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wantstodirectThe television remote was not in the pizza box under the couch. It finally turned up on top of the bookcase by the window, half buried in the pot with the dead geranium. Raising it in triumph, he settled back against the pillows, sprayed some cheese on a piece of jerky and started channel surfing with the mute on.
Replay of a hockey game on TSN, end of hurricane season on Outdoor Life, remake of Smokey and the Bandit…
“Which after The Longest Yard and The Dukes of Hazard pretty much proves there is no God,” he muttered, jabbing his thumb at the remote.
… some guy eating a bug on either the Learning Channel or FOOD—he didn’t stay long enough to see if it came with a lecture on habitat or a raspberry vinaigrette—three movies he’d already seen, two he didn’t want to see, a bug eating some guy on either Discovery or Space, someone knocking at the door…
His thumb stilled.
Someone knocking at his door. Carefully. Specifically. Trying not to wake the neighbors.
Dropping the spray cheese down in a pile of blankets by the jerky, Tony headed for the door. Leaning forward, he peered through the security peephole.
Leah Burnett, the stuntwoman who'd been working on the Darkest Night set earlier this evening.
And a translucent overlay of a big guy with antlers.
She grinned up at the lens and lifted a bag of Chinese food into Tony’s field of vision.
All right. She had his attention.
Stepping back, he opened the door.
“Hey.” She waved the bag. “I thought we should talk.”
“All three of us?”
“Three? If you have company…”
“No.” He just moved enough to stay solidly in her line of sight, blocking her view of the apartment. “You, me, and the guy sharing your space.”
Dark eyes widened. “Guy?”
“Big guy.” He held his hand about half a meter over her head.
“Really? What does this guy look like?”
“Hard to say, he’s a little fuzzy. Got a rack on him like Bambi’s dad, though.”
“And you can see him right now?”
“Not right now. He kind of comes and goes.”
“Uh-huh.” A quick glance up and down the hall. “Maybe we should discuss this inside.”
“Got something to hide?”
“Just trying to keep you out of trouble with your neighbors.”
That seemed fair. Besides, there were precautions in place in case he was actually in any danger from her. Them. Although, given the Chinese food and all, he doubted it. Opening the door all the way, Tony tucked himself up against the wall and beckoned the stuntwoman in.
The glyphs painted across the threshold were supposed to flare red and create an impenetrable barrier if danger approached—it had taken days of fine-tuning to stop them from going off for the pizza girl, Mr. Chansky, and the elderly cat who lived at the end of the hall. As Leah stepped into the apartment, they flared white then orange then green then a couple of colors Tony suspected the human eye shouldn’t actually be able to see. The pattern slammed out to fill the doorway, turned gray, and fluttered to the floor.
Leah brushed at the shoulder of her jacket, the pale ash smearing across the damp fabric. “Sorry about that.” Her nose wrinkled as the smell of burned cherries momentarily overwhelmed the smell of the Chinese food. “What did you paint those on with, cherry cough syrup?”
“Yeah.” When she stared up at him in astonishment, he shrugged. Carefully. His head felt like he’d just been hit repeatedly with a rubber mallet. “Cherry was the only flavor that worked. And,” he added, hoping he sounded like he believed it was possible, “I will fireball your ass if you try anything.”
“Like what?”
“Sorry?”
She pulled the door out of his hand and closed it. “What are you expecting me to try?”
He had no idea, so he followed her farther into the apartment.
“I suppose I should be impressed that a guy your age actually sorts his laundry,” she muttered stepping over a pile of jeans and up to the kitchen counter where she set the bag down, shrugged out of her jacket, and started opening cupboards. She handed him a full plate and stepped over socks and underwear. “Daniel told me you were gay.”
“Yeah.”
“Way to work against the stereotype.”
“What?”
She picked up a t-shirt from the nearest clothing pile. It was a Rumor Gal promo shirt with OMFG in big letters.
“It was free. Look…” Tony pushed the laptop to one side and set his plate down on the small square table. “… if you’re here on some weird makeover thing, I don’t want my life rearranged.”
“You sure?”
Her smile changed the whole shape of her face. Made her look years younger. Made her eyes sparkle. Made her look like someone he’d like to get to know. Really well. Made him want to slide the sweater off her shoulders, push back the dark curls and…
… he suddenly noticed that the translucent antlered guy looked a lot solider. Except for the horns, and the weird way his eyes had no whites, he seemed to be human. His skin tone was a little deeper than Leah’s—a regular coffee instead of a double double—he had a lot of long dark hair twisted into dreads, and he was naked. And, although it was difficult to tell for certain, given that he and Leah were still sharing the same space, remarkably well hung.
What the fuck?
Tony shook his head and Leah was once again just a not very tall stuntwoman eating chow mein in his living room. Alone. No overlay of antlered guy. Eyes narrowed, he took a step back and raised the plastic fork. “What was that?”
“A test.” She caught a bean sprout before it fell off the edge of her plate. “Ninety percent of men fail it.”
Tony did the math. “Well, good for me. I’m really most sincerely gay.”
“And yet you still can’t afford a decent wardrobe?”
“Yeah, well here’s a thought…” He moved a pile of old sides—the half-size sheets with all the background information for each day’s shoot as well as the necessary script pages—and sat on the steadier of his two folding chairs. “… unless that guy is your inner fashion designer, how about you let the t-shirt thing go and tell me what the hell is going on?”
She thought about it for a moment, then nodded and sat on the edge of his bed. “You’re a wizard.”
Tony just barely managed to resist coming back with, I know I am, but what are you? It was just past three in the morning, for fucksake. He was a little punchy. He swallowed a mouthful of beef fried rice and said: “You’re… ?”
“Not.” A wave of her fork, dangling a piece of overcooked bok choi, cut off his reply. “It’s complicated. Maybe you should call your teacher, and I’ll only have to go through it once.”
“My teacher?”
“Mentor. Whatever you call the senior wizard in charge of your education.” Dark eyes sparkled again. “I’m assuming that in this brave new millennium you don’t use the word master.”
“What makes you think I have a teacher?”
Leah sighed. “You’re young. Far too young to be on your own.”
“Surprise.” He spread his hands.
Brows rose. “What happened to your teacher?”
He pushed chow mein around his plate. “I thought we were going to talk about the naked horny dude.”
Fortunately, only a little rice went up her nose. When she finished laughing and snorting and blowing her nose on the crumpled handful of toilet paper Tony’d brought from the bathroom, she said, “His name is Ryne Cyratane. It means: He Who Brings Desire and Destruction. He’s a Demonlord.”
“Oh, man.” The fork bounced as he dropped it on the table. “Not again.”
“Excuse me?”
“A few years ago, some friends of mine stopped a Demonlord from coming through in Toronto.”
“Coming through?”
“Yeah, there was this lesser demon writing the Demonlord’s name on the city in blood and…” He frowned, trying unsuccessfully to remember the specifics Henry had told him about how they’d finally defeated it. “It got complicated, but he didn’t make it.”
“Obviously.” Her tone went beyond dry to desiccated. “Well, there’s no need for you to worry about this one. I’ve got him contained.” She stood and pulled up her sweater.
“Nice tat.”
“Thank you.” It circled her navel, row after row of black glyphs spreading almost up to the edge of her ribs like ripples moving out from the point of impact. “It’s a Demongate. As long as I live, the gate stays closed and my lord is denied reentry to this world.”
“Your lord?”
“Long story.”
“Okay. Reentry?”
“He was here about four thousand years ago. For almost five hundred years, worshiped as a god, he ruled a territory in what’s now Lebanon. Ish. Same general geography anyway, near as I can figure. He had a temple, he had handmaidens, he had a lot of sex.”
That would be the desire part, Tony figured.
“Then something came up—he’s never said what—and he created a gate to return to the hell he came from. It took a lot of power. To get it, he killed everyone in the village and, with their blood, anchored the gate in his sole surviving handmaiden.”
And that would be the destruction. Tony leaned closer. The tat wasn’t black. Not exactly. It was a very, very dark red-brown. “You’re the handmaiden.”
“Handmaiden, priestess, lover; I was his…”
“Girlfriend?” He winced at her expression. “Sorry. I was just channeling Young Dracula, you know when Frau Blucher is explaining and… Never mind. Sorry. Totally inappropriate interruption. I’ll just, uh, be quiet now.”
She waited a moment longer.
Tony picked up his fork and ate some more rice and tried to look like there was some other idiot in his apartment who couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
“I was his most beloved.” Leah continued at last. Her fingertips lightly stroked the edges of the pattern, raising goose bumps on her skin. “He cut the gate into my flesh, glyphs written in the blood of my people, because he intended to return but would be unable to open the gate from the other side. Gates from the hells have to be opened from our side or we’d be overrun by demons in a heartbeat.”
“And they have to be asked in?” Then he remembered that he’d said he’d be quiet and he shrugged apologetically, but she seemed resigned to the interruption.
“You’re confused, that’s vampires.”
It didn’t seem like the right time to correct her. Henry went where he wanted. “Why didn’t this Ryne Citation…”
“Ryne Cyratane.”
“Right. Why didn’t he just leave the gate open?”
“Because that would have been just asking for another Demonlord to come along and try to take it over. And, before you ask, the wizard who had opened the original gate was long dead.”
“Dead wizard.” Yeah, that sounded encouraging. “Nice.”
“Probably not. Anyway, Ryne Cyratane figured that I’d be able to stand what he’d done to my people for just long enough for him to finish up his business at home and then grief and guilt would cause me to take my own life. Should I be stronger than my grief, it wouldn’t much matter because time was on his side and a human life is pitifully short to the demon kin—and, back then, pitifully short was even shorter. Unfortunately for his plans, he made a small error—although, to be fair, I was squirming a bit while he incised the protection runes.” She traced the outer ring. “He intended to protect the gate from me, to keep me from defacing the pattern, thus destroying the gate and preventing him from returning, but he ended up writing in a much more powerful and general protection.
“The gate protects itself and, in protecting itself, protects me. I can’t be injured because that would affect the gate. I can’t age because that would affect the gate. I am held as I was the day he left this world.”
“Four thousand years ago?” And that would make her… “You’re four thousand years old?”
She shrugged and sat back down on the end of the bed, retrieving her plate and looking mid-twenties at the absolute outside. Jeans. Sweater. High-tops. “More or less. Probably closer to thirty-five hundred. You lose track after a while.”
Given the whole vampires, wizards, other worlds, sentient shadows, trapped ghosts deal, he saw no reason to doubt her. Precedent suggested the world was about a hundred and eighty degrees weirder than most people suspected and, these days, nothing much surprised him. Besides, hers wasn’t the kind of story a sane person would make up. On the other hand, she did fall off buildings and set herself on fire for a living, so perhaps sanity wasn’t a given here.
“So…” He groped his way back to the beginning of the story. “… this Ryne Cyratane slaughtered everyone you knew?”
“Every single person. Even called the goatherds in from the hills.”
“I don’t want to bring up old shit, but…” Tony pushed a cashew around his plate until it slid off the edge, bounced across the table, and off onto the floor. Only then did he look up and meet her gaze. “He slaughtered everyone, and you don’t seem too upset by that.”
“What do you expect?” Her shrug was perfect twenty-first century ennui. “It happened a very long time ago. I’ve dealt. You should have seen me right afterward, I was a mess.” She widened her eyes, raised both hands, fingers spread, and shook them from side to side. “I was the crazy lady who lived in the wilderness for about three hundred years. One day I was a warning to misbehaving children, next thing I knew I was being fished out of the Nile by the servants of a priest of Thoth. He cleaned me up, brought me back to myself. He was a wizard.” Her eyes unfocused and the corners of her mouth curled into a smile as she examined the memory. “And kind of cute in a shaved head, totally fanatical sort of way.”
“What happened to him?”
“He got a little too ambitious and the governor fed him to the crocodiles.”
Crocodiles? Tony wished the threats on his life were so mundane. “Couldn’t have been much of a wizard.”
“They were very large crocodiles. And there were a lot of them.”
“What happened to you?”
Attention snapped back onto Tony’s face. “Do you really want the whole life story? Because until the last couple of centuries, it’s been pretty much centered in and around the beds of powerful men.”
It’d been more than that—frighteningly more—Tony could see a bloody history lurking behind Leah’s glib comment. But he could also see she didn’t want to share. Not a problem. He didn’t like handing out every detail of his back story either. “So this demon has been trying to get back through the gate for thirty-five hundred years.”
Dark brows drew in. “No. What makes you say that?”
“Well, he’s… you know.” He waved at where the translucent image would be and realized it hadn’t been around since Leah’s little orientation “test.”
“Oh, that. We’re connected, of course, but after all this time he knows I’m not going to kill myself, so he lives his own life. He’s probably hanging around the gate right now because of the Demonic Convergence.”
“Say what?”
“The reason I’m here.”
“Right.”
“And he’s usually around during sex.”
Tony raised the fork again.
She grinned and rolled her eyes. “Stop panicking, we’ve already established that’s not going to happen. But if it did, the energy created while I adjusted your lifestyle would go through the gate and into my lord—as long as he’s close enough to the gate at his end.”
“The Demonlord gets off through you?” That sounded just a little ethically kinky.
“Not exactly off. He gains power from sex. Always has. The man/woman variety only, though…” Her voice picked up a slightly mocking tone. “… which seems kind of limiting for a demon powered by sexual energies, but there you go.”
“You’re feeding him? With sex?” Scratch the qualifier. Tony liked to think he didn’t judge, but there was a definite ethical kink in the stuntwoman’s lifestyle.
“Well, he was my god,” Leah reminded him pointedly. “And,” she continued before he could respond, “there’ve been benefits on my side over the years. Like… the years. And a certain…” Dark eyes gleamed. “… vitality.”
“He slaughtered your people!”
“You’re going to have to let that go,” she sighed.
“Why?”
“Because it’s ancient history, it’s not important, and we have bigger problems.”
“Bigger?”
“The Demonic Convergence.” Tony could hear the capital letters in her voice. “Energies are aligning. Powerful energies. Powerful enough to crack the barriers between here and the hells?”
He had to agree that didn’t sound good. “Hells? More than one?”
“Many more.”
“Well, isn’t that just fucking great.” All at once, Chinese food seemed trivial. He put down his fork. “And these energies are powerful enough to open a Demongate?”
Her hand dropped to cradle her stomach. It was the same gesture Tony’d seen pregnant women make and in this context that creeped him right out. “Not this gate. Like I said, it’s protected. New gates will be created. Okay, not really gates, more like access points that can be exploited just long enough for something to come through.”
“One to a customer?” That sounded good.
She nodded. “But there could be hundreds of them.”
That didn’t. “Hundreds?”
“Rough estimate.” When her expression grew reassuring, Tony figured he must have looked as stunned as he felt. “But don’t worry, most of these holes will only go through a few layers, just to the closest hells. The convergent energy has to hit the same spot over and over before we get to anything much bigger than imps.” She got up, walked into the kitchen, and set her empty plate in the sink.
Empty. She’d kept eating while she was telling him about demons, and Demongates, and slaughter. I guess she really has gotten over it. It’s just a story to her now. Maybe someday the Shadowlord and the house would be just stories to him. Maybe. Probably not. Thirty-five hundred years was a lot longer than he’d get. He watched her rinse the plate, set it on the counter, and turn to face him.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
Her expression slid from reassuring to impatient. “Don’t you have questions?”
“Yeah. A couple.” Understatement. He had so many questions he could barely drag one free of the mess. “Okay. Imps. They’re not a problem?”
“Without a wizard they can be one hell of a problem, pardon the pun, but you should be able to deal with any that manage to get through.”
“Manage to get through?”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Leah’s sudden smile had so much wattage behind it, her Demonlord made a brief, translucent appearance, flickering in and out again before Tony fully realized he was there. “We’ll be smoothing out reality’s potholes before anything can come through. I’ll find them,” she added when he shook his head, “and you’ll close them.”
“I don’t know how!”
“I do.” She all but patted him on the head as she passed on her way back to the sofa bed. “I just needed a wizard to implement the knowledge.”
Just. As far as Tony could tell the word just didn’t belong in any sentence spoken since Leah had walked through his door. Just thirty-five hundred years old. Just got a Demongate on the old turn. Just a Demonic Convergence. Just imps. Just needed a wizard. Wait a minute… “How did you know?”
“Know?”
“That I was a wizard?”
“I felt you use your power when you kept that piece of flying metal from puncturing the bag, of course. Over the years I’ve become attuned.” He'd used the Come To Me spell to snatch up a piece of aluminum before it could fly into the inflated landing bag for her stunt.
“To power?”
“Among other things.” Her expression as she looked up from rummaging in her purse was subtly smuttier than anything Tony could have ever managed. He felt his ears grow hot. Hotter when he realized she was doing it on purpose.
“Stop it.”
“Sorry. Bad habit. Sugarless gum?”
“No, thanks.” She seemed more amused than contrite. “Hang on; I thought the…” He waved a hand in the general direction of her stomach. “… the gate thing was supposed to protect you.”
Her hand slipped under her shirt again. “It does.”
“Then why did you need me out there saving your ass tonight?”
“What makes you think that you weren’t there because I needed you to be?” Three and a half millennia of confidence in the question.
“Well, I…”
“They tried to burn me at the stake once—well, actually, they tried a number of times, but in this particular instance, it rained for eight days. The wood was too wet to light, and finally one wall of my cell washed away and I escaped.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t just…”
“Fuck my way free? Devout Dominicans; a little too fond of barbeque but devout. They weren’t interested. So…” She stood and slowly walked over to stand beside his chair, pushing a pile of laundry out of the way with the side of her foot. She wasn’t exactly looming over him—she wasn’t exactly tall—but she was so there that he had to fight the urge to move away from her, to give her space. “… are you going to help me out or not?”
“Help you close up imp holes made by a Demonic Convergence?” He was amazed he got that sentence out with a straight face.
“This isn’t funny.”
Okay. Maybe not entirely a straight face.
“If a shallow hole isn’t filled in and the convergent energies keep hitting it and making it deeper, then something a lot more demonic could get through. If that happens, people will die.”
That took care of the smiling. “I figured.” Nikki, Alan, Charlie, Rahal, Tom, Brenda, Hartley… “They always seem to.”
“Yeah, they do.” Her palm cupped his cheek for a second and he saw thousands of years of people dying while she lived on. He’d have jerked back, but she was gone before he could move, sitting once again on the end of the sofa bed. It had happened so fast he could almost convince himself he’d imagined it. In fact, he had every intention of convincing himself he’d imagined it.
“So…” She leaned back on her elbows, crossed her legs, and kicked one sneakered foot in the air. “… what happened to your teacher?”
And here they were back at the beginning. And why not answer? It seemed he owed Leah a confidence or two. “She went back to her own world.”
“Her own world. Another world?” Leah asked when he nodded. “Not a hell?”
There were wizards nailed to a blackboard. “Not exactly.”
“Damn.” Apparently, after living for so long, nothing much surprised her either. Tony appreciated how much that simplified things. “Reality’s getting a little crowded.”
“Tell me about it.”
“No.” Her foot kicked out and pointed. “Your turn.”
So he told her. About the Shadowlord because that was tied up with the whole wizard thing but mostly about Arra and how he hadn’t wanted to leave and she hadn’t been able to stay. “But she left a lot of information on her laptop about how to be a wizard and I’ve been…” He stopped when Leah raised a hand. “What?”
“You’re learning how to manipulate cosmic energies from a home study course designed by a wizard from another world?”
“Yeah.”
“Unbelievable.”
“What is?”
“Her cosmic energies aren’t your cosmic energies.”
“What?”
“She’s not from this world.”
“Duh.”
Gripping the edge of the sofa bed, Leah sat up and leaned toward him. “Okay, I’ll try and make this simple. It’s all about energy, right? This Arra did teach you that?”
“Yeah.” He tried not to sound defensive and had a feeling he was failing miserably at it.
“So the energy of her world has to have been different from the energy of this world because the whole…” One hand rose to sketch a circle in the air. “… world is different. Different planet. Different stars. Her energy pattern is therefore different. Following me so far?”
“Yeah.”
“So, on this world she had to adapt everything she knew to fit a new pattern. To make a square peg—her—fit in a round hole. What worked for her here won’t necessarily work for you. You are not a square peg. You’re a round peg. The hole is also round. You need to find a teacher who knows what’s going on in this world.”
Beginning to get pissed about the distinctly patronizing tone, Tony reached out for the spray cheese and the container slapped into his hand. “I seem to be managing.”
“What is that?”
She sounded more appalled than impressed. Not the reaction he’d expected but then, he reminded himself, she claimed to have met wizards before. “It’s a can of spray cheese.” He turned it so she could see the label. “I was eating it on beef jerky.”
“On beef jerky?” Leah rummaged around in the blankets, pulled out the open bag of jerky, stared at it, and shuddered. “I can see I’ve got my work cut out for me. Never mind, we’ll deal with your eating habits another time.”
“Hey, I’m not the one with a demon in my belly!”
“Oh, for crying out loud, I didn’t eat him! And I certainly didn’t cover him in…” Leaning forward, she snatched the can out of his hand. “… an edible cheese product. Doesn’t it worry you that the manufacturers feel they have to define it as edible?”
“No,”
“Fine!”
“All right, then!”
Leah glared down at the can in one hand and the bag in the other and her lips twitched. Then her whole body. Just for a moment, Tony was afraid that spray cheese and beef jerky were the secret ingredients Ryne Cyratane had been holding back and now, with them both in close proximity, the gate was opening. Then he realized she was trying not to laugh.
Then she wasn’t trying anymore.
She laughed like they hadn’t been talking about demons and wizards and the possibility of people dying. She laughed like this moment, the moment when laughter overwhelmed her, was the only moment that mattered. Tony smiled as he watched her; it was impossible not to.
It was just as impossible not to join in.
They almost managed to stop a couple of times, then one of them would wave the can of spray cheese and they’d lose it again. Finally, they ended up lying side by side on the sofa bed, gasping for breath.
“Oh, yeah. I needed that.” A long breath in and she sat up, twisting just enough to look back over her shoulder at him, pushing dark curls off her face. “Was it good for you?”
Tony ignored her, frowning as he tugged a familiar plastic bag out from under her butt. “You’ve crushed my jerky.”
The brow he could see lifted in a decidedly smutty manner. “Is that what you crazy kids are calling it now? Damn.” And the brow dipped down. “Is that the time?”
He squinted toward the TiVo. 4:46. He had to be up for work in three hours and fifteen minutes. “Fuck.”
Her turn to ignore him. He was kind of amazed by that actually, all things considered. “I’ve got to get some sleep.” She slid to the edge of the mattress and stood. “I’ve got a two o’clock call for a CBC Movie of the Week.”
“Stunt?”
“It’s what I do.” Scooping up her purse, she hung it on her shoulder and headed for the door. “If you’re finished with work before sunset—they want the light for the shot, reflections on the water and all that artistic crap—can you come by VanTerm? I’ll leave word with security.”
“Hang on!” He jumped to his feet and followed her. “That’s it? We eat chow mein, you tell me we’re having a Demonic Convergence with a high chance of imps, and then we just go off to work?”
“Unfortunately, saving the world doesn’t buy the groceries.” Rummaging in the depths of her bag, she pulled out a slightly crumpled card and passed it to Tony. “My cell number. Call if you’re going to be late or you can’t make it.”
“And?”
“And we’ll reschedule. This isn’t going to go away; we’ve got lots of time to fix it.”
“Yeah, but when did it start?”
“A week ago Monday afternoon at 2:10.”
“Really?”
“No. And yes. Approximately.” He could hear her smile even though he couldn’t see her face. “You really are gullible for a wizard.”
“Maybe.” Reaching out, he stopped her from opening the door. “But one thing before you go; are you here, in Vancouver, because this is where the convergence is happening, or is it happening here because it’s where you are?”
Her expression was almost proud when she turned; like she was about to praise a puppy. “You’re smarter than you look.”
“Thank you. You didn’t answer the question.”
“This…” A light, almost reverent touch against her stomach. “… is the second oldest and most powerful continuously running bit of magic in the world.”
“What’s the first?”
“I’m not allowed to say.”
“Seriously?”
“No, I’m just bullshitting you again.” A firmer pat on the sweater above the tat. “This is the oldest.”
He literally felt his heart start beating again. The way his life had been going lately, if there was an older bit of magic in the world, he could expect it on his doorstep at any time. “That’s a sick sense of humor you’ve got there; I can see why you were a demon’s favorite handmaiden.”
“Sticks and stones…” Ryne Cyratane flashed as she smiled. “… won’t actually touch me.”
“Lucky you. So if you’re walking around with the oldest magic in the world, then the convergence is here because you are? Nothing personal,” he added when she nodded, “but I wish you were somewhere else.”
“Too late now, things have started. And when I say things, I am, of course, referring to the Demonic Convergence eating holes through our reality into a myriad of hells. Bright side, though, with a wizard in the immediate area, the world stands a better chance.” Dark brows lifted as she grinned. “You wouldn’t wish a worse chance on the world, would you?”
He made a show of thinking about it but didn’t fool her.
“You’re a good man, Tony Foster.” Taking hold of his shoulders, she kissed him gently on both cheeks and murmured something in a language he didn’t know. “Sumerian blessing,” she told him stepping away. “Roughly translates as ‘the gods help those who help themselves.’ I left out the part about the goats. Redo the wards before you go to sleep—they won’t stop a Demonlord, but they might stop lesser demons.”
“Might?”
“Should.”
“Should’s not a lot more encouraging.”
“Best I’ve got.”
Ryne Cyratane flickered again as Leah went out the door. Head half turned, he seemed to be paying more attention to Leah’s surroundings than to his handmaiden although, since Tony was trying to get a better look at his ass, there may have been subtleties missed.
[Lifted from chapter two of Smoke and Ashes by Tanya Huff with some small edits.]
Replay of a hockey game on TSN, end of hurricane season on Outdoor Life, remake of Smokey and the Bandit…
“Which after The Longest Yard and The Dukes of Hazard pretty much proves there is no God,” he muttered, jabbing his thumb at the remote.
… some guy eating a bug on either the Learning Channel or FOOD—he didn’t stay long enough to see if it came with a lecture on habitat or a raspberry vinaigrette—three movies he’d already seen, two he didn’t want to see, a bug eating some guy on either Discovery or Space, someone knocking at the door…
His thumb stilled.
Someone knocking at his door. Carefully. Specifically. Trying not to wake the neighbors.
Dropping the spray cheese down in a pile of blankets by the jerky, Tony headed for the door. Leaning forward, he peered through the security peephole.
Leah Burnett, the stuntwoman who'd been working on the Darkest Night set earlier this evening.
And a translucent overlay of a big guy with antlers.
She grinned up at the lens and lifted a bag of Chinese food into Tony’s field of vision.
All right. She had his attention.
Stepping back, he opened the door.
“Hey.” She waved the bag. “I thought we should talk.”
“All three of us?”
“Three? If you have company…”
“No.” He just moved enough to stay solidly in her line of sight, blocking her view of the apartment. “You, me, and the guy sharing your space.”
Dark eyes widened. “Guy?”
“Big guy.” He held his hand about half a meter over her head.
“Really? What does this guy look like?”
“Hard to say, he’s a little fuzzy. Got a rack on him like Bambi’s dad, though.”
“And you can see him right now?”
“Not right now. He kind of comes and goes.”
“Uh-huh.” A quick glance up and down the hall. “Maybe we should discuss this inside.”
“Got something to hide?”
“Just trying to keep you out of trouble with your neighbors.”
That seemed fair. Besides, there were precautions in place in case he was actually in any danger from her. Them. Although, given the Chinese food and all, he doubted it. Opening the door all the way, Tony tucked himself up against the wall and beckoned the stuntwoman in.
The glyphs painted across the threshold were supposed to flare red and create an impenetrable barrier if danger approached—it had taken days of fine-tuning to stop them from going off for the pizza girl, Mr. Chansky, and the elderly cat who lived at the end of the hall. As Leah stepped into the apartment, they flared white then orange then green then a couple of colors Tony suspected the human eye shouldn’t actually be able to see. The pattern slammed out to fill the doorway, turned gray, and fluttered to the floor.
Leah brushed at the shoulder of her jacket, the pale ash smearing across the damp fabric. “Sorry about that.” Her nose wrinkled as the smell of burned cherries momentarily overwhelmed the smell of the Chinese food. “What did you paint those on with, cherry cough syrup?”
“Yeah.” When she stared up at him in astonishment, he shrugged. Carefully. His head felt like he’d just been hit repeatedly with a rubber mallet. “Cherry was the only flavor that worked. And,” he added, hoping he sounded like he believed it was possible, “I will fireball your ass if you try anything.”
“Like what?”
“Sorry?”
She pulled the door out of his hand and closed it. “What are you expecting me to try?”
He had no idea, so he followed her farther into the apartment.
“I suppose I should be impressed that a guy your age actually sorts his laundry,” she muttered stepping over a pile of jeans and up to the kitchen counter where she set the bag down, shrugged out of her jacket, and started opening cupboards. She handed him a full plate and stepped over socks and underwear. “Daniel told me you were gay.”
“Yeah.”
“Way to work against the stereotype.”
“What?”
She picked up a t-shirt from the nearest clothing pile. It was a Rumor Gal promo shirt with OMFG in big letters.
“It was free. Look…” Tony pushed the laptop to one side and set his plate down on the small square table. “… if you’re here on some weird makeover thing, I don’t want my life rearranged.”
“You sure?”
Her smile changed the whole shape of her face. Made her look years younger. Made her eyes sparkle. Made her look like someone he’d like to get to know. Really well. Made him want to slide the sweater off her shoulders, push back the dark curls and…
… he suddenly noticed that the translucent antlered guy looked a lot solider. Except for the horns, and the weird way his eyes had no whites, he seemed to be human. His skin tone was a little deeper than Leah’s—a regular coffee instead of a double double—he had a lot of long dark hair twisted into dreads, and he was naked. And, although it was difficult to tell for certain, given that he and Leah were still sharing the same space, remarkably well hung.
What the fuck?
Tony shook his head and Leah was once again just a not very tall stuntwoman eating chow mein in his living room. Alone. No overlay of antlered guy. Eyes narrowed, he took a step back and raised the plastic fork. “What was that?”
“A test.” She caught a bean sprout before it fell off the edge of her plate. “Ninety percent of men fail it.”
Tony did the math. “Well, good for me. I’m really most sincerely gay.”
“And yet you still can’t afford a decent wardrobe?”
“Yeah, well here’s a thought…” He moved a pile of old sides—the half-size sheets with all the background information for each day’s shoot as well as the necessary script pages—and sat on the steadier of his two folding chairs. “… unless that guy is your inner fashion designer, how about you let the t-shirt thing go and tell me what the hell is going on?”
She thought about it for a moment, then nodded and sat on the edge of his bed. “You’re a wizard.”
Tony just barely managed to resist coming back with, I know I am, but what are you? It was just past three in the morning, for fucksake. He was a little punchy. He swallowed a mouthful of beef fried rice and said: “You’re… ?”
“Not.” A wave of her fork, dangling a piece of overcooked bok choi, cut off his reply. “It’s complicated. Maybe you should call your teacher, and I’ll only have to go through it once.”
“My teacher?”
“Mentor. Whatever you call the senior wizard in charge of your education.” Dark eyes sparkled again. “I’m assuming that in this brave new millennium you don’t use the word master.”
“What makes you think I have a teacher?”
Leah sighed. “You’re young. Far too young to be on your own.”
“Surprise.” He spread his hands.
Brows rose. “What happened to your teacher?”
He pushed chow mein around his plate. “I thought we were going to talk about the naked horny dude.”
Fortunately, only a little rice went up her nose. When she finished laughing and snorting and blowing her nose on the crumpled handful of toilet paper Tony’d brought from the bathroom, she said, “His name is Ryne Cyratane. It means: He Who Brings Desire and Destruction. He’s a Demonlord.”
“Oh, man.” The fork bounced as he dropped it on the table. “Not again.”
“Excuse me?”
“A few years ago, some friends of mine stopped a Demonlord from coming through in Toronto.”
“Coming through?”
“Yeah, there was this lesser demon writing the Demonlord’s name on the city in blood and…” He frowned, trying unsuccessfully to remember the specifics Henry had told him about how they’d finally defeated it. “It got complicated, but he didn’t make it.”
“Obviously.” Her tone went beyond dry to desiccated. “Well, there’s no need for you to worry about this one. I’ve got him contained.” She stood and pulled up her sweater.
“Nice tat.”
“Thank you.” It circled her navel, row after row of black glyphs spreading almost up to the edge of her ribs like ripples moving out from the point of impact. “It’s a Demongate. As long as I live, the gate stays closed and my lord is denied reentry to this world.”
“Your lord?”
“Long story.”
“Okay. Reentry?”
“He was here about four thousand years ago. For almost five hundred years, worshiped as a god, he ruled a territory in what’s now Lebanon. Ish. Same general geography anyway, near as I can figure. He had a temple, he had handmaidens, he had a lot of sex.”
That would be the desire part, Tony figured.
“Then something came up—he’s never said what—and he created a gate to return to the hell he came from. It took a lot of power. To get it, he killed everyone in the village and, with their blood, anchored the gate in his sole surviving handmaiden.”
And that would be the destruction. Tony leaned closer. The tat wasn’t black. Not exactly. It was a very, very dark red-brown. “You’re the handmaiden.”
“Handmaiden, priestess, lover; I was his…”
“Girlfriend?” He winced at her expression. “Sorry. I was just channeling Young Dracula, you know when Frau Blucher is explaining and… Never mind. Sorry. Totally inappropriate interruption. I’ll just, uh, be quiet now.”
She waited a moment longer.
Tony picked up his fork and ate some more rice and tried to look like there was some other idiot in his apartment who couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
“I was his most beloved.” Leah continued at last. Her fingertips lightly stroked the edges of the pattern, raising goose bumps on her skin. “He cut the gate into my flesh, glyphs written in the blood of my people, because he intended to return but would be unable to open the gate from the other side. Gates from the hells have to be opened from our side or we’d be overrun by demons in a heartbeat.”
“And they have to be asked in?” Then he remembered that he’d said he’d be quiet and he shrugged apologetically, but she seemed resigned to the interruption.
“You’re confused, that’s vampires.”
It didn’t seem like the right time to correct her. Henry went where he wanted. “Why didn’t this Ryne Citation…”
“Ryne Cyratane.”
“Right. Why didn’t he just leave the gate open?”
“Because that would have been just asking for another Demonlord to come along and try to take it over. And, before you ask, the wizard who had opened the original gate was long dead.”
“Dead wizard.” Yeah, that sounded encouraging. “Nice.”
“Probably not. Anyway, Ryne Cyratane figured that I’d be able to stand what he’d done to my people for just long enough for him to finish up his business at home and then grief and guilt would cause me to take my own life. Should I be stronger than my grief, it wouldn’t much matter because time was on his side and a human life is pitifully short to the demon kin—and, back then, pitifully short was even shorter. Unfortunately for his plans, he made a small error—although, to be fair, I was squirming a bit while he incised the protection runes.” She traced the outer ring. “He intended to protect the gate from me, to keep me from defacing the pattern, thus destroying the gate and preventing him from returning, but he ended up writing in a much more powerful and general protection.
“The gate protects itself and, in protecting itself, protects me. I can’t be injured because that would affect the gate. I can’t age because that would affect the gate. I am held as I was the day he left this world.”
“Four thousand years ago?” And that would make her… “You’re four thousand years old?”
She shrugged and sat back down on the end of the bed, retrieving her plate and looking mid-twenties at the absolute outside. Jeans. Sweater. High-tops. “More or less. Probably closer to thirty-five hundred. You lose track after a while.”
Given the whole vampires, wizards, other worlds, sentient shadows, trapped ghosts deal, he saw no reason to doubt her. Precedent suggested the world was about a hundred and eighty degrees weirder than most people suspected and, these days, nothing much surprised him. Besides, hers wasn’t the kind of story a sane person would make up. On the other hand, she did fall off buildings and set herself on fire for a living, so perhaps sanity wasn’t a given here.
“So…” He groped his way back to the beginning of the story. “… this Ryne Cyratane slaughtered everyone you knew?”
“Every single person. Even called the goatherds in from the hills.”
“I don’t want to bring up old shit, but…” Tony pushed a cashew around his plate until it slid off the edge, bounced across the table, and off onto the floor. Only then did he look up and meet her gaze. “He slaughtered everyone, and you don’t seem too upset by that.”
“What do you expect?” Her shrug was perfect twenty-first century ennui. “It happened a very long time ago. I’ve dealt. You should have seen me right afterward, I was a mess.” She widened her eyes, raised both hands, fingers spread, and shook them from side to side. “I was the crazy lady who lived in the wilderness for about three hundred years. One day I was a warning to misbehaving children, next thing I knew I was being fished out of the Nile by the servants of a priest of Thoth. He cleaned me up, brought me back to myself. He was a wizard.” Her eyes unfocused and the corners of her mouth curled into a smile as she examined the memory. “And kind of cute in a shaved head, totally fanatical sort of way.”
“What happened to him?”
“He got a little too ambitious and the governor fed him to the crocodiles.”
Crocodiles? Tony wished the threats on his life were so mundane. “Couldn’t have been much of a wizard.”
“They were very large crocodiles. And there were a lot of them.”
“What happened to you?”
Attention snapped back onto Tony’s face. “Do you really want the whole life story? Because until the last couple of centuries, it’s been pretty much centered in and around the beds of powerful men.”
It’d been more than that—frighteningly more—Tony could see a bloody history lurking behind Leah’s glib comment. But he could also see she didn’t want to share. Not a problem. He didn’t like handing out every detail of his back story either. “So this demon has been trying to get back through the gate for thirty-five hundred years.”
Dark brows drew in. “No. What makes you say that?”
“Well, he’s… you know.” He waved at where the translucent image would be and realized it hadn’t been around since Leah’s little orientation “test.”
“Oh, that. We’re connected, of course, but after all this time he knows I’m not going to kill myself, so he lives his own life. He’s probably hanging around the gate right now because of the Demonic Convergence.”
“Say what?”
“The reason I’m here.”
“Right.”
“And he’s usually around during sex.”
Tony raised the fork again.
She grinned and rolled her eyes. “Stop panicking, we’ve already established that’s not going to happen. But if it did, the energy created while I adjusted your lifestyle would go through the gate and into my lord—as long as he’s close enough to the gate at his end.”
“The Demonlord gets off through you?” That sounded just a little ethically kinky.
“Not exactly off. He gains power from sex. Always has. The man/woman variety only, though…” Her voice picked up a slightly mocking tone. “… which seems kind of limiting for a demon powered by sexual energies, but there you go.”
“You’re feeding him? With sex?” Scratch the qualifier. Tony liked to think he didn’t judge, but there was a definite ethical kink in the stuntwoman’s lifestyle.
“Well, he was my god,” Leah reminded him pointedly. “And,” she continued before he could respond, “there’ve been benefits on my side over the years. Like… the years. And a certain…” Dark eyes gleamed. “… vitality.”
“He slaughtered your people!”
“You’re going to have to let that go,” she sighed.
“Why?”
“Because it’s ancient history, it’s not important, and we have bigger problems.”
“Bigger?”
“The Demonic Convergence.” Tony could hear the capital letters in her voice. “Energies are aligning. Powerful energies. Powerful enough to crack the barriers between here and the hells?”
He had to agree that didn’t sound good. “Hells? More than one?”
“Many more.”
“Well, isn’t that just fucking great.” All at once, Chinese food seemed trivial. He put down his fork. “And these energies are powerful enough to open a Demongate?”
Her hand dropped to cradle her stomach. It was the same gesture Tony’d seen pregnant women make and in this context that creeped him right out. “Not this gate. Like I said, it’s protected. New gates will be created. Okay, not really gates, more like access points that can be exploited just long enough for something to come through.”
“One to a customer?” That sounded good.
She nodded. “But there could be hundreds of them.”
That didn’t. “Hundreds?”
“Rough estimate.” When her expression grew reassuring, Tony figured he must have looked as stunned as he felt. “But don’t worry, most of these holes will only go through a few layers, just to the closest hells. The convergent energy has to hit the same spot over and over before we get to anything much bigger than imps.” She got up, walked into the kitchen, and set her empty plate in the sink.
Empty. She’d kept eating while she was telling him about demons, and Demongates, and slaughter. I guess she really has gotten over it. It’s just a story to her now. Maybe someday the Shadowlord and the house would be just stories to him. Maybe. Probably not. Thirty-five hundred years was a lot longer than he’d get. He watched her rinse the plate, set it on the counter, and turn to face him.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
Her expression slid from reassuring to impatient. “Don’t you have questions?”
“Yeah. A couple.” Understatement. He had so many questions he could barely drag one free of the mess. “Okay. Imps. They’re not a problem?”
“Without a wizard they can be one hell of a problem, pardon the pun, but you should be able to deal with any that manage to get through.”
“Manage to get through?”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Leah’s sudden smile had so much wattage behind it, her Demonlord made a brief, translucent appearance, flickering in and out again before Tony fully realized he was there. “We’ll be smoothing out reality’s potholes before anything can come through. I’ll find them,” she added when he shook his head, “and you’ll close them.”
“I don’t know how!”
“I do.” She all but patted him on the head as she passed on her way back to the sofa bed. “I just needed a wizard to implement the knowledge.”
Just. As far as Tony could tell the word just didn’t belong in any sentence spoken since Leah had walked through his door. Just thirty-five hundred years old. Just got a Demongate on the old turn. Just a Demonic Convergence. Just imps. Just needed a wizard. Wait a minute… “How did you know?”
“Know?”
“That I was a wizard?”
“I felt you use your power when you kept that piece of flying metal from puncturing the bag, of course. Over the years I’ve become attuned.” He'd used the Come To Me spell to snatch up a piece of aluminum before it could fly into the inflated landing bag for her stunt.
“To power?”
“Among other things.” Her expression as she looked up from rummaging in her purse was subtly smuttier than anything Tony could have ever managed. He felt his ears grow hot. Hotter when he realized she was doing it on purpose.
“Stop it.”
“Sorry. Bad habit. Sugarless gum?”
“No, thanks.” She seemed more amused than contrite. “Hang on; I thought the…” He waved a hand in the general direction of her stomach. “… the gate thing was supposed to protect you.”
Her hand slipped under her shirt again. “It does.”
“Then why did you need me out there saving your ass tonight?”
“What makes you think that you weren’t there because I needed you to be?” Three and a half millennia of confidence in the question.
“Well, I…”
“They tried to burn me at the stake once—well, actually, they tried a number of times, but in this particular instance, it rained for eight days. The wood was too wet to light, and finally one wall of my cell washed away and I escaped.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t just…”
“Fuck my way free? Devout Dominicans; a little too fond of barbeque but devout. They weren’t interested. So…” She stood and slowly walked over to stand beside his chair, pushing a pile of laundry out of the way with the side of her foot. She wasn’t exactly looming over him—she wasn’t exactly tall—but she was so there that he had to fight the urge to move away from her, to give her space. “… are you going to help me out or not?”
“Help you close up imp holes made by a Demonic Convergence?” He was amazed he got that sentence out with a straight face.
“This isn’t funny.”
Okay. Maybe not entirely a straight face.
“If a shallow hole isn’t filled in and the convergent energies keep hitting it and making it deeper, then something a lot more demonic could get through. If that happens, people will die.”
That took care of the smiling. “I figured.” Nikki, Alan, Charlie, Rahal, Tom, Brenda, Hartley… “They always seem to.”
“Yeah, they do.” Her palm cupped his cheek for a second and he saw thousands of years of people dying while she lived on. He’d have jerked back, but she was gone before he could move, sitting once again on the end of the sofa bed. It had happened so fast he could almost convince himself he’d imagined it. In fact, he had every intention of convincing himself he’d imagined it.
“So…” She leaned back on her elbows, crossed her legs, and kicked one sneakered foot in the air. “… what happened to your teacher?”
And here they were back at the beginning. And why not answer? It seemed he owed Leah a confidence or two. “She went back to her own world.”
“Her own world. Another world?” Leah asked when he nodded. “Not a hell?”
There were wizards nailed to a blackboard. “Not exactly.”
“Damn.” Apparently, after living for so long, nothing much surprised her either. Tony appreciated how much that simplified things. “Reality’s getting a little crowded.”
“Tell me about it.”
“No.” Her foot kicked out and pointed. “Your turn.”
So he told her. About the Shadowlord because that was tied up with the whole wizard thing but mostly about Arra and how he hadn’t wanted to leave and she hadn’t been able to stay. “But she left a lot of information on her laptop about how to be a wizard and I’ve been…” He stopped when Leah raised a hand. “What?”
“You’re learning how to manipulate cosmic energies from a home study course designed by a wizard from another world?”
“Yeah.”
“Unbelievable.”
“What is?”
“Her cosmic energies aren’t your cosmic energies.”
“What?”
“She’s not from this world.”
“Duh.”
Gripping the edge of the sofa bed, Leah sat up and leaned toward him. “Okay, I’ll try and make this simple. It’s all about energy, right? This Arra did teach you that?”
“Yeah.” He tried not to sound defensive and had a feeling he was failing miserably at it.
“So the energy of her world has to have been different from the energy of this world because the whole…” One hand rose to sketch a circle in the air. “… world is different. Different planet. Different stars. Her energy pattern is therefore different. Following me so far?”
“Yeah.”
“So, on this world she had to adapt everything she knew to fit a new pattern. To make a square peg—her—fit in a round hole. What worked for her here won’t necessarily work for you. You are not a square peg. You’re a round peg. The hole is also round. You need to find a teacher who knows what’s going on in this world.”
Beginning to get pissed about the distinctly patronizing tone, Tony reached out for the spray cheese and the container slapped into his hand. “I seem to be managing.”
“What is that?”
She sounded more appalled than impressed. Not the reaction he’d expected but then, he reminded himself, she claimed to have met wizards before. “It’s a can of spray cheese.” He turned it so she could see the label. “I was eating it on beef jerky.”
“On beef jerky?” Leah rummaged around in the blankets, pulled out the open bag of jerky, stared at it, and shuddered. “I can see I’ve got my work cut out for me. Never mind, we’ll deal with your eating habits another time.”
“Hey, I’m not the one with a demon in my belly!”
“Oh, for crying out loud, I didn’t eat him! And I certainly didn’t cover him in…” Leaning forward, she snatched the can out of his hand. “… an edible cheese product. Doesn’t it worry you that the manufacturers feel they have to define it as edible?”
“No,”
“Fine!”
“All right, then!”
Leah glared down at the can in one hand and the bag in the other and her lips twitched. Then her whole body. Just for a moment, Tony was afraid that spray cheese and beef jerky were the secret ingredients Ryne Cyratane had been holding back and now, with them both in close proximity, the gate was opening. Then he realized she was trying not to laugh.
Then she wasn’t trying anymore.
She laughed like they hadn’t been talking about demons and wizards and the possibility of people dying. She laughed like this moment, the moment when laughter overwhelmed her, was the only moment that mattered. Tony smiled as he watched her; it was impossible not to.
It was just as impossible not to join in.
They almost managed to stop a couple of times, then one of them would wave the can of spray cheese and they’d lose it again. Finally, they ended up lying side by side on the sofa bed, gasping for breath.
“Oh, yeah. I needed that.” A long breath in and she sat up, twisting just enough to look back over her shoulder at him, pushing dark curls off her face. “Was it good for you?”
Tony ignored her, frowning as he tugged a familiar plastic bag out from under her butt. “You’ve crushed my jerky.”
The brow he could see lifted in a decidedly smutty manner. “Is that what you crazy kids are calling it now? Damn.” And the brow dipped down. “Is that the time?”
He squinted toward the TiVo. 4:46. He had to be up for work in three hours and fifteen minutes. “Fuck.”
Her turn to ignore him. He was kind of amazed by that actually, all things considered. “I’ve got to get some sleep.” She slid to the edge of the mattress and stood. “I’ve got a two o’clock call for a CBC Movie of the Week.”
“Stunt?”
“It’s what I do.” Scooping up her purse, she hung it on her shoulder and headed for the door. “If you’re finished with work before sunset—they want the light for the shot, reflections on the water and all that artistic crap—can you come by VanTerm? I’ll leave word with security.”
“Hang on!” He jumped to his feet and followed her. “That’s it? We eat chow mein, you tell me we’re having a Demonic Convergence with a high chance of imps, and then we just go off to work?”
“Unfortunately, saving the world doesn’t buy the groceries.” Rummaging in the depths of her bag, she pulled out a slightly crumpled card and passed it to Tony. “My cell number. Call if you’re going to be late or you can’t make it.”
“And?”
“And we’ll reschedule. This isn’t going to go away; we’ve got lots of time to fix it.”
“Yeah, but when did it start?”
“A week ago Monday afternoon at 2:10.”
“Really?”
“No. And yes. Approximately.” He could hear her smile even though he couldn’t see her face. “You really are gullible for a wizard.”
“Maybe.” Reaching out, he stopped her from opening the door. “But one thing before you go; are you here, in Vancouver, because this is where the convergence is happening, or is it happening here because it’s where you are?”
Her expression was almost proud when she turned; like she was about to praise a puppy. “You’re smarter than you look.”
“Thank you. You didn’t answer the question.”
“This…” A light, almost reverent touch against her stomach. “… is the second oldest and most powerful continuously running bit of magic in the world.”
“What’s the first?”
“I’m not allowed to say.”
“Seriously?”
“No, I’m just bullshitting you again.” A firmer pat on the sweater above the tat. “This is the oldest.”
He literally felt his heart start beating again. The way his life had been going lately, if there was an older bit of magic in the world, he could expect it on his doorstep at any time. “That’s a sick sense of humor you’ve got there; I can see why you were a demon’s favorite handmaiden.”
“Sticks and stones…” Ryne Cyratane flashed as she smiled. “… won’t actually touch me.”
“Lucky you. So if you’re walking around with the oldest magic in the world, then the convergence is here because you are? Nothing personal,” he added when she nodded, “but I wish you were somewhere else.”
“Too late now, things have started. And when I say things, I am, of course, referring to the Demonic Convergence eating holes through our reality into a myriad of hells. Bright side, though, with a wizard in the immediate area, the world stands a better chance.” Dark brows lifted as she grinned. “You wouldn’t wish a worse chance on the world, would you?”
He made a show of thinking about it but didn’t fool her.
“You’re a good man, Tony Foster.” Taking hold of his shoulders, she kissed him gently on both cheeks and murmured something in a language he didn’t know. “Sumerian blessing,” she told him stepping away. “Roughly translates as ‘the gods help those who help themselves.’ I left out the part about the goats. Redo the wards before you go to sleep—they won’t stop a Demonlord, but they might stop lesser demons.”
“Might?”
“Should.”
“Should’s not a lot more encouraging.”
“Best I’ve got.”
Ryne Cyratane flickered again as Leah went out the door. Head half turned, he seemed to be paying more attention to Leah’s surroundings than to his handmaiden although, since Tony was trying to get a better look at his ass, there may have been subtleties missed.
[Lifted from chapter two of Smoke and Ashes by Tanya Huff with some small edits.]
