Hollywood Demon (The Collegium Book 6) (5 page)

A tremor snaked along her spine as she relived being the focus of that diabolical rage. “But why wouldn’t it attack you since you’re the one assembling the evidence of its presence? Wouldn’t it want to take you out of the picture?”

“It’s enjoying the game.” Mark’s voice was rough with anger. “We’ll see if it likes my next move.”

Mark didn’t speak on the drive home, and Clancy was completely okay with the silence. He’d scared her with his determination to fight a demon. What was the wretched thing’s name? Faust.

Her thoughts were a random, jumbled mess. She was also thinking how much she wanted a bath. She’d showered on the road trip from New York, halting at truck stops, but she wanted to wallow in a jasmine-scented bath. With bubbles. She longed to wash off her fear and the wrongness of contact with a demon.

Her skin crawled. It had been a demon looking at her through Bryce’s blue eyes. She ought to have paid attention to the weird way he’d held the coffee mug although it must have been burning his skin. Demons didn’t care if they hurt a host body—actually, they reveled in hurting people.

The Rocinante turned off the street into the private road of the Yarren Estate. Passing through the old ward that kept the place safe lifted a weight of tension from Clancy that she hadn’t realized she carried.

She’d been subconsciously braced for another demonic attack.

Mark showed no reaction. The gate opened and he drove through, but not to the garage. He drove around it and on to the housekeeper’s cottage, to Doris’s home. “I’ll bring your bag over.”

“I can get it.” She didn’t question why he’d brought her to the cottage and not the house. She was just grateful he had. The old stone building was square and solid, with the deep front porch shaded by the silk tree beside it, its leaves falling in welcome to winter. Clancy’s ancestors had built the cottage during the nineteenth century gold rush, but her ancestors had been there before then. Tongva, then Spanish, with a Mayan line added, travelling up from Mexico. Then had come the Irish, Welsh and Icelandic people from over the seas. All of them had connected with this earth.

The geo-power below the cottage hummed steadily. If she reached for it, it would cradle around her as it had in childhood. But California was her brother’s territory. She flinched from the power. If she wanted to stay here, at home, then she had to prove that she wouldn’t disturb the balance he maintained.

Which reminded her of the Collegium. She stood with the passenger door open and leaned back in to meet Mark’s eyes as he brooded in the driver’s seat. “We need to tell the Collegium about Bryce’s possession. They’ll send someone to exorcise him.”

“The demon will have already gone.” He stared straight ahead, although it didn’t seem that he saw the pretty garden with its late-blooming roses, windflowers and spires of snapdragons.

“Then the Collegium will ensure it can’t return.” She didn’t want to contact the Collegium, either, but it had to be done—for Bryce’s sake. “I’ll phone them.”

“I will.” He looked at her then.

Her heart stuttered at the bleak anger in his eyes.

Then even that emotion was gone. A small smile curved his mouth, apparently meant to reassure her. “Clancy, go in. Have a hot chocolate or something. I’ll tell Doris what happened and she’ll be over. Forget about this. You came back to Los Angeles for your own reasons. Live your life.”

“That’s all well and good…but your wretched demon knows me.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Mark put the Rocinante in reverse. “I’ll keep Faust busy.”

She slammed the passenger door shut, since he obviously wasn’t about to listen to reason, and climbed the couple of steps to the front porch, hearing the engine growl the short distance to the garage and stop. At least he hadn’t driven off to do something reckless.

“Bath first. Worry later.”

In fact, aware that Doris would be instantly at the cottage when Mark told her of their encounter with Faust, Clancy grabbed a quick shower instead of a leisurely soak. She borrowed her grandma’s herbal shampoo, and the scent of rosemary was a sharp, aromatic counterpoint to the horrors of the morning. It smelled like incense.

Hair wrapped in a turban and another towel around her, she opened the bathroom door to find her duffle bag deposited outside it. She hadn’t heard Mark climb the old wooden stairs. She lifted the bag, carried it through to the second bedroom, the one that had been hers in childhood, and dressed quickly in black yoga pants, a plaid pink and cream shirt, and a snuggly soft gray cardigan. She padded downstairs in socks with her brown hair still wet and loose about her shoulders.

Doris had made hot chocolate. “Two marshmallows?”

“Three. It’s definitely been a three-marshmallow morning. Thanks.” Clancy took her mug and slid onto a chair at the round table in the sunny kitchen. Cream colored walls made the most of the light and the worn Spanish tiles on the floor gave the room warmth and character. She faced the same cuckoo clock on the wall that she’d wound in childhood. Except now, marshmallows and cuckoo clocks couldn’t provide quite the same comfort. “It was definitely a demon, Grandma.”

“Mark is obsessed.” Doris stirred her mug of hot chocolate, swirling the melting marshmallows. The puffy curls of red hair that framed her face seemed limper, or perhaps, it was the worry deepening her wrinkles that made them seem so. Doris was concerned. “He believes a demon took Phoebe’s soul.”

“So he told me.” Clancy paused to savor the rich chocolate flavor of her drink. Doris added cinnamon, vanilla and love to her hot chocolate. No other ever tasted as good. “What if Phoebe really did sell her soul to a demon?”

Doris sighed. “We’ve had the Collegium’s best demon hunters out here, twice. They found no evidence of demonic activity—or no more than the usual level of idiots attempting and failing to summon them.”

“Was Fay Olwen one of the demonologists?” Clancy caught a marshmallow with her tongue and let it finish dissolving in her mouth.

“No.” Doris was suddenly defensive.

The marshmallow no longer tasted so sweet. Clancy turned the mug around on the table, studying the pattern of daisies painted on it, trying to phrase her question and challenge tactfully. “Then you didn’t actually have the best, did you? Grandma, a demon infiltrated the top of the Collegium before Fay discovered and defeated it a few months ago. It could have hidden this demon’s presence.”

“Why would it? Demons aren’t known for working together.”

Which was true. Clancy sipped hot chocolate.

“Was it very bad?” Her grandma asked. She meant the encounter that morning.

Clancy put the mug down. It landed with a bit too much force, a minor thud that set the hot chocolate sloshing. “I froze. In the face of an obvious physical threat, I froze. Grandma, I’ve trained for years in Taekwondo, yet Mark had to save me. He pulled me out of Bryce’s reach. He fought the demon in Bryce’s body. Mark even had to push me to make me run. I can’t believe that I froze!” She could hear her voice growing shriller, but couldn’t seem to stop it. This selfish but real concern had been simmering away beneath everything else, and now, in this room where she’d confided so many of her hopes and fears to her grandma, the deepest one spilled out. “I’m a failure at magic, and now it seems I can’t even handle ordinary life.”

“A demon is hardly ordinary. And you’re
not
a failure. Not at anything, ever.” Doris gripped her hand. “Honey, what did they do to you at the Collegium?”

Clancy shook her head, pulling her hand away and physically leaning away in her chair. “It’s not what they did. It’s how I failed.” She became aware of her huddled posture and forced herself to straighten. “And it doesn’t matter. Not now. Grandma, Mark wants to go after this demon alone.”

“Honey.” Doris closed her mouth. Whatever she’d been about to say, she obviously changed her mind. “Mark isn’t in danger from a demon. There is no demon.”

“I—”

“Just wait. Think about it, Clancy. You didn’t sense a demon before this poor man attacked you. If Mark hadn’t primed you with his talk of demons, would you have accepted the reasonable explanation of a psychotic break.”

Clancy hooked her heels on the edge of her seat and wrapped her arms around her knees. “Bryce said he wanted to eat my heart and take my soul!”

Her grandma sat back in her chair, her face losing color. “Mark didn’t tell me that bit.”

“Mark wants to keep us out of it. Safe.” As she said it, Clancy realized how true it was. Initially, Mark had wanted her understanding. Perhaps he’d even considered her as an ally; an equal, after years of being the kid on the estate. But now, he’d pulled away to protect her and Doris. “I didn’t sense the demon, but isn’t that characteristic of demonic possession?” She frowned, trying to remember a field of magic she’d had little interest in when she studied at the Collegium. “Demons like to possess humans because our flesh hides them.”

Ugh.
She reached for her hot chocolate and took a healthy swallow to wash away that nasty thought.

“I have a friend who’s a retired priest,” Doris said. “I’ll have him stop in and check on this Bryce Goodes. Poor soul.”

“Can your friend do an exorcism?” A question Clancy had never thought she’d ever have reason to ask.

“Yes.” Doris finished her hot chocolate, some color returning to her face. “Father Jorge has experience with evil.”

Clancy shivered. Evil. It was a concept most people debated philosophically or relegated to horror movies. But evil was real and it twisted lives.

Mark had lost seven years of his life to chasing it.

“Grandma, how do we help Mark?”

“It’s not Mark who needs help.” The interruption came from the man opening the back door. His voice was biting and the expression in his eyes furious. “What are you doing here, Clancy?”

“Jeremy.” All of her muscles went slack in shock. Her arms released her knees and her feet thudded to the floor. “Hi?”

Her brother ignored her tentative greeting. “I felt the magic you used. I was in the middle of an early tutorial session and I had to break it off to quiet the surge of geo-forces you caused.”

“I’m sorry.” She felt awful. This was why she’d vowed she wouldn’t use her magic. She wanted to stay here, at home, and that meant respecting that home was Jeremy’s territory. The Collegium had awarded it to him. “I didn’t meant to. I was—”

“Good morning, Jeremy,” Doris broke in. “Don’t I warrant a polite greeting, even if you can’t spare one for your sister whom you haven’t seen in over a year?”

He flushed. “Good morning, Grandma.” He crossed the small room, bent and kissed Doris’s cheek. But as he straightened, he scowled at Clancy.

Because he was scowling, he missed the warning look Doris directed at her.

Apparently, they weren’t going to tell Jeremy about the demon.

More secrets.
Clancy sighed.

“So, what is your excuse?” Jeremy demanded. He looked every inch the successful hipster with his carefully trimmed black beard, and the tweed jacket over dark brown trousers that was probably a fashionably ironic joke on the old academic uniform. “You know your power is unstable. That’s why Erik kicked you out of Iceland.”

Well, there went one of her secrets: the reason the Collegium had demoted her, and she’d resigned. From independent, roaming sensor of geomagnetic disturbances, she’d been recalled to New York to provide support to more senior—and reliable—geomages at the Collegium.

“I quit the Collegium,” she said to her brother.

“Neville told me.”

Of course he did
, she thought bitterly, and was instantly ashamed of her bitterness. It wasn’t Jeremy’s fault he was smart and respected, whereas she was—as the chief geomage, Neville Schuster had grudgingly phrased it—“well-meaning”.

“But you didn’t tell me, Jeremy? You didn’t think I’d be interested?” Doris collected her mug and Clancy’s, and rinsed them both at the sink. Her stance, in her turquoise velour sweat suit, was very straight and indignant.

“You’re close to Clancy. I reasoned that she’d tell you herself.” Jeremy paused. “Have you told Mom and Dad?”

Clancy made a face. “Not yet.”

“Do that,” he ordered.

“I will.” She’d send them a text and turn off her phone. She winced at her own cowardice. Her parents loved her, but their inevitable disappointment and how they’d worry that her presence here would make Jeremy’s life harder made her reluctant to talk with them.

He paced the length of the small kitchen, spinning in the doorway to the living room, and returning. Restless, as always. It was as if he couldn’t bear to be still, as if he was making up for his childhood of lassitude and limits that fighting leukemia had imposed.

The reminder of all he’d survived deepened her guilt. “I just want to be home, Jeremy. I didn’t intend to use my magic and cause trouble for you.”

“You never do.”

She flinched, but leaned forward earnestly. “No, I mean it. This morning…” She glanced at Doris who stood drying her hands on a tea towel. Clancy went with a truth, if not the complete truth. “Coming home, coming here to the estate, my magic reached out to make a connection. I stopped it as soon as I realized what was happening.” As soon as she’d felt the Earth’s grumbling response.

A thoughtful frown creased Doris’s face as she rehung the tea towel. “You were always sensitive to the chamber.”

Jeremy muttered something under his breath.

“More sensitive than Kennett.” Their grandma directed her words at him. Kennett had been Jeremy’s predecessor, the Collegium-sanctioned geomage responsible for California and its active geology. “Clancy, does it still talk to you?”