the law will be on my side. Clear?”

They didn’t nod, but they didn’t spout threats, either.

“Move,” I said, and with an obedience that told me the potions were nasty, the two of them started up the cement stairs and toward the double wooden doors. Slowly I began to relax.

Ivy looked at the gun, her brow furrowed. “It looks like yours,” she said.

“You noticed that, too?” Eying the attackers, I pulled one side of the door open. Jenks’s kids entered the church first—three of them carrying my broken sunglasses—then the bad guys, then us. “Are you okay?” I asked Ivy.

She smiled to show her fangs, small until she died and became a true undead, and I stifled a shiver. Ivy was great at maintaining a grip on her instincts, but fight, flight, or food brought out the worst in her, and this was all three. “Not a problem,” she said as the dark foyer took us. One of these days, we were going to invest in a new light fixture, but the sanctuary beyond it was a bright wash of light, the sun coming in the tall stained-glass windows to make colored patterns on the new set of living room furniture, my unused desk, Ivy’s exercise mats, and Kisten’s burned pool table. I still hadn’t had it refelted. My bare feet squeaked over the old oak, and I shoved Jack toward the small hallway at the back of the sanctuary.

“Trent is here already?” Ivy asked, clearly having smelled him. “He’s still alive, right?”

I nodded, wiping the grit from the sidewalk off my feet. Good Lord, I had tagged an assassin in my bare feet and a bikini. If this showed up on the Internet, I was going to be peeved. “Last I knew, he was. I told him to go into the kitchen and wait.” Assassins usually traveled in threes, but these were elven. I didn’t know their traditions.

“He’s in there,” Jenks said derisively as he dropped down to us. “I don’t think they’re real assassins. They didn’t know any ley-line magic.”

“You don’t need magic to be deadly, Jenks. You of all people should know that.”

Jenks snorted. “I don’t think they know any. They stink like elves, but they’ve got so much human in them, they might not have any magic.”

I shrugged, guessing as much by the almost indifference Jenks’s kids had shown the two attackers. The man in front of us glanced back as we entered the dark hallway, and I smiled mockingly. “All the way to the end,” I directed as we passed the his and her bathrooms and twin bedrooms and headed to the huge, industrial-size kitchen. I cleared my throat in warning as Jack and Jill whispered between themselves, and they shut up.

The pixies were singing about blood and daisies as we entered the sunlit kitchen to find Trent safe within a circle of his own making between the cluttered center counter and the sink, full of dirty spell pots. The bright, cheerful gold of his circle was free of any demon smut, making me uncomfortable. He’d just been under my aura and had seen the mess I’d made of it. Demon smut. Ugly. Black. Permanent—mostly.

The kitchen was hands down my favorite room in the entire church, with its expansive stainless-steel countertops, fluorescent lighting, and center island counter with my spelling equipment hanging above it and in the open cabinets below it. There were two stoves, so I didn’t have to stir spells and cook on the same surface. My mom’s new fridge took up a wall. Bis, perched atop it, was asleep next to the skull-shaped cookie jar. The little gargoyle had probably been trying to stay awake after sunup and misjudged. He’d be down until sunset no matter how noisy we were, and it was getting noisy. Pixies were flitting in and out through the one small window over the sink. Ivy’s computer was set up on the big farm-kitchen table against the inside wall, but the space felt like mine. That Trent had been in here alone sort of bothered me.

Jenks’s kids were flitting everywhere, too excited to perch in one place, and they were starting to give me a headache. Trent, too, looked like he was hurting. “Look, Ivy! Elf under glass!” Jenks said, and I sighed, even as a small twinge on my awareness went through me and Trent dropped his circle.

Like one entity, Jenks’s kids swarmed Trent. He stiffened, but did little other than grimace when Jrixibell asked if she could make a dandelion necklace for him. Yeah, Jack and Jill might be elves, but they weren’t full-blooded like Trent. The pixies were almost ignoring them.

“Jenks …,” I prompted, my own head splitting from their noise as I glanced at Bis. How the cat-size, gray-skinned kid could sleep through this was a wonder, but he was, his leathery wings lying close to his back, his black-fringed ears drooping, and his lionlike tail wrapped around his clawed feet in slumber.

Jenks clattered his wings for their attention. “Okay, you lot!” he shouted. “Jumoke, Jack, Jixy, Jhan can stay if you’re quiet! The rest of you, hit the garden. Evens take cleanup. Odds on perimeter. Not a butterfly crosses the lines without someone knowing! And watch the splat-ball marks. Stay back until we have a chance to get out there with salt water. And no dropping moths into the puddles to see what the charms do! Clear?”

In a chorus of affirmation and disappointment, they dispersed, the eldest children Jenks had asked to remain retreating to the overhead rack. I exhaled in relief, and realizing that I was standing like Jenks with my bare feet spaced wide and my hands on my hips, I dropped my arms.

“Sit,” I said to the would-be assassins, pointing at the floor beside the fridge, and they gingerly lowered themselves. With a languorous stretch, Ivy shoved the magazines off her chair with a booted foot. They hit the floor with a thump and slid into a long pile against the wall. Deceptively calm and relaxed, she drifted back to the doorway, standing to look aggressive as she took her hair out of its ponytail and let the strands fall where they might. Unless the assassins went through the window, they were stuck.

A breath of self-preservation made me toss a roll of paper towels to the woman. Not only was her chin bleeding, but the man’s forehead was scraped where I’d thunked him into the sidewalk. Ivy would appreciate it, if nothing else. The harsh ripping of the paper sounded loud, and folding up a sheet, Jill dabbed at her jaw and passed the roll to Jack.

“Move, and I’ll be on you like a demon,” Ivy said. “Do, please.”

Jack and Jill looked at each other. Together they shook their heads. I kept one eye on them as I unloaded Ivy’s bag next to my broken sunglasses, setting the two splat guns and five knives on the counter, looking right at home among my magnetic chalk and scrying mirror. The knives had an elaborate, intricately raised design on the handles to help with the grip. I didn’t like that one of the guns looked like mine. I wondered what was in them. That first shot had been aimed at Trent, making me wonder about his story of Quen not letting him leave Cincinnati without me. He could’ve gotten himself on someone’s hit list, but these guys weren’t good enough to be taken seriously. And why would elves want me dead? No, I was betting they were here for Trent.

“Did they tell you who sent them?” Trent prompted, and I tightened my robe again.

“Not yet.” Turning to them, I smiled. “Who wants to go first?”

No one said anything. Big surprise. I flicked a glance at Trent. It was a no-win situation. If I was tough, he’d think I was a thug. If I was too nice, I’d be a pushover. Why I even cared what he thought was beyond me.

Jenks dropped down to the man. “Who sent you?” he barked, sword angled at the man’s eye.

Jack remained silent, and Jenks’s wings began slipping an eerie black dust. In a whisper of sound, Jenks darted close and then away. The intruding elf yelped, his hand smacking his head where Jenks had been. I frowned when I saw the wad of hair in Jenks’s grip. I didn’t like this. Jenks was usually easygoing, more inclined to plant seeds in the ground than people, but his land had been violated, and that brought out the worst in him.

“Ease up, Jenks,” Ivy said as she came forward to touch Jill’s face. “You need more finesse with the big ones.” She made a little trill of sound as the woman drew back in fear, and I sighed as Ivy started to vamp out.

Think, Rachel, I mused silently. Don’t just react, think. “Guys,” I said, conscious of Trent watching. “We need to find out what’s going on without leaving any traces.”

“I won’t leave a mark,” Ivy whispered, and Jill paled. “Not where you can find one.”

“They might be a test from the coven,” I said, and Ivy’s finger, tracing the woman’s jawline, curled under and she straightened in disappointment.

“We can’t simply let them go,” Ivy said. “Even if it wasn’t much of an attack.”

I winced. “Maybe we should call the I.S.?”

Jenks snorted, and from the overhead rack came a peal of high-pitched laughter. Yeah, bad idea.

“Mind if I hurry this along? I have an idea.”

It had been Trent, and, as one, we all turned to look at him.

“You have an idea?” Jenks said sarcastically, hovering before him in his best Peter Pan pose, his hands on his hips and his red bandanna tucked into his waistband. “The day you have a good idea will be the day I eat fairy toe jam.”

“He said it was an idea. He never said it was a good one,” I scoffed. But my lips parted at the sudden prickling of magic. Like a blanket rubbing the wrong way, wild, elven magic scraped across my aura, both an irritant and an enticement, pulling at my pores as if trying to draw my soul from my body.

“Hey!” I shouted, knowing it was Trent. Elves were the only species that dared to use wild magic. Even demons shunned the art. It had a horrible unpredictability along with the horrible power. It couldn’t be the two elves on the floor. They had zip strips on. “Trent, no!” I did not have a clue as to what he was doing, and with a satisfied glint in his eyes, he clapped his hands.

“Volo te hoc facere!” he exclaimed, the sound pinging through me, making me both cower and jump as the force I felt him drawing from the line abruptly fell to nothing.

I will you to do this? I thought, clutching my robe around me. An enthrallment spell?

But I think it was, and I stood at the table and stared at Trent, aghast. The rims of his ears were red, and his jaw was clenched in determination. “That was a black spell,” I whispered, stepping forward and out of Ivy’s reach. “That was a black spell!” I yelled, and he retreated to the table, his eyes falling from Jack and Jill. They were motionless, almost slack-jawed, eyes unfocused and hands limp, unable to do anything apart from the most basic things to survive unless told. “You enthralled them, didn’t you!” I exclaimed, and he bowed his head. When it came back up, his eyes met mine with a fervent gleam, unrepentant.

“What did he do to them?” Ivy said, sidling up next to me. Jenks wasn’t happy either, buzzing over them as they blinked vacantly.