The Demon Abraxas (24 page)

Ana felt herself falling apart; the world she knew shredding around her. His lips still on hers, Abraxas inhaled and she was drawn up into herself again. Her knees buckled and he caught her against his chest. Ana rested her cheek on his shoulder while his arms encircled her waist. Patterns of electricity and heat coursed through her.

“Oh my God,” she said. “It’s like that?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Because of who you are?”

“That’s the love of the divine for creation. Anyone who has eyes to see can look through that love.”

Ana couldn’t say anything. She shut her eyes and rested against Abraxas’s chest, thinking she might just stay there forever regardless of what happened in the rest of the world.

At some point the desert slipped away, and the feel of Abraxas’s body with it, and the couch rose under her again. When she opened her eyes on her living room, lying in a sunbeam, she felt as peaceful as she could ever remember feeling. Even the inside of her head sounded quiet. Nothing familiar looked the same. She went from room to room staring in wonder at the graceful arc of a lamp, the sheen on the floor tiles, the pleasure of a refrigerator to keep food cold and an oven to cook it, the miracle of the kitchen tap, the beauty of window glass and then outside the almost unbearable glory of trees.

* * *

When Sabel woke, it was already well into Sunday morning and she had two text messages from Ana, the first checking in and the second suggesting they meet for lunch. She gave her a quick call to pick a time and a place. On the phone, Ana sounded distracted, but when Sabel walked into the restaurant for lunch, she looked attentive, much more so than Sabel felt. Her dreams had been restless and leapt back and forth from demons to Ana.

“I ordered us an appetizer, I hope that’s okay,” Ana said as Sabel sat down. “I’ve been starving lately. I think Abraxas revs up my metabolism. How was the thing last night?”

“They took me up to a studio apartment and asked me to do a summoning with them.” Sabel looked around at the neighboring tables but Ana had positioned them well and it was unlikely that the other chatty diners would hear them. Of course if anyone did overhear, they’d probably think the two women were chatting about a book or movie. “The, um, demon confirmed that they’re right to think the other guy is with you.”

“Well that’s no worse.”

“I asked for the name of the leader.”

Ana sat forward. “And?”

“Johnson.”

She hit the table with her right palm. “Charles Johnson, it has to be!”

“There are a lot of people named Johnson in the world,” Sabel cautioned. “But I thought the same thing.”

“I wondered if Helen was involved with someone at the company. Kerry said she thought Helen originally got promoted because she was hooking up with an executive. I took it for sour grapes, but over time it seemed to ring true. Plus Johnson has been trying to get Detlefsen to agree to sell and there’s a lot of money in it if he does. It has to be him.”

It was hard for Sabel to gauge how impetuous Ana could be with this information. At times Ana seemed to understand the kind of information they needed to get before they could turn the summoners over to the police, and other times it looked like she was about to charge in with guns blazing.

“We can’t do anything until we have proof,” Sabel said.

The server arrived with a large, shallow, white bowl filled with mussels and steaming with the scents of wine and garlic.

“An appetizer?” Sabel said to Ana with a smile. She thought, but didn’t add aloud,
More like sex on a plate
. Muscles across her midback loosened up a bit and she leaned against the chair and let the small tense places she hadn’t been aware of slowly give up their death grip.

Ana grinned back and picked up a mussel. Sabel tried not to watch the strong line of her jaw as she tipped her head up and ate it.

“I like them better than oysters,” Ana said.

“You’re in a good mood.”

Ana’s cheeks colored and she glanced away. “I guess I’m getting used to all this a little. He’s not a bad guy for a…spirit, demon, whatever. I always felt like there was more to life, you know, and now this is all starting to make some kind of sense. When did you come out as a witch?”

“It’s hard to say,” Sabel said and then paused. This was the first time she’d been in public with someone to whom she could tell some of the real stories of her life. In the past, with other women, this was the point where she talked about discovering Wicca and other goddess religions and practicing them in secret during her last few years of high school. It was in the neighborhood of the truth, but it never felt really satisfying to talk about because she didn’t get to say: yes, magic is real and I can do it and maybe you could too.

Ana was waiting for her to say more and she smiled a little. “I don’t usually get to tell people the truth,” she said. “I don’t know where to start.”

“Maybe at the beginning?” Ana suggested.

“I’m not sure where that is. When I was quite young, I came back in time from an older age to prepare myself for what I would learn when I met the Hecatine witches. We work in a field of magic that deals with time and information, so the beginning is both before and after I met them.”

“You can time travel?”

“Not physically, but with my consciousness, yes. The easiest way is to connect with yourself through time, younger and older selves. Actually quite a few people do it without ever realizing it. When I hear stories of people who say that at a dark time in their lives they suddenly knew it was going to get better or they felt like some force was taking care of them—sometimes that’s their future self reaching back. When I was a kid and I needed help, that opened me up to having my own self come to me with aid. The only unusual part of my story is that when I was seventeen, I realized it was me who had been coming to help me and I started to use that power intentionally.”

“Did you ever cheat on tests by telling yourself the answers?” Ana asked with a mischievous grin.

“Once,” Sabel told her. “But it wasn’t very useful because I still had to learn all the answers and I like to learn. Mostly I gave myself spiritual practices to study and lots of reassuring talks until I could get to college.”

“Rough home life?”

“Not like yours,” Sabel said and then added, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I mean that mine was just restrictive. Magic was the only thing my parents didn’t control because they didn’t understand it…they didn’t see it as real.”

She didn’t know how to describe it to Ana. Her household hadn’t been strictly regimented but the expectations were so high and clear that there was little room for variance. The trap wasn’t obvious because she’d been born inside of it. Her parents always told her she could be anything she wanted, but they meant anything inside of a very narrow range of possibilities. Disappoint the family and she’d find herself a bright kid with no wage earning skills and no money—that was always clear.

“And yet you didn’t grow up to be a party animal.” Ana tried to keep her tone light, but Sabel saw the tightness around her eyes and kicked herself for bringing up Ana’s childhood.

“You just missed my midtwenties,” Sabel told her. “You’d be surprised.”

“Maybe you can take me back in time and show me.”

Sabel laughed. “I can’t time travel physically, though I wonder…”

“What do you do with magic?” Ana asked.

“I can stutter time a little, but that just looks like me moving quickly or anticipating what’s going to happen because I have more conscious time than you’re seeing. And if the temporal weather is just right I can do a few fancier tricks like slowing or speeding time in an area, like a room, or even stepping out of the timestream completely.”

“But Lily still got you in a headlock,” Ana pointed out.

“I was distracted by the part where you went through a window. Plus she’s pretty fast as a crossbreed.”

Sabel didn’t add that the magic triggered in Lily’s store when Ana went through the window also started the leash constricting in her chest. Some of her shortness of breath hadn’t been from Lily’s choke hold.

“You knew that about her?” Ana asked.

“Not until she had me in the headlock, but then it was obvious. She’s pretty strong for a plain human of her size.”

Sabel ate another mussel. They were incredibly good with the base layer of salty flavor from the mussels themselves overlaid with sweet tomato, pungent garlic and acidic wine.

“Should we skip entrees and get a second bowl of these?” she asked.

“I love the way you think,” Ana said and then turned away quickly looking for their server.

Sabel couldn’t hide her smile, but she transmuted it into a smaller gesture than the huge grin she felt. It just wasn’t the time, but she hoped there would be a time…

“So you can give yourself information from one time to another? Can’t you just tell yourself who the summoners are?” Ana asked when she had their order in and returned her attention to the table.

“I can only pass information that doesn’t change what already happened. I can’t change the timestream. So, for example, I couldn’t tell myself of a few weeks ago that you were going to be kidnapped because then I would have stopped something that, from our perspective now, has already happened. But I could tell myself that I was going to learn magic because I had already learned magic in the future to be able to tell myself that I was going to learn it.”

“That made almost no sense to me.”

Sabel laughed quietly. “It rarely does. I may not be able to tell myself who the summoners are because in the future I don’t know, but it’s equally possible that I do know and I can’t communicate back to this time. Not all times are equally easy to reach.”

“Do you know when you’ll die?” Ana asked. “That would be really creepy.”

Sabel shook her head. “No, a person’s death is a time that’s almost impossible to bridge into.”

“But if you talk to your future self and she’s like sixty, then you know you’ll live that long.”

“You can’t see the future clearly from your present. My future self can give me information but I don’t see her or know how old she is. And I think if I tried to tell myself about my death, the information simply wouldn’t pass. The timestream is very powerful and obeys its own rules.”

“Oh.” Ana sounded disappointed.

“If you keep asking me questions about time magic, we’re going to have to initiate you as a Hecatine witch.”

They finished the second plate of mussels while keeping the conversation to light topics, then split the bill and walked out of the restaurant into the shopping arcade to which it was attached.

“We need a way to get the police to search Johnson’s house,” Ana said as they wandered slowly down the colonnade. “I wonder if we could do an anonymous call or something.”

“It would be helpful to know exactly where he’s hiding the summoning stuff, otherwise we just tip him off. And if it’s not him or not at his house…”

“I could try talking to him on Monday, maybe drop some hints.”

“Dangerous.”

“But if it is him, he already knows I have Abraxas. Oooh, look at those boots.”

Ana stopped in front of a shop window and Sabel paused next to her. They were nice boots, but what she really noticed was that after a moment Ana leaned close enough that their shoulders touched. Then Ana’s fingers touched her palm and slid down until their fingers interlaced. Sabel squeezed her hand to show that the contact was more than welcome.

Their shoulders were already touching, Ana’s slightly higher than hers. She leaned into Ana and a days-old tension flowed out of her body. Then she felt the band across her chest start to constrict. She ignored it. The stupid leash and its hair-trigger sensor. Had it gone off when Abraxas stepped out of Ana in the bookstore? No, because she was standing at least five feet away from Sabel. But now this simple touch put Sabel close enough to the threatening power of a demon that the stupid thing decided it was a danger.

She dropped Ana’s hand and stepped away from her. The second band of the leash was beginning to close around her upper chest. The pain was blunt and diffused through her chest, but it already stopped her from taking full breaths.

“Can Abraxas protect you?” Sabel asked, trying to ignore the building pressure.

Ana paused and then answered, “He says he can, plus there will be people around.”

“Let’s think about it.”

She gestured to Ana to come with her and started walking in the direction of her car. All three bands were pressing on her now. Stepping away from Ana slowed the compression, but it wouldn’t stop and reverse until she could get home and apply the right magic, or until she passed out and some time elapsed, but she didn’t really want to collapse in the middle of a mall. How long did she have until she couldn’t talk?

She stopped outside the elevator to the parking garage. Her chest felt like someone was standing on it. From her lower ribs up to her throat, she ached and she was starting to fear she wouldn’t be able to keep the pain from showing on her face for much longer.

“Thanks for suggesting the mussels,” she managed. “I had a good time.”

“Me too.” Ana looked confused. “I’ll see you…?”

“Call me.”

She stepped into the elevator before Ana could try to hug her. When the doors closed, she put a hand to the wall to support herself. She was gasping in shallow breaths. If she had more air, she’d have cursed Josefene and this truly stupid magic.

* * *

When it came down to actually walking through the halls to Johnson’s office on Monday morning, all the bravado Ana had been building up over the course of Sunday leaked away. As soon as Sabel had said his name, Ana knew she wanted to confront him, but now with her heart pounding, she wondered if maybe Sabel had been right that they should have come up with a more circumspect plan. Sabel had tried to talk her out of it when she called her Sunday evening to see when they would meet up again.

Ana wanted to look Johnson in the eyes. On the bright side, the fact that he was Jacob made it even clearer that she could fully trust Detlefsen, which she’d wanted to do but had held herself back just in case.