The Problem With Black Magic (24 page)

Sammael was ready: glowing red eyes, check. Brutal, savage claws, check. A physical shape somewhere between a goat, a tractor and a Dallas Cowboys Linebacker? Check.

As the final details of his figure filled in from the summoning, he raised his voice in his best, most terrifying growl. "WHO DARES SUMMON ME, THE DEMON SAMMAEL-"

"Sorry, the shock and awe approach has never really worked with me for some reason. I recommend changing into your preferred human form, I imagine it's a lot more comfortable in this venue."

Sammael
coughed and considered his summoner. Sitting before him in a folding metal chair was a small woman in a brown suit, her equally brown hair pulled back into a tight bun. She wasn't beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, but there was intelligence in her narrow brown eyes, and she could be considered attractive, in a librarian-ish sort of way.

Sammael
began to change form, a mist obscuring the details of the process. If she knew that he had a preferred human form, she was already better informed than the average summoner, and there wasn't much point to grandstanding with the "Ye Olde Demon" look. He changed into the 20-something blond form he preferred: good looking enough to assist in getting what he wanted when he chose to pass for human, but not so good-looking that people mistook him for a film star and chased him down for his autograph. That got annoying real fast.

Change complete, he dropped his arms casually at his side. "So, what does my mistress command-
- ah, what is that?" he trailed off as his nose alerted him to the huge, matted pile of blood and fur right outside his summoning circle.

The woman looked slightly embarrassed, but only for a moment. "
That? I killed and drained 50 rabbits in order to get the sacrificial blood to summon you. I figured I was better off erring on the side of too much than too little."

Sammael
tried not to show much emotion in front of humans on general principle, but he couldn't help raising an eyebrow at that. "Fifty rabbits? You know, it's much more cost effective to use your own blood for this, human."

"I know, but unfortunately I'm slightly anemic, and losing that amount of blood would be unsafe. Then, I might fall unconscious, and you'd be stuck in the circle with no one to dismiss you for six hours before dawn, which wouldn't be
fair to you, obviously. So I used animal blood. I apologize for any inconvenience," she concluded, her face impassive.

Sammael
massaged his temples, where he felt a ghost of a headache starting to grow; this was going all wrong. "Alright, whatever, you got me here. What should I call you, mistress?" he said, hissing the last word.

"Helen," she said crisply.

"Lovely. Hello, Helen; I reckon you already know my name. Now what do you want, lady?" he said, putting his hands on his hips and fixing her with an impatient glare.

Usually, when a woma
n of a certain age summoned him, it was because her husband had taken up with a younger woman, and the mistress had decided to put a curse on the pair of them. That was more or less how he had Helen pegged at this point, so he couldn't help but drop his jaw when she named her actual request.

She raised her chin up, looking him in the eye. "I wa
nt you to father a child for me: a son."

When he had recovered the power of speech, the demon sputtered.
"You...moron! You can't use the circle to compel me to do that! How could you have the knowledge to summon me and not know that!"

"I know," she said, with that no-nonsense tone she had. "
Sammael--"

"The only POSSIBLE way that could happen is if you willingly broke the circle so I could come out, in which case, do you know what I'd do first? Rip your intestines out and wear them like a feather boa, you dumb bitch. Then rip your ears and nose off and eat them as
hors d’oeuvres. Then break you in half and take your torso back home as a trophy, and THEN--"

Helen didn't seem to be particularly moved by any of this. "Yes, that's a very real possibility, but obviously, I'm hoping it won't come to that. Eventually, you might decide that you want to have a child by me."

Sammael's further threats died on his lips. What was the point? He had been summoned by a complete whack job, apparently. "Uh, it doesn't work that way, hon. Either you give me an order that I can obey-- curse someone, extend your life at the cost of your soul, that sort of thing-- or you send me back. If you ever let me out of this circle, I'll kill you, and that's that."

Helen shrugged as if this was of no account. "Maybe," she said. "And maybe after a few thousand years of cursing people and whatnot over a bunch of trivial garbage, you'll appreciate not having to bother. In any case, I intend to summon you periodically with this request,
then let you go if you say no."

Sammael
blinked. "That's it? You're going to summon me and keep asking me to be your...baby daddy?"

Helen nodded, like he was a very slow child who had finally caught on.
Sammael smiled: wow, she was even more bonkers than he thought. He walked up the very edge of the circle, so she was only a foot or two away, and looked down at her.

"Great. You've convinced me. Why don't you break the circ
le? We'll get busy, have a grand old time, and then I'll be on my way."

Helen rolled her eyes. "No
Sammael, obviously if I let you out now, you're just going to kill me."

Sammael
felt his eyes widen. "But you just said!--"

Helen shrugged again and crossed her arms in front of her. "I'm a judge; I have a good feel for when people are lying. I'll know when you're saying it for real."

Sammael backed up: this was bad. Sure, she was crazy, but not the fun kind of crazy: the kind of stone-cold, calculating crazy that lived long enough to put everyone who had ever called them crazy in the ground. He could imagine her summoning him every night for the rest of her natural life with her request, and never letting him out, ever. That would put a serious drag on the next several decades.

He put up his hands in supplication. "Listen to me, Helen," he said with as much earnestness as he could fake. "I'm sorry for trying to scare you with the whole scary demon act, but this is insane; this isn't good for e
ither of us. What are you, 40 years old? You can't have too many child-bearing years left. Knock off with this crazy stuff, go find some halfway-decent bloke and have at it."

Helen's face remained impassive. “If you outwait my biological clock, I have a surrogate lined up; it's not an issue."

"And demon kids are a wreck, what with blowing things up all the time before they can control their powers, if they ever learn. Some don't. It's worse than having a retard for a kid, I swear."

"Since I want a demon to father my child, it’s my responsibility to handle the many challenges that
will entail, not yours. Though I appreciate your concern."

Sammael
gave up on reasoning with her and threw up his hands, frustrated. "Why? Why do this? Why do you want a demon kid so badly?"

Helen's expression softened slightly for the first time since she'd summoned him.
"I want what every mother wants, for my child to survive and be happy. If I have a demon child, no human being will be able to threaten him, ever. He'll be free to do whatever he wants."

Sammael
exhaled, not sure how to regard her now. He could tell she was telling the truth, and it wasn't that she'd discounted the possibility that this quest would end with her head displayed on his mantelpiece; she'd considered it, knew it was likely, and went forward with it anyway. All because she'd decided that she wanted her child to have everything she could possibly give him.

"So...what?
You're going to summon me every day and ask me this?"

"No, I thought that would be cruel and unusual. I'll only summon you once a week at this time and keep you for an hour, so you can question me and decide whether you would be comfortable with me as the mother of your child."

Sammael sneered. "Why would I want a stone crazy bitch like you to mother my kid? If I want tail I can get it anywhere, and no offense but I've never been turned on by the whole sexy-librarian look, hon."

Helen smiled; he was amazed how different her face looked with that expression. "Because I'm n
ot crazy, although I am a bitch, and I imagine it takes a bitch to properly mother a demon. And thank you for the "sexy," comment, I don't hear that often."

Sammael
just looked at her. It wasn't that she wasn't afraid of anything; she was too logical to be fearless. She was smart enough to fear him, but had made peace with her fear a long time ago. There was nothing he could threaten her with that she hadn't already considered, and dismissed.

Helen leaned back her head and yawned, a voluptuous yawn from deep in her throat. "Anyway, I'm tired; since you're obviously not going to warm up to the idea immediately, I may as well send you back tonight so we both can relax.
Begone, Sammael."

Sammael
felt his form begin to melt away and found, to his surprise, that he didn't actually want to leave yet. "Hey, I thought you said you were going to give me an hour to question you."

"Yes, yes,
next time: once I've had some practice with this summoning and it doesn't leave me so lethargic. Goodnight, Sammael, I'll see you next week."

"Goodnight, ridiculous crazy lady," said
Sammael, smiling.

As her drab apartment began to disappear, only to be replaced with his sumptuous rooms,
Sammael realized that if he was honest with himself, he had to admit that he was looking forward to the next time Helen summoned him. He was going to spend the next week thinking up some dynamite questions for her.

PREVIEW: SUCCESSION OF WITCHES

Succession of Witches
, the second book in The Familiar Series, is available now.

Sam had been staying at Bob’s Motel on the outskirts of the city for almost seven months, which was a record even for him. He’d lived in cheap motels before, but usually he foun
d an apartment before the three-month marker. However, his first few attempts to find an apartment in Sterling had been fairly nightmarish, and at some point, procrastinating on further apartment hunting became living at Bob’s for the forseeable future.

It wasn’t all bad. The place was cheap, but the maids did a serviceable job cleaning the place, saving him the effort of cleaning up after himself. There was a free continental breakfast of all the stale cereal you could eat, which might not be very appetizing but would do in a pinch. Most importantly, the room did have one really comfy reading chair, the importance of which was not to be underestimated.

While it could get noisy at night, at 5:30 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon the place was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. Or a bunch of library books, which was what Sam was currently trying to levitate. Taking on a familiar had done what no amount of nagging from Dr. Serenus Zeitbloom and his mother could accomplish: motivated him to practice his magic. He had realized that if he wanted to get Cassie to stop being scared of him, it would probably help if he was a little less scared of himself.

There was a painfully loud
thunk
as the Sterling Public Library’s copy of
War and Peace
banged into the ceiling. Sam winced; he shouldn’t be using the works of Russian authors for levitation practice. The book stuck to the ceiling for a moment before falling, and Sam managed to get his hands under it before it hit the carpeting. A banging on the ceiling from the room above made it clear that the hotel wasn’t entirely empty; someone up there wasn’t keen on the noise he was making. Sam knocked gently on the ceiling, hoping the guest above him would take it for the nonverbal apology it was.

After he knocked, he heard a soft thumping noise coming from the wall behind him, from behind the bed. Sam raised
an eyebrow; no one was staying in that room. Maybe one of the maids was in there.

He ran his fingers over the worn cover of Tolstoy’s masterpiece, wondering what he was doing wrong. For some reason, it was easier to move the book in big, sweeping movements
. Trying to get it to hover just a few inches above the table was what had led to smacking the book into the ceiling. With the big movements, it was just a general release of energy that he didn’t have to think about much, but getting the book to hover required summoning flows of air to manipulate it, and that just didn’t seem to work.

Though some magic could work around the laws of p
hysics, in general it was much easier to work within them. That’s why he knew he must be summoning some kind of wind to power the book’s flight, but he couldn’t see it. In theory, he should be able to see the threads of air energy keeping the book aloft, but he barely saw anything. He could feel that they were there, but when he tried to concentrate on them, it all became a blur.

If he had tapped into Cassie’s magic anytime recently, he’d probably be able to see every single serpentine thread. As far as he knew, familiars were just supposed to provide fuel for spells, not make you significantly better at them. It was one of many ways in which his familiar was atypical, and while he wanted to know why, now was not the time to worry about it.

He put
War and Peace
back on the table and picked up a much lighter book, actually a children’s book; he’d picked it up because the mermaid on the cover reminded him of Cassie for some reason. Concentrating on lifting the book ever so slightly, he managed to levitate it above his palms for a few seconds before he had to release it and let it fall back onto the table. It was either that, or give in to the temptation to throw it really hard again.

Sam rubbed his eyes, trying not to give in to frustration. He’d all but ignored his magic for close to a decade; it wasn’t exactly a shock that his attempts to attain more precise control over it weren’t going well. The problem was that he didn’t know what he needed to do to improve. Should he just try to levitate his library books over and over again and hope to see improvement, or was it a total waste of time?

On a whim, he turned and squatted to retrieve the room’s copy of the bible from the lowest drawer of the night table next to his bed. Maybe working with something heavier would be easier, and the motel’s copy of the Holy Scripture was one of those large, annotated versions that was actually bigger than
War and Peace
. Feeling the weight of it in his hands, he threw it towards the table.

“Stop!” he yelled, managing to summon enough air pressure to stop the book before it fell. For a second, Sam could see the currents: funnels of
translucent gold and silver that danced in strange patterns, leaving shimmering dust in their wake….

For some reason, the Holy Bible then exploded in a shower of sparks and singed paper. The force of the explosion pushed Sam down on his backside as smoke enveloped his part of the room. Coughing, he rose to his feet to see his motel room decorated with ribbons of paper from the destroyed tome—and worse, his other library books. When the bible had gone, it had taken all the other books with it, though the table was mysteriously unharmed.

He muttered a made-up word quickly, his marker for time reversal, and the pieces of the destroyed books flew back to the table and began reassembling themselves, paper and leather spines twisting together in a display that was strangely intimate. Within a moment, the books were intact.

That was his life in a nutshell: fail at a task from Magic 101 that a small half-demon child could do, then reverse time to fix his mistake, something only a handful of living demons would even attempt. He’d done a local time reversal, only affecting the room he was in, but he could do much more. He knew from last fall’s adventures that his effective range was miles.

He heard more thumping from the wall next to his bed. Whatever the maid was doing in there, he hoped she would be done soon.

At this rate, he wasn’t going to be a good master for any witch, let alone Cassie. He went to take a look at the mermaid book again, trying to figure out what it was about the female on the cover that reminded him of his familiar (since aside from her dark hair, the drawing of the fishtailed woman looked nothing like the girl he knew), and stopped in his tracks when he realized the book had changed. In fact, all the books had: they were covered with some kind of soot, and once he saw it he could smell subtle, but noxious fumes as well.

“Dammit!” he yelled, not even caring that he had cursed. This happened at random times. Sometimes using magic on an object would do nothing, sometimes it would change the mass or weight, and rarely everything would be covered by this disgusting substance, the residue of black magic. Levitating a book wasn’t a black spell by any stretch of the imagination, but apparently all of Sam’s magic was black by definition; even when he was doing something white magic could easily do, he still ran the risk of dark aftereffects.

He tried to brush the powder off the cover of the mermaid book before it could eat through the paper like acid and destroy it, but pulled his hand away quickly; the stuff was burning to the touch. Not only had he cursed his library books by accident, but the stuff was unusually potent. He wouldn’t have risked
the books, but he hadn’t seen the residue in years and he’d honestly forgotten it was a possibility. Or maybe he’d just fervently hoped he’d outgrown it.

Suddenly he felt a chill; h
e knew he should count his blessings. Imagine if the spell he’d use to freeze time in the city last October had triggered a rare aftereffect…the possibilities were too terrible to even contemplate. Did he avoid an aftereffect that time because his magic was more suited to bigger spells than little ones? Or did he just plain get lucky?

Shielding his hand with an old undershirt, he knocked the books off the table to save
its clean wooden surface. The threadbare carpeting below was probably beyond help anyway— let the magical soot eat it up like candy.

As Sam made his way toward the bathroom to get a towel to wipe off the table, two sharp bangs from behind the headboard of his bed startled him. He turned towards the far wall, tense. He no longer harbored any illusions that it was the maid.

He considered casting a spell so he could see through the wall, but given how working magic had gone tonight so far, he decided to quit while he was ahead. It was getting late, and it was almost time to go find that godforsaken club downtown where Dwight’s band was supposed to perform.

Still, Sam thought as he changed into a clean pair of jeans and a T-shirt, he could be sure of two things:

1.
      
He wasn’t going to be able to take out books from the Sterling Public Library anymore.

2.
     
Something was trapped in his wall, and it wanted out. Badly.