Trying to insult me into doing your job as well as mine? Pushing Worthington wouldn’t make him more inclined to cooperate, though. “Very well. I can propose it to Joanna Spry instead. It should be within her abilities.”
“Hmph. Yes. Do that. You keep claiming the woman’s competent. This will be a good time for her to prove it.”
“One more thing, sir. Would you please check with the other US councils? Ask if they’re seeing a rise in demons recently? Two appearing at the same time is unprecedented, and recent months have seemed unusually demon-filled. I’d like to know if the increase is just here or more wide-spread.”
“I can put out a feeler or two, yes. We have had rather an excess of… incidents this year.” Worthington paused. “One of those new demons didn’t happen to be out Fox Bluff’s way, did it?”
Silas tried to recall where that was. “Northeast? The stronger one is somewhere in that direction.”
“Huh. Well, if you find yourself near Fox Bluff, you might look up a sorcerer named Lori Hutchins. Hedge witch, really, no power to speak of. She called me this morning at a truly ungodly hour, to claim she’d seen a demon pop into being out of thin air. Nonsense, of course. Demons don’t appear without being summoned.”
Lots of unheard-of things seemed to be happening, though. “What did she say, exactly?”
“A bunch of hysterical drivel. But maybe there was a kernel of truth in it, after all. Wait a moment and I’ll get her address. I wrote it down, meant to drive out that way and look around at some point. Demons popping out of thin air. Hah. Hold on, Thornwood.”
Silas found a pencil and notepad and was ready when Worthington got back on and gave him the address. Worthington hadn’t asked for her phone number, though odds were she’d be in the white pages.
“And keep me informed, of course.” Worthington hung up.
Silas said, “Yes, of course, sir,” to the dial tone and pushed down the cradle. Over his shoulder he said, “Joanna Spry next.”
She answered her phone immediately, sounding alert. When he explained the situation, she was also a lot more inclined to be helpful. “Of course, I can take a first look for one of them. Can’t guarantee I can handle it if it’s anything bigger than a two-syllable demon though.”
“Play it safe,” Silas agreed. “See if you can locate it, figure out who summoned it and whether it has a current host or is in a sorcerer’s confinement, whatever information you can get for me. If it’s a pipsqueak, you can just take care of it. If not, the more details I have the better.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Spry said. “Where am I going?”
The lower-powered sign had been southeast, close to the little town of Campersville. He gave her as much information as he had from the spell map. To make the map cover all of his part of the state, he’d had to go pretty large scale. “I can’t tell if it’s in the town, or just outside it, and I don’t know any sorcerers in Campersville. If you find traces, it might be worth calling Locke and seeing who’s listed in the council records for that area. Someone had to summon it.”
“I can do that.” She actually sounded cheerful. “It’ll make a change from the local ghost population. I swear, half of this winter’s dead hung around as ghosts to make trouble.”
“More than usual?” They’d seen that happen before— ghosts failing to cross over— with a ghoul involved. The last thing they needed was to add another of those.
“It could just be the awful dreary weather this winter and the closing of the local mill. Economy’s bad, more desperation, more violence, folks are angry and depressed. Me too, I admit. A demon’s a change of pace.”
“Don’t get cocky,” Silas ordered, regretting it a moment later. “Sorry, not telling you how to do your job. But I’ve come up against demons lately that were five and six and seven syllables, one that might’ve been more.”
“Holy hells, Silas!”
“Yeah. It’s been an interesting few months. I appreciate you checking this out for me, but play it safe, all right?”
“I will. I have no desire to be demon fodder. You take care too.”
“Keep in touch.” He hung up the phone and turned. “And that leaves the other one for us.”
A soft displacement of air heralded the swoop of Kii the hawk into the kitchen. She landed on the back of a chair and cocked her head at him. “One what?”
Pip stood on his hind legs to look up at her, tail wagging. “We’re hunting a demon.”
“Again?” The hawk swiveled her head to check out Darien, Jasper, and then focus back on Silas. “What are you lot, demon magnets?”
“I don’t think so.” Although isn’t that a disturbing thought? Could my magic combined with Darien’s somehow be attracting them? He needed more information about whether this was a local problem or a wider one. But the demons now on the ground came first. “Either way, we need to find these two and deal with them.”
“I can help.” Kii preened one long flight feather. “Recognizing power is my talent. Human power, demon power, get me close and I can spot it.”
Silas whistled softly. He still wasn’t sure he trusted the hawk, who just a couple of weeks ago had been accomplice to Darien’s kidnapping. Pip’s wagging tail wasn’t enough reassurance. The damned pup liked everybody. But when he glanced at Grim, his familiar lowered his head fractionally in a nod.
“Yes, that could be useful, thank you.”
Darien cleared the dishes into the sink, ran a little water on them, and turned. “Okay, what do we do?”
Silas met his eyes, trying to see how Darien felt about all this. So much had happened to that young man in the span of a few months, and it still showed up in restless sleep and nightmares. But Darien’s expression was bright and eager. “We find the demon and send it back to hell. Simple.” I hope.
“Can I help?” Jasper asked. “If there’s anything I can do? I’ve developed rather a dislike of demons.”
Silas could imagine how true that was. “Sure.”
An hour later found them and all three familiars in the Studebaker, driving down winding country roads that were taking them quite close to Fox Bluff. They’d discussed splitting up to search, but neither Jasper nor Darien had experience with detecting demon magic, and Silas didn’t trust the hawk not to lead them astray. They’d stick to doing it slow but safe.
March had come to rural Illinois with a mix of rain and snow that left bare patches in some of the fields and drifts along fencelines. The thin light of the cloudy day cast shadows in the woods. Silas kept his detection spells active as Darien steered the car gently around a bend.
Jasper looked up from his paper map in the back seat to say, “Coming up on Coilingbroke, and then in four miles, it’s Fox Bluff.”
“Are you seeing anything?” Darien asked Silas.
“Not so far.” Silas sketched a new rune and sent it out seeking. “The spell map gets us about a ten-mile radius, but that’s still a hell of a lot of countryside. And if the demon’s lying dormant, and whatever magic it worked this morning is fading, it’s going to be hard to find.”