Page 56 of When I Accidentally Summoned a Demon

Iknow what it is before it finishes detaching from the wall.

The markings—five binding sigils etched into its flanks, barely visible beneath centuries of limestone dust—I have seen them before, in the Pit, on the walls of the second enforcement chamber.

A hellhound.

They are older than the church above us by at least four hundred years. They are, in the precise terminology of infernal practice, a ‘custodem perpetuum’. An eternal guardian. Bound to this place. Given no choice in the matter.

I feel something closely adjacent to sympathy. Then it opens its jaw and lunges for my face. The feeling vanishes.

I catch its throat with both hands, and my heels drag backward across the stone floor as it drives me toward the far wall. It is almost my height. Its body is skeletal and ancient—joints of black, calcified bone, ribcage like a collapsed vault, eye sockets burning with a dull infernal red. Not the elegant predator of hellhound mythology. This is something older, cursed to a single purpose for so long, it has become its only purpose.

My only purpose is protecting Vesper. This is a fiery, hellbent determination, forged in my blood, radiating from my very damned soul.

I shove it sideways with everything I have, and it crashes against the wall. The impact cracks the stone from floor to ceiling. A gargoyle mounted in the left alcove loses its head in a clean diagonal break. Stone dust rains in a wide curtain. The hound scrabbles, catches itself, and rounds on me with a long-awaited fury and is deeply offended at any delays.

“Val.” Vesper’s voice comes from beyond the iron fence. “What does ‘qui sub lapide requiem petit’ mean?”

I duck the first swipe. The hound’s claws catch my shoulder, and the cold-fire bloom of it spreads across my back, but I set it aside.

“Who seeks what rests below this stone,” I translate.

A pause. The scratch of her thumbnail on her palm. “Next line. Non mendacio⁠—”

The hound hits me in the chest with its full weight. We go over backward together. The iron fence around the coffin catches my spine with a shriek of bending metal. My bones jar. I feel the rail fold under the impact and make an internal note, as iron does not make that sound when it’s having a pleasant experience.

I get one hand under the hound’s jaw and the other around its throat and push. “—sed veritate,” I finish, through my teeth, because I am a goddamn professional. “Must not come here with lies alone.”

I bring my tail around in a full arc and crack it across the hound’s flank, hard enough to raise stone dust from its ribs. It recoils with a grinding yelp, and I shove off the ruined section of fence and roll upright. The bite on my shoulder is already healing. The back is taking longer.

“You are significantly uglier up close,” I tell the hound pleasantly.

It snarls. Foam drips from its lower jaw.

“Oh. That hurt your feelings?” I roll my shoulders back. “Good.”

The humor helps mask the bone-deep fear I feel for Vesper. It centers me, enabling my focus.

When the hound lunges again from the left, I sidestep, catching its rear leg with my tail and whipping it directly into the opposite wall. It hits the stone like a catapult striking a fortress. Both remaining sconces along the far alcove shatter. Rock shards scatter across the floor in a wide radius and rattle against the iron fence.

The hound gets up immediately. “That,” I say, “is genuinely unfair.”

“Non clavis,” Vesper calls from the coffin, slightly breathless. “No key, right?”

“No key,” I confirm and step wide to my right, drawing the hound’s attention away from the window. My tail moves in a slow warning arc.

“Non vis hanc sedem movet—” she shouts.

The hound feints left. I do not take it. “—no force shall move this place,” I answer. “What’s the next part?”

The hound coils back on its haunches, and I judge the angle of its weight distribution with seventeen centuries of experience. I unleash my claws, prowling, mirroring its movements.

“Sola veritas faciem tenet.”

“Only the truth worn on your face,” I translate again.

A brief, expressive pause from the other side of the wall. “Is this man serious⁠—”

“Vesper,” I redirect.