Demon Shade (The Demons of Oxford Book 2) Read online

  Demon Shade

  The Demons of Oxford Two

  Kara Silver

  Contents

  About Demon Shade

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Also by Kara Silver

  About Demon Shade

  Ancient demons still need to feed, even over the holidays.

  Kennedy Smith has hardly drawn breath following the horrific events of her first term at Heylel College when a travelling fair of her long-lost kin arrives in Oxford. But Kennedy’s excitement places her in danger when she steps in to cover for her sick cousin as an Innamorata, or Lover, opposite the breathtakingly handsome Tristano.

  Aeth warns her she needs to distance herself from the fair and its performers, but Kennedy finds herself wondering if he’s just doing his job as the guardian tasked with preparing her for her destiny as a demon mage…or if he has ulterior motives for his demand.

  When her rival is murdered, and all signs point to her as the killer, she’s left with little time to decide who to trust. A legion of demons is on the rise, and Kennedy’s about to find out the hard way that no one is who—or what—they seem.

  * * *

  Fans of Elizabeth Hunter and Linsey Hall will thrill to Kennedy Smith’s quest in England’s ancient and beautiful university city.

  To Isobel, always.

  To the Pitt-Rivers Museum, that inspired this.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Max Beerbohm, for his wonderful Zuleika Dobson.

  Thanks to Rebecca Hamilton, for all her expertise and patience.

  Thanks to Heather Cardona, for her great help.

  Thanks to Lara, Shannon, Debbie and Deborah for beta reading.

  Cover art: Rebecca Franks at Bewitching Book Covers.

  Proofreading: Liz Borino Editing

  “Therefore I tell my sorrows to the stones …

  When I do weep, they humbly at my feet receive my tears and seem to weep with me.”

  Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus

  1

  Today’s the day. I’m gonna do it.

  Kennedy eyed the town memorial that had no idea what was coming to it, and hoped none of the sculptured faces that jutted out in weird places from it were eyeing her back. After her recent experiences with monuments and masonry, she wouldn’t have been surprised if one or more stone versions of town luminaries through the ages wagged disapproving fingers at her, or stuck out their tongues at her, or even showed her their arses. Not gonna stop me though. The harder things seemed, the stubborner she got.

  Wyebury, manufacturing ingenuity, said the bronze plaque set into the paved path that circled the monument to the town’s history. Nice enough pun, Kennedy supposed, glimpsing the words as she ran around the circle, gauging her best point of entry. She’d always thought the group of higgledy-piggledy shapes, showing the town’s evolution from an ancient Saxon settlement to its 1960s garment-manufacturing glory days and then to a town poised for the future—whatever that might mean—looked like a toad turning into a triangular pyramid, with random mushrooms sprouting from it. Why not both?

  Her resolve buckled a bit, and Kennedy thought she might as well warm up just a teeny bit more before her feat. And it was cold, being December. The any-day-now scent of snow in the air filled her nose and its chill stung tears from her eyes when she tipped back her head to squint up at the heavy grey clouds. That sky doesn’t look too clever.

  Realising how readily she’d slipped back into local idioms made her smile. You can take the girl outta Wyebury, but you can’t take Wyebury outta the girl. One term at a uni in the south didn’t cancel out a lifetime spent in the north.

  Pity Chandyce hadn’t been keen on coming out on Kennedy’s early morning runs with her. Kennedy’s ears still rang from Chandy’s screech when Kennedy had suggested it, with Karl’s scornful laughter as a bass line. Yeah, she got her best friend’s surprise. The two of them hadn’t done much, if any, sport since school, two years ago, and Kennedy would never have thought she’d be a runner. But she wanted to stay in shape, stick with the training she’d started during her term at Heylel College, Oxford.

  She’d run from Chandy’s place, her crash pad during the Christmas vac, along the canal and up through the campus to the park where she’d jogged and sprinted all the way down to the stream and wooded copse. Her long red-brown braid swung, getting on her nerves, so she shoved it inside her sweatshirt and beat feet to the fitness circuit near the skateboard park. She used the latter as a training pad first and jumped from the litter bin to the top of a ramp, to forward roll down it and leap across to a pipe. Her damaged ankle felt more or less okay when she landed, so Kennedy deemed it healed. Yay. Go, me.

  She crossed to the circuit training area. A huge man in short-shorts and a wifebeater, sweating like a warthog in mating season, despite the December weather, grunted in time with his pumps and thrust on the cross-trainer in the corner. He frowned at her when she swung herself along the monkey bars and then arced out her legs to fling herself to the top, where she balanced on the narrow metal strip as if it was a beam.

  Sweaty in Shorts’ reaction was nothing compared to the glares she got minutes later in the children’s park, this time from pedestrians using the path that ran by its side. Seemed Wyeburians didn’t like a young woman using the trajectory of a tyre swing to spring to the top of the slide, then from there, leap onto the side of the climbing frame and propel herself down the middle of that to the ground.

  “Don’t mind me; I’m a demon,” Kennedy said to a pinched-faced woman who stood and tutted. “Not that I know if demons are into exercise, but no harm in keeping in shape, right?” The woman snatched up a stray Coca-Cola can from the ground and deposited it into a litter bin, tsking and shaking her head before stomping off.

  Dear Demon Diary, today, while demon training, I… Kennedy didn’t have the funnies about her to continue, although part of her wished she could voice her worries and, well, fears, if she was honest with herself. How she felt at any one time since having learned she was a demon—and a demon mage at that, whatever that was—ranged from a low-level general a bit scared to spikes of quite frightened, actually to effing terrified, thank you very much at some points. Oh, and with a bit of background worry about what she might become thrown in, just to sweeten the mix.

  Sod this. Go for it. Back at the top of the park, she circled the monument once more and, before what she was about to do caught up with her, jumped straight to the top of its protective fence, remembering to use the section near the gate that was supposed to be stronger. Adrenaline flowed as she scrambled over representations of the town’s earliest beginnings, vaulted the smaller weird-chair-shaped things and climbed over the bigger ones, and scrabbled for footholds and handholds in the growing-in-size heavy paternalistic rectangles reproducing its Victorian pomp and circumstance. Someone shouted as she got onto the pyramid and took a res
t in its hollowed-out arch before swinging herself to the tip of its tiny apex.

  “You shouldn’t be up there! Get down!” cried a voice from below.

  “Obviously I will,” Kennedy called back, not bothering to look down. “I’m hardly planning to live up here. D’uh.” It was the first time she’d been on top of a high structure since college, and she’d been saving it for today as some sort of connection with Heylel College and its museum roof because of where she’d be in a few hours.

  “Is this a protest?” called out a studenty-looking guy, stopping his skateboard and twirling it to rest under one arm and crane his neck up at her.

  “Yeah. Against people our age on skateboards,” Kennedy muttered, shaking her head to signal no down to the guy. His expensive clothing and gear, along with his height and self-assured confidence, reminded her of the posse of rich guys she’d come up against last term. They’d had a horrible, misogynistic bet running, which had come to fruition on one of the worst evenings of Kennedy’s life. And the gang of pathetic rich kids hadn’t even figured into the mess.

  Arrggh. Remembering that was pushing up things she was trying not to think about. Seemed a demon couldn’t catch a break these days. Kennedy climbed down, a lot more slowly than she’d ascended, muscles wobbling with the ebbing adrenaline, hopped over the fence and blended with the going-to-work crowds to head back down to the canal and to Chandy’s.

  And the first thing she saw was Chandy and Karl making out. Chandy, perched on the kitchen counter between Karl’s legs, was half-naked, not wearing anything underneath her almost undone dressing gown, but thank God Karl was dressed, in his inevitable designer tracksuit and expensive trainers. Must kill him to wear unfashionable, grease-stained overalls at the garage.

  “Sorry…” Kennedy scooted around them to turn on the faucet and get herself a glass of water. She inched back around them again, trying not to disturb the couple as she went into the living room—her bedroom—where she rummaged in her case for an outfit for the day. Damn. The ironing board was in the kitchen/dining room/utility room, and she didn’t want to go back in for another ringside view of Karl’s hand on Chandy’s breast or Chandy’s hand in Karl’s back pocket, groping his ass cheek.

  Oh, well, maybe any creases would drop out of her clothes if she hung them near enough to the shower to catch the steam. She tried it, hoping the K and C show was over by the time she got out so she could grab some breakfast before she left. At least a cup of coffee.

  “That was a bit ignorant,” Chandy said as soon as Kennedy walked back into the living room, making her jump. “You could’ve said goodbye, oh and good morning, to Karl.”

  “Oh.” Kennedy shoved her toiletries back into her bag. “I sort of thought I’d be disturbing you, better leave you to it, you know? Talking of, mind if I get a cup of coffee or something? Want anything?”

  Chandy followed her into the kitchen. “You don’t have to ask permission.”

  Kennedy bit back a sigh. “Sorry,” she tried. Again. “Just, I feel a bit in the way.”

  “Be easier when her highness has sodded off home for Chrimble,” Chandy observed.

  Kennedy paused in taking two mugs down. “Had another run-in with Yasmin?” Kennedy was supposed to be staying in Chandy’s flatmate’s room for the actual Christmas period. With the university vacs being so long, she was cluttering up their living room until then. “Things were okay to start with, though?”

  The two had seemed to get on, put in touch by someone from the Business Certificate course Yasmin had just graduated from and Chandy was just starting; Yasmin needing a flatmate and Chandyce a place to live. Kennedy had had a few pangs at first, assuming Yas was the new Kennedy in Chandy’s life, with Kennedy gone.

  Chandy shrugged and rootled in the fridge for milk, sniffing it before putting it on the counter. “She’s jealous of me having Karl.”

  Ah. Was she? Or maybe pissed off that Karl was there most nights, if not spending the evening with Chandy then coming over later to sleep there? Kennedy couldn’t believe how quickly things had escalated between Chandy and the guy she’d met in her first week at the local higher education college.

  Kennedy didn’t know to think about it. Before, she’d have been privy to every detail of it, from Chandy’s first glimpse of Karl, there on day release from his garage for his motor mechanic diploma, to their first date down the pub, to Karl’s first time staying over. Now, despite her friendship with Chandy, it all seemed remote, which could be a result of the physical distance between them, of course, with Kennedy in another city. But Kennedy felt it was more to do with all the serious, far-reaching things she was going through, what with being a demon and all. She didn’t know if she fitted in with Chandyce, or any humans, not any more. And she didn’t hang out with demons. So, where did that—

  “Kennedy! Je-sus. Got water in your ear from the shower?”

  “Sorry. Daydreaming.” Kennedy poured boiling water into the two mugs.

  “Essay crisis, yah?”

  Kennedy narrowed her eyes at her friend’s impersonation of some of the loud, self-absorbed uni students they’d used to serve when she and Chandy had both worked in the pub. “No. But just thinking about the Rose and Crown, actually, wondering why you’re not still there? You were until recently, right?”

  “Oh, you know.” Chandy took a packet of biscuits out from inside a cereal box where she hid them from Yasmin. “It got in the way of a social life.”

  “Yeah?” It hadn’t used to, with any guy interested in Chandy dropping by to flirt the evening away with her, and she’d managed to make her working hours into dates with guys she was into, ensconcing them at the bar or at a corner table and flitting over to them at every opportunity.

  “Plus Karl wasn’t that keen on me working in a city centre pub, you know? Not the best place.”

  And a clothes shop in a city centre mall is?

  “Karl looks out for me.” Chandy’s voice was sharp. “Cares about me.”

  “I never said he didn’t.”

  “No, you haven’t said anything about it.” Chandy finished adding sugar to her coffee and replaced the bowl with a smack on the counter. “Or about much at all.”

  “I…know.” Kennedy swallowed. “I’ve had a lot on my mind. Still have. Things—”

  “If you weren’t rushing back to Oxford, after having just left there, we could talk today. But, you are.” Chandy twirled a long dark curl around a finger. “Coz you got a date with your cop bf, innit?”

  “Look, I know you didn’t like him—”

  “Actually, none of us did. Sorry.” Chandy let the curl spring back.

  Kennedy hadn’t expected to see Chris over the holidays. Constable Collier worked in Oxford; she’d left there for the break and would be back in January. But he’d been on his way home to his northern town for a weekend for some event or other and had called in to take Kennedy out for the evening en route.

  Karl had taken exception to the constable wrinkling his nose at the unmistakable sweet smell permeating the flat—Karl and a friend had been smoking there—and claimed Chris was staring all around at everything as though it was stolen and at them as if memorising their faces. He’d taken greater exception to Kennedy calling that weed-paranoia, ranting for ages about how stupid she’d been to bring a cop into a flat full of multiracial, poor teenagers.

  And Kennedy felt as if she’d thrown a firecracker into a drum full of petrol and was now covering her ears and shutting her eyes against the inevitable bang and flash.

  “Sorry,” Kennedy said again.

  “You know what cops are like…how they treat people round here. Or you used to.” Chandy’s tone was lighter, but Kennedy wasn’t naïve enough to think it any of it a joke.

  “I have to go,” she apologised. “You know I’m getting a lift to Oxford and back, else I wouldn’t be able to go.”

  “Yeah. Wouldn’t be able to pop in and have a spot of brunchy-wunchy with your policeman else. Wouldn’t that be a t
rag?” Chandy’s smile as she left the room was anything but merry.

  Kennedy had wanted, no needed, some downtime, some normal time—her old life back. Was it because she now knew she was a demon that she didn’t seem to fit in here any longer? She had no idea, but what she did know was she didn’t like it.

  2

  Outside in the street, Kennedy stopped dead on seeing Mrs Bannister, the wife of her former Sixth Form director, waiting outside. Was she the one who’d be giving her a ride to Oxford and back? Kennedy froze, unable for some reason to make her feet carry her forward. All she knew was that her skin prickled and she didn’t want to get into the car with her. How stupid.

  The woman was leaning against her car, and she nodded, talking quickly into her mobile, her free hand over her mouth, and disconnected her phone call as soon as she glimpsed Kennedy. She waved, her fingers darting and fluttering, drawing Kennedy towards her. Kennedy shivered and remained where she was.

  Kennedy didn’t know why, but she was forming excuses to cancel. She fought not to take a step back as the woman moved towards her. “Mrs Ban—”

  “Angela, please! I told you to call me by my first name!”

  Her tone rang charming and light, like a peal of bells or an arpeggio on a harp, but her words fell across Kennedy’s shoulders like a lash, making her wriggle. Making her back itch. Odd.