Blood of the Demon (27 page)

I groaned again. Two hours was still pretty impressive.

“Jill went to get food,” Zack said. “There isn’t a damn thing to eat in this place except for some red beans that she turned her nose up at.”

I laughed weakly. “Yeah, she doesn’t think much of the instant stuff.” I carefully levered myself to stand, taking slow breaths until the wave of dizziness passed. “All right. So did we manage to get all of those things out of the library before I lost it?”

Ryan nodded, expression sobering. “Looks like it.”

“Then the next questions are: What were they, and how did they get in there?”

His face clouded again, then he gave a small shudder, as if throwing off a chill. “Zack said that they’re some sort of very nasty pest but … not from here.”

“From where?” I didn’t look at Zack. I wanted to see how much
Ryan
knew.

“From an alternate plane. The demon plane, I think. Like that dog.” Ryan’s frown deepened, and I could feel a chill walk over my skin. His eyes were shadowed pits as they lifted to mine. “Don’t ask me how I know this, Kara. I don’t know.”

There was so much I wanted to ask him. No, there was so much I wanted to shake out of him, like,
Who the fuck are you?

“Okay,” I said instead. “So it didn’t kill me. That’s a good thing. Then I guess I need to figure out how it got into my aunt’s library.”

“That I think I can help you with. There’s a section of the library that feels really wacky.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “Wacky?”

Ryan laughed, only slightly forced. “Yeah, that’s a technical term.”

“How can you even tell in that library? There’s arcane crap everywhere!”

He thrust his hands into his pockets, smiling sheepishly. “Um, we kinda moved a bunch of stuff around while we made sure that all of those things were gone.”

“Ooooh, you are gonna be in so much trouble when my aunt comes back. For all we know she had a
system
in place.”

He made a sour noise. “Well, it’s a system of a big pile on the floor now. And there’s a place that looks wacky. Are you feeling well enough to take a look at it?”

I started to respond, but the banging of the front door caught my attention. I heard pounding footsteps, then Jill came careening around the doorway, bags of fast food in each hand. The intense and worried expression on her face cleared instantly at the sight of me standing.

“Well, it’s about time you got over your little mosquito bite,” she said, flouncing into the room and plopping the bags on the desk. She crossed her arms over her chest, eyeing me. I grinned and hugged her.

“Get off me, you crazy bitch,” she grumbled, but I could hear the relieved laugh in there as well. “Here—Ryan and Zack said you needed to eat. And I need to as well. I’ve been spending the last couple of hours perched in the damn disaster area your aunt called a library with a fucking fishing net, waiting for another one of those psycho pixie things to pop out, while Ryan and Zack moved books around and muttered to each other.”

I had to laugh at the mental image. “Okay, food first, then fun with fishing nets.”

* * *

TWO ALEVE AND a hamburger and fries later, I was ready to deal with my aunt’s library again. The ache in my back had settled to merely sore, and I managed to make my way down the hall with only one or two muttered invectives.

I brushed my hands over the library door frame. It felt odd without any wards on it. As I stepped in, I felt a crawl of sensation—not the usual beaded-curtain sensation of going through wards but more the feeling of approaching a source of wrongness. I now knew exactly what Ryan was talking about when he said “wacky.” There was a section of the floor in front of the bookcase on the east wall, an area almost two feet across, that was
wrong
. I forced myself to step closer, certain that I had to be stepping near a diagram or circle, because every sense I had was screaming at me that this was a portal.

What I couldn’t tell was if it was open. I frowned as I crouched. It wasn’t open in the sense that I was familiar with—the slit of light making a doorway from one sphere to another—but it sure wasn’t closed either. It was …
mushy
was the best word I could come up with. Stuff could get through but not easily.

I looked sharply back at the doorway. Ryan and Jill stood just outside the door, watching me warily, but it wasn’t them I was interested in. “The wards,” I said, unintentionally hissing softly on the last
s
.

Ryan frowned. “What about them?”

“I think they were twofold.” Damn it.

“Why? What is that?”

“It’s … a portal. Sort of. A weak spot.”

“Oh, shit,” he breathed. “The wards kept stuff in as well as keeping things out.”

“Yeah,” I said with a groan. “There were wards all throughout the library, which I couldn’t understand. And
when I had Kehlirik take down all the wards, that left that portal wide open, so to speak.”

Jill leaned against the wall, thumbs hooked into her jeans. “So why didn’t Kehlirik see that portal thingy?”

An unpleasant feeling settled in my stomach as I looked back at it. “I’m not sure. He was exhausted after clearing the wards, and with the books and other stuff piled all over, I guess he could have missed it.” I rubbed my arms. “Heck, it wasn’t until you moved all the stuff that we knew it was here.” But surely a demon of Kehlirik’s level would have been able to feel it. So why didn’t he say anything about it? Maybe because he had more reason not to?
He’d wanted to speak to me—about Ryan. But after he cleared the library wards, suddenly it wasn’t as important
. Because he’d found the portal? Now that I was close to it, I could feel a sickeningly familiar resonance about it.
It’s probably big enough for that dog to have come through
.

Could this portal also have something to do with the consumed essences? I considered it but then dismissed the idea. The portal had still been warded when Brian’s essence was eaten, so whatever was doing it couldn’t have come from this.

Ryan voiced the question that we were all thinking. “Can it be closed?”

I sighed. “I have no idea. I don’t even know if it
should
be closed.”

Ryan frowned, but Jill angled her head to the side. “Oh, like maybe this is a pressure valve or something?”

“Yeah. And that’s putting it a lot more clearly than I ever could have.” I eased my back into a more comfortable position. “I … have to see if my aunt comes back, and ask her.”

Jill shifted uncomfortably.

“And if she doesn’t come back,” I continued, throat tightening, “I’m going to have to ask, um, someone else.”

I swore I could hear Ryan’s teeth grind together. He muttered something under his breath and then spun away and strode down the hall. I clenched my hands and counted slowly to ten, then counted another ten for good measure.

Jill leaned her head out of the doorway to watch the retreating Ryan, then looked back at me, eyebrow raised questioningly.

“He and I had a bit of a discussion the other night wherein he stated that he was worried about me throwing myself at Rhyzkahl and falling for that pretty face and forgetting he’s a demon.”

She pursed her lips. “Hmm. And he doesn’t know that you and ole demon lord have already bumped uglies?”

“No, he does
not,”
I said. “And it’s going to stay that way, now that I know he considers it akin to selling my soul.”

A flicker of doubt passed over her face, and I sighed. “It’s not,” I assured her. “He’s not a ‘demon from hell’ kind of demon.”

“Then why are they called demons?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.

“The same reason that midwives were called witches a few centuries ago. Fear of what is not understood.” I could hear the defensive tone in my voice, and it made me take a mental step back. I
did
fear Rhyzkahl. And I sure as hell didn’t understand him.

She pondered this for several heartbeats, then shrugged and lowered herself to sit cross-legged on the floor. “Okay, so you can summon demons. And can work magic or whatever—”

“I can shape arcane energy,” I explained.

“Uh-huh. Magic to me,” she said, nose wrinkling as she smiled. “But then again, electricity is magic to me too. Flip switch, light comes on. So what about other supernatural stuff?”

“Like what?”

“Like vampires and werewolves and witches and that sort of thing.”

I had to shrug. “I’ve never met any of those, as far as I know.” I shook my head. “I take that back. I’ve met witches, but they’re not the ride-the-broom, cast-spells kind of witches. But vampires and werewolves?” I shrugged again, but I thought instantly of the missing essences. Was that some form of vampirism? And what about that dog-thing? “I’m not going to say that they don’t exist, because who am I to say that, but I’ve never met a werewolf or vampire that I know of.”

She laughed. “Well, I don’t know much about your magic woowoo stuff, but,
man
, Ryan sure has a raging case of the jealous going on over your demon lord, doesn’t he?”

I made a sour face. “He’s
not
jealous, trust me. He just thinks I’ll forget who I am if I even look at Rhyzkahl.”

Jill gave me a measuring look, then sighed and rolled her eyes. “Y’know, for a smart chick, you can be seriously fucking clueless.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes right back at her. She was the clueless one if she thought Ryan’s grouchiness meant anything.

Fortunately, she didn’t seem to feel like arguing her point. “So do you think your aunt knew about that being there?” she asked, lifting her chin toward the corner of the library.

I blew my breath out. “She had to know. It doesn’t feel
new. And I think I screwed up colossally by having all the wards taken down.” But I felt a renewed flare of annoyance at my aunt. Why couldn’t she have fucking told me about this? Surely a weakness in the fabric between the spheres was something that I needed to know about.

“Why didn’t your aunt tell you about this?” Jill asked in an echo of my thoughts.

I gripped my hair, then shook my head. “Probably the same reason that so many people don’t have wills. They don’t want to consciously think that they won’t have time to put things in order. Nobody wants to think about how sudden and unfair death can be. Everyone thinks that they’ll have those last few minutes to gasp out their final instructions.” I sighed. “Now I need to redo the wards as best I can and then summon a demon who can put them back as soon as possible.” I scowled. It was nowhere near a full moon, which meant that it would be a bitch to summon anything decent. And more dangerous.

“Well, let me get this crap over with,” I said. “Hopefully I can do enough to keep anything else from coming out.” Jill stepped back, and I focused on pulling enough potency to weave the protections I needed. It came to my control slowly, like taffy on a cold day, reminding me that I wasn’t exactly at my strongest. I hissed through my teeth as I shaped the sluggish energy, cautiously probing at the weak spot. I wasn’t sure I wanted any of my wards to actually touch the weakness, just in case it could be warped or shifted, so I compromised and made a little dome of energy over it. After finishing that, I backed out of the library and set another level of wards—both keep-out and keep-in wards.

I sighed as I looked them over. I sucked at crafting wards, but I had a shred of confidence that they would
hold until I could summon something that could place some more-robust protections. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and looked at my moon-phase calendar, even though I knew that it was only a week past the full. Another week until there was no moon. I’d have to give it a try then.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said to Jill, as I replaced the aversion on the front door. “I think we’ve done enough damage for one day.”

IT DIDN’T FEEL LIKE A SUNDAY. I WAS USED TO MY weekends flying by, over before I could even blink, but so much had happened in the past two days that I kept thinking it should be Wednesday at least. Or September.

But now time had slowed back down to a non-frenetic pace, and I had a list of crap that I needed to get done, plus some stuff that I merely wanted to get done. I was pleasantly sore from my trip to the gym the other day—just enough achiness to remind me that I liked having a few muscles—and I really didn’t want to gain back the pudge. So before I could talk myself out of it, I headed to the gym, taking the risk that I’d be shocking the people who worked there by showing up twice in one week.