The Demon Abraxas (21 page)

“A thousand-year conflict probably counts as more than ‘bullshit politics,’” Sabel said quietly without looking up, but Ana heard the smile in her voice. “And I should be going anyway.” She got to her feet and smoothly pulled a card out of her purse, offering it to Lily. “Please send me the bill for the window.”

The lines around Lily’s scowl softened a little and she took the card. “Can you tell me the Hecatines’ interest in this matter?” she asked in a neutral tone.

“It’s my interest,” Sabel said. “I asked for permission to help track the summoners and to protect Ana. The others don’t want to get involved.”

“Good. Will you let me know what you plan to report back to them?”

“It’s enough to have to report to one authority,” Sabel said. “How about I just let you know if I plan to tell them anything about the Sangkesh in this city? Not that they don’t already know. Will that satisfy you?”

Lily nodded.

“And I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know your plans for Abraxas.”

“I expect Ana will keep you up-to-date on that,” Lily said, a note of tension creeping back into her voice.

“You know what would be great,” Ana said, fed up with their terse back and forth. “Someone should really set up a diversity training seminar for the witches and the Sangkesh demons.”

Lily’s dark expression didn’t change, but Ana was rewarded with a suppressed smile from Sabel.

Ruben’s agent finally came through with a small part for him and he wanted to fly down to LA on Saturday and party there for the weekend. Although Ana had only known Lily for a week, she called and asked if she’d consider staying at the house with her for a few days. She usually liked being alone, but if the summoners came back, she wanted backup. Plus, she hoped that having Lily around to work on moving Abraxas to an appropriate vessel would speed things up.

She had trouble thinking of anyone else she’d rather have stay in the house with her, other than Sabel. The two friends she’d stayed close with from college were both in committed relationships and it would be weird to ask them over. She hadn’t even called them about the whole kidnapping and demon summoning situation because she hadn’t a clue where to begin.

Lily showed up on Saturday evening with carryout Indian food and a stack of books. After eating, they settled in the living room with tea. The file from Helen’s apartment was open on the table and Ana worked on filling in her matrix of information from the articles: who they featured, where the story was from, what success had been detailed. She felt Lily watching her and looked up.

Lily raised an eyebrow, and Ana was taken aback by the structure of her face. In the bookstore, she thought she was imagining it, but Lily’s features had shifted from rather good- looking to plainly beautiful. She had thick, bow-shaped lips in an oval face. Her dark eyes, set close together, augmented each other in a singular obsidian stare emphasized by thick, gracefully curved brows and light olive skin. Her high round cheeks disappeared under the smiles that came slowly but filled her face. Ana blinked and wiped a hand across her eyes. She appreciated any beautiful woman, but she didn’t usually fixate on the straight ones—there wasn’t any point.

“Cut that out,” she muttered to Abraxas.

“What is he doing?” Lily asked in the curious tone of a scholar. Even her throaty voice sounded good to Ana.

“I’m pretty sure he’s sweet on you. Every time I look at you, you get more attractive.”

Lily laughed and reached across the space between them, holding her fingertips toward Ana. She felt her own arm tremble and then her hand lifted itself and reached toward Lily. When their fingers met, a cloud slowly blossomed up from the touch. Lily slid her fingers across Ana’s hand, the pads of skin soft against the warm palm. The cloud between them became thicker, rising up like a plume of smoke, wavering but not dissipating. In it, Ana could begin to see features, a man’s chest and the beginning of arms, a trunk that hinted at legs. She strained to see the face but could not make out features, only the darkness of a mouth and two smaller hollows that evoked eyes.

“Not bad,” Lily said. “Think you’ll be able to do it on your own soon without flame to draw from?”

“Maybe,”
Abraxas’s voice came very softly from the heart of the cloud.

“Can you come into me?” Lily asked. She closed the book she’d been reading and set it on the coffee table.

“Hold on to Ana,” Abraxas told Lily.

Lily’s fingers closed firmly around her hand and she felt a rush of wind go out of her. Lily’s dark eyes flicked shut, leaving Ana sitting on the edge of her seat, hand extended, achingly alone. With her free hand she reached up and touched her forehead. She wanted to call Abraxas’s name, to see if he would answer her, but she was afraid either that he wouldn’t or that he would come back from Lily to her.

She felt deflated, less of herself. Having Abraxas in her head seemed like such a bother at times, but she missed knowing that there was another voice she could call on, a wise companion who could give opinions without judging who she was. She’d not seen so clearly before how amazing it was that Abraxas could live in her head, hear her thoughts, and still try to teach her everything he was teaching her. She didn’t deserve it. She’d been a jerk to him, trying to get rid of him, shutting him out.

There had been an ever-present sense that she’d never noticed until now that she was all right with him. Perhaps it came from knowing his mind while he knew hers. She couldn’t exactly read his thoughts, but they shared the same mental space. He couldn’t lie to her or hide from her. With every other person in her life, she knew they kept something hidden away from her, away from other people, and with Abraxas she had nothing hidden.

“Abraxas,” she said quietly.

Lily opened her eyes and Ana, through the connection of Lily’s hand, could feel Abraxas looking at her.

I’m here
, he said, once again inside her head with her.

“Incredible,” Lily said aloud as Abraxas streamed between them, back into Ana’s body.

Lily shook her head and dropped Ana’s hand abruptly, running her palm thoughtfully across her own thigh. Ana rubbed her thumb over the tips of her fingers as if she could feel traces of Abraxas’s path back into her body. Her skin was a half-degree warmer than usual, but otherwise no different.

“Why me?” Ana asked. “And why you? Would this work for any two people?”

“It took enormously powerful magic to put Abraxas in you. I’ve been thinking about it and I think that Helen’s death had to be a significant factor. That’s mainly why it’s so hard to get him out of you. But he can visit me because of my demon blood.”

“You?” Ana started and then didn’t know what to ask.

“I’ll show you,” Lily said. “Provided you don’t tell the witch.”

Ana shook her head. That didn’t sound like a good idea. She was still processing the altercation at the bookstore.

“She already knows you’re part demon,” Ana said. “After the fight, she said you were too strong.”

“You’ll find it hard to talk with her about this anyway, and even harder to tell people who don’t understand magic,” Lily said. “This world that we share, the material world, it resists change by magic because…well, that’s a very long story. There are other worlds where magic is very natural, the Unseen World as they’re called in the aggregate, but not when you’re dealing with material substances. But there have been rare times when a fundamental shift occurs in what is possible here.”

She reached down and began unlacing one of her boots. The few times Ana had seen her, Lily was wearing heavy boots as was the style of the day. Maybe a little heavier than a small frame like hers would support, but not outside the bounds of taste, though Ana had wondered why a woman in her mid-forties who owned a business was wearing Goth-girl boots. As Lily unlaced one and started to pull it off, Ana saw that she wore some kind of very thick cotton sock, and just below the edge of the sock, as it folded down in the removal process, her skin became thick and very brown, creased almost like the skin of a crocodile.

Lily pulled the sock all the way off and flexed her foot. A little yelp escaped Ana’s mouth before she got her hand over it. Lily had three thick toes that extended most of the length of the foot, ending in talons that looked like small horns. A tiny toe extended off the heel of the foot. It looked almost like a bird’s foot, only the toes were much thicker.

“What the hell?” Ana said under her breath.

“Two thousand nine hundred and seventy-four years ago, with the building of the Temple, King Solomon altered the material world so that demons could take physical form,” Lily told her. “There’s great debate about whether he understood that this would allow them to breed with humans. I like to think that he did because it meant the Sangkesh, the protectors, literally have skin in the game.”

“But it means that the bad ones do too, right?”

“They can but, as you saw with Drake, a lot of them prefer to steal their bodies. The Sangkesh are much better at working with half-breeds like me.”

“One of your parents was actually a demon?”

“My mother. Demons reproduce in a couple of ways. There are those who have manifest forms very unlike humans; their bodies consist of elements like fire, water, sand, stone, and so on, and they produce other demons like Abraxas. Usually when those demons reproduce like that it weakens them, so they tend not to do it very often. Then there are the demons who are closer to humans in appearance that can actually, more or less, interbreed with humans. That’s where I come from. You know, you have some demon blood too. You’d have to in order to be able to host Abraxas and get through everything you’ve been through.”

Ana got up from the couch and stared at her hands. “But I’m not…” she gestured at Lily’s feet.

“You need to be at least one-quarter demon to have any real physical signs, useful as they can be.” Lily lifted one leg and curled the toes of the foot together. “For you, one-sixteenth probably means you’ve got a temper and you tend not to live the life that people expect you to live.”

The idea of having a demon relative felt frightening and exciting at the same time. She never did want to live the life others expected of her. She loved freedom and she had always craved something she couldn’t name that wasn’t provided in her normal life. It felt like a longing for a deep, resonating connection to life itself. Was that from the demon blood?

She also loved the physical strength, energy and endurance that Abraxas brought her, but she kept wondering if there was a cost. Being raised with the ideas of demons as lying, evil creatures was hard to shake.

Demon blood is strong, passionate, disruptive. Do these not describe you? It is not evil,
Abraxas told her. After a moment, he added:
Ask her how old she is
.

“He wants me to ask how old you are,” Ana said, perplexed.

“Ninety-two,” Lily said.

“Oh,” Ana heard herself say in a small voice. She stared at the faint lines by Lily’s eyes, the smooth, creamy skin firm over her high cheeks. “You don’t look much over forty.”

“Demons are long-lived,” Lily said. “If I keep my nose out of trouble, I plan to make close to two hundred. You don’t have enough demon blood for that, but I suspect you’ll be pretty spry in your eighties and nineties.”

“If I make it that long,” Ana said.

“Allying with that witch won’t help,” Lily said.

“Shit, what do you two have against each other anyway? You never even met before yesterday. Is the whole demons and witches thing that serious?”

“It’s over a thousand years of serious,” Lily said. Ana made a circular motion with her finger to show that Lily should keep talking and she did. “We look after things. For millennia the Sangkesh have hunted the harmful demons and protected humanity. I won’t bore you with hundreds of years of history. The Hecatines intervene when it suits them and they haven’t hesitated to kill Sangkesh and even side with the Shaidans if that favors their goals. They perverted the magic of Solomon to create their own creatures to serve them, the way Solomon gave the demons form. They will bend anything to suit their ends.”

Ana thought about Drake’s eyes as he stood in her cubicle. He saw her as a tool or an obstacle, not a person. She knew that Sabel could never be like that, but what about the people she worked for? What were they using Sabel for and did she know?

* * *

Gabriel Leonard, the investor turned demon-summoner, called and invited Sabel to “meet his friends.” It wasn’t her idea of a thrilling Saturday night, but Ana had that Sangkesh demon bookstore owner at her place and Sabel didn’t relish spending time around her.

The details about the meeting seemed fairly safe on the surface. These men had no reason to suspect that she was connected to Ana, and the meeting was in a public place. Plus Sabel was straight up angry now that she knew the Sangkesh were mucking around in Ana’s life. This was their city, they should have this handled already. How hard could it be to shut down one demon and send another back where he belonged? She had the impression that they were toying with Ana or using her as some kind of experiment. The sooner she could wrap this up, the sooner she could be back to the part about suggesting that she and Ana have a drink together and laugh about all of this. She loved hearing Ana laugh.

It was already late on Saturday and she sent Ana an email rather than a text telling her that she was going to meet the summoners. Ideally, Ana would check her email in the morning and Sabel would have sent a second message by then telling her that everything was okay. No point in worrying her now when she couldn’t do anything to help.

Sabel went downtown for the meeting dressed in one of her most conservative gray pantsuits and wearing the little pearls that were both beautiful and lightly magicked. Leonard waited for her outside the door to the restaurant. They were close to his office building and she wondered if he’d come from there. He was also in a suit.

“Ms. Young,” he said. “We’re going around the corner.”