Shadow Summoner: Choronzon Chronicles Book One

by Tess Adair

  Like, maybe, your “connoisseur” father trying and failing to summon a demon, she thought but didn’t say.

  “Well,” said Adelaide slowly, apparently gathering her thoughts, “if you’re asking if I’ve ever seen something that’s difficult to explain—”

  Behind her, Richard scoffed. “Of course she hasn’t. Adelaide’s got an active imagination, but she’s not insane.”

  Logan kept her expression bland and neutral, and offered them a shrug.

  “Then you really don’t have any idea how dangerous it will be here tonight. I highly recommend that you both go into town and find a hotel for the evening, then come back in the morning. I should be finished by then, unless something goes wrong. Of course, there is a very real possibility that something will go wrong, which is one of the many reasons the two of you should vacate now.”

  “I’m not leaving my home,” said Adelaide, pulling her spine straighter, as if to emphasize her point. “Richard, you can go if you want.”

  Richard huffed, his chest puffing up like an echo of her. “I will not leave you here alone.”

  Logan felt certain that spending too much time with either one of these people would drive her insane. Her left hand traveled up to her face to pinch the bridge of her nose, as if that action stood any chance of alleviating the headache she felt coming on.

  “I want you both to understand something,” she said slowly, taking a deep breath to keep herself calm. “Tonight, in this room, I am going to summon this demon and bring it into fully realized existence. While I don’t yet know what kind of demon it will be, please believe me when I tell you that I have never once met a demon that was peaceful and nonthreatening. In general, demons are violent and bloodthirsty, and ten times more powerful than a human being. When this demon comes through, it’s going to do what demons do. By which I mean it will try its best to kill and eat you both.”

  Adelaide and Richard both stared at her, neither one moving. Logan sighed.

  “Okay. It’s your house, you are certainly free to stay.” She reached down into her bag and pulled out a folder, then produced two stapled stacks of paper and handed them over. “I’ll need you to sign these waivers acknowledging that I told you that you might die, so you and your family have no right to sue me if you do. Understand?”

  The pinched-face twins took their papers from her and looked them over. Logan had read through the document before, so she knew how extensive it was—there were sections on beheading, disembowelment, getting eaten alive, general loss of limb. The draft of it had expanded over time, as her father and Knatt had encountered ever more new scenarios deemed waiver-necessary.

  Adelaide signed hers first and passed it back.

  “So,” she said, looking pleased with herself, “what happens now? Are you going to walk through the house with a little EMF device or something?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “To detect its presence, or whatever people like you do.”

  People like you. Logan took a second to try and figure out what Adelaide’s impression of people like her might be. She considered Adelaide’s insistence that her “haunting” was a ghost, recalled her use of the term spectral phenomena. Then it clicked.

  “Adelaide,” she tried to sound neutral, not patronizing. “Do you happen to watch a lot of ghost-hunting TV shows?”

  Richard laughed. “She can’t get enough of them.”

  “I understand they’re very popular,” Logan said, restraining a sigh. “But it’s really best to treat them as entertainment only. They’re not exactly educational. And no, I’m not going to go around with an EMF detector. That wouldn’t tell me anything, except maybe that you’ve got a power line nearby.”

  “Fine,” said Adelaide with a huff. “Do we do anything now?”

  Logan reached into her bag once more and pulled out a bundle of sage. “I’m going to smudge the room with this. Then we wait.”

  For a blissful moment, neither client spoke. Logan stood from her chair and pulled a lighter from her pocket to get the sage started. Barely thirty seconds had passed when Adelaide impatiently broke the silence.

  “How long do we wait?” Her voice was like the whine of a small child.

  “Until sundown.”

  “Sundown?”

  “At the earliest.” She turned the sage over in her hands, making sure to light it evenly, then blowing on the edges until it smoldered. “Feel free to go get yourselves some lunch.”

  She started toward the corner of the room, then paused.

  “Let me know if you make any coffee, will you?”

  She couldn’t help but enjoy the affronted shock that settled over Adelaide’s face.

  To Logan’s delight, her clients grew bored of waiting after only an hour. They left her alone and disappeared off to some distant corner of their castle to entertain themselves. Once they were gone, Logan pulled out her chair and knelt down on the ground with a piece of chalk to draw a symbol she’d learned a long time ago—a graphic tree, with the roots and branches stretching and curving outward, forming a circle. The tree symbol was a standard representation of knowledge and truth, and Knatt had taught her how to use it when she was a child. Strictly speaking, she knew she wouldn’t need it, but its unnecessary protection gave her a sense of comfort anyway.

  “Today, I’m going to teach you about letha summoning,” he’d told her. As he spoke, he used black ink to sketch out the tree on a large piece of paper. “Letha summoning can be used for one of two potential purposes, but both types of casting require the same ingredients. First, one must use either an imbued object or a powerful symbol to help concentrate one’s cast. Next, an herb with magical properties to strengthen the cast; technically herbs are optional, but if you don’t wish to exhaust yourself entirely, I do recommend them. Finally, the caster must speak a spell word or two, then spill fresh blood for a catalyst. Some may choose to sacrifice an animal for this, but many casters prefer to use their own blood. After all, for most summonings, you will only need a little.”

  After he’d shown her the symbol of the tree with interwoven roots, and made her copy it out over and over again until he was satisfied she’d be able to draw it on her own later, he showed her how to activate it. He took out a metal device that looked like a small hammer with a lever in the handle. Holding it just below his left wrist near the outer bone, he flicked the lever in one quick motion, setting off the device, and a tiny drop of blood flew from the skin of his wrist and onto the image before them. Much later on, he explained that the small hammer was actually a modified medical device for diabetes patients. He called it the blood-letter.

  She did now as he had done then. With one quick motion, she produced the tiny amount of blood needed to activate her simple protection summon, and she let it fly onto the chalk. The symbol blazed with light as if it had caught on fire, but only for a moment. Then it was motionless once more, as though nothing had happened at all.

  As she briefly surveyed her work on the symbol, she got a flash of what her aunt might say about it at Other Side. All this letha nonsense, and for what? Not that her aunt never added a performative aspect to her casting—it was just that, at Other Side, the performance was for show only. Their magic needed no medium. Still, when the occasion called for it, they did love to pull out all the pomp and circumstance they could. I love a good ritual, her aunt would say.

  With the knowledge that she’d done her due diligence, Logan sat down again and leaned back in her chair, now pulling a small book out of her bag. There would be nothing else to do for several more hours. Most contracts she took with Knatt left her with large chunks of time to kill between the set up and the actual work. Knatt always insisted she show up on site sometime in the morning, even though they almost always dealt with phenomena that resisted showing themselves until nighttime. Since her second job with him, she’d made sure to bring a book or two wherever she went.

  Another hour into her wait time, her cell phone—charging silently in
a corner—buzzed on the floor. Logan put her book down to go check it.

  First, she read the name Matthew. Then she read the message.

  Any chance you’re still in town and looking for something to do tonight?

  To her chagrin, she couldn’t immediately place the name Matthew with a face. Then it clicked—her companion from the unfamiliar room that morning. Good to know she’d gotten his name at some point.

  She took a moment to remember the previous evening’s events so she could gauge what kind of a response he warranted. As far as she could recall, he’d been pretty good company. He might be well worth another go.

  She wrote him back: I have to work tonight, but I could be free tomorrow.

  She started to put her phone down to go back to her chair, assuming that he’d take a few hours to get back to her. To her surprise, her phone lit up before she could let it go.

  That’s perfect. I can meet you at the bar again if you want.

  As a rule, she preferred city boys, and city girls. But every once in a while, she didn’t mind the sweetness, and the promptness, of a small town native.

  Sounds good.

  Then she went back to her chair and her book. She still had hours left to wait.

  The pinched-face twins came back into the room just as the sun started to slip behind the trees. Without a word, they walked to the other side of the table and seated themselves directly across from Logan. While Adelaide smoothed the ends of her hair with her fingers, Richard cleared his throat and straightened his spine.

  “Will it…start soon?” he asked, waving his hand around vaguely in the air.

  “Yes,” said Logan. She lit the candles anew.

  Ever so slowly, the sun dipped lower. Shadows pooled at the edges of the room and grew outward, stretching toward them. The night was coming on.

  As the sun finally disappeared, Logan felt the same unexplainable shiver she’d felt when she’d first walked in. Her spine automatically straightened as her body began to anticipate the imminent fight.

  Good, she thought. It’s close.

  She didn’t say anything to them, of course. Scaring people tended to make them act like idiots. And these two didn’t need any help with that.

  A muffled crashing sound came to them from another room. Richard’s head whipped wildly to the left, in exactly the opposite direction from where the sound was actually coming.

  “Did anyone else hear that?” he asked. His tone sounded almost conspiratorial.

  “Of course we did,” Adelaide snapped.

  Richard turned a sulky glare on her.

  “It doesn’t hurt for me to ask, you know,” he said.

  “You always think you need to insert yourself into everything.”

  “Well, sometimes when I don’t insert myself, you end up backed into a corner by Rodney the tennis instructor—”

  “That was one time, and I’m perfectly capable of—”

  “Hey!” Logan held up both hands, one for each of them. They fell momentarily silent. She wished they had never come back into the room. More than that, she wished that Knatt would let her turn down jobs, especially if they wouldn’t meet her terms. “Does everyone remember my speech about how dangerous all of this would be?”

  They nodded.

  “Okay,” she paused, and let the rest of her words come out slowly, so she could be sure they would be understood. “So now, I want you both to shut the hell up as if your lives depended on it. Unless, of course, one of you was really keen on spending the next week cleaning the other’s guts and brains off the ceiling.” With her mouth pushed forcibly into a thin line, she added, “I want you both to take a good look at my face right now, so you can understand that I’m not in any way joking.”

  They both stared at her in horror, which unfortunately made it hard not to laugh.

  Silence descended again. The twins kept their mouths shut, and apparently the “ghost” decided to follow their lead. They heard no more crashing from the next room.

  Logan allowed the silence to stretch. In fact, she allowed it to stretch for a good half hour—primarily to make sure her clients could actually keep it up that long. When she was satisfied with their patience, and her own petty revenge, she reached down into her open bag and pulled out the blood-letter and a sachet of powdered herbs.

  Holding the device delicately in one hand, she concentrated on the space between worlds, between existence and nothingness, held in her mind like water cupped in a palm. That was where the beast was, trapped and likely impatient. She imagined herself reaching out to it, tempting it. She raised both hands, still holding tight to the concept of the in-between. Then she spoke.

  “Invoco pecum.”

  As she said the words, she flipped the lever on the blood-letter, holding it down longer than she had before to let out a larger drop of blood. Her blood splashed on the table, along with a small sprinkling of powder, which lit up for a brief moment as it fell through the air, but stopped as it scattered on the stone. For a moment, the room seemed to rumble, like it was vibrating in anticipation, but then that, too, stopped.

  Within seconds of the magic’s burnout, they heard another sound from a farther room. This one wasn’t a crash—in fact, it sounded like a wail. Hearing its siren call, Logan’s blood began to race.

  The lights above them flickered. As if on cue, rain began to fall heavily outside the window. The lights flashed again, twice, then went out. Immediately, Richard got up to stand.

  “I’ll check the breaker box.”

  “Wouldn’t help,” said Logan. “They’ll only go out again.”

  Richard sat back down.

  “Are we just supposed to sit here in the dark?” Adelaide’s voice was a terrified whisper. With the gloom hiding her face, Logan couldn’t help but smile. So naïve, these rich kids, she thought.

  “If the dark worries you, it’s not too late for you to leave. I certainly wouldn’t blame you.”

  “No,” said Adelaide immediately, apparently affronted at the thought. “No, I’ll be fine. We’ll both be fine.”

  She shot Richard a look, as though daring him to disagree. Though his expression looked stricken, he merely shrugged in response.

  “Suit yourselves.” With no further comment, she pulled the lighter out of her back pocket and lit up the rest of the candles that she’d set up along one edge of the table. They might not last much longer than the electric lights, but they’d be a help while they did.

  After a moment, Logan realized the room had gotten quieter. Glancing to her left, she could see that the rain had not let up—they just couldn’t hear it anymore. One look back across the table told her that her clients hadn’t noticed yet.

  As she looked out at the rain again, she heard something behind her—a kind of clicking sound, almost like an insect. Slowly her head turned back to the right, toward the sound.

  Just like Adelaide, she saw a little girl. And just like Richard, she saw a little boy.

  The figure standing beyond the table faded in and out, its shape in flux, never quite taking hold. The entity stood before her, but not fully—a thin veil of reality lay between them. Of course, it wouldn’t look that way to most untrained eyes. Logan had figured out over time that most people interpreted the ambiguous one way or the other so quickly that they didn’t even realize what they had done, and accepted their own ideas as truth, without question.

  Adelaide had seen a girl. Richard had seen a boy. Neither of them had seen any such thing.

  The creature, such as it was, reached a hand—possibly a claw—upward, then pushed it forward. Logan guessed that this was the motion Adelaide had interpreted as the little girl throwing a ball. In reality, the creature was trying to free itself from its caged state, stuck between worlds.

  “Well,” said Logan, “no time like the present.”

  She tightened her grip on the blood-letter in her right hand and pressed it to the skin just below the outer bone of her wrist until she drew a thicker line of blood
. Then she hovered her wrist over one candle’s flame.

  “Invoco,” she whispered. The flame grew larger and brighter, nearly engulfing her hand. “Invoco pecum.”

  A bright flash filled the space, originating from the point of the flame. For a moment, it seemed like nothing else would happen. Then Logan heard a growl from the far end of the room. The veil was broken; the beast had come through. Hurriedly, she slipped the device back inside its protective box in the bag.

  As Logan let her head turn slowly to the sound, she clocked her clients’ frozen, terrified expressions. So they’d noticed the growling, if nothing else.

  Finally, her gaze found the other end of the stone table. There it stood—only about three or four feet tall, its small gray head peering at them over the edge. Before Logan could consider her next move, it crouched down and jumped up, landing on the solid stone. Gray scales covered its entire body, from the hunched back to the elongated forearms—forearms which ended in curved claws that dragged along the table when it moved. Perhaps it was the wrong reaction, but a sudden surge of excitement moved through her body, and in an instant, she was ready.

  With instinct as automatic as breath, Logan leapt onto the table as well. As she pulled the 8-inch dagger from the back of her belt, she cursed herself for eschewing any larger weapons from her home arsenal. She just had to travel light, didn’t she? The beast, of course, didn’t need to bring anything to fight her. She listened to the light scratch of its claws on stone.

  The beast paused at the sight of her and looked her up and down, like it was evaluating her. Slowly, its jaws opened wide, and it made a loud clicking sound. Then it lunged at her.

  Several things happened at once. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Adelaide jump back from the table while Richard gave a scream but remained frozen in place. She threw her right forearm up in front of her face while she thrust the small dagger forward. The monster tried to pull back from her, but its swinging arm connected with her blade. As dark blue blood splashed on the stone, it roared and stumbled backward. Within moments, it turned around and disappeared through the far doorway.