The feeling of being watched crept up the back of Suyin’s neck as soon as she stepped outside, though her stalker was nowhere to be seen. She’d checked out the front and back of the apartment before she left and had seen no sign of him.
But that didn’t mean he wasn’t there.
She scanned the alley carefully before descending the spiral staircase from her balcony to the downstairs neighbor’s garden.It was still spring, and the plants hadn’t grown to their full lushness yet, but the trees were speckled with buds due to burst into foliage any day.
She opened the tall gate and peered around, seeing nothing except a couple neighborhood cats hissing at each other. Her skin still crawled. She swore she felt eyes on her.
She’d rented out the small garage behind her building, and she entered through the side door, careful to lock it again behind her. It smelled like engine oil. Her rusty piece-of-shit Civic was tucked as close to the wall as possible to make room for her brand-new baby: an all-black, 745cc Honda Shadow Phantom.
She’d traded in her beat-up old Harley a few months ago for the Phantom, going for something sturdier with a lower seat and room for a passenger on the back. The suspension and brakes had been upgraded, and the matte-black stealth paint job was too nice to pass up.
Still, the coven’s meeting place and occult shop was only twenty minutes on foot, and normally, she would’ve walked. She didn’t like leaving her bike outside for the long hours she was at work.
But now, all she could think about was how easy it would be to sneak up on her at a walking pace, and how quickly she could be ambushed around a corner.
She pulled her favorite helmet off the hook on the wall, zipped up her leather jacket, and lifted her satchel strap over her head. Rolling up the garage door, she pushed her bike out and then shut the door and locked it. She fired up the bike and shot down the alley, stray cats fleeing at the rumbling engine.
As she peeled around the corner onto the main road, she almost smiled. It felt good to ride, especially with all the doom and gloom she’d been carrying around lately.
She drove a few extra blocks to purge her heavy emotions, pulling up in the alley behind the shop half an hour later.Engaging the disc locks on her tires, she covered the bike with the tarp she’d stashed behind the garbage bins. After one final scan of the alley, she opened the heavy back door and set about flicking on the lights.
Le Repaire des Sorcières—The Witches’ Lair—was a cozy occult store full of casting supplies and other knickknacks witches found attractive. A lot of witches had mild hoarder tendencies when it came to their love of trinkets with potential use in their practice.
They loved crystals, charms, and figurines of goddesses from different cultures and mythologies. They loved herbs, incense, candles, and books. Le Repaire supplied those items to the witches in Montreal, and it also held appeal to non-witches who were curious or liked the aesthetic.
The spacious basement cellar where the coven met had a circle of chairs and a whiteboard for meetings, open floor space for sigil drawing, and several rows of bookshelves and worktables for study.
That was where Suyin’s grimoire had been stolen from a few months ago. The demon had walked into the store and threatened to kill the witch on duty, Marie-Thérèse, if she didn’t open the ward for him. Suyin didn’t expect anyone to risk their life for grimoires, even priceless ones, and she was glad Marie hadn’t been hurt.
She’d since upped the store’s protections. Now, as long as her wards held, it would take a powerful demon a lot of effort to break in, giving them plenty of time to fight back or escape.
After completing the same ward-maintenance rituals she did at home, Suyin opened the store for business. An occult shop on a Monday morning wasn’t the busiest place around, and she knew she’d have time to kill.
Settling onto the stool behind the front counter, she pulled her laptop out of her bag and fired it up. She didn’t open her inbox to respond to her coven members’ messages, though sheprobably should have. Instead, she pulled up the PDF she’d downloaded from the coven’s database after the theft.
The demon had stolen one of Suyin’s oldest possessions and left everything else untouched, and she wanted to know why. He may have taken her grimoire, but thankfully, Marie-Thérèse and a couple other coven members had faithfully scanned every book in their collection and saved the files on the computers downstairs.
Suyin had been poring over the scans of her grimoire for months now. As if it was going to make any more sense now than it had when she’d read it ten years ago, and ten years before that, and when her mother had first given it to her …
The grimoire was entitledThe Book of Gamigin, and it was the last thing in their collection she would’ve guessed a demon would want. Supposedly written by a father she’d never met, the book had been her mother’s most prized possession, though Suyin had never understood why. Even when she’d left it to Suyin before her death, on Suyin’s eighteenth birthday, she’d been unable to provide a reasonable explanation of its importance.
Keep it safe, was all Fay had said.This book contains knowledge beyond even what the angels perceive. Your father entrusted it to me, and now, I’m entrusting it to you.
It was one of the few times Fay had spoken of Suyin’s father, Samuel, and Suyin knew only the barest facts about him. According to Fay, Samuel had been an avid witch practitioner with a passion for demonology—hence the name of his grimoire—and he’d died of an illness only months after Suyin’s birth.
Apparently, he’d tried to summon Gamigin, a demon known for wisdom and magical expertise, on several occasions throughout his life and failed each time. More surprising than the failure was that Samuel hadn’t been killed in the process.As a rule, demons did not respond well to humans trying to enslave them.
As for Fay, she’d never been a particularly nurturing or emotional person, but Suyin had always gotten the sense that she’d loved Samuel deeply and spent the rest of her life quietly grieving. She’d left China with baby Suyin immediately after his death, and for the most part, she’d never spoken of him again. Suyin had never even seen a photo of him.
After Fay’s death, more than thirty years ago now, Suyin had cracked open the old grimoire, hoping it contained information about her father and why Fay had hidden it for so long. Unfortunately, it hadn’t made a lick of sense.
After months of study, she’d concluded that either her father had suffered from a mental illness causing severe delusions—perhaps as a result of messing with black magic, one of the reasons Suyin had always steered clear herself—or he hadn’t written the book at all. Maybe he’d gotten possession of it from a demon somehow. After all, it was written in Sheolic.
Now that it had been stolen, Suyin was motivated to read it again. She was desperate to understand why a demon might want it. Something had to make sense. Somehow, everything fit together. She was just missing the bigger picture.
After an hour or so of trying to decipher incoherent ramblings—cross-referencing everything with her Sheolic-English translation book—the little bells over the front door tinkled, offering a welcome distraction.
“Good morning,” she called out, straightening from her computer. She blinked her eyes back into focus, realizing her nose had been only a couple inches from the screen.
