Ivan nodded, feeling a trifle unsure what she needed at this moment, but willing to follow her direction.
The pages in the grimoire opened to a double-paged spell. A musty odor rose, yet the second note sprang up, fresh thyme rubbed raw.Ivan looked over the spell. The diagrams depicted what he guessed were witches bowing before fanged men. Vampires. Blood spattered the entirety of the page. It jeweled on the paper, as if to lift the thin sheet would tilt the crimson liquid creeping to the margins. Witches' blood. Poison to vampires.
"I can't read the words. Are they even words? Doesn't look like any alphabet I've ever seen."
Dez pressed a hand over the bottom corner of the page nearest her. "They're not words in the sense you need to understand and define them. They're more intonations and a cadence. This spell is old. Witches once cast using thoughts and rhythm and sound.
It's an experience, like becoming one with the spell."
"I become one with my spells. I hum...I work with incantations and tones. It's how my mother taught me. But I've never seen it written out like this before."
He spread a hand over the diagrams. One of the drawn female faces cringed at his movement, as if he would slap her. Ivan drew back his hand. "No reversing this spell, though, that's for sure. Unless we can find a witch who understands this. It is an amazing thing, whoever cast this spell, to free a nation of enslaved witches. Is there a picture of the original caster?"
"I don't believe so." Dez bent over the book, dropping a billow of the sheet over the corner of the page, and spreading her hands over the pages as if to discern the very tones of the long-ago recited spell. "There's something I need to tell you, Ivan."
"Is this going to be a good tell or a bad tell?"
"Would it matter?"
"No." He drew her close and kissed the top of her head. "Whatever you want to say to me is good. It's just you and me now.
And you know things about me. My darkness. My craving for goodness. And that makes everything right."
"That's hope, yes?"
"Maybe. It's trust, that's for sure. You can tell me anything, Dez."
"Very well." She let out a breath, and then reached for the grimoire, carefully closing it, and grasped it to her chest. The book was huge, and she looked a child clutching it. "Ready?"
"I am," came the brimstone-laced growl.
The room grew dark. And Ivan knew they'd made a terrible mistake. Before Dez could send the book away, Ivan's scream of pain halted her.
Himself held her lover before his fearsome, demonic form. The darkness secreted most of the devil's hideous appearance, but Dez had seen it before. It was an image she would never forget.
How had he gotten to her? She had always taken measures, planted devil traps and warded her surroundings-not home, but at Ivan's place.
She had let down her guard, left herself completely unprotected. She had chosen heart over logic. Yet she had not been fully prepared to face the consequences.
Himself must have been waiting for this perfect opportunity. Using Ivan as his pawn, the bastard had finally found a way to put his talons to the Grande Grimoire.
Fingernails digging into the white silk sheets, Dez demanded Ivan's release. "You hand over the grimoire," Himself said. He gouged his talons deep into Ivan's bare chest. Blood oozed out in crimson rills.
"And you can have this pitiful excuse for a fixer. I don't know what I saw in you, boy. Fucking the witch was a splendid plan. But falling in love with her was not allowed."
"I-" Ivan couldn't speak. Pain stretched his face. His arms clawed out, as an insect's legs kick when pinned.
Dez knew Himself could not simply take the book. If he could, it would have been done centuries ago. He must have her permission to even touch the grimoire. And he had never approached her personally to demand it, not until now.
Now that she was unguarded.
"You're killing him!" she shouted.
Indeed, the black talons had begun to rip open Ivan's chest. Rib bones snapped and organs were exposed in luscious gore.
Sick with the sight of her lover's suffering, Dez dropped the book and crawled to the edge of the bed. What spell could she use?
She tried wind and whipped it up to a tornado, but Himself stood firm even as the torrent whipped Ivan's legs from the floor and splattered his blood against the walls.
Dez stopped the spell, for it further tortured her lover. Rain would merely make the monster chuckle. And swarming insects he would gobble in delight.
A simple bell was all she needed.
"Hand it over, witch."
"No!" Ivan managed to shout.
Some inner part of the vampire oozed from his body. No vampire could heal from such a wound, especially not if Himself touched his heart.
"Very well!" Dez shouted. "The book is yours!"
And the atmosphere lifted. The darkness receded. Ivan dropped to the floor in a sprawl.
And the Grande Grimoire no longer lay on the bed.
Chapter 15.
S moke infused the bedroom. Billowing black clouds receded into the corners. A distorted figure lay on the floor against the wall.
Blood painted his chest and arms-and that looked like an organ protruding from his gut.
Dez choked out a gasp. She scrambled off the bed and rushed to Ivan's side. But she stopped two feet from his sprawled body where her toes slipped in the vampire's blood. The crimson liquid was everywhere. Thick and dark, Ivan's life invaded her senses. Exotically enticing even as the disgust pushed up her bile.
He was conscious, trying to mumble something. The pain must be beyond measure.
Don't touch. Do not comfort him.
"What have I done?"
The Grande Grimoire no longer lay on the bed. A book Dez had guarded for over a thousand years without fail.
"Gone." And the slightest twinge of liberation allowed her, for the moment, to stand there and take it in. An exhalation washed fickle relief through her being. Gone was the responsibility. Gone was the constant worry and fear. Gone...
Her lover might die. Had she sacrificed the book to spare Ivan's life, only to see him die?
Bending, she stretched out her hands, her fingers curling, wanting to touch, to comfort, but she couldn't do it.
Ivan's hand scrabbled through a pool of blood. Dez stepped back to avoid contact.
"I may have destroyed the entire witch nation."
To speak her sin brought reality crashing upon her.
Dez stumbled backward, looking about. The room blurred and seemed to move. She was naked still. Had to find clothes.
Had to...run.
Snapping her fingers and muttering a spell, she called up some clothes. A soft white blouse cloaked her shoulders and breasts, and snug gray corduroy slacks fell to her ankles. Black heels clasped her feet.
Staggering, Dez shoved her fingers up through her hair. "I have to make this right. Why did I do it?"
For one man? One man she had known did not have her interests to heart. A man who had plainly told her he would betray her.
Yet they'd made love the entire afternoon. She had fallen deep into a murmur of bliss. It was something she had never in her life had-the connection with another of her kind, the understanding. And it had been wonderful.
And he'd been desperate to discover his truth. To know his parents could have never been so cruel to him.
"Yes. I...did it for you." She glanced to Ivan.
He looked at her now. Dark eyes, spattered with his own blood, blinked. The tips of his fingers curled. He cringed, and Dez heard rib bones snap. His body was beginning to heal.
"I...love you?" No louder than a sigh, certainly quieter than a whisper.
It felt right to say it, even if she wasn't sure of it. Love?
Their being together had made this happen. Himself had never been able to approach her before, to demand the grimoire. Thanks to decades spent studying diabology early in the twentieth century and creating foolproof methods to keep back the devil, Dez had done so effortlessly. But with his fixer present, and without a single ward or spell to guard her against the devil, Ivan had acted as a sort of conduit for Himself's entrance.
Dez thought she had seen the last of Himself a century earlier.
"This is all too much."
She had to get out of here. Clear her head of the heart spell. And if she remained, tended to Ivan-touched him-she'd never be able to think straight.
He'd be fine. Slowly, he'd heal, and then his master would reward him for finally bringing the Grande Grimoire to him.
And yet, the war between the nations would be stirred to a head now that Himself held the spells of all witches in his talons. "Oh." Catching herself against the door frame, Dez forced herself to stagger out from Ivan's bedroom and through the apartment.
She ran out into the hall and onto the elevator, her heels clicking erratically. As did her heart.
She didn't know this city. Didn't matter. She needed air. Sanctity.
She needed to run from this mistake.
Ivan twisted in on himself as the debilitating pain of his healing muscle and flesh and bone rendered him utterly incapable. He could not move to stand or push himself out of the pool of his blood.
He'd tried to call out as Dez fled the room. His voice resided in his pain right now.
She'd left him. Alone. Suffering.
What she must have thought; to have handed over the grimoire to Himself to save him. He understood Dez must not be in her right mind.
And that scared him worse. She was frantic. And she was alone in the city. She wouldn't be safe.
He pressed a palm to the floor and tried to move onto one knee. His gut felt as if his insides had been wrenched outside his body.
And they had.
Bitch that it wasn't so easy to kill him. Because the pain was still there. And it blinded. And pain meant life. He was quite literally indestructible.
Falling forward onto his chest, he moaned as the parted rib cage crushed against the floor.
Evening must have arrived hours before. Dez couldn't place herself in time as she stepped outside Ivan's building and took the sidewalk with no care for direction. The air held an unwelcoming chill. Surrounded by tall buildings, she couldn't spy the moon or a single star, some navigational mark to give her direction.
She missed her home. There it was safe.
Was that what she had done over the years? Shelter away in a safe environment, literally closing herself off from the world? As Ivan had pointed out, she craved connection.
So much so, she'd given up the grimoire in a desperate attempt to keep a connection. A connection that probably wasn't as strong as she wished. Well, it couldn't have been. They hardly knew one another. And yet they did. Good sex did not make for a strong relationship. But trust did.
"Relationship," she breathed. "This is so not you. You were the one to demand he agree it was just sex. What have you done?
Did he bewitch me? Was that it?"
She knew better. There had been no magic in the room beyond which their bodies had created when they'd joined together. Ivan had not used persuasion or influenced her magically in any way. She had wanted to show him the book. It was the most secret part of her she'd wanted him to know.
Truly, she had gone over the edge. Her mind was cracked and she was not acting to character.
Yesterday, she might have welcomed such a change. To try new things, to open her heart to a relationship. To awaken from her slumber.
"That damned heart spell!"
Seeking her truths had resulted in finding them. And Desideriel Merovech possessed some dark truths.
Would Himself start unraveling spells immediately? What of any new spells made? Would they be recorded in the book now?
She didn't know. She didn't have answers to anything. She wanted...She didn't know what she wanted. The world to stop and cycle in reverse, erasing her mistake.