Prologue

There was a painting of an alchemist and a demon over the desk in Simon’s library. Oil on canvas, the copy was as close to an original as you could get outside a museum. The image depicted the infamous Faust, the subject of books and plays, pleading with the demon, Mephistopheles, whom he had sold his soul to. Simon had laughed when he bought the expensive painting, shaking his head at such a stupid man making such a stupid deal with a demon. Too bad he didn’t have Simon’s sensibilities. Or magic.

A split second before the clock struck twelve, there was a knock on the library door. Simon stood in the center of the room on the thick, dark brown rug, hand to his chin, staring at the painting of Faust. He turned as Phil opened the door.

“Should we go?” Phil asked. He was already in his sweatshirt and old tennis shoes, a metal baseball bat in his hand.

“Yeah, let’s go,” Simon answered. Phil nodded and left the doorway. Simon glanced once more at the painting, glaring at the demon. A ridiculous caricature of a demon, essentially just an old man in a red outfit, Simon typically paid little attention to it. But tonight he was pissed at all demons, even the fake ones.

He went to the closet and swapped his collarless button-up shirt and leather dress boots for a hooded jacket and black tennis shoes. He’d learned his lesson about wearing his nice clothes out on a night when Phil might be splattering viscera around with his bat.

The living room of Simon’s apartment was an extension of the library, covered in wall to wall bookshelves and heavy leather couches, the TV and video game consoles looking out of place among the vintage paintings and statues of monsters from all over the world—Japanese oni, East African shetani, the Russian chort. The coffee table had a stack of high school textbooks where Simon’s friends had been working on homework while they waited for deeper night to fall.

Phil was now by the front door, baseball bat balancing on the toe of his shoe. There were dents in the metal from many nights of use. Tanit was in the kitchen, shrugging on a black corduroy jacket over her fishnet tights and jean miniskirt. She had the pantry open, where glass jars of glowing, swirling mist lined the shelves.

“How many tonight, Sy Guy?” Tanit asked.

“Just one,” Simon said.

Tanit raised her eyebrows, waving a jam jar of glowing light at him. “Only one? You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“I thought you had a plan to make up for all our losses.”

“We are, but tonight’s not about money. You’ll see.”

Tanit joined them at the door and handed Simon the jar. Simon put it in his pocket before they stepped out the door, locking it behind them. The hall was empty, but it always was, even during the day. It was a new apartment building, and most of the apartments hadn’t been sold or rented out, yet. There was no one to wonder about the teenagers who owned an apartment all by themselves and left at all hours of the night.

Outside, they passed by Simon’s car parked by the curb and instead walked down the sidewalk. Simon knew the streets better in the dark. Sometimes he felt he didn’t recognize them in the sunlight. Hood pulled up over his bleached white hair, he led the way. Tanit and Phil walked behind him, Tanit talking quietly with a grin, Phil cocking his ear toward her and keeping his eyes on the roads around them. A car passed occasionally, headed to the suburbs from the unimpressive downtown a few blocks away. A homeless person was curled up on a street corner, a jacket wrapped around them to ward off the chilly spring air. An average night in an average city. No signs that anything strange might ever happen there, no omens that a Witch was walking with his friends beneath the streetlights.

Simon reached the road he was looking for in a quiet, dirty neighborhood on the edge of downtown, where the pine trees leaned over the leafy gutters and shielded the alleyways between buildings. He took a sharp turn down an alley between a pawn shop and an abandoned laundromat. A graffitied dumpster and stack of mildewy boxes obscured most of the alley from sight, and every corner of cracked concrete was dark except for the back door of the pawn shop, where a dim yellow light flickered.

Simon stopped in the middle of the pathway and held out a hand, Tanit stopping beside him to rest an elbow on his shoulder. With a soft exhale, a pale white, glowing mist sprung from his palm, making the multitude of silver rings he wore shine. The same substance he kept in a multitude of jars in his pantry, now captured in the palm of his hand instead of crystal. He turned his hand over and let the mist drop to the asphalt. The magic fell slowly through the air and over a line of weeds growing through a crack, tumbling between their leaves like ethereal fog. Simon let the stream flow for only a few seconds before stopping. The magic curled over his shoes and the concrete before he kicked it, dispersing it in the chilly night air.

“Is that it?” Tanit asked, watching intently as the glowing wisps faded in the breeze.

Tanit was always interested in how he did his magic, and he could feel Phil watching too. Simon didn’t usually work this way, needlessly spreading magic around like that. Normally, he didn’t need to.

But his customers weren’t showing up like they used to. A good strong whiff of his magic on the breeze would remind his clients what they were missing.

“Oh ye of little faith,” Simon said to Tanit.

“Baby, please, I’m your biggest fan. Or at least your number-one occultist.” Tanit bopped Simon’s nose, a smile on her red lips.

He smirked back. “Better get to your spot; the smell of my magic travels fast and we don’t need any stray humans wandering in by accident.” Stray humans were unlikely to survive a run-in with one of Simon’s customers.

Tanit turned, whispering a final grinning jab to Phil on her way back toward the street to stand as lookout. Phil shook his shaggy brown head at her before withdrawing into the shadows on Simon’s right, the brief glint of his baseball bat the only sign of where he stood.

Simon picked a spot of mostly dry wall beneath the yellow light and leaned his head back against it, hands in his pockets, eyes closed, and waited.

He took deep breaths of exhaust and pine, listening to the familiar sounds of the night around him. The scrapes and creaks from unknown sources that might put others on edge, but they were nothing but gentle ASMR to Simon. Phil never moved and could have fallen asleep or vanished for all the noise he made. Tanit’s footsteps echoed down the alley as she paced at the mouth, only a silhouette against the night. She whistled sharply only once, when a cop car passed, and she and Simon ducked out of sight until it turned off the street.

The waiting took forty-five minutes. Unheard of, especially with his alluring magic out in the open like that, instead of safely enclosed in a jar. It should have taken five minutes. He swallowed his annoyance silently.

Finally, a scraggly cat dashed from under the dumpster and past Simon’s shoes, bolting out the back of the alley. Simon straightened and saw Tanit stop pacing, standing with her feet wide and her arms crossed, as if to stop anyone from entering.

Simon looked to the deepest shadows of the alley, expecting to see the sway of a small shadow creeping toward them. Nothing stirred.

Then he heard Phil shift nearby. “Roof.”

Simon turned his gaze upward. A large figure crouched on the edge of the laundromat’s roof, watching him with round eyes that reflected yellow and green. Jagged shards of moonlight cut across the shadows of its boney, gray skin. The arms and legs were too long to look natural, the torso too thin. From the top of its skull protruded two squat, twisted horns.

The demon had no menacing presence, no aura of evil like might be in a storybook or a bible, but it did look out of place, as though an arcane statue had sprung up between the brick buildings and telephone poles. No matter how often Simon saw demons in the city, they never looked like they belonged. In that way, he felt they were the same as him.

“Skagger Roth!” Simon greeted. “It’s been a while.”

The demon’s skeletal mouth parted, revealing several rows of slim, dull teeth. “Sssimon,” the creature replied. His voice was nearly lost in the drip of a drain pipe and the creak of a chain link fence.

Simon pushed away from the wall to face his visitor. “Good to see you, as always.”

“Likewissse.”

The demon dropped from the roof into the alley soundlessly and padded toward Simon on long fingers and toes. Skagger Roth would have been two heads taller than Simon if it was standing, but Stalkers always moved on all fours. The truth behind the stories of hell-hounds, Simon assumed, although they resembled their other legends more closely. Animated corpses. Wendigos.

As the demon neared, Simon saw one of his shoulder blades was exposed, ringed in sticky black scabs, and there was a congealed liquid dripping from a hole where an ear had been torn off. Not unusual, for a demon; Simon had seen much worse. The demon was unphased by its wounds but hesitated at the edge of the lamplight around Simon, uncomfortable—which was exactly why Simon worked deals in the halo of lamplight.

Simon kept a casual smile on, despite his disappointment. A Stalker was usually a welcome sight. They were hunters, rather than scavengers like the smaller species, the Crawlers. As a result they had more they could offer Simon, stolen clumps of cash and credit cards and blood stained jewelry. Such wealth was tempting, especially since so few demons had come to deal in the last four weeks. But replenishing his suffering funds had to wait—tonight Simon needed answers. Stalkers weren’t likely to entertain his questions, but he would have to make this deal work for him anyway.

Skagger Roth cocked his head, the dribble from his injured ear becoming a black stream. “Come to deal?” he asked.

“What else?” Simon answered. He pulled the jam jar out of his sweatshirt pocket. The glowing mist inside cast a sickly pallor on the demon’s broken bones beneath the thin skin.

Skagger Roth’s pupils dilated at the sight of the magic until his eyes became entirely black. His cocked head rotated farther until he was nearly looking at Simon upside down. Simon saw the coiling of leg muscle but didn’t flinch when the demon sprang forward.

Phil’s metal baseball bat swung from the shadows and slammed into the demon’s chest with a crunch. Skagger Roth reeled back with a haggard hiss, a broken rib the color of yellowed book pages protruding through the skin. He turned on Phil, who now stood between Simon and the demon, bat splattered in black blood. In a blur of gray skin, Skagger Roth slashed at him with a claw. Phil twisted to the side, taking the demon’s claws to one shoulder, where they tore his sleeve and left several shallow red gashes. Then Phil punched the demon’s arm down before grabbing the beast by the horn, shoving him down to his knees on the pavement.

“Watch yourself, ugly,” Phil warned.

Skagger Roth slid his black eyes up to Phil with a smile so wide it seemed as though his cheeks were torn. There was a vicious rage clearly written on his face, but Phil didn’t flinch. A Stalker could tear off a human head before the human could scream, but Simon and Phil knew that wouldn’t happen here. Not with Simon’s delicious magic on the line.

“It’s alright, Phil,” Simon said lightly, putting a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Skaggs is an old friend. He can’t help it if he’s a little excited for a bit of my magic.”

Phil stepped back, shouldering the baseball bat, his narrowed eyes still locked on the demon. Simon nodded to Tanit, who had turned to watch the scuffle from her place a few feet away. She reluctantly turned back around.

The Stalker moved forward again, away from Phil, his too-wide smile turned toward Simon.

“Your pricsse?” Skagger Roth asked, as if their conversation hadn’t been interrupted. His head was cocking to the side again, further and further each second.

Simon said, “Well, for you, Skaggsy, I have a special deal. Half the usual price, if you do me a favor.”

Skagger Roth’s neck unwound and he looked at Simon straight on. “Favor? For a Witch? Send a Crawler to do your chores.”

Simon would love to boss a Crawler around, but he hadn’t seen one in days. “Come now, Skaggs. A big smart demon like you can handle one tiny favor. Or did you not want any magic tonight?”

Simon tapped the jar of magic against his palm, making sure the movement caught the demon’s gaze. Skagger Roth’s eyes went to the magic like moths helplessly following a flame.

Skagger Roth’s lips peeled back from his teeth completely, leaving them bare. There were pieces of something gristly and rotten stuck between them. “What isss it?” Skagger Roth said through his clenched teeth.

“I need you to deliver a message for me to someone in the underground.”

A gargled laugh came from the demon’s throat, his broken rib shaking. “Don’t feel like coming yourssself?”

“You know, I doubt it would be my idea of good nightlife.” Simon shrugged. “What do you say? Deal?”

Skagger Roth hesitated, but his eyes betrayed his hunger for magic. He extended his hand, his long fingers uncurling to reveal a stack of grime coated dollar bills that hadn’t been there before. “Deal.”

Simon smiled. The demon couldn’t say no to a deal with Simon, not with his magic on the line. They never could.