And step three?
Summon a fucking demon.
Chapter Five
Scrubbed clean and dressed in a brand-new sweatshirt and leggings from the stash Gabriel left, Jaci snapped into explorer mode, rummaging through the cupboards and shelves and taking inventory.
Food, clothing, basic household stuff—all present and accounted for.
But she found no overt magical supplies. None of her grimoires, herbal blends, or crystals. No Tarot cards, no potions, no ritual blades. Even the knives and scissors had been removed from the drawers, and she couldn’t find any candles either.
Smart thinking on Gabriel’s part, de-witchifying the place. But like most bloodsuckers, he lacked imagination and severely underestimated his opponent.
God, she loved when they did that.
Witch versus vampire? It’son, dickhead.
Absent her anointed black candles and summoning potions, Jaci had three options for calling upon the hell realms:
Astral travel, which was risky and unpredictable, given some of theotherentities that traveled those roads. A blood spell—messy, painful, and exhausting. Or, drumroll, please… Straight up dying, sending her own soul to the eternal pits.
Jaci huffed out a sigh.Blood spell it is.
She just needed something to amplify the signal. A decent herb or crystal or… apple?
Her lips curved into a wicked grin as she spotted the overflowing fruit bowl on the kitchen countertop. “Hello, lovelies.”
Technically, pomegranate was the original forbidden fruit. But apples had been maligned for so long, they were just as effective in dark magic these days. It was mostly a matter of intention, and right now, Jaci hadeveryintention of besting that asshole vampire.
Just thinking about him again had her shaking with rage.
Perfect—more fuel for her dark spell. All she had to do was picture his smug face and replay the sounds of his even more smug accent, andboom—anger, hatred, and disgust rose up at her command.
The feelings were almost certainly mutual, but the guy’s emotions were encased in ice. Any time Jaci had tried to get a read on him, all she felt was that chill. That hardness.
She thought back to the battle last night. She’d spent a good portion of it hiding in the wine cellar, but from what she’d pieced together later, she was pretty sure one of the other Redthorne princes had been killed in the chaos. Yet her captor hadn’t shown so much as a flicker of grief over his brother’s death.
Jaci wasn’t judging him—hell, if someone bumped off her sister, she’d be dancing in the streets in a sequined mini-dress, dousing herself in champagne and singing songs about the good times—but shewascurious. If the royal vampire family was so fractured that the death of one of their own didn’t even cause a ripple, clearly they had bigger problems than worrying about one little witch.
And that one little witch planned to take full advantage of it.
With Gabriel’s spy cameras watching—and possibly listening, too—Jaci reached for an apple, trying to keep the evil gleam out of her eyes.
“Healthy choices make for healthy witches,” she sing-songed, pocketing the fruit and heading back down the hallway. The bedroom had a speaker on the night table, so she plugged in her phone and queued up her favorite dark techno playlist, hoping it would drown out the noise she was about to make.
Plus, summoning a demon always went better with bass.
Closed away in the gleaming white marble bathroom, she removed one of the glass shelves from the medicine cabinet and wrapped it in a towel, then smashed it against the edge of the clawfoot bathtub. She plucked out the biggest shard and used it to bisect the apple at its equator, revealing a pentagram of seeds in the center of each half.
Jaci smiled. The dark path had never been her choice, and in her twenty-five years of life, it’d caused more pain and death than she cared to think about. Mostly, she couldn’t wait to leave it all behind—to burn her spellbooks and walk away from the craft for good. Still, in moments like these, she found herself marveling at the clever ways nature tucked hints of pure magic into everything it created.
Standing before the antique mirror hung over the sink, she ate the bottom half of the apple, seeds and all, picturing the demon she wanted to call.
Then, taking a deep breath and focusing on the five-pointed star in the half that remained, she sliced her palm with the glass and made a fist, letting the blood run over the fruit, binding her magic to the seeds. Energy gathered around her, hot and prickly, raising the hairs on her arms. The moment she felt the magic crest, she called on the swirl of dark emotions Gabriel had stirred inside her, held the bloodied apple in her left palm, and pressed her right palm against the mirror, chanting her spell.
Blood of darkness, blood of fire
Heed the call of my desire
