“It’s safer to want things here,” he said. “You should do that more.”
“I should.” She tried very hard not to want anything in this moment.
“Will you be able to do this?” he asked. It might have been insulting, but he looked worried. For her. “Given your…”
“Disability?” Morgan’s laugh came out as a bark. “Well. Traditionally, demon-summoning has been seen as the refuge of the untalented, the people who couldn’t manage to work their will on the world in any other way. It’s probably because the trained mages are more likely to know better, but I figure if Tim could manage it, I can probably get close enough.”
He nodded, his eyebrows still knotted.
“Now, into the circle with you,” she said. “Gisele will be home in half an hour, and I want to get this cleaned up so she doesn’t have to walk into a giant mess.”
He stepped into the center of the circle and dropped his glamour. The glossy hair disappeared, and a ripple ran from the crown of his head down to his feet, leaving burnished scales behind. She was glad. She wanted her last memory of him to be of who he really was.
She opened the journal, cleared her throat, and started chanting.
She was most of the way through the ritual when she realized something was wrong. The wind had picked up and the doors on the cabinets rattled. That couldn’t be right. The generic abstract art prints on the wall in the phone room would never have stayed in place if this had happened when Tim did the ritual. It was too late to stop, though. Luke—Lucareoth—looked anxious, his tail lashing. But he stayed put, trusting her. She raised her voice to be heard over the howling of the wind. It felt like the world was tilting, the floor angling toward the center of the circle. She leaned back as she barked out the last syllables.
Beneath Lucareoth’s feet, an inky portal opened. He yelped, and he fell.
And Morgan was pulled after him.
9
She tumbled onto something that reminded her of cheap industrial carpet. It had the same texture and same plasticky smell, but while the pattern was as hideous as one might expect, it shifted under her hands in a way that left her dizzy and nauseated.
She climbed to her feet cautiously. Lucareoth stood with his back to her, patting his horns. His clothes were somewhat less sleek than she’d remembered. “Oh thank the father-eaters, it worked. Now if I can just—”
He turned around and saw her. His eyes widened. “Oh no. No, no, no, this isworse.”
Morgan looked around. It wasn’t that big a room, with dingy beige walls and a plasticky table and no windows. Illumination came from the ceiling without a need for fixtures, but the irritating buzz of badly installed lighting still whined at the edge of her consciousness. There was no trace of the portal.
She looked at Lucareoth with trepidation. “We’re in—”
“The Plane of the People, yes,” he said. “What you call the Infernal Plane. What the Earth are you doing here?”
She winced. “The portal sucked me in. We must have messed something up.”
“You said it would work even with your magic-blindness!”
“It did work, didn’t it? You’re here!”
“So are you!”
“Yes, I realized that!”
“And that is a huge problem!”
“Yes, I realized that, too!” She slapped the wall in frustration. The wall shivered and she pulled her hand back. “What’s wrong with the walls?”
“Someone hasn’t paid the bill recently enough,” he said.
“What do you mean?” She put a hand out more cautiously. The wall wasn’t quite solid under her palm. It had give, like a waterbed. The ugly beige felt less like a solid and more like really strong surface tension. If she pushed hard and fast enough, she might break through entirely. She didn’t want to know what was beneath the surface.
He sighed. “This office isn’t real. It’s a construct.”
“Constructed of?” She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.
“Bent light,” he said. That wasn’t so bad. He continued. “Powered by human souls.”
