Demon's Vow: Part 2 of the Final Asylum Tales (The Asylum Tales series) (7 page)

When all the stones were flipped over, I gently lowered everything back to the floor and knelt down. Simon had been intently focused on the protection of himself and the items in the room. The warlock hadn’t merely painted the symbol on the stones. He had chiseled it in so that there was no removing it short of destroying the stones in the floor.

Add your blood. Make it yours.

As the demon hissed the words through my head, a dagger shot across the room and landed point first between a pair of stones less than a foot from my hand. I jumped back, watching the blade shiver there in warning. That could have very easily been my chest or the back of my skull.

I wasn’t crazy about the idea of closely tying this demon to me a second time, but putting my blood in the symbol in Simon’s rooms meant that I could more easily close the doorway. I could control the demon in a manner of speaking, though I knew I was lying to myself if I thought I could control a demon. The only concern was that if I didn’t agree to make this doorway mine, then there was a good chance the demon was going to kill me for the irritation. I might let it sulk in the basement at Asylum, but it had a lot more free range in Simon’s rooms.

Unfortunately, what won out in the end wasn’t the idea of being able to lock the demon away more effectively. It was the notion that Simon’s rooms would now be mine and I could use the demon to keep out the warlocks and the witches who might want to take over this space. My gig as a guardian wasn’t going to last. They’d reach a point where they’d tire of the game and finally kill me for using magic. But before that, they’d revoke my right to visit the Dresden library. I was easier to kill if I knew less magic than they did.

With Simon’s rooms, I could study in secret. I could review his notes and read his books, expanding my knowledge and finally getting the one thing the bastard owed me—an education in magic. I’d give the demon a little bit of my blood if it brought me one step closer to gaining control over my life, a step closer to evening the score at last.

Picking up the dagger, I sliced the palm of my left hand, pain drawing a hiss of air through my clenched teeth. The pain was good. It cleared my head, brought me out of the past and secured me in the present. I held my hand open, waiting for the blood to well up, before squeezing it into a fist over the outer line of the symbol. The symbol didn’t need to be entirely filled with my blood, just three key lines required a small smear.

As my blood dripped into the last of the lines, a surge of power jumped into my body, knocking the breath out of my lungs and causing my heart to skip a beat. I shook my head as if to clear it, but the buzzing wasn’t in my head. It was the energy in the room and I was suddenly tapped into it all. But the energy wasn’t coming from some old spell that Simon had created. It was from the demon.

“Gage!” Gideon shouted outside the door. “Gage! Are you in there?” His hard-soled shoes echoed across the floor as he ran toward Simon’s old rooms.

“Fuck,” I whispered.

The demon snarled in my brain and I could feel it gather up its energy as it launched itself across the room, slamming into the door with enough force to make the thick wood barrier shudder in its frame. While I couldn’t see the creature, fresh gouges appeared in the wood as it fought its way toward the other warlock.

“Stay out, Gideon!” I shouted back. “I’m alive! Stay out!”

Not trusting my companion to listen to me, I tried to use the same spell I used in the basement at Asylum to lock the demon back in the symbol, but the creature was stronger in these rooms than I was accustomed to. It turned the energy it was using on the door toward me. I raised my shields at the last second, but it still plowed through. Pain slashed across my cheek as it tore three long slashes through my flesh with its talons.

“You’re not touching him!” I snarled, putting more energy behind the locking spell as I dropped my shields completely.

Glass exploded on the table and the lights winked out again, but I didn’t need the light. I couldn’t see the demon with the lights on, and the darkness actually helped me focus my magic. As the demon turned, preparing to rush me a second time, I changed tactics. It was lost in a rage, determined to hurt something now that it had been denied access to its prey. When it crossed above the symbol toward me, I directed the energy to reach up from the floor and grab it as if the hands of the dead were trying to pull it back toward the Underworld.

No!

It shrieked in my head, the sound so deafening that I didn’t hear the glass breaking, but I could feel it raining down on me from around the room.

“Enough!” I bellowed. I halted the spell, but didn’t disperse the energy releasing the demon.

“Gage? Are you all right?” Gideon shouted from the other side of the door, but I ignored him.

“We need to come to an agreement. You attack who I say or I will close the doorway and destroy the stones,” I said in a low voice.

You need me,
the demon howled.

“But you need me more,” I said. “I can find another way to get what I want. Are you willing to wait for someone else to come along to set you free?”

I have an eternity ahead of me.

“Yeah, or you can make a deal with me now.”

The silence stretched for several seconds. Sweat beaded on my brow and my arms started to tremble under the weight of holding the spell in a state of limbo. I was giving this thing another two seconds and I was shutting the doorway down. If I had any sense, I’d do it anyway. Dealing with demons was too dangerous and I was beginning to wonder about my own sanity if I was willing to go down this dark road. But it was right. I did need it.

What are your requirements, Master?
the demon hissed at last, surprising me.

Master? This was a development that I wasn’t expecting.
Master
couldn’t be a word demons tossed about lightly. It couldn’t actually interpret this bargain I was trying to wring out of it as my beating it. But then, maybe I was beating it. I was forcing the demon to do my bidding.

“You will attack only who I say,” I commanded softly, trying to be careful in the event that Gideon was listening at the door. “You will not attack Gideon.”

Anyone else forbidden?

“Trixie, Bronx, and Sofie as well.” I didn’t expect my companions to walk through the door in the Towers, but I had to cover my ass in the event that some fucking witch or warlock got crafty. Besides, Sofie might be stuck as a cat, but the old witch did pop back to the Towers on occasion for information. I didn’t think she’d ever dare come into Simon’s rooms, but I didn’t want to risk her life.

Any other wishes?

“Back off. These rooms are mine now.”

The demon was quiet for a moment as if pondering my requests. The fierce, ruthless anger I had felt coming off it just seconds ago had diminished completely and all I felt was a kind of pensiveness.

Am I to be locked up completely like in your other rooms?

It was referring to the basement. The spell down there kept a much tighter leash on it, but then I’d been afraid of the power creeping up through the floorboards and attacking a client in the middle of a tattoo. Unexplained attacks and gruesome deaths were always bad for business.

“If you can agree to not attack me or those I have listed as untouchable, I will allow you to remain freer than at Asylum.”

Agreed
.

As if to show that there were no hard feelings, the lights popped on around the room. Glass that shattered in the face of the demon’s rage drifted gently across the room, and reassembled into beakers, vials, and other sundry items as if nothing had ever happened. Not allowing myself to be distracted by the elegant display of power, I completed part of the closure spell I had started, trapping some of the demon’s powers. In comparison to what I had erected at Asylum, I was willing to estimate that the demon was now operating at only half power. Or rather, I hoped that it had access to only half of its powers.

My legs wobbled when I released the energy and I started to collapse toward the floor, but a cushioned ottoman shot across the room and caught me before I could hit the floor. This was just too weird.

“Gage?” Gideon called, reminding me that the warlock was waiting in the hall.

“I’m alive,” I shouted back. My body ached as if I had pulled several muscles trying to lift something I had no business lifting. But then, I guess that was only natural when you went a couple rounds with a demon. No, that was wrong. You go a couple rounds with a demon, and your intestines get strung up around the room like Christmas lights. This was what it felt like when you went a couple rounds with a demon that needed you alive.

I heard the rattle of the door handle as the warlock tried to open the door. My hand shot out and I reinforced the lock, keeping him barred from the room. “Don’t come in. I can’t shut down the spell. Simon still has it tuned to me so I can be in here, but anyone else coming in will be shredded.”

“What kind of spell? Maybe I can help unravel it,” Gideon offered.

“I’m not sure. I need to dig through his notes and try to find it,” I lied. Closing my eyes, I drew in a deep breath, pushing down the self-loathing that rose up like bile in the back of my throat. “I’ve got it so it can’t leak out of the room anymore. Go down to the library and I’ll meet you in a few minutes.”

I waited in the tense silence, listening to the pounding of my heart in my ears. I was terrified that the warlock was going to force his way in. The demon might say that he wasn’t going to attack Gideon, but I could still feel it coiled just past my shoulder as if waiting to launch itself across the room. Demons couldn’t lie, but they were great at half-truths and finding loopholes in agreements.

“Five minutes, Gage,” Gideon warned.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I heard his footsteps retreating as he headed back toward the open shaft in the far wall that would take him to the basement level where the library was located.

You’re sure you don’t want that one killed?

“Yeah,” I snapped. “I’m sure.”

The demon chuckled and I shook my head. Exhaustion was taking its toll and the bed in the next room was starting to look appealing. Of course, I’d have to burn the sheets first, but I had a feeling my new little friend would be only too happy to help with that task. Fuck it. Even with fatigue leaving me trembling where I sat, I wasn’t sleeping here. I had a bed waiting for me that wasn’t watched over by a demon.

“I need to get out of here,” I muttered, slowly pushing to my feet.

Looking around, my eyes landed on the bookshelves in the far corner and some small bit of energy returned to me. If I was to have any hope of finding some spell or at least learning more control that would give me an edge over the Towers, there was a good chance it lay in Simon’s books. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time or energy to go searching through them tonight to find what I was looking for—not that I even knew what I was looking for at this point.

“How long did you watch Simon?” I asked as I walked over to the bookshelves. None of the books looked familiar to me, but then the bastard hadn’t let me touch his books while I was his apprentice. He believed that the best way for a young apprentice to learn was through watching and mimicking.

Time is difficult for me to judge, but I was here before you arrived as a child.

I nodded. “Could you help me find something? I need . . .” I started, but my words quickly drifted off, unsure of how to phrase my request.

Power,
the demon whispered with a gleefulness that bit at my nerve endings like a jolt of electricity.
You wish to take down the Towers. You wish for control and power. You wish for protection.

“Yes.”

Two books slid partially out from there they had been shelved, one at chest level and the other on the very top shelf. Grabbing both, I took them over to the table and looked at them. The first looked to be a spell book, but upon flipping through it, the spells all appeared to be extremely aggressive and lethal. The book was old, older than even my former mentor. Simon had either taken this from the library or stolen it from a colleague many years ago.

The second book was the disturbing one. It was all about demons.

“Why this one?” I looked up in the direction that I felt the demon hovering even though I couldn’t see it. “More information will give me the ability to control you better. Improve my edge over you. Wouldn’t that make it harder for you to eventually kill me?”

The demon’s amusement increased and it was like I could feel it smiling at me. Its presence drew closer so that it was surrounding me, but I didn’t feel crowded.

It is like a chess game.

“And I’m a pawn?” I growled.

No, in this case, I am the pawn.

“What?”

I have allowed myself to be taken so that greater things can happen in the future.

My heart started pounding as some part of my brain desperately scrambled to find a way out of the mess that I had created. “What are you talking about?” Had my attempts to ensnare and control the demon gotten me into an even bigger mess that I couldn’t escape? It was a hidden skill with me to constantly make things worse when I got involved.

She will claim her time with you soon. And if you’re not prepared, she will break you.

Lilith. When I’d encountered her in the Underworld this past summer, she’d been adamant about my being able to free her so that she could wreak havoc on the rest of the world.

“Why me?”

You have potential.

“Fabulous,” I muttered, suddenly feeling bone weary as hope of getting to the bottom of this dilemma quickly deflated. This conversation was getting me nowhere. I already knew that Lilith wanted to use me. I could only assume it was because she saw some kind of weakness within me that she could exploit.

Yes, it is. But as you will learn when you read, demons can read the future in the waves of magic.