Read Online Hollywood Demon (The Collegium Book 6) by Jenny Schwartz - Free Book Online

times. “I need to go if I’m to make the meeting.” He took another sandwich to eat on the way, and if he was escaping further discussion concerning Clancy and Doris involving themselves in the pursuit of Faust, well, he expected he wouldn’t escape it for long.
    Clancy gulped some coffee. “Where’s your office?”
    “Sherman Oaks.”
    “Can I hitch a ride? I need to buy a car to get around. If you drop me at a car yard, that would be great. Please?”
    He bit back his automatic offer that she borrow whatever was in the garage. Cars had collected at the estate over the years, abandoned by his dad and grandfather and himself. But Clancy didn’t want to borrow a car. She’d lowered her pride enough to accept a job from him for a couple of weeks. He had to respect her need for independence. It mightn’t matter to him if she borrowed a car, but it mattered to her.
    “I can give you a lift. But I’m leaving, now.”
    “No problem.” She gave him a tight smile. “I’ll dash back to the cottage and grab my purse. I’ll meet you at the garage.” She was out the door on the last word.
    Doris regarded him directly. “Look out for her.”
    He nodded as he grabbed keys from the drawer—not the ones for the Rocinante. “I will.”
     

Chapter 4
     
    The SUV was ordinary, old even, but Clancy felt magic brush over her skin as she climbed in. Startled, she glanced at Mark who waited in the driver’s seat.
    “It’s warded,” he said.
    Wow . A mobile ward was seriously expensive. A mage could easily maintain a personal ward, but this magic wasn’t Mark’s. It had a stranger’s signature. Mark had paid someone with far more magic than he possessed to weave a ward into the metal frame of the vehicle. A ward sunk into the Earth was maintained by the life force of its location, but to ward a lifeless car required heavy duty power.
    “What does it ward against?” She buckled her seatbelt.
    “Other magic. In this car you can’t be ensorcelled or otherwise compelled. Nor can another car hit it.” They were in a magical fortress. “Grandfather bought it for me after the crash.” After Phoebe’s death and Mark’s obsession with hunting the demon who took her soul.
    Clancy glimpsed the wall of the neighbor’s house where Faust had—maybe—appeared, and then, they were speeding past it. Maybe it was cowardly, but she wanted her and Mark’s conversation to do the same. She didn’t want silence, as they’d had on the drive back from Hollywood Boulevard, but she also didn’t want to discuss the tough stuff.
    “I came home to be ordinary,” she said mournfully.
    Her comment, or perhaps the unexpectedness of it, surprised a laugh out of him. She smiled faintly. “Tell me about your work. I don’t remember you as a gamer.” He’d been too active, always outside, always surrounded by people.
    Not like now. She realized why he’d winced away from her comment in the kitchen that morning about being too alone. She’d been talking about herself, but he’d become isolated by his obsession with Faust.
    “I always gamed a bit. But I got into it in a big way about six years ago.” After Phoebe’s death. Perhaps that was the story of his life, before and after Phoebe? But his voice was relaxed, confident and self-deprecating. “I had to do something after college.”
    “You were doing something.” She watched the competent movements, the small adjustments of his hands on the steering wheel as he took the back streets, weaving through them to the car yards and his office in Sherman Oaks. “You were modelling and working on a script. Oh . Screen writing, games development. It’s all storytelling.”
    “That’s it. Gaming was the path I took,” he agreed. “I found that the stories I wanted to tell, epic adventures in unknown worlds, suited gaming.”
    Epic adventures. Stories in which good battled evil with the odds stacked against the hero. Was that how Mark saw himself, as the lone hero on a quest?
    He