The following days proved instructive in multiple ways.
For one thing, I thought of Wizards as being the top of the magical food chain, on the mortal realm at least. Having spoken with Cindy on the matter, I learned the wisdom my family had passed on to me was likely heavily flavored by the fact that my family's native magical talents are modest at best, and our exposure to the other realms of reality was therefore minimal. Wizards probably were among the more powerful magical beings wandering America, but from Cindy's descriptions of Demon Princes, I realized that they might just be the big fish in a little pond.
For another, I learned that Cindy was not a great teacher. Not that she wasn't entirely willing to instruct me - in this, she was as obedient as in anything else. She was enthusiastic, even. She just wasn't great at breaking down material in a way that made it easy for me to absorb. Part of that was down to our relationships with magic differing heavily. Wielding the power of Sin was literally Cindy's nature, and while I had my singular gift, any magic beyond that was something I needed to learn to perform. Part of it was also down to the fact that as willing and eager as Cindy was to obey, she was still a Sin Demon. The first time she and I sat down to study the book in earnest, she had dressed herself in a tiny tartan skirt and translucent blouse, without either bra or panties, resulting in a study session that lasted about fifteen minutes before I was balls deep in her pussy.
We also made a few fascinating discoveries, some of them with disturbing implications. As I struggled my way through performing a ritual which would, in theory, allow me to hear lies for a short time, I cursed aloud the exacting and fiddly nature of what I was doing.
"Fuck, there has to be an easier way to manage this. Even if part of my problem is lack of practice and a lack of grounding in true magic, you can't expect me to believe that Wizards go around spending thirty minutes setting up a ritual space every time they want to cast a minor spell."
Cindy was surprisingly patient for a demon, provided she was following my orders, so there was no frustration or exasperation in her voice as she answered me. "I expect that magic has advanced in the centuries since this book was written. Perhaps the wizard who penned this tome in the 900s knew of no other way, but given how much your non magical society has advanced, it is possible your magical society is similarly more sophisticated."
I glanced up from the notes I was taking on my progress to ask, curious, "How do you know the book was written in the 900 AD? Is that on the cover somewhere, or...?"
To my surprise, Cindy didn't answer right away. Instead, she frowned and stared off into space for a few moments, only to announce cautiously, "I do not know how I know that." I let her take a few moments to process and think, finishing writing down the sentence I had started, before setting down my pencil and looking at her. "Is it possible you learned it when you were summoned previously? I mean, the ritual which allowed Mycah - and me - to summon you is right there in the book. Could someone have used the same ritual and summoned you before?"
Cindy continued frowning, an expression I hadn't really ever seen on her face before. Her time on the mortal plane was generally blissful, so seeing her upset was honestly a little shocking. Eventually she nodded slowly and explained, "It is possible, but I have no memories of it having happened. If I have been summoned to the mortal realm before, whoever did so must have found a way to remove my memories of it. I do not naturally forget. That is a thing of mortals. If I cannot recall a thing which I have previously experienced, it means powerful magic was involved."
I spent the next fifteen or twenty minutes going back and forth with Cindy, developing a few simple experiments to see if I had the power to cause her to forget anything, but we weren't able to find any sets of commands or uses of her own power which would produce the effect. Modifying memory simply wasn't in her power suite, as it didn't relate to Sin in any meaningful way, and none of the spells she had yet studied in the book would do the trick. Eventually, she announced that she would examine the remainder of the book to determine if it contained such a ritual, but we otherwise set the matter aside as something to look into if we ever got more resources to help.
Another fascinating discovery was that the bond Cindy mentioned which granted her a tiny measure of the free will I possessed also granted me the ability to draw upon her as a power source. Much as she could leverage and expend the Sin she absorbed to fuel herself and her power, I could draw forth her Sin to power the spells and rituals in the book.
The sensation of doing so was dangerously seductive. I just needed to relax my controls a little, to let myself give in to some measure of Sin, to draw on her, and suddenly performing the rituals became vastly easier. Tiny mistakes in hand gestures or pronunciations which would otherwise have caused the spell to fail completely suddenly were smoothed over by demonic power. A ritual which allowed me to see in the dark went from grainy 80s night vision goggles to not being able to tell the difference between the lights in my apartment being on or off.
I resolved not to draw on that power too often, for two specific reasons. The first was that any Sin which I drew from Cindy needed to be repaid. The first day I discovered that I could draw on her power was also the first day she needed to warn me that I was at risk of breaking our bond. Considering we had spent nearly an hour in bed together that morning, I needed to have her explain that the Sin she was giving through the bond was the same Sin she absorbed to maintain it. I could draw on that power freely, but if I spent it too heavily, I was at risk of not being able to repay her in time.
The second reason was that giving in to the sensation of Sin affected my mood and my actions in ways I wasn't comfortable with. Much as Cindy was a creature of absolutes, only able to act according to her nature, the more I leveraged her power to fuel magic, the harder it was for me to exert my will over my own choices. I didn't want to fuel some magic spell with Sin, only to turn around and assault the next pretty girl I encountered because I couldn't control my Lust, or to road rage and ram some asshole driver when I was overtaken by Wrath.
