Mark of the Demon

CHAPTER 4

I stared at my reflection in the mirror. I was not a beautiful woman. I knew that. I was by no means unattractive and I did my best to keep my figure in shape, but I was usually referred to as “cute,” sometimes “pretty,” occasionally “quite appealing,” but almost never “beautiful,” unless it was someone who wanted something from me. I had boring-brown hair that refused to take any sort of curl, dark gray eyes that refused to be hazel or blue-gray or even sparkling, legs that were about three inches shorter than I would have liked for them to be, and an insistent little layer of pudge at the top of my jeans. Not beautiful.

So why had it happened? Why was I still alive? I was too realistic to think that my charm and beauty and sexuality had swayed a creature of that much power from rending me to shreds or keeping me for a plaything to be tormented at his leisure. And why seduce me?

Reality had crashed in on me seconds after he vanished from my basement summoning chamber, and I’d wallowed in a full-blown freak-out for nearly an hour, indulging in plenty of self-loathing and heaping servings of crippling doubt. I’d finally gone to bed, but sleep had been elusive.

Two enormous issues kept battling with each other in my head over which was worth stressing out about more. First was the matter of what the fuck went wrong? It had been a simple summoning. A fucking fourth-level summoning! And Rysehl was a demon that I’d summoned dozens of times before. After I’d calmed somewhat, I walked around the diagram, obsessively checking every sigil and rune that I’d sketched out, looking for any deviation, any smudge or change that could have altered the portal, and finding nothing to explain what had happened.

But this creature had said his name was Rhyzkahl. Had I mispronounced “Rysehl”? Somehow garbled the word? I cast my mind back over the summoning, the ritual, over and over until it was all little more than a jumbled blur. I thought I said it right. The names are close, but not that close.

I felt as if someone had pulled the floor out from under me. I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought I was good at this. I shuddered and scrubbed at my face, struggling to push away the aching doubt.

But forcing myself to stop thinking about the summoning only shifted my thoughts to the other elephant looming in the room. Oh, fucking shit, I silently wailed, why the fuck did I fuck him?

I couldn’t even give myself the “easy” out and blame it on his compulsion of me. I knew that he was capable of doing so, since I’d managed to figure it out and call him on it. But then he gave me his word…. And a demon’s word was inviolate. No, I’d just been incredibly needy and pathetic.

I grimaced and turned on the water, cupping it in my hands and splashing it onto my face. I scrubbed away the grit in my eyes, keeping the water deliberately cold to try to shock myself back to a reality I could understand and accept.

I sighed and reached for the towel. Nope, still the same haggard and confused face staring back at me in the mirror. I’d already taken a hot shower, with water as close to scalding as my water heater would give me, seeking to sear the memory of the night away.

But you don’t want to forget, I accused myself. You enjoyed it.

I sighed and straightened. And that was the truth. That had been some seriously incredible sex. No doubt. Best. Sex. Ever.

Which circled my thoughts back to: Why me? Why seduce me? Was sex that hard to come by in the other spheres? That made no sense. He wanted something from me. An alliance? A summoner of his own? It was possible, I supposed. I’d heard of summoners who allied with particular demons, though such alliances were unpredictable and fraught with danger.

I had to assume that Rhyzkahl was some sort of demon that I’d never heard of before. My portal had opened into the demon realm—I felt reasonably confident of that. The demons I knew were creatures of arcane power, inhabitants of one of the many other planes of existence and one of the few that was accessible from this plane with the proper forms and rituals.

There were twelve varieties, or levels, of demons that could be summoned, or so I had been taught. When I had first begun my training as a summoner, I started with simple summonings of zrila—first-level demons not much larger than a cat, though with reptilian bodies and six legs. Limited intelligence and easily controlled. Ten years later I had progressed to the twelfth level: reyza. And not once during that time had I seen or heard of anything like Rhyzkahl. He was obviously a creature of great power—that much was clear by how easily he’d shattered the bindings and wardings. But I had no idea what he was or what his place was in the hierarchy of the demons.

My mind kept going back to what he’d said to me. Call me whenever you need me. Call him? Summon him? Who was he to say such a thing? And how was I supposed to do that when I didn’t know how I’d done it in the first place?

I walked out to the living room and fired up my computer, then pulled up a search engine. It was a long shot, but I’d struck gold with the Internet before. There were no formal organizations or cabals of summoners that I knew of, but there were a few message boards—the type that catered to the “paranormal nutjob” faction—that were sometimes used to exchange information between arcane practitioners. A good 99.9 percent of the posts were incredibly fantastical piles of bullshit, from people who claimed to be “masters” of arcane power. But every now and then a nugget of promising information could be unearthed from someone who actually knew what the hell they were talking about.

No such luck this time, though. I ran searches with every possible spelling variation of Rhyzkahl, but the only hit I came up with was with Rhizko—which turned out to be the user name for a pudgy and pasty online gamer of indeterminate gender.

I leaned back in the chair and rubbed my eyes. “Shit.” The two hours of fitful tossing that had preceded my alarm going off had not done much for my energy level or mental sharpness. “Shit,” I said again for good measure, then stood. It was barely seven a.m., and the autopsy on the victim from the wastewater plant wasn’t until noon. I had time to seek answers from a far more reliable source.

I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt from a Miami-Dade PD training seminar, shoved my hair up into a ponytail, and jabbed some mascara at my eyelashes as a pitiful concession to makeup. After the autopsy I would come back and change into something decent. It was sorely tempting to just bury myself in work, push all of this crap to the back of my mind. That was the way I usually dealt with stress in my life.

But I already knew that this was one problem I wouldn’t be able to put aside until later. I needed to know, and since the Internet had failed me, the next best hope was that my aunt would have some useful information in the library at her house.

Now I just had to figure out how to explain to my aunt how I’d screwed up such a simple summoning.

Aunt Tessa’s house was on the lakefront, a century-old two-story with gleaming white paint and lovely blue gingerbread molding adorning the porch. Most of the equally lovely old houses in this area had been restored and were now tourist attractions. Many offered tours. My aunt’s was not one of them.

There was a cheerful Welcome! sign on the door—a standing joke, since my aunt encouraged visitors about as much as I did. I avoided people by living in the middle of nowhere, and my aunt did so by maintaining carefully crafted wards and protections that were set around her house. Unless a person was invited or had significant need to be there, most who came to Tessa’s house remembered something more pressing that needed to be done or decided that the visit could be put off until another day.

I once asked her why she bothered with the welcome sign at all. She replied that she didn’t want people to think her too odd or standoffish, so having a welcome sign on the door would mollify people’s attitudes toward her.

I had learned long ago that the best way to deal with that type of rationalization from my aunt was to just nod and change the subject.

I could feel the faint prickle of the wards as I entered her house, a sensation like passing through an invisible beaded curtain. I wiped my feet automatically, though I doubted that my shoes were dirty. But Aunt Tessa kept her house clean enough to be a showplace, even if she never allowed anyone inside except me. She’d restored the house by herself right after I started with the PD, and it still looked just as perfect as the day she’d finished—gleaming hardwood floors, elegant flowered wallpaper, and exquisite crown molding—all immaculate and flawless.

“Aunt Tessa?” I called.

“Front room, sweets!”

I stepped around the corner to see my aunt ensconced with a book upon an antique love seat. Sitting lotus-style. How a woman in her late forties could be limber enough to sit like that was beyond me, but Aunt Tessa was remarkable in numerous ways beyond her flexibility.

To most in the community, Tessa Pazhel was the mildly eccentric and extremely unpredictable woman who ran the natural-food store downtown. Tessa dressed the part, too, wearing brightly colored skirts and clashing shirts in eye-searing tones one day and then muted khakis and combat boots the next. Wild kinky blond hair sprang out from Tessa’s head, the polar opposite of my painfully straight brown hair. Tessa was whippet-thin, while I had to fight tooth and nail for every ounce of fat loss. The only feature we had in common was our gray eyes.

I was the spitting image of my mother—Tessa’s sister. At least that’s what I’d been told and shown in pictures. My own memories of my mother were dim at best.

Today my aunt was dressed in a mid-calf-length blue velvet dress, with heavy silver chains draped around her waist and black suede boots on her feet. She lifted her eyes from her book and peered at me as I sat in the chair next to her.

“Well, you’re alive,” she said without preamble, setting her book aside. “Which means that if you summoned Kehlirik it didn’t go too horrendously wrong.” She leaned forward, eyes narrowing as she looked into my face. “But you sure don’t look very happy about a successful summoning.”

“The summoning of Kehlirik went fine,” I said. “I’ve officially completed my training and am now a full summoner.” I paused. It would be so easy to just leave it at that. But then I wouldn’t get any answers. “I … uh, tried to summon again last night, and … well, things didn’t go quite the way I’d planned.”

The angles in her face seemed to sharpen. “That right there is a very bad thing. When there’s any deviation from the plan in a summoning, someone usually ends up in bad shape.” She arched an eyebrow. “So, what happened? You tried to summon a higher-level demon again and couldn’t hold it? You dismissed it? It didn’t come all the way through?” She shook her head. “Two big summonings in a row is pretty dicey.”

I groaned. “Aunt Tessa, I don’t know what went wrong. I wasn’t trying anything ambitious at all. I was trying to summon a lower demon, Rysehl. Easy. And I called Rysehl, but that wasn’t what came through.”

Tessa went very still, and when she spoke, her voice had lost all trace of its usual gaiety. “Kara, what came through?”

Shit. How was I going to explain to my aunt that not only had I somehow screwed up the summoning but then I’d gone and had sex with the creature?

Tessa reached out and grabbed my hand, bony fingers painfully tight on mine. “Your silence is unnerving me, kiddo. Spill it.”

I winced. “I called Rysehl—I’m sure I did! But it wasn’t Rysehl. I’m still not sure what he was, but he said his name was Rhyzkahl.”

My aunt was silent, and when I looked up at her I was shocked to see a stricken expression on her face. “Aunt Tessa? What is it?”

She swallowed visibly, throat bobbing in what would have otherwise been a comic manner. “Rhyzkahl.” She let out a ragged breath. “Yet here you are still, and in what appears to be one piece.”

I tried to give a diffident shrug. I didn’t have to tell her about the sex part, did I? “Yeah, well, I mean, I, uh … just remembered what you taught me about dismissals.” I avoided looking directly at my aunt. I am such a damn chickenshit. “So, um … what is he?”

“You … dismissed him,” Tessa stated, voice flat with disbelief.

“I’m still here, right?” I tried to keep my voice steady and blasé.

My aunt remained silent, and after several seconds I risked a peek at her face. Tessa crossed her arms over her chest and glowered at me.

“Young woman,” she said in a voice that was cold enough to destroy the entire citrus crop of Florida, “you are going to tell me exactly what happened last night.”

I took a nervous breath. “Not until you tell me who or what Rhyzkahl is.”

I steeled myself for a verbal flaying, but instead Tessa just sighed and nodded. “Yes, you need to know that. I’m sorry I didn’t already teach you that, but, by the spheres! I’d no idea you’d be insane enough to call one of his ilk.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose! Who is he?” I looked at my aunt warily. “Is he some kind of creature that can take human form?”

Tessa shook her head. “No, nothing so simple as that. Library. Now.” She unwound her legs and was out of the room before I could stand. By the time I walked down the hall and into her library, Aunt Tessa was already sitting cross-legged on the floor with a stack of books piled about her.

I set my bag down on a pile of papers on the table. There was no point in looking for a clear space. In fact, I had always thought that library was an inappropriate term for the room. Describing a room as a library gave one the impression that it was fairly ordered, with books on shelves and arranged in some logical manner or system. But order and logic did not apply anywhere here.

True, there were shelves on the walls, all of which were filled with books or papers of various types, but the books were shoved onto the shelves in a completely haphazard manner, often without any attempt to keep the spine out to make it easier to look for a specific title. There was no free wall space; absolutely every inch, from floor to ceiling, all the way to the molding around the door, was bookshelves. A broad wooden table dominated the center of the room, with two worn leather-upholstered chairs beside it. Books, scrolls, and papers tumbled over one another on the table and chairs, with more piles of books in scattered locations on the floor throughout the room.

And from the center of the ceiling hung an enormous, luxurious crystal chandelier—utterly out of place and looking far more suited to the ballroom of an ocean liner.

I’d once had the temerity to throw my aunt’s own words back at her and point out that the chaos in the library could attract unwanted energy and interfere with her summonings. I’d been rewarded with the crisp response that just because I didn’t understand her organizational system didn’t mean it didn’t exist. Hell, for all I knew she really did have some sort of methodology, but in ten years I had yet to fathom it.

Tessa scratched the side of her nose, then motioned me over. “Are you sure it called itself Rhyzkahl?”

I moved over to my aunt and knelt beside her. “Umm, yeah. Pretty darn sure.” More than sure. Those words were seared into my memory, along with the memory of him lying beside me, his hand resting on my hip, his lips on my skin. The sight of him standing and pulling his shirt on, muscles rippling more pleasingly than any male model—

I abruptly realized that my aunt was peering at me, eyebrows drawn together. I summoned an innocent look and worked on controlling the flush.

Tessa gave me a measuring look, then pointed to a picture in the tome before her. “That’s Rysehl.” The picture showed a wingless creature that looked like a goat/dog/lion, with an elongated reptilian face and small stubby horns that curved up and forward from the sides of its head. A spiky ridge crest rose from the middle of its forehead, extending down to the nape of its neck. In the picture the demon crouched, head tilted to one side as if listening for something. I knew this demon, knew the face. This was Rysehl, a fourth-level demon. The one I’d intended to summon.

I shook my head. “Definitely not what came through last night.”

Tessa shrugged and turned to a page that was marked with a black feather. “All right, then, how about this one? This is Rhial.” I didn’t recognize this particular demon, but I could see instantly that it was a mehnta, a ninth-level demon—which was obviously not the one I had encountered. Mehnta looked like human females—albeit winged human females with clawed hands and feet and dozens of snake-things coming out of their mouths. Most assuredly not Rhyzkahl.

“No.” I was starting to get annoyed. I knew what demons looked like. The differences between the lower- and higher-level demons were unmistakable. The higher the level, the bigger and more intelligent they were. Seventh and up were winged, with the twelfth-level reyza nearly half again as tall as a normal human. The faces of reyza were still bestial, with mouths full of deadly sharp teeth and long extended fangs, but not as much so as those of lowers. The higher demons’ bodies were far closer to a human’s, too, though with more muscle and power than any human could ever hope to attain. “It wasn’t a zrila, savik, ilius, luhrek, nyssor, faas, kehza, graa, mehnta, zhurn, syraza, or reyza.” I rattled the names off quickly.

“Thank you for that lesson in demonology,” my aunt replied dryly.

I sighed. “Aunt Tessa, I thought you recognized the name Rhyzkahl. What is he?”

Tessa ignored me and flipped to another section of the tome. “This one is Rhykezial.”

This picture didn’t show a creature that I had any familiarity with at all. It looked more like a painful cross between a squid and a spider, and I figured it was one of the multitudes of creatures that could not be summoned between the planes. Or perhaps something from another plane entirely. There were a multitude of planes, but the demon realm was the only one that ever intersected with this world, as far as I knew.

I let my breath out gustily. This was starting to feel like looking at a lineup. “No, Aunt Tessa. Can’t you just tell me what Rhyzkahl is?”

Tessa closed the tome with a soft thud. “I just don’t want to believe that you summoned that one. To be honest, I find it very hard to believe that you summoned that one.” She gave me a sidelong look. “Especially since you’re still here and still you.”

I could feel the flush starting to rise again. “I’m here and I’m me. And I told you. I didn’t summon him.”

Tessa stood, pressing her lips together as she moved to a bookshelf by the door. She hummed to herself—a tuneless, discordant thing—tapping her finger on her chin while she scanned the shelves. Finally she made a small noise of triumph and pulled a thin volume off the top shelf, turning and dropping it in front of me.

I blinked. “Aunt Tessa, that’s a comic book.”

Tessa sniffed. “It’s a graphic novel.”

I managed to hold back the eye roll. “Okay, it’s a graphic novel. I thought you were going to show me Rhyzkahl.”

“Well, these creatures don’t exactly want to sit still for portraits. But this artist managed to make one of his characters look almost exactly like Rhyzkahl. Or what Rhyzkahl is presumed to look like.” She leaned over, then flipped quickly to the middle of the volume. “Here.” She stabbed her finger at a panel.

I exhaled in a rush. It was him, or as close as a human artist could capture. The same build, the same hair, and the artist had even managed to capture a trace of the power in his eyes.

“He’s seen him,” I murmured, eyes on the drawing. It depicted Rhyzkahl standing on the top of a battlement with a reyza to his left. A smirk curved his lips as he looked down at a man dressed in medieval-style garb kneeling before him. “He doesn’t call him Rhyzkahl in this, but he’s seen him.” I scanned the rest of the page, seeking other depictions.

Tessa muttered something under her breath that sounded suspiciously foul and vulgar. “And so have you, it seems.” She reached in front of me and slammed the graphic novel shut, then snatched it from my hands as she straightened, turned, and shoved it back into its space on the shelf. She spun and stabbed a finger at me. “How? How did you survive?”

I lifted my chin mulishly. “You haven’t told me what he is yet!”

Tessa rubbed at her temples, grimacing. “I’ll tell you, but then you need to tell me what you did during your ritual that allowed Rhyzkahl to come through.”

“I don’t know what I did!” I wanted to stand and pace, but there was no possible way to do that in this room. “It was a summoning of Rysehl, for fuck’s sake! I made a fourth-level diagram! I called his name!”

“Well, you must have done something!” she snapped. “I doubt Rhyzkahl just decided to drop in for tea!”

“I don’t know! That’s why I fucking came here—to try to find out!” I had my hands clenched to keep them from shaking, but the quiver in my lower lip betrayed how unsettled I was.

Tessa exhaled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just worried about you.”

I nodded, throat tight. “Sorry I yelled.”

Tessa rubbed her eyes, then shook her head, as if she’d lost an internal argument. “Rhyzkahl … is not a regular demon, not a creature that can be summoned by the usual means. Or at least not by the means that we employ for summonings of any of the twelve levels of demon.” She toyed with the chains around her waist. “I know I’ve mentioned them to you briefly, but I can understand why you wouldn’t ever think that one had come through.” She sighed and spread her hands. “Rhyzkahl is a lord. One of the Demonic Lords.”

I stared at her. “Wait. I thought they were like demigods.”

“They are. They are incredibly powerful and refuse to be bound or subservient. This is why they are so dangerous.”

I swallowed harshly. “All of them?”

Tessa locked her gaze on me. “All of them.” She lowered her head, eyes still on me. “Rhyzkahl is ancient and has one of the largest followings of any of the lords. He is ambitious, and devious, and takes matters of honor very seriously. Even if he could be summoned, he would never submit to any manner of terms and would destroy any summoner who dared to bring him through.”

I struggled to parse this new information. I didn’t doubt my aunt’s knowledge, but Tessa’s description of Rhyzkahl didn’t match my own experience of him. Or did it? He was certainly terrifying when he first came through. I thought I was going to be destroyed. I’d felt the menace of him in that first rush of terror, when he’d scattered the bindings like dust. Perhaps it was true. So why didn’t he destroy me? I asked myself for perhaps the thousandth time.

I mentally replayed Tessa’s words, then abruptly snapped my gaze up to my aunt. I wasn’t a slightly experienced homicide investigator for nothing. Aunt Tessa was keeping something back. “How would you know that the drawing resembled him?” I demanded. Then I pointed at Tessa. “You’ve seen him too!”

To my surprise, Tessa went pale and sank to sit on the floor. “Powers of all, yes. I have. I was a stupid teenager. And the only reason I’m still here is because he … was otherwise occupied.”

Something in my aunt’s tone told me more than any words could. I knew enough about demons that if my aunt—my powerful, experienced-summoner aunt—was this shaken by a memory that had to be over thirty years old, it had to have been bad.

I leaned forward and placed a hand solicitously on her knee. “I’m sorry, Aunt Tessa. Are you all right? Do you need me to get you anything?”

“Oh, for the love of all the spheres. I’m not about to fall over.” She rolled her eyes, color returning to her face, then stood, brushing imaginary dust off her skirt. She looked up at the graphic novel on the shelf. “I don’t know how you survived, but I can only be intensely thankful that he chose to spare you.”

My throat felt tight. I knew what a Demonic Lord was, but it had simply never occurred to me that I might have called one, even inadvertently. The other-planar creatures known to me as demons had a strict hierarchy, with each level of demon jockeying for position and power within their respective levels. At the highest, above the twelve levels, were the lords—potent creatures who could wield devastating power and who utilized the powers and skills of the demons who served them. I hadn’t thought that they could even be summoned, which was why I had so little knowledge of them.

“You’ve always told me that the demons are neither good nor evil,” I stated, watching my aunt.

Tessa shook her head. “Don’t try to fling my own words into my face. I didn’t say he was evil. I said he was devious,” she said, shoving books back onto the shelves in utter defiance of details such as available space and the laws of physics. “Remember, good and evil are human terms that merely refer to the application of human morals. Demons are absolutely and utterly self-serving, and at the same time they are completely honor-driven. Which is a good thing, because without that driving sense of honor, nothing would ever get done in the demon realm. Everything is tied to honor and status.” She gave me a piercing look. “And a summoning is enormously offensive to a lord. Any demonic creature who did not take revenge against such an offense would be seen as weak and would lose huge amounts of status. Offend a demon—or a lord—at your own peril.”

I stayed silent. Tessa would never believe that Rhyzkahl had just let me go. Is that what happened? Did he just let me go? I guess he did, since I’m here and alive, but how could it be so simple?

Tessa sighed. “Go. You can tell me later exactly what happened, since you’re obviously not ready to tell me now.” She adjusted the chains at her waist, shaking her head. “You’re alive. That’s what matters the most.” She leaned in as I stood up and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, then took me by the elbow and steered me toward the door. “I’ll talk to you more later.” And with that she pushed me out of the library and shut the door.

I looked back at the white door, relief warring with confusion. At least now I knew what Rhyzkahl was. But I had a feeling I was happier not knowing.