Chapter 7

CHAPTER 7

DAMON

B everly quirks an eyebrow at me as I walk into her bookstore, The Book Coven.

"The name of your shop is a little on the nose, isn't it?" I ask her.

She crosses her arms. "Well, take it up with my ancestors. It's been The Book Coven for over two hundred years."

"Hmm," is all I have to say to that. I go up to the counter and finger a stack of vampire romances. "Humans never change, do they?"

"Hang around a while," she says. "They might surprise you."

I laugh. "I've been around quite a while already. How much longer will I have to wait?"

"Where is Tamzin?" she asks, ending my benign attempt at small talk.

I motion across the parking lot. "Getting coffee. She didn't sleep well."

"I'm surprised you can get this far away from her," Beverly says, pulling a large old book out from under the counter.

"This is about as far as I can go without feeling the need to run back to her," I admit. "It is frustrating. She is frustrating."

"Tamzin is a sweet girl," Beverly says defensively. "You could have been stuck with much worse."

"That's exactly the problem. She's sweet. Too sweet. And to her own detriment."

"She's been through a lot—"

"I know all about her dead husband," I say, cutting Beverly off. "I only found out about him half an hour ago and I'm already sick of him. How can she stand it? She's not honoring his memory. Can't she see that? She's only hurting herself."

Beverly gives me a long look that I can't quite read. She's not angry or annoyed. More like…intrigued, I think.

"You seem awfully passionate about this," she finally says.

"It's my job to torture humans. What is the point if they torture themselves?"

She gets a laugh out of that. "Oh, I see. Are you jealous that Tamzin is doing a better job being her own demon than you could do?"

"I wouldn't call it jealousy," I say, leaning on the counter and looking across to the coffee shop. "Maybe pity. But that only makes me angry. She shouldn't be pitied. I've known women like her through the eons, single mothers, working women, women who have led empires. She could be so much more if she would just stop wallowing."

"That's hardly fair," Beverly says. "We all suffer grief in our own way. It's very easy to tell someone just to get over it, but it is a very different thing to actually do it."

"Perhaps," I say, looking back at her and picking at the pages of the book she's flipping through. "But there must be a way to get her out of this…this funk. To bring her back to herself."

Beverly threads her fingers together over the book and looks at me again. "Why do you care?"

"I don't," I say quickly. "She's just…getting on my nerves. If we have to be stuck together, she could at least be a little less miserable to be around."

"Maybe you could help her," Beverly suggests.

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know. I'm just a lowly human. What do I know about the powers of demons? Maybe getting a human woman to forget her long-dead lover is a bit too much for you to handle."

My fingers turn into claws and I drive them clear through her counter. "Be careful, witch," I say, my voice low, gravelly, and demonic. A voice that would cause most humans to wet themselves. Beverly, though, doesn't bat an eyelash as she waves her little finger and puts her counter back together again.

"Whatever you say, Damon," she says sweetly. "Now, as for your little problem. I've been working out the different possible meanings of Bella's spell."

"What do you mean different possible meanings?" I ask in my human voice.

"Well, translation is more an art than a science," she says. "And the placements of the words in the spell, along with the hand movements she used and the symbol she drew on the cookie jar, all those elements can mean different things. Add to it that Bella is a child and that she was terrified out of her mind and, well, we can't know exactly how her spell worked or how to break it."

I run my hand over my face in frustration. "How did this even happen? She is a child. How could she overpower me?" Beverly cocks an eyebrow again. "I don't mean that as an act of bravado. I really want to know." I try to give her a sincerely pleading look. "How did this happen?"

She shakes her head. "Bella is a promising student. But she's not of any particularly powerful bloodline. Both her parents were human, so her powers aren't being amplified by mixing supernatural blood. She doesn't even attend Mystic Cove Academy for the Arts, the new witchcraft school here in town. She is a perfectly average witch. So, how she did it, I have no idea. You'd have to ask The Dark Lord about that."

"I've been trying," I say. "It appears that in my current state, I am unable to communicate with the demon realm. I cannot even contact my cohorts."

"Hmm. That is a problem," Beverly says. "Can you access your powers at all?"

You tell me , I ask her telepathically.

"Get out of there," she says, waving her hand like she's batting away a bug. "So, you at least have that going for you."

"What is this book telling you?" I ask. "What have you learned so far?"

"She bound you to the jar, I know that much," Beverly says. "And the jar is bound to Tamzin, as I already suspected."

"None of that is new information."

"Okay, smart guy," Beverly says. "How about this? Most binding spells of this type can only be broken when one person's goal is fulfilled."

"My goal was to possess and torture Tamzin," I say. "So, I still have to find a way to do that? It will be impossible in this form."

"Hence the problem," Beverly says. "It could be that Tamzin has some goal or destiny that needs to be fulfilled. But humans are dreadfully slow when it comes to fulfilling their potential. For some, it takes a lifetime."

"What if we discover the origin of the curse in the first place?" I ask. "If the person who sent me to possess and torture Tamzin undoes the curse, could I then be set free?"

"It's possible," Beverly says. "I guess it is one avenue to explore. If it fails, we can always move on to something else. Does Tamzin know who would want to curse her like that?"

"No idea," I say. "She said something last night. Or, she thought it. Something about whoever hurts her, hurts Tamzin, would also be hurting Bella. So, it can't be someone who loves Bella. I'm guessing she means any of Bella's extended family."

"What do you mean, she thought it?"

I shrug.

"You've been reading Tamzin's thoughts?"

"Hey, I cannot communicate with the demon realm. I'm bored."

"Shame! Shame on you!" Beverly says, shaking a finger at me. "You had better stop that right now, or else I'll curse you myself."

"Okay, okay. Wow, human women are so testy."

"You haven't seen me get testy, little one," Beverly says, rolling up her sleeves.

"Fine, fine. The last thing I need is another curse right now."

The bell above the door rings and Tamzin and another woman walk into the store.

"What's going on?" Tamzin asks. "Looks like the two of you are about to come to blows."

"Nothing," Beverly says. "We were just talking about ways to break the spell that Bella put on the two of you."

"What have you come up with?" the other woman asks.

"Damon, this is my great-great-great-something-grandmother, Cora," Beverly says.

I have to clean out my ear to see if I heard her right. "Are you sure? I thought humans aged much faster than that."

"It's a long story," Cora says. "I was a ghost for two hundred years and now I'm here. I'm also a spirit medium."

"Interesting," I say, anxious to talk to some of my demonic friends about this development. But I will have to save that for later. "Anyway. Beverly was saying something about finding out who sent me after Tamzin in the first place."

"It's one possibility," Beverly tells Tamzin. "All curses, hexes, spells, have an opposite. And undo button, so to speak. If you can find out who sent Damon after you, we can find out what the counter spell is. Now, that counter spell might be a bit messed up since Bella got in the mix, but we can at least try. It gives us a place to start, anyway."

"I just have no idea," Tamzin says. "It can't be any members of my family. They would never want to hurt me, or especially Bella. But I can't think of anyone who would hate me that much."

"How about hates you just a little?" I suggest.

"What do you mean?" Tamzin asks.

"You said no one hates you that much. That would indicate someone out there hates you at least a little bit. Maybe they hate you more than you think."

Tamzin's mouth opens and then closes, as if she was going to argue with me and then thought better of it.

"Okay. I mean, I get what you are saying. Someone out there hates me enough to hex me. But it's not going to be the most obvious suspect, right? I mean, if I knew who it was, I'd be knocking on their door already."

"So, instead of looking for someone who hates you, just look for someone who…greatly dislikes you? That sounds so lame," Cora says.

Tamzin thinks for a moment. "Well, there is Cathy."

"Who is Cathy?" Cora asks.

"The secretary at my daughter's school. We do not get along. And this chucklehead—" She points her thumb at me. "—made things a whole lot worse this morning."

"Me?" I ask. "I didn't do anything. I was stuck in that cookie jar. That was all you."

"Yeah, but you didn't want me to go back and apologize."

I straighten my collar. "And I still stand by that. You shouldn't have gone back."

"What happened when you apologized?" Cora asks.

"Not much. She nodded at me and said apology accepted. But she didn't apologize back for threatening to call CPS on me."

"Well, if she's threatening to call CPS, I doubt she sent a demon after you," Beverly says.

"That's a good point," Tamzin says, tapping her lips.

"So, who else is there?" I ask, growing impatient. "A snotty cousin? A frenemy from high school? Another mom at the PTA? Think."

"I don't know!" Tamzin exclaims. "I mean, I don't have a large extended family. I don't get out much. I barely use Facebook anymore. If I ended up dead tomorrow, I'm sure the police would be like, ‘Well, she has no known enemies.' They would be just as stumped as I am."

"The police!" Cora says a bit too excitedly. "Go see Beckett."

"Officer Dawson?" Tamzin says. "How can he help?"

"I don't know," Cora says. "But solving mysteries is his job, right?"

"You don't think he'll be weirded out by, you know, the demon?" Tamzin asks.

"The man believes in aliens," Cora says. "A demon isn't going to faze him."

"Okay, fine." Tamzin checks her watch. "But I have to run home for a meeting in… Oh, crap!"

"What is it?" I ask.

"Bella's violin is in my trunk!"