Deals with the Devil (The Devil's Due Series Book 1), page 1
Deals with the Devil
Veronica Ford
Cat and Crow Publishing
Published by Cat & Crow Publishing, LLC
Copyright © 2023 by Veronica Ford
Book Cover Design by ebook launch
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, except brief quotes used in reviews.
ISBN: 979-8-9884735-0-3
Contents
Dedication
Not the Beginning
1. 1
2. 2
3. 3
4. 4
5. 5
6. 6
7. 7
8. 8
9. 9
10. 10
11. 11
12. 12
13. 13
14. 14
15. 15
16. 16
17. 17
18. 18
19. 19
20. 20
21. 21
22. 22
23. 23
24. 24
25. 25
26. 26
27. 27
28. 28
29. 29
30. 30
31. 31
32. 32
33. 33
34. 34
35. 35
36. 36
37. 37
38. 38
39. 39
40. 40
41. 41
42. 42
43. 43
44. 44
45. 45
46. 46
47. 47
48. 48
49. 49
50. 50
51. 51
52. 52
53. 53
Not the End
Devil’s in the Details
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
About the Author
Dedication
It’s all about you, dear reader. You’re incredible.
Not the Beginning
The crowd is definitely hostile.
I take a deep breath as I scan the room. Pam gives me an enthusiastic nod and a double thumbs up. Nicki sits next to her, having made all her own choices, and Naasira stands against the back wall, her hand resting on her sword. Marlowe is sprawled in the tiny lecture-hall seat with deceptive casualness, his long legs stretched in front of him, and as always, my sacral chakra hums at the sight of him. I take another deep breath to calm it.
“Apocalypse comes from a Greek word meaning revelation, a complete unveiling of a previously unknown truth.” I begin. The audience glares back, their silence accusing. “That’s what apocalypses do,” I continue, trying not to sound defensive. “They force us to confront the truths about ourselves we’d rather not see, the ones we keep buried deep in the dark. They reveal who we truly are, and what we’re willing to do.”
I start to warm up, settling into lecture-mode. I’m comfortable here, holding the audience but removed from them. A sort of quasi-participation. It’s why I loved teaching so much. “All of the great prophets – Ezekiel, Mohammed, Spielberg – claim that the apocalypse will come in a big bang, so to speak; an alien invasion, a deadly epidemic. A demon horde. To be sure, some of them do.” I shrug, feeling the audience begin to settle into the rhythm of the story. “But most apocalypses are subtler than that. Shifty little buggers. You’re just going about your life, happy enough in your half-truths. Maybe you’re distracted by all the things you think matter, like succeeding at your job and recycling. Then bam!” The crowd startles back at my sudden shout.
“All the deals you’ve made with all your free will come due at once. At least, that’s how this one started. The others…” I turn to the camera.
“Well. You know about those.”
1
Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre
Burning sage smells a lot like marijuana to the uninitiated, so I smudged my office with the window wide open, frantically waving the smoke out and muttering prayers. I didn’t need any rumors about being a pot-head getting in the way of tenure, even if the devil’s lettuce had just been legalized. I didn’t need any rumors about being a witch, either, especially since I wasn’t – that was Gram’s area. But I’d been around magic all my life, enough to know something was wrong on campus, and that smudging wasn’t helping.
UConn, I thought disgustedly, jamming the still-smoking sage bundle out on the windowsill. I should never have come back.
I gazed out the window at the late September sunshine. The campus had changed while I’d been away. Mirror Lake, the large man-made pond I could see from my office window, had been cleared of most of its weeds. A sidewalk meandered around it now, with a few strategically placed benches. There were new buildings and a couple of multi-level parking garages where there used to be grass. UConn had been busy while I’d been gone, growing in its own space until it felt like it would burst.
But there was still the slight buzz of magic, pricking at my skin like tiny thorns. Whenever I stepped onto campus my shoulders twitched, like someone ran a cold finger down my back. It was like Doppler radar for heebie-jeebies. I come from a long line of witches, even if I didn’t practice the craft, and we take those sorts of feelings pretty seriously. I just couldn’t quite figure out why I had the heebie-jeebie shoulders.
Grabbing my bag, I sniffed my way down the brightly lit hallway, making sure the marijuana smell hadn’t drifted past my closed door. It had, but maybe they’d all blame Missy, who had the office next to mine. She studied the Beat poets, after all. Who knew what she was lighting up in there. Dodging around a few students in the stairwell, I made my way outside.
“Hi, Dr. Farrelly!”
I aimed my professional smile at the four students eating ice cream, their blond hair glinting in the sun. They made me feel old with my pencil skirt and my hair pulled back in a bun. I was going for a professional look and I felt like the bun and skirt gave me a certain gravitas, but the four blondes with their sorority t-shirts and ponytails made me feel like I’d overshot a bit.
“Have you tried the Dairy Bar yet?” one of them asked me. She was in one of my classes. Susan? No, no one named their kid Susan anymore. Savannah, maybe?
“Not yet, but I will. What did you get?” She was short and perky, her smile wide and earnest.
Her friends grinned, licking their cones. “We all got strawberry.”
I started to respond, but suddenly the skin on their faces melted away, dripping down their cheeks like wax and revealing bone and cavernous eye sockets.
Four skulls grinned at me, their fleshless mouths smeared with bright pink ice cream.
I stumbled back. In the next instant their faces looked completely normal and they were laughing about something. Stephanie? Sarah? flipped her shiny hair over her shoulder and waved goodbye as one of her friends tugged her away.
Sweet Hades in a handbasket! I looked around, but no one else seemed to have noticed. The girls meandered down the sidewalk chattering with each other, backpacks slung over their shoulders, licking their face-altering ice cream cones.
I resettled my own bag more firmly on my shoulder and turned sharply away.
I’m just here to be a professor, I reminded myself sternly. Just a regular, mundane professor. No magic for me. Magic led to trouble, every time. My mother’s face, her brown hair, flashed before me.
No, I was not getting involved.
I crossed the brick road in front of Miller Hall and climbed the stairs to one of UConn’s many campus cafés. The heels on my coolest pair of boots clacked across the floor and several students, curled up in institution-style easy chairs scattered down the long, wide hallway, looked up at the interruption of their phone-time. Wincing in apology, I tried to lighten my footsteps as I approached the line at the café. Five minutes later, armed with an iced latte, I made my way back out into the sunshine to slip into the stream of students walking to class.
“Evil walks amongst us!”
The street preacher was standing on a low brick wall at the top of the steps. “The sins of the flesh are so obvious,” he continued in a whiny voice.
Most of the students were walking past him without a second glance and I joined them, keeping my head down and sipping furiously on my paper straw, which was already getting soggy.
“Sexual immorality, witchcraft, fighting, getting drunk, wild partying.” Dude was on a roll, ticking off all the good times on his fingers. “People who do things like that will not inherit the kingdom of God.” He was misquoting Paul’s letter to the Galatians. He sure had the spirit right, though – all sin and rigidity, follow the rules or be damned for eternity. No wonder the students were mostly ignoring him.
“You!”
He leapt off the wall and charged in my direction, shoving a few students aside to block my path. He was younger than me and dressed neatly in a striped button-down and sharply pressed khakis, his buzz cut so tight I could see his scalp. He looked more like he belonged in the campus military program than preaching on a brick wall.
“Galatians, chapter five, verse nineteen,” I said automatically, hoping he’d leave another bible-reader alone. Several students paused to watch us curiously.
His eyes bugged out so far, I was tempted to poke them back in. “You know the scriptures?”
“Yes, I –”
“The face of the Lord is against evildoers!”
You’re only paranoid if it’s never happened before, and Gram had made sure I knew our history growing up.
“Proverbs,” I cut him off before he could go further. “Chapter thirty-four, verse sixteen.”
He whipped his gaze back to me. “A worthless person walks with a perverse mouth! Winks with his eyes, points with his fingers! Who with perversity in his heart continually devises evil, who spreads strife!”
“Chapter six.” I wasn’t certain of the verses on that one, but I also didn’t see how it applied here. He was the one pointing and stirring up strife!
“You have brought these sins to them. These, the innocent lambs of God!” He threw his arms out wide, as if indicating the whole world. We were in between classes in the center of campus and a lot of students were walking by.
Crowds are dangerous. Crowds turn into mobs. Even though I didn’t have powers of my own, I’d grown up with witches who taught me to be furtive, and Gram’s admonitions rang in my ears: “Don’t draw attention to yourself, Luna. It isn’t safe.”
I clenched my jaw with irritation, but I turned to leave. Preacher Dude grabbed my arm and spun me back around.
“Suffer not a witch to live!” He exhorted the innocent lambs around us.
There it was. The W word.
I eyed the growing crowd of students nervously. Some of them were starting to look uncomfortable, but others were taking out their phones to snap pictures.
No good, no good, my mind chanted.
“Love does no harm to a neighbor. Romans, chapter thirteen.” I snapped, wrenching my arm free. This guy wanted bible verses? I could do bible verses all day long. I had studied that book inside and out as a child, trying to fit in. It hadn’t worked, but I knew my scriptures.
I was about to burst into a particularly choice litany from the Gospel of Luke when he blinked and shook his head jerkily, as if there were a swarm of bees flying around.
He snapped his eyes sharply in my direction and stood unnaturally still, his head cocked to one side. Blackness slid over his eyes until there was no white showing.
“Your time has come.” His voice sounded impossibly low and slurred, as if he were testing the inside of his mouth with the feel of the words. “I invoke the bargain made.”
I froze, staring at him.
Oh, that’s not good. Invoking’s never good.
He glared at me through his blackened eyes and his lips moved as if he was about to say something more, but then he staggered backward as if he’d been released from something. The darkness bled from his eyes and they lightened to a muddy brown, the whites easily visible now. He shook his head and looked around wildly at the small crowd that had gathered, as if he were looking for help.
The students around us started snapping pictures of him instead of me. Some of them were clearly recording the scene with their phones.
I fought down my growing anxiety at all the attention.
“He is here!” the preacher gasped. His face flushed red. “The witch has brought him!” He pointed at me. “The great dragon was cast out, the Devil which deceiveth the whole world.” He backpedaled away from me, almost tripping on the students behind him. “He was cast out and his angels were cast out with him! She has brought him here!”
A few of the students were starting to look alarmed. Several were staring at me. I shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant. “Revelations, chapter twelve. It’s full of drama.” I smiled weakly.
What in the name of Hecate? The zealots usually moved in on me like I was wearing a big red pentagram – probably the family history – but this was a little over the top.
I turned back to the preacher to ask him what he meant by “invoking the bargain made”, but he scrambled away from me, knocking into his briefcase. He ducked between the bodies milling on the walkway, zig-zagging through the crowd, practically running to get away. I stared after him, then glanced down at the handful of pocket-sized bibles that had spilled out of his case.
“You forgot your bibles!” I called after him, but he was gone. I tossed my now watery drink with its soggy straw into the nearest recycle bin and scooped the little books back into the briefcase. I didn’t think he’d come back for it, but there was no point in leaving a mess.
Students started to break away now that the excitement was over, but one stood staring at me, or rather, staring in my direction. She had bright green hair cascading down her back and startlingly light blue eyes. They were the palest blue I’d ever seen, like shards of ice. But she was blind, if her cane was anything to go by.
“Excuse me.” I started to slide past her, eager to get away from the preacher’s madness.
“Behold, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut.” Her voice sounded bored as she looked me up and down, though she clearly couldn’t seeme. But I got the feeling she saw me, alright. It was creepy. “It is the end, and a new day is coming. The law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood.”
“What?” I said dumbly. That was a particularly nasty verse from the Book of Hebrews. What was with all the bible quoting today?
She tapped her cane on the ground a few times, her eyes never leaving mine. Like she could seeme. When I didn’t respond she huffed impatiently. “Just get a move on, witch. You’re running out of time.” She turned away.
“What do you mean, cleansed with blood?” Was she threatening me? Herself? As a state employee, I was required to report it if someone made a threat – did I have to report this? “What do you mean, end? End of what? Time for what?” I called after her, but she was swallowed by the crowd of students before I could tell her I wasn’t a witch.
The start of the semester a few weeks ago must have really amped up the energy on campus. There were likely a few small magic-users in the crowd rushing to class; maybe the sudden accumulation of magic in one place simply triggered some weirdness to pop up as summer ended and thousands of bodies descended on the carefully manicured New England campus, turning it into a small, self-contained city.
It’ll probably settle back down, I told myself, glancing at the briefcase of bibles. Of course it will.
Rushing to class! I was late for my first official faculty meeting!
2
Sweet Honey
I slipped into a seat in the middle of the small auditorium where our faculty meetings were held and hunched down. I’m not much of a participator, and after having my bun shaken loose – actually and metaphorically – I wanted to remain anonymous.
Unfortunately, Mira, the chair of the English department, had other ideas. After the initial welcome back murmurs, she asked all new faculty members to stand for introductions. I dutifully stood and tried to look enthusiastic.
I truly was happy to be there, despite my oddly jumpy shoulders and general sense of impending doom. It was a beautiful day on a beautiful campus, and I had a job I liked, even if it was at UConn. Unless my student’s melting face meant Satan really was coming and Preacher Dude was right. I chewed my lip. None of that sounded good. So my enthusiasm probably looked a little nauseous.
I focused my attention on Mira. She was a small woman with a small nose and a nervous air about her, as if she wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen next. Plus, she wore a lot of pink, which is never a good sign. Today she was wearing a whole suit that was pink, even the blouse underneath her jacket.
Yep, evil’s definitely afoot. I stifled a sigh.
There were half a dozen new faculty members, and we all waved and smiled when our name was called. I’d met them all at the new faculty orientation, but I stared at them now, trying to sear their faces into my brain so I might remember their names. I’ve always had a terrible memory, and names were my kryptonite.
Pam, specialty Composition and Rhetoric. We met in the copy room last week. She waved happily at me, her blonde curls bouncing around her head like some kind of spastic halo. I smiled back. I thought Pam would be easy to like, which was nice because not being much of a participator made making friends hard.
