I raised my head.
His hand moved to my cheek, brushing away a streak of tears. “I want to be with you as myself, and until he’s gone, I won’t know who I really am. I haven’t known since I became a demon mage.”
“But …” My voice was hoarse, almost soundless. “If we wait and you … you don’t …”
“I’ll just have to survive tonight. I want to discover myself … and I want to do it with you.”
I nodded even as my heart tore itself apart. He wanted to love me as himself, not as a demon mage with another being interwoven through his mind and sharing his body. If that meant we would lose our last chance to share this kind of intimacy, I would respect his decision.
But he would survive. He would. He had to.
We lay together on the sofa, him stretched out on his back and me lying across him, our legs tangled. He stroked my neck and spine, and I touched his face, kissing him over and over. We held each other, waiting. Wanting the time to come. Wanting it to never arrive.
The back door clicked. Footsteps. A pause.
“That works better without clothes,” Kai observed dryly.
“Mind your own business,” I muttered, eyes closed and cheek resting on Ezra’s chest. “How did it go?”
“Good. No sign of those cultists or anything else suspicious.”
Ezra tensed under me, then sat up, lifting me with him. He drew me to my feet, and we faced Aaron and Kai. Terse determination had replaced their earlier grief.
The wait was over. It was time for battle now. I didn’t know who or what we would fight, or if there was an enemy to fight aside from the magic that bound Ezra and Eterran together, but we would fight it with everything we had.
Ezra pushed his shoulders back, and with that steady, soothing calm that had amazed me from our first meeting, he looked across the three of us.
“I’m ready.” He quirked an eyebrow. “Let’s summon a demon.”
Chapter Nine
Beneath glaring fluorescent lights, Ezra stood in one of the two circles inside the twenty-five-foot outer ring that Robin and Amalia had drawn on the museum basement’s floor. He was dressed in full combat gear, including his bad-guy-smasher gloves with their steel-reinforced knuckles and elbows.
Kai, Aaron, and I were arranged on his left, outside the silver array. We’d dressed in combat gear too, my belt around my hips, Sharpie in its sheath on Aaron’s back, and Kai’s vest loaded with small weapons. Had we dressed for battle because we felt stronger in these clothes? Or because it was a way of acknowledging the gravity of this night?
Robin stood opposite us. She hadn’t dressed for a fight, wearing a gray sweater under her leather jacket, but I wasn’t sure she owned real combat gear. Amalia was positioned across from Ezra, facing him, and she looked as “haphazard posh” as always in leggings, tall boots, and a leather jacket of her own.
I’d never paid much attention to Amalia. Next to Robin’s mysteries, the apprentice sorceress had seemed kind of inconsequential—but I was revamping my impression of her big time.
Holding the ornate cult grimoire in her hands, Amalia chanted in Latin. The ancient words rose and fell with undeniable power, her voice smooth and confident, almost regal. It was as though she’d been born to read this spell—or as though she’d prepared since birth to read it. The thought that she might falter seemed ridiculous, and I had no doubt about her ability to perform the ritual flawlessly.
The final member of our strange group wasn’t in the basement. Zylas was somewhere above us, prowling the museum rooftop as he watched for any sign of trouble. If any cultists showed up, he would warn us—and, depending on the intruders, eliminate them.
As Amalia’s voice rolled through the room, Ezra waited alone in the circle, his left eye glowing faintly as both human and demon watched their fate unfold. Fighting to control my nauseating fear, I held on to Aaron’s and Kai’s hands. They gripped my fingers as tightly as I held theirs.
Amalia continued to chant, voice rising, then she paused. She gestured to Robin. The petite contractor knelt and opened the case at her feet. She withdrew a vial of demon blood—Nazhivēr’s Second House blood, crucial to the summoning.
Walking into the empty circle, she uncorked it and tipped the vial, pouring the demon blood onto the central symbol. Instead of splashing across the floor, the thick liquid stuck to the rune, turning it dark scarlet.
She retreated to the circle’s edge, and a heartbeat of silence ran through the basement.
“Te tuo sanguine ligo, tu ut vocatus audias, Eterran of the Dh’irath House!” Amalia declared.
A scarlet shimmer rippled out from the blood-coated rune. It spread across the silver array, turning the lines around Ezra’s feet an eerie, iridescent ruby. He stiffened, the crimson gleam in his left eye brightening.
Amalia launched into the next phase of the ritual. Endless Latin flowed from her lips, then she pointed at the outer circle a foot in front of her boots.
“Terra te hoc circulo semper tenebit!”
The reddish glow imbuing the array whooshed upward in a shimmering wave, outlining a faint dome that arched over the outer ring. The gleaming dome faded, invisible, but according to Robin’s explanation from a week ago, Eterran was now sealed inside the circle. Ezra would leave that silver ring as a human—or he wouldn’t leave it at all.
My pulse drummed in my ears, a rapid beat counting down the minutes and seconds that remained.
Almost ten years had passed since Eterran had been summoned from his world and tricked into accepting a contract. Ten years since Ezra, deceived by the cult that ensnared his parents, had accepted his transformation into a demon mage.
Eight years since Ezra had run away from home, triggering the chain of events that had led to his parents’ deaths and the destruction of Enright.
Six
