30. Research
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"It took me about a month and a half," Melissa explained. "Like we talked about last night, there's the name glyph, which Lily already gave us. We know two of his aliases, which means we know at least some of the letters from his true name. What we need is to figure out his 'magic square'. Then we overlay the glyph on that, and it'll tell us what letters are in his true name, and what order they appear."

"Not counting duplicates," I added. "Duplicate letters don't go in the glyph."

Melissa nodded, "Right. So we'll be about ninety-percent the way there once we have the square. Then it's maybe a bit of educated guess-work to come up with the true name. For Verothilas, Mara figured it out in about ten seconds after I found the magic square."

Susan asked, "So how do we figure out his magic square? That's the step I'm not getting. How did you do that for Verothilas?"

Our tall sexy blonde girlfriend grimaced, "Just a lot of research, connecting dots, and some intuitive leaps. Like I said, it wasn't easy."

"We've already got a lot of information," Amber commented as she looked at the notes we had from last night. "So what do we do, just a bunch of web searches and stuff to dig up what we can?"

"Pretty much," Melissa nodded again. Then she warned, "Use a VPN, mask your location, use safe-mode in your browser, cover all your tracks. If this guy gets tipped off that we're looking for him, it could be game over for all of us."

I asked from the kitchen, "How would he know if we're looking him up online?"

It was Saturday morning and I was making us all some brunch. We had a kind of late night last night working with Lily, taking notes and listening as she gave us a huge info-dump about Armaros. She'd known the guy for something like seven thousand years, plus she had a ton of up-to-date information she pulled out of Verothilas at the new moon last week.

Like we knew he still had property in Morocco, he had a big mansion in Tangier and spent part of his time there. But he also spent a lot of time in Las Vegas now, and he was in London a lot too. His modern human guise was a businessman named Artemi Kaslov, he was into boxing and gambling in Vegas, while his London and Tangier stuff was part of an import/export business.

I already knew what he looked like in his demon form, that image was kind of burned into my mind ever since my first demon-Mara dream back in March. And Lily described his current human guise, based on what she learned at the last new moon. As a human he was tall, broad-shouldered, muscular, with dark skin and short black hair. He looked to be in his late-forties, and tended to wear expensive custom-tailored suits and stuff.

Melissa replied, "His human guise is obviously some kind of gangster, Mara. I mean the boxing and gambling stuff in Los Vegas, the import-export business between Morocco and London? He sounds like a villain from a spy movie or something. Anyways, I'm not saying he'd be looking out for us specifically, or for anybody researching the demonic angle? But he's probably watching his back from a crime-lord angle. He could have false info out there set up like an online honeypot and use that to collect IP addresses or other info from people who come across it."

She shrugged, "The bottom line is this guy's almost ten thousand years old, he's dangerous no matter how you look at it. So like I said? Cover your tracks when you're searching up stuff online. VPN, false accounts, safe-mode, and so on. This is a guy who could wipe us all out without breaking a sweat, but he probably wouldn't even bother wasting time doing it himself? I mean, if he is a mafia type, he could just have some hit-man come do it for him. So be careful!"

Susan looked like she agreed with all of that, but she asked "I'm still not sure what we're searching for? I mean, he's not going to leave his magic square thing posted on a blog or social media account."

"Of course not," Melissa shook her head. "It's about learning as much as possible about the guy. There might be clues or hints. That's how we got Verothilas? I learned as much as I could about her, about what was important to her, what sort of stuff she did, and all the legends and rumours about demons matching her description and style. Then it was a bunch of connecting dots. And like I said, a bit of luck, a bit of inspiration."

Amber smiled, "Too bad we can't visit any of his 'known associates'. I'm sure a trio of succubi could find some ways to get information out of people."

"I don't want any of you going anywhere near people connected to him," Lily stated. "Stick to research from a safe distance."

I relayed that to the others and added, "She sounds pretty strict about that. And if he caught any of us, he'd probably find out immediately what we were up to and who we were working for. That'd be the end of us."

"Sorry," the cute brunette grimaced. "I was just kidding. Thinking if this was a spy movie or something, that's probably the sort of thing we'd be doing. Sitting in our basement looking at stale links on Wikipedia would make a boring story."

"Boring and alive beats any other option that includes being dead," Melissa stated.

I grinned and added, "We could spice up the research by doing it naked? And taking frequent breaks for fun."

Susan laughed, "So we've gone from a sexy spy thriller to a porn spoof of a boring research movie."

"Why not?" I smiled as I brought plates over to Sue and Melissa. "It suits our style doesn't it?"

After I grabbed my own plate I sat down with the others. It was just bacon and eggs this morning, with some toast on the side. Amber didn't want any, but as the rest of us started eating she stole a piece of bacon off my plate and munched on that.

Melissa had sort of taken the lead on all this, since she already had the experience of figuring this stuff out for Verothilas back in December. She continued her lecture as we were eating, "So we know from his name glyph that there's thirteen unique letters in his true name. And I've been looking at it? This is a six by six grid. Verothilas' was only five by five, so this is already going to be a lot more complicated. Thirty-six squares on the grid versus twenty-five."

"Thirty-six letters," Susan commented. "We're obviously not talking about English letters in this alphabet. How'd you handle that with Verothilas?"

"Weren't they in English?" I asked. "I still remember her true name and it's all English letters."

Melissa shook her head, "English glyphs are common to a bunch of other languages, and I'm sure there's some transliteration going on over the years. Like for instance we have almost the same alphabet as they used in the Roman Empire? They only had twenty-three letters though. Anyways, they're the same glyphs and sound almost the same, but two very different languages."

She paused for a forkful of eggs before continuing, "But yeah, that's part of the reason why thirty-six letters will make it more challenging. There could be letters that don't translate to English? It'll make it harder to figure out his true name."

My demon mom spoke up, "Best that you don't worry about pronunciation. When you find his name, you cannot speak it out loud. He'll hear you and know he's in danger."

She almost sounded embarrassed as she admitted, "And Melissa is correct by the way, we generally use transliteration. It's all a bit of a hack anyways, since many of us have been around since long before written language."

I smiled as I repeated all that to my girlfriends.

The others grinned as well, before Melissa got back to her lecture again.

"We've already got some clues. Between his common name Armaros and his current human alias Artemi Kaslov that's eleven unique characters right there. So basically we're missing two letters, but even if we had them we don't know what order to put them in."

"That's not counting duplicates," I reminded her. "There's no way of knowing how many duplicates are in his true name. We might have got lucky with Verothilas, she only had a single duplicate in her name."

Susan asked, "Is it common to have a lot of duplicates? I suppose that's an advantage, it makes it harder to guess their true name based on their glyphs."

Lily responded, "We generally don't know each other's true names so it's hard to say what's common. I would assume there will be at least one duplicate letter, but there could be more. That is something we don't need to worry about yet, first we need to find his magic square."

I relayed that to the others between taking bites out of a slice of toast.

We were all quiet for a few minutes as we focused on finishing our breakfast. Or three of us finished breakfast while Amber stole another piece of bacon, this time off Susan's plate.

"You could have had your own bacon you know," Sue reminded her. "Mara asked if you wanted anything."

The small succubus blushed "I know. I wasn't hungry at the time, but it smells so good!"

I giggled, "Next time I'll know to make a couple extra pieces just in case."

Once we were all finished eating, Susan looked at me and said "I have a question for Lily. I'm wondering why she decided to do this now? Why not last winter, after we defeated Verothilas?"

"May I take over Mara?" my demon mom asked me.

I slipped inside while Lily stepped out, the two of us basically traded spots, so she could address Sue directly while I watched from her big leather sofa.

"I didn't know Armaros was involved at that point," Lily explained. "I didn't know of his involvement until Mara first dreamed of my progeny in March. And even then, all I had to go on was her dream. That dream was also the only evidence I had that Verothilas was responsible for the death of my offspring."

She went on, "The information Mara shared with me from her dream provided the motivation I needed to work out how to access Verothilas' power within her brooch. Each time I've done it I improved and honed my spells, until the most recent new moon when I was finally able to scour her memories and confirm what Mara uncovered in March. I was able to destroy the last of my prison at the same time. While I have not yet regained my demonic body, I'm otherwise free and have greater access to my power now than I did a year ago."

"Ok," Sue said as she thought that through. "Then my next question is, why not wait till you're completely free? Wouldn't you be even stronger if you had your own demonic body?"

Lily hesitated, "If I were in my own fully demonic body I would be stronger, but there's a chance he'd sense my return. Right now I remain hidden inside a half-human body, I'm all but invisible to other demons. They'd have to see us with their own eyes to know I was here. Armaros was always stronger than me. Even if I had my own body I wouldn't have a chance of defeating him. So I'm trading strength for stealth. By staying hidden I'm keeping all of us safer."

After a slight pause she finished, "Once Armaros is gone, then I will walk the Earth free and proud."

"We're not going to try and kill him are we?" Melissa asked. "That'd cause some sort of cataclysm, from what you've told us."

Lily shook our head, "No. We will imprison him, like we've done with Verothilas. And once that is done, we can safely drain him of his power as we're already doing to her."

"Won't that expose us to more demonic energy?" Susan asked? "If we're going to imprison him the same way, there'll be another big blast of that energy."

My demon mom nodded, "Correct. To avoid another dose of that energy, you'll want to stay away when it happens."

"What about me?" I asked.

At the same time Melissa asked, "What about Mara? She has to be there with you regardless."

Lily responded, "I'm working on a way to protect her. I won't move against Armaros until I know Mara will remain safe."

"As I told you all last night," she added, "I don't expect you to solve this puzzle in a weekend. Keeping all of us safe is the top priority. I'll be working on that while you're trying to find me his name. There's no rush, no urgency. Remember, we have the advantage in that he doesn't know I'm back. As far as he knows I remain imprisoned, and ignorant of his and Verothilas' actions against me. We won't make any moves until we're all ready. Unlike last autumn we have the luxury of being the hunters rather than the hunted."

"Ok Lily," Sue said, "We'll do our best. We'll figure this out."

Melissa agreed, "We won't let you down."

My demon mom smiled, "Thank you. Melissa, Susan, Amber, and Mara. I have every faith the four of you will find me his name."

~ To Be Continued in Book 6! ~

Acknowledgements: Thanks to the Coven of Kylie and Jess for all their support! Thanks to all the great writers we've met on Discord and Scribblehub. And huge thanks as always to all my awesome Patrons for your support! You're amazing! <3 <3 <3

Mara and the gang are back again with the sixth installment of the series!

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