The Accidental Druid's Guide to Binding Demons, page 1
The Accidental Druid’s Guide to Binding Demons
Kari Gregg
Contents
Blurb
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Kari Gregg:
Copyright © 2024 Kari Gregg
Cover designed by Getcovers
All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Warning: This book contains strong language, sexually explicit situations, and may be considered offensive to some readers. This book is for adults only.
NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
No part of this work was created with generative AI.
Created with Vellum
For CNM, CRNP, and Drs: Crist, Yin, Lum, Beede, Watkins, Livingood, Colette, Ouess, Bijula, and Singh at UPMC/Western Maryland, Mercy Hospital, John Hopkins, and other medical campuses as well as the entire oncology team at Schwab Family Cancer Center, circa 2015-2024—all of you played an instrumental role in keeping me alive so far and I will be forever grateful for your care and dedication.
If you think about it in just the right way, this book is your fault.
Also, heartfelt thanks to Jennifer and Laura—you guys are the best!
Blurb
About The Accidental Druid’s Guide to Binding Demons
After testing as mundane, David just wanted to earn his botany degree and enjoy his ordinary life. He didn’t count on a First Blood demon portaling into his part-time job to bind with anyone near that dormant nexus, though. Bad luck for David—demons only bind with magicals.
The jig is up.
Now outed as a druid, David navigates the Cumberland metro’s perilous magical community while exploring his link to that demon, Jae. David’s father, Teddy Mace, had closely guarded secrets, including how strong David’s powers were as a child, but what else had Teddy hidden? What got him killed? And once Jae helps David decipher his dad’s lost grimoire, will the murderers target them next?
Add in David’s godfather and Towpath Guild Boss John Griffith, an edible-loving imp sent to be David’s familiar, and frenemy roommate Finnegan who is inarguably the worst fire mage ever, and David’s dream of a normal life spectacularly implodes.
Whoever dismembered Teddy Mace will have to stand in line if they want to eliminate David to keep that cold case arctic. He and Jae are hard to catch. Fully bound? Killing this new demon/magical team may be impossible…if they can stop pissing each other off first.
Content warning: violence, blood magic, explicit male/male sex, generational trauma, parental estrangement, alcoholism recovery…All these people are super f*cked-up. But you don’t want to miss necromancy, the dragon of Pittsburgh, and a twelve-year-old oracle who can be bought with video games and chalupas.
131,160 Digital Words
1
Shoving my uniform ball cap onto my head, I climbed from my truck in employee parking at the Western Maryland Botanical Garden. Heat from the baking asphalt scorched the soles of my work boots. I swiped at sweat already slicking my temple while I took in the vibrant color beginning to pop in the maples towering over the stone, glass, and cedar of the Visitors Center. I grimaced. Way too hot for early October in the mountain highlands, but I trudged across the arid desert of the parking lot, anyway. Fucking climate change. I veered onto a path to the left, ducking around the rear glass double doors of the Visitors Center to head toward a humble staff building on the side.
The Visitors Center boasted open spaces with interactive exhibits of flora and fauna guests could expect to see in the garden, a gift shop, and an event room that spilled onto a patio frequently reserved for weddings and parties. More importantly, the Visitors Center boasted air conditioning.
The shed for staff did not.
As soon as I stepped through the door, I turned to my right to clock in for my shift. A clipboard hung on a roofing nail next to the time clock, a pen dangling from bailing twine tied to the nail. Signing my name to the roster, I grabbed a radio from the wire basket installed below—cell service was spotty in the mountains and much more so throughout the stretch of acres that made up the botanical park. Two-ways worked better. The valley in which the garden’s designer had developed waterfalls and a pond were a complete dead zone, but radios were good enough otherwise. Mostly.
I dragged the lanyard with my ID badge from under my forest green WMBG polo as I exited the shed and strode toward the greenhouse, which was the genuine beating heart of the garden.
“Running late?” my boss asked when I pushed inside, but she said it with a smile.
Megan was all right. Standing five-foot nothing, the blonde could’ve been mistaken for any of the biology majors the garden hired as grunt labor instead of the PhD and formidable grant wrestler she was. Her jaunty ponytail, blue jean cutoffs, and WMBG logo tank top screamed student instead of management. In the two years I’d worked there, she’d never been afraid to get her hands dirty, though. To wit, she danced around her ongoing pet project, pruning shears at the ready—grafted fruit trees. In fact, the tree she tended was mine, a singularly unambitious graft of crabapple to Granny Smith.
“Class ran over,” I said.
“Dr. Dixon likes the sound of her own voice.” Megan hummed while she snipped away grafts that hadn’t taken. “Not like the trees are going anywhere.” She snickered. “Well. This one will go into our Franken-orchard in the spring, but my point stands.”
The orchard was on the garden grounds without officially being included in the park, a special exhibit open for students and locals later in the fall. Like me, most who registered for the single elective class Megan taught at Frostburg State University chose varieties of apple trees to graft. They were most likely to thrive in this hardiness zone of the Appalachians, and since every student’s grade depended on the success of their grafts, we tended to choose conservatively.
I’d done the same varieties of apple as everyone else for class, but I’d also experimented with other fruit bearers at my childhood home outside town. The only times I’d been willing to revisit the place had been to tend my grafted trees just as Megan pruned to encourage better growth in the scions here. Until Megan’s class had awakened my curiosity for novelty grafts, I hadn’t been to the house since my father’s murder. I’d planted my rootstock and grafted them outdoors rather than babying them in dad’s greenhouse, but they’d flourished. Bonus: I’d discovered I could handle returning to the landscape of my boyhood if I stayed away from the house, where memories of my father and my old life haunted me most.
If I was careful no one saw my truck before I crossed my dad’s wards onto our land, I’d convinced myself it was okay. I’d be safe.
Everything was a risk, wasn’t it?
“You want me at the pond?” I asked, shying away from the No-man’s-land of my dad’s violent, premature death. “I almost finished replacing the walking bridge on Wednesday. Just needs an hour and a quick clean-up.” Or a lot of clearing tools and setting the space to rights, but given my gloomy thoughts, I was in no hurry to play field guide to tourists.
Megan shook her head. “Nah, I sent Cooper.” She put down the pruning shears. “Can you check out the oaks in the Grove instead?”
Since she’d hired me, I’d occasionally wondered if Megan might have a little druid in her. She was that good with plants, flowers, trees, and shrubs, but other times, I was certain she must have some witchy ancestors. Not enough to identify her as magical at age thirteen when everyone tested for latent abilities, but she always seemed to read me and give me whatever I needed to keep going, to keep growing. Like the plants. She nurtured me as adeptly as she tended to anything with chlorophyl.
The Grove was the most distant section of the botanical garden. So far from the Visitors Center, many guests didn’t bother to hike there. We maintained a cleared understory so the area featured groupings of old-growth trees and not much else. Kids from the junior high came for lessons in leaf identification when school resumed after summer break and Megan had built a roofless reading cabin with a tiny library for selfies as well as dotting faux gnome houses throughout. That area was my favorite in the botanical garden and not just because fewer guests wer
Still, my mouth thinned. Because the Grove featured groupings of many tree varieties. “Just the oaks?”
Megan nodded. “Tourists from Baltimore reported trouble with the dryads.”
I winged up an eyebrow, surprise arrowing through me.
“I know. Right? Since when do dryads let us pesky humans glimpse them, forget watch them racing around.” She rolled her eyes. “Something stirred them up.”
“Maybe a bear.” The black bear population ranged pretty far in search of food before hibernating, though we had spotted none except young adults passing through in the spring since I’d worked there. “If a bear is marking trees, that’d set the dryads off.”
“I don’t think so.” Megan wrinkled her nose. “A bear would make the dryads mad. The Baltimore people said they looked scared.”
My brow furrowed because seriously? What scared a dryad? They were tree nymphs, shy, rarely appearing even to me. The only things I knew about them fearing were loggers and wildfire. “No fire?”
She shook her head, ponytail swaying. “It’s been hot and dry, but no signs of smoke. Cooper’s a fire mage, low-level or not. He said the closest blaze is in Lonaconing.” She shrugged. “We need to confirm that, though. Make sure you have your bear spray on you just in case,” she said, returning her attention to the scion she’d been prepping for winter. “Whatever the problem is, don’t try to fix it yourself.” She lifted her chin to pin me with a flinty stare. “I mean it. Find out what’s bothering the dryads and report back. We’ll plan what to do about it as a team. In the meantime, Cooper blocked the trail to the Grove to keep guests out on his way to finish work on the walking bridge.”
“I’ll be there and back in two shakes.” More like thirty minutes if I hustled and pinpointed the problem as soon as I reached the oaks. The Grove was a couple miles from the Visitors Center, minimum.
“Take the golfcart. We keep the forest floor bare in the Grove as a defensible space against wildfire, but if a spark kindled anyway, we need to know.”
Nodding, I turned, but halted when Megan called to me. “David?”
I looked over my shoulder. “Be careful,” she said.
Uneasy, I exited the greenhouse and headed to the garage where we stored snowmobiles, our lone golfcart, and other heavy equipment. I swiped my employee badge across the reader of the security system and signed out the cart from another dangling clipboard. Moments later, I drove south.
WMBG didn’t own a fleet of golf carts because we preferred ATVs. Western Maryland was all hills and valleys, the topography steep and rough in the botanical garden where we maintained the ecosystem so meticulously. ATVs could handle trailers hauling supplies, mountains of compost, and heavy trees and shrubs. Megan had equipped our golfcart with all-terrain tires, but it still labored in steeper areas of the park.
Students didn’t line up for jobs at the garden to ride, anyway. We logged in a lot of miles during our shifts because we enjoyed hiking. We wanted that. Didn’t matter what field we studied: environmental science, wildlife and fisheries, or botany. We wanted our boots on the ground, not pressing gas and brake pedals.
At least the golf cart was quieter.
I zipped along the most direct path to the Grove, keeping an eye out for guests. Weekdays this late in the season, when fall colors began painting the forest in yellows, vibrant reds, and oranges, we didn’t see many tourists, but locals bought annual passes to log their daily steps on cultivated paths with breathtaking scenery. The heat wave must’ve kept those diehard nature-lovers away because I only had to maneuver around an elderly couple and a jogger before I reached the sawhorses we used to close areas under maintenance and repair. I pulled one aside, returned to the cart to steer past it, and then put the golfcart in park so I could drag the barrier back into place.
After, I could drive at full throttle, which was a whopping thirty miles per hour. Quicker than I could run, but didn’t seem much faster, especially if Cooper was wrong about the fire risk. I didn’t spot telltale smoke or smell anything burning, though. I was no mage, but I would’ve sensed something. If a blaze had sparked leaf litter we hadn’t cleared yet…The ground didn’t feel wrong, not like fire at least.
I slowed the cart and parked it when I spied the first dryad outside the Grove’s standing oaks. Megan was right. From a distance, the dryad’s mossy eyes were as wide as pie plates. The green and browns of her skin that operated as a camouflage for the nymphs when they weren’t burrowed deep into tree cores was mottled too, her thin chest heaving with panic. When I stepped away from the cart, two other dryads joined the first, all of whom moved with agitation and distress.
I’d never spoken to the dryads. Tree nymphs were happiest left alone. If they weren’t so shy…But getting caught speaking to a magical creature would’ve blown my cover as a mundane. Non-magical folk didn’t make a habit of talking to skittish dryads. I’d nevertheless befriended the nymphs who had claimed the Grove as their home. I respected their circle and taught other staff members to honor their sacred space. In exchange, they left offerings for me, usually the feather of a bird nesting high in the branches of their oaks or an especially perfect leaf. Last winter solstice, I’d brought them a gift of honey—dryads were suckers for out-of-season sweets—and they’d reward my generosity with an enchanted pebble. I wasn’t sure what the pebble was supposed to do, but I appreciated their good intentions.
Today, the dryads wanted me nowhere near their home. Panic-stricken, they waved me off. “I can’t,” I dared to say as I approached them. With access to the Grove blocked off, no one would hear me speaking to magical denizens of the forest few among magicals could communicate with, so I chanced it, if only to calm them a little. “I need to find out what’s gone wrong.”
And there was something wrong.
I leaned down to dig my fingers into the soil to try to pin the wrongness down, but this was different, something I hadn’t sensed before. Wholly unique. Not fire, no, but this didn’t feel like a bear either. Glancing over my shoulder to ensure it was safe, I stretched my senses. Lines grooved my forehead as I concentrated.
Animal.
Dangerous…but intelligent?
While I’d focused, a pair of dryads drew closer, which set my heart to thumping. These two were the oldest, the ones I’d judged most powerful in their clan. One darted forward to give my shoulder a hard shove, then scrambled away.
Caught off guard, I fell. My ass planted in the dirt. I scowled at the dryads. “What? This is my job. I told you I need to—”
Both glared at me, arms crossed over their chests. The one who’d pushed me pointed with insistent jerks at the golf cart.
I was only positioned a few inches lower, but containing the hidden parts of myself, ignoring those secrets, became exponentially more challenging for me the more of my skin touched the ground. My breath caught as my senses sharpened. Then I inhaled deeply. “What is that?” The scent lingered in my nostrils, but the vibration of wrongness—alongside the trill of danger that lifted the small hairs on my arms—was what resonated inside me. “Blood?”
Ignoring the shrill alarm from the dryads, I pushed to my feet.
Whatever had troubled the nymphs wasn’t dead. I’d know. But the flood of coppery metallic scent swamping me indicated that death loomed, inching near. I lurched forward, so transfixed I barely registered the sudden halt of birdsong. The dryads shrieked. The others joined the pair who had stepped forward, but I only vaguely noted their hands on me, struggling to yank me away, which was a neat trick considering how strong the nymphs were when properly motivated.
They just weren’t motivated enough. They couldn’t stop me. Once I caught the aroma of spilling blood, nothing could.
I lurched into the cluster of oaks and crossed into their sacred circle. The dryads abruptly fled and without their tugging to pull against, I face-planted into the loamy earth. I shook my head, no doubt streaking dirt all over me as my bleary head spun.
