Chapter XXXIX

Iris would never allow herself to be seen in this kind of state; sweaty, covered in dirt stains, bruised. She reached up to fix her hair, then stopped when she saw her hands. They were filthy! 

There was grease on them, a few scratches from where she’d fallen and scraped along the ground, and her nails were both ruined and had gunk stuck beneath them.

She made a mental note to schedule a manicure. Her training and martial arts already left her with rather unfeminine hands, something which she was always keenly aware of, but there was no reason to allow her nails to look this messy. 

Iris rubbed her nose with the back of her wrist, then groaned. She was even allowing herself to slump, another thing that she had always avoided doing. Good posture was a sign of good breeding, and she was an Ulvent, not just any girl off the street.

“Caw!” the vulture squawked. 

“Shut up, you,” Iris grumbled. She put a bit more weight on her foot, pressing the daemon’s body against the ground with more force.

She was a mess. Her supply of cards had run out, and her brass knuckles had been used so much that the enchantment on it was smoking. Her costume had several rips and tears in it, despite all of the effort she put into making it tough and magically resistant, and she had worked through most of her supply of magical trinkets.

But she’d won.

She supposed that victory made up for a lot, because despite being incredibly tired, dirty, magically exhausted, and having burned through much of her supply of gear, she felt a wellspring of warmth in her chest. Pride, probably. Or sudden indigestion from all the stress from the fighting... but it was probably pride.

“Stay here. If you move, I’ll beat you to a pulp again,” she said before stepping off the bird.

It took her a few minutes to find some rope. It was grease-stained and worn, but it would do. She returned to the vulture, who hadn’t moved except to slump into the ground some more. She shoved it with her foot, then grunted as she laid the rope down and rolled the daemon up and over it.

She hadn’t joined the girl scouts. This was the first time in her life that she regretted it, because her knot-work in the end left a lot to be desired.

Still, the vulture daemon was well and truly trussed up. She was sure that it would be able to escape with sufficient wriggling, but that was fine. For now, it was captured, and that’s all that mattered. 

There were two ways, generally, to get rid of a daemon.

Generally, because there were probably some secretive wizarding techniques out there to do it, and she suspected that her family and clan had their own methods that weren’t readily accessible to her, or maybe they were too expensive and inefficient to work.

There was also whatever Carrot did. 

Iris wasn’t sure what to think about her... acquaintance’s methodology. She certainly wasn’t going to try to replicate it. Instead, she found her purse and pulled out a few small ceramic plates. 

They were fancy cup coasters with cork pads on the bottom, but she preferred to think of them as ceramic plates. They were definitely made of some sort of ceramic material, and she’d scratched off the little sticker at the bottoms. 

Each one had a set of runes carefully engraved onto their top. 

She placed them in five spots, forming a rough circle around the downed vulture. It wasn’t a pentagram, because she wasn’t drawing lines between them. Instead it was more of a pentagon. 

Honestly, she had to find time to carve out a few more. Six was a more stable number than five. And while setting down twelve of them would take a long time and be a little finicky, it would give her more room for runes. 

The reason she hadn’t was that five was plenty for the kinds of daemons she expected to run into in her day to day. The city hadn’t been a hive of daemon activity. There had only been a few rare occasions where she had to step out and put a daemon down, and those had been small, weaker things that were more likely to cause mischief and maybe steal a few things than stir up real trouble.

Was Carrot hunting down all the stronger daemons all this time?

No, that couldn’t be. That would paint Iris as inefficient and weak, and she didn’t like the thought of that, so she dismissed the possibility and continued to set down her array. 

Of the two normal ways to get rid of a daemon, the first was simple and violent. Beheading the daemon would do it. Though only most of the time. To be safe, cremation and burial was best. Unfortunately, that mostly just made the negative magically-rich body turn into ash, or it would contaminate the soil. It was negative, dark magic, and spreading it out as a fine smoke was a good way to disperse it, but it would still be there, just... spread out.

The other solution was less barbaric, and it did have some resemblance to what Carrot did.

She checked the order on her rune plates, then double-checked it, just to be sure. Then, because she was already all dirtied up, she fell onto her knees in the garage and pressed her hand to the activation stone.

Then she paused.

This... was an opportunity, wasn’t it? How often would she get to interact with a contained, captured daemon? The vulture wasn’t able or willing to spill secrets about its master, but... that didn’t mean that it couldn’t still be useful.

She pulled out a few tools. The best she had for what she had in mind was a long, carved piece of wood. Grabbing a carving pen and her cellphone, she started to cut some grooves into the wood while looking up some pictures she’d taken of some old tomes.

This was... not a good idea. In fact, there was a multitude of warnings captured in those pictures that outlined all of the safety precautions she wasn’t taking. 

Still, the carving went fast. Her little carving tool was enchanted for it, after all, and soon she had a new Ulvent device, albeit a simple one, that she placed just so over the activation plate.

She placed two fingers on the plate, concentrated, then pulled the magic from the air around her and poured it into the modified coaster.

The plate warmed under her touch, then continued to warm until it was almost painful to the touch. She didn’t stop, however.

The vulture croaked pitifully and thin waves of barely visible force was pulled away from it. The bird’s feathers lost their unnatural, dark glossiness, and it shrank ever so slightly. More importantly, its magical signature weakened, and the daemon’s energy was siphoned 

Normally, reasonably that power would be dispersed. It wasn’t entirely safe. It may well lead to more daemons at a later date, but it was better than nothing and it solved the problem for the moment.

Now, however, a good chunk of that magical energy was being siphoned into the wooden stick she’d just carved.

It was good wood. Yew, taken from a centennial tree. Treated with oils, soaked in an enchanted keg for a decade. The kind of supply that was hard to come by and which she didn’t have an infinite amount of, but that quality would give the enchantment she’d carved into it a much needed boost.

Creating a device that absorbed negative magic like this was... not entirely useless. There were enchantments and rituals that could be powered by a daemon’s magic, and having that magic stored in a nice, convenient stick instead of a living daemon certainly made things more convenient. 

She started to question the wisdom of her actions when the stick started to smoke and fill the room with a dangerously acrid stench.

Iris waved a hand before her face to dispel the smell, but it only worsened. She cut off the spell in a hurry when the stick caught fire, burning green and black.

“Oh, crap!” she hissed before picking up the stick and waving it about. It burned merrily, then snuffed out after a few vigorous shakes. 

She tossed the stick down, then rubbed her hands clean. She could tell from a touch that the stick was imbued with magic, and not the fun sort. That thing was contaminated in a bad way.

She checked on the circle, but that was fine. The vulture was smaller now, still breathing, still injured, but alive. 

That was about what it deserved. 

She pulled the rest of the magic out of it, then pressed the right deactivation sequence into her plates. The air swirled for a moment, but the device had done its job. The daemon was no longer. 

A cautious person would kill and bury the animal anyway. A more cautious person would have done all of this in a sealed room where the dark magic could be captured and disposed of more safely. 

She was neither.

Standing, she found a rag, wrapped it around the stick, then placed it in her purse. That would come in handy later.

For now... she supposed she ought to send a tip to animal control about a big bird stuck in this old garage, then get back to Carrot. She bet the moron had found some trouble for herself.

***