Hollywood Demon (The Collegium Book 6) (16 page)

Mark rode up in the elevator to the floor the demonology department occupied and exited to a very ordinary corridor, the kind that might be seen in any college or university. Flyers were pinned to a noticeboard, advertising various events and someone trying to re-home a hamster. A guy barely twenty hurried up wearing jeans and a concert t-shirt over a long-sleeved white t-shirt. His red hair was too long and looked like it needed a wash. Student, for sure.

“Mark Yarren? This way.” The kid hurried back the way he’d come, and Mark followed.

They stopped at a closed door, the guy knocked, and Gilda shouted, “Come in.”

The kid opened the door, Mark stepped past him, and the kid closed the door, staying outside. Once inside, Mark could see why. This was a demonologist’s workroom, and set up for high level magic. His own magic was minimal, but even he saw the powerful magics shimmering up from the pentagram and circle drawn on the floor.

He couldn’t help but remember how badly a similar summoning had gone for Rivera. “Good morning, Gilda.”

“Morning.” She introduced him to two other men in the room.

He shook hands without bothering to memorize their names or faces. Since no one offered to take his coat, he draped it over the back of a chair against the side wall.

“Actually, that’s the seat we’d like you to take, Mark.” Gilda pushed up the sleeves of her brown sweat suit top worn over jeans and sneakers. Evidently, this was her work uniform. The two men wore business casual.

He unbuttoned his jacket, hitched the knees of his expensive suit, and sat.

Immediately, the candles at the five points of the pentagram ignited.

“Let us begin.” Gilda began chanting.

Clancy and Neville sat down at a small table in the foyer with their coffees, and she felt the privacy bubble he enveloped them in.
Great
. She really wasn’t going to like what he had to say. So she went first.

“I’m not going to train with Jeremy,” she said defiantly.

Neville sipped his latte, and regarded her thoughtfully.

She resisted the temptation to fidget. She could sip coffee just as noncommittally. She tried it and burned her tongue. She put the cup down. “I know you and Jeremy discussed my lack of control of my magic. He told me, yesterday.”

“We did, among other things.”

Clancy ignored that ominous rider,
among other things
. She had her own statement to make. “I won’t train with Jeremy. I don’t think he’s the right teacher for me.”

“And you’re beyond that stage,” Neville said, shocking the fight out of Clancy. He set his latte down. “Besides which, you’re quite right. Jeremy would not be a good trainer for you.”

Was that sympathy in her old boss’s eyes? The coffee she’d just drunk churned sourly in her stomach. She braced herself as he continued.

“In fact, what Jeremy and I discussed was that you have more power than I realized. And since that discussion, I’ve learned that you chased off not just a demon, but a demon lord.” He sat back and considered her. “Many geomages stumble at channeling their power in a manner that attacks rather than brushes past demons, whose very nature is antithetical to our earth magic.”

Clancy nodded, only half-aware of doing so. That matched what she’d found in Mark’s books about geomagic. On the other hand, she hadn’t realized her efforts against Faust were in any way extraordinary. She’d thought that Doris and Jeremy could do the same.

Neville rubbed the back of his neck. The collar of his olive shirt was old and limp above his gray sweater. His ancient khaki corduroy trousers were hidden by the table. “I’m an old man with an established way of doing things. I taught my approach to magic to Jeremy, and it suits him. But I am not a fool. You have as much or more power than your brother.”

She went cold with shock.

“My regret is that here at the Collegium we failed to help you discover and control it. You’ve been left to do that yourself. I advised Jeremy to monitor your development. I did not tell him to interfere.”

“Or to train me,” she concluded, groping dimly for what he implied.

Then Neville stated it outright. “Sibling rivalry.”

“No. I’ve never competed with Jeremy, never challenged him.”

Neville smiled, faintly, experienced and rueful. “Maybe he wants to keep things that way.” He got up arthritically, moving slowly. “I’m sorry, my dear.” He abandoned his coffee half-drunk and walked away.

The privacy bubble burst with his departure. The babble of other conversations, the scuff of feet, the hiss of the coffee machine, a chair scraping, all intruded, and bounced off Clancy’s preoccupation. She was locked inside a world of hurt.

Doris had been gentle. So had Neville, in his own way. But neither could mitigate the pain of the truth they delivered. Jeremy—

Oh, thank God.
There was Mark striding toward her. Clancy jumped up, thrusting aside her own issues. “Did they—” just in time she remembered their partly mundane audience.

Mark understood what she meant. A muscle pulsed by the tense line of his mouth. “Faust didn’t turn up.”

“But…” But Gilda was the Collegium’s chief demonologist. She had the skills, power and resources to control any demon…didn’t she? Clancy checked her watch. Her conversation with Neville hadn’t been long, but over three hours had gone past.

Mark shoved his arms impatiently into the sleeves of his cashmere coat. “It didn’t work. They don’t have Faust’s true name, and his tie to me is evidently weaker than they thought.” He adjusted the collar of his coat, wrenching at it. Then his frown deepened and focused. “What’s happened? You look stricken.”

An archaic, poetic, but apt word. She was stricken. Struck to the heart. “Nothing to matter. Not now.”

He held her jacket for her as she fumbled to put it on. “This damn place.” He was furious and impatient, but his hands were gentle as he untucked her hair from the collar of the leather jacket.

“It’s not the Collegium’s fault.” She meant to stay silent, but the truth escaped her. “Neville thinks I have more power than Jeremy.”

“Do you?”

She gasped. Her answer had so many implications, not least because then she couldn’t hide from her decision.

Mark clasped her hand, giving it a tiny, comforting shake. He didn’t press her to respond. Perhaps her gasp had told him everything?

They walked to the exit. The foyer was busy. It was lunch time in New York, late morning back in California. The hurrying crowds parted around them. If any were people Clancy knew, she didn’t see them.

Mark waited till they were outside and descending the steps. He had his own concerns, demonic ones, but in the comparative privacy of the street, he addressed hers. “You didn’t realize your power. Okay, you were young, learning. But, why didn’t anyone else recognize it?”

“I think Grandma knows. She told me I’d have to choose.” Clancy shivered.

He stopped near a small, hole-in-the-wall bakery.

It smelled heavenly, or should have. Clancy had the sensation of a wave cresting and about to crash over her.

“To choose,” Mark repeated. “To continue to be less than you are so that Jeremy can be more than he is.”

The wave broke, flooding her with pain, but releasing her from that awful feeling of being locked away. That’s what shock did to a person. Mark had broken the metaphorical glass of her prison, and rescued her.

She laughed shakily, without humor. “Put like that it sounds ridiculous.”

“So do most family dynamics.”

She leaned her head a moment against his shoulder because he had truly understood, and he’d given her the respect of trusting that she could handle a starkly honest discussion. The pain of Jeremy trying to contain her power so that he could inflate the importance of his own was less than the fact that she and her family had colluded, even unthinkingly, in that action. “If I try to change things…it’s not just magic. There’ll be family dramas.” Her parents would side with Jeremy. She accepted that. Her whole life had been shaped by that knowledge, however subconscious it had been. “I don’t want to take California from him.”

“But you could?”

She recalled the geo-forces flowing to and through her in the chamber beneath the cottage—and Jeremy’s reluctance to enter it. “Yes.”

Mark nodded, and changed the subject. “We should eat, hungry or not.” He bought them both savory pocket breads and they ate as they walked slowly back to the portal.

Oscar, the Los Angeles porter, wouldn’t be there to receive them, but he’d said he was calling a courier to fill in for him. Couriers were people with the talent to navigate the in-between, but without a portal of their own.

They halted at the corner of the street where Paul O’Halloran ran the New York portal. Mark screwed up the wrapper from his bread and tossed it in a trash can. “At some level, you knew.”

“Pardon?” She had half her bread still to eat.

“You came home saying you wouldn’t use your magic, not at all. Part of you knew that you couldn’t use your magic and remain subservient to Jeremy. Your greater power would be exposed.”

“Subservient. Nice word.”
Not
. She threw her uneaten bread into the trash can.

Mark stared at a pigeon pecking the sidewalk near them, its feathers fluffed against the cold. “It’s amazing the truths we hide from ourselves. Power, and the fear or lack of it, warps our thinking.”

Okay
. Now, she didn’t think he was talking about her.

Nor did she think Faust would be obliging enough to shelve his demonic plans while she dealt with her emotional crisis. So she made a huge effort and squashed down her churning misery. “What happened when Gilda attempted to summon Faust?” It was an invitation for Mark to share his thoughts.

“Nothing. I sat on the fringe as Gilda and two colleagues attempted spell after spell. I felt the spells move through me.”

“Really? Ugh.” Demonology was an awful magic.

“It was an interesting experience.” He shook his shoulders, as if shrugging off the memory. “We need to get back to LA. I have a theory that I want to put into practice, and I need to do it before Gilda does summon and banish Faust.”

“But you said she couldn’t contact the demon.”

“Through me.” Mark gave her a darkly sardonic look as they closed the distance to the portal. “Gilda has some preparations to make, but then she’s also returning to LA. She’s going to latch onto Faust via the traces he left of himself in transforming Rivera.”

Clancy halted at the door to Paul O’Halloran’s short-stay hotel. “But last night Gilda said Rivera is too fragile for a summoning.”

The disillusion in his blue eyes darkened them to indigo. “Apparently, circumstances have changed.”

“But Rivera would still have to give her permission if they want her involvement.”

He pushed open the hotel door. “If Gilda offers Rivera even the smallest hope of getting her own body back, do you think she can refuse?”

It was ruthlessness so sharp and calculated it verged on cruelty. She hurried after Mark as he strode to the stairs down to the portal. “Do you think you can save Rivera?”

“No.” He halted on the stairs and turned to look up to her. “But I think I can rescue Phoebe’s soul.”

Clancy and Mark stepped out of the in-between into the basement of Oscar’s bungalow basement.

The courier receiving them was a Malaysian woman about Clancy’s age, but shy.

Even in her preoccupation, Clancy had to ask, “Has Oscar’s niece had her baby?”

“Not yet.” The woman smiled. She stayed in the basement, while Clancy and Mark saw themselves out. Evidently, they weren’t the only travelers expected.

They walked through the sunroom on their way out, weaving a path through Oscar’s partly finished paintings. They were portraits. Excellent ones. Even without fees for using his portal, Oscar could have made a living from his art. An elderly couple smiled gently at one another on a large canvas. A smaller square canvas portrayed a cat curled on a newspaper.

It reminded Clancy of her own artistic ambitions. It was possible to run parallel lives of magic and painting.

Something to consider
after
they’d rescued Phoebe.

Inside the SUV, she turned to Mark. “Tell me.”

He pulled into the heavy LA traffic, driving with barely half his attention, heading back to the estate. “I had three hours to sit and think while feeling the demonology spells scour through me. I realized that even though I lack the power to manipulate it, my tiny spark of magic doesn’t prevent me being sensitive to it.”

He shot her a quick glance before the traffic demanded his attention. “You don’t get it. I’ve spent seven years tracking Faust and feeling guilty because I lacked the magic to retrieve Phoebe’s soul from Hell, or to prevent Faust taking it. I couldn’t convince the Collegium to help, and the non-Collegium demonologists I hired all failed.” He paused. “Rivera was the first I hired just to banish Faust. The other demonologists fed me various lines of trash about calling Phoebe’s soul home.”

Clancy felt cold at how many years of disillusionment and frustration he’d endured.

He thumped the steering wheel. “I wasn’t a complete idiot to fall for their spiels. There was some truth in what they said. Remember, last night, I read you those paragraphs from the seventeenth century heretic priest. He posited Hell not as a place of punishment, but as a realm antithetical to our own. What if demons aren’t evil? What if it’s simply that those we encounter on Earth are the ones with the really bad judgement to attempt to break the rules and enter our world?”

She unwound her scarf which was too warm here in LA and scratched her neck. “I don’t see how that helps with Phoebe.”

But Mark was confident of his reasoning. It sounded in his voice which had life and hope, again. Determination rang in it. “Her soul doesn’t belong in Hell. Faust must be holding it there, somehow. But not quite in Hell. That’s why the demonologists I hired couldn’t find Phoebe’s soul in Hell. Faust is using her human soul as his bridge to this world. That’s why he can manifest at will. She’s the means of opening Earth to him.”

“That’s quite an hypothesis.” It took Clancy’s breath away. Phoebe’s soul as a bridge between realms. The traffic ground to a halt as she thought. Mark didn’t interrupt her. “On Saturday, at Rivera’s studio, everything Faust told us about coding and demonic tourism, and then, his transformation of Rivera’s flesh…”

“Is both true and a distraction,” Mark concluded as the traffic started moving again. He signaled for a side street and detoured around the road works ahead. “Sitting in the demonology department’s workroom, watching them struggle, it was as if…it was like what you just experienced regarding Jeremy.”

“What? How?” He’d lost her. Shocked her.

“You didn’t realize how much power you had, or if some part of you did, you buried it. You had more reason than me—and I’m not claiming that I have magical powers I’ve just discovered—but I’ve spent seven years obsessed with how magic could defeat a demon and save Phoebe. It hasn’t. Calling Phoebe’s soul out of wherever she is stuck between Earth and Hell isn’t about hammering at the problem with raw magic. It’s about using what I do have.”

He showed all the fervor of a new religious convert, or a man about to run down the road shouting, “Eureka!” Then again, running down the road would probably be quicker than their current, stalled-again progress.

Since they were stationery, he rested an elbow on the window and looked at her. “Faust has used our own fears and insecurities against us. Rivera is the obvious example with her transformation. But Phoebe…I think she’s holding herself in Limbo. She’s stuck in despair, believing that she can’t escape, even believing that she deserves her suffering. I have to call her home. Demons terrify us so that our fear defeats us.”

All of which might be true, but Clancy didn’t think rescuing Phoebe’s soul would be as simple as Mark, in the fervor of his revelation, hoped it would be. On the other hand, it was obvious that she wouldn’t be able to talk him out of whatever he intended to try. And, she had her own sudden insecurity to combat. “How do you intend to call Phoebe’s soul? Through your love for her?” And if he loved Phoebe still, what had Clancy shared with him, yesterday? She’d felt so close to him.

“I don’t love, Phoebe.” He rejected the idea immediately, but not with the sort of over-statement that would make her think that he protested too much. Instead, he sounded as if it were an option so unlikely as to be instantly discarded.

The tension of rejection that had tightened Clancy’s muscles relaxed.

“I’m not going to use an emotional tie at all,” he continued. “I felt Gilda failing to catch the signature of Faust’s presence through me. I want something concrete. Like to like. It was the porter’s paintings that gave me the idea.” The traffic started moving again, painfully slowly accelerating to two thirds of the speed limit

Oscar’s paintings?

Understanding dawned. “Portraits.” She considered the idea. It had a long history. Paintings that possessed and enchanted their owners were legendary and powerful.

“Photos,” Mark said. “It all comes back to the old knowledge, the one that my great-grandfather wrote into his spell, that photos steal a person’s soul. Faust has frayed that original spell. I intend to work around it to steal back Phoebe’s soul using one of her photos.”

“How?”

“A homeopathic spell. From the infinitesimal trace of Phoebe in the photo to the reality of her trapped soul. If I open the path for her, she can return. She’s the bridge between our realms.”

And Faust would be defending that bridge.
But Clancy stayed silent. She was puzzling over Mark’s thinking, adding to it, altering it. “If this is about calling Phoebe back into a likeness of herself…”

“Rivera!” He swung the SUV in a screeching U-turn.

“She’ll never agree to it,” Clancy warned.

“She’d just be a channel for Phoebe’s soul. It wouldn’t possess her.”

Clancy shivered. She would never consent to such a procedure. The wrongness of it… “How can you be sure Phoebe wouldn’t try to stay?”

“Gilda’s a demonologist. They have exorcism skills. If Phoebe tries to stay, Gilda can kick her on. Hell, Rivera could do that herself.” The road to Rivera’s yoga studio was only moderately busy. Mark planted his foot on the accelerator.

Clancy folded her arms, hugging herself. She felt cold despite the warm sweater she wore. She’d shed her leather jacket before entering the car. It slithered off her knee as Mark took a corner too fast and sharp.

“Sorry,” he said laconically. “We have to beat Gilda to Rivera. Who knows what summoning and banishing Faust through Rivera will do to her appearance. She might revert to her old self.”

“If she’s lucky,” Clancy muttered.

He halted joltingly at a red traffic light. “I’m not heartless, Clancy. But I’ve lived this nightmare for seven years. If I can free Phoebe’s soul, I’ll be free, too.”

“At what price?”

He looked at her.

“Even magic has a price, Mark.”

“I’ll pay it.” He shifted into gear and drove through the green light. “I’ll pay any price.”