Mark of the Demon

“Good deal. You tell me if you need anything. Don’t be proud.”

“I will. I won’t.”

Jill gave me a thumbs-up, then walked off to speak to the coroner’s office personnel. I leaned against the metal building of the main office, watching as the body was carefully gathered up into a black plastic body bag.

I would definitely summon tomorrow night. There were a number of demons who could probably help me. Perhaps Rysehl? He was just a fourth-level demon, a luhrek, resembling a cross between a goat and a dog with the hindquarters of a lion. He was also a much weaker demon than Kehlirik, which meant that he would be considerably easier to summon. But Rysehl was usually a very cooperative creature and a good resource for esoteric information, despite being merely a luhrek. I could think of several questions to ask him about the kinds of arcane activities that could leave those types of traces on a body.

I pushed off the building. Screw Crawford, I thought. I am the best detective for this case, and I’m gonna prove it.

CHAPTER 3

The dead bolt on the front door slid home with a soft click, the last step in my preparations for the summoning.

I’d nearly changed my mind about going through with it. After leaving the wastewater plant, I’d gone to the station for several hours to do preliminary legwork and write up my initial report, but by early afternoon I could hardly keep my eyes open—not that surprising once I realized I was operating on zero sleep.

I’d finally given up on coherent thought and headed home to grab a nap, staying awake on the drive home only by keeping the window open and singing along loudly to bad country music. By the time I’d crawled into my bed, I was seriously doubting my ability to summon again, even a minor demon. But six hours of sleeping like the dead did wonders for my energy level, and by midnight I felt ready to go.

I wandered through my house, the usual excitement twining with the usual nerves as I made certain that the house was secure. All of the various mundane tasks were complete. I’d closed the gate at the end of my driveway, checked and secured all the windows—which included nailing several boards over the broken window—then locked all the doors, double-checking everything compulsively. I’d learned the hard way last night that a locked door wouldn’t do much to keep an intruder out, so for tonight I’d added just a tweak of power around my house.

Arcane work could be pretty tiring, which was why I seldom did much outside of summonings. But, after last night’s near disaster, I had to grudgingly admit that I needed to expend the energy. I wasn’t exactly highly skilled at crafting arcane wardings, which meant that it took me nearly an hour to pull together a small protection that would cause anyone approaching the house to experience feelings ranging from mild fear to terror—an arcane version of a subsonic frequency, and hopefully just enough to make a person think twice about trying to get inside.

The house was still spotless from top to bottom from the deep scouring I’d given it before my summoning of the reyza. I wasn’t in the regular habit of keeping my house in pristine condition, but the messes and piles of clutter could harbor unwelcome pockets of energy, or so my aunt Tessa always said—though I suspected that was probably just a way for her to get me to clean the place up at least once a month. It was tough to motivate myself to tame the clutter, since I didn’t exactly encourage visitors. I kept it clean—after all, this was the South, and I’d be neck deep in bugs if I didn’t—but my dirty laundry usually ended up on the floor, and my bed got made only once a week when I changed the sheets.

I owned just over ten acres out here, and most of it remained woods. My house was smack in the middle of the property, with only about a hundred-foot radius around the structure cleared of thick forest and underbrush, though there were still plenty of trees around the house to shade it beautifully all year long. The house itself was a single-story Acadian with a steeply pitched roof, high ceilings, and a broad porch that extended across the entire front. The high ceilings also made it hard as shit to heat in the winter, but I had long ago accepted that electric blankets were made for just that reason. Besides, in south Louisiana it didn’t get all that cold. The house was close to one hundred years old, with walls and ceilings that had been made with precise tongue-and-groove construction. The exterior was supposed to be a dusky blue, but it was also unfortunately in dire need of a new paint job and had a rather mottled appearance where the white of the old paint showed through.

But the best feature of the house was its elevation. It sat on enough of a hill that I was able to have a basement, though not so high up that it could be seen above the surrounding trees from the highway. Houses with basements were practically nonexistent in this region, and the large basement of this house was absolutely perfect for the kind of arcane activities that my aunt and I dealt in. Aunt Tessa had converted the attic in her own house into a summoning chamber, but she frequently moaned that it wasn’t as good as a basement. It was a lot harder to make an attic noiseproof and lightproof, and the earth that surrounded a basement helped soak up excess arcane resonance. Plus, the heat in any attic in the South was damn near unbearable in the summer.

I returned to the foyer, compulsively checking everything again and quietly pleased with how nice it looked. I could have people over every now and then, the thought intruded. Maybe a crawfish boil in the backyard for people from work? It really was a lovely little house, and there was a part of me that wanted to show it off. I had dim childhood memories of my parents throwing parties and having people over—before my mother got sick. But neither of them had dealt with the arcane, I reminded myself. They’d had no reason to be secretive and private.

I had plenty of reason. I’d have to scrub the shit out of the basement to make sure there was no evidence of a summoning diagram. I grimaced. And hide all my implements. Would anyone come, anyway? I had plenty of casual friends from work, but Jill was probably the only one I felt any real “friendship” toward, and I could count on zero hands the times we’d hung out together outside of work. Baby steps, Kara, I chided myself. Make some friends, then worry about throwing a party.

I scowled and pulled my focus back to the task at hand. I could worry about my social life some other time. I checked one more time that the curtains completely covered the windows, then headed to the hallway door that led to the basement. I paused in front of it, taking a deep breath and rolling my head on my neck to work the tension out. I was good at this, I reminded myself. This was going to be a very low-level summoning, and I’d performed plenty of them successfully. I’d worked my ass off for the past decade to learn everything I could about summoning demons. I knew the chants, the bindings, the names. I’d studied rituals dating back centuries, when it was first discovered that there were people who were genetically gifted with the ability to open a portal between this world and another—a world of creatures that came to be known as demons. Last year I’d even taken leave from work and scraped together the money to spend two months in Japan, studying under the summoner who had been my aunt’s mentor—a waste of time and money, I later decided. The convergence had been too weak to summon anything really interesting, and Tessa’s mentor—a wisp of a man who looked old enough to have been around for the first summoning—was a rude, condescending asshole.

I slipped off my bathrobe, folded it neatly, and set it against the wall in the hallway, despite my usual habit of dropping clothing wherever I happened to be. For the thousandth time I reminded myself that I needed to put a hook on the door for just this reason. I opened the basement door and walked naked down the stairs, skin prickling with goose bumps at the slight chill that lingered in the air despite the fire I’d lit earlier. It was spring closing in on summer, but the basement held the cold fiercely at times. I pulled the waiting clothing off the hook at the bottom of the stairs—drawstring pants and a loose shirt made from a gray buttery-soft silk. I’d never bought into the whole flowing-silken-robes thing—far better to be free from distractions, able to move about.

I stepped off the stairs, bare feet chilling against the concrete of the floor. The basement was huge—almost the same square footage as the main floor of my house. There was a fireplace in the south wall that tended to get a lot of use, since the basement stayed cool in the summer and became downright frigid in the winter. A couple of years ago, I’d converted the third of the basement that contained the fireplace into a mini-office, carpeted in a plush deep-red shag that only barely avoided looking like it belonged in a bordello. A heavy oak table and a comfortable wingback chair that I’d scored at an estate sale completed the ensemble. The other two-thirds of the basement floor was smooth concrete, unmarked except for the intricate and large circular diagram I had laboriously chalked out earlier.