Hollywood Demon (The Collegium Book 6) (17 page)

Rivera’s yoga studio looked too damn normal. The café beside it was quieter on a Monday than during the weekend, but a few people were eating lunch in the courtyard.

Clancy told herself that the sense of darkness hanging over the studio building was the shadow of a cloud. The day was patchy. Sunshine then clouds. Rain before bedtime.

Mark ignored the “closed” sign and hammered on the front door.

“Why would she even be here?” Clancy asked. “She’ll be at home.”

The door opened. Alek, the demonologist they’d met here last time, blocked the doorway.

Mark pushed past him. “Gilda said she’d meet Rivera here where Faust last manifested. Rivera?”

“Why are you here?” Alek shut the door with a bang. He followed Mark down the corridor, ignoring Clancy completely. “Gilda phoned. She said you have no connection to the demon—apart from your obsession with it.”

“I don’t have a connection, but Rivera does.” Mark found Rivera in the small kitchen, sitting at a table, drinking a cup of tea. The air smelled of peppermint.

Clancy moved just inside the room and leaned back against a wall. The fridge was at her elbow.

“Rivera.” Mark pulled out a chair and sat on her left at the small, square table.

A smile twisted Rivera’s Phoebe-mask face. She replaced the cup she drank from precisely in its saucer. “You grimace when you look at me.”

Mark’s back was to Clancy and the doorway. She couldn’t see his face, but she expected Rivera was right.

“Alek has been working with me.” Rivera hitched up the gaping collar of the yoga shirt she wore. Her clothes on her transformed body were too large. Phoebe had been slender. Elven, the gushing media had called her. “Would you believe Alek is a psychiatrist as well as a demonologist? I get shrinked—shrunken?—two ways, body and mind.”

Mark leaned forward. “Rivera, I need your help.”

Alek pushed off from the counter he’d stood against, watching, and sat opposite Mark at the square table. “Whatever you’re planning…no.”

From her position by the door to the kitchen, Clancy heard the front door open. The long central corridor enabled her to see who entered: Gilda, with two men who carried bags, probably filled with demonology equipment.

Gilda noticed Clancy peering out of the kitchen. “What are you doing, here?”

“Rivera, please, listen to me.” Mark grasped the woman’s hands. His back was to the doorway, Phoebe’s to the side wall where a calendar and whiteboard hung, and Alek’s back was to the sink as he faced the door. The empty chair at the table had its back to the empty space in front of the window that looked out to nothing more exciting than the rear fence.

Rivera looked down at Mark holding her hands, and her mouth twisted, thinning the pout of her Phoebe-lips. “You must want something badly.” She glanced up as Gilda and the two men entered the room, and her gaze flickered back to Alek. She withdrew her hands from Mark’s hold. Her fingers trembled as she wrapped them around her teacup. “Way to make a girl feel outnumbered.”

Clancy locked her hands behind her back, one hand gripping her other upper arm. The tension in the room was skyrocketing, and Clancy was none too certain any of them were doing the right thing.

Gilda put the bag she carried onto the empty chair. “Rivera, you agreed to assist us.” It wasn’t just a reminder or a conversational opening gambit. Gilda glared at Mark. “You should leave.”

The two men who’d entered with her crowded the doorway, making Clancy feel squashed. If she felt she couldn’t breathe, Rivera had to be near breaking point.

“I need your help,” Mark said to Rivera. “With your resemblance to her, I can call Phoebe back from Hell with a homeopathic spell.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gilda snapped.

Mark turned on her. “I’m not. Faust is using Phoebe’s soul as a bridge from Hell to our realm. To stop him we need to rescue Phoebe’s soul.” He outlined his reasoning, being more concise than when explaining it to Clancy on the drive from the portal.

Listening, Gilda put her bag from the chair to the floor, and sat.

Alek protested. “Gilda, you can’t possibly think this is a good idea. Rivera’s psyche might never recover.”

While the demonologists and Mark argued, Rivera’s gaze unexpectedly searched out Clancy squashed in her corner by the refrigerator. “Should I do this?”

Rivera’s question silenced the whole room.

Mark swiveled in his chair to stare at Clancy, to whom the question had been so obviously directed. His frown ordered her to say yes.

Clancy looked past him to Rivera in her Phoebe-transformation. “No.”

“Clancy!” Mark’s shout was a cry of protest at her betrayal. His chair toppled as he stood, and he caught it one-handed. “This is Phoebe’s one chance.”

“I knew Phoebe in high school,” Rivera said quietly. Not that anyone was paying her much attention. Everyone was talking at once, giving their opinion of what needed to be done. “Two foster kids, abused by the system and out to survive.”

Alek got up and grabbed Gilda’s bag, unzipping it. “I’m here because I agreed to do a summoning and banishment. Nothing more, but that has to be done. So let’s do it.”

“It could mean losing Phoebe forever,” Mark shouted. “You’ll banish Faust but he’ll keep his bridge. All of his plans will continue.”

“I say we summon this demon,” one of the unnamed men had a deep voice. It rolled through the room. “And we force the bastard to tell us his plans and to free this Phoebe you’re concerned about.”

“Well.” A new voice made itself heard. “As amusing as this all is, there’s no need for such fuss just to talk with me.” Faust manifested by the window.

Gilda moved fast, leaving her chair to stand and face the demon.

Clancy felt stifled. She was breathing brimstone. All of the demonologists were murmuring spells, their magic thick in the air.

No, not all the demonologists. Rivera sat silent and still. She even dropped her gaze from Faust to stare into her teacup.

Magic boiled in the air. To give the Collegium its due, it trained its mages well. The four Collegium demonologists joined their magic and flung it at Faust. The power of the banishment spell howled and ripped at the room, making the walls shudder.

Faust stood at the focal point of the blast—and smiled.

“Mark?” The voice came from Rivera, but it wasn’t hers. Rivera, for whatever reason, possibly to honor an old friendship, had contacted Phoebe herself. She was a demonologist and she’d forged this connection.

Clancy hadn’t heard that tone, the caressing intonation on Mark’s name, in seven years.

The voice was hesitant, but real. Phoebe was present.

Faust lunged for the table, and the demonologists’ magic held him back. They mightn’t yet have managed to banish him, but they could and did block him. Alek’s narrow face paled with the effort.

“Hold him,” Gilda barked, and fumbled for something in her bag.

Phoebe-in-Rivera’s-body and Mark ignored all of them. Phoebe smiled sadly. “I’m grateful for this chance, Mark, to explain and to set you free.”

He choked. That was what he wanted to do for her.

Clancy reached for the geo-forces that ran deep underground. If the demonologists couldn’t banish Faust, then, perhaps, she might be able to at least chase him away again. Mark needed this time with Phoebe.

And Phoebe needed it, too. Tears leaked out of Rivera’s eyes as she looked at Mark. “I always felt like a fraud. That one day you’d see the real me—and I guess you did. I tried to trade your soul for mine.”

He clasped her hand, and Phoebe-Rivera’s fingers clung to his. “You were scared,” he said.

“Out of my mind.” Phoebe gave a hiccoughing laugh and took a shuddering breath. She tossed her blonde hair as she’d done in her movies and fashion shoots, flirting with the camera.

But this time, Clancy saw the bravado behind the confident gesture and her heart broke a bit.

Evidently, so did Mark. “I forgive you, Phoebe,” he said, his voice strong and sincere.

Phoebe-Rivera shook, her skin crawled and her bones re-shaped.

Clancy tore her gaze from that horror to discover what was happening in the battle between Faust and the demonologists. For Rivera to be losing the transformation, Faust’s power had to be loosening its grip.

The demon knew it, too. He shrieked and leapt like a ferret after a mouse, intent on attacking Mark. Mark who was completely oblivious, focused on Phoebe-Rivera.

I have to protect him
. Clancy’s geomagic surged, but was pushed aside as other magic, demonologist magic, exploded.

Gilda raised her hands and Faust rose, suspended, then spiraling faster and faster.
Boom!
In mage sight, the room shimmered copper and blood. Then cleared.

Faust was gone.

“Banished,” Gilda said as she collapsed onto her chair.

“He’ll return.” Mark’s voice was gravelly. He scrubbed his hands over his face.

At the head of the table, Rivera had her own face and form again. She sat straight, tears streaming down her face, seemingly unaware of Alek taking her hand and talking soothingly.

“Phoebe is free.” Mark moved clumsily, like a paralyzed man recovering. He reached Clancy and drew her into a tight hug. “You were right. I shouldn’t have asked this of Rivera.” He twisted to look at Rivera. “But thank you.”

“I did it for Phoebe. She had everything I wanted…and then, to be trapped by Faust.” Rivera shuddered. “He was using her. Too many people used Phoebe. I’m glad you loved her.” And then, Rivera was gone, and a door, probably to her private retreat room, slammed.

“I’ll stay to be sure she’s okay and that Faust doesn’t return,” Alek said.

“He’ll be too weak for a few days,” Gilda said, but she wasn’t arguing. She looked terrible, too, exhausted. “Mark, I apologize. It was only when Phoebe freed herself that Faust’s power collapsed. He was using her as…well, bridge mightn’t be the correct term, but it’ll do. We need to talk about your counterspell.”

“Tomorrow.” He walked out with Clancy.

Sunshine had never felt so good. She tipped her face to it. The geo-forces beneath her flowed and reached to her, comforted her like a cat stropping against her legs.

Mark looked around as if seeing the café and the street for the first time. “I feel free.”

“You are,” she said quietly.

There was no magic locking them in a privacy bubble. However, their own intensity, the power of the moment, did that for them. Before Clancy had time to worry if talking with Phoebe had locked Mark in the past, he smiled. “Let’s go home.”

Clancy had thought that they’d make love the first time lightly. But Mark had his shackles off now, no longer protecting his emotions with the memory of Phoebe’s betrayal. That was forgiven and consigned to the past. Now, he was fully in the moment, totally committed to loving Clancy.

She lay naked in the middle of his big bed and panted. “Mark.” His name was a blurred plea on lips swollen from ravaging kisses and tasting of him. “Please.”

“Aren’t I pleasing you?” He grinned, fierce yet happy, teasing her.

“Mark! Ohhh.” A groan as he finally entered her, sliding in so awesomely slowly, the laughter fading from his eyes to be replaced by passion and possession. She wrapped her legs around his waist. “Stay.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” He kissed her, sucking at her lower lip.

Her intimate muscles contracted around him and he gasped, and thrust. She arched beneath him, gratified by the suspicion that his thrust hadn’t been planned. Finally—finally—he was as near to shattering as she was. She trailed her hands down his spine, teasing him with the light scratch of her nails.

A second thrust.

“Love me,” she whispered against his mouth and rubbed up against him.

His control broke and he pounded into her, the intensity exactly what she needed, and what she matched. They stared into one another’s eyes, his burning blue, as they strained for their own and each other’s pleasure, and reached it.

Her second orgasm detonated. It was an obliteration of her senses, tumbling her into an overload of pleasure that centered on her dim awareness of Mark shouting as he pumped inside her. She angled her hips to take everything.

He rolled off her, sliding down to kiss one of her nipples.

She whimpered as her heightened pleasure senses flared.

“I’ll be back.”

She didn’t know how he found the strength to walk, although she admired his back view. Happiness floated her. No, actually, that was Mark lifting her. She must have dozed off. “Where? Oh.”

He lowered her into a bath filled with hot water, then sat behind her.

She leaned back into the cradle of his body as he soaped her breasts and traced patterns all over her body. She wasn’t sure at what point the teasing caresses ceased to soothe her and began to arouse. She was just so ready for him.

“What do you want, Clancy?”

His breath against her ear made her shiver. She caught his hand and guided it there, her hips lifting and falling as she rode his hand. The water in the bath lapped at her breasts. It was a deep tub.

She climaxed.

“That’s my beautiful girl.” He kissed the curve of her neck, the line of her shoulder.

She stood unsteadily. “Condom?” She rode him in the bath tub, slipping and sliding, laughing and loving. Shivering with pleasure as his groan of release reverberated through her.

They finally made it downstairs to find that Doris had left a chicken casserole in the oven. It smelled of herbs and white wine, and they were both ravenous.

Doris had to guess they were involved. The casserole meant she approved.

Clancy ate her meal wearing one of Mark’s t-shirts. He was shirtless, so she admired his muscles and his happy, relaxed expression.

“Your smile is making me all sorts of promises,” he said.

She hadn’t realized she was smiling, but she felt her face stretch into a grin. “I intend to keep all those promises.”

He leaned back in his chair, jean-clad legs spread. “Come here and show me.”