Ryan nodded. “Okay, then we’ll starting figuring out strategy for this whole thing when we’ve all had some sleep.”
I climbed out of the car, and he surprised me by getting out and walking me up to the porch. I almost made a smart-alec remark about how I didn’t think I was in danger of getting mugged in the ten feet between the car and my door, but I restrained myself. We’d been doing a lot of “joking” back and forth lately, and it was beginning to feel forced, as if we were desperately clinging to the friendship portion of our relationship.
“Okay, you and Zack are hiding something from me,” he said, but there was a smile in his eyes. “And I figure it has to be something that the demon told you, and the only reason for you two to hide it from me would be if it had to do with my favorite demonic lord. So I wanted you to know that I’m a big boy, and I don’t want you to feel any more stress about any of this because of me.” He put his hands on my shoulders, and this time his smile was tinged with something that might have been sadness or regret, though I couldn’t tell if it was for himself or me. “I worry about you,” he said, in an echo of what Zack had said earlier, “and I fucking hate that you’re in this situation, but I also know that I have no business judging or make demands on you that will only make the whole thing harder on you.”
I blinked at him, then returned the smile. “Wow. You’re, like, being all mature and shit. That’s kinda scary.”
He laughed, then surprised me again by pulling me into a hug. “You are such a goddamn dork.”
I recovered enough to give him a return squeeze, then he stepped back. He’d started with the “friend-hug that was a little more than a man-hug” shortly after I’d made my oath to Rhyzkahl. I really liked the hugs, but they confused the shit out of me at the same time. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him to stop. Ryan was solid and muscled, and he smelled damn nice as well.
“Hey, you’re the one who chooses to hang out with me,” I countered. “And I’m not the one who watches Star Trek and all that stuff.”
He heaved a dramatic sigh. “One of these days I’m going to make you watch some quality television.”
I glared at him. “I like my reality shows.” One of my current addictions was a show about preschool beauty queens and their white trash mothers. It was like watching a train wreck. I loved it.
He shuddered. “The horror.”
I poked a finger at his chest. “Right, and you want me to watch some show about a cheerleader who kills vampires.”
“You have no idea what you’re missing!”
I gave a derisive snort, but then I sobered. He knew something was up, so this was probably the best time to fill him in on what had happened. “Okay, so here’s the deal. Skalz offered me protection.”
All humor vanished from his face. “Tell me.”
I did, tempted to skim over the part about my arrangement with Rhyzkahl being “enviable,” but ruefully admitted to myself that it was better to get it all out in the open now. Besides, Zack would tell him eventually anyway.
“And so now you have the dilemma of whether to ask Rhyzkahl to provide protection for you instead,” Ryan said, expression grim.
I exhaled in relief. He understood. “Yeah. Exactly. If I use another demon for protection, I’ll have to negotiate terms. But if I accept it from Rhyzkahl, it seems . . .”
“Like another way for him to keep you under his thumb,” he said, voice nearly a growl.
I nodded.
He started to run his fingers through his hair, then scowled as he realized that it was glued into place with a metric ton of hair product. He dropped his hand and sighed. “I’m glad you told me this.”
I was too, suddenly. I liked feeling that I could trust him. There were times when I really wasn’t sure.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said, “but don’t rush into any decisions, all right?”
“I don’t plan on it. I should be able to tell you more Monday.”
His expression briefly tightened at the obscure reminder that I’d be summoning the demonic lord soon, but in the next breath he’d masked it and offered me a smile instead. “All right. Well, get some sleep.”
For an instant I thought he was going to lean down and kiss me on the forehead, but instead he turned and walked back down the stairs to his car. I unlocked my front door, feeling the brush of my arcane protections, comforting and strange. I looked back to see the tail-lights of the SUV retreating down my driveway, then gave a pathetic soft sigh and stepped inside.
Chapter 5
I thought I’d have trouble falling asleep—that so-tired-I’m-wired feeling humming through me. But I barely remembered crawling into bed and the next thing I knew it was one in the afternoon.
I caffeinated myself, showered, and made myself reasonably presentable before heading over to my aunt Tessa’s house. Tessa had been released from the neuro center a couple of months ago, after she’d mysteriously recovered from her even more mysterious coma. It hadn’t been mysterious to me—I’d been fully aware that her essence had been pulled away from her body to fuel a powerful arcane ritual. She’d spent six weeks in a coma—without a mark on her body or anything that showed up on a CT scan or an MRI to explain it. With Rhyzkahl’s help and instruction I’d created an arcane beacon to draw her essence back to her body—barely in time, too. Her body had been perilously close to losing its grip on life.
It had been another month before they’d allowed her to be released, but she’d finally convinced them—in her inimitable acerbic fashion—that she was in full possession of her faculties. After she was discharged I made sure to send a fruit basket to the nurses on her floor—as much of an apology as a thank you.
My aunt’s house was in a historic district along the lakefront, full of century-old houses maintained or restored to immaculate condition. Gleaming white with elegant blue molding and pristine landscaping, Aunt Tessa’s house fit the neighborhood perfectly. My aunt, not so much.
I knocked twice, then opened the door and stuck my head in. “Aunt Tessa?”
“Kitchen!”
I headed obligingly in that direction and found my aunt perched on a stool at her counter with the daily crossword in front of her. Her frizzy blond hair was pulled up into a twist on top of her head, and she had on billowing hakama pants that nearly overwhelmed her skinny frame and a gray T-shirt that said FRAK OFF—overall, a somewhat tame look for her. Unlike her personal style, her kitchen was as exquisite as the rest of her house—rose-colored tiled floors, lovely wallpaper with subtle patterns of climbing ivy, and dark granite countertops. Her one deviation from the original nature of the house was her appliances—stainless steel and thoroughly modern.
Well, there was one other deviation: the summoning chamber in the attic. I rather doubted the original owners had intended for the space to be used in that manner.
At the kitchen table sat Carl, with a mug of coffee beside his hand and a book in his other. He lifted his eyes briefly and gave me a small nod, then returned his attention to his book. I was still getting used to thinking of him as Tessa’s boyfriend. To me he was Carl the Morgue Tech, quiet, somewhat emotionless, and—I’d discovered—impervious to arcane wards and who knew what else. And for him, that small nod was the equivalent of an exuberant greeting. Tall and lean with an athletic build, he had hazel-brown eyes set in a lightly tanned face and closely cropped hair that was more transparent than blond. He really didn’t fit the stereotypical image of a lanky and pasty morgue worker, but his general demeanor made up for any deviation from the expected norm. I took a quick peek at the cover of the book he was reading. Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures.
Yep, more than made up for not looking the part.
Tessa gave me a smile. “Hiya, sweets. You had a busy night last night?”
I pulled myself onto a stool opposite her. “Er, well yeah. Had a thing with the FBI task force. Woke up about an hour ago.”
“So was
it a demon?”
I blinked at her. “Huh?”
She pursed her lips. “The singer. The threats. Was it a demon that attacked her?”
“How on earth did you know about that?”
Tessa gave an exaggerated sigh and flipped her newspaper over to show me the front page. “I didn’t lose all my brains cells while I was in that silly coma. The paper stated that Lida Moran was receiving threats that ‘demons would take her soul,’ ” she said, making quote marks with her fingers. “You were working late last night with your FBI friends, and there was an incident during her concert.” She gave me a smug smile. “So. Was it a demon?”
I chewed my lower lip as I scanned the article. It was a well-sanitized version of what had happened—no doubt thanks to the efforts of Ryan and Knight—with a few eyewitness accounts of audience members who, luckily, were skeptical enough to say that it was “some dude dressed up like a demon or something.”
I began to set the paper down, then paused at another sight of the name Moran in a different article near the bottom of the page. LOCAL BUSINESSMAN BEN MORAN DONATES TO WOMEN’S SHELTER. I was usually completely clueless when it came to who The People were, but even I knew that Ben Moran was a major player in the local social and business scene. “Is Ben Moran related to Lida?” I asked.
“Her uncle,” Carl said without lifting his eyes from his book. “He was her guardian too, after her dad died several years ago. They live on the other side of the lake.”
“The rich side,” Tessa added with a quirk of a smile. “Ben Moran is on the board of Lake Pearl Bank and owns Moran Debris Removal.”
“Well, I’ll get to see for myself,” I said. “I’m going over there this afternoon to talk to Lida and see if I can find out anything more about what happened last night.”
Tessa tapped the counter. “Which brings us back to my question: Was it a demon?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not sure what it was, but I’m damn near positive that it wasn’t anything from the demon sphere.” I set the paper down, satisfied that there was no mention of me, and nothing that remotely implied that anything supernatural had occurred. Not that I expected the newspaper to say anything of that sort. “It had a strange resonance though,” I continued, not concerned about Carl overhearing any of this. He was already clued in about the demon summoning, and he was also the last person I was worried about blabbing indiscreetly. “I’m pretty sure I’d know it again if I felt it. I had a zhurn with me, and it said that the thing was some sort of construct. Maybe a golem or something of that ilk.”
Carl abruptly straightened and closed his book. “Time for me to leave,” he said with a ghost of a smile. He stood and moved to Tessa, giving her a sweet kiss on the cheek before heading out. A few seconds later I heard the front door open and close.
I resisted the urge to comment on how strange he was. I didn’t exactly have much room to talk. I returned my attention to Tessa. “Um, anyway, I don’t really know too much about constructs or golems, so I’m probably going to be spending some time in your library doing research.”
Her mouth drew down into a frown. “I’m not sure I want to allow you back in there after you ransacked it so terribly!”
I met her eyes with my own steely gaze born of too many weeks of uncertainty, stress, and feelings of betrayal. “If you’d been honest with me, there would have been no need to rearrange anything in that library.”
I was shocked to see pain and sadness flicker across her face before she looked away. “I thought it was the right thing to do at the time,” she said, voice suddenly quiet and hoarse. The capitulation and show of submission hit me like a blow. Tessa had always been the dominant one in our relationship—perfectly reasonable and logical since, not only had she been entrusted with raising me after my parents had died, but she’d also been my mentor in the art of summoning.
It wasn’t the only change in her that left me somewhat unnerved. Somehow she’d known of my agreement to become Rhyzkahl’s summoner, and in the weeks after she’d woken from the coma I kept expecting her to lay into me about it—to give me a full verbal flaying. Or to at least want to know more about the circumstances that had led to the agreement, or the terms of my oath. But neither argument nor conversation had ever materialized, and the couple of times that I’d tried to speak about it, she’d hurriedly changed the subject, as if the thought of even mentioning a demonic lord was anathema.
I shifted uncomfortably on the stool, suddenly insanely glad that Carl had left before he’d been forced to witness this. Or had he somehow known this was coming, and excused himself accordingly? Anything was possible. Especially with him. “Look, if you don’t want me to use the library, I’ll understand.”
Tessa sighed and rubbed at her eyes. “No, go ahead and use it. I’m sorry I said that. Besides, you need it more than I do right now.”
Something about her tone made me frown. “Aunt Tessa, have you summoned since . . . you came back?”
She gave a soft snort. “There’ve only been two full moons since I was released from the hospital. Give me a little time to adjust, all right?”
I schooled my expression into an understanding smile. I had yet to tell her about my discovery that potency could be stored—and without resorting to the kind of torture and murder that the Symbol Man had used. Summoners utilized the natural potency that flowed in the world to create the portal between the spheres through which the demons were summoned from their world to ours. Potency was also required to power the wards and bindings that protected the summoner from being torn to pieces—either by the forces of the portal, or by the summoned demon. Power was easiest to draw and control during the full moon, which was why summonings were almost always performed on—or very close to—the full moon. On rare occasions a summoner could perform a ritual when there was no moon, but only when calling a very low-level demon, for whom very little power would be required for the bindings and protections. During the waxing and the waning of the moon, the danger lay in the erratic inconsistency of available potency. A hiccup in the flow of power during the forming of a portal could mean an ugly and bloody death.
However, in an effort to “woo” me to become his summoner, Rhyzkahl had provided me with instructions for a ritual to help draw my aunt’s essence back to her body. And I’d discovered that a portion of the diagram used in the process could be used as a means to store small quantities of power, and—more important— release it in a smooth and steady flow. I still wasn’t sure if Rhyzkahl had intended for me to discover this means of storing potency, but he certainly had yet to voice any objections to my use of it.
But I had absolutely no idea why I was holding back from telling my aunt about this. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t seem like herself. Was that it? The storage diagram was a huge discovery, and the more I learned about it, the more I realized that it had the potential to be dangerous as well. What could be done with a massive supply of stored potency?
I could summon other demonic lords. And bind them, with enough preparation. Not that I ever would. One demonic lord was enough for me, and such summonings were insanely dangerous. But what if another summoner—one with scruples similar to the Symbol Man—had this knowledge? What could someone like that do with a demonic lord at his command? I’d faced that possibility once already—even chosen to die rather than let it happen.
A chill swept through me. What if that’s why I might be in danger? Not only did Rhyzkahl have the advantage of having a summoner bound to him, but he had one who wasn’t limited to summoning during the full moon. There might be some who would seek to remove his advantage, or worse, there might be some who would seek to protect themselves by removing one who had knowledge that could make it easier to enslave them. All the more reason for me to keep it to myself. The last thing I wanted to do was put Tessa in any sort of danger again.
I jerked as Tessa put a hand on mine. “You look ill, sweets. What is it?”
I forced a smile. “Sorry. Lost in thought for a
second. I think I’m still tired from last night.”
She gave my hand a pat. “I’ll make you some of that boring oversweetened tea that you tolerate, okay?”
I laughed. “That would be slightly delightful.”
I expected her to turn and go to the sink, but her hand stayed on mine. Her gaze had gone distant, and I even glanced behind me to see if she was looking at something out the window.
“Aunt Tessa? Is something wrong?”
The barest hint of a frown furrowed her brow. “Do you ever wonder why Szerain was willing?”
I blinked. “Huh?”
She dropped her eyes to mine. “Szerain. The lord that my mother and Peter Cerise and the others were trying to summon . . .”
Even with her clarification it still took me a few seconds to figure out what she was referring to. “Right. When Rhyzkahl came through instead,” I said, keeping my face immobile. Nearly thirty years ago Peter Cerise had gathered five other summoners together in a bold, ambitious, and shockingly dangerous attempt to summon the demonic lord Szerain. Cerise’s wife was dying of breast cancer, and Szerain was—supposedly—amenable to being summoned for such a need. This was most assuredly not the case for any other demonic lord.
Perhaps the summoning would have proceeded without incident if Szerain had actually been the one to come through the portal, but Peter Cerise and the other summoners were unaware that the then-teenage Tessa was hiding in that basement that night. And though she’d yet to realize her potential as a summoner, her presence altered the forming of the portal. A different—and unwilling—demonic lord was pulled through instead: Rhyzkahl, one of the most powerful of the demonic lords.
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