Fury of the Demon

Chapter 44

The ringing of my phone jarred me from an oddly logical dream about encyclopedias and babies and ladders. I peered at the name on the caller ID and instantly shot directly to wide awake.

“Zack?”

“Hey, babe.” He didn’t sound as strained as a day and a half ago but didn’t sound at all animated either. “Caught you sleeping, huh?”

I glanced at the clock. A little after eight a.m. “Yeah, working consultant hours is kind of cool. How are you doing?”

“I’ve been lots better,” he said. “I’m not ready to leave here yet. I . . . can’t.” He went quiet for a moment. “I just wanted to talk.”

I felt the subtle desperation behind the words. “I’m here for you,” I assured him. “Eturnahl.”

“Kara,” he said in a voice so thick with emotion it brought a lump to my throat. “You’re okay? Are you?”

“I am,” I said, smiling softly at his concern. “I promise. I’m really okay.” But then I sighed out a breath. “I’m sorry if giving Vsuhl to Szerain made things harder for you.”

He echoed my sigh. “It’s so convoluted,” he said, as if the implications carried eons of pain. “I can’t process all of the possible complications yet. What I do know is that if you hadn’t given Vsuhl to him, you wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t be Kara. And that’s all that means anything right now.”

A warm glow went through me. It mattered to him that I was still me. “And you’re still Zakaar. Even more than you were before.”

He remained silent for several seconds. “How is Ryan?” he finally asked.

How could I explain it? “He seems all right. We had a pretty normal evening.” Grimacing, I sat up. “Zack, he knows about Szerain, but he looks like Ryan. I don’t understand. Did you partially resubmerge him or something from a distance?”

“No,” he said as though pronouncing a death warrant. “He did that. On his own. With Vsuhl, he freed himself, and is using it to give him a measure of stability.” He made a sound like a half-sob. “But he isn’t ready.”

My worry spiked. “Zack? What’s wrong?”

“I can’t do this,” he said in a broken voice. “Szerain is in danger, and he’s dangerous. I can’t protect him or others. I can’t deal with it.”

“I’m not sure you have to,” I said carefully. “Not the way you did before. He may not be ready, but there’s nothing we can do about that now, and I know he’s not going to abandon you. Neither will the rest of us. Once in the posse, always in the posse.” I wanted to reach through the phone and give him a hug. “It’s going to be all right.”

“I can’t see it,” he said weakly. “But I’ll believe you.”

“You’d better,” I told him.

I heard him clear his throat softly, take a breath, release it, then take another. “Kara, have you ever killed anyone in the line of duty before?”

The abrupt change of subject had me blinking in confusion. “No, I’ve never even been in a position to . . .” I suddenly understood where he was going with this: Pyrenth. That night, when I found Zack and brought him to Jill’s house, he had no doubt sensed my pain over the reyza’s death.

“Pyrenth was the first,” I said, throat tight. “No, wait.” An uncomfortable realization struck me. “He’s the first I knew for sure. I Earth-killed a kehza and a graa, but, at the time, I assumed any demon killed on Earth made it back through the void to the demon realm.” Now I knew that, while there was a good chance a demon could return, it was by no means a certainty.

“And if they’d died before on Earth and returned—”

“Then the good chance drops to crappy,” I finished for him. A second death on Earth for a demon usually meant death for real. Eilahn had died on Earth once already, and so I worried doubly for her.

“Pyrenth had traversed the void once before.”

The implications of that simple statement left me mentally scrambling and ripped a new wound in my pain over his death. I took a moment to put it all together. Zack waited in patient silence on the other end of the line.

“When I made the decision to use deadly force to stop Pyrenth from taking Idris,” I finally said, “I was playing the odds that he’d make it through the void and back to the demon realm. My intention was to stop him, to kill him if that’s what it took, with a secondary consideration that he’d have a chance of making it home. But it was a gamble.” I closed my eyes and let out a long slow breath. “I thought his odds were better than they were, but it was always a gamble.” Explaining it, actually speaking the words out loud, helped. My respect and gratitude for Zack climbed even higher. He was going through ten tons of shit and yet he still took the time and thought and energy to help me get through this.

“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, write 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.”