Take the books.

You're tempted, for a moment... But it's just too big a commitment. You'd be trading one dubious obligation for another, and you doubt that Ms. Meyers would appreciate you trying to back out. You'd prefer to take Maya's place on the guillotine sure - but the way things are structured, she'll only be in harm's way for a week, if you succeed. Signing up with Ms. Meyers, you'd be stuck for life.

"I appreciate your offer," You say, nodding to her, "But I'd rather see how far I can get with my own efforts first."

There was no reason to make an enemy unnecessarily early, however.

"No sparrow ever reached great heights flying under their power..." Ms. Meyer's chided, "But sure, I understand. It'd probably be dangerous if you were too eager to hop on to the first offer you received, even. The offer will stand as long as Professor Devlin remains interested in you."

"Thank you," You smile, "It's good to know that college has opened at least one career to me."

You give her a nod and a smile, as she brings Ms. Devlin's books to you from the restricted section. The books seemed so unassuming to the eye, but after this conversation... They had a certain weight to them, an energy that you knew would change everything.

Back in your room, you sort through the books that you had borrowed. Only one of them looked like a proper cultic text, a sinister looking tome bound in black leather. The rest... Until you opened them and saw their contents, you wouldn't have thought the dull-looking beige blocks had anything especially unusual in them. Maybe the lack of titles on the covers would have struck you as unusual, but it wasn't that weird for a book lacking its dust jacket.

And as you open the books, and begin to skim... The dry tone and bland descriptions just reinforce that impression, as they casually speak of the traits of demons and how to appeal to them - in between banal descriptions of truly monstrous things. On one page, it speaks of a Warmonger's physical prowess, its suitability as a shock trooper even in "the age of gunpowder", and offers some general notes on their average height, weight, and strength... While on the next, it speaks of a Warmonger's zeal for ****, recommending them as suitable for the interrogation of "disposable" prisoners, while cautioning how their "spiked phalluses" tended to leave captured women unsuitable as offerings for more sexually minded demons. On the cold words of the page, straightforward facts and brutal atrocities mix and intertwine, and at several points in your haste you catch yourself simply... Overlooking, the significance of a description, until you go back and let it sink in.

Worse, after a couple of hours, you find yourself downplaying the horror yourself - "Well, okay, the skullfucking guy is bad, but at least it's a faster end than the flaying guy", "Taking what is dearest to another as an offering for the greed dude is bad, but it's better than the blood sacrifices that, like, half of these ask for", "You know, all in all, these succubae don't sound that bad at all". The last one was a particularly worrisome WTF for you, considering that your entire point here is to take down a succubus!

But Ms. Devlin hadn't donated that many books, and it doesn't take long for skimming to give you a feel for what each of these books involved. The black grimoire was the only book that dealt with actual summoning, and was almost exclusively dedicated to the structure of different rituals, each meant to cater to a different vice and level of power. Supposedly, the vices could be substituted in a pinch with only minor changes, but it cautions that misjudging a power level could lead to "egregious consequences" - something that seemed self-evident to you, but you suppose cautious individuals weren't generally known to summon demons.

The other texts she'd offered were more like an Encyclopedia Demonica. While it seemed like the author for each differed, and some were from notably different centuries, each book focused on a dedicated topic; what offerings different demons desired, what protections were effective and how to tune them against a specific target, what different demons were, and an exhaustive discussion on the proper etiquette for dealing with demons - including strict guidelines for ensuring you didn't get completely screwed on a bargain.

All in all, it was a much more well-rounded collection than you'd expected. Considering her "ascension" into a succubus, you'd have thought her collection to be more tightly focused on her new species - or at least, on lustful demons in general. But it seemed as though she'd been prepared to deal with a fair number of demons, at least on paper... Idly, you wondered about what her mortal life must have been like. Ms. Meyers could probably have told you, but you doubt there were any outside of the cultist community who would be able to share any of the details with you.

Which did bring up another important point, however - you still had to work out a way to test these books. Ms. Meyers had verified their legitimacy for you, but you'd only just met her - and you suspect that she would encourage you to do your own research as well, if you could work out a way. And unfortunately, it didn't seem wise to just compare it to a bunch of other books - Ms. Meyers had indicated that demonology texts should be presumed untrustworthy until proven otherwise, and that misinformation was common. A bunch of books repeating a "demon tail" didn't make it valid, any more than reading a bunch of medieval accounts meant that the era was rife with witches poisoning wells; what mattered were reliable, verifiable accounts, of which... You had none. Except, maybe, the very books you needed to confirm the reliability of.

"You won't get anywhere without taking a few risks", Ms. Meyers had said. And her words were more true than she knew, with only a handful of days to save Maya. Only by confirming the validity of some of these texts could this impasse be broken, and the only plausible way to do that would be experimentation...

You could try to verify the species catalogue, perhaps. That would be the safest option - but also, the most time-consuming. Demons were everywhere in the news these days, and while you suspect that worshippers were buffing up their reputation, there was no real lack of pictures, videos, or stories. By comparing their features to those of the books, you'd have a pretty good grasp of how reliable that particular source was... Possibly.

Because confirming the obvious stuff would be easy enough, but tracking down "somewhat off" information would be a lot harder - if it was even meaningful, and not the fact that even reliable books are imperfect. Not to mention that as one of the more straightforward texts to check, a subtle trap would be best served by making sure that this book was reliable. Taken to extremes, that logic would make any testing pointless to begin with - but maybe it was worth considering for this most passive of tests.

On the opposite ****, you could just dive right in - actually go ahead and summon a demon, one of the "safer" ones listed. Not that there was any such thing as a "safe" demon, but you could summon up one that you could just douse in holy water if things went badly. This would allow you to perform the most thorough battery of tests to the best degree of reliability, letting you test out the recommended protections and see if the demon would be receptive to the recommended phrases, but...

Well, if the books are sufficiently fatally flawed, it would probably end in disaster one way or another. Not to mention that even in the best case, you'd be summoning a demon, with all that implies; more or less every summoning involved an offering that you were very much not comfortable in providing. If it held the keys to protecting Maya, you'd go through with it regardless, but... It would be going pretty far if you were just performing an experiment.

As a sort of middle ground... Maybe you could take up Ms. Meyer's advice after all. Go to Ms. Devlin, use her as a broker to find a different demon, and see how the protections and language works with them. Whatever you owed Ms. Devlin would probably be minor compared to what Maya owed, and meeting with another demon on Earth... You have a bit of a better idea as to how to protect yourself at a public meeting if your protections fail than you do in a secret ritual.

Except Ms. Devlin was one of the more dangerous demons to talk to, especially with her interest in you, and Ms. Meyers indicated that any demon on Earth was probably more dangerous than the dredges left in Hell. If things fail badly enough, being in public would just mean that there would be consequences after the demon killed you - and even if negotiations went well, they'd probably be irate at the fact that you would be negotiating for the smallest of potatoes, considering you were only interested in the negotiations themselves.

There were a surprising number of ways to verify the books' contents, but... There were no harmless ways. Ms. Meyers was right; risk was inevitable. How much of it were you going to embrace here?