Chapter 1
Adrenaline fired in my veins, intensifying my senses. My pulse throbbed in my ears, jumping nervously, and air rushed through my nose with each deliberately deep breath. Tension infused my muscles as I held my stare on my opponent.
Lounging on the opposite side of the coffee table, the demon watched me with softly glowing red eyes. The living room lamp bathed his warm skin, toffee brown with a reddish undertone, and his long, thin tail coiled across the carpet, the barbed end twitching.
On the table between us were two stacks of playing cards—and the prize. The plastic container held four fat cinnamon buns from a nearby bakery, the tops drizzled with white icing.
I shifted my attention to my cards: the two of hearts and the queen of spades. To win, I had to play both before my opponent could empty his hand.
Zylas flicked his two cards as he studied me.
Entertaining a demon wasn’t easy. He hated anything that involved a screen, and convincing him to try board or card games had been a losing battle—until I realized the missing ingredient. He didn’t want to play games. He wanted to win games, and winning wasn’t any fun without a prize to claim.
“It’s your turn,” I pointed out.
A corner of his mouth lifted, flashing a sharp canine. He brushed a finger across the top of his cards, then plucked one out and set it on the discard pile. The jack of hearts. He’d skipped my turn.
I gritted my teeth as he tossed down his last card, emptying his hand.
“Vh’renith,” he declared smugly. “I win.”
Clenching my jaw even tighter, I swept up the stock and discard piles. “That makes two wins for you, and two for me. The fifth will be the tiebreaker.”
“The next winner gets the food,” he agreed.
I shuffled the cards more thoroughly than necessary, just in case he’d come up with ways to cheat. He was a demon, so I couldn’t rule out the possibility.
“I did not cheat, drādah.”
“Stop reading my mind.”
“Stop yelling your thoughts at me.”
I froze in mid-shuffle. “Wait. You—” I gasped. “You are cheating! You can read my mind, so you know my cards and what I’m planning to do!”
He snorted. “I do not know your cards.”
“But you can read my mind, so that means—”
“I do not know your cards.”
At the hint of a growl in his voice, I snapped my mouth shut. Demons didn’t lie—and could detect lies when others spoke them—and he hated it when I suggested he was being untruthful.
I dealt the cards. “If you can hear my thoughts, why don’t you know my cards?”
He slid his off the coffee table and fanned them out. “If I heard every ka’an thing in your head, I would not be able to think.”
“What does ka’an mean?”
“Turn the first card.”
I flipped the top card off the stock to start the discard pile. “You know what I’m thinking all the time. You always notice when I …”
Trailing off with a blush, I cleared my throat and grabbed my cards.
“When you insult me in your head, na?” he asked slyly.
“See? You do know what I’m thinking.”
He dropped the two of diamonds on the discard pile. “Only what you want me to know.”
I plucked a pair of cards off the stock and organized my bulky hand, annoyed by his early advantage. “What do you mean, you only know what I want you to know?”
“Take your turn.”
I played the jack of diamonds—skipping his turn—then the ace of diamonds and ace of hearts. With that, we had an equal number of cards again. Much better.
He scanned his hand. “Why do you think I know everything in your head?”
Frowning over his question, I almost missed him play a card. His ability to read my mind was something I tried not to think about too hard, but I had noticed he didn’t react to my every thought. I’d assumed he was tuning me out so my inner dialogue wouldn’t drive him crazy.
I discarded a card onto the pile. “You always seem to know what I’m thinking.”
“Because I can hear you, or because I can guess?”
Guess? He couldn’t be guessing what I was thinking. “You respond to my thoughts as if I’m talking to you.”
“When you are thinking at me. Sometimes I hear other things, but I do not hear what you do not want me to know.”
My mouth dropped open.
“Take two cards, drādah.”
I looked down at the pile. A jack of hearts peeked out from behind a two of hearts. He had only three cards left. I drew two cards from the stock, added them to my hand, then slapped down an eight. “I choose spades.”
He played the nine of spades. Two cards left in his hand.
“You’re saying you can’t hear my thoughts, but only when I don’t want you to hear them?” I asked suspiciously as I rearranged my cards, planning my next move while simultaneously dissecting his expression. “How can you tell if you’re not hearing things I think?”
He said nothing, waiting for my play, so I tossed down the two of spades and the two of clubs. His mouth thinned as he drew four cards, putting him at six and me at four.
After a moment’s thought, he laid down an eight. “Diamonds.”
I slapped my second eight down. “Spades again.”
He scowled at his hand, then drew a card. I played another spade, leaving me with the jack and six of spades. As long as he didn’t change the suit, I could play them both on my next turn and win our tiebreaker.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I accused as he scrutinized his options.
His scarlet gaze rose to me. “There are many things you think that I do not know. Like your face, drādah, and how it changes color.”
My eyes popped.
“Your skin turns red,” he mused as he leisurely drew a card from the stock. “Your breath grows quick. Your heart beats faster. Your scent changes …” He canted his head, observing my reaction. “You stare at me, and there are thoughts in your eyes, but I hear nothing.”
My mouth opened and closed, and I could feel the telltale heat rising in my cheeks.
His voice dropped to a husky murmur. “What are you thinking now, drādah?”
“N-nothing.”
His eyelids lowered, hooding his eyes. “Do not lie to me.”
I gulped and stammered, “Wh-whose turn is it?”
“Your turn.”
I snatched a card from my hand and tossed it down. As it hit the pile, I realized it was the six of spades. I was supposed to play my jack first to skip his turn! I would’ve won!
He fanned out his seven cards, watching me with calculating eyes, then played the six of diamonds over my six of spades, changing the suit.
I drew a card—the five of spades.
“What are you hiding?”
My attention shot back to him. “Wh-what?”
He played a diamond. “When your face changes color and your breath comes fast, is that because of me?”
“No!”
“Lying again, drādah.”
Crap. Fighting my intensifying blush, I yanked a card off the stock. The last eight of the deck! Now we were talking.
He played another diamond, reducing his hand to four. “Why do you guard these thoughts? You do not hide other thoughts about me.”
“It’s none of your business,” I declared as I slapped down my eight. “Spades.”
And with that, I won. With no more eights, he couldn’t change the suit, and on my next turn, I would play the jack and five of spades, emptying my hand.
As I clutched my winning pair, he fanned out his remaining four cards. Two jacks had been played, and the third was in my hand. Even if he skipped my turn once, I’d still win. The only way he could win was if he—
He placed the seven of spades on the pile. Then he put the seven of diamonds on top of it. Then he laid the seven of clubs on top of that. My eyes narrowed to slits as he held up his final card.
“No,” I growled.
He dropped the seven of hearts on top of the pile, emptying his hand.
“No way!” I yelled, flinging my two cards into the air. With those four cards, he would’ve won no matter which suit I’d chosen.
He flashed a grin and pulled the cinnamon buns across the table. “Vh’renithnās.”
He’d only just learned the game, yet he’d beaten me three times in a row. Leaving the cards where they were, I pushed to my feet, fuming. Maybe I was a sore loser, but he was already bigger and faster and stronger and more cunning and he had an eidetic memory. He shouldn’t be better at cards too. It wasn’t fair.
As I stormed past him, he caught my wrist and pulled me backward. One arm flailing, I lost my balance and fell—landing squarely in his lap.
My blush reignited and I shoved away from him. He wrapped an arm around my waist, holding me down, and his warm breath stirred my hair.
“You missed it, drādah,” he breathed in my ear. “Your moment of dh’ērrenith.”
Dh’ērrenith—the demonic word for certain victory.
“If you can’t read my mind,” I muttered, fighting the urge to squirm against his immovable strength, “how do you know I was going to win?”
“Do not let your opponent distract you.”
Had he brought up the mind-reading thing to fluster me? I swallowed the hysterical laugh bubbling in my throat and tugged at his encircling arm. “Let me go.”
Instead of obeying, he slid the carton of cinnamon buns off the table and dropped it on my lap. “We will share the prize.”
“You want to share?” Him? Mr. Selfish?
“We will share … if you explain what makes your face change to red.”
“What?” I shoved hard, twisting free from his arm. The cinnamon bun container tumbled to the floor. “What kind of offer is that?”
“You lost. I will share my prize, but I want something else.”
“Then keep your prize,” I grumped, straightening my sweater. I stalked to my bedroom, but as I stepped through the door, I couldn’t resist glancing over my shoulder.
Zylas already had his teeth buried in an icing-drizzled bun. He angled his head, catching my eye. More heat rushed into my face and I fled into my room, shutting the door tightly behind me.
Breathing hard for no reason, I dropped onto my bed and rubbed my cheeks with both hands. Why was I so bashful? I shouldn’t be blushing like this. Zylas was a demon—a demon with no respect for personal boundaries. The more his invasions of my space annoyed me, the happier he seemed.
I lowered my hands from my face, a smile pulling at my lips. This time, though, he’d overplayed his hand. What he’d revealed had been well worth the embarrassment.
He couldn’t read all my thoughts.
How much sleep had I lost worrying about what he could hear in my head or how his demon brain interpreted it all? If he was in the dark about everything I preferred to keep private, that meant he didn’t know why I blushed when he touched me, or why he sometimes caught me staring at him, or why I’d freaked out when he’d stripped us half-naked in a storm drain.
Especially that last incident. I really hoped he had no clue about that one.
Feeling newly cheerful, I fished under my bed and dragged out a thin metal case. Time to get to work.
“Egeirai, angizontos tou Athanou, lytheti,” I declared, my hand splayed across the cool steel top.
The box lit up with white runes, and I opened the lid. The Athanas Grimoire lay on top, its worn leather cover shiny from handling—though little of it recent. Carefully lifting out the book, I collected my notebook from underneath it, stacked it and the grimoire on my pile of reference texts, and carried everything into the living room.
Zylas had shifted to the sofa, lying sideways across it as he shoved half a fluffy cinnamon bun into his mouth.
“You’re going to choke,” I warned him.
Ignoring me, he swallowed his mouthful without chewing.
I tidied the deck of cards, then spread my books out and sat cross-legged behind the coffee table, using the sofa as a backrest. Zylas’s tail hung off the cushions beside me.
Tucked inside my notebook were my mother’s notes and translations, but I’d yet to figure out which pages of the grimoire they corresponded with. I shifted them aside to reveal my translation of the first page of the grimoire. Quiet awe slid through me every time I looked at the list.
Fourteen names stretching back over four thousand years, all belonging to my ancestors. Each sorceress had taken on the meticulous task of recopying the aging grimoire to preserve its knowledge, and I would be the fifteenth name on that list. The grimoire had last been recopied over three hundred years ago, the longest gap in its history.
As I scanned the list, my attention caught on a name: Myrrine Athanas. She was the fifth sorceress to have copied the grimoire, an ancestor from millennia ago.
Lower lip caught between my teeth, I flipped back to my mother’s notes and read the top page.
Insertions from Myrrine Athanas—direct descendant of Anthea??
3 5 passages added to her grimoire copy, not from original book
Journal entries?
Could be more, need to check to end
Myrrine mentions Λευκάς – Leukás?
-> Leucadia, island in the Ionian Sea on the west coast of Greece
1000-700 BC?
Was she the first summoner to disobey the 12 warning???
I reread the last line several times. When I’d reviewed her notes before, I’d assumed “12 warning” was supposed to be “12 warnings” and she’d missed a letter. Figuring I’d eventually find these warnings, I hadn’t paid much attention to the note. But what if her quick scrawl didn’t contain an error but was her shorthand?
12 warning … twelfth warning … Twelfth House warning.
Pulling the grimoire closer, I carefully turned the fragile pages. The ancient paper, cracked and stained, tore easily and I didn’t want to add to the damage. Finally, I found the section I wanted—the demon Houses. I didn’t need a translation to recognize the First House. The illustration of a winged demon, with long horns, a muscular build, and thick tail with a heavy plate on the end, looked eerily similar to Tahēsh, the escaped demon that had nearly killed me and Zylas three months ago.
I flipped past the first eleven Houses and stopped on the final one. An illustration of Zylas’s doppelganger filled part of the page, and beneath the House name were two sentences written in precise strokes with an ancient pen. I’d translated them already.
Never summon from the Twelfth House. For the trespass of this sacred covenant, the sons of Vh’alyir will destroy you.
Could that be the warning my mother had referenced? Did she think Myrrine Athanas had summoned a Vh’alyir demon?
“Zylas?” I glanced over my shoulder. “Didn’t you say no demon of your House has ever been summoned before?”
He sleepily cracked one eye open. “Var.”
“Are you sure? Could a Vh’alyir have been summoned a really long time ago?”
“I do not know.” When I continued to look at him hopefully, he released a huffing breath. “Maybe. Most stories of our House are forgotten. Other demons say we are never summoned, but they maybe would not know if some few of our Dīnen disappeared long ago.”
Only demon kings—the Dīnen—could be summoned to Earth, a fact which I suspected was unknown to most Demonica practitioners. I might be the only human on the planet who knew we were stealing demon leaders to enslave as fighting puppets.
I tucked my hair behind my ear. “Why have your stories been forgotten?”
“The old Vh’alyir demons are all gone. Dead.” He gazed at the ceiling, his eyes seeing another world. “Our history died too. We are only what we are now.”
“What are you now?”
He closed his eyes again. “I know no stories. My sire died too soon to teach me.”
A memory pricked my subconscious, something else he’d told me, but before I could chase the feeling, he added brusquely, “All demons of my House are young and zh’ūltis. They do not know stories either.”
If the Vh’alyir House didn’t know their own history, maybe a Dīnen had been summoned and the current generation had forgotten about it. Myrrine had lived a very long time ago, even by demon standards—whatever those were.
I shuffled through my mother’s notes to another page that referenced Myrrine Athanas. Returning to the grimoire, I searched for any mention of the ancient sorceress. Probably futile, considering the length of the grimoire and the illegibility of some pages, but …
In the back half of the book, I turned past an endless section of complicated arcane arrays and their accompanying instructions, full of crossed-out sections and notations—that would be fun to translate—and found a long list of incantations.
Was it just me, or did this page feel different?
I peered at the edge. Were two pages stuck together? I rubbed the corner between my finger and thumb, and the edges parted. With painstaking care, I peeled the pages apart and laid them flat. On one side was the completed array that went with the marked-up instructions, and on the facing page was an illustration of a medallion.
It vaguely resembled an infernus. The artist had drawn both sides, with a tiny but complex array filling one face. The medallion’s other face displayed spiky markings in an outer ring around eleven sigils.
In the center was a twelfth sigil—Zylas’s House emblem.
My heart beat faster as I leaned over the page. A line of text, four words long, titled the illustration, but I couldn’t read it. It wasn’t Ancient Greek, Latin, or any language I recognized. What did it say?
“Imailatē Vīsh et Vh’alyir.”
I jumped. I hadn’t heard him move, but Zylas was sitting up. He reached past me, his arm brushing my shoulder, and touched the line of illegible text.
“Imailatē Vīsh et Vh’alyir,” he repeated. “Magic Amulet of Vh’alyir.”
It was written in demonic?
“A magical item of Vh’alyir?” I twisted to look at him. “What is it?”
“I do not know.”
“But it’s named after your House.” The only other text on the page was a short line scrawled under the drawing—this one in Ancient Greek. Excitement fizzed along my nerves as I flipped to a blank page in my notebook and picked up my pencil. It didn’t take me long to translate the line.
ὁ ὅρμος ὁ ἀπολωλώς ἁπάντων ἐστιν ἡ κλείς
– Μυρρίνη Ἀθάνας
The lost amulet is the key to everything.
– Myrrine Athanas
“The lost amulet,” I whispered, “is the key … to everything? What does she mean, everything?”
Zylas frowned at the page. “How is it lost?”
“If Myrrine wrote this note, I guess the amulet went missing during or before her time.” I slumped back against the sofa. “Key to everything or not, it’s no use if it’s been lost for millennia.”
“But it is not lost.” He pointed at the array-marked side of the illustration. “This imailatē was around Tahēsh’s neck before I killed him.”
--
Hunting Fiends for the Ill-Equipped
The Guild Codex: Demonized / Book Three
Copyright © 2020 by Annette Marie
www.annettemarie.ca
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