Diana Rowland - Fury of the Demon

“I haven’t,” I said as I held up my hand. “Scout’s honor.”

“Excellent! Flaying is so very messy,” she observed as she turned and sauntered up the steps. “I do prefer to avoid it, though I would perhaps make an exception in the case of Ryan.”

I smiled. It was good to be home.

Some people had to deal with jet lag. Me, I got dimension lag. Four-thirty in the morning, and wide awake with zero hope of getting back to sleep. The house was quiet, which I was used to after living alone for so long. However, I felt obliged to creep about, since I figured Ryan probably didn’t want to hear me thumping around this early in the morning.

I doubted Eilahn and Zack were asleep since the demonkind seemed to need far less rest than puny humans, but I had no idea where they were. Eilahn’s favorite place on the property was the roof and her second favorite was the woods on my nearly-ten acres of property. The roof, most likely, I decided, with the pair of them perched like beautiful human-shaped gargoyles by my satellite dish.

After making my silent-ish way to the kitchen, I plunked my laptop and notepad on the table, started a pot of coffee, then scrounged in the fridge while I pondered what needed to go on my Hunt for Idris to-do list. Even though I knew he was still in the demon realm, Katashi was definitely right there at the top, so I went ahead and scrawled his name on my pad before prepping my first cup of coffee with the appropriately massive amounts of sugar and cream.

Like me, Zack had a list of the known Katashi people and would do some digging there. Katashi’s main base of operations was in Japan, but I wasn’t going to make the assumption that his people had Idris there. Master Isumo Katashi had too damn many connections.

Over eighty years ago, he’d performed the first summoning since the mid-seventeenth century. Self-taught, he’d called Gestamar, a challenging as all hell high-level demon. It still boggled my mind that he’d managed to do so and survive. I couldn’t stand the man, but I had to give him mad respect for that feat.

As the first summoner of the twentieth century, he naturally became the root source of all modern summoning, which meant that every active summoner had either learned directly from Katashi or one of his students, myself included. Though I’d spent only a couple of useless months with him, my aunt Tessa—who’d taught me—was his student for almost a decade.

In other words, the old man surely had one hell of a network with students and associates all over the world, which meant a myriad of potential hiding places for Idris.

I sat, took a sip of coffee and noted Follow up with Ryan and Zack beneath Katashi’s name. Better to wait for some solid info on the old bastard before tackling that mess. I tapped my pen on the paper and considered the events that occurred right before I was summoned to the demon realm six months ago, then wrote TRACY GORDON in all capital letters. Though not directly linked to Idris, Tracy had tried to sacrifice me to make a permanent gate between this world and the demon realm, which meant he surely had connections to someone. Most likely one of the Mraztur since Kehlirik, a reyza of Rhyzkahl, had guarded Tracy’s focus diagram.

Ryan, Zack, and I had already done a pretty thorough search/tear-down of the house where Tracy Gordon had lived, helped by some nice sledgehammer-to-wall action. I was pretty damn confident nothing remained there that could be useful to us.

It was his other house that interested me, the one that he owned through a shell corporation, and the one where, in a room packed full of books and papers, Kehlirik had guarded the diagram. If Tracy had kept journals, I figured they’d be there, and I damn well intended to find and take them, along with anything else in his library that caught my eye.

Finders keepers, you son of a bitch.

With the sun now rising and my plans of library-pillaging firmly in mind, I finished my coffee, took a quick shower, dressed, then grabbed my bag and headed for the front door.

I made it out and onto the porch before I realized the hitch in my plans. Two Chevy Impalas sat in the drive, along with a Toyota Camry I didn’t recognize. The Impalas had government plates, which told me that my fed-boys had finally been issued new vehicles to replace their Crown Vics. And I didn’t know who the Camry belonged to, except that it wasn’t me.

I have no car . I’d resigned from the Beaulac police department, which meant I didn’t have a department-issued vehicle anymore. Well, shit . Ride on the back of Eilahn’s motorcycle? That would make pillaging the library a lot more challenging. I sighed and turned to head back inside, then paused. Something was different about my porch.

A lot was different, I realized with a start. The stairs had been rebuilt and the railing along the front replaced and painted. Moreover, a swing now graced the porch—a lovely wicker thing that hung from two solid eye-bolts in the ceiling.

I moved down off the porch and onto the gravel driveway, turned to get a better view of the front of my house. There were flowers—actual living plants—in neat beds on either side of the steps. A pretty little crystal and brass arrangement hung from a corner of the porch, catching the morning sunlight and casting it back out in shards of rainbow. There was even a birdfeeder hanging from the other corner, though I wondered whether any bird would come near the house while demons perched atop it.

I smiled with warm pleasure. My house looked . . . nice.

Eilahn leapt lightly from the roof and smiled at me. “You have your bag. Where are we going?” she asked with an enthusiastic lift in her voice.

“I was hoping to go to Tracy Gordon’s summoning house to check out his library,” I told her. Maybe I could borrow the Camry? That would be better than riding pillion on the motorcycle.

Her face grew hard and more than a little scary. “Tracy Gordon baztakh unk kirlesk .” She spat into the gravel.

I didn’t know what that all meant, but it was simple enough to guess the sentiment, and I certainly couldn’t blame her for it. He’d shot her twice, point blank, and killed her. Fortunately, because it happened on Earth, she made it through to the demon realm and recovered. Once through the void was usually successful. Twice, not so much.

I nodded toward the Camry. “Whose car is that?”

She followed my gaze, then looked back to me and beamed. “Yours!”

I gave her a blank look. “How can it be mine?”

Eilahn ducked through the front door and returned before I had time to process she’d gone. She dangled a set of keys in front of me, displayed the brass fob with Kara’s Kar neatly engraved in script on it. “Because this proclaims that these keys match your vehicle, I have tested them in the ignition, and they fit. Therefore, that,” she said with a nod toward the car, “is your vehicle by the process of a successful trial.”

Kara’s Kar? I rolled my eyes. My house elves were out of control, but right now I wasn’t about to complain. I took the keys from her and smiled. “Well, let’s try it out!”

A note on the dash in Zack’s neat handwriting held clear, concise instructions for operating the automatic gate. Yet another point for the elves.

The house Tracy Gordon had used for summonings and other arcane practices was on the far side of Beaulac, but since it was so early in the morning, and there was little traffic, I went ahead and cut straight through town.

A garbage truck made noisy work of dumpster-emptying behind Beaulac Junior High, while across the street a man in nothing but shorts and sleep-tousled hair ignored his dog’s yappy barking at the din. A few determined souls headed into Magnolia Fitness Center, clutching towels and water bottles. I was probably still a member there, I realized, since my dues were on auto-payment.