“I chose the blade over a bullet because it had a better chance of taking him out of the game,” I went on. “I didn’t know there were no ‘odds’ with Vsuhl, that a kill was final.”
“Pyrenth gambled too,” Zack said gently. “Rhyzkahl couldn’t force him to come to Earth. Pyrenth knew the danger and chose to come. You killed him in the line of duty, and he died in the line of duty.”
Tears pricked my eyes. Those were hard terms though ones I could understand. It still gnawed that Mzatal hadn’t warned me that dead by the blade meant Really Dead, but the heavy guilt around Pyrenth’s death abated somewhat.
“Thanks, Zack,” I said.
“Sihn,” he replied, and I heard a whisper of smile in his voice.
“You doing okay with Sonny?” I asked, ready for a change in subject.
“He’s a blessing. I’m not sure I’d have made it this far without him.”
At least that much was working out well. “I figured it’d be good for both of you. He needed to help someone.”
“I read him,” he said. “He’s a mess. Good pairing.”
I laughed softly. “My whole posse is fucked up. It’s perfect.”
• • •
After reassuring Zack that Jill was doing well and Steeev was taking good care of her, I hung up, found some shorts, and then followed the smell of coffee. Ryan leaned against the kitchen counter, arms folded across his chest, and eyes unfocused as though lost in thought. I continued toward the coffee pot as it made its last gurgles.
“Morning, sunshine,” I said with a bright smile. Yeah, let’s just keep pretending everything’s nice and normal.
He startled a bit, then smiled. “Morning, sleepyhead.”
“It’s not that late,” I pointed out. “You’re not exactly an early bird yourself today unless this is the second pot of coffee.” I retrieved two mugs from the cabinet, filled them.
“Nope. I’m running late.”
I placed the mugs on the table and sat. Okay, I was awake, and I had coffee. What the hell was I supposed to do now?
Ryan pulled out the chair opposite mine and dropped into it. “Now what?” he asked in an eerie echo of my thoughts.
I started to say I didn’t have a clue, then shook my head. “We can’t keep on pretending everything’s normal,” I said. “We both know it’s not.” He gave a grim nod, and I continued. “I need training still. I need to find out if Paul is all right. And I need to talk to Mzatal.”
“Sounds like you have a plan.” Ryan picked up the mug nearest him, took a sip, then made a that-doesn’t-taste-right face.
I winced a little. “I guess I do.”
“That’s half the battle.” He stood and moved to the spice rack.
I dumped sugar and cream into my coffee. “And what’s the other half?”
“Perseverance and follow-through,” he told me. “A lot of people have plans. They’re useless unless you do something with them.”
I gave him a wry smile. “Time to get my ass in gear then.”
“Drink your coffee first,” he said, then returned to the table to put a scant spoon of sugar and a shake of cinnamon into his cup.
I quickly lifted my mug to my mouth to hide my mild shock. Ryan always drank his coffee black. Was this whole Ryan-appearance simply a pretense to make it easier on me, or did Szerain need to keep it like this? A pang of loss went through me. Was there any of my Ryan left? I sipped my coffee and, for a moment, wished that I could go back to that beach in the demon realm where I’d gone with Helori, and simply be away from everyone and everything for a while. And just as quickly pushed the whiny self-pity down. This wasn’t about me, and I wasn’t going to run away from my problems. Too many others depended on me.
“What about Zack?” I left the question wide open to see where he’d go with it. I’d assured Zack that Szerain wouldn’t abandon him as all the others had, but it was an assumption.
He set his cup on the table, swallowed. A weird ripple passed over his face as though he’d almost lost the Ryan features. “He’s broken,” he said in a strained voice. “I’ll take care of him. I know broken.”
I exhaled softly. “Yeah, I guess you do. Thanks.”
He nodded. “When are you planning to follow through with your plan?”
“After I get caffeinated I’ll go down and top off the storage diagram.” Luckily I maintained a habit of keeping it as full as possible at all times. I sighed, rubbed a hand over my face. “And then I’ll summon a little after noon, I guess.”
“You’re reluctant to do this,” he observed.
“No, I’m not reluctant.” I grimaced. “It’s sort of a weird nervous-dread-anxious-resigned hybrid emotion.”
“Well, that narrowed it down,” he said with a twitch of his lips. “Caused by?”
I set my mug down, leaned back in my chair. “Caused by the fact that my demonic lord lover brought down the fires of heaven and would have killed me and everyone else if you and Kadir hadn’t helped me stop him.”
Ryan winced. “That would do it. He lost control.”
“And then he closed me out,” I said, then sighed and rubbed at my temples. “Weirdly, that was the worst part.”
He looked at me sharply. “Closed you out?”
The ache tightened my chest again. “We have this connection, and he . . . went totally silent.” I couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. “Like he didn’t hang up the phone, but wasn’t talking on the other end of the line.”
He breathed a curse—in demon, I noted with another weird pang. “I understand the hybrid emotion now.”
“I guess I get to see if he’ll still train me.” I pressed my fingers to my eyes. “I don’t even know what to expect.” I dropped my hands and grimaced. “And he might be pretty pissed off I didn’t give him Vsuhl when he asked for it.”
“You’re a good student. He’ll teach you,” he assured me. “And if you’d given him Vsuhl, you would now be Rowan, anchoring the mini-nexus for Jesral and Rhyzkahl.”
A shiver ran over me as the memory of those bizarre few minutes as Rowan surfaced. Szerain had saved me, as had Bryce. I rubbed my arms, found myself smiling at Bryce’s fierce loyalty. He’d called to me, had never stopped. Kara . . . Kara . . . Kara . . .
Like Giovanni called to Elinor.
“Shit!” Ryan surged up from the chair. “I’m late and I have a meeting.” He quickly came around the table, pulled me to my feet and gave me a hard hug. “Summon Mzatal. If you don’t think you can train with him, don’t go with him. And if you do go, we’ll hold down the fort here.”
With that he kissed my cheek, grabbed his briefcase, jogged to the front door, and was gone before I could even form a reply.
Blinking, I stared after him. A disguised demonic lord in a meeting with federal agents. That was fun to wrap my head around. Then I scowled. A disguised demonic lord who’d left before I could ask him about Elinor. Or the twelfth sigil. Or anything else.
“You win this round, Szerain,” I muttered. “But just you wait.”
• • •
With the decision made to summon Mzatal, the rest of the morning turned into a frenzy of activity: I topped off the storage diagram, woke Bryce up and told him to pack since I knew he’d want to come with me to be with Paul, did my own packing, had a quick talk with Jill and confirmed everything was okay with the bean and that Zack had called her that morning—all the while forming, discarding, and reforming arguments to use with Mzatal for why he shouldn’t shut me out and why I needed to be able to train with him and why I’d kept Vsuhl and then given it to Szerain. It was sure to be an entertaining discussion, one way or the other.
As soon as everything was ready, prepped, and packed, I called Tessa and wasn’t surprised when it went to voicemail. She was still in Aspen and wasn’t the sort to be glued to her phone when out having fun.
“Hi, Aunt Tessa,” I said into the recording. “Looks like I’m going back to the ‘retreat’ for a while. I’ll, uh, wri
te as soon as I can. Love you.”
I hung up. It felt oddly unfinished to leave without speaking to her, but we’d been successfully sending messages and letters back and forth for months now. Everything would be fine.
The thought of messages reminded me to do a final check of my email. There was only one item in my inbox, and I realized that Paul had probably worked some of his magic to get rid of my mountains of spam. My pulse gave an uneven lurch as I noted the sender. I opened it, read the attached DNA test results, then read them again.
“Welcome to the family, cousin Idris,” I murmured, pulse thudding weirdly. I’d suspected for a while, but having it confirmed raised even more questions. Or rather, one question in particular. One I dreaded asking.
I called Zack, held my breath as it rang. I’d made him promise not to answer the phone if he wasn’t up for a call, but voicemail wouldn’t cut it for what I needed to say and ask.
“Hey, Kara.”
“Hey, Zack,” I replied, relieved, though it quickly shifted to apprehension about the pending question. I stalled and took a moment to fill him in on my decision to return to training unless everything went pear-shaped between Mzatal and me.
“I’ll miss you for sure,” he said when I finished, “but it’s what you need to do. I’ll talk to Ryan tonight. We’ll keep things together here.”
I heard the unspoken “somehow,” yet I still thought he sounded a bit better. He seemed to be holding it together at least.
“Zack, I had a DNA test done on samples from Idris and Tessa,” I said in a rush. “He’s my cousin.”
Zack went super quiet.
I forged ahead. “Rhyzkahl’s the daddy, isn’t he.” It was more statement than question. With the timing of Tessa in the demon realm, it made sick sense.
Zack cleared his throat. “I’m flipping you the bird right now,” he said, letting me know I’d crossed into territory where he couldn’t or wouldn’t stray. The mandates, agreements, and oaths that bound him originated with the Demahnk Council and those he named only as “the others.” From what I could tell, the bond with Rhyzkahl was a subset of those oaths. Not that I truly understood how any of that worked.
But flipping the bird was answer enough. “Well, how about that,” I said with a sour smile. “That asshole made something awesome.” It also meant he’d had sex with me, all the while knowing he’d had sex with my aunt. Gah!
Shuddering, I hurriedly pushed the mental images away. “Does Rhyzkahl know about Idris?”
“He does not. I mean, hypothetically, if there was something to know.” Strain laced his voice as he desperately sought the balance of telling me without telling me.
I had more questions, but the interrogation could wait until I saw Zack in person. I had plenty to mull over, and he sure as hell didn’t need more stress right now. “You’d better write while I’m away at demon school,” I said lightly.
“You know it,” he said, sounding a bit more relaxed now. “On pink paper.”
“Perfumed, or it doesn’t count.”
Chapter 45
I hung up with him, and then could put it off no longer. Eilahn had Fuzzykins and her squirming little spawn in a giant pet carrier in the living room, and as Bryce paced anxious circles around it, I went down to the basement and began the summoning.
I spun the power out from the storage diagram in brilliant strands of potency, interlocked and coiled them together to create the portal. I made the call, held the strands—felt through them as the summoning found Mzatal and took hold.
Yet when I pulled, nothing happened. Baffled, I felt down the strand. It definitely had the demonic lord, but instead of coming through smoothly like every other summoning, it was as if he’d dug his heels in. Breath hissing through my teeth, I fed more power into the strands, tugged and felt the resistance, like a fish on a line. Except that I had Jaws on the other end of my Ronco Pocket Fisherman.
The hold on him fractured and dissipated, and the portal spiraled closed with an uncomfortable pop.
Chest heaving, I released the portal strands and stared at the empty diagram. He wasn’t going to even answer my call? Bleak dismay clutched at my gut, but a growing outrage quickly kicked that aside.
Oh, hell no. On the social etiquette scale, refusal to answer a summons from your lover ranked several steps below breaking up by text message. He could show his lordly ass up here and tell me to my face we were over, but no fucking way was I going to slink off and give up at this point.
I shot a quick look to the storage diagram. A little less than half-full, which meant I was going to have to pull some serious magic out of my ass to make this work. Teeth clenched, I cleared the diagram of the residual energies, retraced the sigils, and started over. Having that seventh ring of the shikvihr made a big difference now. No way would I have been able to attempt two summonings in a row six months ago, much less of a demonic lord.
Once again I cast the arcane strands out to form the portal, but I paused before I made the call again, assessing. The base wasn’t strong enough, and if he resisted again, I risked a backlash on both ends, like losing hold of the fishing pole and falling on your ass.
I picked up the knife that lay with my other implements and made a quick sharp slice in my left forearm. As the blood welled, I traced over the anchoring sigils, grimly pleased as the strands amplified.
“Mzatal!” I shouted the name and once again felt the summoning find its mark. Arcane wind whipped from the portal and through the basement as I seized the strands and pulled. Yet unlike the first attempt, this time I felt the resistance yield. I sent out more strands, like vines wrapping around a branch, and continued to pull, breath hissing. There was no way I could draw an unwilling lord through, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to make it easy on him to refuse. It felt like dragging an anchor across sand, but at long last the vortex portal formed, deposited my target and subsided.
Shaking from the effort, I grounded the strands and stabilized the energies. Black dots swarmed my vision, and I blinked them away, fought to stay upright. He was there in the circle, on one knee and facing away from me with the intricate rope of his braid marking a dark line down the center of his back.
Blood tickled my forearm in slow rivulets, slithering down to drop off the tips of my fingers. I felt into him, sick ache growing as I found the wall and the silence once again—not as profound as it was before I told him to leave, but with barely a whisper of more.
“Mzatal,” I croaked, cleared my throat and tried again. “Mzatal.”
He stood and turned to me, eyes betraying . . . uncertainty? Indecision? Either were totally out of place on him. He tipped his head back and inhaled deeply, and when he lowered it again his gaze held resolution.
“Zharkat,” he said with tangible pain. “Beloved. Yaghir tahn.”
“Open to me, Mzatal,” I said, voice trembling slightly. Damn it. “I can’t forgive you if you continue to do what wounded me most.”
Our connection might have been mute, but his expression was not. Regret and desolation carved deep lines into his face as he moved to me and took my hand, ran his fingers over the empty prongs of the ring. “It is not so simple,” he said. “Will you tolerate me thus until we speak at length?”
I gave him a short tight nod, though as soon as I made the controlled gesture I realized that I too was afraid to reveal too much of myself. Yes, he could read everything from me anyway. But that’s why the loss of our union hurts as much as it does. The sudden clarity left me mentally groping for several seconds. The ever-present wordless communication and knowing made that drastic imbalance tolerable and acceptable. How else could anyone have a relationship with someone who could read their every thought?
“Yes, we do need to talk,” I told him, relieved that he would, at least, still talk to me.
He lifted one hand to my cheek and, even though muted, I felt his awareness that he was face to face with losing me, felt the anguish behind that knowledge. “I do not want to lose you,??
? he said, voice laden with the grief of that possibility. “Cannot.”
I covered his hand in mine, leaned into the gesture. “Then let’s work this out.”
Mzatal exhaled in deep relief, leaned down, touched his forehead to mine and closed his eyes as I pulled him close. We sure as hell had some major serious holyfuckOMG looming Issues to deal with, but this was a huge start. But another big-ass elephant lurked in the room, and I had to ask about it.
“How is Paul?”
The color drained from his face, and he straightened and looked away. Cold gripped me. “Mzatal, is he dead?” I asked, grief already rising for the good-humored and brilliant young man.
“No!” He snapped his eyes back to mine, and I watched him pygah, as if he couldn’t bear to even think of such an outcome. “No,” he said again, less sharply. “He lives. The critical physical damage has been healed.”
My worry grew for both Paul and Mzatal. “He’ll get better though, right?”
He shook his head slowly. “I do not know,” he said in a voice utterly devoid of luster. A heartbeat later he straightened, looked over my head with unfocused eyes and let out a low curse. “I left Elofir overwhelmed in the plexus and must return,” he said, attention returning to me. “There is much disruption from the Mraztur’s abuse of the nodes.”
A coil of worry abruptly unwound within me as comprehension dawned. He was deeply engaged in the plexus. That’s why he resisted the summoning. “What about Idris?”
“He will recover fully.” The hint of a smile that accompanied the words flickered and faded. “Though he bears the burden of his sister’s ordeal.”
“Will you let me come back with you?” I asked, making the decision. “And Bryce as well?”
A smile brushed across his mouth, seeming foreign among the lines of worry and stress. “It is your home, zharkat,” he said, like a promise.
I nodded, then turned toward the stairs and hollered, “BRYCE! EILAHN! GET YOUR ASSES DOWN HERE! WE’RE GOING!”