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I turned back to Ryan. “Okay, I’ve been awake since about nine last night, and I need to make preparations for the summoning and then take a nap, so you have to go away for a while. Come to my house at ten tonight.”
He grinned with wicked deviousness. “Aww, can’t I come over and nap with you?”
“What? No!” I blurted before my brain could engage. Shock flickered briefly in his eyes, and then his grin slipped, to be replaced by his neutral fed smile. Fuck, Kara. Overreact much? I thought with a mental groan. “I mean, I really need to rest, so I intend to sleep.… Unless you are offering to bore me into somnolence?” I added, struggling to bring back the teasing tone of the conversation.
“Ouch!” He laughed, but I could detect a forced edge to it. “All right, I’ll see you at ten.” And he turned and sauntered off to his car.
I watched him go, mentally thrashing myself for reacting like such an idiot. What the hell was wrong with me? I teased and joked with my coworkers all the time. So why the freak-out when Ryan did the same? He was teasing too. Right?
I exhaled as he backed out of the driveway and drove off. I had to face facts: I was no good at dealing with men. I couldn’t even tell if he had any real interest in me. How pitiful was that? Still, it wasn’t like I knew him all that well. We’d been thrown together for a month on the Symbol Man case, and that had pretty much been it. It was sad that my best friend was someone I barely knew, but even if I did know him, did I want to get involved with him?
Not sure. That was the best answer I could give myself. Not only did I not want to chance losing him as a friend, but I also didn’t know enough about him. The demonic lord Rhyzkahl had implied that Ryan was more than he seemed. Unfortunately, I’d had no chance to pursue that, as I’d been more consumed with finding a way to help my aunt. Hell, Rhyzkahl could have merely meant that Ryan had more arcane ability than he was letting on, or maybe even that he colored his hair. But the comment still bothered me, if only because it cast doubts I didn’t want to contemplate. I liked Ryan.>“Such as?”
“Stillbirths,” I said quietly. “Ill patients dying when they should have been able to recover. An empty ‘pitcher’ would almost have a vacuum effect as it pulled back any available essence.”
He frowned. “What about population growth?”
“More essence can form, or grow from existing essence, but it takes time. Think of a tomato. Takes weeks to grow it but minutes to eat.”
“I think it scares me that you know this,” he said, a slight smile twisting the corner of his mouth.
I shifted uncomfortably in the chair and didn’t smile back. “I think it might have been my fault.”
He straightened. “Wait. What? Why on earth would you think that?”
I quickly explained about the ilius and my worry that somehow I’d failed to dismiss it properly. But by the end of my recitation he was already shaking his head.
“Nope, not buying it. I don’t know that much about summonings and demons, but it doesn’t make any sense that it would escape your control and then go swoop down on this guy. Even if he did commit suicide.”
I sighed. “I know, but I can’t think of a better explanation.”
“Then you haven’t figured it out yet,” he said. “You will.”
I gave him a small smile. His belief in me was probably misguided, but it was still reassuring. “Well, just for that, I’m going to let you come with me to my aunt’s house while I try—yet again—to break in to her library so I can do some research.”
He gave a bark of laughter. “Like Tom Sawyer ‘let’ his friends paint the fence?”
I grinned and stood. “Damn, I didn’t know you could read.”
“Yeah, well, it was an audiobook.”
“Smart-ass. I’ll meet you over there.”
I stood in the hallway of my aunt’s house and scowled at the door to the library. I loved my aunt. I really truly did. She was the only family I had left after my parents died—my mother of cancer when I was eight and my father from a drunk driver three years later. She raised me and became my mentor after determining that I had the talent to become a summoner of demons. Aunt Tessa had the capacity to drive me crazy, and there were times I wanted to throttle her, but I did love her.
However, at the moment I was back to wanting to throttle her. She’d rigged her library so full of twisty-ugly wards and other arcane protections that I felt like a member of an arcane bomb-disposal unit. And though I’d known she had a zillion arcane protections on her house and library, I’d assumed—foolishly, as it turned out—that my aunt had allowed some sort of exception for me, her only living relative.
I couldn’t even open the library door to see what kind of condition the room was in, because of the protections that writhed and pulsed in angry coils of purple and black—visible only to someone who could see the arcane. To the average person, it looked just like a regular door.
Actually, the average person wouldn’t get close enough, since part of the protections on the library—and on the house itself—involved a complicated aversion effect that made anyone trying to get into the house suddenly think of something that urgently needed doing elsewhere.
The aversions hadn’t been hard for me to get around, but the rest of the protections were another matter entirely. Working with arcane wards was not my forte. It required skill and potency—much like a summoning. I needed more experience to gain the skill, and potency was difficult to come by except during the full moon. The reason that summonings were usually done when the moon was at or near its fullest was because natural potency was rich and calm at that time. During waning and waxing of the moon, potency was scattered and hard to control. It was low and weak during the dark moon, but it was even, which was safer. Fluctuations in potency could be devastating when summoning a demon. I’d summoned the ilius the night before the full moon—safe enough to do with a third-level demon—but a summoning of anything higher than eighth or ninth level was best left to the night of the full. The restrictions of the phases of the moon were a pain in the ass, but the only method of storing potency that I knew of was the one the Symbol Man had used—torture and murder. Needless to say, I didn’t want to go there.
Ryan let out a low whistle. “That looks seriously ugly.”
“It’s ridiculous,” I complained. “Why the hell did she need all of this?”
“I dunno, but she was apparently not kidding about keeping people out.”
