He led Jonathan across the courtyard, but he let go of him when Jonathan took up the cup. Jonathan could feel it, could feel the demon writhing.
“You will take the demon inside you.”
He was sick at the thought. He did not want to take it in again, not willingly, not unwillingly. He did not want to fight it again.
“Will—” He shut his eyes in a long blink. “Will my injury return when I take on the demon?” As soon as he asked it, he felt foolish. How would Timothy know?
But Timothy nodded. “You will endure worse as well, but to your body only. This is why you must stay so removed. Let the demon tire. Keep yourself strong.”
They were on the main floor of the abbey now. Jonathan glanced uneasily at the cup. “Can’t it hear you?”
“Not in its prison, no. It knows nothing. It will know everything once it takes over you, but it will not believe it is in any danger. It will behave as any Perry, certain it will win the battle, letting its arrogance carry the day.”
There was an insult in there somewhere, but Jonathan could not bring himself to be offended. He carried himself on heavy feet up the stairs and down the hall, but outside the door to the tower, he could bear himself no farther. “Timothy, this is madness. How do you even know all these things?”
Timothy stopped and smiled.
“I love you, Jonathan Perry. I have always loved you, and I will always love you.” His eyes grew shiny with unshed tears. “But the time of our partnership in this life has ended. Let me go in grace to the battle I must fight.”
“Timothy…!” Jonathan reached for him, dying for a third time in less than half an hour.
Do not go. I cannot bear to lose anyone more.
Timothy stepped back from the touch. He shut his eyes, let the tears fall, then opened them again. “Remember what I have told you, mira,” he said and pressed the cup into Jonathan’s hands. Jonathan hissed, gasped, then fell still as Timothy pressed his mouth to his, holding him fast in a lover’s embrace as the demon raced inside his body, clawing at his flesh until the only thing that remained of Jonathan was that kiss—and then he was nothing, nothing at all.
Chapter Fifteen
D’lor
Lady
The Lady is the feminine incarnation of the Goddess.
The Lady is dual. She possesses the aspects of both male and female,
and she can shift between them as it pleases her and as she finds the need.
The Lady is brighter than any sun and darker than the deepest shade.
The Lady carries the world in her arms. She bears. She nurtures. She sustains.
The Lady gives life, and the Lady destroys life to return it
to the cradle to be born again.
Jonathan was gone.
And then to his surprise, he found he wasn’t.
He was still inside his body, but he was small, slight, and very compressed. He could feel the demon everywhere, but it had not consumed him somehow. It had, in fact, flooded him and pushed him back and down. He felt himself rushing through his bloodstream, swimming, flying…and then he stopped. He felt scrapes, pain—
“Enjoy your stay,”
the demon snarled, and Jonathan gasped as the pain pulled him down and he was pressed into a tight, close space.
But he could see. He was crammed into a corner of himself, pinched and bent and wrapped like a mummy in the pain, but he was still there, and as if through a long, thin pipe, he could see what the demon was doing with his body. It was clutching the cup to his chest, and it was moving swiftly but with a heavy limp up the tower stairs. Jonathan thought he saw Timothy for a moment, but then he saw nothing but the stairs and the tower, first the door of his study, then his bedroom, and then at last the turret room itself.
The trappings of Timothy’s bower were gone. The only thing left in the room was the Elliott demon, still wrapped in Charles’s body. It was waiting.
The Perry daemon thrust the cup forward at it. “Give me my weapon, coward,” it spat, literally drooling as it spoke. The pain, Jonathan thought, feeling its echo. Everything Madeline had done to heal him had been undone. His body was fevered again and full of poisons, scars… The demon bore it all, sending what he could to Jonathan in his prison, trying to extinguish him with it. It didn’t work, for Jonathan knew how to redirect it back to the demon, and so the pain kept cycling, round and round and round.
The demon in Charles’s body made a moue with its host’s lips. “Poor sot. Such inferior stock you must work with, who cannot even keep your token of power safe. But yes, of course I will give it to you. I would hate for the legend of my victory to have its roots in my prowess as a bully. I wish to win by my wit and intelligence, as is fitting my superior consciousness.” He held out Charles’s hands, and Jonathan trembled as he watched the sword appear there, forming out of the air. “Here you are.”
With a roar, the Perry demon tossed the cup carelessly onto the stones as it reached for the sword. The cup rolled to Charles’s feet, where the demon picked it up and palmed it happily, like a child returned its favorite toy. The Perry demon was regarding its sword in much the same way.
Jonathan shivered as it ran his hands over the magical steel, inscriptions and all restored. The last time he had seen it whole, it had been hot with his father’s blood. It was clean now, but Jonathan knew the blood was still there, as was Andrea’s and every other who had died upon it. It was a terrible sword, one he had never wanted to see again. Now here it was in his hands. In the demon’s hands, the place it should never have been allowed to rest, no matter what the cost.
“You are such a fool, Elliott.” The Perry swung the sword through the air, and the demon reveled in the way it hissed and glinted in the early evening light. “You still think, after all I have done to your House, that your ugly little cup will have any power against my blade? Whatever magic you pull from, it will be useless against this steel. It will cut you from your body like a knife through butter.” The Perry laughed, its entire being buzzing with the thrill of the death to come. “Prepare to end.”
It swung the sword again, aiming right at Charles’s head, and the Elliott did not move, nor did it stop smiling. It stayed exactly as it was, calm and serene as the magical Perry blade passed straight through and out the other side again, leaving the demon and Charles’s body exactly as they had been, undisturbed.
Jonathan felt his demon pause.
The Elliott demon practically purred as it spoke. “This is what I mean, Perry. You have always relied on your might, your influence, and your arrogance. You have clung to the title and to your things. You sold us all for them, and you sold those whom we protected. You filled your sacristy with money and steel, and you have laced both with magic, thinking that will be enough, that it can replace that which you destroyed.”
“Our charge was to increase our power,” the Perry demon hissed. “We have done nothing more than that for which we were designed.”
Charles’s face turned angry. “Power
to protect them
. Not yourself!”
“It was our nature! We did nothing more than we were told!”
The Elliott demon rolled Charles’s eyes and waved his hand, dismissing the argument. “Enough. This is your end; your bid for power failed. You have been so confident for so long. You cannot fathom that anything at all can destroy you, which is precisely why you have failed to see the one thing that can.”
It held Charles’s hands wide, and as Jonathan and his demon watched, the Elliott daemon changed.
It was Hamilton Elliott now—or, rather, it was wearing his skin, as it had Charles’s. But it was eerily like him, its tics and shape changing to match what Jonathan remembered of the man. His voice pitched to the tone Hamilton Elliott had spoken with, his body growing slightly taller, somewhat thinner. Jonathan thought, fleetingly, that they had all been blind idiots not to see Charles’s true father, for the resemblance between the two when seen so close together was blazingly obvious.
“I let my pride slack,” the demon said in Hamilton’s quiet voice. “I whispered to them of justice, but I made myself appear the slighted beast, the underling, the hopeless case. It was warming, to see the way they nurtured me. The more I reduced, the stronger they protected me. This one”—he tapped Hamilton’s forehead and curled his lips in a rueful smile—“tried to trick me, tried to restore
him
, but he has lost, as has his daughter, and even his sweet, pitiful son, the fruit of his painful labors. But the rest of my blood was loyal and true, and they gave me more victory than I ever dreamed.”
“You were imprisoned!” the Perry demon said. “They threw you in the lake! You were
weak
, the weakest of them all!”
Hamilton Elliott’s mouth smiled. “So weak you need not bother with me, hmm?” The demon shifted again, and now it wore Martin Smith, alive once more in all his cocksure glory. The demon held out Smith’s hands in proud triumph. “While you were building empires, little fool, I was building armies. I even lured this one in from outside the blood, letting him believe he could control me. While you have beaten and enslaved your clan, I have yielded to mine, and they have nursed me into what you see before you now. They
give
themselves to me, Perry! I must enslave none with madness or pain. I need not kill you to prove my superiority. It is all around me! And now that the Lord is returned to me, all his talismans gathered at my side—now I am stronger than ever! I am not bound by body, but I may choose to form one from a dazzling palate as it pleases me, a variety which increases by leaps and bounds every moment. Now
I
am the Lord! And with these bodies I will reclaim the world we have lost, and I will take vengeance on those who caused this pain.”
“The world we knew is dead,” the Perry demon spat. “The Old Ones are dead and gone. They are nothing but ghosts.”
“They are not dead.” The demon shook Smith’s head, but it was not smiling. “I have kept them. I have kept them all. I did not let their stars go back to the sky. I kept them safe with me. They cannot die. I will never let them die again.”
It changed once more. Now it was one of the witches, the one who had lowered her veil and who had been so cool to Jonathan as she dismissed his love for Madeline. She still appeared icily serene, but there was something off about her too. The demon wore her as easily as it had the others, but she looked especially wrong somehow. Even Jonathan, for all he hated the twelve that had killed Madeline, felt pity for the noble and powerful witch, now reduced to be the demon’s puppet.
“I have all their power too—the strength of the Twelve Sisters of the witch’s Council,” the demon said through the cool, smooth tones of the High Witch. Her lips curled in a placid smile. “Their bodies were gritty, but their souls were like sipping a sunset or a cloudless sky. Such a pity to have them first, but there are other witches, and they will re-form Council after Council to defeat me once they comprehend what I have done, what I am. And I will drink them all, hoarding them in my cellars like treasured wines, indulging at my pleasure. But now I shall drink you—slowly, painfully, so that your life is drawn out as long as you might enjoy it, if you can enjoy it while writhing in pain. I want the hulking little equerry on the other side of the door to spread the news far and wide of my terror, for the whole world let my charges die horribly and alone, and so the whole world will answer in kind. And I want them to know it is coming, to fully understand what heaven and hell awaits them in my mouth. But first—first you, my old friend.”
“You won’t take me so easily,” the Perry demon said, but Jonathan could feel its fear and uncertainty.
The witch’s mouth curled again. “But I will. I will take you so easily it will make you weep, and I shall use my cup to catch your tears and drink them one by one.”
The witch held the cup before her and changed once more. Both Jonathan and the demon recoiled at what they saw in the demon’s aspect now.
“No,”
Jonathan whispered and tried to shut his eyes, but he could not close them, for the demon wanted them opened. He could only watch as Andrea Carlton walked forward and placed her cool hand against his body’s chest.
“This is how I will beat you,” she said, her voice full of the same innocent, sultry teasing that had lured Jonathan to his destruction in the end. “I will destroy you in the skin of the child you raped with that sword. I will drink you down through her mouth, the one you defiled with your agent’s lust. And I will swallow you with her thighs, the ones you cut, the ones you burned, the sex you ravaged only to please yourself. I have made her whole again. I have made her stronger. I have let you destroy me so that I could make myself immune to your blood, to your weapon, to any harm you might inflict upon me. And now I shall return it all to you, each and every molecule of pain you have inflicted upon my House. I am the Lord now, and you and all the world will answer to me.”
“The sword,” the Perry demon sputtered, but its terror was plain now.
Andrea’s mouth smiled, and she slid her hand up the demon’s chest. “The sword will not save you, Perry. Nothing will.”
Her fingers turned to knives, and both Jonathan and the demon screamed as the Elliott demon dug them into Jonathan’s fragile chest.
It pulled back before the Perry demon could swing Jonathan’s arm around and stop her. It ducked the blow, then rose again, making Andrea’s eyes impish as it suckled Jonathan’s blood from the blades that were now fingers once again. It licked her lips, and Jonathan shuddered, remembering, remembering, remembering…
“Just the start, Johnny. Just the start.” She drove his thumb into her mouth and suckled hard. Jonathan recoiled as he felt the demon remember what it had done to her, as it forced him to remember. He tried to climb away, tried to leave, but he could not escape it. He saw it all, over and over and over again.
Andrea laughed. “Oh, but this shall be better than the Twelve. Nothing shall ever match this sweet blood of my victory. I wish I dared to keep you alive longer so as to extend your suffering.” She tipped her head to the side, looking vaguely sad. “I shall miss you. How extraordinary.” Then her eyes went dark, and she extended her claws again. “But not enough to stop. Now I shall know you, Perry, as you have known so many of me. I shall know all of you.
All
of you.”