Legacy of the Demon

  “No, I’m the one who owes you an apology. I was being bitchy, and you didn’t deserve to have me take it out on you.” But surely my bitchiness wasn’t enough to warrant the undercurrent of anxiety in his tone. “Is everything okay?”

  “Not really.”

  My heart sank. “Shit. Did you get in trouble over not reporting Giovanni?”

  “No.” He paused. “I’m . . . sweating. A lot. It’s red.”

  My heart finished dropping all the way down to my toes. “Are you able to drive?” I even managed to keep my voice mostly calm.

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  “Can you make it here?”

  He exhaled. “I’ll make it.”

  “If at any point you feel like you might not be able to keep driving, you fucking call, got it? We’ll come get you.”

  “I will. Thanks.”

  “Marco, no matter what happens, I promise we’ll take good care of you.”

  He hung up without replying. My anxiety had retreated, but dread took its place. I returned inside and filled Pellini in.

  “Huh.” He frowned. “Does that kill your theory that having arcane abilities is a protection?”

  I massaged the back of my neck. “I don’t know. I’m not sure if Knight’s abilities are arcane or something else.”

  Pellini’s mouth twisted. “Don’t know about you, but I sure hope they’re something else.”

  A cry of alarm from the guest room cut our discussion short.

  “Shit!” I dashed down the hall and careened into the room. On the bed, a disoriented Giovanni clawed from beneath the blanket, eyes wild with confusion.

  “Giovanni.” I grabbed his shoulders. “You’re safe. It’s okay.”

  A small measure of the panic left his eyes as he took in the sight of me, though the confusion remained.

  “I’m Kara. Kara Gillian.” I released him and eased back.

  A frown puckered his forehead. “Sì, Kara.” Except he pronounced it Kah-rah. He muttered something in Italian, gaze darting around the room, then switched to English. “You cannot be here. Where is Elinor? Elinor!”

  At least I was pretty sure that’s what he said. I hadn’t counted on a language barrier since I knew he spoke English, but apparently the seventeenth-century version had evolved in accent and pronunciation and inflection in the past three hundred plus years.

  “I can help you understand me better,” I said, slowly and distinctly. “But you need to come with me.” I added gestures to get my point across.

  He scrambled up and backpedaled shakily toward the window, rattling off a stream of Italian that included my name, Elinor, and Szerain. I had no clue about the rest. My smattering of nexus-imbued Italian was useless, since mine was the current-day version.

  “Pellini, a little help!” I advanced on Giovanni and threw an arm around him as his legs gave way. The sight of Pellini sent him into more of a panic, but he weakened as he struggled against me and passed out when Pellini reached him.

  Pellini looped one arm around Giovanni’s waist and drew his arm over his own neck. Giovanni topped me by only a few inches but was solid enough that I was glad to relinquish him.

  “To the nexus,” I told Pellini. “I’m hoping that if I can connect him to modern Earth flows, we’ll be able to update his language and orient him.”

  “Makes as much sense as anything else,” Pellini said with a shrug. “What about your other guest?”

  I thought about it for less than a heartbeat. “I don’t have the time or energy to deal with Rhyzkahl or his bullshit.” Or the stomach to force him into his house so soon after the headache incident. “Let him see. Let him wonder. There’s nothing he can do about it, and he’ll find out eventually.”

  Pellini chuckled under his breath and helped me get the unconscious Giovanni out the back door and across the porch. Rhyzkahl sat against the tree with Squig beside him. He didn’t look at me with malice, which told me he didn’t remember my Cruella de Kara act. But shock registered on his face as he recognized the supposedly long-dead Giovanni, and his gaze remained locked on us until we made it onto the nexus and I raised a curtain of potency as a privacy screen. We could see out, but he couldn’t see in.

  Pellini laid Giovanni at the center of the slab then retreated to the grass. “Can you keep him calm while you’re doing the language trick?”

  “I can get him nice and chill.” I crouched beside Giovanni and tapped in to the super-shikvihr that flowed around us then traced four floating pygah sigils over Giovanni. Envisioning calm clarity for him, I placed one each on his forehead, throat, chest, and abdomen. His aura shimmered over his body like a layer of azure fog and, with slow precision, I selected delicate strands of local potency and attached them to it, then more and more until I had five times the number I would have needed for myself.

  I closed my eyes to shut out all visual stimuli. The strand colors intensified in my mind’s eye, displaying subtle differences in hue. I expanded into clear intention beyond thought, called in conversations and culture and images and objects. As those flowed—“downloaded”—I overlaid impressions of the environment: Rhyzkahl and his prison, the grove tree, Sammy, the kittens, security, warding, personnel, the house layout.

  More and more, until his aura crackled with sparks like static electricity. Enough. Deep in the flows, I moved, reluctant to release the luscious connection, yet aware of my purpose. One by one, I disconnected the strands and merged them back into the flows.

  At long last I looked up at Pellini. “I’m going to try to wake him. Stand by in case he freaks.” I traced a fifth pygah for good measure then called potency up from the nexus in gradually intensifying waves like a giant sensory alarm clock.

  He groaned and threw an arm over his eyes to shield them from the midmorning sun. “A smith pounds his anvil within my skull.”

  “Giovanni,” I said, “do you know where you are?”

  “Earth. Louwheezy . . . Louisiana.” The words came out slowly, but clearly. “On the nexus?” He pushed up to sit cross-legged, squinting in the bright sunlight.

  “That’s right. And if I told you I needed to drive my car to the gas station, would that make sense to you?”

  He tilted his head up at me and frowned. “A mechanical wagon.” He spoke carefully as if choosing from a selection of words. “The car requires gas as the hearth fire requires wood. I understand this.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. I wouldn’t have to explain every technological advance made in the last three centuries. Sometimes this magic shit could be really handy.

  Giovanni put a hand to his head. “There is much else I do not understand.” His forehead puckered. “And I know you, though we have never met.”

  “That’s right, we’ve never met,” I said. “I think we need to continue this inside, where there’s food. And coffee.”

  Pellini muttered agreement, and together we hauled up an unresisting Giovanni and marched him back across the yard.

  “Giovanni Racchelli,” Rhyzkahl said in a clear voice when we were still a dozen feet from the porch steps. He stood, eyes intense on us as he drew breath to say more.

  I started singing at the top of my lungs, drowning out whatever Rhyzkahl was trying to say. “Do your balls hang low, do they wobble to and fro.” Pellini grinned and joined in, deep baritone belting out the silly lyrics with me. “Can you tie them in a knot, can you tie them in a bow.” We hauled Giovanni up the steps and across the porch. “Can you throw them over your shoulder like a continental soldier, do your balls hang low!”

  We slammed the door behind us.

  Chapter 16

  Somehow, I resisted the urge to flip Rhyzkahl off through the window, and instead helped get Giovanni into a chair. Pellini set two ibuprofen and a glass of juice in front of him, while I loaded up a plate with various pastries, bread, cheese, and fruit. If the dude had
been dead for three hundred years, he was probably hungry.

  “Would you please give Bryce an update?” I asked Pellini. “We’re going to need a companion for our guest.” I dropped into the chair across from Giovanni and gave him my best friendly smile. “Go ahead and eat. I’ll answer your questions.”

  He didn’t argue and tucked in like a starving man. “This is Earth, yes? But it is slip timed.” He shook his head. “Out of time.”

  “Yes, time has passed since you were last in the demon realm.”

  “You must send me back.”

  “I can’t. I didn’t summon you.”

  “I must return. Elinor needs—” He broke off, face paling by degrees. “Elinor.” His hand flew to his throat, and his eyes grew distant. “Call her,” he murmured.

  “Giovanni,” I said gently, “she’s—”

  Through bared teeth, he snarled a word. “Szerain.” He shot to his feet, chest heaving. “Szerain bade me call her only to bury his essence blade in her breast. Serpent! Betrayer! Most accursed of all of the qaztahl!”

  “I’m sorry.” I kept my voice pitched low and even as I did my best to project calm.

  Giovanni leveled his gaze my way as if seeing me for the first time. “Kara Gillian. What have you to do with this tragic tale?” He sank into the chair. “Call her. Call . . . you.”

  “I heard you call,” I offered cautiously. “I thought it was only a dream memory of Elinor’s.”

  “A nightmare.” He shook his head slowly, eyes unfocused. “And I am yet impaled upon its bloody claws.”

  “Giovanni, what do you remember?”

  Confusion knitted his brow. “How much time has fled since Elinor . . .” His eyes stretched wide in realization. “Since I . . .”

  I took a deep breath before assailing him with the lovely news. “Over three hundred years.”

  He sagged, squeezing his eyes shut as my words hit home. “Three centuries.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t even imagine how much of a shock this is.”

  “Elinor,” he murmured, voice shaking.

  He thinks her dead all this time, I thought. That was no doubt kinder than the truth: trapped in Szerain’s essence blade for centuries. “What do you remember,” I asked again, “of what happened to her . . . and you?”

  Giovanni raised his eyes to mine but didn’t speak for several seconds, as if gathering pieces of the nightmare. “Elinor danced a ritual with Szerain in his summoning chamber. It was sooner than planned. She was not ready, but neither she nor Szerain could be dissuaded. I waited in the antechamber for her to finish, but . . .” He pressed his fingers to his eyes. “The ritual shattered. I felt it. Heard it. The palace shook, and the air shrieked. I should not have been able to enter the chamber, but the door lay askew, wrenched from its hinges.”

  I’d felt Elinor’s terror and panic, seen glimpses through her eyes of the ritual spiraling out of control, but now I wanted his perspective. “What did you see?”

  “A vision of hell,” he said, staring at nothing. “Violence and chaos. A wailing vortex of corpse-livid hues. Elinor . . .” His voice caught. “My Elinor in the center of it all, eyes glowing, fierce and terrible. And terrified. Though I have but small ability to see the arcane, the power burning through her . . . coming from her . . . near blinded me. Yet I could think of nothing but to reach her side and save her from the madness.” Grief and helplessness swam in his eyes. “But it was Szerain who stood behind her, holding her upright with his arm tight around her waist as if in a grotesque dance. He looked at me over her head and shouted, ‘Call her.’” Giovanni tensed, and one hand curled into a fist on the table. “I did. I called her name, screamed it through the gale that sought to tear me away. Szerain raised Vsuhl, and it shrieked louder than the vortex.” His jaw clenched. I waited on tenterhooks for him to continue, even though I knew what happened next.

  “I trusted him, believed with all my soul that he would protect her, save her.” Anger darkened his face. “But no. He drove that accursed blade into her heart.” The anger melted into distress. “I fought to reach them, to drive him away from her, but for naught. He bore her to the stone as the blade consumed her soul, and he commanded me, ‘Call her. Do not cease calling.’” A shudder went through Giovanni. “I called her. I have never stopped calling her. I . . .” His voice broke. “Elinor.”

  Holy shit. I sat back and struggled to process everything—not only his account of events but also the unbelievable determination of this young man to keep calling to the woman he loved for over three hundred years. Not to mention, Giovanni’s version of events shone a slightly different light on Szerain’s actions. Yes, he’d killed Elinor and trapped her in the blade, but what was Giovanni’s role? Had Szerain held hope for her recovery down the road? Why else order him to keep calling her?

  But not centuries down the road, I thought with a pang of sadness for Giovanni. All that remained of Elinor existed in the fragment of essence attached to mine. “Slew Elinor. Created you,” Szerain had once told me. Why? How?

  “You called to me,” I said gently.

  “In the darkness,” he murmured.

  “Yes, you helped save me.” He’d kept me from losing my Self. Kept me from becoming Rowan, thrall to the Mraztur. “How did you know to call me? How did you know my name?”

  “A whisper in the darkness,” he muttered, eyes growing haunted. “Like leaves in the wind, but there was no wind. There was nothing.”

  The darkness of the void? A chill walked down my back. I had shadowy memories of my own trip through the void, yet mine had only lasted a couple of weeks.

  I leaned forward. “Do you remember what happened to you? How you died?”

  He blinked and seemed to come back to himself. He looked briefly perplexed at my question, as if still unable to believe that he could have died—which I figured was perfectly reasonable. “Szerain came to me. Bade me to continue calling Elinor.” He frowned. “I remember nothing more.”

  With the world falling apart around him, there were any number of ways he could have bought the farm. I banked my frustration and changed tack. “What about the ritual? Do you know what it was for?”

  His expression cleared. “To awaken Szerain’s Earthgate.” He hesitated and gave me a hopeful look. “Did it succeed?”

  “No, it didn’t,” I said, then watched him deflate. Great, I couldn’t even tell him his girlfriend’s death had actually been for a good cause. And here I was about to make it worse. “It wreaked a terrible cataclysm upon the demon realm, and the ways between Earth and the demon realm slammed closed. That’s why it took you so long to return.” Yet now Kadir’s gate was awake. Could the others be far behind?

  Giovanni remained silent for close to a minute as he struggled to reconcile this new and unpleasant information. “I must return to the demon realm,” he finally said with intense determination.

  Damn, it was Kara-disappoints-Giovanni-at-every-turn day. “You can’t,” I said. “Not right now. I’m sorry. There’s too much upheaval both here and there.”

  He stood, eyes blazing as he clenched and unclenched his hands. “I must see Szerain,” he said through his teeth.

  Yeah, he was a tetch upset. I couldn’t imagine what he’d be like without the five nexus pygahs. I leaned back in my chair. “He’s not in the demon realm. He’s in hiding on Earth now.” Of that I was mostly sure. I paused as a spasm of grief tightened my chest. “He was my friend.” Or rather, Ryan was my friend. But Ryan was gone and had never even been real. I barely knew who Szerain was.

  Giovanni’s shoulders sagged. “He was mine as well. And he . . .”

  “He killed the woman you loved.” I let out a low sigh. “I’m sorry. I wish there was more I could do for you.”

  “I need solitude,” he said, voice hollow.

  “Of course,” I said without hesitation. Pellini ste
pped in from the war room right on cue, followed by Sharini Tandon. “You can go anywhere you want,” I continued to Giovanni, “but for your own safety, we’re assigning you a bodyguard. Her name is Sharini, and I promise she’ll keep her distance unless there’s reason to do otherwise. For now, I’m asking you to stay within the fence line. It’s not safe beyond it.” I had no intention of letting him leave—at least not yet—but it would be a lot easier if he remained here willingly. “If there’s anything you need, you have only to ask.”

  Tandon stepped up. “Signor Racchelli, it’s my pleasure to serve as your security detail. If you’re looking for a quiet place, there’s a nice little shady spot where Miss Jill put a couple of benches.” She smiled. “How about I show you the way, then I’ll leave you be.”

  Giovanni mutely pushed up and allowed himself to be escorted out. As soon as the front door closed, I dropped my head to the table and groaned.

  “When this is over, I want to spend a month in Tahiti.” I looked up at Pellini. “Tahiti still exists, right?”

  “Far as I know.”

  The walkie-talkie on the counter buzzed. I snagged it and pressed the button. “Go ahead.”

  “Detective Knight is at the front gate.” A pause. “He doesn’t look good.”

  “Copy that,” I said. “Clear him through. We’re ready for him.”

  • • •

  Knight was indeed covered in a hideously familiar red, viscous sweat. We wasted no time and got him settled on a futon mattress on the living room floor—well out of the way of foot traffic, since we knew about Pod Phase this time.

  I crouched beside him. “I know it doesn’t feel like it,” I said, “but you’re going to be okay. We’ll take care of you.”

  He gave me a wan smile. “Thanks.” His smile faded, and his throat worked as he swallowed. “I guess whatever I end up as can’t be worse than what I am right now.”

  My heart squeezed at the depth of emotion in his voice. “You’re magnificent now, and you’ll still be magnificent when you come out of this.”