Pale Demon. Kim Harrison

it settled over him, not too tight, not too loose. Oh. My. God. He looked good, unaware that I was watching. His hair was mussed where he’d tried to slick it back after wiping off the blood, and it was all I could do not to reach out and smooth it. My hand gripped the scrying mirror tighter as he tucked the black cotton shirt behind his waistband in a move that was both casual and intimate.

      Upon noticing my eyes on him, he stopped, a mistrustful wariness coming over him. Motions sharp, he zipped his suitcase closed and slammed the trunk shut. “What can I do to help?” he asked.

      “You help?” Jenks said, flying since Trent had shut the trunk out from under him. “You’re the reason we’re in this trouble. The day we need your help—”

      “Relax, Jenks,” I interrupted. Sure, Trent had sicced the coven on me, but he wasn’t the one getting filmed being dragged down the street by a demon. Jenks made a hum of discontent, and I gripped my scrying mirror tighter, it feeling slippery in the sun. “There’ve got to be pixies here,” I said, leaning to look at the gas station overhang. “Can you talk to them? Find out where the local big bad uglies are so I don’t do my magic on their doorstep?”

      Face screwing up, Jenks shifted his wings in sullen affirmation. His hand rose to slap his bicep to make sure he had on his red bandanna, then dropped to rest on the butt of his sword, again on his hip thanks to Ivy. “Sure,” he said, buzzing off with a noisy wing clatter. “Tink’s a Disney whore, Rache. Why don’t you start thinking with something other than your hormones?”

      “Hey!” I shouted after him, stiffening when he was suddenly surrounded by pixies in brown shirts and pants. They had spears pointed at him, but they soon dropped them and he went with them willingly. Slowly I exhaled. Trent scuffed his boots, and I looked over the abandoned gas station. A car went by, looking a thousand miles away on the overpass.

      Hiking my shoulder bag up, I headed for the man-made shade of the overhang. Trent moved to stay with me, dropping his bloody shirt and wet wipes into the trash can along the way. “Ah, I should apologize for not doing this sooner,” I said, feeling a pang of guilt.

      “You were scared,” Trent said, his lofty attitude making my eyes narrow.

      “I’m not talking about yesterday,” I said tartly, guilt vanishing. “I mean the last two months. Al wouldn’t tell me the curse, and it took me a while to find it.”

      Trent glanced at me, his pace going stiff. “It’s a new curse,” he stated flatly. “I thought you would simply untwist the one you put on me.”

      “I didn’t curse you,” I said sharply. “I took ownership of the one Minias claimed you with. But don’t worry. This one won’t hurt. I’ll take the smut.” Crap, I’m taking his smut.

      “Ah …,” he started, and I scuffed to a halt, my toes edging shadow as I squinted at him in the sun. Damn, he looked good in that T-shirt, and looked even better out of it. Stop it, Rachel.

      “I’m not going to ask you to pay for it,” I said, tired. “I’m so covered with smut that this little bit won’t show. On you, though …” I slipped under the gas station’s overhang, appreciating the cooler temp. “We don’t want to jeopardize your bid for mayor, do we?” Okay, that might have been catty, but everything about this bothered me. Pulling my magnetic chalk out, I dropped my shoulder bag. “How’s that going anyway?” I asked as I set my scrying mirror beside it. “The Weres have had the mayoral seat for over fifteen years.”

      Trent edged under the overhang, his eyes on the holes in the roof. “Not as well as I’d like,” he said, a practiced polish coming across with his words, as if he had been saying it a lot lately. “I’m writing off the Were demographic. There’s been a marked increase in registered Were voters in the last two months, which will make things difficult. If I knew it was an intentional block by you, I’d be irritated.”

      He went silent, spinning to keep me in his sight as I walked around him, bent almost double to trace a circle on the dirty concrete. Straightening, I kicked out an old pop can, and sank to the ground. His eyebrows rose, and I shrugged. “Have a seat,” I said, indicating a spot about four feet in front of me.

      Still silent, he bent his knees and found his way to the ground in a graceful move that was as far away from the boardroom as his present clothes were. He had an almost animal-like grace now that he wasn’t in a suit, and something twisted in me. Stop it, Rachel. Jenks was right. I thought way too much with my hormones. But seeing Trent sitting cross-legged in jeans, that thin black T-shirt, and blood-splattered boots, I was struck by how quickly the businessman was slipping away. It kind of worried me—even as I liked it.

      Trent’s gaze dropped from the broken roof to me, and I warily shuffled my things around, trying to figure out what was going through his mind. He’d known Ceri for almost a year now, and her old-school, black-magic-using elf mentality had been rubbing off on him. She’d believed demon magic was a tool. A dangerous tool, but a tool. Trent had been taught to fear it, much like the coven had. But clearly that was changing. I didn’t know what he could do anymore, and it moved him from a familiar threat to something I had to be wary of.

      Looking across the two-lane road, I whistled for Jenks, getting a burst of green dust signifying that we were good. On the horizon, the waxing moon rose in the bright light of afternoon. At the car, Ivy was busy cleaning the backseat with her special orange wipes. Nervous, I wiped my palms on my thighs. The wind moved my hair, and I tucked the strands, still caked with the dust of the arch, behind an ear. Ivy wanted to drive all night, but I wanted to rent a room to shower, if nothing else. I felt icky.

      “I meant it when I said I didn’t mean to drag this out to the last few days,” I said as I pawed through my bag. “Al wouldn’t tell me how to do the curse, just gave me a book. Demon texts don’t have indexes, so I had to look page by page. It wasn’t in there. But it does have a page or two with info like substitutions, sun and moon tables, conversions …”

      I found the index card with the Latin Trent was going to have to say, and I handed it to him. He automatically took it, his expression one of surprise. “The curse to free a familiar was—”

      “At the back with the metric to English conversions, yes,” I said sourly. “I guess they don’t do this often.” I set five candles on the cement. They were from my last birthday cake. How sad was that? The finger stick and shaft of redwood were next. I had a moment of panic until I found the vial of transfer media. I could buy it, sure, but not anywhere near here.

      I twisted where I sat to reach my scrying mirror, setting it between us as the platform on which to do the curse. Trent looked at the dark wine-colored hues that it reflected the world in. His boots shifted. He was nervous. He should be.

      “You need the mirror for this?” he asked, though it was obvious.

      “Yes,” I said, thinking the plate-size piece of etched glass was beautiful for all its dark purpose. Etched with a stick of yew, the pentagram and associated glyphs were how I accessed the demon database in the ever-after. It also let me chat with my demon teacher, Algaliarept. I guess you could say it was an interdimensional cell phone that ran on black magic, and since this curse needed to be registered, I’d have to use it. Suddenly suspicious, I asked, “Why?”

      Trent’s eyes fixed on mine, too innocent. “I was remembering having used it to talk to Minias. It wasn’t hard.”

      I flicked the top off the finger stick with my thumb and jabbed myself. The brief pain was familiar, and I massaged three drops of blood into the transfer media. “Demon magic never is,” I said softly as they went plinking in and the expected redwood scent was quickly overshadowed by a whiff of burnt amber. I glanced at Trent, hoping he hadn’t noticed. “That’s why you pay for it the hard way. He’s dead, by the way. Minias. Newt killed him.”

      Suddenly tired, I slumped. “I can’t get the familiar bond annulled,” I admitted, knowing he wasn’t going to be happy. “The best I can do is file an emancipation curse. That’s why I need the mirror.”

      Sure enough, Trent clenched