“Excuse me,” Jenks said dryly. “I want to see if Captain Tight Ass bugged your car.”
“Thanks, Jenks,” Trent said, and the pixy darted out before the door even closed.
“That was fun,” I said, not liking that my knees were wobbly. Exhaling, I tapped a line and let it fill me, washing away all the unease.
Trent pulled out a chair, and I flopped into it. Silent, he sat next to me in the middle of the store. In the lot, Jenks’s dust glowed under Trent’s car in a fitful come-and-go light. “Maybe you should sit this one out?” Trent suggested, and I looked askance at him, surprised.
“You too?” I said. “Why?”
He shrugged, an uneasy expression creasing his forehead. “Glenn is right. If Weast decides you’re a threat, he might try to put you in the cell next to the zombies.”
CHAPTER
14
My breath was slow and my fingers were tingling with latent line energy as they rested on one of the books Trent had brought down from the safe room off the girls’ nursery last night. I’d been whittling through them for hours, moving them from one end of the coffee table to the other as the sun rose, filled the great room, and now, as it neared noon, began to slip away. That the book on my lap was a demon text went without saying, but if you had to read a demon curse catalog, sitting in the sun was a good place to start.
Tired, I slumped deeper into the indulgent leather couch facing the never-lit fireplace in Trent’s great room. The space itself was huge, being three stories tall, one side all window that looked out onto his pool and patio. It was unusually warm, and I was having trouble staying awake even with the no-doze amulet. I could smell coffee brewing, the heavenly, nutty scent drifting down from the living quarters on the third floor like heaven itself.
Neither Trent nor I had slept, and after a night of looking at ugly curses, I’d had enough. The only charm I’d found that might have been remotely helpful had been one to wake someone up, and I flipped to it. Sleep not, but be awake, I read, translating the Latin. It was demon magic, meaning all I had to do was tap into the collective and say the magic words. “Non sic dormit, sed vigilat,” I whispered, jerking when my heart gave a pound and my hands shook. It was like slamming a venti, and I took off the no-doze amulet before I gave myself an aneurysm.
Breath held against the coming puff of burnt amber, I snapped the book shut. It was the last, and as I dropped it on the spent pile, my gaze went to my handwritten notes. Several of the books now had crisp new sticky notes hanging out of them to mark the charms, spells, or curses that might contain or capture a malevolent energy source, but even though Trent’s library was unique, I doubted anything I’d found hadn’t been tried by the demons before—tried and failed.
Leaning forward, I fingered a slim volume that had been especially disturbing. Just who was Trent’s mom?
Oh, I’d found lots of magic whose intent was to capture, but none lent itself to work on sentient energy, like the baku. How did you catch a sunbeam? With another sunbeam? I thought, shuddering at the memory of the Goddess’s divided mystics, some bent on killing the Goddess and forcing me to take her place, the rest shredding my mind to kill me so I couldn’t. The last thing I wanted to do was engage the Goddess for help. If even one of her mystics recognized me, I might be right back fighting for both our lives. Everyone else they ignored as we used the energy they sloughed off to change the laws of nature and do magic, but I was the one who first taught them how to comprehend an existence that was based on mass, not energy, and that memory died hard.
I exhaled, making a fist to squeeze out the last of the latent magic that had soaked into me, then shaking my hand to send little trills of static power out to be lost. The large estate was empty without the high voices of the girls and the responding rumbles of their dads. They’d be coming back tonight. I didn’t have to leave, but I would.