He composed himself to get back to the business at hand. “I’m the one thing that stands between The Cycler finding and taking Tam. We are about a blink away from a worldwide war, but keeping her in my dimension carries risk. I can’t have her hexing me. I need protection.”
“Did you lock her books and tools away?”
“Of course I did, but she’s two thousand. There is plenty of magic she can do with just her mouth.” Wrong wording. An image of her talented mouth and all the naughty things it could do to him surged through his mind as if it were the witch who had the demon thrall, putting sexual thoughts and feelings into his head from a distance.
From the look on his face, Dayne seemed to have caught the innuendo. “I see. Let me guess. You think she’s cast a love spell on you.”
“I don’t love her. Don’t be ridiculous. If she cast that, it failed.” Unless it was just starting to take effect, making him think about her, taking the demon right out of him...
“Defensive,” Dayne said. “Why don’t we go downstairs and see what the damage is and what we can do about it? Do you have a personal item of hers?”
Cain pulled the pair of black panties from his pocket and smirked.
“It’s hard to imagine why she’d feel compelled to use magic against you,” the sorcerer said, dryly.
Cain just shrugged and followed him downstairs. The black cat darted past his legs to follow Dayne.
Once downstairs, Greta paced back and forth over a spot at the far corner of the room, looking distressed and deep in concentration.
“What’s up with that?”
The sorcerer shook his head. “I have no idea. I’ve never seen her do anything like that in cat form.”
She sniffed at a spot on the ground, making unearthly shrieking sounds.
“Greta,” Dayne said. No response. The cat continued her bizarre ritual. Pacing, growling, sniffing. “Greta, look at me!”
The cat looked up, seeming to snap out of it. “Mrrawwr?”
“Go upstairs and shift and put some clothes on so we can talk about this.”
She hesitated, but finally went upstairs. Once she was gone, Dayne was all business. He uncorked several bottles, opened some books, sprinkled a few herbs, and chanted some words in a strange language that didn’t seem like Latin. Cain knew Latin. And ancient Sumerian. Some of the other dead languages he’d grown rusty on from lack of use. As he chanted, Dayne glowed much like Tam had in the caves.
The whole ordeal made the demon jumpy. The sorcerer could be doing anything to him. This was why demons didn’t do this. It made them too vulnerable. Going to one magic user to protect yourself from a second magic user raised the odds the first one would hex you. They tended to have a code of honor to protect each other and respected the spells of others most of the time. Cain could be stepping into quicksand, here.
Finally, the glow faded from the sorcerer and the glassy look in his eyes cleared. “There are no spells in effect right now.”
“She hasn’t done magic against me? You’re sure?”
“Positive,” Dayne said. “I wouldn’t be able to undo her spell, but I would know if it was there. You’re clean.”
The demon let out a sigh of relief, muscles he hadn’t known he’d been clenching, loosening. “Can you give me something to keep her from casting one?”
“You’re asking me to make her helpless,” the sorcerer said, his expression closed.
“No. I’m not asking that. She still has her energy balls. She can resist a lot of my thrall...” Perhaps he shouldn’t share so much information. “I just don’t want what happened to Luc to happen to me. Witches are dangerous to us. If I’m being asked to protect her, then I should be protected from her. It’s only fair. Remember, I could toss her on her ass out of my dimension. Then you all are on your own.”
If things went to shit, he could be affected with the magic users coming out of the closet and uniting. It would be a demon nightmare. But the sorcerer didn’t have to know how seriously Cain took the threat, not when he had more immediate protection needs.
Dayne sighed. “I know. All right. I’m going to loan you something of mine. If you lose this, I’ll hex you myself. It belonged to my Uncle Arthur.” He took a gilded box off the shelf and retrieved a ring from underneath several small scrolls of parchment. “I need to bespell something you’ll wear that won’t draw attention to you. If you take this off, you’ll be unprotected. The spell will last three moon cycles at the most, so if this isn’t resolved by then, you’ll want to return to have it recharged. When all of this is over, you will return this ring to me.”
Cain nodded. He didn’t like the way he was being spoken to, but at this moment all he cared about was being nice to the magic user with the promise of safety. He was grateful the ring wasn’t gaudy. It was a simple band made of pewter, with runic markings carved into it. Probably no one would notice it.
He stood out of the way while Dayne prepared for the spell. Greta came downstairs as he was finishing the preparation.
“Hey,” she said, keeping a wary eye on Cain.
The sorcerer put the ring on the table. “Hey. So what was that weird behavior about a few minutes ago?”
The therian looked confused. “What weird behavior?”
Dayne pointed to the area where she’d acted so oddly. “You were pacing and growling and looking really intense and sniffing, like something upsetting happened there.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I was down here for a few minutes with you guys, then I decided to go upstairs and change. Then I came back down. I wasn’t even over there.”
“Is this kind of memory loss normal?” Cain asked.
Dayne stroked his chin. “Sometimes. It depends on a lot of factors. I think she was a little anxious when she shifted, but she was human enough in there to engage with me and understand what I was saying, so her memories should be intact. There’s no logical reason for this.”
“Could she be under a spell of some sort? Something that would affect her as a human but not as a cat?” Cain had paid close attention to the various ways magic could be used to f**k with someone.
“It’s possible, but if someone else cast a spell on her, I wouldn’t be able to undo it.”
“True, but at least you would know. Besides, what if you did it?”
Dayne looked offended. “Why would I do it?”
Cain shrugged. “I don’t know. To protect her from something? Isn’t that what men in love do?”
The sorcerer seemed doubtful. “Something I don’t remember either?”
“Good point. Nevermind, then.”
“Even if I’d done it, I can’t even undo my own spell if I don’t know which spell I used. As you can see, I have hundreds of books down here. Memory-related spells are a dime a dozen.” He made a sweeping motion to the shelves behind him with all the books.
“Well... you can work on this Nancy Drew mystery after you’ve fixed my ring.” Cain needed Dayne to stay focused and not get off track on something that didn’t involve or affect him.
The sorcerer shot him an annoyed look. “In a minute. Greta?”
The therian bit her lip, her anxiety rising. “Yeah?”
“Will you shift back? Maybe you can help me in cat form.”
She seemed upset at the idea of doing something she wouldn’t remember doing later, but she closed her eyes and shifted anyway, her height dropping several feet in seconds. The black cat wrestled her way out of her clothes.
“Greta?”
“Mrawrr?”
“Do you remember what happened over there?” Dayne pointed. “Blink once for yes, twice for no.”
Two blinks.
“But something happened?”
She tilted her head to the side, looking from the area of the room he’d indicated and back to Dayne. One blink.
“Do you remember any spells being done?”
A pause and a look of concentration, then one blink.
“Did someone else take your memory?”
Two.
“Did I do it?”
One.
Cain stood back and watched the kitty charades, less than amused. Why this drama had to interfere with him getting his ring, he didn’t know.
“Can you remember which book I used?”
Greta went to the shelves with the books and jumped up onto one, threading her way around the dusty volumes of magic until she got to an old, red leather volume on the middle of the second shelf. Dayne took it and thumbed through.
“This is nothing but forgetting spells. It’ll take me forever to figure out which one it is. Thanks, baby. You can go change back now.” The cat rubbed against his hand, then hopped off the shelf.
“As enlightening as that was, I need that protection spell.”
Greta hissed at the demon and dragged her clothes into the hallway. By the time she returned, Dayne had set up a circle of salt and put together a potion in a small iron cauldron, adding the personal object of Tam’s with a glare aimed in the demon’s direction. What other personal object but panties was an incubus going to have from a woman he’d been sleeping with?
“Remember anything that happened?” the sorcerer asked when Greta reached his side.
She shook her head. “Just shifting, after that it’s a blank until I took my clothes to go shift again. And I think I hissed at Cain.”
“I expected as much.” Dayne took her hand. “Don’t worry, we’ll figure this out.”
Cain cleared his throat.
The sorcerer kissed Greta, ignoring the throat clearing. “Let me do this spell so we can get the demon out of our hair, then we’ll work on it.”
“I’m standing right here,” Cain said.
Greta rolled her eyes in the demon’s direction and went upstairs. Dayne finished dropping herbs into the cauldron. He took a book, the cauldron, and the ring into the center of the circle, dropped the ring in, raised his arms, and began to chant. Whether or not it was the spell Cain had asked for, something was happening. A green, shimmering wall came up around the cauldron, then the ring rose out of the potion, spinning as Dayne incanted.