Barbara Foote was a beautiful woman who was getting ugly fast, but she seemed oblivious to it, because she was too rich for anyone to tell her.

She was puffy, irritable, and clearly addicted to something, quickly ruining a face and body that had been world-class ten years ago. It wasn’t just age. It was pretty easy for a rich woman to age gracefully these days, changing the way she dressed while still letting everyone know she was rich, avoiding obvious cosmetic surgery, getting by with calorie shunts and cell injections.

A real friend would have told her to get on blockers or go to rehab, but Barbara didn’t have any real friends, which is why she invited the entire cast of her terrible vanity play to party at her mansion after the show.

It was easy to tell how beautiful she used to be, because the house was full of old photos of her, taken when she was young and hot, commissioned by a husband who wanted to show her off, taken by a photographer who probably had sex with her.

Her recently deceased husband had been a legendary tech billionaire, a robotics pioneer who made his money off the first practical humanoid robots. The kind they didn’t make anymore, since the corps took over, and outlawed anything smart enough to have a conversation.

Barbara immediately inserted herself between Brian and the guy who played his Martian lover, roughly pushing Judy out of the way, until she was forced to stand by me and Lydia.

Lydia was freaking out in a very deliberate, Lydia kind of way, but I was the only one who could tell she was nervous. She was pacing around the room, ostensibly admiring photos of Barbara, while quietly scanning the auras of anything that moved.

Her voice came into my head again. “Timothy, this woman is a demon thrall. We should get out of here.”

“Are you sure?” I thought back. “I thought demon thralls were like influencers and CEOs, is this woman even coherent enough to be worth manipulating?”

“I suspect this demon was assigned to her husband and stayed behind, since this widow still controls his money. This house reeks of demon, but I can’t spot him, which means he is likely much older and stronger than me.”

I went briefly pale. “You’re six hundred years old and this thing is older than you? That sounds… bad.”

“I can’t hide us in a demon’s lair. Please make an excuse to leave before he spots us.”

I wandered over to make my excuses to Barbara and was interrupted by a fire alarm. An old-school robotic voice said, “ALERT, ALERT: Smoke has been detected in the garage. Please exit the structure during first-level fire suppression.”

Barbara and the entire cast panicked and charged the front door, sweeping Lydia up with them, carrying her away as I was looking in the wrong direction. I wasn’t running for the exit, because I didn’t believe the alarm. I didn’t smell smoke, and I didn’t trust tech this old, so I was headed for the alarm panel in the back, assuming Lydia would be by my side a moment later.

But then I heard her voice in my head, “We got separated. Run and grab something silver off the dining table. The knives are fake, but everything else is old silver. Grab whatever fits in your pocket.”

So, I ran through the empty house and grabbed the first bit of silver I saw. “You want me to fight a demon with a fork?”

“I want you to learn some proper spells, so we don’t have to resort to cutlery next time we meet something stronger than me!”

“Wow,” I said, surprised by her tone. “Did you just get snarky with me? You really are scared.”

As I was headed back to the living room, a muscular man in an expensive suit grabbed my arm and hustled me into the back yard, saying, “Let’s get you out of here before the smoke hits!”

I was pretty sure this alarm was fake, but this man’s grip was crazy strong, and it was all happening too fast. Lydia was stuck in the front yard, surrounded by people she couldn’t push through or vanish in front of, leaving me alone in the back with this handsome beast of a man who was at least a foot taller than me.

I didn’t see any point pretending, so I said “You’re the demon, right? What’s your Name?”

I had never seen a demon who looked old on purpose before. This guy looked like a leading man or a male model who was keeping fit, well into his 50s. He had perfectly sculpted black hair with gray at the temples, a little too perfect to be natural gray. Brown eyes that turned completely black as I asked his Name.

“My demon name is Titus. I’m a lieutenant serving the Demon Lord Moloch, and right now, I’m trying to figure out what the fuck you are.”

This was not a sex demon. This was not an incubus fuck toy with a bulge in his pants. This was a killer who had switched to killing people with money instead of claws. He had been Barbara’s lover since long before her husband died. He wasn’t actually sitting on the boards of these companies Barbara had money in, but he was obviously telling her what to do.

God knows what he was doing in the bedroom to keep her under control, or what kind of drugs he was slipping into her morning latte to keep her docile.

I was no match for this guy, so I had to keep him talking. “Hey, if Barbara is your thrall, did you write that shitty play?”

“Fuck you, my script was perfect. You’re just too stupid to understand it.”

As I suspected, no writer can resist talking about his work. “Nah, man. Even as propaganda, it was nonsense. It looked like you were trying to discredit the New Testament, but nobody reads the Bible anymore. Most people in that audience don’t even know there was a New Testament! And why would you bother? You guys drove the Christians underground before I was born!”

“It’s not enough to put a Christian down,” the demon said, “You’ve got to keep kicking or they’ll get back up. My emperor turned his back on them, and I will not repeat his mistake.”

My body was bringing in magic by instinct, responding to the threat. I saw his black horns and tail pop out as he examined my aura. Not just any demon could paint their horns black. That color was reserved for elite servants with a body count, and even my baby senses could tell this one was old.

“You have an amazing aura, kid. If I had met you a year from now, you could have been a real problem.”

And suddenly, Lydia was all over him, popping out of the gray so fast, it looked like teleportation. She was angry, she was scared, and she was not fucking around. I felt like I was getting my first look at the real Lydia, the Lydia from Roland’s painting: fangs popped, claws out, slashing at this guy like an animal.

It should have been terrifying, but in context, it was strangely comforting. Something about seeing her this way, fierce and protective, facing real danger to try and keep this thing off me - it was visible proof that she was on my side, and she was already taking damage.

Lydia was faster, but Titus was a lot stronger. Lydia was doing some kind of astral fading trick to keep herself from getting hit, blinking in and out of the real world, scratching and biting at him like a set of disembodied claws and teeth. But this big bastard had claws of his own, and he was definitely drawing blood.

Titus finally got hold of something solid and flung her into a marble fountain, smashing a statue of an angel as Lydia got impaled by its blunt stone sword. Lydia yelled at me to run as Titus charged her, but I couldn’t just stand there and let her get hit.

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I only knew one spell, so I used it, levitating his body off the ground, using the same trick I used on Lydia during our sparring session. He was a lot heavier, but it worked. I knocked him off balance and trusted Lydia to take advantage of it.

She launched herself at him and yelled at me to “Run!” again, barreling into him, hard enough to knock him down. She was carving big chunks out of his arms, face, and chest, until he was thrashing in a pool of his own black blood.

I thought she was winning, until Titus conjured some kind of surging black portal and kicked her through it with both feet. Lydia soared backwards and I saw how badly she was hurt, leaving a quart of her own golden blood trailing in mid-air, until it splashed on the grass.

She tumbled backwards into the portal, which immediately closed behind her, leaving me alone with the demon who had just kicked her ass.

I finally decided it was time to take her advice, but it was way too late to run. Titus pounced on me and lifted me high off the ground with one arm, peering up at me like he was trying to get a better look at my soul.

He sniffed at me and poked my neck with a claw on his other hand, just enough to draw blood. He licked the blood off his finger and said, “Another Kovach? After all this time?” He squinted at me. “Six hundred years of selective breeding, and you’re the best they could do?”

Titus gripped my throat a little tighter and shook me up and down, like he thought shaking me might activate my magic powers somehow. But all I did was choke. So here I was, squirming at the end of a demon’s claw again, completely at his mercy, but this time, I was determined to fight back. I twisted my body and kicked him, aiming for his face, but I had never tried to kick anybody for real before. He blocked me with a slight twist of his shoulder and started to laugh.

“You’re trying to hurt a demon who predates the birth of Christ, kid. What are you gonna do with your little feet?”

But I kept trying to kick until he reached over with his free hand and slapped me, literally slapped me in the face, just like dad used to, whenever I would mouth off. He hit me so hard, I blacked out for a second, and woke up with blood pouring out of my nose.

He saw my eyes drift over to where his portal had been and said, “Relax, I didn’t kill her yet. Just sent her away so we could chat. Your succubus, what’s her name? Lila or Lola or something? She doesn’t even have a tether on you, yet. I can’t believe she’s letting you walk around in public when she hasn’t even closed the deal. Am I really looking at an unbound Kovach mage?

“If she had a tether on you, I’d have to kill you, but if you really are unclaimed, maybe we can make a deal. First, in about five minutes, you’re gonna be working for me. Might as well get your mind around that. Lola’s gonna be back in a few minutes, then I’m gonna snap her neck and take you down to meet my Master. That is not gonna be fun for you, but Jacob Kovach was a friend of mine, so I’m gonna make you the sweetest deal I ever made anybody.

“I’m still gonna take you to Hell and present you to my Master, but there are two ways this can go. I can drop you off at the Inquisitor and he can start shoving metal into your pink bits, or I can drop you off at the harem and let you pick out your new best friend. Lila’s headed back here at Mach 10, so you’ve got about sixty seconds to decide.”

I gagged and choked out a reply. “If we’re gonna negotiate, can you at least swing me around?”

Titus snickered and swung me around to face him, bringing me in close at eye level. He even loosened his grip a little, so I could deliver a complete sentence without gasping.

“Thanks,” I said. “Your Master is a lot more powerful than mine, right? Could you get me out of this contract, and let me work out a new one?”

He nodded.

“And nobody’s gonna cut me open if I cooperate?”

He nodded again.

“And this harem you’ve got, does your Master have any redheads?”

The big demon snickered again. “Three or four. But kid, if you do right by us, I’ll take you to Psongor and let him make you one from scratch.”

I sighed, went limp, and stabbed him in the eye, as hard as I could.

Initially, I thought I missed because I felt no resistance. It didn’t feel like I was stabbing an ancient, invulnerable demon, it felt like I was stabbing warm Jell-O. I didn’t realize it worked until I smelled something burning and heard the scream as he dropped me. A good seventy percent of that fork was in his eye, and the flesh around it was burning with a weird radiant light, like he had a little sun rising in his head.

I picked myself up from where Titus dropped me and ran for the sliding door, just as Lydia popped into real space and went for his throat. I missed a good minute of demon on demon combat and returned to find Lydia riding on his back, stabbing frantically as he tried to throw her off.

She was in bad shape. Her clothes were shredded, she had long scratches on her arms and legs, and I could see bare skull where he had tried to cave her head in. Titus hadn’t seen me yet; presumably he had better things to do with his one remaining eye, so I was able to run around behind him while he flailed at Lydia.

While the demons thought I was running away, I had been in the kitchen, grabbing the rest of the forks.

Titus was swinging wildly, trying to grab Lydia, but she was getting better at dodging him, and her claw scratches were taking their toll. I watched her make one long cut over his remaining eye, so the big demon would be blinded by his own blood.

While they were thrashing, I ran up behind him, and jammed another fork in his spine. I didn’t know if demon spines actually had nerves in them, but it seemed smarter than just randomly stabbing him in the back. I planted two more forks in him before he reached back and swatted me, sending me tumbling through the swing set, headed for the back fence at high speed.

That impact was gonna hurt real, real bad, but I remembered Brian and tried to improvise with levitation again, trying to push against the fence instead of the ground. The spell absorbed my momentum, and I used the fence to launch myself back the other way, soaring toward the fight that I should have been running away from.

I was moving too fast to aim myself, so I just kind of crashed into him from behind. Not hard enough to move four hundred pounds of muscle and magic, but hard enough to scramble my brain again, and drive two of those forks deeper into his back.

Titus roared in pain and wrapped his tail around my neck. I was officially tired of demons fucking with my neck, so I jammed a fork in the place where his tail met his spine and was gratified to see another tiny sunrise coming out of his ass. His tail caught fire and detached from the rest of him, dropping me on the mercifully soft lawn.

Lydia’s angry voice shouted, “I told you to run!” in my head.

“Hold his arm still!” I thought back, and she did.

I jammed another fork in his shoulder and immobilized his left arm, then we did the same thing with his right. His arm was a big target, but my aim sucked. I accidentally hit Lydia with the fork, and she screamed as I neatly clipped most of her finger off.

I had seen Lydia suffer terrible injuries during this fight, but this was the first time I had heard any indication of pain. I guess her demon stuff made her immune to most of it, but something about that silver burned her just as bad as it burned him. The last finger on her right hand flared, burned to a crisp, and fell off, leaving an angry black nub.

I yelled, “Sorry!” out loud and she yelled, “Use them all!” in my head.

I jammed half a dozen more forks in his left side and suddenly remembered I was a wizard. I got around behind him, levitated myself with a running start, and jammed my last piece of silver through the top of his head on the way down. I bounced off his shoulder and fell backwards into the swing set again, but not before I drove seven inches of silver straight through his skull.

Titus screamed one last time and vanished in a swirl of black smoke. A dozen silver forks hovered in the air for a moment and fell gently back to Earth.

* * *

And then everything got quiet.

The automated system sounded the all clear once the tiny garage fire was out, but Barbara had already moved the party to a nearby hotel. I flicked my phone back on and saw a dozen frantic texts from Judy, asking where we were.

“Had a blast,” I texted back. “Next time, you can skip the play and just invite us to the fire.”

Lydia looked terrible. A normal human would have been dead from the wounds I saw, slowly closing as she dripped blood on the lawn.

Lydia stared at the forks and then back at me. “Did we really just kill a lord’s lieutenant with a dozen silver forks?”

“No, ma’am,” I corrected, smiling. “Those last three were spoons.”

* * *

I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. We did not deserve to win that fight. I spent the next week running weird theories by Lydia, trying to guess what happened. Maybe the silver had a weird interaction with my aura? Maybe we had a secret angel helping us from the gray?

I didn’t get a real answer until I showed the fight to Azael.

He said the more powerful a demon is, the more vulnerable they become to old silver. Not just any silver. Coins, bars, and bullets might hurt a little, but to really hurt a demon, the silver has to be old, and it has to have been in the same shape for a long time.

If it’s old enough, silver has a way of “grounding” infernal magic the way the negative properties of the Earth can ground power lines. The more powerful a demon gets, the more magic is required to maintain its form, so the older they get, the more it hurts to have that magic interrupted.

And it gets better. It’s not just about how old the silver is, it’s about how that silver has been given and received. Azael says a wedding is a kind of magic ritual, a sacred ceremony that creates an angel tether between two people. The longer that marriage lasts, the more powerful that tether becomes, especially if both people honor their vows for a long time.

Gifts given at a wedding are blessed, and items that are treasured acquire a sacred quality over time. Treasures passed down from earlier generations can be part of multiple weddings and be blessed multiple times.

The Foote family silver had been passed down through five generations of happy marriage, until it ended up in the barren, loveless drawer of Barbara’s kitchen. But the magic was still in it, and that silver was still blessed.

I didn’t believe it, either, but Azael says we beat one of the meanest demons in Hell, because I shoved a +5 Holy Fork in his brain.