Mark of the Demon

CHAPTER 1

I could hear the intruder breaking into my house.

Unfortunately, it was in the same instant that the demon appeared before me.

The sound of shattering glass upstairs disrupted my focus for only a fraction of a second, but it was enough for the arcane portal to shift from my control and leap away from me like an untethered water hose. I made a frantic grasp at the portal, cold sweat breaking out under my arms as I struggled to wrench the power back into place. My heart slammed in my chest as I fought the uncontrolled energy, seizing each strand to bind and anchor it. My technique was raw and inelegant, but I didn’t give a crap. I was only interested in surviving, not in how pretty it looked.

It felt like an eternity, but it was merely several frenzied seconds before I had the wildly fluctuating potencies settled and calmed. I cautiously loosened my hold as I took several deep, ragged breaths, struggling to slow the mad galloping of my pulse. That had been far too close for my peace of mind. If that loss of focus had come just a few seconds earlier, I most likely would have been ripped apart—either by the maelstrom of the arcane portal I’d opened in the basement of my house or by the claws of the demon I’d just summoned through that portal.

I exhaled a shuddering breath, finally releasing my hold on the portal as I looked with no small amount of triumph at the massive demon on one knee before me, his head lowered and his wings tucked along his back. He had remained utterly still throughout my battle with the portal, and I silently thanked whatever powers existed that I had already sealed the terms with him before losing control. I could feel a grin spread across my face. I’d done it. I had summoned a reyza, the highest of the twelve levels of demons.

I was officially a full-fledged summoner.

The sharp crack of more glass breaking spoiled my reverie. My grin shifted to a scowl. A burglar. Just great. If I went upstairs to deal with the idiot, I would have to abandon my ulterior motive for summoning the demon. And summoning a reyza was worth more than a few wordly possessions. Besides, my wordly possessions weren’t worth very much.

But the demon snapped his head up at the sound. “Someone intrudes on your demesne,” he growled, deep voice resonating powerfully through the basement. Before I could take a breath to give a response or command, the demon bounded up the heavy wooden stairs of my basement, bursting through the door that exited into the main hallway of my house.

“Son of a bitch!” I swiftly anchored the potency that I hadn’t yet grounded. Well, so much for that plan. My legs shook as I staggered up the stairs after the demon, and I snarled at the fatigue that slowed me down. I was used to feeling somewhat drained after a summoning, but this was more than I’d expected.

I heard a panicked shriek coming from the front of my house and I took off in that direction, forcing my wobbly legs to move. Okay, I managed to summon him. Now can I control him? The shriek of terror abruptly spiraled upward as I lurched down the hall.

“Kehlirik! No harm!” I shouted, commanding the demon with my voice even as I exerted mental pressure on the arcane bindings.

I rounded the corner to the living room, panting for breath and grateful that my house was “cozy” instead of palatial. I wasn’t sure if I could have made it much farther without falling on my face. I made a quick mental note: Get more rest before summoning a twelfth-level demon!

The demon snarled and turned to me, holding a rail-thin, gibbering man by the collar and looking insanely incongruous against the muted sage-green walls and cherry-wood furniture in my living room. One wingtip brushed the computer on my desk, and I resisted the urge to grab that wing and yank him away. Probably not a good idea when I still wasn’t certain if the demon would abide by my will.

“You should let me slay him, summoner,” the demon said in a deep voice that sounded like rolling boulders. He held his captive dangling above the floor with no apparent effort and no strain showing in his heavily muscled body. He towered over me, his head topping mine by several feet, with leathery wings the color of burnished copper extending several more feet beyond that. In a house with eight-foot ceilings, the demon would have been forced to crouch awkwardly and tuck in his wings in order to fit. Fortunately for him, my Acadian-style house had the traditional fifteen-foot ceilings designed for the subtropical climate of south Louisiana, where high ceilings helped keep houses cool.

I took a deep, steadying breath. The demon wasn’t resisting my control. One less thing to sweat right now. “No, Kehlirik,” I said carefully. “Our justice works differently in this sphere. But I thank you for your aid.” The demon’s captive had ceased his shrieking, at least, now reduced to whimpering moans. I rubbed the sudden gooseflesh on my arms, still horribly unnerved at how close I’d come to disaster. Just a few seconds earlier… I threw off a shudder and forced my attention back to the present.

A throbbing growl came from the demon’s throat. “He is a thief. Worthless. He has no honor.” He crouched and dropped the man to the floor, then pinned the intruder down with one foot. He tucked his wings behind him, clasping wickedly clawed hands together in front of him. A thick, sinuous tail curled around his legs, tip twitching in indication of his mood, and a dark and spicy scent surrounded him, foreign and wild. Crouched, his head was level with mine, and I was relieved that I could stop craning my neck to speak to him. This was only the second reyza I had ever seen, and I was still shocked at how large they were.

“It is … different here,” I said, even though I heartily agreed with the demon’s assessment of his captive. “I’m going to have enough trouble explaining away his talk of winged monsters.”

“If I slay him, he cannot speak of winged monsters,” Kehlirik replied, with undeniable logic. Then his broad nostrils flared as he snorted, “Not that I am a monster.”

I had to smile. “No, reyza. You are no monster.” Though the demon was monstrous in appearance—flat nose set in a bestial face, a wide mouth accented with curved fangs, and a thick ridge crest that swept back over his head and down his spine—I knew far too well that he was anything but a monster. “But it would be more difficult to explain a dead body,” I continued. “Murder is a serious offense here.”

He bared his teeth, lips curling back from the wicked fangs. “No body would be found, summoner. But I will respect your desire.” He inclined his head to me, then spread his wings, somehow managing not to knock any of my pictures off the shelves. I looked at him in uninhibited delight. I’d spent almost ten years studying and training, carefully guided by my mentor and aunt through the summoning rituals of each level of demon, gradually working my way up to working solo. A solo summoning of a reyza was considered “graduation,” and here I was with one in my living room.

I crouched to get a look at the wide-eyed man beneath Kehlirik’s foot, unconsciously echoing the demon’s posture. Pale and skinny with scraggly hair that stood out from his head, the intruder was probably in his early to mid thirties, though I knew that my estimate could be off by about a decade. Heavy drug use tended to age a person, and I could easily peg him as a meth or possibly crack user. He also had the distinct sour odor of someone who hadn’t paid close attention to hygiene for quite some time, and I found myself shifting slightly closer to the reyza, whose scent was far more appealing.

“Wow, did you ever pick the wrong house tonight,” I said. Then I had to laugh as a realization hit me. “Wait. I bet you’re the one who broke into those two houses up the highway last week. Am I right?”

The man whimpered and shook his head, his eyes wild. “No! No, not me! I … I thought this was my buddy’s house—”

Kehlirik snarled down at the man, causing him to yelp in terror again. “I’m not stupid,” I informed my intruder. “Don’t insult me again.”

The man began to shake with sobs. “OhGodohGod, p-please don’t let it eat me! I’ll never do it again, I swear. I just needed enough to buy a rock. Oh, God!”

I shifted my regard to the demon. Kehlirik rumbled low in his throat, returning my gaze with eyes full of intelligence and cunning. I was ridiculously tempted to screw with my burglar and ask the demon if he was hungry, but I wasn’t completely sure that Kehlirik would realize I was kidding. I was fairly positive that demons had no taste for human flesh, but it was probably best to not test the issue. There were plenty of unknowns when it came to demons.

I stood, shaking a slight cramp out of my leg. I really couldn’t allow the demon to kill him. The guy was a drug addict and probably had a rap sheet a mile long, but I doubted that any of his offenses were of the capital variety—most likely nothing more than theft to support his habit. Besides, I was supposed to be one of the good guys.

Oh, well. There was no doubt that he was going to babble about what he saw. I would just have to trust that no one would believe any ravings he might have about winged monsters.

Besides, it was his own damn fault that he’d picked my house to break into, on a night that I’d summoned a demon.

A deliciously wicked compromise occurred to me. “Reyza, I do not wish this one slain, but perhaps you could do me a service.”

The demon’s eyes glowed a ruddy orange in the dim light of my living room. “Name your desire, summoner.”

With effort, I kept my face composed. “I would have him punished for his intrusion, yet he must be returned to me physically unharmed.”

The demon inclined his head gravely, but I was fairly sure I could see amusement in his eyes. “It will be done, summoner.”

I barely had time to step out of the demon’s way before he snatched up the pathetic man and bounded out the front door. I followed, pausing just long enough to grab my cell phone and handcuffs off my desk. I exited onto my porch just in time to see Kehlirik leap into the air with my erstwhile intruder firmly grasped in clawed hands.

I let out a snicker and sat on the front step. I listened as the panicked screams faded into the night sky, then dialed the number for the St. Long Parish Sheriff’s Office.

“Hi, this is Detective Kara Gillian with the PD,” I said when the dispatcher answered. “Could you please send a patrol unit to my home address? I have a ten-fifteen on a 62R here.” A 10–15 was an arrest, and a 62R was a burglary. Though I worked for the Beaulac Police Department, I lived outside the city limits, which meant that if something criminal happened at my house, it was sheriff’s office jurisdiction.

“A 62R … Kara, someone broke into your house? Way out there?”

I recognized the woman’s voice as a dispatcher who’d previously worked with the PD. Slightly pudgy with harshly dyed red hair, but I couldn’t remember the woman’s name to save my life. “Yeah, but all he managed to do was break a window by the door.”

The dispatcher laughed. “Bad choice of houses!”

You have no idea, I thought. “No kidding,” I said instead. “Good thing the noise woke me up.”

“All right, I’ll get a unit out there.”

I set the phone down and clasped my hands lightly around my knees, looking up at the moon that shone full through the barest sheen of clouds. A languid breeze twined through the dark trees, rustling needles and bringing a deep, rich scent of earth and pine to me. I hugged myself against the slight chill, listening to the faint buzz of a mosquito and the song of a nearby cricket. A satisfied peace stole through me, an almost-Pavlovian response to my environment. I’d lived in this house my entire life—with the exception of one terrible month after my father was killed by a drunk driver. I was eleven and had been placed in foster care until my aunt Tessa could return from Japan to take over as my legal guardian. My mother had passed away three years before that, from ovarian cancer that had gone undetected until it was far too late, and there were no other relatives—or even close friends—to take me in, a fact that had not pleased my aunt at the time, especially since the one time she’d met me before I’d been in diapers. But she’d done what she could to lessen the upheaval for me, despite her reluctance to take on the enormous responsibility of raising a preteen kid. She’d moved into this house with me instead of yanking me out of the only home I’d ever known, knowing that in time I would find more comfort than grief here.

I was nearly thirty now and finally beginning to realize just how important that comfort was to me. I loved it out here, far from town and other houses. I lived on a seldom-traveled highway, my driveway was long and winding, and the nearest neighbor was well over a mile away.

It was the perfect house for someone who required privacy.

And it wasn’t until I was fifteen that I’d learned my aunt’s ulterior motive for the decision to raise me in this house. My aunt Tessa was a summoner of demons, and the basement of this house was an ideal place for a summoning chamber.

A few minutes later, the demon swooped down to land neatly in front of me, dangling his ashen-faced prisoner by one ankle. “I believe he is suitably cowed.”

Too bad I couldn’t give this treatment to all my arrestees. We’d probably have fewer repeat offenders, I thought as I handcuffed the unresisting man. I left him whimpering softly on the porch with his hands cuffed behind his back, then returned my attention to the demon. “My thanks again, Kehlirik.”

The demon slowly sank into a crouch. “Summoner, this was the first time you called a reyza unaided, yes?”

I gave a wary nod. Had I screwed something up?

He snorted, flaring his nostrils. “I did not think that you called me for the sole purpose of thwarting an intrusion. Had you another desire for this summoning?”

I rubbed the back of my neck. “I … had been hoping to learn how to reverse a portal without having to close and reopen.” That was why it was worth the effort to summon the higher-level demons. With the proper negotiation of terms, they could be persuaded to share a measure of their knowledge and skills.

The demon ticked his claws against his leg, a thoughtful expression on his monstrous face. “And you were forced to anchor and close when I left your control to apprehend your intruder. Forgive me. I should have waited to know your wishes first.”

“No, it’s all right,” I said, more than a little shocked by the apology. “Trust me, I’m very pleased that you caught the guy, especially before he did any real harm.”

“Still, I should have waited to know your will first.” He gave me a small bow, moonlight glinting off the curved horns on his head. “When next you summon me, I will school you in the technique to allay my shame in failing you.”

I controlled my expression, with effort. I knew that matters of honor were deathly serious among the demonkind, but this was my first experience at being owed a debt of honor. “You have not failed me,” I said, carefully choosing my words and trying not to show my glee, “but I would be honored to learn this and would consider any debt between us null.”

Kehlirik abruptly went still, hissing softly.

I took a cautious step back. “Is something wrong?” Crap. What had I done now?

The demon gave a low growl. “Something touches the arcane in this sphere.”

I started to relax, then frowned. “What do you mean? Another summoning?” There weren’t many other summoners in the region. In fact, I didn’t know of any in all of southeast Louisiana except for my aunt, though I figured New Orleans probably boasted a couple. Of course, people who made a practice of summoning demons didn’t usually hang signs on their door advertising the fact, and summoning itself was not exactly a common skill. You had to have someone mentor you in the art for several years, plus you had to be willing to shed some blood now and then.

I’d been mentored by my aunt Tessa, of course. By the time I hit my teenage years, I realized that there was more to the world—and my aunt—than met the eye. The day after I received my driver’s license, my aunt “introduced” me to my first demon, who confirmed her suspicion that I had the ability to be a summoner. After beginning my training, I discovered that here, finally, was something I excelled at. The rituals, the forms—all felt as natural as breathing. Training under my aunt had not always gone smoothly, but I’d never regretted starting down that path to become a summoner.

Maybe Tessa had summoned tonight as well? The spheres were in excellent alignment for the higher-level summonings, and with the moon at full it couldn’t get much better.

The demon settled his wings, as if uneasy. “I cannot tell, but it has a taint to it.”

“What sort of taint?”

Kehlirik growled again, a deep, throbbing sound that made the hair on my arms stand on end, even as used to demons as I was. “Blood and death.” His eyes narrowed. “More I cannot determine. I am not versed in such. You would need to call another to learn more.”

Crap. There was no way to summon again tonight. Two summonings in one night was far too draining and dangerous. I glanced up at the moon again. It would still be full enough tomorrow. That would work.

Kehlirik gave a heavy snort. “A vehicle approaches this place. Do you require more service of me?”

“No,” I said, after a brief hesitation. “My thanks again, reyza. Your help has been invaluable this night.” My original reason for summoning the demon had been blown, but it had been more than made up for by his promise to school me in the more-advanced forms. I would definitely summon him again on the next full moon.

Kehlirik folded his wings in close and bowed his head before me. I took a deep breath, finding my focus, then lifted my arms and began to speak the words of dismissal as I pulled potency to me. A sharp wind rose from nowhere, sending dust into my face and bringing with it an acrid, sulfurous smell that burned my nose. I squinted against the wind at the massive form of the demon, carefully holding my focus as I finished the chant. Kehlirik rose up with a bellow, spreading his wings and throwing his head back. A blinding sliver of light formed behind him, and in the span between one heartbeat and the next he disappeared, with a sharp crack like a breaking glacier. The light dissipated and faded, spinning off sparklets that danced briefly in my peripheral vision before disappearing.

The wind died instantly and I dragged my hands through my shoulder-length mud-brown hair, finger-combing it as best I could. Just in time too; I could see headlights coming up my long driveway and hear the crunch of tires on gravel. My legs wobbled and I sat heavily on my front step again, taking deep breaths to get rid of the black spots that briefly pirouetted through my vision. Dismissals were nearly as draining as summonings, though nowhere near as dangerous.

The sheriff’s unit stopped just a few feet from my front porch and out stepped Justin Sanchez—a short and skinny deputy with uneven teeth and dark hair that looked unkempt no matter how short he cut it. He sported a scraggly mustache that looked like a balding caterpillar beneath a nose that had a slight bend to the right. He’d been with the PD before he transferred to the sheriff’s office and had been one of my teammates back when I first became a cop, teaching me early on that size wasn’t everything in a fight. More importantly, he taught me how to snap my gum—an annoying trick I used to harass my aunt until she threatened to cease teaching me if she ever saw gum in my mouth again.

He gave me a grin. “Looks like this moron picked the wrong house, huh?”

I batted my eyelashes and put on an innocent expression. “Why, Officer, I’m jest a helpless li’l gal. I was skeert to death!”

He laughed. “Yeah, right. For some reason I feel sorry for this guy.”

If you only knew.

“By the way, nice jammies,” he said with a sly smile.

I hurriedly crossed my arms over my chest. The “jammies” were just the silk shirt and pants that I wore to summon, but it hadn’t occurred to me to throw on different clothes. Or even a bra. Not that I was so well-endowed that it was instantly obvious, but Justin was a cop and a guy. And it was chilly out. He had noticed.

And while I knew he was just teasing me and giving me shit, I never knew quite how to respond when guys joked with me in a quasi-sexual way. My aunt Tessa was not the most sociable of people, and I’d been forced to figure out the complexities of social skills on my own—with varying degrees of success. That was one of the reasons I loved being a cop: There was a built-in sense of brotherhood that satisfied a long-buried desire to somehow belong.

That was also why I loved being a summoner—there were rules when dealing with demons. Dealing with humans was never simple or straightforward.

Justin didn’t seem to notice my angst—he just snickered at my reaction, then settled down to the business of taking my statement and the report of the burglary. He took a few obligatory pictures of the damage to the window by the front door but didn’t bother going inside. Damn good thing, since the door to the basement was still ajar. That would have been a tough one to explain—the chalked circle, the carefully placed candles, the tinge of incense. I kept my smile fixed on my face while I gave myself a mental head-smack. I had no desire to be dubbed a “Satanist” by people who had zero clue about demons and the arcane. Even though there was no such creature as “Satan” or “Lucifer” or a “Prince of Darkness”—at least not among the creatures I dealt with—that fact wouldn’t help me explain away my penchant for summoning the other-planar creatures that were known as demons.

Finally Justin had all the information he needed and had my perp stuffed into the back of his car. He scowled as he closed the door. “Dopehead. He’s totally zoned out.” He glanced back at me as he climbed into the driver’s seat. “Hey, I think you cut yourself on some of the glass.”

I followed his gaze to my left forearm, where a thin trickle of blood was snaking its way down to my hand. I quickly swiped at the blood with the hem of my shirt. It wasn’t the first time I’d stained the shirt with blood. “Yeah, looks like I brushed against something. It doesn’t look too bad though.” I knew it wasn’t a serious cut. The knife I’d used was razor-sharp, and I’d become skilled at making the requisite slice no deeper than it needed to be. It was always worth that small pain to feel the sense of utter satisfaction after a successful summoning, to know that, as long as I didn’t screw up anything in the ritual, I would be able to control a demon. Even if I couldn’t control anything else in my life, I knew I had that.

“Well, be thankful that you’re not working tonight. Apparently the night watchman at the wastewater plant found a body.”

I leaned against his car. “Unless the guy was killed with a bad check, I doubt I’ll be involved.” That was one nice thing about working mostly white-collar crimes: I very seldom got called out in the middle of the night for an investigation.

Okay, that was the only nice thing. Everything else about it bored the living crap out of me. For two years I’d busted my ass as a detective in Property Crimes, and three weeks ago I’d finally been rewarded with a transfer to the Violent Crimes Division. However, I had yet to have a case assigned to me, and since there were still plenty of check-fraud and identity-theft cases, I’d continued to work those while I learned the ropes of homicide investigations.

But I could live with that. The feeling of accomplishment at the promotion had been damn near as sweet as a successful summoning. Here I was with thirty looming on the horizon, and I could actually say that I was finally getting somewhere in my life. I had a solid career and something resembling a future, despite my best efforts to fuck up my life when I’d been young and stupid.

“Girl,” Justin corrected as he pulled on his seat belt. “Not a guy. Cut all to shit, from what I heard, with a big mark on her chest.”

Goose bumps sprang up on my arms. “You mean, cut as in torture? Is the mark on her chest a symbol?”

Justin snorted. “Now, why you gonna go thinking like that? It’s probably some crack whore who got on the wrong side of her dealer.”

“Or it could be the Symbol Man—”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re as bad as the rookie officer who called it in,” he chided with a teasing smile. “He was squalling that he had a ‘Symbol Man murder!’ Don’t you be overreacting and jumping to conclusions too. I mean, it’s been three years since the last body was found. And the methodology is different too. All the other bodies were found in remote areas, pretty decomposed. This one’s a fresh dump, in a place with a security guard, which would guarantee that the body would be found quickly.” He lifted his radio and keyed up, advising the dispatcher that he was clear of the scene with one arrest. “If anything, it might be a copycat,” he said, after replacing the mic in its holder. “He killed twelve people, then stopped. Why start up again after three years?”

“Thirteen,” I corrected, an odd excitement and unease running through me. “There were thirteen bodies found. I read through the case files just a couple of weeks ago. And maybe he stopped because he got sick, or was in jail.” Or maybe he was just waiting for the right time to come around again? A sliver of sick fear wormed its way down my spine at the thought. I didn’t want this particular theory of mine to be right.

The phase of the moon was only one factor when summoning a demon. The spheres containing this world and the demon world moved in patterns much like the orbits of planets, and summonings could be performed only when the spheres overlapped. The greater the overlap, or convergence, the easier it was to perform the more-complex summonings. The convergence had been so small for the past few years that it had been damn near impossible to summon anything higher than eighth level.

But now the convergence was nearly as high as it could possibly be and would remain so for at least another month.

If those murders were part of some sort of summoning, that would explain why he’d stopped. And why he would start again now. I rubbed at my arms, unsettled.

“Whatever. Guess we’ll find out eventually,” he said, glancing back to see if his arrestee was still zoned out. “All right, lemme get this dumb-ass to the jail. You just go on back to your nice comfy bed, and don’t worry your little head about any more mean ol’ bad guys coming in.”

I pushed my unease aside and gave him the laugh he was expecting. “I feel so safe.”

“Protect and serve and all that shit,” he said, giving me a mock salute, then he rolled up his window and drove back down my winding driveway.

My smile died as soon as he was out of sight. I returned to the porch, mincing over the gravel in my bare feet as quickly as possible, then snatched up my cell phone and scrolled through my stored numbers.

“Turnham here,” my captain answered crisply on the first ring. I breathed a mental sigh of relief that I hadn’t woken him up. I’d taken a chance in assuming that, if there was any suspicion at all that this was a Symbol Man case, he’d be on the scene.

“Captain, it’s Kara Gillian. I heard you might have a Symbol Man case at the wastewater plant?” I was trying to keep my voice level and calm and professional, but I had a feeling that my eagerness leaked through.

“How the hell did you hear that? Do you keep your radio on twenty-four/seven?”

I couldn’t help but smile. There were plenty of cops who lived and breathed police work and who did keep their police radio on at all times. In fact, I’d been one of them when I was first hired, listening obsessively to every call and keeping mental tabs on what was going on in the world outside my house. I loved being a cop, and it had been like a deep breath of fresh air for me to be a part of something special after more than a decade of what was often bitter loneliness. It had taken nearly a year for me to finally accept that I could, in fact, occasionally turn my radio off and still be just as much of a cop. “No, sir,” I said. “I had a 62R at my house, and Deputy Sanchez clued me in when he picked up my perp.”

“Ah. Well, that’s all right, then.” He sounded mollified. “And I’m glad to hear you nailed the guy. I take it you want to be in on this case?”

“Well, sir, if you don’t think I’d be in the way. It’s just that I probably have the most familiarity with the case files right now, and I think I could help.” I held my breath as I waited for his response. Most likely he’d tell me to meet up with the lead detective in the morning to fill him in. But what I really wanted was to see the body.

“If you don’t have a problem coming out to the scene at this hour, that’s fine with me. You have something to contribute, and it would be good experience for you,” he said, to my relief.

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I promised. I raced back inside to change as soon as I hung up, suddenly deeply grateful to my drug-addicted intruder for choosing tonight to break into my house.