A fucking fallen angel, landed in my basement.
“Oh, Hecate’s chilly tits,” I whispered to myself, my heart plummeting even as a rising thrill swelled inside my stomach. “This is so very deeply fucked.”
From what I’d read, the fallen were ultra-wily, temperamental, and extremely powerful—exactly the kind of unpredictable daemonfolk I do not fuck with as a general rule.
But here she was, anyway, which meant shit was about to get extremely outside the box.
She whipped around to face me in a single blurring motion, still kneeling, dainty little hands folded primly on her lap. Her fingers were tipped with vicious black talons, knuckles dusted with iridescent scales. She cocked her head, examining me, the tip of a forked pink tongue peeking between her lips. Then she smiled at me, wide and feral, a flash of onyx teeth with fanged canines and incisors.
Let me tell you, there’s something viscerally unnerving about black teeth, especially ones as sharp as hers. I had a mounting suspicion that, unlike the real Malachus—wherever the hell he was—this chick’s demonic bite might be a lot worse than her bark.
A bloom of pure dread uncurled inside my chest, shooting down into my fingertips and toes like a falling star. Alas, the thrill-chasing part of my brain that often took the wheel at times like this downright relished it. So this wasn’t going to be a lesson-learned type moment, then, I noted to myself. No big surprise there; I’d never been much good at those.
“Ill tidings!” the demon said cheerfully, in a cross between a velvety purr and some gigantic gong struck directly between my ears. Gritting my teeth, I narrowly resisted clutching at my head. When it comes to demons, a show of weakness is just about the worst thing you can do. “Whom do you serve?”
The roteness of her greeting defused the tension just a hair. Demons always start with the ill tidings bit; it’s what passes for good manners with them, part of some governing daemonfolk etiquette.
I drew myself up, putting on an imperious expression modeled after my mother, and doing my level best to avoid looking as rattled as I felt. When dealing with entities from the netherworld, throwing up a badass-witch front tends to be at least half the battle.
“I serve my goddess, my ancestors, and above all, myself,” I replied, the traditional response of an Avramov summoner. I don’t know what the Blackmoores, Thorns, or Harlows say—in the highly unlikely event that a witch from one of Thistle Grove’s other magical families has ever bantered with a demon—but I’d bet my ass on some corny noise about serving the ultimate good, light conquering darkness or whatever, cue a stirring orchestral overture. Avramovs don’t buy into any of that oversimplified, good-vs-evil binary crap. Like the pragmatists we are, we’ve always staked our claim firmly in the gray.
The problem was, this was the part where I was meant to bind this entity by her true name. Which was going to be a neat trick, considering I almost definitely didn’t have the real Malachus at hand.
“And you, Malachus Azaranthinael, appear at my will and behest,” I finished, crossing my fingers behind my back. Hey, worth a shot; maybe the lore was just supremely off base on how Malachus was supposed to look. “Which means you must obey . . . and begone at once!”
“A fine sentiment,” the demon crooned, with another of those awful, spine-tingling smiles. In a streak of movement, she was on her feet, naked and stupidly gorgeous, a curtain of black silk hair draped over thick curves and long, smooth limbs. Her skin glowed like a paper lantern, as if lit from within. Too bad we’d started off on such a wrong foot; she probably had some killer beauty tips. “If I were, in fact, Malachus Azaranthinael.”
“If you are not, why do you appear in his stead?” I demanded, trying to enforce one final shred of protocol before this already wayward train went careening completely off the rails. Demons weren’t supposed to bend the rules like this; when you summon one by their true name, what you call is meant to be what you get.
“Because, as it happens, there is no Malachus,” she said, still grinning like the void, honest-to-goddess little flames dancing in her golden eyes. Sounds like something right out of a cheesy cartoon, but it sure didn’t feel clichéd when the abyss was staring you dead in the face. Chills crawled under my skin, crept into my knees—the type of nerve-jangling bullshit I lived for, the reason I went all in on such foolhardy antics as this in the first place. “There is, and ever was, only me . . . and the lies of Malachus I tell, to entice dim little deathspeakers like you into calling me up, unbound.”