Legacy of the Demon

  “Ah, the never-ending refrain of the modern woman.”

  Chapter 35

  Though the air held a distinctly chilly bite, it was an absolutely gorgeous day, with bright blue skies and a scattering of happy puffy clouds. By the time Pellini and I had the garlands artistically draped around the front door, the net launcher had been properly sighted in, and Bryce’s mood was drastically improved. Now that I knew I wasn’t risking getting my head bitten off, I pulled Bryce aside to go over what to do with the various Kara’s Kompound residents and working personnel during the summoning.

  Bryce scrutinized the duty roster on the whiteboard. “As far as my security people go, we absolutely need to have a reserve force off-premises in case the worst happens.” He frowned. “I sure as hell don’t want everyone standing in a cluster on the big X when the bomb drops. Not a single one of them will want to leave, but that’s too bad.”

  “Maybe they can draw straws,” I said with a wry smile.

  “That’s exactly what they’ll do,” he replied, utterly serious. “The losers will have to ship out.”

  “At least they’ll have company. Not only do I want Janice, Michael, and Jill out of here, but I want the dog, cat, and kittens safe as well.”

  Bryce laughed. “That’ll make the losers happier. Kittens make everything better. I’ll send everyone to Jill’s house in town, unless you have an objection.”

  “That’s perfect. It’s already warded to the teeth with Zack’s protections.” I knew this was one decision Jill would be on board with, especially when she had a daughter out there who needed her alive and well.

  “Good deal,” Bryce said. “I’ll get all of that rolling.”

  With that settled, it was time to deal with the rest of my pre-summoning must-do list.

  As soon as I was showered, dressed, and armed, I stuffed Elinor’s journal and Szerain’s notebook into my bag then arranged for the security guard on standby, Dennis Roper, to follow my Humvee in a separate vehicle. Solo excursions were a big security no-no, and I heartily approved of our two-people-per-vehicle protocol. But at the moment, even the silent and stoic Roper was more company than I wanted.

  After a quick stop for supplies at the temporary building that housed the Beaulac PD crime lab, I continued on to the outreach center.

  My heart skittered when I turned onto the street and spied a military light utility vehicle parked out front. One of ours, I realized an instant later, recognizing the long dent on the right rear bumper. As we neared, security specialist Bubba Suarez stepped out of the vehicle with his weapon at the ready. The instant he saw it was me, profound relief flowed over his wide face.

  “I’m sure glad it’s you, ma’am,” he said after I parked and hurried up to him.

  “Is Jill inside?”

  “Yes, ma’am. She was dead set on coming here. Told me she had special business. We did a sweep of the building for threats, then she asked me real nice to wait outside for a bit while she took care of something.” He shifted his feet, grimacing. “I done texted her twice for status checks, and each time she says she’s fine, but it’s been almost a half hour now. I was just about to go on in when y’all came ’round the corner.” He turned his head and spat a stream of tobacco juice into the street. “We still ain’t got the chickens, dangit.”

  “I’ll check on her.”

  I told Roper to wait with Suarez, then I pushed open the front door of the center and stepped in.

  “Jill?”

  A few seconds of silence then, “In here.”

  My footsteps echoed as I moved through the foyer and into the common room. Jill sat slumped on a dusty chair by a scarred metal desk. Shafts of light speared through the gloom around her.

  “I thought that maybe if I came here I could feel something of my daughter, like how you felt Szerain,” she said, voice cracking. “But it’s just a smelly, dirty room.” She let out a brittle laugh. “I guess I’ve finally gone off the deep end.”

  “Shallow end is for people who refuse to take risks.” I brushed the worst of the grime off a second chair and pulled it over by her. “You’re not crazy, Jill. Coming here wasn’t crazy. Honestly, when I think about everything you’ve been through in the last year, I’m stunned you haven’t started painting the walls with your own poop.”

  She blinked at me. “That’s . . . completely disgusting.”

  “See? You’re still a long way from totally losing it.” I gave her a warm smile. “I was looking for you at home because I have an update for you.”

  Her expression turned guarded. “Spill it.”

  “After you left with Bryce last night, I tried to confirm arrangements with Szerain. We didn’t get to chat this time, but he gave me written, final instructions. The plan is still on for bringing them home.”

  “It can’t come soon enough.” She closed her eyes and let out a long sigh. “I need to hold my baby girl.”

  “I have something to show you.” I pulled Szerain’s notebook out of my bag, placed it on the desk between us and opened it to the first drawing. A baby looked up from a tumbled blanket, eyes bright, and mouth open in an expression of delight.

  “Oh my god. It’s her.” Jill’s eyes went to a sketch in the corner, a small dragon with its eyes closed and its head tipped up to the sun. “And . . . that’s her, too,” she said with a note of amazement in her voice.

  “Jill, she’s growing up fast.” I waited for her to tear her eyes from the sketch. “Maturing really fast because of her demahnk half.”

  “How fast?” The question came out in a strained croak.

  “Fast.” I flipped to a page with Ashava in human form—a little girl of nine or ten, eyes sparkling with humor above a mischievous smile. “This is her now.”

  Jill reached toward the page, hand trembling. “Oh my god. She’s beautiful.” Tears spilled onto her cheeks. “Look at her.”

  I waggled my fingers at the notebook. “There are more. Lots more.”

  She started at the beginning and paged through slowly, studying each drawing with reverent intensity as if absorbing every minute detail. Her gaze lingered on the last one. “I missed all of this. I missed her growing up.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “She still has plenty of growing up left to do, though. And it seems Szerain did his best to chronicle her life.”

  “Yes, he did.” Her eyes met mine. “He did that for me.” Jill sniffled and wiped the tears away. “It’s settled then. He gets cookies for life.”

  I laughed. “Sounds more than fair.”

  “Do you feel ready to do the summoning tonight?” she asked, a steely glint in her eye.

  “With luck, I will very soon.” I patted my bag. “The Symbol Man painted his sigils with blood, and I have plenty of luminol right here.”

  Comprehension lit her face. “He was trying to summon Rhyzkahl.” She laughed softly. “And now you’re going to plagiarize his work.”

  “Exactly! Seems only fair he should help me out now, considering everything he did.”

  “You’re looking for the glyphs from the big circle on the meeting room floor, right?”

  “Those are the ones.”

  “I’d better give you a hand,” she said, getting to her feet. “I think I have a bit more experience with luminol than you.”

  “You do.” I grinned. “I’ve never used it. I always waited for the crime lab to do all that stuff.” I dug the spray bottle and nitrile gloves out of my bag. “With two of us, it shouldn’t take long.”

  I ducked outside to let Roper and Suarez know what we were doing, then Jill and I went to the meeting room and got down to business. The first task was to block as much light as possible from the chinks between the boards covering the windows, but the plunder of some old sofa cushions dealt with that issue. Once the room was nice and dark, I shone my flashlight on a place where I knew there’d been
sigils.

  Jill spritzed the spot. I turned off my flashlight. The sigils glowed.

  “It’s working!” I jumped up and down a few times and did a quick happy dance. “Hot damn!”

  “So copy them down, you big weirdo,” Jill said with a touch of her old asperity. I seized her in a hug then got to work sketching the sigils and their placement. We quickly fell into a pattern of shine-spritz-draw, sidestepping our way around the large circle. But we’d barely made it halfway around when the shine-spritz produced a large solid glow instead of sigils.

  “Crap,” I muttered.

  “This is where the decapitated victim bled out,” Jill said. “His blood obscured the sigils.”

  That victim was the summoner who’d caused all the trouble. Peter Cerise, whose head Rhyzkahl had twisted off. I peered at the area but couldn’t make out a thing.

  Jill took another two steps and spritzed. “It should clear up right about here.” Light blood spatter glowed, but I could make out the sigils.

  “Looks like that big blood spot obliterated close to a dozen sigils,” I said. And there wasn’t a thing I could do about it but keep going. Kind of like life in general.

  To my relief, we didn’t run into any other ruined areas, and we eventually shined, spritzed, and drew our way back to where we’d started.

  I shone the light on the floor nearby, outside the ritual diagram. “Try here.”

  “Kara . . .”

  “Just do it. Please.”

  With a resigned sigh, she spritzed the spot. I flicked off the light and crouched beside the glowing patch. My blood, where the reyza Sehkeril had hooked his claws in my belly and left me to die in a pool of blood and viscera. I drew my gloved fingers across the luminescence. “It seems like an eternity ago. I was so . . .” I couldn’t find the word.

  “Innocent? Naïve? You were played by a player and had been kept in the dark about everything. Considering what and who you were up against, you kicked ass.”

  My gaze drifted to the luminol glow in the shape of a boot print. Rhyzkahl’s, where he’d tracked my blood after nudging my intestines with his toe. I let out a long breath that felt like the purging of toxic sludge, then stood. “I still don’t know all of what we’re up against, but the past is ancient history. I’m not that naïve woman anymore.”

  “You got that right, chick. You went through the fires of hell and came out fighting.”

  “I plan to kick a lot more ass,” I said with a smile. “Starting with a Jontari imperator tonight.”

  Jill laughed. “Slow down there, partner. Start off light with subduing him and bending him to your will.” She pulled a cushion from the window to let in shafts of sunlight. “Did you get enough of the sigils copied? I mean, considering about ten percent were ruined.”

  “I think it’ll be enough,” I said, looking down at my diagram sketch, easily picking out which aspects pertained to bindings and protections. The missing spark wasn’t jumping out at me, but I strangled the worry before it could take up residence. As soon as I made it back to the house, I’d go through it sigil by sigil and figure it out. Somehow. “I have a hundred times more info than when I got here. I’d call that a win.”

  Jill peered at a pair of sigils on the outer edge then pointed at my sketch. “Those two aren’t right. There’s supposed to be a long curved part that goes from the top of one to the middle of the other.”

  “Damn, you’re right. I forgot to put in the joining link.” I quickly penciled in the correction then looked up at her with a frown. “How’d you pick out such a tiny discrepancy?”

  She shrugged. “I have a good memory.”

  “A really good memory,” I said, impressed. The diagram had hundreds of sigils in it. As I skimmed my eyes over it again, my breath caught. With those two sigils corrected, everything else took on a new pattern, and now the diagram practically glowed with a life of its own.

  “Maybe I should learn what some of these things mean,” Jill said. She gestured at the sigils. “Might come in handy with being mother to a qaztehl.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” I said, closing my notebook to protect the diagram sketch. “There are a number of standard ones that you could learn to recognize.”

  “She’s freaked out,” Jill murmured.

  I gave her a perplexed look. “Who? Ashava?”

  Jill nodded. “Everything’s scarier with Szerain gone and Zack still weak. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen next.”

  Holy crap. Szerain wasn’t with the others in the dimensional pocket because he was still in the bubble. But I hadn’t told Jill anything about that. She had no possible way to know where Szerain was or wasn’t. Or Zack’s condition, for that matter. But Ashava knew. Jill was feeling Ashava’s worry and fear.

  Suddenly, other little snippets of conversation made more sense, such as Jill referring to Zack as Ashava’s sire and her certainty that her daughter had red hair. And now, correcting those sigils in my sketch.

  Ashava, you clever little minx, I thought with glee. She’d maintained a thread of contact with her mommy. Not only had she just helped me out, but the sadness no longer haunted Jill’s eyes. Ashava had reached out for reassurance and given it at the same time.

  I opened my mouth to tell Jill then closed it. What if her knowing about the connection made it tougher for Ashava to get through? Maybe the kid needed Jill to be mentally relaxed so that she could slip in unnoticed? I wasn’t sure how it worked, and I definitely didn’t want to jinx it. Probably best to wait and ask Szerain before saying anything.

  “I’ll tell you what’ll happen next,” I said brightly. “I’m going to make sure Elinor gets rescued, then we’ll follow through with the plan to get Szerain, Ashava, Zack, and Sonny back with us where they belong.”

  “That’s exactly right.” Jill gave a fierce nod. “Now get your ass home so you can summon a big bad demon.”

  “And you’re going to get chickens?”

  “Yup. Nowhere near as cool as a demon, but not all of us can be Kara Gillian.”

  “The world would run out of coffee within a week if everyone was Kara Gillian.”

  “Three days at best.” Jill strode to the door with a lilt in her step. “Then it would be every Kara Gillian for herself.”

  A world without coffee? I shuddered and followed her out.

  Chapter 36

  Back at the house, I started chewing my way through my pre-summoning to-do list, adding items and tasks as they occurred to me, and doing my best to not fret about the Be lordy??? at the very bottom of the page. Within the first hour, the list doubled in size, at which time I realized that I was possibly delving into minutiae in order to avoid dealing with that last item on the list. I therefore began a regime of merciless prioritization and delegation because, for fuck’s sake, Kara. No, I didn’t need to break out the weed-whacker and trim the grass around the nexus. I was summoning a demon, not the President. Nor did I personally need to change the burned out floodlight at the northwest corner of the house when I had any number of people who would gladly do it for me. In similar fashion, I delegated filling a sports bottle with tunjen, and crossed out Clean oven and Fold laundry. Seriously, what was I thinking?

  “Lunch,” Pellini said as I sat hunched over my list at the kitchen table.

  I obediently wrote down Lunch. “Can you take care of getting my wizard staff from DIRT?” The six-foot long turbo-charged cattle prod was deliciously effective against most demons and would be awfully nice to have on hand.

  “Sure thing, but only after you stop and eat your goddamn lunch.”

  I lifted my head, surprised to see a plate bearing a grilled-cheese sandwich, a generous handful of figs, and several strips of bacon. “Oh. Where’d that come from?”

  He cast his eyes heavenward. “I fucking cooked it while you sat there and muttered to yourself. Now eat it before I hold you
down and force-feed you.”

  I snatched up the sandwich and took a hasty bite. Pellini was the sort to carry out a threat like that. “Thanks,” I mumbled around bread and cheese. My appetite woke up as sandwich met stomach, and I tore through the rest of the food.

  “That’s better,” Pellini said with a satisfied nod.

  “Yeah, I feel better.” I leaned back and rubbed my happy belly. “Did Jill find an open farmer’s market?”

  He gave me a curious look. “No. Why?”

  “The figs,” I said, gesturing to the remnants on the plate. “Where’d they come from?”

  “Seriously? From the fig trees on your property.”

  I blinked. “Wait. I have fig trees?”

  Pellini tossed his hands up. “Jesus. You have about half a dozen along the east fence line.”

  “Huh. That’s cool. I love figs.”

  He shook his head, laughing softly. “I’m gonna go see about getting the wizard staff.”

  “Thanks for lunch,” I said. “You take pretty good care of me.”

  He snorted and drew breath to make what I was certain would be a snarky reply, but instead he let it out and gave me a crooked smile. “Anytime, Kara,” he said then strode off toward the war room.

  Feeling restored in body and mind, I skimmed the rest of my list, pleased to see that the major tasks had all been taken care of—with the exception of the Be Lordy crap. Maybe being lordy was about being super confident? Lifting my chin, I filled my brain with positive thoughts. Tonight, I will successfully summon a Jontari Imperator, survive the experience, and send him to Fed Central to snatch Elinor from Xharbek’s clutches!

  Crap. Unless Xharbek had moved her. That was a very non-positive thought, but a darn timely one. It would suck major ass to make it through the summoning only to send Dekkak to the wrong place.

  After a moment of consideration, I pulled out my phone and called Agent Clint Gallagher. It was a total long shot, but if he was keeping tabs on the plague victims, he might know something about a non-plague patient.