I found myself smiling as I pulled up beside the Crown Vic. Leaning against the hood of the car with his arms crossed over his chest was a tall man with reddish-brown hair and a rugged face. He was wearing a polo-style shirt and blue jeans, which showed off his workout ethic nicely. It was the most casual I’d ever seen him attired. It didn’t make a difference. His entire demeanor announced his profession even more than his car did.
I didn’t give a crap about his profession at the moment. My day had started out shitty, but it definitely looked as if it was turning around now.
I climbed out of my car and slung my bag over my shoulder. He pushed off the hood of his car with a grin.
“Hello there, Special Agent Kristoff,” I said.
He gave a mock sigh, but his green-gold eyes sparkled with amusement. “So formal.”
I laughed. “Fine. Hi, Ryan.” I’d met Ryan during my investigation into the Symbol Man murders, when we were both assigned to the serial-killer task force. My first impression of him had not been a positive one—arrogant, condescending, and dismissive. Later I’d discovered that he could see the arcane, and I came to trust him enough to tell him that I was a summoner. Other than my aunt, he was probably the only person who knew that little fact about me.
After that initial trust had been established, we’d become friends—something that was both rewarding and baffling to me at the same time. Like my friendship with Jill, I treasured this connection with Ryan. Yet at the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder if we would ever go beyond “just friends.” Or if I even wanted that. Hell, I had no idea if he was remotely interested in anything beyond friendship.
And this is the last thing I need to be worrying about, I chided myself. My life is complicated enough as it is right now.
“Dare I ask why you’re standing in my driveway?” I said instead.
“Because, while you were dead, someone fixed your door for you.” He turned to glare at my pretty new door. He’d been the one to break it a couple of months ago, busting in when he heard me screaming. It had been only a bizarre demon-induced nightmare, but he’d thought something far worse was happening.
I had a strong suspicion that he was also the one who’d fixed the door, though he’d never admitted it. “Aw, poor you,” I said. “You have to stalk me from outside.”
“Actually, I was in the car with the AC cranked up until I heard you coming up the driveway. Did you know that it’s insanely hot?”
I snorted and started up my front steps. “You’d think this was a subtropical climate. You’re spoiled by your time at Quantico. Don’t worry.” I glanced up at the sky. “Give it a couple of hours and we’ll have our usual afternoon thunderstorm. Then it’ll be hot and humid.”
Ryan made a strangled noise as he followed me into my house. I lived in a single story Acadian-style house, with peeling paint and a broad front porch, on enough of a hill to allow me to have a basement; it was located in the middle of ten acres at the end of a long, winding driveway. Very private. I loved it.
“I’m too used to living up north,” he admitted. “I’m melting like a Nazi at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
I dumped my bag on the desk by the door and then turned to him. “So what brings you back to these parts?” It had been more than a month since I’d last seen him. We’d exchanged a few emails, but since we were both understandably reluctant to mention anything related to the arcane in email, they’d been fairly terse and boring.
His mouth twitched. “Well, I think I’m going to have to get used to this insane heat and humidity. I’m on a temporary transfer down here.”
My heart gave a mad thump of delight, and I had to fight to keep my face from showing anything more than a pleased smile. “Seriously? There are enough crimes related to the arcane in this area to warrant that?”
“There is a variety of reasons,” he said, shrugging, “and I’m not privy to all of them, but the suits at the top apparently felt it was worth it to base our little task force in this region, at least for now.”
“Well, I approve,” I said, with as much of a sober nod as I could manage.
He laughed. “I’ll be sure to pass that on to the powers that be.”
“You do that!” I couldn’t keep a straight face anymore and had to grin. “Okay, seriously? I have to admit that this is the best news I’ve had in quite some time.”
He tilted his head. “I can’t decide if that’s incredibly flattering or seriously pathetic.”
I rolled my eyes. “Pathetic, obviously, because I just realized that I’d forgotten what a smart-ass you are.”
“You know me too well.”
I wish! I thought, then hurriedly pushed the thought from my mind. “So, are you working anything right now?”
He made a face. “Nothing fun. I’m working a public corruption case—utterly mundane. Can’t really talk about it.”
I nodded and resisted the urge to pry. I’d been in law enforcement long enough to know that there were some things that had to remain confidential—if I wanted to remain friends with him, that is.
I gave a mental sigh. Ryan was seriously good-looking, though certainly not in any pretty-boy sort of way. He was about a head taller than me, with nice broad shoulders, a trim waist, and gorgeous eyes that I often felt were wasted on a guy. But I didn’t have very many friends, and I was—okay, I admit it—too chicken to make any sort of move and risk blowing the friendship all to hell.
But, damn, there were times when I really wanted to jump his bones.
“So where’s your partner?” I asked instead. During the Symbol Man investigation, Ryan had been partnered with Special Agent Zack Garner, who looked far more like a lifeguard than an agent specializing in arcane and supernatural incidents.
“That blond bastard is on vacation. California.”
I laughed. “Surfing?”
“You nailed it. So how about you?” he asked as he looked through my fridge for something to drink. He snagged a Diet Barq’s out of the bottom drawer and quirked an eyebrow at me. “Anything going on that you can talk about?”
I grimaced. “Yeah. I’ve had a pretty shitty day. Sarge called me this morning to go wake up one of our narcotics detectives, and I found him dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound.”
“Damn,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry to hear that. It doesn’t get much shittier than that.”
I scrubbed at my eyes and leaned back against the counter. “Actually it does.”
He gave me a disbelieving look.
I took a deep breath. “Brian’s essence was gone. Consumed.”
He was silent for several heartbeats. “You mean, like your aunt?”
I shook my head. “Tessa’s essence was drawn out to power an arcane ritual. It was intact—sort of like taking a battery out of a robot and using it in something else. Brian’s essence was … eaten. There was nothing but shreds left.”
Ryan sat down at the table and looked up at me, a frown playing across his face. “How can you tell? I mean, doesn’t the essence leave the body after death anyway?”
“Yes, but not immediately, and it’s more of a gentle release.” I pulled out a chair on the other side of the table and plopped down. “Fuck, you’re going to make me try to explain this? Um, it’s like the body—the physical shell—has the essence in a firm grasp. When it dies, the grasp is loosened, which allows the essence to float away whole, so to speak. But when it’s consumed, there are ragged edges still left behind, like meat torn from a bone.”
He gave a shudder. “All right, that sounds pretty hideous. So, he … what, doesn’t go to his afterlife or whatever now?”
I rubbed my temples. “It’s a bit more complex than that. Everything I’ve been taught about essence and potency says that, while there’s no such thing as actual from-one-body-to-the-next reincarnation, essence does get reused. Think of it like water being poured back into a pitcher. The next time a child is born, another glass is poured out. But if too much essence
gets consumed, then there won’t be enough to create new life, and we’ll start seeing some nasty side effects.”
“Such as?”
“Stillbirths,” I said quietly. “Ill patients dying when they should have been able to recover. An empty ‘pitcher’ would almost have a vacuum effect as it pulled back any available essence.”
He frowned. “What about population growth?”
“More essence can form, or grow from existing essence, but it takes time. Think of a tomato. Takes weeks to grow it but minutes to eat.”
“I think it scares me that you know this,” he said, a slight smile twisting the corner of his mouth.
I shifted uncomfortably in the chair and didn’t smile back. “I think it might have been my fault.”
He straightened. “Wait. What? Why on earth would you think that?”
I quickly explained about the ilius and my worry that somehow I’d failed to dismiss it properly. But by the end of my recitation he was already shaking his head.
“Nope, not buying it. I don’t know that much about summonings and demons, but it doesn’t make any sense that it would escape your control and then go swoop down on this guy. Even if he did commit suicide.”
I sighed. “I know, but I can’t think of a better explanation.”
“Then you haven’t figured it out yet,” he said. “You will.”
I gave him a small smile. His belief in me was probably misguided, but it was still reassuring. “Well, just for that, I’m going to let you come with me to my aunt’s house while I try—yet again—to break in to her library so I can do some research.”
He gave a bark of laughter. “Like Tom Sawyer ‘let’ his friends paint the fence?”
I grinned and stood. “Damn, I didn’t know you could read.”
“Yeah, well, it was an audiobook.”
“Smart-ass. I’ll meet you over there.”
I stood in the hallway of my aunt’s house and scowled at the door to the library. I loved my aunt. I really truly did. She was the only family I had left after my parents died—my mother of cancer when I was eight and my father from a drunk driver three years later. She raised me and became my mentor after determining that I had the talent to become a summoner of demons. Aunt Tessa had the capacity to drive me crazy, and there were times I wanted to throttle her, but I did love her.
However, at the moment I was back to wanting to throttle her. She’d rigged her library so full of twisty-ugly wards and other arcane protections that I felt like a member of an arcane bomb-disposal unit. And though I’d known she had a zillion arcane protections on her house and library, I’d assumed—foolishly, as it turned out—that my aunt had allowed some sort of exception for me, her only living relative.
I couldn’t even open the library door to see what kind of condition the room was in, because of the protections that writhed and pulsed in angry coils of purple and black—visible only to someone who could see the arcane. To the average person, it looked just like a regular door.
Actually, the average person wouldn’t get close enough, since part of the protections on the library—and on the house itself—involved a complicated aversion effect that made anyone trying to get into the house suddenly think of something that urgently needed doing elsewhere.
The aversions hadn’t been hard for me to get around, but the rest of the protections were another matter entirely. Working with arcane wards was not my forte. It required skill and potency—much like a summoning. I needed more experience to gain the skill, and potency was difficult to come by except during the full moon. The reason that summonings were usually done when the moon was at or near its fullest was because natural potency was rich and calm at that time. During waning and waxing of the moon, potency was scattered and hard to control. It was low and weak during the dark moon, but it was even, which was safer. Fluctuations in potency could be devastating when summoning a demon. I’d summoned the ilius the night before the full moon—safe enough to do with a third-level demon—but a summoning of anything higher than eighth or ninth level was best left to the night of the full. The restrictions of the phases of the moon were a pain in the ass, but the only method of storing potency that I knew of was the one the Symbol Man had used—torture and murder. Needless to say, I didn’t want to go there.
Ryan let out a low whistle. “That looks seriously ugly.”
“It’s ridiculous,” I complained. “Why the hell did she need all of this?”
“I dunno, but she was apparently not kidding about keeping people out.”
“I’m her only fucking relative. I should be able to get in.”
He peered at the winding wards. Ryan was able to sense the arcane, though not to the degree I could. “Fucking shit. Where would you even start?”
“That’s the problem. I’ve been poking at the edges for the past couple of weeks, because it doesn’t look so bad there. But every time I get that part undone, it re-forms.” I scowled at the door and the writhing wards. I’d been spending almost as much time at Tessa’s house as at my own—to the point where I’d begun to keep clothing and toiletries in her spare room. “I’m just going to have to dive into that big knot in the middle.” I thought I could see where to begin to unravel the damn things; all I needed to do was work up the nerve to touch them arcanely. You’re being chicken, I berated myself. If you’re wrong, you’ll get a big zap. Get over it!
“Well, here goes nothing,” I muttered as I began to mentally reach out. “It’s not like my aunt would try to—”
I threw myself backward as I saw the protection ward flash red in my othersight.… kill me! Shit! The edge of the arcane lightning bolt crackled over me, sending a stinging pain sparkling through my extremities as I landed heavily on my back on the hard wooden floor.
“Shit! Kara!” I heard Ryan shout. “Are you all right?”
I blinked away the stars crowding my vision to see him crouched over me, his face a mask of horror and concern. “Okay, that hurt,” I croaked.
He reached out and pushed my hair back from my face. “Are you all right?” he repeated.
“Yeah,” I wheezed, more than a little surprised by his gesture. “Just let me lie here and gasp for a while.”
He must have seen it in my eyes, for he abruptly jerked his hand back and shoved it through his hair instead. “That was insane,” he said, blowing out his breath. “A fucking lightning bolt?”
I finally progressed to rolling over onto my side, and from there I managed to shove up to a sitting position against the opposite wall. My limbs still twitched, and the stinging pain was only just beginning to fade.
“Damn it,” I said, frustrated. “I guess I’m going to have to summon a demon to get through these wards.”
Ryan reached down a hand to help me up. I was grateful for the assistance. My knees still felt wobbly, but at least the pain was pretty much gone. I’d been lucky. Landing on that floor had hurt like crazy, but it was better than being fried. I’d caught just the edge of it, and that was more than enough. “Your aunt has a summoning chamber here, doesn’t she?” he asked.
I gave him a thin smile. “She sure does. And she has that all warded up as well.” I sighed and tugged my T-shirt back into place, rolling my head on my neck to try to get everything back into proper alignment. “I’m going to have to summon in my own chamber and bring the demon over here.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Why do I get the feeling that you’re not talking about summoning some nice little dog-size creature?”
“Because you’re annoyingly perceptive. I need oodles of answers, and there’s a reyza that owes me a favor.” A reyza was a twelfth-level demon—the highest level of demon that could be summoned by normal means. Demonic lords could be summoned as well, but the rituals involved were so insanely complex and required so much power that it was damn near impossible unless the lord was willing, which was pretty much never.
He raised an eyebrow at me. “And how the fuck are you going to get an eight-foot-ta
ll demon with giant wings, horns, and a tail from your basement to here? In the trunk of your Taurus?” Ryan had good reason to be familiar with the appearance of a reyza—he’d been closer to one than he’d ever wanted to be when he was captured by Sehkeril, the demon who’d allied with the Symbol Man.
“You just leave that to me,” I said with a smug smile. I headed toward the door, with Ryan following.
“So, uh, do you think you’ll need any help transporting your demon?” He managed to keep his tone light and nonchalant, but I knew how badly he wanted to see a summoning.
Of course, he had seen a summoning before, but from a vantage that he probably had not desired—on the inside of the circle, as one of the intended sacrifices.
I gave a dramatic sigh. “Oh, well, I suppose I could use some help. Yes, you can come to the summoning.” Then I lowered my head and glared at him. “And the only reason I’m even considering allowing you to attend this summoning is because this particular reyza owes me a debt, so I feel fairly secure that he won’t immediately try to rip us both to pieces.”
He grinned.
I rolled my eyes, but I couldn’t help smiling. There were times when the federal-agent attitude dropped away completely and he was like a teenager. I loved seeing these other facets to his personality—and that he was willing to reveal them to me almost made me feel like a trusted insider.
I closed and locked the front door and walked down the steps to where our cars were parked in the driveway. I turned back to speak to him, then paused, looking at Tessa’s front yard, squinting in the late-afternoon sun that bounced off the lake.
He noticed my puzzled expression and glanced at the yard, then back to me. “What’s wrong?”
“Someone mowed her lawn.” And fairly recently too. Perhaps the day before? And the flower beds out front had been weeded and tended. I gave myself a mental thwack for not noticing this earlier.
Ryan gave the yard another sweeping glance, then shrugged. “Probably one of her neighbors doing her a favor.”
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