Page 16 of Hexes From Exes

The streets of Lower Anathamea were empty, the buildings mostly decrepit and crumbling. It’d never been a place of great riches, but it never used to look like this. Cass grew up in Lower Anathamea, back when it was just a few slums and not abject poverty. Homelessness didn’t exist for demons like it did for humans, so there was no one to take care of the crumbling structures. When demons died they just fell apart and became one with the sands of time, worn down by the fires of eternity.

Cass ducked into the third tallest building, making her way up crumbling steps until she found the room in question. Anyone who took the time to enter the building would know there was something amiss - the inside of it was spotless compared to the outside. On the third floor was a room with a large, heavy door and a keypad on it. Cass pressed a few buttons, sighing as the door slid open and she hurried inside. The door closed behind her with a loud click.

“Cass, back so soon?” asked the demon just inside. His name was Dread, or at least that’s what he went by. He wore a mask that obscured most of his features and Cass caught the telltale signs of shimmering magic that distorted his true form. Whoever he really was he didn’t want any of his patrons knowing. Cass figured it was a mutual need for security. He knew her name, but if one of them went down, the other would follow close behind. There was no way to explain how you knew that someone was running a backdoor portal to the human realm without admitting some culpability.

“Yeah, I have some loose ends to tie up,” she said with a shrug.

Dread nodded, drumming his fingers on the desk in front of him. “I see, well. You know the price.”

She did.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a single item from the human world - a pendant that she knew had magic. It wasn’t much, but Dread didn’t seem to care about amount. Even the smallest hint of magic was plenty for him. His fingers reached out greedily, grabbing the pendant from her and examining it closely. He pulled an item out of his desk to look it over, confirming the magic within.

She saw a momentary flicker in his magic that made him look a bit like an enforcement demon, but it was so quick she was sure she imagined it. Why would an enforcement demon run a hidden portal to the human realm?

“You’re free to go. Same place as always?” Dread asked.

Cass nodded, stepping onto the ramshackle platform that operated as the illegal portal. She closed her eyes, waiting for the jarring sensation of being portaled to the human realm. It was a little bumpier than the official one run by Jerry, but it got the job done, so she tried not to think too hard about what would happen if the portal broke down mid trip.

When she opened her eyes, she was in the human realm.

* * *

“Cass!” exclaimed Alice, her arms opened wide as she embraced Cass’s human form. Cass hated wearing the human skin, it made her feel small and unnatural. She shifted a little once out of Alice’s embrace, trying to remember where the edges of her body ended and began. Eric looked up from his spot across the table, his glasses perched on the tip of his nose.

“Oh, hey Cass! We didn’t expect you today,” he said, pushing back from his chair to embrace her. Cass melted into the hug from the two humans, forgetting how good it felt to be held. Since Rick, she hadn’t done more than casually dated, mostly because she didn’t have time. Well, and she was illegally going to the human realm to research hidden demon texts that were for some reason in a human archive…that would be hard to explain to anyone.

“Yeah, I had some extra time, I thought I’d stop in,” she said, setting her bag on the ground near the table. She followed Alice through the small room into the back archives of the Phoenix Museum of Antiquities.

When Cass got the promotion to The Department of Magical Investigations, she was shocked and, honestly, annoyed. She’d loved her projects researching ancient demon texts and journeying to the human world to find them. They always showed up in the most random places, like garage sales or estate sales. She’d travel to the human world with Rick and while he was off doing whatever revenge demons do all day, she’d busy herself with finding the texts and either bringing them back to Anathamea to add to her research or would find a bench and read on her own time.

Cass finding the texts at the Phoenix Museum of Antiquities was a happy accident. She was at an estate sale looking over some ancient texts when a woman who turned out to be Alice saw her picking through the papers and nearly had a fit. “Don’t touch that!” she practically screamed at Cass.

“Excuse me?” Cass had said.

“I’m sorry, I’m a researcher…those are ancient texts, if you could just…” and she watched as Alice pulled out a pair of white cotton gloves and carefully took the texts from Cass.

“You’ve seen these before?” Cass asked, shocked. That’s when Alice told her she was an archiver at the Phoenix Museum of Antiquities, and informed Cass that she was going to have to take the texts from Cass because that’s where they belonged.

“You’ve other texts like this?” Cass asked, her disbelief only growing. Alice nodded emphatically, trying to pack the texts away in some sort of sealed device. “Yes, quite a bit. The museum is full of such things, whenever I see them at these sales, I always bring them back to the museum. It’s where they belong,” she reiterated.

“How funny. I’m a researcher myself,” Cass told her. It wasn’t a lie, but the rest of her elaborate backstory was. She claimed to be a researcher for Sumerian texts. Alice thought that was the origin of the demonology texts, so she quickly garnered herself an invite to the museum. From there, Cass found the short list of texts that she had no idea existed, entire pages that had been hidden away in a human museum and far from the demon eyes they belonged to.

When Cass petitioned her department to remove the texts from the humans and add them to the Anathamea library she was essentially shot down. And then, just a few days later, promoted to a department where she would have absolutely no reason to try to get the texts again.

It didn’t sit right with Cass. Any time she was in the human world, she dropped by to see Alice and Eric, usually tying it to the end of her work missions. Then, suddenly, she was no longer being sent to the human realm to investigate magical breaches. Fee took over her investigations into Poppy and her group of magic-yielding humans while Cass was “promoted” to mostly investigate magical issues within Anathamea.

Using Dread was a necessity, one that didn’t sit well with Cass. What did the demon council not want her to know?

“Anything new?” Cass asked, following Alice deeper into the labyrinth of texts. Most of them were from other cultures – Greek, Roman, Norse, all sorts of other ancient tomes. The demonology texts were often mixed with the Sumerian ones, near the back of the office. Alice already had made a few comments on how she thought they weren’t really Sumerian but promised to save her investigating for whenever Cass stopped by ‘on loan from the Canadian museum.’ It was the only way to explain her sporadic ability to visit the couple.

“No, just the same texts as last time. We haven’t had luck deciphering anything else,” Alice said truthfully. The rooms where the ancient books were stored were windowless, and when no one was in them the lights clicked off to preserve the texts. It was climate controlled, and while Phoenix rarely worried about humidity, it was controlled against the heat. It was cleaned twice daily to prevent dust, and it was in the center of the building away from any pipes that may leak and cause mold or other damage to the texts.

Alice donned her cotton gloves before she pulled some of the papers off the shelf, the same ones they worked on last time. In the center of the room sat a lone table with 2B pencils and papers for copying or photographing. She arranged them carefully in the way that only Alice would - precise, delicate, ensuring the material couldn’t be injured or maimed. “Eric ran some tests,” Alice added slowly, her gaze darting to the door to the room they’d just gone through. It was clear the couple had argued over whether they should tell Cass their findings.

“Oh?” Cass asked, genuinely curious. She’d seen the various machines and tests the humans ran on papers to determine the age or the origin. It was a way for them to break down the material used, trying to date it or narrow down where it came from.

“Yeah…it’s not Sumerian,” Alice said. Her eyes were locked on Cass as she said this, her tone accusatory.