Gods and Demons Read online

  The next people on the scene were a couple of detectives. After they surveyed the basement, one of them drew Isabella away to talk to her, and the other squatted down in front of where I sat on the steps.

  “What’s your name, Miss?”

  “Kellana Rogirsdottir.” I spelled it out for him.

  “What happened here?”

  “We interrupted a sacrifice, but we were too late.”

  He chewed on his pencil, then asked, “How did you know there was a sacrifice?”

  I shook my head. “We didn’t.”

  The detective didn’t seem too pleased with the volume of information I was dispensing. What was I supposed to tell him? That we were following a blood mage hoping to prevent the next near-nuclear catastrophe?

  By the time Torbert showed up, there were a dozen cops, an ambulance, forensics people, and a medical examiner traipsing around, and most of the neighbors were awake and providing an audience beyond the yellow tape. It looked like a scene from a TV show.

  Torbert talked with the detective for a while, then wandered over to the curb where the cops had us sit.

  “Are you all right?” he asked me, bending close.

  “I don’t know,” Isabella said. “She refuses to answer that question.”

  “I just want to go home.”

  He reached out and moved my arm. It took me by surprise when he touched one of my burns, and I snarled at him. His eyes widened, then he took a step back, straightened, and waved to someone.

  Two paramedics came over, and the woman squatted in front of me. “Let me see,” she said.

  I opened my arms and let her see my ruined shirt, and what it showed of my wounds underneath it. She sucked air through her teeth, and I heard a soft gasp from Torbert.

  “She needs a hospital,” the paramedic told Torbert.

  “I need to go home.”

  “Doesn’t that hurt?” the male paramedic asked.

  “It hurts like bloody hell. I have medicine at home.”

  “I don’t think…” he started to say, but I stood up, and his voice tailed off as his eyes followed me upward.

  “Am I under arrest, Agent Torbert?”

  “No, of course not. We have a lot of questions, though.”

  “You can ask them tomorrow. Isabella, can you get the keys out of my pocket?” While she pulled out my keys, I told Torbert, “The blood upstairs is Nieminen’s. You want to collect it because it can be used to trace him.”

  I ignored Torbert, the detective, and the paramedics, who all called after us as we walked away.

  As she started the car, Isabella asked, “Are you going to be all right?”

  “I think so. It’s all just surface burns.”

  When we got home, Isabella helped me peel my clothes off, and then took the pot of burn ointment and spread it on me. My mother was an apothecary, and though my magic wasn’t as strong as hers, I was competent enough to prepare basic medicines.

  The cooling effect of the ointment was immediate, and as more and more of the burned area was covered, I felt the tension and pain flow out of me.

  “You’re lucky,” Isabella said as she worked. “All the burns are on your front. You’ll be able to sleep on your back.”

  I didn’t feel particularly lucky.

  “We did solve one mystery tonight,” Isabella said. “Nieminen was the man I smelled at Weber’s house. He was the murderer.”

  Torbert showed up with Wen-li and Bronski the following morning, just as the last of my crews pulled out of the compound. I invited them into the cottage and put on another pot of coffee.

  “You look a lot better than you did last night,” Torbert said.

  “I’m still a bit tender.”

  “So, what happened?” he asked.

  I nodded to Isabella, who told them about Nieminen, Jennie, and the demon while I poured coffee for everyone.

  When she finished, Torbert said, “Her name was Jennifer Watkins, age thirty-six, divorced, no children. She owned the house.”

  “You said there was a demon,” Wen-li interjected. “We found demon blood, but what happened to the demon itself. Did it escape?”

  Isabella looked to me.

  “It was a major demon, an old one. We killed it, cut off its head, and then it laughed at us and disappeared.”

  I gave them a little time to digest that.

  “Some legends say that major demons are immortal. You can put them in a blender, but they reincorporate.” I shrugged. “I’ve never studied demons, and that’s the first major demon I’ve encountered, so I’m not an expert. I saw one when I was young, but a mage fought it. My mother wouldn’t let me watch the battle, so I don’t know what happened to it.”

  Bronski was usually very quiet, but he pursed his lips and said, “Dave told us that you said we can trace Nieminen using his blood. I’m not familiar with blood magic. Is this something you can do?”

  My respect for his magical skills dropped even lower. I wondered if the man had ever studied his craft.

  “It’s not blood magic. I was referring to a simple tracking spell. Hair, fingernail clippings, anything that was physically a part of him would work, but blood works the best. I’m sure any competent magic user could do it.”

  As they were leaving, I drew Wen-li aside. “I know that Bronski has magic,” I said, “but I’m astonished that he didn’t know what a tracking spell is.”

  She bit her lip and glanced in his direction. “Yeah. Kind of strange.” She didn’t say anything else, but I could see concern in her face.

  I went back inside the cottage, where Isabella had cleared the table and was washing the dishes. My shirt irritated my burns, so I took it off, poured a glass of lemonade, and sat in front of the air conditioner.

  “I can’t believe that you jumped on a fire demon and didn’t even singe your whiskers,” I said. “Must be nice to be a demigod.”

  Isabella smirked. “Demigod is not exactly correct.”

  “Not fair,” I grumbled.

  “Some people are born with great beauty, others get immunity to fire demons. Life is fair in its own way,” she said.

  Not feeling particularly philosophical that morning, I said, “I don’t trust Agent Bronski.”

  “Which proves that you’re a good judge of character,” Isabella said. “I wonder how long he’s been working with the PCU.”

  I gave her a raised eyebrow look and waited for her to clarify. In response, she chuckled, then said, “It might be interesting to find out if he volunteered to work with them before or after Weber put the statue up for auction.”

  After cleaning up, Isabella announced that she was going grocery shopping, an activity she had shown little interest in during the time I had known her. She was usually happy with giving me money and eating any large slabs of meat I might bring home.

  “Is there anything in particular you want me to pick up?” she asked as she started out the door.

  “Ten pounds of beet roots.”

  She stopped. “Got a major craving for beets?”

  I shook my head. “I need to get smart about fighting demons. This charging-into battle-waving-a-sword business is stupid. I’m not a battle mage. Hell, I’m not even a particularly strong hedge witch. But I am a trained alchemist. Demonbane. I can cook up some demonbane, fill some paintballs with it, and shoot them from beyond arm’s reach.”

  Isabella wasn’t easily impressed, but the look on her face showed that what I said impressed her. Whether with my idea, or my stupidity at taking so long to figure it out, I didn’t want to ask.

  “There’s such a thing as demonbane?”

  “Sure. You’ve seen those reddish-purple pillars surrounding the Capitol and the White House?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Limestone coated in demonbane,” I said. “Either they found an Elf to make it for them, or a human magician cooked up something comparable.”

  “So, you make demonbane from beets? I mean, I’m half demon, and though beet
s aren’t my favorite, I’ve eaten them.”

  I chuckled. “It’s one of the ingredients. Cinnabar, mandrake root, and torbernite in a beet juice solution. Since we have some demon blood, we’ll use that as well. Add a bit of magic to bind it all together, and you get a solution so toxic that even demons can’t stand it.”

  “I’m not familiar with all that stuff,” she said.

  “Cinnabar is mercury sulfide. You can’t even handle it with your bare hands. Torbernite is found here on Earth, but it’s much more common in Hel. It’s a crystal formed from phosphorous, copper, water and uranium. Mandrake root contains hallucinogenic neurotoxins.”

  “Sounds nasty. Where do the beets come in?”

  “Demons hate beets. You can use carrots if you don’t have beets, but they don’t work as well.”

  She pursed her mouth and stared at me, then said in a dry voice, “Anything else you need?”

  “A bottle of nice red wine and some dark chocolate.”

  Isabella rolled her eyes and walked out.

  Chapter 14

  Isabella surprised me by bringing home some food besides meat, then shocked me by cooking shrimp fajitas with onions, spicy peppers, and tomatoes, served with guacamole and refried beans.

  “You need to recover your strength,” she told me as she set the feast on the table.

  “Where did you learn to cook?” I asked. The exotic smells almost had me drooling.

  “I’ve lived a long time,” she said, “and I’ve picked up a few skills along the way. Acceptance of the existence of non-Humans is still sketchy, and I don’t think most people are ready for beings such as me.”

  I nodded as I chewed grilled shrimp and swallowed. “Most people are willing to accept me as a witch, whether they believe I have any magic or not. You know, sort of like they would accept me as a Presbyterian. But to tell them I’m an Elf? Someone not born on this planet, and fundamentally, biologically different than they are? No, they have a problem with that.”

  “But you’re not biologically different. Elves can interbreed with Humans.”

  “And Angels, and Devils, and some say the Aesir and Giants, though I won’t be testing that last one. I guess you might call all of us subspecies. But crossbreeds have limitations. Donkeys and horses can interbreed, but their offspring are sterile. A Human-Elf child will be a witch, but his or her magic will be different from either parent. A Nephilim who is half Elf is very different from one who is half Human. Did you know that a half-Elf Nephilim and a half-Human Nephilim can’t produce viable children? The issue is always miscarried.”

  “I guess you saw a lot on your journey to get here,” Isabella said, a wistful note in her voice.

  “Some places I would like to visit again, some I hope I never do. A couple where I might choose to live if I had a choice. Earth is a very violent and cruel place. It’s not like that everywhere.”

  “And Midgard?”

  “Better than Earth, I think. Still filled with war and strife, ambition, intolerance and greed.” I smiled. “But I haven’t seen all the realms, only half. Maybe someday I’ll snag myself another handsome realm walker.”

  Isabella insisted on doing the dishes, so I washed and trimmed the beets and took them down to my lab. I was busy lining up ingredients for the demonbane when she came in and stood in the doorway.

  “Wow. I don’t know what I expected when you said a lab, but this looks like a modern chemistry laboratory.”

  “Carolyn modernized it. My lab at the cottage is a lot more rustic. In addition to being a witch, an apothecary and an alchemist, she was a licensed pharmacist. A very smart and talented woman. I learned a lot from her.”

  “And you still miss her.”

  “Oh, yes. She was my best friend for fifty years. We lived together for the last thirty years of her life. I still catch myself expecting her to be here. When you came back from the store tonight, it was kind of a shock to hear your voice. Your mind falls into patterns, and for thirty years, the someone else walking in the door was always Carolyn.”

  Isabella might have heard something in my voice, because she changed the subject. “You said the ingredients in this demonbane are highly toxic in themselves. You keep that sort of thing around?”

  I chuckled and picked up my grimoire. Walking over to her, I turned to a page near the back of the book.

  “You won’t be able to read this, but this is a list of minerals,” I paged through the section showing her, “with pictures, descriptions, and references. There are sections for plants and animals and other things. The landscaping business is pretty slow in the winter, so I travel and collect things. Especially rare things, such as torbernite, that I can’t get at the market.”

  Wearing doubled surgical gloves, I transferred all the ingredients to the glovebox under the vent hood. “I learned by casting wards around workings such as this, but adding a second level of safety is great. Now, as soon as the beet juice cooks down, I’ll be ready to go.”

  Concocting the demonbane took about three hours, but came off without a hitch, even though I’d never made it before. The final product turned out to be far more radioactive than the torbernite, which made me uneasy. The next step was to fill paintballs with it. The stuff turned out to be more corrosive than I expected and it melted the plastic balls I injected it into.

  “Not good?” Isabella asked.

  “Not good.”

  I searched through both my book and Carolyn’s before finding a possible solution on Google. Some years before, I had bought two cases of lead crystal glasses from an estate sale, and they still sat in their boxes in the attic.

  I put a glass between two metal plates, and using magic to supply the needed weight, ground it into powder. I had molds for paintballs, because I often made them with solid substances. First, I poured the demonbane liquid into the molds, then I sprinkled a layer of glass over each one. Sketching three runes into the air, I spoke a Word. There was a flash of light, and I had thirty-two purple balls. Ta-da!

  The Geiger counter stayed quiet when I scanned them, and when I put one under the spectrometer, it gave me the boring reading of leaded glass.

  “Fantastic!” I jumped up and down and clapped my hands like a little girl.

  “I take it that it worked? What was destroying that beautiful glass all about?”

  I picked up one of the balls and handed it to her. “The demonbane is acidic, so I needed glass to contain it. It’s also radioactive, so the leaded glass blocks that. The magic spell created a ball of glass and sucked the liquid inside. Be careful with them. By necessity, the glass is fragile, so that it shatters easily when it hits a demon.”

  “And this will kill a demon?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. If all it does is chase them away, I’ll be happy.” I showed her my paintball gun and filled the hopper with the balls. “I bought it for vampires. They were a real problem a couple of years ago, right after the breach. More vampires than rats in DC.”

  “That’s genius!”

  “Well, I can’t take credit for the idea. I read it in a fiction novel about a witch who filled paintballs with potions.”

  Torbert came by the nursery the following morning. “Just thought I’d stop by and check on you. Have you had any new lurkers or mages trying to break in?”

  “Things have been rather dull since Nieminen blew up Virginia,” I said. “Any luck on tracking him down?”

  “We checked every hospital and clinic in the metro area and didn’t get a hit. Maybe he wasn’t hurt as badly as you thought.”

  Isabella snorted. “He was bleeding like a stuck pig.” She shook her head. “He’s the head of ICAA. Did you bother to ask ICAA for a list of their registered healers in the area?”

  Torbert stared at her, then blinked and said, “You must think I’m the dumbest person in the world. No, we didn’t.”

  He whipped out his phone and made a call, wandering away from us as he talked. Isabella and I exchanged an eye roll. It wasn’t as though Torbe
rt didn’t know about magical healing—he employed a healer—but he still tried to view paranormal actions through a familiar lens.

  Torbert shouted in alarm, and I turned back to see what the problem was. I saw him stumbling backward, then he fell on his butt. I ran over to where he sat, looking around for some sign of trouble. I didn’t spot anything except Fred, standing a few feet from the open door of his house, staring at Torbert.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, while extending a hand to help him up.

  “What is that?” he asked, pointing to Fred.

  “That’s Fred. He lives here.”

  Gnomes are humanoid, one to two feet tall, but with gray skin, hair that resembles dried grass, and features that look like a withered potato. They aren’t most Elves’ idea of attractive. Probably not attractive to Humans, either.

  Torbert gave me a kind of wide-eyed look, so I figured I needed to explain a little more. “He’s a Gnome. He does most of my pest control and all the irrigation. He and his wife, Kate, live under that mound over there.”

  “He just emerged out of solid ground!”

  “Well, yeah. He does that. Gnomes move through earth like fish swim through water. That’s what makes him so good at laying irrigation lines. We don’t have to dig.”

  I pulled Torbert to his feet. Then I walked over to Fred, calmed him down, and assured him that the big man wouldn’t yell at him anymore.

  Taking Torbert by the arm, I pulled him toward the cottage. “Let’s go talk somewhere more private. You about scared the poor Gnome half to death.”

  “I scared him?”

  “Yes, you’re large, loud, and you don’t belong here. You startled him.”

  I brewed a relaxation tea of lemon balm and lavender, poured it over ice, and gave a glass to Torbert. “Here, drink this. You know, in your line of work, you really need to react better to beings you haven’t seen before.”