“It’s Kara Gillian,” I said when he answered. “Do you know anything about patients brought to Fed Central since my last visit?”
“No, because there haven’t been any,” he replied gruffly.
“Wait,” I said. “No new patients? There’ve been no more plague victims?”
“That’s right. Guess there wasn’t much of whatever infected them.” He paused. “David Hawkins has been in a giant black sphere since a few hours after you saw him.”
A pod. “Has Dr. Patel said anything about his potential outcome?”
He made a noise of frustration. “Not a word. Have you figured anything out on your end?”
“Nothing useful,” I said honestly enough.
“All right,” he said, voice thick with disappointment. “Why did you want to know about new patients?”
“Just checking on the status of the plague,” I lied. “I’ll be sure to keep you in the loop if I find out anything,” I lied some more.
“Do that.”
I disconnected and scowled at my phone. So much for my long shot. I was running out of time and options for nailing down Elinor’s location.
“Kara, you dumbass,” I muttered with a smile. I had an Elinor-sensor right inside me.
Relaxing, I closed my eyes and let myself sink into her awareness.
Bright light and pale walls. A man in blue scrubs.
That could be anywhere, damn it.
Tick. Tick. T-t-t-tock.
But that was Fed Central.
I opened my eyes, wrote Find Elinor on my to-do list, then drew a nice thick line through it. That was satisfying, but now I had no choice but to deal with the final item.
Scowling, I wadded up the list and chucked it in the trash, then I went down to the basement and made a pile of every bit of Jontari info we’d scraped up. To that I added Szerain’s notes, Elinor’s journal, and my own notebook, then I lugged it all out to the nexus, plopped down to sit on the slab beneath the grove tree, and tried to figure out what the hell to do next. Because I honestly had no idea.
All I knew was that this very evening I’d be calling Dekkak to this gleaming black and silver surface—after spilling blood. Or maybe the blood part came after the demon was here. I didn’t know when or even how much. But there would be blood. Mine.
Fuck. Me.
Instinct and habit yammered at me to prepare and make ready, but refused to give me any specifics on how or what to do. None of my usual habits or personal rituals were needed for this summoning. Well, except for the shower I always took before a summoning, this time as a courtesy to anyone standing beside me, but I wouldn’t be doing that until later this evening.
At a loss, I attempted to diligently pore over the materials I’d brought with me but gave up after only a few minutes. There was nothing I needed to memorize. No sigils to double-check for what to use and in what order for my diagram.
Because I wouldn’t be using a diagram.
Nearly twelve years of being a summoner. Twelve months in a year. At least one summoning every full moon. Okay, so I’d only performed a handful in the past year, but even so, I’d drawn out well over a hundred and fifty summoning diagrams in chalk and blood during my summoning career. That didn’t even count the several hundred in chalk alone that I’d drawn just for practice.
Simple, low-level summoning diagrams could be sketched out in about an hour. For my first reyza summoning—Kehlirik—I’d spent nearly five hours on the diagram, checking and rechecking every aspect.
The summoning of Dekkak would be the biggest I’d ever done in my life—and I wouldn’t draw a single sigil. Not the slightest dust of chalk. And that was freaking me out.
Be lordy. Yeah, right. Beeeeee the ritual. Beeeeee the summoning.
Beeeeee scared out of my mind.
Ugh. Stop being such a ninny.
I rested my head against the smooth bark of the tree. The leaves rustled high above. My fear retreated, and calm clarity took its place.
All right, so I’d never realized before how much the creation of a summoning diagram calmed and focused me. Chalking sigils required me to scrutinize every detail, every nuance, every fragment of the whole. The process embedded the many aspects of the ritual in my consciousness in a way rote study could never accomplish. It gave me an intrinsic and nearly instinctive awareness of how all the pieces fit together. The ritual diagram was more than a complicated picture. It was a set of instructions, a recipe. An incredibly complex program.
Want to summon a demon? There’s an app for that. I thought with a quiet giggle. And the nexus was one hell of a supercomputer.
But how was I supposed to hold the entire program in my head? How was I supposed to know what to do?
A breeze stirred the branches, vibrating the trunk pleasantly against my back. Iridescent shadows rippled and danced over the grass and my legs, like a mystical alphabet holding the secrets to the universe.
Ohhhhhhh.
For a human summoner, the sigils were important, whether floaters or chalk-sketched. They were human-comprehension-sized building blocks that defined and specified the parameters and the limits of the conglomerate summoning blueprint. No ordinary human summoner could hold the complete essence of a ritual in their head, which is why the preparation of the diagram—using discrete units—was so important.
But at the end of the day it wasn’t the loops and swirls and curlicues that mattered. It was what they conveyed. Just as black marks on pulped wood were only significant because they could form words that conveyed ideas and meaning.
My problem was that I’d been struggling to understand how I could be the ritual with my puny little human brain. I’d forgotten that the nexus not only allowed me to draw on Rhyzkahl’s power, but also to tap his demi-god-like resources to know the ritual in full then shape and control the potency accordingly.
Relieved, I sent a wordless thanks to Rho for nudging my thoughts in the right direction. I let my attention drift to where Mr. Lordy himself was pulling cucumber vines and tossing them into a pile a beyond his orbit.
With Idris arriving in the next day or so, it was time to break the news to Rhyzkahl that he was a daddy. I briefly considered ordering him over to me, then decided I was feeling too good to be confrontational. Instead, I stood and made my way to the heap of plant detritus.
“Why are you destroying your cucumbers?”
“They have ceased producing,” Rhyzkahl said as he chucked another clump of vines onto the pile. Dirt scattered onto my feet, which was no doubt by intent. “As they have outlived their usefulness, they must be removed and the soil replenished so that others may thrive.”
“Uh huh. Are we still talking about cucumbers?”
He straightened, dusting dirt from his hands as he glowered at me. “Do you yet insist on engaging in this folly?”
It took me a second to realize he meant the impending summoning. “Unless you have a brilliant idea for some other way to rescue Elinor, yes.”
“And so, without the gimkrah, you seek to summon an imperator.” He spat the word. “Your imprudence will cost you your life, Kara Gillian.”
“Nah, I think I got this shit,” I said cheerfully. “Though, I gotta say, it wasn’t easy digging up information about the Jontari.” I cocked my head. “Don’t suppose you happen to know why it was censored?”
“For a multitude of reasons that remain valid to this day,” he growled.
“Aw, c’mon. Throw me a bone here. If I’m going to risk dying beneath the claws of one of their ilk, I’d sure like to know what the deal is.” I eyed him. “Surely it isn’t because the Jontari were killing all the summoners?”
Rhyzkahl gave a derisive snort. “The summoners who perished were either careless and lost control of the vortex and bindings, or were reckless enough to summon a creature far beyond their abilities to control.” He e
yed me right back. “Such as an imperator.”
“Subtle.”
He crouched and resumed pulling up vines. His face was a cool mask, but he flung the vines away with more force.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Quite perceptive of you.”
“Fine. Keep your little secrets.” I didn’t mind him having that little win since it was a warmup to my real purpose. I folded into a cross-legged sit—away from any not-so-accidental dirt spatters. “I like Janice,” I said casually. “She’s smart and open-minded and doesn’t take shit.”
The tension cording his shoulders eased slightly. “I enjoy her company.”
“And she clearly enjoys yours, too.” I plucked a blade of grass and wound it between my fingers. “I can’t imagine how lonely you lords must have been when the ways were closed during those years after the cataclysm.”
“Centuries,” he said, and only the barest hitch in his voice revealed that I’d brushed a nerve. He shifted to the inner circumference of his orbit and began pinching dead blooms from clumps of yellow flowers. “It is no secret that we qaztahl enjoy the . . . endlessly entertaining presence of humans in the demon realm.” His tone became lofty, as if to imply human company was akin to watching kittens play. “Your species’ antics are an interesting diversion.”
Smartass replies crowded forward, but rising to his bait wouldn’t serve my purpose. “Would it really be so terrible to admit that you’ve occasionally had feelings for a human?”
He fell silent for several heartbeats, though his deft fingers continued to remove spent blooms. “There have been humans whose company I enjoyed more than others,” he said. Grudgingly.
I suppressed a grin of victory.
But Rhyzkahl shocked me by adding, “Elinor was dear to me.” He turned and met my eyes. “But this you know already.”
A flush crept up my neck, even though I hadn’t spied on his intimate moments with Elinor on purpose.
“Through the millennia, I have held fondness for others as well,” he said.
“What about Tessa?” I asked with a bared-teeth smile. “Were you fond of her, or was she just a casual fuck?”
Rhyzkahl went still.
“Surely you remember my aunt,” I growled. “Yeah, I know you slept with her a couple of decades before you seduced, used, and tortured me.” Damn it. I clamped my mouth shut and slammed a lid on the flood of condemnation that threatened to escape. “What’s done is done. Just tell me. What was she to you?”
Rhyzkahl returned to culling flowers. “I was fond of Tessa Pazhel—as a student and a bedmate.” A smile briefly touched his eyes. “At times Janice reminds me of her, with her spirited conversation and equally spirited bedding.” He frowned and flicked a bug from a leaf. “My realm grew lonelier when Tessa chose to return to Earth and . . .” His frown deepened.
Aha! I leaned forward. “Why did she leave?”
His shoulders lifted in a careless shrug. “To return to Earth,” he repeated.
A pat and simple reply. And too much like the programmed responses given by people who’d been manipulated.
“But why?” I pressed. “What was her explanation?”
“She decided—” Uncertainty flitted across his face. “No, she . . .” Still crouched, he jerked around to face me, muscles rigid. He’d surely manipulated enough humans to know what it meant when there was a wrinkle in an otherwise smooth memory. A glitch in the matrix.
He didn’t speak a word, but I felt him pleading, urging me to tell him.
What to say? I did not want to cause another vicious headache. The last one had been triggered by Rhyzkahl’s thoughts of his own parentage. I had to assume the info about the lords’ own kids would be protected as well. “Too much sun will give you a headache.” I nudged my head toward the grove tree. “How about taking a break in the shade?”
Without a word, Rhyzkahl stood, strode to the tree, and rested his back against it. I followed at a more leisurely pace to give time for the tree-calm to take effect. By the time I reached him, his features were relaxed, and the tension gone from his stance.
“She returned to Earth because she was pregnant,” I said. “Tessa told me that she was living in Japan and had a fling with some American guy and that the baby was stillborn.” I paused. “But it wasn’t.”
Comprehension flared in Rhyzkahl’s eyes. He pushed off the tree trunk, expression a mix of shock and naked hope. “Idris,” he choked out. “It is Idris, is it not?”
“Yeah,” I said, more than a little off-balance by this startlingly human reaction. “Idris is, um, your son.”
For the tiniest fraction of a second, Rhyzkahl’s aura blazed as if he burned with elation. Then the mask dropped back into place, his features smoothed, and his lordly bearing returned. Damn, he had impressive control.
“My son,” he said slowly, as if tasting the word. “He despises me.” His brow creased ever so slightly, as if he was trying to determine if that should matter to him.
“Well, you do have a bit of a reputation.”
He didn’t reply or react save to turn away from me and begin to slowly pace the perimeter of his prison. Processing this new paradigm, I figured, and the implications. Rhyzkahl now held the forbidden knowledge that the lords could father children—and from there he could surmise that they had likely done so many times over the last few millennia. No doubt he was considering how this new information affected various plots and plans. And, surely, wondering why the knowledge had been suppressed and the children hidden.
I thought of Rhyzkahl’s face shining oh-so-briefly after learning Idris was his son. I’d seen that look before, on fathers holding their newborn child for the first time.
Maybe that was why the demahnk didn’t want the lords to know.
Maybe it risked making them too human.
• • •
Jill returned mid-afternoon with a truckload of supplies and groceries. But no chickens.
“I bought chickens,” she assured me when I came out to help her unload. “They’re being delivered tomorrow.” Then she shrugged. “That is, assuming you haven’t been eaten.”
“Your faith in me warms the cockles of my heart. Admit it. You didn’t want to bring chickens home today for fear that Dekkak would eat them all.”
“It would be a terrible waste of money,” she said with a tragic air, then her breath caught as she pulled me into a hug. “Bryce wants me and the pets and the civilians out of here in the next ten minutes. Stay in one piece, damn it. Call me the instant you know anything.”
“I will, and I will,” I said and hugged her back just as hard.
I released her as furious yowling heralded the arrival of Lilith Cantrell with a cat carrier in each hand. Behind her, Sammy bounced eagerly on a leash held by the stocky Kellum, with Janice and Michael bringing up the rear.
“Jill,” Bryce roared from the door of the security outbuilding. “Get your shit packed and your ass out of here.”
Jill shot him an affectionate middle finger then leveled a fierce look at me. “Remember: Don’t die. I love you.”
“I love you, too. Now go away.”
She smiled and dashed to her trailer while I headed into the house to take the most important shower of my life.
Chapter 37
Okay, Kara, I told myself as I stepped onto the nexus, we’ve been busting our asses for two days, planning and preparing for this damn thing. I paused my silent lecture for a dramatic three heartbeats. Don’t. Fuck. Up.
I positioned myself with the grove tree behind me, a pace from the edge of the slab. I’d given up wearing formal summoning garb not long after I started training in the demon realm. In its place I’d usually opted for whatever felt comfortable. But today, everyone here had on the full kit usually reserved for incursion response—combat fatigues, boots, body armor, guns, knives, y
ou name it. For this summoning, I was happy to trade a bit of mobility for protection. Except for my feet, which were bare to allow me to better feel every shift and nuance of the nexus.
At those same feet, my blood bowl and ritual knife lay ready. Light from the full moon pierced the leaf canopy, patterning the area with misty color while, around me, woven strands of potency thrummed, ready for the summoning call. The super-shikvihr undulated in scintillating electric blue waves and, directly beyond it, the amber glow of over a hundred floating sigils marked the Dekkak binding zone—an oval-shaped area nearly twenty feet wide and extending all the way to the vinyl exterior of Rhyzkahl’s house.
Potency from both the prepared ritual and the nexus saturated me to the point that I no longer felt limited to flesh and bone and skin. My brain told me to use my eyes to confirm all my people were ready and in place, but my lord-sense knew before I looked. Each person shone with their own unique energy signature. Pellini, armed with the borrowed wizard staff, just off the nexus to my left. Rhyzkahl near the tree trunk behind me. Turek tucked in close to the house and, beside him, Giovanni within a circle of protective wards. Bryce and Suarez by the launcher, ready to deploy the graphene net upon Dekkak’s arrival. Roper and Tandon hunkered down half a dozen feet into the woods as a last resort backup, both with weapons loaded with shieldbuster rounds.
“Status,” I murmured, for the sake of everyone who didn’t have the nifty lord-sense. A series of crisp affirmatives came through my earpiece. “Ready here, too. Time to boogie.”
The moonlight abruptly brightened, and I looked up in surprise to see that the tree had withdrawn its branches from over the nexus. I grinned in gratitude and relief. Now I wouldn’t have to worry about either demon or net getting tangled up in it.
As I’d done hundreds of times before, I began the familiar chant that would unite the energies and open the interdimensional portal. Yet the words jangled off my tongue, and the ritual was sluggish to respond. It felt wrong. Too structured. Harsh rather than harmonious.
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