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There was another type of demon above those twelve levels: the demonic lords. It was considered pretty much impossible to summon a demonic lord. Or rather, with enough power and preparation it was technically possible to summon one, but surviving the experience was another matter entirely. Yet I’d accidentally summoned Rhyzkahl, one of the highest of the demonic lords, and I’d even survived the experience.
In a manner of speaking.
Rhyzkahl had created a link to me after I’d unintentionally summoned him, and for a time he had come to me in dream-sendings, so vivid and real that it was impossible to tell whether I was awake or asleep. Plus, elements of these sendings could intrude into the waking world, as evidenced by one instance where he healed an injury I’d received when I was awake. But those had stopped after he’d saved my life. I’d had dreams of him since, but they never felt as visceral as the sendings.
I knew I should be pleased and relieved that the link had apparently been severed. But I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Or him. It didn’t help that many of the dreams were filled with scorching erotic content—with me as an eager participant. I woke from them shuddering with a combination of pleasure and need—feelings that quickly shifted to confusion and uncertainty. Was he sending these dreams in order to remind me of what we’d shared and what he could offer? Or were the dreams merely messages from my screwed-up psyche, reminding me that I had no boyfriend, no sex life, and no prospects?
Either way, I could do without the reminders.
I felt the demon’s return before I saw it. I pushed off the car and straightened as it swirled around me, illusory teeth grazing me. I suppressed a shiver. “Show,” I commanded as I closed my eyes. Images flickered behind my eyelids, hazy and difficult to follow, but along with the images came scent and sound and a sense of distance, as if I’d walked the demon’s path. I could have done without the scent. The hunter was quite dead, face bloated and swollen, and the rank stench of decomposition surrounded him. I had no idea how he’d died—whether from drowning or injury—but the important thing was that I knew the body was in this area.
I opened my eyes, then held the door open for the ilius. It swirled around me again and I could feel its rising hunger. It had completed its task and wanted to be fed. I tightened my mental grip on the arcane bindings, even as sweat prickled under my arms. “Not here. Soon.”
The demon flashed red in my othersight, then slid into the backseat again. I got into the driver’s seat as quickly as I could. I’d never heard of an ilius feeding on a human, but there was a lot I didn’t know about demons. I didn’t care to find out what would happen if it got hungry enough. Fortunately, the place I was headed was only a short distance down the highway. Once again I pulled the car over and released the demon. “Follow,” I commanded, then set off at a light jog down a well-worn path, grateful for the moon that lit my way. I could feel the demon following me and had to shake the unnerving sensation that it was chasing me. A few hundred yards later I stopped at the edge of a bayou. I turned back to the ilius and held the image of a nutria in my mind—a large ratlike creature with nasty yellow teeth. Nutria were an invasive species that had quickly overrun south Louisiana and did terrible damage to marshlands—so much so that nutria-eradication programs had been created.
I had my own nutria-eradication program right here. “Feed,” I said, continuing to hold the image in my mind and sending the mental emphasis that it was to feed only on the nutria.
It zoomed past me so quickly that I nearly lost my balance, and before I could even blink I heard an animal shriek; it was quickly silenced. I looked away from the sight of the demon winding itself around one of the creatures. I’d seen an ilius feed before. There was no blood or rending of flesh, or anything graphic and grotesque. To anyone without arcane ability, it merely looked as if the nutria seized up and convulsed, dying for no apparent reason. But othersight would show that the ilius was gently and painlessly slaying the creature with a near-surgical jab of arcane power, then drawing out and consuming its life force—or essence.
The demon dropped the empty husk of the nutria and dove on another. I kept my eyes fixed on the moon above the trees, ignoring the imagined mental screams of the ratlike creatures. After about half a dozen nutria, the demon slowly coiled its way back across the water to sleepily wind around me like a cat preparing to settle in for a nap. A demonic, life-eating, piranha-toothed, misty cat.
I stepped back from the demon and began the dismissal chant. Wind rose from nowhere, bringing the scent of rotting vegetation and nearly making me gag. But I kept my focus steady, and a few heartbeats later a bright slit opened in the universe—the portal between this world and the demon sphere. A ripping crack split the quiet of the swamp, and then the light—and the demon—were gone.
I gave myself a minute to catch my breath, then headed back up the trail to my car, not looking back at the scattered bodies of nutria along the bank of the bayou.
Sunrise had bathed the eastern sky in purple and gold by the time I made it back to St. Long Parish. I’d gone farther on my hunt with the ilius than I’d expected, nearly to the Mississippi—Louisiana border. The hunter had obviously managed to cover some distance in his little flatboat before running into trouble. On the way back I called an acquaintance who was a member of a local dog-search team and gave her the approximate GPS coordinates. She thanked me and didn’t ask any further questions. I’d given her tips before that had—of course—panned out, with the admonition that I didn’t want questions and that she was free to take all the credit for herself. She assumed I was clairvoyant. I wasn’t about to correct her.
My phone buzzed when I was about half a mile from my house, and I grimaced. It had to be work if I was getting a call this early in the morning. I was a detective with the Beaulac Police Department, working violent crimes and homicides. I’d been back at work for only a week after being on medical/administrative leave for nearly a month, thanks to the serial killer known as the Symbol Man. I’d closed the case but had not escaped unscathed—even though I didn’t have a single scar to prove it.
My caller ID showed that it was from my sergeant’s cell phone. I hit the answer button. “I’m not on call and my shift doesn’t start until ten today, Crawford. Leave me the fuck alone.”
Cory Crawford laughed. He’d been promoted to sergeant a few weeks ago when my former captain was appointed chief of police. That appointment had left an opening, which created a reshuffling all the way down the line. I’d had a few issues with Crawford in the past, but, to my surprise and relief, he’d become a completely different person after his promotion.
“Nah, it’s not work. I was just wondering if you could do me a favor since you live out in the middle of fucking nowhere.”
I grinned. My house wasn’t quite in the middle of nowhere, but it was far enough away from Beaulac—and most civilization—that I had a heaping portion of privacy. And since I summoned demons in my basement, privacy was pretty damn important to me. “What do you need?”
“I need you to swing by Brian Roth’s place and wake him the fuck up. His shift started at six this morning. He still isn’t in yet, and he has a meeting with a witness at eight.”
I continued past my driveway. Brian lived in a gated subdivision just a few miles from where I lived, on a sprawling piece of land that was almost as wonderful as the ten acres I owned. “He’s not answering his cell?”
“Would I be calling you if he was?” he said with asperity. “But the witness is a friend of the captain’s, and if Brian doesn’t show I’m gonna have to write him up.” I could hear the reluctance in his voice.
Brian and I had started in police work at about the same time and had even been teammates when we were road cops. Then we’d both been promoted to detective within months of each other, though he’d gone to Narcotics while I’d been put into Property Crimes. I glanced at my watch. Almost seven-thirty now. Brian would be pushing it to get to work in time to meet the witness. It took me nearly half an hour to make it in from my house.
“I’m almost there. I’ll bang on his door and then call you back.”
“Appreciate it.”
The gates to his subdivision were closed, but they swung open obligingly after I punched the police access code into the little keypad. A few minutes later I pulled into the driveway to his house—two-story with white brick exterior, faux columns by the front door, a double garage, and decent landscaping. It was the kind of house that would be impossible to afford on a cop’s salary, but his dad was a judge and his stepmother was a lawyer, and they’d supposedly purchased the house for him as a wedding present. I’d heard rumors that he tried to refuse it and had reluctantly accepted it only after his dad showed the house to Brian’s new wife. It didn’t surprise me that he might have refused it. Brian was a decent guy who worked hard, and I didn’t see him as the type to be comfortable accepting such a large gift, even from family.
A red Ford F-150 was parked in the driveway next to a gold Ford Taurus with public plates—Brian’s department-issued vehicle. That told me that he was most likely at home, since I knew the pickup was his personal vehicle. But a shiver went through me as I approached the house, and I paused, trying to capture the fleeting sense of unease that had drifted by me. My gaze fell on the door and my eyes narrowed. It was pulled mostly shut, but the latch hadn’t caught and it was ajar approximately half an inch. I quickly retreated to my car and grabbed my gun and holster out of the glove box, then returned to the door, clipping the holster onto my belt and holding my gun at the ready position. I couldn’t see any sign of forced entry. Maybe he just didn’t pull the door all the way shut? I wanted to believe that, but the continued sense of unease nagged at me.
I nudged the door farther open with my foot, staying behind the jamb. “Brian?” I called. “It’s Kara Gillian.”
Silence. Not even the brush of movement on carpet. If he was in there, he was being awfully quiet. I gave the door a soft kick to push it open all the way, then took a quick peek in.
