Page 10 of Demon's Bane

Porcelain clinks, and a new thread of magick wends its way between us. Inhaling the sweet, Goddess-touched taste of it, I raise my cup to my lips and drink deeply.

Springtime dances across my tongue.

Blooming and brilliant, like the light of the vernal sun itself has been steeped into the brew. It warms a path down my throat until I’m nearly certain I might glance down and see the soft glow of it emanating from the center of my chest.

I close my eyes for a moment to savor it, and when I open them again Joan is watching me carefully.

“Well,” I say, feeling the warmth of the tea and the magick of our deal nestle deep within my soul. “It would seem we have a bargain.”

3

Joan

There’s a demon in my apartment.

A glamoured demon who looks mostly human at the moment, but still a demon.

Glancing over at him as Esme starts a circuit of the place to cast her wards, I study him from the corner of my eye.

If I saw this glamoured demon on the street, I’m not sure I’d be able to pick him out as not being entirely human. The disguise Esme created is nearly perfect, seamless except for a slight waver around the edges, the smallest thread of uncanniness that makes the small hairs of my neck stand on end.

It’s not that he’s unpleasant to look at. Rhett’s glamoured face is perfectly pleasant. Handsome, even, though something about it is hard to remember when I look away. Like staring at a photograph that’s just out of focus, his dark brown hair and hazel eyes seem designed to be forgettable, though maybe it’s just another facet of the glamour’s magick. The rest of him, too, is average. Average height, average weight, nothing that would make most people look twice if they saw him in a crowd.

There’s just something…offabout him.

If I look too closely, I can almost convince myself I see a hint of crimson when he blinks, a subtle haze when he moves hinting at his true form beneath.

It also doesn’t help that I’m far too aware of what a demon actually looks like.

I’d been shocked when I saw the demon who came for Emilia in the first, failed Tithe of my lifetime, and just as in awe when Allie’s husband Eren came for her.

Wings and horns and tails. Huge, hulking frames and red eyes.

Demons aren’t exactlyforgettable.

Which is just one more reason I’m on edge, knowing exactly what kind of being is standing in my living room, what’s lurking beneath his glamour.

I don’t really know anything about demons, beyond what Allie’s told me about Eren. I don’t know how they think or act, what I can expect from my new other-worldly houseguest.

I also don’t know what the hell I was thinking to agree to this.

Some mixture of foolish desperation to hold on to my last tether to the life I was born into, a challenge I couldn’t back down from, the chance to be able to call the coven out on their bullshit and stick one to Esme Hawthorn if it turns out the answer Seren has for her isn’t the one she wants to hear.

And something else. Something I can’t even begin to explain. A crackle of magick and a bright flame of recklessness that had me agreeing to this whole convoluted mess.

Idiocy. All of it.

Because even as I raised my cup and accepted her bargain, even as Rhett did the same with those glamoured eyes of his holding mine, some part of me knew this was a mistake.

But I don’t know if there’s anything I can do to stop it now, not when I’ve got a demon in my living room and the HighPriestess of the Crescent Coven casting my entire apartment in wards.

Neither Rhett or I have said a single word by the time Esme returns.

We’re both standing still and straight, as far away as we can get from each other in the living space that’s never been big, but has also never felt nearly as small as it does now, simmering with witch and demon magick.

“Almost done,” Esme says briskly as she finishes in the kitchen and reappears in the living room. “Rhett, I just need to place a final binding on you.”

Strangely, he doesn’t spare Esme a single glance as he turns to me.