Hollywood Demon (The Collegium Book 6) (11 page)

“So you believe us?” Mark had pushed back from the table while Clancy told her story. Now, he leaned forward. “Do you think Faust was lying?”

“I believe you, conditionally. I need to hear what my colleague finds at the site of the latest manifestation, Rivera Dryden’s studio. I believe something happened. Faust, or whatever its name is, was probably telling you just enough truth to harvest your fear.”

“I was terrified,” Clancy admitted.

Gilda nodded. “You did good.”

“I couldn’t let Faust drag Mark to Hell.” Clancy glanced at her brother. “I know I promised not to use my magic in California.”

“Why would you promise that?” The sharp question came not from Mark or even Gilda, but from Neville.

Clancy blinked. “Because it’s unstable. I didn’t want to cause trouble for Jeremy…like now.”

“A geomage has a responsibility to use his or her talent,” Neville said sternly.

Jeremy’s cheekbones had reddened, but his eyes were angry. He wasn’t embarrassed. “I didn’t ask Clancy to renounce her magic.”

Neville looked from brother to sister, then leaned back in his chair. “We’ll discuss this later.”

“You certainly shouldn’t give up your magic,” Gilda said. “This was a demon that was playing with a mid-level demonologist, yet it fled from the threat of your geomagic. That’s raw power you summoned.”

“Ordered, not summoned,” Neville corrected.

Gilda rolled her eyes.

“Sorry.” Neville apologized for his pedantic correction with a wave of his hand. “I still say that the forces you stirred up made your actions reckless. We detected the surge in New York. But I can’t deny that you exercised major talent. More than you’ve channeled at the Collegium.”

“Here, I’m home,” Clancy said simply.

Jeremy shifted minutely in his chair. The slight movement conveyed substantial anger.

Beside him, Neville was suddenly silent and thoughtful.

“What do we do about Faust?” Mark brought the discussion back on track.

“You? Nothing,” Gilda said.

Mark absorbed the dismissive, commanding tone without apparent offence. His voice became, if anything, more courteous. “What will you do?”

Gilda put both hands on the table and stood. “I shall confer with my colleague who is studying Rivera’s studio. Then we’ll identify Faust’s true identity, and banish it.”

Mark stood as she did, polite to the end. But his intensity broke through his courtesy. “The demon has been planning its strategy, testing and refining it for seven years—or more. Even if you banish Faust, the method of entry he has invented will remain a danger. Digital images and code. I’ve been working on a counterspell.”

The tiny shrug of Gilda’s shoulders silenced him. It was a shrug of disdain.

His mouth became a stern line of frustration. “I don’t need magic to construct a spell. I’ve been working on this for three years. At least consider—”

“Email it to me.”

She won’t look at it
, Clancy thought.

“I’ll see you out.” Mark ground out the words. With his minor magic, existing on the fringes of the magical world, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d run headlong into the bland, unthinking arrogance of those with power.

Privilege. Those who had it, took it for granted. Worse, they tended to underestimate just how much Fate had granted them.

Mark frowned at Jeremy and Neville as they stayed in their seats, but he didn’t force the issue. He walked Gilda out.

Which left Clancy alone with her former boss and her brother.

Neville swallowed some coffee, then cradled the mug in two hands. “That was some disturbance you kicked up,” he said to her. “I wondered what trouble Jeremy had encountered when it was reported to me. Then I heard rumors of a demon in California.”

The Collegium grapevine! The puzzle was that a demon had been able to hide in the Collegium as long as it had. The way rumors and curiosity circled in Collegium headquarters made secrets hard to keep.

“I took the portal out here and phoned Jeremy to collect me, and to explain the disturbance. He told me that was you.” Neville stared at her for a long count of ten seconds, before he set his mug on the table. “What you did was risky, but since Jeremy calmed the geo-forces you stirred up, I’ll say no more about it.”

Clancy ignored Neville’s uncharacteristic magnanimity, her brain stuck on his earlier words.
Jeremy calmed the geo-forces? Jeremy?
She’d been the one in the chamber. She’d felt Jeremy arrive and leave. She hadn’t felt him as much as touch the geo-forces. They had flowed to her command.

Her brother met her indignant gaze and tipped his head in a silent challenge, daring her to say something.

“Neville,” she began.

“It’s time you left,” Mark said from the doorway. When he walked forward, his boots thudded on the hardwood floors. He was angry.

“No problem.” Jeremy bounded up from his chair. “We’ll talk later,” he said to Clancy.

“You bet,” she said tightly.

Unexpectedly, Neville extended his hand.

Shocked, she shook hands with the chief geomage, the man who’d demoted and chastised her. He held her hand an instant longer than necessary, looking into her eyes. She looked back into pale blue eyes, the skin creased and wrinkling at the corners, eyelids drooping, but extremely alert.

Neville searched for something. Perhaps he found it. He nodded and released her hand. “We’ll all talk, later. But for now, I’m returning to the Collegium. Jeremy?”

Her brother strode out with his boss and mentor.

Mark waited for the sound of the front door closing, then swore. Loudly. “Sorry,” he threw vaguely in her direction, and walked out.

She tipped her head back and looked at the ceiling. There was a cobweb in the corner that she’d need to sweep down since she was being paid to clean.

She wrenched her hair out of its prim knot, shed her jacket, kicked off her uncomfortable high heels, and ran after Mark.

The books of magic were stacked on Mark’s desk where Clancy had left them that morning. So much had happened since then. To her, the demon seemed the least of it. She had quieted the geo-forces she’d stirred up, and Jeremy had let the chief geomage think that power was his! She was all messed up and unsure of herself. Did it matter that Jeremy had lied if she was going to keep to her renunciation of her geomagic? But was she really going to give up entering the chamber? Just the thought of never again entering its peace, to stand in the heart of those powerful geo-energies, made her mourn. If she hadn’t entered the chamber, hadn’t had the reminder of what it gave her, renouncing her magic would have been easier.

Would have been wrong?

Mark picked up three large books at once, climbed two steps on the library ladder, and shoved the books onto the shelf she’d emptied earlier. He moved with furiously controlled energy.

Clancy passed him two more books, then another two. Anything she said about Gilda looking into the situation with Faust would only underline the insult he’d received. The Collegium might be taking the demon more seriously, but they weren’t according Mark any more respect. He and his limited magic were sidelined.

He re-shelved the last book and jumped down from the ladder. “My counterspell would work.”

Evidently he’d been having this argument with Gilda in his head.

“I believe you,” Clancy said. “The Collegium can be stuck in its own importance. Neville, for instance—”

Mark’s scowl deepened. “I saw you enter the chamber beneath the cottage. You, not Jeremy. He seemed scared of it.”

Scared?
She opened her mouth to question Mark’s observation, but the words never made it out. She was suddenly, overwhelmingly aware of how close he stood. Near enough that he’d reached out and clasped her shoulder in support. His hold was strong and gentle despite his anger.

“We’re both fools,” he said. “I keep chasing the Collegium’s help and respect. They’ll never count me as one of their own. Not with my minimal magic. No matter how much I study and learn, I have to do so alone.”

“I’m here,” she said quietly.

He clasped her other shoulder, drawing her in as his hold slid into a hug. “I don’t understand. Why would you want to surrender your magic? If that’s the price Jeremy has put on you staying in California, you should tell Doris. She wouldn’t let him get away with it.”

Clancy put her hands against his chest and pushed. That gained her a few inches, but didn’t break his hold. “It’s my fight, not something to go running to Grandma about.” Her words echoed.
My fight.
She stopped resisting Mark and leaned into his warmth. “I can’t fight my brother.”

He shifted his hold, hugging her comfortingly. “Sometimes we’re losing a fight that no one told us we were fighting.”

The confusing sentence made sense to her. Unpleasant sense. “Grandma said the same thing, not so gently. She said I’ve given Jeremy my power. Not in a transfer kind of way, but by not taking what is mine.” Mark smelled so good, a subtle scent of warm male and expensive cologne. She nestled into him, ignoring that his muscles were still tense with anger. The anger wasn’t directed at her, and she trusted he’d never use it abusively. He was too strong in himself to be that weak and vindictive.

“You should be everything you can be.” He tipped her chin up and looked into her eyes.

She fell into the intense blue of his eyes, and into the mesmerizing intimacy of being this close and open to another person. She trusted him, an emotion born of their shared childhood, her old crush, and her new knowledge of him as a man.

His fingertips left her chin, but only for his hand to slide around and cup the back of her head as his face came nearer and nearer.

She closed her eyes as his mouth caressed hers. Her lips parted to the soft, coaxing pressure of his; to their shared curiosity and growing pleasure. It was kiss of shivering delight and discovery, and she felt the moment when her shudder of response transmitted itself to him.

His mouth hardened with passion and he backed her up against the bookshelves, trapping her against a vertical support that aligned with her spine. She arched against him, shoulders pressing against a shelf, as their kiss went nuclear. Hot, so hot. She craved the flavor of him, and chased it, licking his lower lip. He growled and flicked his tongue into her mouth, stroking hers, growling again when she sucked him.

He tore his mouth from hers, but only to search out the pulse beating at the base of her throat. His teeth scraped lightly as he unbuttoned her white shirt.

So good. That felt so good.
She gripped his butt, forgetting everything but the urgent need to take more. She rubbed against him, hampered by her tight skirt and their differences in height.

He picked her up and set her on the second rung of the ladder. Her bare feet curled around the rung. It was like freefalling, leaning back against the slant of the ladder, crowded by Mark. It was exciting and dangerous. He pushed open her shirt, and pushed down the lace cups of her bra. She followed his gaze to where her pink nipples jutted from the white lace.

Holding her gaze, he nibbled on one. No teeth, just teasing lips. Her insecure perch made writhing unwise. She whimpered, a sound she’d never made before. Then gasped. “Mark!”

He established a sucking rhythm that somehow matched the pulse low in her belly.

“Please, oh please.” She was touching him anywhere she could, her hips thrusting in tiny movements to his rhythm, her fingers threading through his hair.

“Your mouth.” It was an order. One foot on the first rung of the ladder, one on the floor, lying over her, he took her mouth.

Tremors of pleasure like a mini-orgasm as their kiss went on and on, until the ladder gave a warning creak. It was too much excitement for the wooden structure. Mark lifted her away, instantly.

She swayed on her feet, her balance lost in every sense. He walked around his desk, dropped into his chair, and lowered the arms of its ergonomic design. She hitched up her skirt and straddled him. He bucked beneath her and groaned.

They both went still.

It had been heated foreplay, but it was only foreplay. Anything more, though, and they’d be having sex. He was hard and full, and she ached between her legs. Actual pain low in her pelvis because she wanted him so much.

But if they did this…

She’d never had casual sex. For her, it was always about loving and being loved. She knew herself well enough to know that casual sex with Mark would destroy her. Maybe not immediately. Right now, she was all raw instinct and just wanted him. But later…she’d avoid the estate and the cottage, lose the chamber, because coming here would become mixed up with wanting and needing and not having him. Mark wasn’t ready for a relationship.

That was the truth. He was still hung up on Phoebe. Maybe not loving his ex-fiancée, but scarred from her betrayal.

“We can’t.” Two words that made her throat hurt as she forced them out.

Blue eyes darkened with passion, their pupils wide with arousal, stared into hers. His hands moved restlessly at her hips. “Clancy?”

She didn’t know what he was asking. Wasn’t sure if he knew. “If we do this, everything changes. I don’t think I can handle that.”

His hands stilled. His roughened breathing slowed. They stared at one another. He traced the line of her spine from tailbone to her neck. She shivered and involuntarily petted his chest.

He closed his eyes for a long moment. When he opened them, his passion was shackled and locked down. Very gently he readjusted her bra, re-buttoned her shirt, and straightened its collar.

She absorbed the caring of those small touches, stored them up as memories as precious as the passion they’d shared, before sliding off him. She tugged down her skirt, and looked up to see him watching her.

“You’re right.” A growl edged his voice, deepening its timbre. “Our lives are too interwoven, past and present.”

“And future,” she added. She felt shaky and cold without the heat of him against her. She folded her arms, trying to hug in some warmth. “I guess I’ll see you—”

His phone rang. At some point he’d placed it on his desk. Now, they both saw the caller’s name. Gilda.

With a grimace of apology for her, Mark picked it up.

Gilda’s voice was loud over the phone. Clancy heard her clearly. “You were right. There was a demon here, a powerful one. You need to take precautions.”

“I’ve been doing so for seven years.”

“Take more.”

“That sounds ominous,” Clancy said as Mark stuffed the phone in his pocket.

He nodded absently. “I’ll send her the draft counterspell I’ve been working on, and my thinking behind it. Maybe someone will at least look at it.”

“I wouldn’t hold your breath.” Her cynicism came out of years of contact with the Collegium and her own current turmoil. When Mark hesitated at the first computer lined up along the far wall, she shook her head. “Ignore me. You have to send it. If this is a new way for demons to enter our world, the Collegium needs all the help it can get. It’s on them, then, if they accept or reject it.”

“Meantime.” He tapped keys busily. “The ward on the estate is strong. We’re safe here. When you go beyond it, heed Gilda’s warning and be alert.”

Clancy considered the risk of encountering Faust again. “How long do you think it will take them to banish Faust? Not to counter whatever his hell-born tourism plans are, but just to lock him, personally, in Hell?”

“It depends how well he’s hidden his name.” Mark’s fingers flew over the keyboard. He was talking and composing an email simultaneously. “A couple of days, maximum.”

She walked around restlessly. With him sitting on a low-backed chair, she wanted to cross to him, press against his back, kiss him. She paced away, bumped into the ladder, and blushed. “I’ll tell Grandma to stay here till we get the all-clear. Just in case Faust is feeling vindictive.”

“And you’ll stay yourself?” He spun around to check.

“I’ll stay.” Meeting his gaze, the craving to touch him became worse. “I need to exercise.”

A wry smile curved his mouth. His very kissable mouth. “Yeah.” The energy arcing between them had to find an outlet. They could…exercise…together.

Clancy left the study so fast that her walk was nearly a run. She was in full flight—from herself. In the kitchen, she shoved her feet into the abandoned high heels, snatched up her jacket and fled.