Page 39 of The Spell Caster

“Maybe we should—”

He pressed two fingers over my open mouth. “Layla,” he said, his breath hitching. “Don’t.”

He leaned in, pushing a hand through my hair and holding my eyes with his. “I’m not about to leave you alone. You get what I’m saying?”

He was so close, I could feel his breath on my lips, still stopped by his touch. I nodded, unable to do much else as he stroked his other hand along my scalp.

I suddenly remembered the party. The dream. My body flushed hot.

I shivered as he traced his fingers over my mouth. He pulled himself away with a shudder.

“Come on,” he mumbled, guiding me gently back to my apartment. Inside, it was dark and quiet. I trailed behind him into the kitchenette. He rummaged around in the freezer, pulling out an ice pack that he wrapped in a towel.

Looking me over, he frowned at the bruise forming on my bare upper arm. He pressed the ice pack onto it, and I raised my other hand to hold it in place, our fingers brushing. Costi’s phone vibrated from his pocket. He ignored it.

“Don’t you need to get back?”

His eyes confirmed that he did, but his mouth was set obstinately.

“Don’t get in trouble because of me,” I said.

He scoffed.

“I’ll be fine,” I promised.

“Call me right away, okay? If your mom shows up again. Try to stay away from her. This isn’t right. I’ll tell the security coordinator.”

“You can’t tell her. My mother said they’re friends.”

He cursed. “Of course they are. Keep your eyes open. I’ve been talking to some people, and I’m gonna find out what this is all about. We’ll figure it out.”

My heart warmed. “Be careful,” I told him.

He nodded once. “You too.”

I thought I would break down when he left, but instead I just felt numb. My mother hadn’t always been this way. I thought she had even been happy when I was young. She was the success story of a regular witch who married a spell caster for love and had a powerful child, proving society wrong. What happened to her?

After retrieving my bag of library books, I went into my bedroom. I flipped the lock on my door and fished out one of the history texts, sitting on my bed. The faded fabric cover and yellowed pages smelled of old paper.

There wasn’t a section helpfully labeled “Problems with Your Familiar,” and I had no idea what information would be helpful, so I started from the beginning.

The book was a full, anthropology-style investigation of demon familiars, written fifty years ago.

A lot of it backed up common knowledge: familiars had never been found in the wild, they seemed intelligent but didn’t speak or communicate, they didn’t interact with each other, and they always answered the call of their spell caster, but they would recall themselves after a short time if no spells were being cast.

There were also some strange tidbits I’d never considered: the tallest familiar the author had measured was four feet, their eyes seemed to be sensitive to light, and they had never been able to do an autopsy on one because their bodies would disappear back to wherever they came from if rendered unconscious or dead.

A dead-on-arrival demon was a line of inquiry I hadn’t considered, but reading further, I found that if a spell caster lost their familiar in battle, they could and did summon a new one.

The bond between spell caster and familiar was for life. Demons seemed to age roughly the same as humans, and older spell casters would sometimes find their familiar unresponsive when being invoked—presumably claimed by old age.

There was also a chapter on natural summoners, like Sativa. It happened to some young witches who could pull large amounts of magic—according to the author’s detailed notes, it was a one-in-a-thousand phenomenon. It typically occurred in the witch’s early teens, but the how and the why of it wasn’t clear.

What was unknown about demons was a much longer list: where they went when they weren’t with their witch—the mythological Hell or elsewhere; if they were Earth-like mammals that ate and reproduced; what the nature of the spells they passed to us was; and if they possessed humanlike reasoning or if they worked by instinct. Were they allies? Pets? Did they feel enslaved? Uncomfortably, we had no way of knowing.

I found nothing about invisible or missing familiars, and nothing to suggest this kind of thing had happened before.

I started skimming faster through a long section with charts and eventually groaned, setting the open book aside on my bed. Maybe I was going about this the wrong way.

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