The Demon's Revenge (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 4) by Katherine Sparrow

other.
    A moment later, we stood in her apartment.

 
     
     
     
     
    9
    Hell Cookies
    Lila kept her small studio neat but cluttered. She had three overflowing bookshelves full of Wiccan lore and history, a black cat that slept on her bed, and open kitchen cabinets full of colorful and mismatched plates and bowls. There was a thick tang of magic in the air. I wondered if Lila could smell it: probably not. Our own scents tended to be hidden from us. This magic smelled rich and echoed what I had smelled in the forest when Lila had been overcome with her magic. It meant she’d had other such spells recently.
    Yet another sign that she would change soon. I checked the blue magic that traced tiny lines across her skin like a lightning storm across the continent of her body. It was no greater than before. Good.
    “Coffee?” Lila asked.
    “Always,” I said as I draped my coat on one of her mismatched chairs.
    “And pizza. I’ll order two with everything. I’m starved,” she said and pulled out her phone. She knew the man on the other end, and chatted with him for a bit before placing her order. When she hung up, she said, “I know I should feel zonked from fainting, but I feel so energetic. This is fun having you here, Morgan. I like bringing you over to my place for a little spell-making Hell-door mischief.”
    I studied her and wondered at her words. I wondered what it would feel like for her when she changed. Some transformations were painful. Others were ecstatic. And some were both. Of all the scant accounts I’d been able to find about her kind, none were written with any empathy or insight for the creatures themselves.
    “Don’t look so worried, Morgan,” Lila said. “I know this is the real serious business we are getting down to, and one wrong step and we are doomed forever. But you have to agree, it is kind of fun, right?”
    “You must always respect power and magic, be it your own or Hell’s,” I said.
    “Sure. I know. But I meant it’s fun to have a day with you. You’ve been so depressed. I was worried you might never come back.” She turned from her Formica counter where she was making the coffee and threw herself at me. She gave me a big hug.
    My arms wrapped around her and held her hard, before I made them drop to my side. “Now on to the spell-making Hell-door-mischief,” I said, though I suspected she would change before we had a chance to search for it. I went to her dining table, a couple feet away from the kitchen, and sat on one of the hard backed chairs.
    Lila finished pouring water into her coffee maker. “Can we do a finding for the door?” She sat down next to me and traced her fingers over the uneven surface of her table. “Do we know enough about it for that?”
    “We don’t know enough,” I said. “But we do know some things about the door. It’s a portal into a different realm. A hungry realm.”
    “So we should do some kind of hungry spell?” she asked. “Is that even a thing?”
    I shook my head. “No. But the Hell door will suck in the magic and energy of everything around it,” I said.
    “So we should do a spell that searches for that?” She looked confused.
    “Yes. Imagine a hurricane, and the dead eye at its center. That door is a hurricane in this city, but in itself it is a null place. We search for the lowest point of magic in the city, and we find the door.”
    “Sort of an anti-magic spell,” Lila said. “How?”
    “We’ll need….” I stood and walked to her kitchen, humming as I checked her fresh herbs, her drying herbs, and her ground herbs. A less experienced witch might need a wider palette for this spell, but I had dozens of lifetimes improvising with what was at hand, and had made spells working with far less. I was pleased to see that Lila had large hanging bundles of basil, chamomile, lavender, and mugwort. They were versatile, as were her yellow tinctures of pennyroyal and yarrow. I made a pile of ingredients on the counter, and added