Personal Demon (27 page)

No instigator of this horror on any mortal cop’s radar. And if anybody in the magical community knew anything, Selena would have the information out of them by now. Cagey, this demon master. Damn.

Ivy was so scared she couldn’t do this.

“So what’s this news you have, Selena?”

“We’ve nailed down the identity of the man Gacy’s spirit is possessing. A man named Martin Cruszek was reported missing by his wife two weeks ago. He owns a bakery, but his wife says he was always a little psychic. One morning he took off his apron and walked out. In front of witnesses, so there’s been no suspicion of foul play. In fact, suicide was suspected. Witnesses said he said something about returning to the river.”

“This Cruszek is the man Ian bailed out of jail.”

“Yes. With IDs on both men, it’s easier to find them. I’m checking out a line on Cruszek right now. As for Ian—watch out. Be careful.”

Ivy looked across the booth, to where Ian Doherty had just sat down opposite her. “I will,” She told Selena. “And—be careful with my toothy friend. He’s here to destroy the Covenanters.”

“Guessed that al—”

Ivy turned off the phone before Selena finished. She concentrated
all of her attention on Ian. She tried out her newfound gift for telepathy.
Hello, Jack.

It must have worked. His serious face lit with his wide smile. He’d always been a thin, fragile boy, with fine-boned dark Celtic good looks. He looked healthier than she’d ever seen him before, handsome and whole. Too bad the person looking out of his gray blue eyes was mad as a hatter.

“Someone who finally knows who I am!” he breathed in an excited whisper.

We met in a dream,
Ivy whispered in his damaged mind. She was searching for Ian while talking to Jack. Her recent introduction to roaming around inside other people’s heads was proving to have professional uses.
Don’t you remember?

“He killed me in a dream. I don’t want to remember dreams.”

You’re dreaming right now, Ian. Think about waking up and being Ian. Just let yourself think. Let yourself feel. Feeling hurts, but it’s what you do best.

“I felt them die. I’ll feel you die. But the Master wants you first.”

Of course he does.

Ivy considered her options. She could make a fuss, call for help, get Jack the Ripper safely out of the way. But the real problem would still be out there. The master demon would know if his minions were taken from him. He’d run, hide, enslave others. The murders wouldn’t stop. Not until whatever spell the demon was working drew enough power to succeed.

She could pretty much guess what the demon was after. Power, power, and more power. Over mortals. Over the doors to other dimensions. Demons were pretty straightforward in their ambitions. Jack’s Master was cleverer than most, his sadistic streak deeper and more imaginative. He ruined lives as well as took them.

She’d been bound by blood and magic to find this evil. Now she volunteered for it. She was not looking forward to doing so.

“The Master ordered me to bring you to him,” Jack said. “At first I thought it was your death energy he wanted, but it was you, alive, that was my assignment. You will be our transformation.”

“Transformation. Into what?”

Jack ignored the question. “I believe that finding you was his aim in putting me in this host body. He knew the pleasure I would have taking you.” He sounded very proud of the assignment. He gave a glance around the crowded room. “Don’t make me hurt anyone here. Come quietly.”

She fought nausea. Ruined lives.

Ian. Come back to us, Ian.

“All right,” Ivy said. “I’ll come with you.” She slipped on her coat and picked up her purse.

“Leave your stuff.”

She put her bag down, and stood. “If you want me to leave my coat in the middle of November, you will get a fight from me.”

Ian “Jack the Ripper” Doherty didn’t look happy, but he let it go. Her coat stayed on. She let him take her hand—it felt obscene to have anyone but Christopher’s fingers clasped around her wrist—and he led her out into the cold.

C
hristopher held his hand before his face and slowly flexed his long, strong fingers. Something was wrong. They wanted to be holding something. Someone.

“Oh, bugger it.”

He would have tossed the hand angrily aside had it not been attached to him. There were some things you couldn’t do, even in the dream state.

Such as forget the woman whose absence was driving him mad.

He wanted Ivy to be gone.

But she was gone.

He hadn’t meant to look for her, but he couldn’t stop. He had planned to ignore her, but he hadn’t thought she wouldn’t be there.

“Go ahead. Walk out of my life just because I told you to.”

When did any man ever act sane over a woman whether he was mortal, immortal, or something in between?

Demons, for example?

Oh, no. You are not going there. No thinking about demons. You can’t help her. You won’t help her.

She’s nowhere in the city of Chicago to be helped.

That terrified him.

T
he run-down warehouse building was certainly not the sort of place she’d expected a demon to live. They were luxury loving. If they couldn’t get luxury, they at least wanted comfort. Ivy took note of broken windows, layer upon layer of tagging spray painted on the sagging brick walls. Some of it was quite artistic; most of it was obscene.

Ivy looked the wreck of a building up and down. The place was huge, empty but for pigeons perching on window ledges. She bet there were rats inside. It was one more abandoned warehouse in a run-down neighborhood of abandoned buildings.

“It’s all kind of demoralizing, isn’t it?”

“This is Plan B,” Jack said. Or was it Ian? “The Master decided it was time to move locations.”

“I’m glad I wore my coat.”

“Come along.”

He was holding her arm. Ivy’s impulse was to twist away
and run. She so wanted to let self-preservation trump duty.

Feet dragging, she let the demon’s minion lead her inside. Up one flight of creaking stairs. Then another. She’d been right about the rats.

She felt the evil presence the moment she reached the top of the second staircase.

Jack saw that she was aware of the demon’s presence. He grinned proudly. He breathed in the stench of the creature’s power. “Isn’t he wonderful?”

“Eh. You didn’t grow up with it.”

Ivy was shaking, but she ignored it and strode forward. The poor possessed bastard trailed up the hallway behind her, thinking he was the luckiest serial killer in the world.

She halted in front of a closed door. She stared at the door handle. Dizzy, head pounding, shaking. For a moment, she wished she was tied up, helpless, being forced to enter the demon’s presence. She did not want to go in there. She didn’t want to go through with the confrontation to come.

Jack came up behind her, put his hands on her shoulders.

The touch changed her mind. She wasn’t going to let somebody else push her inside.

Ivy opened the door. She kept her gaze on the stained and worn linoleum floor as she walked inside. The demon’s presence was stronger with each step. His heat reached out for her. Tendrils of hate swirled all around her. When Ivy couldn’t make herself take another step, she did make herself look up. Into the face of the demon.

“Hello, Dad,” she said.

J
ack the Ripper looked particularly smug, standing with his arms crossed beneath the Shakespeare statue.

“That’s my spot,” Christopher said.

“It never has been. She’s mine now.”

Christopher stepped up to the crazy little— “She’s mine. You can’t have her!”

“You gave her to me.”

He had.

The dream went heavy and black around Christopher. Good. Better to be in blackness. Better to be alone.

The hell it was.

“Ivy? Where are you?”

Empty. Black. The heaviness was his heart.

I
vy was stunned at the changes in the person who’d sired her. It had been a few years, and she hadn’t missed him. He had still looked human then. She fought nausea and disgust at the changes. James McCoy looked a lot like Grandpa now. Grandpa had always been disappointed that his witch lover’s experiment in reproduction had turned out more human than demon, at least in looks.

Dad was dark, all right, but in a sleazy way.

But—there was something noble about her grandfather, something pure in his otherworldly wickedness. He was a demon, pure and simple.

She’d always thought her half-demon father more intimidating, more dangerous because he was evil in human form. He’d made the choice to be bad. He was charming, handsome, witty. A total piece of human-shaped shit.

And Ivy didn’t think this just because of the way her mother cursed the cousin who had gotten her pregnant and deserted her. The reason Ivy didn’t think that way was because James McCoy only showed up in her own life when he wanted something from her.

She guessed what he wanted this time. She was not going to throw up.

“How did you—?”

She gestured, taking in the changes in James McCoy’s form.

“Isn’t he beautiful?” Jack asked, coming to stand beside her.

Technically—yes.

“Magic, of course,” her demon father said. “Dark. Deep. Damning. I’ve learned things Mother could never comprehend. She would be proud.”

“Maybe you should pay her a visit. Show her the new you.”

“I plan to. I will take Father’s place.” He ran a hand over his broad red chest, stroked the horns sprouting from his head. “You see the real me at last.”

She gave him a critical look. At least he wasn’t completely naked.

“I will be far larger and stronger very soon now. As soon as I am complete. Think how magnificent I will be as soon as the true demon me is completely released from the human shell.”

There was nothing wrong with being human, half or otherwise. She’d never known her father to show any disgust at either part of his ancestry.

“You’re not the only one in there, are you?”

The demon laughed, and that wasn’t her father suddenly looking out of James McCoy’s eyes. “We found each other. We will be one.”

“That’s what you’re telling him, at least,” she told the demon. To her father, she said, “I do not believe you fell for some line about how you would become your true self if you took in a demon spirit. That’s what happened, isn’t it? You read the wrong spell, summoned a creature from the dark dimension, and he conned you.”

“It was a meeting of like spirits.”

“You fell for a
bujo
, James McCoy! You! You’re from a Traveler familia—you pull the cons, you don’t get conned.
He’s going to eat your brain, Dad! Not that you don’t deserve it…”

Ivy’s voice trailed off. The fit of anger only made her feel worse.

“You look terrible, Lilith,” her father said.

“I’m about to be murdered by a demon! Of course I look terrible!” A sudden horrible thought made her want to vomit. “You are just going to murder me, right? You don’t have any perv incest plan in the works?”

The demon looked her over in a way that really made her sick. “Maybe.”

W
illiam Morris wallpaper, green-on-green floral print. Christopher found that he’d dream walked into Ariel’s Pre-Raphaelite room. He took a seat in a tapestry armchair and stared into the fire. That day was going on forever, and he couldn’t get his mind to do anything but wander in circles. All those circles led back to Ivy.

She was out there, on her own. In danger. Waiting to die.

He was the one waiting for her to die. She was doing something stupid and brave and what she thought was right.

The Burne-Jones painting over the mantel caught his attention. The
woman in the painting had just moved. He’d caught a shift of color within the frame.

Probably some of his freakish senses returning.

Ivy didn’t think him freakish, not as a vampire, not as a man with synesthesia. What an oddly tolerant woman.

“You won’t find another like her,” the woman in the painting said. “She can live within your dreams, you within hers. Are you really going to let that go?”

Christopher looked up to meet the blue-green gaze of his vampire maker. She was so much more beautiful than the woman in the painting. “Are you walking in my dreams, Lady Legacy? Or am I merely dreaming?”

“I’m not asleep,” she said. “It’s not night where I am.”

London. He missed London, even after so many decades. The city hadn’t been his home in his mortal life, but he’d come to love it in his years companioning the Legacy. Her love of all things British poured into him with her blood.

“And then I told you England was no longer your home.”

She stepped out of the painting and took the chair across from him. She wore the medieval draperies of the woman in the painting. The look suited her.

“Not that I don’t know very well about your sneaking into Manchester every year.”

“Only for the football,” he said.

“Hooligan,” she said fondly.

“Do you talk to Ariel this way?” he asked. “Is this why he has that horrible, sentimental painting? So you can step out of it?”

“He knows I have a fondness for all things Arthurian, even Victorian nostalgic revival for all things Arthurian. Of course, there never was an Arthur, but there was and is a Guinevere. I gave Ariel the painting. As a reminder.”

Christopher waited for further explanation. He really wanted the day to be over.

“I never got the chance to tell you why I do not permit strigoi nests in my territory. Why I keep England free of the curse.”

“Keeping somewhere free of the curse seems a good enough explanation to me,” he said.

“You agree that the curse is an evil thing.”

“Of course.”

“Then wouldn’t it be wise to break the curse? To seek the holy grail of a cure? Or at least learn to live as we are without doing any more harm than necessary?”

Christopher looked sharply at the lovely phantasm across from him. “You might have mentioned this to me before.”

“You might have come home to visit your mother once in a while. I wanted to tell you in person,” she added. “But I don’t think they’re listening here.”