and then stood, pacing away from the kitchen and then back. If she had been a normal cat, it would have looked like she was begging for her bowl to be refilled, but Sofie killed that image when she opened her mouth. “There are few things that are forbidden within the Towers. I’m sure you know that.”
“Suspected it, but I liked to think the council had enough sense to draw the line somewhere,” I muttered.
“There are a couple forms of magic that were forbidden, and in general no one mucked around in them because they were too hard to control.”
“Death Magic.”
Sofie stopped, her head whipping around to face me. “Yes, but how did you know about that?”
“Long story. What about the symbol? It’s not Death Magic.”
“No, it’s not and it’s not technically forbidden. But it is extremely dangerous. I’ve heard of more witches and warlocks getting killed for messing with it. It never ends well.”
“You’re stalling.” Grabbing my mug, I filled it with freshly brewed coffee and sipped it. The precious liquid burned my tongue, the roof of my mouth, and all the way down my throat like I had just sucked down lava, but I welcomed it. The warmth seeped into my limbs, fighting back aches and pains. In a few minutes, the caffeine would start turning the gears in my brain. By the time I finished this cup, I’d be back to human status and could actually take a shower without drowning.
“The symbol opens a sort of doorway for a demon. That’s what’s guarding your basement,” she said cautiously, as if she was expecting me to freak out, and maybe I would have if I hadn’t already done that at Simon’s.
“Is it capable of coming all the way through the doorway?”
“No, it’s more complicated than that. It can’t come into our world, but it can send bits of its power through. It remains tied to the symbol. From what I’ve read, the demon’s power fills whatever open space it has. The larger the room and the longer the doorway is left open, the more powerful the demon becomes in our world. Your basement isn’t too large, so you’ve been able to manage it with minimal problems. Anything larger and I’m sure that it would have killed you.”
Unless it wanted something.
Simon’s rooms were easily three times the size of my basement and the demon had been running loose in those rooms for months. It would have been able to crush me in a heartbeat if it had wanted to, but it didn’t because it needed me to do something. It needed me to destroy Lilith.
“Gage, are you listening to me?” Sofie snapped.
I shook my head and smiled down at her before taking another drink of coffee. My mind had wandered for a second. “Sorry, Sof. I drifted off.”
“I said you need to get rid of that symbol. Change it to close the door permanently and then paint over it. You don’t need to be messing with that stuff. It’s dangerous.”
“More dangerous than dealing with the Towers every day? More dangerous than hunting down some psychopath bent on murdering pregnant women?” I demanded, nearly shouting.
Sofie didn’t flinch. She didn’t blink. “Yes. Yes it is.”
I made a dismissive noise as I topped off my mug and carried it into the living room. She didn’t understand. I was risking my life every day to maintain some semblance of peace and quiet in Low Town while people were constantly fighting to tear it apart. I was on the cusp of losing the woman I loved as well as the child she carried. I needed to make this city safe for her. And the power I’d been searching for was finally at my fingertips.
There had to be a way to tighten my control over the demon so that it couldn’t lash out at me. There had to be a better way to tap that power so that the Ivory Towers could finally be taken down. I just had to figure out how I was going to do it, preferably before Lilith came to steal me away.
“What would happen if you put the symbol in the middle of a street?”
“Chaos. Total destruction. I can’t imagine there’s a warlock or witch powerful enough to shut the door again once it was opened.”
I nodded, holding my mug between my hands as I sat on the edge of the couch. I’d suspected as much. This had a high likelihood of ending in disaster if I went down this