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“Sure. I went there, and it was all sorts of scans, like pages from an old book. And whoever had scanned them had written notes in the margins. And this one… I guess spell? They were spells I think. It had a note in the margin that said Repeat these words and you will understand.”
“That’s it?” I sat on a bench facing her, and Cash continued to pace nervously by her side. “It just said you will understand?”
“Yes.”
“And so you read it?”
Her cheeks flushed. “It gets complicated from there. The spell called for me to get a blank notebook and write the words out as I said them. Anyway, I wrote out the whole thing and said the words, and nothing happened. At least not at first. But I left the notebook overnight, and when I came back the next morning, all my writing was gone. I thought someone had maybe torn out the pages, but then I looked at it, and there was one word written on the front page.”
“What word?”
“Ask.”
A vessel spell. Fucking hell, someone had given her the keys to invite a demon onto our plane using nothing more than a pen and paper and her ignorance.
“Let me guess, you wrote in some questions, and it started to tell you all sorts of fascinating stuff. I’m guessing it gave you a name—probably someone you could Google—and told you all sorts of historical stuff.”
Tansy’s head snapped up, and she gaped at me. “H-how did you know?”
“Did it ask you for blood?”
Now Tansy looked super spooked, as if I were taking the thoughts out of her mind without her permission. As far as she was concerned, I was the demon in this moment.
“Yes,” she said finally.
“You were baited. You put your blood on the pages of the notebook, right? And the blood vanished?”
She was on her feet suddenly, pointing an accusing finger at me. “You can’t possibly know that.”
“Sure I can. I haven’t summoned a demon, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t read about how they sneak across. Someone duped you to help their own cause.” I really wanted to know who had sent Tansy that information, because she wasn’t my villain. Someone else had planned all this, and she was their patsy.
“I didn’t think a drop of blood would matter.” Her voice was shaky, and she sat down again. This time Cash took the seat beside her and tried to take her hand. She pulled away and wrapped her arms around herself once more.
“Blood always matters in magic.”
“I know that now.”
“Tell me about Alexandra.”
This was where she broke down completely, tears flowing freely now, her words almost incomprehensible through the sobs. “It wasn’t me,” she said, half-shouting. “I-I woke up covered in blood, and s-she was dead, but I s-swear it wasn’t me.”
Santiago had finished his setup and came to stand beside me. Wilder lurked around the outside of the group, keeping an eye on everything being said and done.
“This was after you put your blood in the journal?” Santiago asked her.
“Y-yes.”
He turned to me, taking me by the arm to pull me closer, and whispered, “It had her by then. She was just a puppet.”
Indeed, the second Tansy had put her blood inside the book, she’d given Gamigan a direct conduit to take her over. At that point she ceased to be Tansy and started being nothing more than a hapless slave for the demon.
“And Laura and Heidi?” I hadn’t told her yet that they were safe because I wanted to see how she’d react.
“I didn’t hurt them.” The sleeves of her shirt were so stretched out they’d started to become flimsy at the cuff. “I think. I-I don’t know. I don’t remember what happened. They j-just vanished, and I knew it was my fault, but I didn’t know why.”
“What about the guy behind the bar?” This was the part that had been driving me mental. There had still been girls living in the house when the bar fight happened. If Gamigan wanted fresh blood, why hadn’t it taken from the obvious sources? Or had her kill off Laura and Heidi?
“What bar?” Cash asked. “What guy behind the bar?”
