Chapter 1
Left Hand Path
Sekhet, one of Lucifer’s most loyal servants and one Lilith loathed with a vengeance, was outraged at being summoned by an unappealing, plain-featured mortal barely past childhood. Sekhet’s dark skin glowed under a head of blond ringlets, while her long black wings, striped with blood, were expanding out around her. Her voice boomed in echoed vibrations, rattling Molly’s insides. Sekhet towered over the trembling teenager. Domineeringly powerful.
Blinded from all sense, Molly, experimenting in the church, had unknowingly pushed her own powers to exceed all limitations, regardless of consequence. Her driving desire, just coming into her darker side, was to establish a close and strong relationship with a demon who was willing to work with her, guide her along the Left-Hand Path.
The intensity she felt in Sekhet’s fearsome presence was rapidly branching out into electrifying numbness, leaving Molly with a feeling of coexisting completely engulfed by the demon’s aura.
Molly, the only grandchild of Dot Patterson, Head of the Witches’ Council, the Sisterhood in the Pacific Northwest – much to the horror of Dot and every witch within the Five State radius – had set her sights on developing her talents in Left Handed Magic, prohibited in the Glossary of Traditional Witchcraft, from which the Coven trained and educated their new coming-of-age, undeveloped witches. But Molly had never imagined this!
What had happened was that Molly had performed the ritual textbook actuate, and drawn the sigil of Sekhet carefully; she had made sure no one was going to disturb her, then closed her eyes and said the prayer, loud and confident. Though expecting something, anything to prove she had succeeded, to come through the smoke of her burning incense, or for an energy to touch her, she had never expected Sekhet to show herself, demanding to know why Molly assumed herself worthy of such an audience.
Tripping over her words, Molly apologized for her hastiness, begging Sekhet for forgiveness. Sekhet laughed hideously at Molly’s downfall, roaring that a mortal being should not have been blessed with such skill.
For Sekhet, as Molly was well aware, blood spurting from her victims’ veins was a joyous thing. To tear into flesh, to scream, to destroy. Molly all but fainted when she heard Sekhet’s request – to provide Sekhet with a body, a living, breathing human, in her place.
Molly, all alone with the demon, had no other choice; to save herself, she had to agree.
