Diana Rowland - Fury of the Demon

“Back when I was a street cop, this was right about the time I’d be heading to the station for shift change,” I told Eilahn. “Whether I was coming on or going off duty, I always liked seeing the world wake up.”

She slanted a disbelieving glance my way. “ Liked? You who pulls your pillow over your head if any dares disturb you before mid-morning?” She let out a low snort. “I doubt you woke to your alarm and thought, ‘Oh, what a pleasure it will be to see the world wake up!’ You would have liked to have been in your bed.”

“Okay, so maybe ‘liked’ is a relative term,” I said with a laugh. “But since I had to be up anyway to keep my job, I figured I might as well dig for a silver lining.”

“Ah, yes,” she replied, “because you are always a model of good cheer before you have had your coffee.”

“Are you crazy?” I asked with mock horror. “Who the hell said anything about going to work without coffee? Do you know how many people I’d have shot even before roll call?”

Eilahn gave a musical laugh, then nodded toward Grounds For Arrest , the coffee shop across the street from the PD. “I wonder how he has remained in business with you gone.”

“Now that’s a mystery.”

My mood remained light as we continued on through town. We passed by the Garden Street Industrial Park, and I stuck my tongue out at it since it was from there that I’d finally been summoned to the demon realm. The industrial park had been developed a couple of decades ago with grandiose plans of bringing in high-tech industry. Too grandiose for Beaulac, it turned out. A gate in the chain link fence was closed and locked, and a large sign proclaimed it to be the future home of an “exciting new development in health care” by RiseHigh LLC.

I doubted the new development would be as exciting as promised, but at least something worthwhile would come of the place.

We made it to the house without any issues and, thanks to the early hour, we managed to avoid problems with nosy neighbors. To my relief and dismay, the wards on Tracy’s house remained intact. Good because it meant the contents probably hadn’t been vandalized, and bad because we’d have to get through some serious protections.

It took close to half an hour of us working together to unwind and temporarily neutralize protections, but finally Eilahn and I squeezed through and into the back of the house without causing an explosion or major blood spillage.

“You will acquire his library?” she asked as we gazed at the books and scrolls and papers.

“Yes. I’m claiming it under Article Five, subsection three, paragraph A of the Multidimensional and Interplanar My Goddamn Property Now statute, namely the section titled Right to Have All The Shit of The Guy Who Shot You and Tried to Fuck Me Up.” I nodded firmly. “This is all mine now.”

Her mouth twitched. “I do not argue your right to ownership,” she said. “But I wonder how you will acquire it.” She arched an eyebrow at me. “You recall our difficulty entering this dwelling? It will be similar on the egress.”

My mood took a nose dive. “Well, shit.” Double shit. Because of the complexity of the protections, we hadn’t dismantled most of them, simply eased by. “Mzatal would be able to rip through them like a wet dog through tissue paper, right?”

“The analogy, while odd, seems apt.”

“Fine,” I said, scowling at being thwarted, even if only temporarily. “Then for now, we’ll gather up as much as we can carry of stuff that looks personal to Tracy. Journals, notes, letters, whatever. That man was up to some weird-ass shit, and I don’t think he came up with it on his own.”

“Nor do I,” she replied, expression grave. “Then let us begin.”

Together, we moved toward the bookcases.

We managed to remove two foot-high stacks of spiral notebooks, loose papers, a few beaten up leather journals, and one raggedy Trapper Keeper without getting badly zapped by any of the wards as we left. Though we ended up leaving the majority of the library behind, what remained looked to be older volumes and reference materials, and I mollified myself with the reminder that the stuff was as safe there as it would be darn near anywhere else.

Both of the Impalas were gone when we returned home. An early morning for the two agents, I noted. Eilahn and I dumped our piles of plunder on the coffee table and then settled in for some nice light reading.

I picked up a battered red leather journal at random, flipped through it casually to see if anything stood out. Annoyingly, there didn’t seem to be any sort of central theme. Accounts of specific summonings jumbled together with diagram sketches, miscellaneous notes, and mundane to-do lists. A dozen or so names filled the margin next to a halfway decent sketch of a zrila. I read through them one by one, murmuring each name to myself. Sara Fillmore. Bryce Thatcher. Robert Finch. Henrietta Sloan. Jose Luis Hernandez. Carla Billings. There were more, but none sparked even a sliver of familiarity. Eilahn denied knowledge of them as well, so I marked the page for future investigation and moved on. One folder, with a picture of a kitten on the cover, held several pages from a sketch book—all with odd drawings of leaf-less trees. Or at least I thought they were trees. In all of the drawings the tree-thing had a weirdly short central trunk with branches above that divided and spread and divided some more. Yet it also reminded me of pictures I’d seen of arteries and veins and capillaries, the way they all divided into smaller and smaller vessels.

A few of the sketches had snatches of alliterative phrases penciled along the outer edges of the pages, but with no meaning or central theme that I could grasp. Boss-boy begets better brains. Masters make misery manually. Cancer clutched Claire’s comfort. Good games give great gifts. And many others just as bizarre.

I read through the odd phrases several times, turning the papers around as I did so to see if anything clicked from different angles, but finally admitted defeat, replaced all of the sketches in the folder, and moved on to the next item.

We pored through for another hour or so and found lots of interesting factoids and tidbits, such as how to determine the gender of a savik , and that a mature faas has seventy-two teeth, but nothing directly relevant. At around eight thirty a.m. we took a break, Eilahn to the roof for some morning sun, and me to scrounge breakfast and make another pot of coffee. I had a feeling it wouldn’t be the last one I made this morning.

My phone buzzed with Zack’s number as the pot began its gurgling. “Hey, Zack, what’s up?”

“Beaulac PD just called Ryan and me out to a scene,” he said. “Since you’re a special consultant, it would be righteous if you could make it.”

Special consultant. That still cracked me up. “I can do that,” I said. “Text me the address. What kind of scene?”

His voice turned grim. “Murder.”

“A murder that your team gets called out on,” I said. Shit.

“We haven’t seen pics yet, but they’re saying Symbol Man.”

My eyes narrowed even as a chill crept through me. “The real Symbol Man is long dead. Let’s hope this is just a mundane copycat.”

“I don’t know. I’m not holding my breath on that one.”

“I’m leaving in two minutes.” Shit. The Symbol Man was a serial killer who’d terrorized the Beaulac area for four years around the time I became a cop. He was dubbed thus for the convoluted mark he’d carved into each tortured and murdered victim. After thirteen victims he stopped, and when three years went by with no sign of more victims, most people concluded he’d either died or left the area.