A Demon’s Book Of Shadows (Witches & Demons #1)

30. Amon

30

Amon

Go find the witch you love, my firstborn.

Mom’s words burned into me with an urgency that made me sick. My father’s face blurred as I was transported back to a memory from my childhood.

The sound of running water filled my ears. My mother sat next to me on the riverbed, a raven feather in hand, parchment folded across her lap as she studied the river. I sat next to her, eager for my painting lesson to start. I grabbed my own raven feather from my medicine bundle and unfold my roll of parchment across my lap to mimic her.

Mom’s shoulders rose and fell as she slowed her breathing. Her hair was a mass of rebellious black strands that caught the yellow light of a thousand small creatures drifting in the breeze.

Familiars—hundreds of them—hovered in the air. They were disguised as fireflies, bats, and ravens. But in my mother’s watchful eye, she knew they were really earth spirits. We were here to study them and make observations. My mother was a witch, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t teach her demon son about the magic the earth spirits possessed .

I dipped my bare feet into the river. The icy water focused me.

“Do you remember what I said about the river and the land? Who moves who?” Mom asked.

“The river moves the stones,” I replied.

My mother’s hand came to my own, gently directing the feather over the parchment. “It would seem so, yes, but only physically. What the water does to the soil is something not all of us can visualize. That is what you are here to paint. You are here to observe the invisible, and to be moved by it. A dream is what all of us feel, like the pebbles and stones that roll along the riverbed, invisible for us to see.” Her chin lifted as she gazed across the river. “Look around you. Do you know what represents the dream?”

“Water?”

“Yes. Water brings clarity to our dreams. We are the stones, but the water is our clarity.” She released my hand, and a great rush of water thundered in my ears. “Amon, you have inherited my magical talents. When you grow into a man, you must not hide from them, even when I am gone.” Her eyes met mine, the light of a thousand earth spirits shimmering in them. “You must trust your shadows when you have forgotten how to trust yourself.”

I shook my head, stirring from my childhood painting memory of mother by the stream. The memory was about to turn into a nightmare.

I had to find Lucy.

“Amon, what did you see?” Dad asked.

I rolled up my painting and stuffed it into my pocket. “No time to explain. ”

With my shadows gathering, I dissipated out of my parlor.

As soon as I manifested in Lucy’s bedroom, my forearms burned. My shadows retreated, fear tingling through my veins. The feather I had given Lucy hovered in the air, taunting me. A witch had been here. She bewitched the space, marking the air with a shimmering afterglow of magic.

Fuck .

Melrose had been here. I knew her signs and scents, both of which clouded my nose. How could I have been so stupid as to leave Lucy alone?

I tore out of her bedroom, heading for the streets. There must be a trail of her magic, even just a fragment of her aura for me to follow.

The stocky figure of a demon made his way down the sidewalk. With his face concealed in reaper-like fashion, Krim’s black aura flickered as he approached. Red eyes gleamed under his hood, both flashing as they landed on me.

He stopped a few paces from where I stood. “Zed tells me that Dad’s back in town. Why the fuck didn’t you say anything?”

“Why would I?”

Krim folded his beefy arms across his chest, sending tendrils of his shadows into the air. “Don’t you think you should let your brother who owns a bar know when his alcoholic father decides to binge drink his entire drink collection?”

“Not when you kicked me out,” I stammered, shoving past him.

He grabbed my shoulder and pinned me against the brick wall. “I kicked you out, because you decided to keep secrets from Zed and I about Lucy. You didn’t tell us that she had magical talents like Mom.”

I grabbed his hand and tore it away from me. “If it makes you feel any better, Lucy is missing. For all we know, Melrose has gone to feed her to the Bone Threader,” I said, trying to hide the worry in my voice.

“If feeding him witches keeps him away from my bar, then so be it.”

Fire ignited in my veins. “Krim, get the fuck away from me,” I barked, ripping my arm away from him. His shadows held onto me. Something silver slid into his palm.

Krim launched his arm for my side.

I fell back, narrowly escaping the blade as it flew over my arm. I ducked, swinging my leg out, striking him behind his knees, which both buckled.

The blade flew into the air and landed straight in his forearm.

“You fucking stabbed me!” Krim bellowed, flailing his arm above his head.

“You shouldn’t have brought a knife to a fight if you don’t know how to use it,” I barked, standing over him.

“Amon?” a female voice sounded from behind me.

I turned, finding a woman carrying a paper bag bulging with groceries.

Shit . This was not how I wanted Lucy’s mother to find me, standing over my brother with his shadows pooling out of his forearm from a knife wound I made .

Cindy’s eyes dropped to Krim before they met mine again with a new intensity. “Where is my daughter? I texted her not long ago and she hasn’t replied.”

My stomach wrenched. “I’m trying to find her.”

“What do you mean, trying to find her ?” Cindy stammered.

Krim’s whimpering was the only sound that filled the silence.

Cindy rounded on me, her aura bursting into orange and yellow sparks. “Amon Ravenblood, I trusted you to protect her from this demon who I thought was threatening to devour her library.”

What little shred of dignity I had left withered as Cindy’s eyes bore into me. Her aura thickened, now aglow with blue sparks of electricity. A bag of carrots and two stalks of celery levitated out of the bag, caught fire, then disintegrated. “Where did you last see her?”

“She was at her sister’s house.”

“And before that?”

“My place.”

Cindy’s mouth turned upside down.

“I’m going to need stitches, you asshole,” Krim grumbled as he climbed to his feet and tugged the knife out of his arm.

Cindy’s shoulders shook as she rounded on him. “Shut it. It’s just a scratch,” she stammered, her voice trembling. With a wave of her hand, a box of Band-Aids came flying out of her bag. One unraveled itself, then slapped across the cut on Krim’s forearm.

Krim’s mouth snapped closed.

The Band-Aids returned to her bag as she squared her hips, facing us both. A few hairs sprung out of her tightly wound bun, frizzling out in her aura. “I will not have a demon come between me and my daughter, wendigo, or the entitled chemistry professor who bakes in his free time at Shadow Daddy’s bar.”

Krim squinted at Cindy. “How did you know that I work there?”

“You demons think you are such shady creatures. You work your day jobs at the tattoo parlor, the university, the bar, and as musicians. The truth is, the Crow family has long been involved with your kind. Us witches, we know that demons have other jobs, ones that channel your unique talents that deal with the afterlife.”

Krim and I exchanged looks. Point taken .

She tucked her bag under her arm. “Now, are we going to find my daughter, or are we going to act like a bunch of dunderheads and twiddle our thumbs?”

I couldn’t help but chuckle as Krim’s reaper hood fell off. Cindy was right about the Band Aid. His cut had completely stopped bleeding, probably due to her magic.

Cindy glanced past us, catching something that made her eyes dilate. “I can always see my daughters’ auras. Something is wrong, something you were supposed to prevent from happening to her,” she scolded, her fearsome gaze returning to me. She tossed her arm up in the air, and a beam of light broke over our heads. “Goddess, show me where my middle daughter is currently.”

The bushes next to the sidewalk trembled. Hedgehogs came scurrying onto the sidewalk.

Cindy turned on her heel, taking off toward the swarm of familiars. “This way.”

Another figure approached. Dad caught up with me .

Krim turned to face the demon making his way toward us. “Go with her. I’ll keep Dad busy.”

The hedgehogs led us toward the library. By the time we arrived, my shadows were grumbling.

“ We know where Melrose took Lucy. Let us loose, and we will find her ,” one of them suggested.

“ You don’t need help from those stupid familiars, or her mother. You need to listen to your own mother and trust us. ”

“Amon, did you say something?” Cindy asked as she approached the library door and grabbed the handle.

She was knocked backward, her bag of groceries flying overhead.

I caught her before she landed in the bushes and helped her to her feet.

“What in the world?” she stammered.

“It’s a shadow vortex,” I replied. How did I know? The obnoxious way my shadows were behaving. They kept themselves concealed from Cindy, but I could see their ghoulish faces and flailing arms as they inspected the vortex.

“Well, it’s nothing a witch can’t handle,” Cindy said, tossing her arms into the air. The atmosphere sizzled and cracked as electricity zapped overhead .

I threw out my arm, grabbing Cindy’s magical burst before it hit the black mass of negative energy. “No. This shit can backfire. I’m going in. You stay here, got it?”

“Who has my daughter?” she asked, fury brimming in her eyes.

I could taste Melrose’s floral scent on the back of my tongue. “The spirit of a witch your daughter released from a grimoire.”

Before Cindy could stop me, I dipped inside the vortex. The energy suffocated me.

A web of thorns lined the entrance, each digging into my skin as I crouched into the claustrophobic space. By the time I fought through the entryway, I was almost out of breath. It felt like walking into a soggy, sea-urchin filled fishing net. Melrose had barricaded herself in here. The terrible web of a green vampire’s magic was not kind to demons. I’d have to rely on my shadows to get through, or risk being shredded to pieces.

“ You should have fucked her when you had the chance. Now that other bitch is going to feed her magic to another demon, ” one of my shadows echoed into my ear.

“ If you didn’t have us, Melrose would have shredded you to pieces ,” another chimed in.

“Help me find her,” I demanded.

“ Oh, we will. And when we do, we will do what we want with her .”

“ We will claim our prize and leave you with what’s left of her .”

Finally, the mass of vines released me as I tumbled through the tunnel. I landed on a solid damp surface that smelled of soil. The scent of water flooded my senses as I entered the Summoning .

“Well hello, Amon,” a high-pitched female voice echoed around me. Melrose had her hands outstretched toward a mass of vines that grew up from the ground.

Lucy was bound by her vines, her body slumped over and lifeless.

Anger branched through me as I approached. “Let her go,” I growled.

“So nice of you to join us. I was just about to share with Lucy about the truth behind your Daddy’s grimoire.”

“Lucy, stay with me,” I said. She wasn’t responsive.

Not good .

“What is it that you want?” I yelled at Melrose.

She lowered her hand, turning to face me. “I want Lucy to know what a demon’s shadows are really capable of.”

Lucy couldn’t stay here. She suppressed her magic for so long, she had no defense against the negative energy inside of the Summoning that could rip her to shreds.

Melrose rounded on me. “Let’s see if Lucy can survive what you did to me.”

“ Read the landscape. That is where you will learn to trust your magic, ” my mother’s words echoed in my ears. My forearms burned as my shadows coalesced, fighting to free themselves from my grip.

“ Trust us ,” one of them growled as he ripped out of my chest.