Dog-Eared
Kim Harrison
Al stared in horror at his book, his frock coat’s tails swishing as he snatched the demon text from the scratched floorboards where Nicholas Gregory Sparagmos had left it.
The need to break the fluid bubble of energy he’d been summoned into so he could strangle the scrawny human became an ache.
His book was ruined, the handwritten pages swelled from water and the binding nearly falling off.
True, it was over two thousand years old, but it had been intact three days ago.
“What did you do to it?” he croaked, his gloved hands shaking as he found a page bent to mark a favored spell. Mother pus bucket. How big a cretin do you need to be to dog-ear a curse?
Thin and heavily scarred, the magic-using human ran a nervous hand over his jeans and resettled himself in the folding chair set to face the well-drawn, blood-enforced circle.
The lights were low behind him, probably to hide that his one-room apartment was just above the poverty line—even if it was filled with esoteric books.
At least the wizard wasn’t summoning him into a closet anymore. “Sorry?”
Al dropped the book in disgust, simultaneously materializing an ornate podium for it to land on. The heavy tome hit with a thump, and Nick jumped.
You should be nervous, little wizard, Al thought, the lace at his cuffs shaking as he cataloged the damage, easing out the earmarks as he found them.
“This is not the condition in which I lent it to you,” he said, his pretentious, Victorian-age British accent clearly conveying his disgust. The scent of burnt amber rising from the damp pages was making his eyes water.
No wonder he had been summoned early. The stench would travel through the thin walls like an ugly argument.
“Oh. Sorry,” Nick said again, smiling to show his teeth. “I fell asleep reading it.”
“In the tub? You were reading a two-thousand-year-old demon text in the tub?”
Nick stood, his motions holding a worried quickness as he went to tweak the ratty curtains shut more certainly. “Are you saying you never have?”
“I have never dropped it!” Al flipped the book closed and held it close, not surprised to feel an ache running through it, stemming from the nearby ley lines.
The once-smooth energy flow was erratic.
It might even out when the pages dried. It might not.
It was as if the book was in pain, and Al forced his jaw to unclench.
There was a time to be the all-powerful demon bent on destruction…
and there was a time to be the helpless slave caught between a salt circle and the ever-after.
But really, there was no difference between the two but for attitude.
“I didn’t write it,” he said, teeth clenched. “Which means I can’t repair it. Banish me. We are done, Nicholas Gregory Sparagmos. The cost of dealing with you is too high.”
Nick’s eyes widened as he stood before Al, his fingers twitching. “What’s the big deal? You can still read it.”
“I assumed it would be returned in the same condition I lent it to you.” Al’s breath shook as he exhaled, breathing upon the barrier between them until the thin haze of distorted time began to hiss and pop. Testing…
A smile quirked the annoying human’s lips. “You said it. Only an ass assumes. I returned it. It’s in your hand. Do you want to know more about Rachel or not? I’m the only one with enough guts to summon you and close enough to her to give you what you need.”
Al pulled back from the barrier, his goat-slitted eyes narrowing.
It was irritating, but the wizard was right.
The man before him was a supreme example of how thin the population of acceptable familiars had become.
But all things bow before an all-consuming goal, and Rachel Mariana Morgan was worth a book or two.
As long as I’m the only one who knows what she is…
Hiding his ire, Al brushed a fluff of nonexistent fluff from his overdone Victorian finery.
It was criminally outdated, but Ceri liked it.
Chin high, he snapped his fingers, and both the book and the podium vanished.
“That depends,” he said with an affected calm.
“There will be no more mutilating of my books. And there will be no books at all unless you are willing to give me something truly worthwhile.”
Nick’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not telling you how she likes her sex, so forget it.”
A smile, ugly and mean, cracked Al’s expression.
He would. Eventually. With the right bait.
“Then banish me,” he demanded again, knowing it wouldn’t happen.
Not yet. Nick was too greedy, too selfish.
“Or I will claw my way out of this circle and break your spine. See how you like me folding your arms backward to mark my favorite parts of your screaming.”
Nick paled, and Al’s eyes closed as he relished the scent of the wizard’s sweat making it through the barrier.
“If you could get out, you would have already.” Nick settled his feet firmly on the old oak floorboards as if he had control of the situation.
He didn’t. “What will you give me for how she likes her coffee?”
It was something he was dying to know, needed to know if he wanted to mimic her.
And yet…“You are slime, Nicholas Gregory Sparagmos,” he intoned, the barrier popping when he poked a gloved finger into it.
“And I will have you stirring my spells before the year is out. My current familiar is wearing thin and could use the help.”
“Stop,” Nick demanded, his gaze on the sudden sheen of black racing over the bubble. It was Al’s aura, and if the demon took the circle, it would fall. “I said stop!”
Gaze fixed on Nick, Al made a fist, pain arcing through him as he pushed it harder against the shifting band of time separating them. But the circle was drawn in blood, not salt, and he jerked his hand free as dark energy boiled and burned.
“You aren’t getting through that alive,” Nick said, but his confidence was cracked. It was all Al needed.
“Then we will die together,” he vowed, and in a swirl of energy, he dissolved, re-forming as a dog from hell. Snarling, he leapt at the barrier, yelping as it flashed a brilliant green and flung him back.
“Algaliarept, I banish you!” Nick shouted, ashen faced as he retreated. “I demand that you leave this place immediately and go directly to the ever-after. Do not stop on the way. Leave now! Now!”
The strength of the curse shocked through Al, the pain almost sweet as he forced himself to remain despite the pull, slavering like a mad thing as he stared at the loathsome human.
It wasn’t just that Nick had chained him with a sliver of knowledge.
It wasn’t that he had ruined another one of his books.
The man was slime. Morgan deserved better.
“If you crease my books again, I will rip your throat out,” Al said, his canine jaws managing the words as a real dog could never do.
And then he gave in and vanished, letting the ancient elven curse pull him back to the ever-after, the demons’ pride and hubris made terrifyingly real.
Or as real as anyone can expect, he thought as he found himself in his library, safely underground and away from the swirling red sands and gritty wind at the surface.
It was all that was left of their paradise.
Huffing in satisfaction, he wrapped the image of a Victorian dandy about himself once again, shaking out the lace at his cuffs and brushing the green velvet frock coat of the last tingle of magic.
There was an intoxicating security here among his books that even his spelling kitchen lacked.
The multitude of tomes were arranged in a pattern only he knew, and the scent of power was as tangible as the thin film of dust upon the oldest. Thoughts made real: the original magic, one might say.
“I knew the dog would scare the shit out of you,” he said with a laugh—his smile fading when he saw his book, his abused, beautiful book, there on the table beside his chair.
“Ceri!” Al scooped it up, his fingers trying to smooth the creases as he noted what curses Nicholas Gregory Sparagmos had favored with his abuse. “Ceri! Tea!”
“Coming!” came back faintly, the elf’s voice holding an unusual amount of bother.
Mood introspective, Al touched the water-damaged cover, silently promising the leather and ink revenge for the violence wrought upon it. The book wasn’t alive in any sense of the word. But the pain in him was real.
Perhaps, he thought as he ran a gentle finger across the damaged spine. Perhaps learning how to mimic Rachel in the hopes of tricking her into the ever-after was not worth damaging his library. He could not fix the abuse. But Newt can…
“Your steps smell of reality.”
Ceri’s soft, somewhat dry tone turned him around.
A fiber mat from the Asia steppe was tucked under one arm, and a clay pot from the Brazilian rainforests was in her grip, two tiny cups stacked atop.
She herself was in a flowing silk gown from no era on earth.
The elf dressed as if she was still a fey princess, even if she was a slave—favored, but a slave all the same.
“You know I don’t approve of mixing eras,” he complained.
Ignoring him, she unrolled the mat atop the table and began to pour out the tea. “Why do you let him destroy your books?” she asked, clearly appalled.
Al flipped his coattails and sat in his indulgent chair.
“I didn’t let him. He claims it’s still readable and therefore no foul can be called.
Technically he is correct. It is readable.
” Focus distant, he held the cup under his nose, breathing the fragrant steam.
Jasmine. Not his favorite, but it hid the stench of burnt amber better than most.
Taking liberty with her station, Ceri sat on the footstool and sipped at her tea. “I can recopy it. That’s it. But it will take me from my other tasks.”