Hollywood Demon (The Collegium Book 6) (18 page)

Classic rock music played in the background and Clancy shimmied her hips to it, singing under her breath, as she painted. Mark had cleared a bedroom and the south-facing room was her new studio. It was a lot warmer than the cottage’s front porch. She wore a soft cotton shirt over jeans and her feet were snug in sheepskin-lined boots.

She was happy.

It had been two days since Faust’s banishment. Gilda had called in reinforcements: other demonologists, the Collegium’s guardian mages, and alchemists to work with Mark on the counterspell. After years of being ignored or condescended to by the Collegium, his knowledge of Faust’s attempt to create a hellspawn tour industry on Earth was needed and respected. The Yarren Estate had filled with magic, much as it must have been back in Mark’s great-grandfather’s day when Edgar had been both Hollywood director and Collegium founding member and legend.

Jeremy had stayed away.

Clancy wasn’t sure if Neville had ordered him to leave her be, or if her brother was biding his time till the coast was clear and then, he expected to “train” her. Limit and corral her power by undermining her sense of self-worth was what he meant. Accepting that realization had been painful; perhaps possible only because Mark made her feel so good about herself.

She stopped shimmying to the music. In front of her, the canvas showed an explosion of green and orange, a tropical inferno that was also how the chamber beneath the cottage felt to her at the moment. It resonated with a lush sensuality, humming to her own wanton enjoyment of loving Mark.

She put her paintbrush down and went in search of him.

The Collegium mages had all decamped for Paris via the Los Angeles portal that morning. Paris, where Edgar and the other founding mages of the Collegium had set the original demon-blocking master spell way back in 1920, had the vitality and creative nexus that this new counterspell needed. It was two o’clock in Los Angeles. Within the hour, the mages would have finished their preparations and be ready to work their spell at midnight, Paris-time. The countdown was on.

She followed the sound of someone chopping wood, and found Mark, shirtless and mind-blowingly gorgeous, reaching for the next log to split.

He saw her, and slammed the ax into the chopping block. “Problem?”

“Not from where I’m standing.” She grinned at him, exaggerating her inspection of his chest into a mock-leer.

He flexed his pectoral muscles, and she pretended to fan herself. He laughed and explained the wood piled to the side of the chopping block. “I needed to do something real.”

“Do you wish you were in Paris?”

“No. They offered, if I wanted to watch the spell being cast.” He shrugged, muscles rippling. “It’s weird. I spent so many years resenting my lack of magic, and now, it doesn’t matter.”

“You have other talents.” She meant that seriously.

He didn’t make light of her comment, either. “I have a life and a future.”

They stared at one another. They hadn’t spoken of the future, but what they shared, it felt like something for the long haul. He smiled at her, and she walked toward him.

The phone in her back pocket trilled.

Clancy rolled her eyes. “One moment.” Until they heard that the counterspell was in place, finally and forever putting the kibosh on Faust’s plans, neither she nor Mark would completely relax or leave themselves uncontactable. She spotted his phone safe on a shelf just inside the woodshed’s open door as she answered hers. “Oh. Jeremy. Hi.” She turned her back on Mark’s scowl. “Yes. Now? I guess I could. All right, I’ll meet you there.”

“What did Jeremy want?” Mark had picked up his shirt and was pulling it on.

“He says he doesn’t have time to train me, today.”

An indecipherable but rude sound from Mark.

“But he wants me to come to his house.” She’d never been there, having spent so little time in LA since leaving for New York and the Collegium years ago. Jeremy’s house wasn’t actually his, but bought by the Collegium. They’d known that as a geomage he’d need a connection to the Earth, and also, that on his academic salary he couldn’t have afforded a house in a central neighborhood. Her parents been enthusiastic about the ranch-style home and its generous yard. They’d redesigned the garden for Jeremy.

“Why does he want to see you now?” Mark put her doubts—all right, her suspicions—into words.

She hated that she dreaded visiting with her brother, which meant that the sooner she did, the sooner this could be settled. “Maybe he wants confirmation that I won’t challenge him for California, and he waited till the demon trouble was finished?”

“You’re not going to challenge him?” Mark’s tone was neutral.

She met his concerned gaze. “It’s like you said about your minimal magic. Now, it doesn’t matter. I’m not defined by the fact that I’m a geomage. There are other aspects of who I am.” He was listening intently, and that helped her put her feelings into words. The conclusion had been coalescing in her for the past two days. “Being a geomage and having the Collegium-sanctioned territory of California, is important to Jeremy. It defines him, in his own mind at least. Before, I didn’t challenge him because I didn’t feel I could or should. Now, it’s because I don’t want to. I’m happy to just be me.”

Mark’s smile lightened his blue eyes.

She smiled back. “Although Jeremy is going to have to accept that I’ll spend time in the chamber beneath the cottage and connect with its geo-forces whenever I want to.” She wanted Mark, and soon, Jeremy, to know that she wasn’t a complete pushover.

Mark kissed her. Exuberantly.

“What was that for? Not that I’m complaining.”

“It’s a bribe, or an incentive.”

She stared at him.

He ran his hands up her waist to cup her breasts. “So that you hurry to talk with Jeremy and come back here so that I can make love to you. I like your thinking.”

It was her turn to kiss him. “I’ll hurry. I just have to find my shoes.” It wouldn’t matter if her brother saw her in her painting gear.

“I’ll grab the keys,” he said.

“Why?” She was distracted, searching her memory for where she’d kicked off her sneakers.

“Because I’m coming with you.”

It wasn’t that Mark didn’t trust Jeremy—

Okay
. The truth was he didn’t trust Jeremy not to undermine the lovely, glowing confidence that radiated from Clancy. She was offering her brother ninety percent of what he wanted. Mark intended to ensure that Jeremy didn’t reach for all of it. Clancy had to keep the right to enter the chamber and play with the geo-forces that surged beneath California. It was essential to who she was. He’d seen that in their love-making in the chamber. Its energy relaxed and strengthened her.

She’d never be ordinary, and he didn’t want Jeremy attempting to hammer her back into that constricting box.

“Shoes!” He found her discarded sneakers hiding behind the counter as he went to the drawer for the car keys. The Rocinante, he decided.

“Thanks.” She took the sneakers from him and shoved her feet in.

A few minutes later they were cruising toward the university and Jeremy’s house, and instead of relaxing and enjoying the super-car, Clancy was picking at a fraying hole in the knee of her jeans.

“Would you like to drive?” he offered.

“What?” She was deep in her own head. “Oh, yeah. Not this time, though.” She sighed and stretched back against the seat. “I hate confrontations.”

“You’ll do fine.”

She turned her head to smile at him. “And then we’ll go home and make love.”

He grinned. “If you’re a very good girl—” He broke off his teasing as a cyclist shot out of a side street, apparently intent on self-annihilation. The Rocinante squealed to a tire-smoking halt. The cyclist vanished down the side street on the opposite side of the road.

“Crazy bananas!” Clancy released her brace hold on the dashboard. “We’re lucky no one hit us from behind.”

“If I could get hold of that guy I’d throw his bike in the sea. May it rust for eternity.” Adrenaline coursed through his veins and the Rocinante gave an ill-tempered roar as he accelerated.

Clancy touched his thigh lightly, a caress of understanding and reassurance. “He was probably a student intent on exams or something. Maybe we just saved the life of the next Einstein?”

“Huh.”

He pulled into the driveway of Jeremy’s house and considered the place. The neighborhood was expensive, although not in the league of the Yarren Estate. The house was a single-story ranch with white trim and warm orange-tinted brick walls. The garden was beautifully designed, giving an impression of lushness although he recognized the water-wise plants from discussions with his own gardener.

Jeremy wasn’t waiting on the front porch, but then, Mark hadn’t expected he would be.

“You’ll be fine,” he repeated his reassurance, trying to make it a promise, and kissed Clancy. Her mouth was tense. “I’ll wait here.”

“Thank you.” She got out of the car, walked around it, and up the path from the driveway to the front door.

With the Rocinante’s window down, he heard the doorbell chime. A beat of seven seconds—long enough to establish that Jeremy hadn’t been hovering, waiting for Clancy. Or was Mark being unfair with his suspicions? The door opened. No hug or kiss between brother and sister, but some sort of brief exchange that Mark couldn’t overhear. It had Clancy’s back stiffening.

“Not good. Not good at all,” Mark muttered under his breath. His right knee jiggled. “Oh, hell.” He got out of the car.

Clancy walked stiffly into Jeremy’s house. She’d come here anticipating—fearing—a difficult conversation, but she hadn’t expected that her brother would make her angry. But his comments concerning Mark—or rather, concerning
her
and Mark—had done so instantly. It was a comment no brother ought ever to make.

“Mark’s slumming, is he?” Jeremy had said, peering over her shoulder, out the door, to the Rocinante in his driveway. “Visiting this neighborhood, I mean.”

But an angry, hurt part of Clancy didn’t believe that tack on: identified it as a cover for his passive-aggressive attack.

Jeremy had implied that Mark was “slumming” by being with her.

And in case she missed the point, her brother underlined it as he closed the front door, shutting her into the blandly beige and stylish living room with him. “Mark’s always been interested in magic, even chaotic magic like yours, since he has so little of his own.”

Translation: Mark was looking to use her.

“I think you should stop talking, now,” Clancy said.

Jeremy ignored her. “Come through to the kitchen. We have wooden chairs there, and your clothes look dirty.”

“The Rocinante survived them.” Clancy walked further into the living room. Through the front window, she could see that Mark had gotten out of the car and was leaning against it. He was there for her. She turned to face Jeremy who’d paused in the arched doorway to the kitchen when he realized she really wasn’t going to follow him. “Do you know, I came here to tell you I wasn’t going to challenge you for California?”

“As if you could.” He laughed, brief and abrupt.

“Neville told me the truth of your discussion of me with him. It wasn’t about my instability, but about the raw power I hadn’t accessed. He never told you to train me.”

Jeremy moved back to her. His dark blue blazer swung open at his vigorous stride. “Why were you talking with Neville?”

“He sought me out.” She stood her ground, although she tucked her hands into the back pockets of her jeans to hide their tremble. “You want California as your territory, that’s fine. I’m not going to challenge you, Jeremy.” She could feel the geo-forces beneath them seething gently, stirring in a sluggish cauldron that Jeremy controlled. She recognized the pattern as a readiness one taught at the Collegium. This was something he’d prepared before her arrival.

“You couldn’t challenge me,” he scoffed at her.

“I won’t.” She reminded herself to stay steady, and not to reach for the geo-forces beneath them to reassure herself. “But I will retain access to the chamber beneath Grandma’s cottage and interact with the forces there whenever I want.”

“No!”

“I won’t disturb your control of the wider ebb and flow. I checked yesterday. I can play without destabilizing your plans for California, but I’m a geomage. I need some access to the Earth.”

His breath hissed between his teeth. “I told you I’d train you.”

“To control my magic.” She scowled. “That’s not going to happen.”

He spun away. “And if I don’t accept your demands, you’ll challenge me? You’ll destabilize all my work here for your puny attempt to impress Mark.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. This has nothing to do with Mark. This is you and me, and a reckoning long overdue if you ask Grandma.”

Jeremy froze. “You’ve spoken of this with her.”

“Briefly.”

He faced her again, a bitter smile curling his mouth within the frame of his black beard. “So you have Neville and Doris’s approval. They won’t reprimand you for risking California’s stability for your ego.”

“That is not—”

“I accept,” he said. “You leave me no choice. I am the geomage of California. You may play your games within the cottage chamber. But if you go beyond it, there will be consequences.”

She allowed him the blustery threat. Her shoulders slumped in relief. “Thank you.”
For accepting my compromise and not making me defeat you. Our parents might never have forgiven me.
She held out her hand.

Jeremy shook his head. He wasn’t touching her, not even to seal the deal.

His rejection cut, but relationship building could happen another day, after he’d had time to see she’d keep her world, and he’d been able to recover his self-image as a strong geomage.

“Was there anything else you wanted to discuss?” She folded her arms, feeling cold and blaming it on the emotional temperature between them.

“You seem to have set the agenda, today.”

“Jeremy,” she began to appeal to him, but a blast from outside the house claimed both their attention. Through the window, she saw Mark stagger away from his car; the car that was over ten feet in the air.

Not a bomb blast. Through the swirl of winter leaf litter she saw Faust.

He can’t be here
, that was her stunned thought. The demon lord had been banished. But her disbelief would have to wait. Mark was out there, alone, facing a pissed off demon lord.

The counterspell! It must have started in Paris. Had it cracked an opening for the demon to manifest one final time? If it had, Faust wasn’t wasting his chance by attacking the gathering of Collegium mages. No, he’d come after Mark, the man who’d pursued him for seven years and ultimately defeated the demon.

The Rocinante crashed down, a mangled wreck. Invisible forces buffeted Mark, tearing and shrieking while Faust balanced on the birdbath her parents must have placed in the central arrangement of the front yard.

Faust would torture Mark, then kill him.

“Where are your wards?” Clancy shouted at Jeremy over the hellish clamor, even as she ran for the front door. She hadn’t noticed any wards when she’d entered the yard, but had assumed Jeremy had granted her—and Mark—access.

“They’re up.”

She spared him one disbelieving, scathing look for such weak wards before dashing out the door. The demon’s power hit her like a tornado. Mark was about ten feet from the porch, but bowed over and struggling to stand his ground. He couldn’t advance against the power tormenting him. As she watched, his shirt tore and blew away.

Faust danced a jig atop the birdbath. The demon looked less human and more like the older drawings of imps. He was ugly and wrong. Evil. Things like tentacles erupted from the back of his calves.

She reached for the geo-forces seething underground. If she’d chased the demon off once, she’d do it, again. She had to hurry.

The geo-power resisted. What the heck? Had Faust found a means of constricting her geomagic?

Mark dropped to the ground and tried to crawl to her. Blood dripped from his face to the dirt.

Clancy’s magic surged, breaking the resistance that had held the geo-forces back from her, and in that instant, she understood the source of the restraints.

Jeremy hadn’t strengthened his wards, but he had taken the time before her arrival to bind and hold the geo-forces from her—and even with Mark about to become the victim of a demon’s fatal revenge, her brother hadn’t released that power to her.

And Faust had known! The demon had counted on her brother’s pride and jealousy to contain her.

They were both deluded idiots.

As she gained total mastery of California, claiming all of the territory and its geo-forces thundering to her, the demon ceased its victory dance on the birdbath. The uncanny wind that had been torturing Mark died away. Complete stillness held the yard in a breathless moment.

Then Faust gestured, and the wreck of the super-car cannoned toward Mark.

The Earth seemed to respond instinctively. Clancy certainly couldn’t have thought through the multiple and immediate activities: the ground swallowed Mark, sheltering him; the car wreck careened into Jeremy’s house, the front wall breaking and falling, the corner of the roof collapsing; and Clancy, herself, jumped off the porch and landed on the Earth, that welcomed her with a violent, terrifying joy.

All of the Earth’s power flowed through her, rose with her pointing arm, and aimed itself at Faust. The demon did not belong in this realm. The Collegium demonologists had banished him, but he’d taken the sliver of opportunity in the weaving of the counterspell to manifest. Very well. She would ensure that never again would Faust walk the Earth.

But the demon hadn’t just come for a final revenge against Mark. It wanted to punish Clancy, also. As her geomagic thundered to vanquish it, the demon dived off the birdbath at her.

Faust mashed his lips to hers and vomited what felt like fire into her mouth.

The inferno raged through her body even as her geomagic triumphed and flung Faust out of Earth’s realm and forever barred him from it. Through her agony, she felt that ultimate lock, but her satisfaction was lost in blazing panic.

Her magic cascaded through her, but seemed only to intensify the inferno. It was hellfire, truly Hell on Earth, and if her geomagic was antithetical to Faust’s demon nature, that remained true for this final curse from him. Her geomagic couldn’t vanquish the hellfire. If anything, the inferno blazed fiercer for the battle.

Then, Mark was there. Cool human lips sealed hers and he drank the hellfire from her. She tasted him, his blood, and the desperation of his kiss. The hellfire left her—and entered him.

He flung himself from her. “I can survive this,” he gritted out the reassurance against the pain-wracked contortion of his muscles. He collapsed to the ground, raising an urgent hand to ward off her magic. “I’m not…geomage. It’ll be…less…for me.” He lay full length on the churned up dirt of the front yard, his body spasming as if tortured on a medieval rack. “My lack…of magic. Hellfire will…die faster.”

Not fast enough for Clancy as she watched his agony and knew he suffered it for her. She knelt beside him, unable to touch him for fear her magic would make his torment worse.

“You need to clean this up,” Jeremy said.

For an instant, his meaning didn’t penetrate her worry for Mark. Then she understood. “Why?” she asked, disinterested.

Mark held her gaze as if it was a lifeline as he grimaced and fought not to reveal how much he hurt. Blood seeped from a wound near his left eyebrow and two gashes on his chest. His hands were rigid, fingers outstretched, muscles rigid. Then they relaxed before the next spasm hit.

Her lungs labored. Her geomagic had already healed the damage the hellfire had done to them, but her anxiety for Mark was its own iron band.

“The neighbors!” Her brother teetered on the edge of the hole she’d instantly excavated to save Mark from the careening wreck of his Rocinante. “Clancy, the scary demon is gone. Mark will recover. Now, you’d better hide your mess from the street.”

“You are unbelievable.” She maintained eye contact with Mark.
Was this spasm less severe, briefer?
But her scorn and impatience was all for Jeremy. “No one saw or heard anything, Jeremy. Your wards aren’t good for much else. They couldn’t keep out Faust. But you obviously set them for privacy. There are no sirens or people gathering in curiosity. No mundanes sensed what happened.” That she had battled Faust, and won.

Or that she’d wrested California from Jeremy.

And that was the real issue. Her brother was trying to boss her around because the bottom-line was that he knew he couldn’t.

“You said.” His voice cracked. He tried again. “You said you wouldn’t challenge me for California.”

Her control broke. The Earth rumbled. The hole that had saved Mark re-filled. “Faust used your attempt to contain my geomagic to attack Mark. He thought you’d succeed in controlling me. You thought you would. You set me up.”

“I am not in league with a demon.”

She waved aside Jeremy’s indignant denial. “Not that. You set me up, calling me here, to your home, to try and ambush my magic, to wrap it so tightly that I couldn’t successfully challenge you. You didn’t trust me or my love for you.”

“Sis—” It might have been belated remorse in his tone.

“It’s too late. When I needed my magic to save Mark from Faust, you still tried to contain it. I can’t forget that. I can’t forgive it.”

Jeremy stalked off, into the house. He slammed the front door and a tile fell from the damaged corner of the roof.

She exhaled waveringly. “I claimed California.” Disbelief made her breathless. She felt lightheaded.

“Congratulations?” Mark’s voice was raw.

But the attempted tease made her smile—in relief. “Are you…is it easing?”

“Better.” He fumbled for her hand and gripped it. “A few more minutes.”

His muscles no longer cramped from hellfire raging through him. She sat and he lay in the ruin of the front garden, and they listened to the distant LA traffic, the sounds of a bird, and a crash as another three roof tiles slid off.

“I should get you to a doctor,” she said, unsure what a doctor could do for hellfire internal burns, but sure that Mark’s cuts, bruises, and possible bone fractures had to be treated.

He was way ahead of her. “I don’t need a hospital or an ambulance. I know a healer who’ll come out to the estate, if we can get there.”

“Ah.” She studied the wreck of the Rocinante. Insurance didn’t cover demonic attack and a tow truck driver would ask questions. A problem for another day. For now, she had to get Mark home. “I’ll call Grandma. She’ll collect us.”