Page 62 of Caught in the Devil’s Hand

The next couple of days went by fast. That first morning, Vallen taught her some of the basics of Mahou over breakfast while scanning the Devil’s Hand for the counter-ritual to unmake his curse. The centuries he’d spent as a demon had eroded his fluency, but he was certain they wouldn’t run into the same problem Majo had.

His eyebrows jumped in surprise with almost every turn of the page. Translating as he went, he found spell effects in every flavor of destructive, cruel, and sadistic.

One ritual was powerful enough to summon a tsunami of any height, anywhere. It required vanishingly rare and expensive components, such as bone shavings from an ocean animal Vallen claimed was extinct. Another ritual made its victim rot as though dead, not allowing an escape from the pain until their brain had completely decomposed. Shumei shuddered to think of it.

Vallen also found the ritual Majo had used to siphon youth from Akki. Although the spell had been broken, thus allowing Akki to return to her normal appearance, the life stolen from her was gone forever. Vallen estimated Majo had stolen a year of Akki’s life, assuming she wasn’t dead already.

He also found instructions for vain enhancements, such as longer hair, larger breasts and penises, and different eye colors. Majo had likely been missing an ingredient when she’d tricked Shumei into drinking the potion for larger breasts—the flower of a plant that only blossomed once every few years, and only in the far north. According to Vallen, it would have prevented Shumei’s nausea.

The most well-worn page was at the back. Vallen gripped the book tightly as his gaze darted across the heavily annotated ritual. He grimaced and cursed. He shook his head in disbelief. When Shumei couldn’t stand it any longer, she begged him to tell her what the ritual did. And in a hoarse voice, Vallen explained…

Majo hadn’t summoned a demon general, but the Damned One himself. Shumei asked him what that meant exactly, but Vallen wouldn’t tell her.

“If you don’t feel the pull,” he’d said, “then I’m not sure.”

“What pull?” she’d asked.

“Don’t worry about it right now.”

Since then, she had spent almost all her time practicing the steps for the counter-ritual, acting them out without the spell components. Her magic would sit up and watch every time, like a dog spotting a rabbit.

She had blushed fiercely to learn she would have to bring Vallen to climax with her mouth for one of the steps. Every time she acted out the spell for him to check her memorization, she knelt in front of one of the tables in the sitting room to symbolize that all-important step, and her cheeks were never anything paler than bright red, amusing her lover to no end.

The difficult part of the ritual was the circle she had to draw around the altar upon which Vallen had to sit. It had to be drawn within an hour, with absolutely no mistakes, and it was as artistic as it was complex. She spent all her waking hours trying to memorize the circle’s pattern and fell asleep two nights straight at their favorite table in the sitting room, leaving Vallen to carry her to bed.

During the daytime hours when Vallen wasn’t instructing Shumei in the basics of magic, he and Oka cleaned the estate. The boy protested, insisting he’d rather learn sword techniques, but Vallen coerced him into helping by saying he had to build up his strength first.

They scrubbed the porch and its columns and replaced all the paper on the doors. Oka praised his “strength training” at dinner, admitting he certainly felt sore all over. After Oka had fallen into an exhausted sleep on the third night, Vallen checked Shumei’s wound, hopeful he could finally have her naked and moaning beneath him without hurting her shoulder. However, seeing it still needed one more day, he held her until she fell asleep.

His ache for her was one he could live with for a bit longer, but he sorely wished to rip off her dress, shove her thighs apart, and plunder her dew-drenched flower all night long while savoring her sweet, shuddering cries. His only distraction was spending the nighttime hours spying on the events outside their walls and bringing back reports in the morning.

After several days without word on Majo, a midnight conversation with a demon had produced results. Of course, he had to pierce the demon six times with his serrated sword and hold it by its hairy neck against the ground to get answers, but the demon spilled a bit of information as well as blood as it died there in the dirt.

The witch was relentless in her pursuit of the young woman who had stolen her prized spell book. She terrorized the villages as yet untouched by the demon raids, searching for available information on Shumei’s whereabouts. But no one had seen a young crow, her blondie brother, and the demon they traveled with. One merchant gave him a horrifying account of Majo abducting a woman from a village that had yielded no information and sacrificing her in a ritual. The merchant had once sold bolts of cloth to the young woman, whose ravaged corpse was later found in the woods.

Vallen decided to keep this last piece of information to himself. To know her act of thievery had inadvertently brought about such an intense search would only make Shumei feel guiltier.

On their fourth morning at the estate, Oka managed to coax Vallen into some actual sword practice before they dusted the interior rooms, and they were parrying in the small bit of open space in front of the sitting room. Shumei sat inside with the spell book on the table, trying to draw the circle from memory on a piece of paper. It was slow work and the urge to peek at the book for a hint was strong, but she resisted and finished the circle, having taken nearly an hour and a half to draw it.

She looked up to see Oka trying his hardest to land a hit on Vallen and failing miserably, but her brother seemed to be enjoying the effort. She smiled at his red-cheeked excitement and then checked her circle to see how well it matched the one in the book.

After a quick count, she found she had made around twenty mistakes. Sighing in disappointment, she began to study the mistakes to make sure she didn’t repeat them, but a shout outside made her look up.

“Rosuke,” Vallen hollered before taking off out of sight. Oka stood transfixed, his wooden sword hanging loosely from his hand. She banged her knee on the table in her rush to stand.

Vallen shouted his friend’s name again. Too flustered to think, she limped toward the door, knee throbbing. When she got to the porch, she couldn’t see Vallen and figured he had vanished around the corner. She glanced at Oka, who looked at her fearfully.

“Come inside, Oka. Sit quietly,” she instructed. He left his shoes on a stone step below the porch and disappeared behind her.

She ran as fast as she could when wearing soft socks on a smooth, wood porch. At the corner, she stopped dead in her tracks. A horse stomped irritably beyond the two men on the ground, where Vallen held a fatigued but handsome man in his arms.

She had assumed Rosuke’s hair would be white like Vallen’s, but it was a bright, flaming red. She had never seen red hair, and she stared as if he were a two-headed ox. His clothes were torn and filthy, his skin drawn and pale. He looked at Vallen with such relief that she knew he had missed Vallen as much as Vallen had missed him.

“What happened?” Vallen asked. She could hardly hear him, but she hesitated to get any closer.

“I was in Houfu. I hadn’t eaten for over three weeks.” He shook his head. “I barely survived the night. I’d hardly begun my search when demons swarmed the streets, at least a hundred. Not an army but more than enough. The city guard was overwhelmed. Many died.” He closed his eyes and grimaced as though revisiting the memory.

“You—you’ve not had a woman for nearly a month?”