Page 1 of Drawn to the Demon Duke (Sombra Demons)

SHE’S A LITTLE RUNAWAY

SUSANNA

T wining my finger around the coils of the phone cord, absently watching through my window, I’m barely paying attention to my older sister as she’s telling me about the Bon Jovi and Skid Row concert she went to last weekend with her husband, Dan, and some of their friends over at the Hartford Civic Center.

Mindy is ten years older than me. Thirty-eight to my twenty-eight, she’s been like my second mom for as long as I can remember.

Even after she had her own daughter a little over eight years ago, Mindy still can’t help but mother me.

Considering she and Amy are the only family I have left, I usually take it with a grain of salt.

But not today.

“They even sang ‘Runaway’,” Mindy adds, and that little jab has my attention snapping from the window, frowning as I grip the phone handle with my other hand.

“C’mon, Min. I didn’t run away,” I begin, the same old refrain to a tired song. “The house in Madison was going for a good price. I couldn’t live with you and Dan forever.”

Sometimes I think Mindy would’ve preferred that I did. She was happy to take me in after Mom died during my senior year of high school, and with Dad having pulled a runaway stunt of his own when I was fourteen, my sister was all I had.

My sister—and my book.

The book that’s been part of my life for so long that, to me, it’s part of my family… and, to Mindy, the reason she wanted to keep me under her nose for as long as she could…

But while I did stay with my sister’s family for a couple of years, earning my keep by helping with the baby after Mindy had Amy, I knew I couldn’t stay.

The small inheritance I got from Mom’s passing was enough for a down payment, and the realtor I worked with suggested this one in Madison.

Sure, it was farther from Mindy than she liked, but I got a solid job at the call center, I attend aerobics classes every Tuesday and Thursday to keep fit, and if I’m still single as I’m creeping up on thirty, it doesn’t bother me half as much as it does my older sister.

“I know,” she concedes, and if she gives in too easily about my having moved out four years ago, it’s only because she has bigger fish to fry. “Jeff missed you. He thought you’d be at the concert. Seemed real disappointed that Dan brought his cousin instead.”

I roll my eyes. “I was busy.”

“I know. That’s what you told me when I asked if you’d babysit Amy.”

Huffing, I turn slightly, tugging on the coils. “I promised Lissy that I’d have dinner after our shift was done.”

Even through the phone, I can hear the way Mindy arches her eyebrow in disbelief. “And that’s all you did? You didn’t spend last Friday with your nose in a book, did you?”

A book , she says. What Mindy really means is that book.

Of course she does.

I sigh, scratching my ankle with the heel of my sneaker, scrunching my neon pink leg warmer.

After I left the call center earlier this afternoon, I popped some bagel bites into the toaster oven, then got ready for tonight’s Tuesday aerobics class.

My hair is in its usual side pony, my leg warmers slouched down over my leggings, with the slightly oversized t-shirt a matching shade of pink covering up my navy sports bra.

I was just getting ready to head out when the phone rang, and now I’ve been talking to Mindy for the last fifteen minutes.

And, no matter how any conversation begins, it always ends up with Mindy double-checking that I’ve stopped obsessing over the leather-bound antique of a book I bought at a garage sale when I was sixteen.

So I tell her what she wants to hear because, otherwise, I’ll only worry her—and that’s the last thing I’d ever want to do if I could avoid it.

“Not Friday. I was getting my Uncle Jesse fix instead.”

Mindy chuckles, and I swallow a sound of relief.

So she thinks I watch Full House on Fridays because I have a crush on John Stamos.

It might not be a real man, but I know it makes her feel better that I can be attracted to any guy.

As far back as I can remember, she’s had Dan.

Me? Apart from a few stolen kisses when I was still in school, I’m single and not really ready to mingle.

I don’t know why, and I certainly can’t explain it to Mindy. I like guys, and I’ve found plenty of them attractive over the years—even if I can’t say the same about Dan’s buddy, Jeff—but… crud. It’s just never been right.

Like they’ve never been ‘the one’.

That, at least, is one thing that Mindy can’t blame on the book. Instead, she points out that if I stopped crushing on fictional characters—like Uncle Jesse or Jareth the Goblin King or Sam from Cheers —maybe I could find my own happily-ever-after with a real-life man.

Really? How boring would that be?

I don’t want boring. I don’t want ordinary.

I want something more , and if it’s because I’ve spent most of my formative years convinced that I can find it in a centuries-old spellbook, well… what Mindy doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Besides, she has her own family to take care of. Dan and Amy should be her focus. Me? I’m doing okay.

And that’s when I catch sight of the mailman walking jauntily toward my front door, and I’m suddenly doing better .

“Mindy? I gotta go.”

“Su—”

“Mailman’s at the door.” I wait for the knock , grinning when I hear it. “I should answer it.”

“Don’t you want to say ‘hi’ to Amy?”

I love my niece. I really do. She’s a precocious, sweet eight-year-old who is the spitting image of us Benoit women.

Even though Mindy is Mindy Dillon now after marrying Dan, the Benoit genes rang true in her little girl.

Amy has our same dark eyes and dark brown hair, and an expression that says she’s always a little dreamy.

The hardest part of moving out was not being able to see her every day, but I needed to do it.

I needed to work toward my future.

“Tell her I love her, would you, Min? And I’ll call back after aerobics. ‘Kay? Love you!”

Unraveling myself from the twist of the phone cord, I place the handle on the receiver on the wall before Mindy can respond. Then, trying to fight against my giddy hope in case I’m wrong, I hurry for the door.

For weeks now, I’ve gotten an irrational thrill every single time my mail was delivered.

I’m so, so close… all I needed was a little reassurance that I’m on the right track, but it’s been ages since I wrote my letter, requesting a response.

I’m too stubborn to believe that he won’t write back.

After all, over the years, I’ve written countless letters—to priests and scholars, self-proclaimed witches and some Satanists—and nearly all of them answered me and my questions.

The way I see it, if the books in the library can’t help me, there has to be someone who can. Once I had my own place, I signed up for every magazine on the occult that I could. Between them and the phone book, there were so many experts I could write to, and now that I’m so friggin’ close…

I yank the door open to find that Fenton is still waiting on the porch, a letter in hand.

“For you, Ms. Susanna. Found it stuck at the bottom of my bag. Thought I should deliver it in case it’s important. Like the gas bill, you know?”

Oh, please don’t be my gas bill… “Thank you, Fenton. I really appreciate it.”

I hold out my hand.

He hesitates, and if his eyes travel the length of my tight leggings, I pretend not to notice.

Fenton clears his throat. “Anyway, I was thinking… if you’re not doing anything tonight, maybe I could take you out. There’s this great bowling alley that opened up on the other end of my route?—”

“Maybe some other time,” I tell him, hoping I’m not being too brusque. I give my ankle a shake, only realizing that my attempt to draw attention to my leg warmer only made it so that he could openly ogle my lower leg. “Got aerobics tonight.”

He nods. “Gotta jazzercise. I understand.”

Right. “So… my letter?”

Fenton blinks, then starts, as though remembering the reason he used to come back to my house after he finished his route while I was at work. “Oh, yes. Of course.” He holds it out. “Here you go.”

I all but snatch it from his grip. “Thanks, Fenton. See you around!”

“Ms. Su?—”

Just like I did with Mindy, I end the conversation before he can continue. In this case, I wave again, flash him a smile, then close the door in his face.

I forget all about Fenton once I flip the letter and see the name scrawled in script on the upper left corner. Mr. Ed Woodrow.

Yes !

Ed Woodrow is the leading demonologist and paranormal expert on the East Coast. He, along with his wife and partner, Lucy, are renowned for visiting haunted houses, but that’s not all.

With the Satanic Panic on late night news and the front page of all the papers, Mr. Woodrow’s gone on lecturing tours, discussing that the barbaric Satanic rituals invented by the press aren’t real—but that demons and ghosts and poltergeists are.

Up until two years ago, I would’ve claimed that none of it was.

But after more than a decade of codebreaking and working toward translating an alien language that doesn’t exist in any of the library books I’ve checked out—and that number is in the hundreds —I finally figured it out.

I found the key to understanding the book when I realized that while some of the words were derived from romance languages, all the way back to Latin, the rest were basically gibberish.

They made no sense, and if they made no sense, I didn’t need to know what they said.

Between the Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese dictionaries I bought at B. Dalton’s, I was able to find a matching translation for approximately eighty percent of the words in my book.

The Grimoire du Sombra.

A spellbook.

I knew it. From the moment my fingers brushed against the pitted leather with the pentacle embossed on the cover, combing through a pile of books on the table outside my former neighbor’s house, I knew there was something different about it.

Something unique. The name on the title page was my first clue that it was something special.

Then there was the way it was printed. It was unlike any typeset I’d ever seen, on yellowed pages that were so old, it was basically ancient.

Still, I offered Mrs. Green ten bucks for it—all of my babysitting money from when I watched her kids the Saturday night before—and she let me have it.

Little Bobby eventually told me that his mom mentioned not having any idea where the book came from in the first place, but I still thought it was an amazing deal, even if I couldn’t read it.

For the next twelve years, I’ve made it my mission to translate it. Once I knew that I just had to go word by word, I made some progress. I kept a second notebook for my translations, not sure if I was wasting my time, though it felt… right to go through the book, page by page.

Until the beginning of summer when I landed on one of the middle pages, and everything changed.