Payback's a Witch (The Witches of Thistle Grove #1)(90)

“A fine sentiment,” the demon crooned, with another of those awful, spine-tingling smiles. In a streak of movement, she was on her feet, naked and stupidly gorgeous, a curtain of black silk hair draped over thick curves and long, smooth limbs. Her skin glowed like a paper lantern, as if lit from within. Too bad we’d started off on such a wrong foot; she probably had some killer beauty tips. “If I were, in fact, Malachus Azaranthinael.”

“If you are not, why do you appear in his stead?” I demanded, trying to enforce one final shred of protocol before this already wayward train went careening completely off the rails. Demons weren’t supposed to bend the rules like this; when you summon one by their true name, what you call is meant to be what you get.

“Because, as it happens, there is no Malachus,” she said, still grinning like the void, honest-to-goddess little flames dancing in her golden eyes. Sounds like something right out of a cheesy cartoon, but it sure didn’t feel clichéd when the abyss was staring you dead in the face. Chills crawled under my skin, crept into my knees—the type of nerve-jangling bullshit I lived for, the reason I went all in on such foolhardy antics as this in the first place. “There is, and ever was, only me . . . and the lies of Malachus I tell, to entice dim little deathspeakers like you into calling me up, unbound.”

I tried not to take being called dim too personally, and failed.

The books do tell you that daemonfolk lie easier than they breathe. By the sound of it, this one had invented a harmless-seeming demon as bait, embedded his name into the lore for gullible assholes like me to find, and then tied his summoning to herself, like one of those fugly deepwater anglerfish that dangle a little light for their prey. Which meant that once she appeared in answer to a Malachus summons, she’d be yanked earthside without any bindings in place.

Damn, I thought, with a grudging stab of admiration, well played. Demons were tricksters to the bone, and she’d gotten me good, fair and square.

“Deviously done,” I said, with a little dip of the head, making one last gamble. You’d be surprised how vain some of these tricky fuckers are, and how hard they fall for a little well-placed pandering. “And when they ask me into whose clever trap I stumbled, what fearsome name shall I say?”

She rolled her huge eyes, rosebud mouth pursed in exasperated disdain, like, Nice try, witch, but maybe get up earlier in the morning next time you try to put one over on me, eh?

“My true name is only mine to know, but you may call me . . .” she said, appearing in a shivery instant at the circle’s very edge, one fine-boned foot poised above the silver line, “Davara Circlebreaker.”

A tad on the nose? Perhaps. Ominous as fuck? No doubt.

In the spirit of experimentation, I raised my hands and flung a banishment charm at her, murmuring under my breath—followed by another, and another. She stayed staunchly corporeal, her inky smile only widening, her smooth form not even flickering under the assault.

“Oooh, Yaga’s Baneful Banishment, how quaint!” she squealed. “I have not seen that one in centuries!”

She pressed against the boundary, the air around her rippling like a heat mirage. The cellar trembled with the sheer force of her assault, little shock waves radiating out from the circle as her will fought hard against the barrier of mine, testing its give. My cluster of protective amulets had already turned searing against my chest, but even my fail-safe runes were badly outclassed; they weren’t going to keep me from getting soul-eaten by something of her caliber, not if she managed to break free.

I stumbled, barely keeping my feet, my heart pumping double time as uncut adrenaline crashed through my veins. If the demon got through me, she’d run roughshod all over Thistle Grove before someone else—probably my own mother, double fuck—managed to lock her down and banish her. Then I’d never live down the mortification of not having handled my own demonic business, not to mention whatever punishment the tribunal saw fit to impose on me.

That is, if I even lived long enough to worry about punishment.

“Not today, bitch,” I muttered under my breath, thinking on my feet. “I am not the one for this.”

I arranged my fingers into a different kind of conjuring, clouds of vaporous black seeping from my fingertips and gathering around my hands. You never really got used to the feel of ectoplasm, not even after years of handling it, its icy stickiness clinging like a noxious second skin. But my magic itself felt wild and slick, a quicksilver thread racing up my spine and churning giddy in my head.

Then came a headlong rush of ghosts, harkening to my call.

The demon blinked in confusion, as the whole host of shades that called The Bitters home began materializing around her one by one. Given that my ancestral demesne was nearly three centuries old, and impressively haunted at that, there were a lot of them. A mosh pit’s worth of hazy gray forms, tattered and nearly translucent, trailing smudgy limbs and writhing hair.

At first, they emanated only bemused annoyance, having been rudely yanked away from whatever ghostly business they’d been minding before I called on them. Then they noticed Davara Circlebreaker, still poised at the edge of my circle, a tiny wrinkle of concern now marring her smooth brow.

Their irritable rumbling abruptly changed pitch into a disgruntled hum—which escalated very, very quickly into the kind of blood curdling wail you could only really describe as “eldritch.”