“My guess is six minutes until Rook and I need to be back in our clothes and the rest of you need to be gone.”
“Whoa, watch it!” Tolliver says as Ezra steps too close to the bottle still feeding Whispering Willow to the unconscious Coven member. “Don’t touch any of my potions unless I hand it to you. There’s lots of dangerous stuff in here, dude.” He pats his messenger bag.
“Sorry, man,” Ezra says, putting his hands up in defense.
“Uh, gals and pals, we got a problem,” Poppy says.
I frown. “I don’t like problems. Can you fix it?”
Poppy hunches and shakes her head. “I can’t copy this.”
“What?”
“As soon as I look away from the book, I forget what I saw. And if I try to look at the book while I’m drawing, my hand won’t move.”
She demonstrates. It’s almost like some force is holding her back, her hand trembling over the page as she tries to re-create what she’s seeing.
Ezra blinks in confusion. “Are you having a stroke?”
Poppy sets her hand down, gasping as though she hadn’t even been allowed a breath. “I think there’s some kind of spell on this thing so it can’t be copied. And I don’t think it’s the kind of spell that can be broken.”
“Spell?” Ezra turns to me. “Is she having a stroke?”
“Alright, okay.” I run my hands through my hair, thinking. “That’s fine. We knew we weren’t going to have time to do an exact copy. Can you just fudge it? Then CJ can get to work on deconstructing the real one.”
Poppy winces. “That’s Problem Number Two. There’s another protection spell on it that keeps it intact.” She shakes her head. “Actually, you could use gloves to handle this. Unless we have some hellfire on us—which Tolliver says is impossible to synthesize—nothing’s going to damage these pages.” She demonstrates by attempting to rip a page. It just flutters through her fingers and settles back down, still in one piece. “Basically, we’d need a demon to tear this thing apart.”
“Problem Number Three!” Tolliver cries suddenly. “Problem Number Three!”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “No more problems until I solve the ones we already have!”
Footsteps echo from the temple below, and I go still.
We left the hatch to the attic open.
“Shit,” I hiss. “The rope!”
It still hangs down through the hatch. Rook rushes over to wind it up. Once he’s finished, we all stand frozen, holding our breath.
I can tell whoever’s below has reached the alcove, because the resonance of their footsteps deepens when they move from the tile to the marble. The steps grow louder and then stop. They’re just below, in the secret passage, but there’s no way they’re getting up here without a rope or a ladder. That’s way too high for someone to jump.
Right?
The silence drags on as we all stare at one another with wide-eyed frenzied expressions.
I bite my lip, berating myself for such a rookie mistake. I’ve gotten all of us trapped in a single room with one exit. Dante would have never. (SeeRule #31: Never get everyone trapped in a single room with one exit.)
There’s a loudthudas a clawed hand grabs the edge of the hatch. A second follows, and then a pair of necrotic twisted horns appears. The intruder pulls itself up and stares at us with whiteless eyes.
I turn to Poppy. “What did you say about needing a demon?”
Nineteen
Cards on the table: I have no idea how to fight a demon.
It’s said that the best way to fight a demon is to not. Because if you’re in a fight with a demon, you’re just basically dead. Their magic follows no rules and is nearly limitless. In fact, they’re so powerful, I often wonder why it’s the syndicates in charge and not the demons.
This particular demon looks male, with dark hair and tall, slightly twisted horns. Its eyes are dark as midnight, the vein in its neck and arms stygian against pale skin, its fingers ending in blackened points.
