Christine Warren - Huntress

“Damn it!” I cursed, snapping the book closed and hurling it against the wall.

“Cin?” Justine asked, sticking her head in the door. “May I come in?”

“Of course,” I said with a sigh.

Dressed in a soft pink morning gown, with her long blonde hair pulled back in a neat chignon, Justine looked lovely. I felt rather bedraggled sitting there on the floor in my nightgown, with my hair uncombed. She picked up the book I had tossed, closed it, and handed it back to me before sitting down in one of the chairs flanking the fireplace.

“I take it the news is not good?” she asked.

I shook my head. “The writing is too obscured by water damage. I can’t make anything out.”

“So we have nothing?” she asked.

“No, we have part of the spell which is basically useless without knowing what the other half of the ingredients are.”

“Hmm,” Justine murmured and sat back in her chair. I watched her face and could almost see the ideas running through her head. “You don’t usually use spells and potions.”

“No,” I agreed. “My magic bends to my will.”

“Then why must you use this spell to bind the demon?”

I blinked at her. “Because I don’t believe my magic is strong enough.”

“Perhaps it is worth a try,” she suggested. “You say this spell is gray magic. Is that not what you have? Both the light and the darkness inside you?”

I thought about it for a moment. Could I do it? Bind a demon with nothing more than the magic I could call? As I was considering this, Devlin and Ginny entered the room. Justine explained our progress to them and they all waited while I thought through the obstacles and implications of what Justine had suggested. Finally I nodded.

“I think I could do it. For Michael, I will be strong enough to do it. But as I see it, we have three problems.”

Devlin arched one dark brow. “Only three?”

I continued on, ignoring his sarcasm. “The least of our problems is figuring out a way to get the demon to vacate Michael’s body without physically harming … well … Michael’s body. I think I have an idea, but none of you are going to like it, and I haven’t exactly worked out all the details, so for now I’m going to keep that to myself. The second problem is what to do with the demon after we get him out of Michael’s body. The Ripper is not going to make it easy. Once he leaves Michael’s body, I’m going to have to force him into some other vessel that he can’t escape from, before he can infect a new body.”

“Or you,” Justine pointed out.

I nodded. “Or me.”

We all fell silent, thinking.

“Oh!” Ginny exclaimed, making me jump. She pointed to the bookshelves that lined the wall next to the fireplace. “Will that work?”

I followed the direction of her finger and if my heart had been beating it surely would have stopped at what I saw.

“Ginny,” I said slowly, “Is that what I think it is?”

“After y’all left Devil’s Island, I kept it in my room as sort of a keepsake to remind me of … everything. When I came to London I brought it with me. I thought it should be here.”

Sitting there on the shelf (serving as a bookend no less!) was a large Grecian urn. I rose to my feet and slowly walked over to it. Reaching out I traced my fingers over the lid and down the sides, making sure it was still intact. And why wouldn’t it be? It was said to have been forged by Hephaestus himself.

I turned back to my friends and smiled. “An unbreakable jar that once held a god of war trapped for millennia. That will do.”

“Before we get ahead of ourselves,” Devlin said, always the voice of reason, “what is the third problem?”

My excitement waned. “The demon is apparently immune to my magic.”

“How can that be?” Devlin asked, stunned.

“I have no idea,” I replied. “But I’ll think it through today and maybe something will come to me. The minute the sun sets, though, we need to find Grady. Until I can figure out why my magic won’t work and how to remedy the problem, we can’t fight this demon. In the meantime, I want to make it very clear to Grady that no one is to harm the Ripper while he’s in my husband’s body.”

As twilight settled over London, I went from room to room in the house, checking the locks on all the windows and doors. If the demon decided to pay us a visit, I wanted to be sure he had to break down something solid to get in. At least we would have that as a warning. Ginny had flatly refused to leave the house at night, even though I had offered to put her up in a fine hotel, or turn a blind eye if she wished to stay with Warren. She was certain that I might need her, though, as I had the night before. Since I had taken her blood, I could use vampire magic to bend her to my will, but I wouldn’t do it. Instead I had sent the footman to Warren’s shop with a request that he come talk some sense into her as soon as he closed for the day.

That task had taken all of five minutes and the previous argument with Ginny had been short-lived. The other hours of daylight I’d spent poring over every book I owned, trying to stay busy so that I wouldn’t go mad with worry. Amy, the housemaid, had come in several times to ask if I needed anything. I had politely declined both lunch and tea, refilling my whiskey glass at a rate that would have been alarming in a human. None of it had kept my mind from wandering to Michael, though. To what the demon might be doing, at this very moment, in his body. For the thousandth time since I’d woken alone in our bed, I pushed the thought aside.

Entering my bedroom, I pulled my coat from the wardrobe and tossed it on the bed. Tonight I wouldn’t be tramping through the slush in skirts and slippers. This time I would be ready for whatever came my way. I was wearing black leather breeches tucked into a pair of thigh-high boots. A black leather vest topped the ensemble. I rarely wore the vest alone, with no shirt underneath. A full-sleeved shirt helped to hide the knives strapped to my forearms, but tonight I would do without it. I wanted to look as dangerous as possible.

I slid Michael’s claymore into the scabbard at my hip, feeling closer to him because I was wearing his blade. It wasn’t the great claymore that he called Ophelia, but one he’d had made as a scaled-down version of his favorite weapon. Wearing a sword in public will get you arrested in most places, and it’s difficult to conceal a blade nearly four and a half feet long. The sword he carried now looked like the claymore but was substantially smaller and easier to hide under a cloak or long coat. Ignoring the fact that the last time I’d seen Michael he’d shoved this blade into my heart, I opened the trunk that held our weapons and pulled out a long, flat box.

As a rule, vampires, especially the older ones, don’t like guns. They seem to view them as cheating. If you can’t win a fight by your own physical strength and skill with a sword, then you deserve to lose. However, last year I’d won a Smith & Wesson .38 from an American in a game of poker and, as it turns out, I’m an excellent shot. Of course, it’s nearly impossible to kill a vampire with a bullet, but it will get their attention. Sometimes that’s all you need. I loaded the gun, tucked it into the waistband of my breeches at the small of my back, and shrugged into my coat.

Michael called this my general’s coat. It was long and black with burgundy silk braiding that decorated the turned-back cuffs and ran along the edge of its stand-up collar. A smart row of oriental frog buttons in the same burgundy silk marched from the collar to just above my waist. The rest of the coat was open, allowing me swift access to the weapon at my hip or the knives strapped to my thighs, hidden by my tall boots. The coat belled out just enough to hide the fact that I was a woman wearing very scandalous and masculine attire. That is, if you didn’t look too closely.