Oblivion Heart (Darkling Mage 4)

“Yes, to all of it. But I never said anything about taking the very first deal the demon offered you.”

“Hey man, listen.” I thumbed absently through the pages of the book in front of me. “There’s something about that damn palace. You felt it. Mammon could have given me the worst deal on the planet and I probably would have taken it. It’s like that dimension has a way of warping your mind, you know? Like it’s, I don’t know, enchanted in some way to bend things in Mammon’s favor.”

Herald’s gaze flitted from me, to the pile of books on the table. “I really can’t blame you in the end. The demon princes have their own way of doing things. I wouldn’t put it beneath Mammon to have some kind of aura in place over the entire domicile, like an eldritch field that amplifies your desires, that makes humans even more likely to make stup

id decisions when it comes to getting what they want.”

I threw him a wounded look. “Hey.”

“But Dust, the Tome of Annihilation? Seriously?”

Herald had heard of it, of course. He was probably the smartest person I knew, next to Carver, or maybe that was because I gauged smartness in terms of how much someone knew about books. In Herald’s case, that was a lot. He could rattle off a list of nearly every grimoire in existence from memory, whether penned by mortal hand or otherwise. He’d also read as many as he could lay his delicately-gloved mitts on.

Not a turn of phrase, mind you, just that Herald’s the kind of guy who handles ancient grimoires with gloves, so as not to damage them with horrible, blasphemous things like fingerprints, or the disgusting oils that humans tend to secrete. And yes, I mentioned that he totally knocked out the Book of Plagues with a left hook, but listen – the Book of Plagues is an exception. That thing’s a complete asshole.

“Listen,” I said. “You and I both know that we had no way of telling what Mammon would ask of me.”

“Right,” Herald said, nodding. “Just as you and I have no way of telling which of these thousands of books is the real Tome.”

I flopped back in my chair, scratched my stomach, and sighed. The Tome could be hiding anywhere. The worst thing was that it could look like any other book, part of its self-preservation instinct, its own defense mechanism.

“Three whole floors, and this is just one library,” Herald muttered. “The Tome likes to hide where it can blend in, but what if it’s in a school somewhere? What if it’s in a private collection?” He groaned, then began to massage his temples.

“Great. So it’s a bomb waiting to go off, and it’s got camouflage. What kind of demon came up with this? Who even wrote this damn thing in the first place?”

“Not a demon, Dust. It’s hard to peg who the original author of the Tome of Annihilation was, but all sources say that it was definitely a human mage.” He pressed his lips together, nudging his glasses up his nose as he scanned another book. “It’s easy enough to say that demons and other entities are capable of so much chaos, but let’s be honest. Nothing has a greater drive and propensity for destruction than humanity itself.”

I grunted and left it at that. There was no point arguing. We’d seen enough evidence of it over the time we’d spent together. Hell, one name alone was proof of mankind’s innate potential for chaos: Thea Morgana.

“Okay,” I said. “My main point is that I won’t give the Tome to Mammon. Plain and simple.”

“And what if Mammon takes your soul anyway?”

“Listen. Igarashi. We’ll burn that bridge when we get there.”

“You mean cross,” he said.

“Sure. Sure I did.”

I lifted my chair as I backed it away from our table, taking care not to scrape its legs against the floor. There were at least two Esthers within shushing distance, and I’d had enough of being accosted by old ladies for one day.

Herald raised an eyebrow at me. “And where are you going?”

“Just gonna stretch my legs,” I said, thrusting out my arms and rolling my neck. I squeezed his shoulders and he immediately flopped to jelly under my touch. Hah. Guy worked too hard. “You’re all tense there, buddy. I’d get to a spa real fast.”

Herald shrugged me off. “Shut up,” he muttered, rotating his shoulder, wincing when his joints popped. “Don’t wander off too far.”

I chuckled. “Try not to miss me.” He turned back to his books, grumbling.

I followed my feet as they brought me to the stairs up to the third floor. Sure, we’d checked the occult section already. In fact, it was the first place we looked. But maybe we’d missed something among the works of Cornelius Agrippa, Aleister Crowley, and John Dee’s writings on the Voynich manuscript and – you still with me so far? Okay. Anyway. Something in my gut told me that the Tome would want to be in familiar territory even if it was on the lam, and it might appreciate hiding someplace that had arcane-adjacent literature.

Not that you could find a real, actual grimoire in a public library, of course. The Lorica had ensured that a long time ago, and there was actually a small team of archivists specifically assigned to combing libraries in case their staffers unwittingly invited supernatural books into their collections. It sounded like the kind of thing a lesser demon would find amusing, sneaking a dangerous book of fire into a grade school library. And sure, it’d be funny for all of five minutes, or however long it took for a kid to burn down his entire school.

I sighed as I arched my back for another stretch. I’d lost count of how many hours Herald and I had been at the library. It was probably the longest amount of time I’d ever spent with books, more so than that brief period I attended college – which, naturally, explains why college was such a brief period for me to begin with.

I cracked my knuckles as I approached the occult section, ready to do another dive, and was only slightly dismayed when a cursory glance confirmed that we’d already checked everything worth investigating. Nothing had changed since the last time we’d looked. Well, nothing except for the blond guy sitting cross-legged among the shelves, his arms as inked as the books scattered around him.

“Oh, sorry, excuse me,” I mumbled, negotiating the little stacks of books he had on the floor. Now I’m no expert, but I’d spent enough of my day at Valero Public to know that this sort of behavior would easily draw the ire of a librarian, if not one of the Esthers. “You, uh, you doing okay over there?”