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Jill. Rhyzkahl. Szerain. Ekiri akar. Sovilas mir nah shey. Xharbek. Ashava.
Next, I flipped back to find Marco Knight’s strange warning.
Twelve. The twelfth is a radical game changer. Spawned of fierce cunning. Beauty and power exemplified. Beware the twelfth.
All sunshine and lollipops. That sucker belonged with the info from when Szerain altered and activated the twelfth sigil on me. I backtracked to that entry in my journal. The words Szerain spoke when he called rakkuhr to consummate the sigil loomed in the middle of the page.
Vdat koh akiri qaztehl.
Qaztahl was the demon word for a demonic lord. I’d asked Eilahn about the phrase, and she had explained that the shift from the “a” sound to “e” in qaztehl simply designated uber power. It roughly translated to Infinite resources to the all-powerful demonic lord unfettered.
Unsettling enough on its own and, paired with Knight’s ominous words and Szerain’s unknown motivations, enough to give a girl nightmares. I tucked the journal back under the papers, returned my notebook to my purse, then toddled my ass off to bed. Nightmares or not, I intended to sleep like the dead.
Chapter 7
No nightmares, eight hours of sleep, and a fresh pot of coffee had me feeling like a new woman. Voices in conversation reached me as I poured a cup. Coffee in hand, I stepped out onto the front porch and waved to Jill and Steeev as they crossed the yard. “Are you sure you feel okay to go to work?” I asked her after I descended the steps.
Steeev opened the passenger door of her car, then stepped aside and waited. Jill frowned up at me with one of her Of course I’m fine looks. “Steeev told me what happened, but I don’t remember any of it,” she said with a shrug. “Then again, I got fourteen hours of sleep last night, so I can’t complain too much.” She grinned at my discomfiture. “Don’t worry, I won’t make that my routine sleep aid.”
“Damn right you won’t,” I said as I approached and looked her over. She seemed fine, but it bugged me that we still had no clue how she’d gone from the house to the pond in a split second. “Anything funky with the bean after all that?”
“Nothing other than being quiet and letting me sleep all night. I’m usually up a dozen times to go pee.”
“Almost forgot to tell you, there’s been a change of plans,” I said. “I summoned Mzatal last night, and he’s sending Bryce and hopefully Idris through this morning. We’ll have a full house again.”
She eased herself into the passenger seat. “You’ll have a full house. I have my mobile home to add one layer of separation from the chaos.”
I waited for her to lower the window after Steeev closed her door. “Speaking of chaos, do you mind if they borrow your other car?”
“That old thing needs a lot of love,” she replied with a snort, “but they’re free to use it if they’re mechanically inclined. It’s parked by the crime lab because that’s where it last broke down. Keys are in it.”
“Guess we’ll see if Bryce knows engines,” I said, grinning. “If he can’t get it working, I’ll rent something.”
“You might want to get your credit card ready.”
“Call me if anything weird happens, okay?”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, mom.”
I forced a smile. She hadn’t seen herself all lit up with power on the valve. Yeah, I was going to worry a teensy bit. Fortunately for my peace of mind, she had a demon bodyguard watching her every move. “See you tonight,” I said, then climbed back up the steps and watched them drive off. Weird life. My life.
After finishing my coffee, I headed out to the nexus. I wouldn’t be summoning humans from the demon realm this morning. Instead, with Mzatal and another qaztahl “pushing” from the other side, my role would be more like catching a ball than reeling in a fish. Though I knew the theory, confidence warred with nerves. I enjoyed the challenge of new undertakings, and I had faith in my skills and training but, on the flip side, it was new. If I fucked up, the ones to pay the price would be the guys being sent to Earth.
No pressure, right?
Eilahn lay curled in her makeshift nest, and had probably been there all night absorbing energy. She lifted her head as I approached, then stood in a single fluid motion, bounded to the tree by the porch, and was up and onto the roof in a heartbeat.
Slowly pacing around the perimeter of the nexus, I searched for any residuals from Szerain’s escapade yesterday, relieved when all appeared normal. I moved to the center of the platform and reviewed my plan. Under ordinary circumstances, I wouldn’t need to do a thing to help bring the guys to Earth. After all, only a few weeks earlier Mzatal and Kadir had pushed me through without any help from this end. But with the arcane flows so discombobulated now, it would be harder for the lords to judge the trajectory and force of their push—like not knowing if a slide was greased.
In other words, I needed to make a big ol’ pillow—or a catcher’s mitt—with the shikvihr as the stuffing. The shikvihr was the advanced ritual foundation for arcane work, and thus far I’d mastered seven rings. Though its floating sigils wouldn’t coalesce for me on Earth until I acquired the eleventh ring, it still boosted my capabilities overall—like having an extra battery. I didn’t have to use a separate storage diagram anymore to stockpile potency for rituals.
I set the knife by my feet and chalked Mzatal’s sigil eleven times in a circle around me, then twice I mentally traced the simple flowing lines of the pygah sigil. Calm settled in, and I felt a click of connection with the nexus. I stood and began to dance the circles of the shikvihr, visualizing each sigil as I traced it in the air. Seven rings of eleven sigils each. As I completed and sealed the last circle, a tingle began in my feet and inched upwards. Laughing, I pumped my fist in triumph then hurriedly checked my watch. Five minutes until go time.
The potency flowed like wispy streams beyond the nexus. I extended my arcane senses into it, gathered strands to me then waited. A few minutes later the strands vibrated, signaling the beginning of the push. Focusing down into the nexus, I channeled potency and wound the strands through and around the shikvihr. The vibration increased, and without warning an arcane gale-force wind rose vertically from the ground, nearly ripping apart my magic catcher’s-mitt-pillow-thing. Heart hammering, I pulled more strands from beneath the nexus, reinforcing the entire structure. Seconds later a vortex, twenty feet across, opened below me, and I balanced on a tiny island above a roaring, lightning-shot chaos maelstrom.
Holy fucking shit! Gulping down panic, I regrouped and struggled to keep my mitt-pillow as stable and secure as possible. The resonance in the strands fluctuated, and the roar of the vortex refined to a low pure tone. An instant later, specks from far below grew and resolved into Idris and Bryce hurtling upward. Wait. Crap! I was above them. How the hell was I supposed to catch them without my mitt-pillow blocking their ascent?
Thinking quickly, I choked off the potency, like crimping a water hose, enough to alter the consistency of my mitt-pillow into a squishy-cloud. Bryce and Idris rose on the wind, tumbling and flailing to ground level and past. They slowed as they hit the squishy-cloud, yet the propelling force from the demon realm drove them through it and upward.
