Chapter 9 Traitorous Pussy
Traitorous Pussy
Moneta. That fucking memory demon had escaped through Ikelas’s rift in the veil to ruin Malachy’s life all over again.
He didn’t have to hunt the demons down; they’d come to him.
Both Cora and Caoimhin—Francis, he corrected with a shudder—had their memories siphoned under his roof. The house wards going off had not been a false alarm, then. But how had Moneta gotten past them?
Twenty-year-old Mal had used a hand mirror to summon Moneta, and the cursed Bestiamancer had mentioned seeing a lamp through a mirror.
Like the standing mirror in the Witch’s Cap bedroom Cora had been gazing into after he returned from checking the tripped wards, when she had forgotten the night before.
Moneta was using mirrors as a portal to siphon memories. But not for much longer.
Malachy fetched the grimoire he had stolen from an Englishman’s vault eighty years ago.
The Profane Arts enchantments within had proven more than worth the grimoire’s selling price.
Traversing into the Witch’s Cap, now devoid of Cora’s comforting chaos, he fed the grimoire a drop of blood and repeated the incantation he had last spoken over his father’s grave.
“I summon you, Moneta.” He stared hard at his reflection in the standing mirror. “Come, and I shall give you a memory of your choosing if you return Cora’s.”
The mirror rippled. Moneta appeared, ensconced in a Roman stola and holding her Lamp of Memories, whose curling flames he was careful not to gaze at. Mirth swam in her bottomless black eyes.
The demon smiled. Malachy smiled back.
“We meet again, boy.”
“At long last. I see you’ve made yourself comfortable in my house while I was away.”
The demon laughed, sharp and biting. “Only because your Necromancer is stubborn. For most, I need only siphon their memories once. Yet the Necromancer’s memories of you kept resurfacing from the dark corners of her mind where she had secreted you away.
The more I attempted to siphon, the deeper her memories hid.
Unlike your memories of your little childhood sweetheart.
What was her name, Cathleen? Colleen? How easily your mind surrendered memories of her. ”
Moneta smiled, scythe-like. “What is it about this Necromancer, hm? Whispers of her have passed through the veil between Realms. Ghose is not the only one vying for a taste of her. We are all eager for her to join us, yet memories of you keep her tethered to this Realm.”
A chill raced down his spine. Moneta might have siphoned Cora’s memories, but Ghose had orchestrated this targeted attack. Ghose was biding his time, waiting for the opportune moment to strike.
Malachy forced his voice to remain calm. “What do you want from Cora?”
“What she so foolishly gave you, boy. Resurrection.”
His stomach soured. Malachy couldn’t, wouldn’t, let them have her. “Yet you’ve failed to make her forget me. You are not what you once were, Moneta. Don’t forget—I offered you a trade.”
“So you did.” Her lips pressed together in thought. “Which of your memories shall I harvest to return the Necromancer’s?”
“This one.”
The moment the demon appeared, his trap had sprung. He had sealed the back of the mirror into a one-way portal, locking Moneta inside the glass. Her smile faltered, then fell, as she realized she could not escape.
“What have you done, boy?” she screeched.
“What you fuckin’ deserve.”
His fist shattered the mirror before her cry reached its crescendo.
He pulverized the glass until his knuckles were shredded, screaming out decades of agony—for his forgotten childhood sweetheart, for his siblings caught in the demons’ crosshairs, for the Necromancer who had nearly forgotten him.
He ground the glass shards under his heel until all that remained of Moneta was the dust of stolen memories that he scattered across the Thames.
Malachy wiped his hands clean of memories. May you be forgotten.
He was determined to find Cora and make it right between them, whether her memories had returned with the demon’s death or not. He couldn’t let her slip through his fingers like water.
But first, there was a traitor to punish.
Of all the doorsteps Francis could have darkened, it was not a coincidence he had found Malachy’s.
He traversed to the spare bedroom where he had locked the former-cat, now-man. Francis spun on the heel of his clawed foot when the door opened. His slit-pupil eyes blinked at the sudden brightness.
“Who sent you, Francis? Moneta? Ghose?”
Francis tugged at the tufts of orange fur sprouting from his flabby body, now wrapped in a bedsheet. Denial died on his lips at Malachy’s murderous glare. His throat worked on a swallow. “No,” he said, lisping from his oversized canines. “It was the demon my wretched wife summoned to curse me.”
“Who?”
“I-I cannot speak her name. Such is the nature of her magic. Pl-please, my kindest, most merciful friend, you cannot fault me! She promised to fulfill my greatest desire, to be a man once more, if I only… let them slip past your wards.”
Malachy clenched his fists to keep from strangling the treacherous beast. “Them?”
“I cannot speak their names. Please—”
“What kind of d—creature is the one who cursed you?”
“She is like a lioness, whispering suggestions as though she speaks inside of me.”
Another fucking demon. The cursed Bestiamancer couldn’t answer who, so Malachy asked the next best question: “Why?”
“I-I do not know. After she cursed me, she dropped me at your doorstep and t-told me to keep my eyes open until she came for me when the time was right.”
Malachy remembered that overcast Dublin day a decade ago when a Persian cat had appeared on his doorstep, orange fur matted on its half-starved body, a collar with an eight-pointed star hanging off its thin neck. The demon had preyed upon Malachy’s weakness for strays and left a rat in his midst.
“All this time, you’ve been spying on me for that creature.” Malachy’s words were lethally soft. “You traitorous pussy.”
“Please, have mercy! I was merely a cat at the time, I didn’t understand what I was doing! Had she come to me when I was a man, I-I never would have listened to her. I would never betray you! Mal, please.”
Francis scrabbled to cling to his arm, and Malachy pried off the claw-tipped fingers, bending them back, poised to snap.
“Despite all evidence to the fuckin’ contrary.”
A shrill cry of pain erupted from Francis as Malachy broke the first finger.
“Please! My oldest, dearest friend… Y-you are at risk of great harm. Only I can save you from them!” Francis howled when another finger snapped.
“Yet you let them into my home. You let them hurt Cora.”
A third finger broke. Tears streamed out of the Bestiamancer’s eyes.
“You do not understand! She cannot be saved. They have foretold the Necromancer’s fate, and it is not you, my tr-truest friend.
The threads of fate cannot be unwoven. Please, Mal.
You cannot save the Necromancer, but you can save me.
And yourself! Should you let me go, I-I will tell you how to defeat the lioness. ”
Malachy tilted his head and said nothing, which Francis mistook for an affirmative. The pound of blood in his ears nearly drowned out the traitor’s blubbering words about an eight-pointed sigil concentrating the demon’s seductive magic.
He looked down at the stranger he had kept as a pet for a decade. When he thought of the months Cora had spent alone in his house, convinced he'd abandoned her when she needed him most, the only real consideration was whether he wanted blood on his suit.
Betraying Malachy had guaranteed Francis’s death. Hurting Cora ensured it would not be painless.
“Mal? H-have we not shared a most splendid companionship? For so many years, just the two of us…”
Malachy’s gaze landed on the artifact mounted behind Francis and narrowed in speculation.
The Pharaoh’s Khopesh was a sickle-shaped sword whose infused magic had outlasted the Egyptian dynasty that had enchanted it.
In millennia the sword had neither rusted nor dulled.
Its curved edge gleamed like a smiling mouth.
Though Francis’s death would not be painless, it would be quick, sentimental idiot that Malachy was.
There and gone, he traversed behind Francis, wrenched the Pharaoh’s Khopesh from the wall, and swung it through the beast’s neck like a warm blade through butter.
Skin ripped, tendons tore, bones split. Blood gushed forth in a fountain as Francis’s head was liberated from his shoulders. His head rolled, spinal cord waving like a ribbon, and came to a stop at Malachy’s feet. An expression of confused terror was frozen on the not-quite-human features.
The hand Malachy wiped over his face came back wet and steaming with the traitor’s blood. He would have preferred a careful posthumous dismemberment with barely a blood splatter on his spats, but the wardrobe sacrifice was worth the satisfaction. The traitor would never hurt Cora again.
Malachy made quick work disposing of the body. Head and hands bagged and sunk in a lake in Suffolk. Body weighted down in a bilgewater canal in Birmingham.
You’re no better than your Da. Colleen’s parting words whispered at the back of his skull as he watched the body parts of his once-feline companion drown under dark waters.
The sun bled into the dirty canal as evening drenched the sky in indigo. Before traversing back to London, Malachy paused for a shuddering breath. Could he mourn Caoimhin if he’d never really existed?
A metaphysical quandary for another time. Now, he needed to find Cora.