Watching myself fry the imp on a holoscreen didn't make the experience any less weird. Nor was it less creepy sitting in Damon's kitchen. I hadn’t known his kitchen had a holoscreen, but it shouldn't have surprised me that he had technology at his fingertips no matter where he was in his house. Of course, most of the meals I'd eaten here, we hadn't really been focused on business. Sure, we were dealing with magical mayhem like we were again, but we'd also been in the kind of haze of first-lust, great-sex, new-couple that made the world go away a lot of the time. Maybe that was how I'd made it through dealing with the demon.
But this time I would be doing it cold turkey. I made myself watch the footage as Mitch demanded to see it from several angles. When he finally indicated he'd had enough with a wave of his hand, Damon left the last image—the flickering flames on the grass—frozen in place.
"So what happens now?" Mitch asked, directing the question at Cassandra rather than Damon. He'd removed his sunglasses, revealing bright blue eyes that didn't miss a thing.
"We'll check the garden to make sure that won't happen again. Then we'll need to search the Riley campus as well."
Mitch pointed at the screen. "You want to explain to me exactly what that was?"
"A summoning spell," Cassandra said. "Most likely set to be triggered by Damon."
"Set by who?"
"You're his security, you tell me," she replied. Clearly she wasn't going to let him imply that any of this was her fault. She and Mitch stared each other down, the atmosphere in the room, tense to begin with, turning even cooler.
"Anybody could have come onto the property during the power outage. A trigger spell doesn’t necessarily take a long time to set up," Lizzie said to Damon.
"We checked after the outage," Ajax said. "We didn't find anything."
"You wouldn't have known what you were looking at," Cassandra said. "Unless you’ve added someone with magic to your team?"
I shot her a glance. She knew they didn't. Was she trying to annoy Mitch?
Mitch's mouth flattened. "No."
"Well, then, I guess you did the best you could." Her tone was sweet, but her eyes were steely. "So now you need to let the experts handle this particular problem."
Mitch opened his mouth, but Damon said, "Mitch, can I talk to you in the other room a minute?" He pushed back his chair and walked out of the kitchen.
After one last glare at Cassandra, Mitch followed, leaving Lizzie, Cassandra, Ajax, and me sitting in awkward silence around the table.
"So you're in security now?" I said eventually to Ajax.
He nodded ,and for a moment I thought that was all the response I was getting. Then he shifted in his seat and seemed to focus.
"I switched departments nearly six months ago," he said.
Not exactly the warmest of responses, but it was better than nothing.
I smiled tentatively at him. "It must be quite a change."
He shrugged. "I started working with the security teams when we were following up on all the beta testers after—" He hesitated, "—you know."
I nodded. I did know. And I didn't think he wanted to talk about the demon any more than I did. And it made sense that Mitch had chosen Ajax to bring with him when dealing with a magical issue if he was one of the few people in the know about what had really happened.
"I found I enjoyed it. The testing work is fun for a while, but I guess this felt more...real, in a way."
"Damon said the testers were all okay now," I said. "That's good to hear."
"There's still a couple we're helping with some follow-up care, but yes, everyone is doing well."
I wanted to ask how he was doing but got the feeling that might be pushing things too far. For now I would be happy that he and I could have a conversation, at least. That would have made Nat happy.
Lizzie leaned forward as though she wanted to ask a question, but the kitchen door opened, and Damon and Mitch rejoined us at the table. Mitch still didn't look happy, but Damon looked slightly more relaxed. I hoped that meant he'd gotten his way in whatever their discussion had been.
"Well?" Cassandra asked.
"Mitch and Ajax will be going back to Righteous," Damon said. "You three can finish your sweep of the garden, and we’ll all meet tomorrow to work out the plan for covering the campus." He looked at Cassandra. "I assume if there are more of those things, then they're most likely aimed at me? Not likely to be triggered by someone random?"
Cassandra nodded. "Given that nothing has happened before today, that seems a fairly safe assumption. We can't be certain, of course, until we've done some more investigations, but if you haven't had any imps trying to take a piece out of your staff until now, one more night isn't going to hurt."
Damon turned to Mitch. "See? She agrees with me."
"Plenty of people agree with you," Mitch retorted. "Doesn't mean they're right all the time."
I hid a smile. If he wasn't so anti-me, I'd probably like Mitch.
"I take people's safety just as seriously as you do, Mr. Angelico," Cassandra said. "You look after a company. Granted, it's a very large company, and I'm sure you're good at your job. But I'm responsible for a whole damned country. I'm good at mine, too. If I thought your people were at any real risk, I'd be telling you to shut the place down for a few days. But given what Riley Arts has had to deal with so far this year, I didn't think you'd appreciate me recommending you do that when I don't think it's justified." She nodded at Damon. "We'll keep an eye on your boss here. He'll be as safe as I can keep him. You have my word on that."
A muscle twitched in Mitch's jaw, but he nodded. "All right."
"I could stay," Ajax offered, voice eager. "Help out here."
Mitch shook his head. "You and I have some planning to do. Damon, you know how to reach us if you need to."
"I haven't forgotten how to use the panic mode, no," Damon said. "Everything is fine."
That was a big fat lie. Everything wasn't fine, and I could tell Mitch thought so, too. But apparently he'd decided there was no point to arguing, so he just jerked his chin at Ajax, muttered, "I'll see you all tomorrow," in the direction of the rest of us, and stalked out before any of us could reply.
Ajax managed a hasty “Bye" before he jogged after his boss.
"Panic mode?" I asked Damon after Ajax left.
He nodded. "Added feature of my latest chip. If I make a certain gesture, it transmits an alarm signal and my location."
"You're GPS tagged like a fancy car," I said, not sure if it was funny or vaguely creepy.
"Not all the time," he said. "Only if I engage it."
"What happens if something happens to you and you're out of range of anything to transmit to?" Lizzie asked.
"Well, then, I'm out of luck," Damon said easily.
"What did you do before the chip?" Lizzie asked, sounding fascinated.
"Panic code on my datapad," he said, shrugging. "And I have a small panic button sewn somewhere into most of my clothes." His mouth quirked. "The less glamorous side of making lots of money. No one has ever actually tried anything physical up until now, but we have enough threats and weirdness on the regular that it's better to be safe than sorry." He brushed his hands together as though the subject was one he wasn't entirely comfortable with. "Speaking of better safe than sorry, let's get this garden done. Then you can show me this library of yours."
Watching Damon's face as he stood in the library and Cassandra explained the card catalog to him was the most entertainment I'd had all day. After a few fruitless hours going over his property with the magical equivalent of a fine-tooth comb, watching his brain almost short out trying to process that, yes, there really were a lot of very old and valuable books here, and no, no one had digitized them or even produced a digital catalog was amusing. Given I'd spent the entire time at his house wondering if another imp was going to appear out of nowhere every time I touched something, I'd take my entertainment when I could.
To Damon's credit, he didn't immediately ask any of the questions I knew he must have been burning to ask. Instead he just shoved his hands in his pockets and said, "Okay, where do we start?"
Cassandra looked almost approving. "You and Maggie got the best look at that imp. We have records of imp sightings. You two can look through those, see if you can find one that matches."
"How many kinds are there?" Damon asked.
"At last count there were somewhere around ten thousand."
His brows flew up. Mine, too. "So many?"
"There are probably more," Lizzie said. "Or maybe there's only one kind and they look different depending on how they're brought through."
"Shapeshifters?" Damon said. His mouth twisted as though he wasn't pleased by the idea.
"Perhaps. Of a sort," Cassandra said.
Did that mean there were other kinds of shapeshifters? I wasn't game to ask. One day I needed to know exactly what was real and not real in the stories that humans told about magic and the supernatural, but for now demons were enough to deal with. I wasn't sure I wouldn't just have a total meltdown if I found out werewolves, vampires, and the like really existed.
"So if we can find this thing in your books, what does that tell you?" Damon asked.
"Maybe how it was summoned. Something about its habits. It depends on how often we've come across one like it before and how good the notes are."
"And how often do you come across them?"
"Well, imps aren't exactly common, but they're not rare either."
Damon looked like he had more questions, but Cassandra turned to Lizzie and rattled off a bunch of letters and numbers. Lizzie nodded and headed into the stacks. Perhaps the Cestis had their own version of the Dewey Decimal system.
I took a seat at the table, glad to be off my feet. Cassandra had made me drink tea at Damon's, and they'd found me crackers to nibble on, but that had been all I could stomach after the adrenaline rush of the attack. I’d rinsed the worst of the sweat and grime off in his bathroom before we left for Cassandra's house.
That had been hours ago, and now I felt like I'd been hit by a whole convoy of trucks. And in need of caffeine. But there was still work to be done. I just had to suck it up and keep going.
Damon took the chair next to mine, removing his jacket and hanging it over the chair. He'd swapped his tee for a dark blue Henley. He rolled his shoulders and tilted his head to stretch his neck in a way that made me think he was just as tired as me.
"Sorry about all of this," I said.
He stopped stretching, face puzzled. "It's not your fault. In fact, if it weren't for you, that thing in my garden could have killed me today. You have nothing to apologize for."
"It feels like I do. They tried to get to you through me. Or me through you. Either way, it still feels like if we hadn't crossed paths, this wouldn't have happened."
"Maybe. But we can't change the past. And dwelling on 'if onlys' has always felt like a waste of time to me. I mean, how far back do you go? If only I'd never stayed here after the quake? If only your mom hadn't died and you'd never moved here? If only she had been the kind of person who didn't sell her daughter's powers to a demon?"
I'd spent quite a bit of time “if only-ing” that one myself since I'd found out that was what she'd done. And some more regretting what happened between Damon and me. Maybe I needed to learn from him and lock all that away somewhere.
Though he was the last person I wanted to ask to teach me how.
Fortunately Lizzie arrived to dump an armful of books between us before our conversation could continue. "Demonkind mugshots, volumes 1 to 5," she said cheerfully. "That should keep you busy for a while."
She was right about that. The books were thick. Cassandra had said there were at least ten thousand different kinds of imps. So I could only assume there were more volumes to come.
"Mugshots?" Damon said hopefully. "Photographs?"
Lizzie shook her head. "Nope, drawings for the most part. I was paraphrasing."
"Will you be helping?" I asked, hoping she'd correctly translate this as "I'd rather not sit here doing this with Damon." Which was a long shot given her view on our relationship.
"Cassandra and I are going to be neck-deep in summoning and trigger spells. See if we can work out how the spell in the garden shed might have worked."
"Cassandra said that would be easier if we knew what kind of imp it was," I said. "If you help, we might find that out faster."
"Maybe, but no harm working the problem from both directions." She pointed at the books. "Enjoy. Yell if you find your creepy pale friend." She headed back to join Cassandra.
I narrowed my eyes at her retreating back as I reached for the nearest book. Volume 1, according to the neatly lettered spine. Prosaic brown leather, faintly worn, and the edges of the pages had yellowed slightly. Obviously old. I didn't want to damage it. Lizzie hadn't told us to wear gloves or anything though, so maybe it wasn't too fragile.
Using my fingertips, I cautiously flipped it open, supporting the front cover as I lowered it down to the table. The title page had a border of swirls and flourishes in black ink that was turning red-brown with age. The title read simply Demonkind I. No further explanations offered. I guess whoever wrote it assumed that if you were allowed to read the book, you probably didn't need them.
I turned the page gently. No table of contents or index. Just a half-page drawing of an imp. Whoever drew it had been skilled. Even sketched in careful strokes and shadowed with tiny lines, the creature was creepy. Tall with bony features beneath a dark skin—the illustration was black-and-white, so I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be black or dark gray or some other shade. Arms that bent at too many angles ended in hands more like clawed spikes. Beside it were a few lines of neat text, but the words were in what I thought was Latin. Somehow the need to learn Latin had never come up in my education.
But then again, if I could read the descriptions and stopped to do just that for each picture these books contained, it would only slow down the search. What mattered was that this creature did not look much like the one I'd killed in Damon's garden. I flipped the page, then another, then another.
Beside me, I was dimly aware that Damon had started a search of his own. Good. Less talking was good.
I flipped another page.
By the time I reached the end of the book, my eyes were already sore. And my brain was full of images that I wasn't happy about. Imps and whatever else these things were came in a dizzying variation of bodies that ranged from gross to truly frightening.
Nothing quite as primordially terrifying as the demon was, but that had been more than just its appearance. Something about its presence had bypassed all sensible thought to hit the part of the human nervous system that still remembered being a small helpless thing that other things with teeth and claws would kill without blinking.
These were just pictures. They couldn't hurt me. They might make my nightmares less pleasant, of course, but I'd lived with nightmares so long that they were normal in a weird way.
Damon closed the book he'd been looking through and sat back in his chair.
"My kingdom for a tagging system," he muttered. "There has got to be an easier way."
He was right. There should be. Even without stopping to read anything, it had taken us over thirty minutes to get through the first volumes.
"Well, you could build a time travel machine and go back and fund the Cestis better so they had microfiche, at least. Of course, you'd have to figure out how to convince them that digitizing all this was safe, as well." I didn't doubt that if he set his mind to it, he could talk Cassandra round. After all, his kingdom could buy a lot of tagging systems. And his charm could probably pay for even more. But that didn't help us here and now.
"If I could build a time travel machine, we wouldn't be sitting here in the first place," Damon said. But then he sighed and reached for the next book.
Asking exactly what he would do with a time travel machine seemed like a bad idea, so I did the same.
The second volume was just as gross as the first. But still not helpful. There were a couple of lighter imps, so I noted the page numbers. Before I could worry about whether Damon and I might have to go through the fifth volume together, Lizzie reemerged with another armful of books.
"Any luck?" she asked.
"Not really," I replied. Damon shook his head, too. "How about you?"
"Cassandra has a few ideas. But I'm mostly of book-fetching duty at this point, so I can't tell you exactly what they are. Happy reading." She turned and headed away again.
The book on top of the pile was volume six. There didn't seem any particular need to go in order, so I took it. The text of the first page actually looked printed rather than inked onto the page. I got about halfway through before a pale imp caught my eye.
"Does this look about right?" I said to Damon, pushing the book in his direction.
He pulled out his datapad. "I have the footage. We can check."
Of course he had the footage. I wouldn't have been surprised if he was able to project a whole 3D image of the thing from his garden and map it somehow against the picture to do a full image match.
But we didn't need anything that sophisticated. Whoever had drawn the creature in the book had been accurate. It wasn't exactly identical once we lined the screenshot against the drawing, but if they'd been together in a freaky demon monster lineup, I would have labeled them as the same species or whatever the right term was.
"We have a winner," I said and picked up the book. Lizzie and Cassandra were sitting at one of the desks in the stacks, heads bent over another book. They looked up as I approached.
"Find something?" Lizzie asked.
I put the book down on the table and tapped the page. "This one."
Cassandra pulled the book closer, studying the picture.
"What does it say?" I asked.
"Still an imp," Lizzie said absently. "Not common."
"Is ‘still an imp’ good or bad?"
Cassandra looked up from the picture. "Well, it means it was sent. Or someone set it up to be summoned. Which is consistent with what the traces from the spell in the shed tell us. It says here..." She leaned closer and squinted. "Contagious. I think. It's not quite clear."
"Contagious?" Lizzie said. "That's weird."
"Is anything about these things not weird?" Damon muttered.
Lizzie pointed at the picture. "Well, imps mostly just try to eat your face off if they're attacking you. At least the ones we usually see. Not sure there's much point in them infecting you with something when they can kill you pretty easily. I mean, look at the claws and teeth on it."
I didn't look. I didn't need the reminder.
“Are they saying this one does more than that?”
Cassandra hitched a shoulder. “Hard to say. There’s nothing else here. It could be contagious, or it could work with sickness somehow. Or it could be the language means something closer to venomous. Or poisonous. This note is from a few centuries ago.” She tapped a notation at the top of the page.
"Well, it didn't touch either of us, so I guess it doesn't matter," I said. "And we cleansed the ashes."
Cassandra nodded at that. "Yes. And we can do some more to reinforce that cleansing if we need to."
"Does it help you figure out who summoned it, knowing what kind it is?" I asked.
"There’s nothing here about that either, to say how common this kind is. Or what it takes to summon one.” She peered at the image. “The remnants I felt in the garden made me think human magic. Which is possible given it's an imp."
"Humans can summon imps?"
"Sometimes. And they can definitely set a trigger spell to help make a target for something else doing a summoning. This one is large though. And the contagion thing is unusual. If it's some sort of stronger imp, then it's more likely to be a lesserkind controlling it. Or a demon using a witch who is far gone into its control."
I didn't like the sound of that. "Why far gone?"
"The sort of power it would take to bring a stronger manifestation over would burn out most humans," Cassandra said. "It's not like a binding. It takes a lot more power. For a witch to funnel that much power from a demon, they would have to cede total control to it. At which point it's safe enough to say that they’re really no longer a person. More a person-shaped home for the demon to walk around in."
The thought of that made me want to gag. "Why would anyone do that?"
"I doubt many people set out to end up that way," Cassandra said. "People are foolish. They think they’ll be able to control what they give to the demon, to resist it. Most of them cannot. Which is why only fools dabble in such things to begin with." She looked at me. I met her gaze. Yes, my mother had been a fool who had bound her only daughter's powers to a demon. But I had no desire to follow her in her footsteps.
She'd paid dearly for her choices in the end. And I'd had the love and care of my grandparents to help me heal the worst of the scars from my childhood with her from the time I'd turned thirteen. True, the last of her legacy had only come to light when I'd accidentally broken the bond with the demon, and I hadn't yet truly dealt with that final betrayal.
Then again, perhaps she had cared for me a little. Whatever she'd done to bind me to the demon, she’d also kept it from influencing me in any other way other than siphoning my magic. I hadn't turned into the kind of mindless demon meat suit Cassandra was describing—and no, no thinking about what a close call it might have been or I'd risk losing my lunch right here in the library—and the Cestis had declared me free from demon taint twice now.
My mother had been powerful. Possibly as strong as Cassandra or Lizzie. Why she'd chosen the life of a grifter and to be the kind of witch who preyed on the hopeful or the hopeless, selling them love potions or luck spells and taking their money for years, was something I would never understand. Maybe it was the only way she could play out whatever her plan for me had been or get whatever the demon paid for me. But she hadn't lived long enough to reap whatever reward she thought she was earning.
"So we're looking for a person?" Damon asked.
"I think a person most likely set the spell in your garden," Cassandra corrected. "But it's unlikely they're working on their own."
He pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, grimacing.
"Which brings us back to working out who wants to get to you," I said. "And Righteous."
Lizzie nodded agreement.
Damon shook his head. "Just when I thought things were getting back to normal."
I flinched. Just when he'd fought to bring his company back from the disaster my demon caused the first time. He could tell me he didn't blame me all he wanted, but it was hard to see how he could feel anything else.
Cassandra looked sympathetic. "We will start there. You have a good team working for you. If Mr. Angelico will cooperate, then hopefully we can narrow down a list of people to talk to. In the meantime, we’re also talking to our networks. See if anyone has noticed any unusual activity."
How unusual would something have to be to stand out from whatever the Cestis had already been dealing with?
As if she could sense what I was thinking, Lizzie rubbed her arm, flexing her fingers.
Cassandra pursed her lips. "But I think all of this can wait until the morning. Lizzie and Maggie need to rest. I need to speak to the other members of the Cestis. Damon, I would recommend you go to a hotel for the night. I would prefer to check your home one more time before you stay there alone. Choose one you haven't stayed in before."
"We have suites at the Riley campus," he said. "I don't usually stay there. They're more secure than a hotel would be."
"Perhaps. But it seems likely that someone who is targeting you will be watching the place you work," Cassandra said.
Damon nodded. "I understand that. And I'll think about it."
Cassandra nodded. "It is, of course, your decision. Just be careful. Lizzie will let you out. We can reconvene at your office in the morning."