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Groaning, I flopped onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. It was made of dozens and dozens of narrow boards that were all meticulously linked with tongue and groove joints. Every wall and ceiling in my house was like that. Hell, the whole house was a marvelous example of construction done right, with every section planned in detail and built with care and precision by my grandfather. One of our security guards, Bubba Suarez, had an extensive background in construction. He’d once spent the better part of a rare morning off going through the house, from attic to basement, making manly noises of appreciation for details I’d been blissfully unaware of but apparently made an enormous difference in the structural integrity of the house.
“You got yerself a mighty fine place here, Miss Kara,” Suarez had announced. “Keep up the maintenance, and this beauty’ll last ’til the Mississippi dries up, s’long as a twister don’t hit it dead on.” And then he went to gaze adoringly at the brickwork in the fireplace.
Experience told me that my summoning diagram needed to be as solid and precise as this house. Every piece doing its part and working together as a perfect whole for maximum strength and stability. Easy. Except that I had only a handful of scattered and incomplete references that could tell me how to create it. Szerain expected me to do the most difficult and dangerous summoning of my life without any sort of blueprint. Me, who’d only ever summoned “tame” non-Jontari demons. It would be like trying to build a mansion, sans instructions, after only building doghouses.
The one thing that kept me from descending into full-blown panic was the essence-deep knowledge that Szerain believed I could pull it off. Since I couldn’t possibly learn it in time, I needed to know it.
I struggled to wrap my brain around knowing the entirety of a major and unfamiliar summoning but gave up when my eyes began to cross. All right, what if I broke it down into its components? That was much less head-hurty.
I knew how to open a portal. That was the same no matter what kind of creature was being summoned. Same with the call, the command to appear, though this one would require way more oomph—like fishing with braided monofilament instead of dinky ten pound test. However, the nexus would provide all the power I needed.
It was the bindings that stopped me dead and left me cold. When push came to shove, I had to admit that I’d never done real ones before. The protections I’d always laid were sturdy enough to hold a weak demon, but for any creature with more than a smattering of arcane skill, they’d be about as effective as chains made of construction paper. I needed to know how to contain a Jontari imperator, but I had no foundation to draw on. I was expected to chain the beast with only the barest knowledge of metal.
No, it was even simpler than that. I was trying to make electricity without knowing to wrap a copper wire around a magnet. Once I grasped that missing core aspect, that spark, I felt certain that my experience would fill in the rest. If I could just find one complete drawing or description of a full old-school diagram with protections designed to contain a mega-powerful creature, then I—
I jerked upright. The outreach center! Peter Cerise built a diagram there to summon and bind Rhyzkahl, who certainly counted as a mega-powerful creature. Even when Cerise was bleeding me, I couldn’t help but admire the exquisite brilliance of what he’d created, unlike anything I’d seen before. Too bad I’d been a bit preoccupied and unable to give it a close examination.
Crime scene photos would show the diagram, I thought then immediately abandoned that idea. The Crime Lab had been reduced to rubble when the PD valve blew.
My smile grew. But Peter Cerise had used my blood to paint the sigils. With the right equipment, I should be able to see every single one.
“Oh, Kara, you so awesoooooome,” I sang. With any luck, I’d find that core nugget of info I needed to summon the big bad demon and rescue Elinor.
After coffee, of course.
I tugged on a sweatshirt and shorts, dragged fingers through my hair then shuffled to the kitchen. Janice sat at the table, coffee in hand as she watched news footage on a tablet. She had on black fatigue pants and a green, long-sleeved shirt that bore a computer company logo and looked exactly like a shirt our tech whiz Lilith Cantrell owned.
“Crap,” I said as my brain finished waking up. “Forgot to make arrangements for clothes for you. Sorry.” Or any other arrangements, for that matter.
“No worries.” She shut off the tablet and gave me a light smile. “You have a good crew here. They made sure I knew the drill and had what I needed.” She lifted her chin toward the stove. “There’s bacon and biscuits if you want them.”
Relieved, I continued to the coffeemaker where a sticky note from Jill told me to check my email. Definitely the best place to leave me a note and guarantee that I’d see it. “We’re lucky to have so many solid people working with us.” I filled and doctored a cup then took a long sip. Go, caffeine, go!
After a few more gulps to finish waking up, I pulled up my email on my phone and found a message from Jill with a timestamp of five a.m. In other words, after she returned from getting the net with Bryce, she’d stayed up to work on the Korean document. I wanted to show her the sketchbook, but I’d wait another hour or so before waking her.
Hey K—
Between the power of the internet and Giovanni’s awesome brain, we translated that doc. Quick summary: There’s a Korean artifact—a stone turtle—that’s actually filled with makkas.
Since I figured that might prove useful, I searched online with the description from the text, and I’m pretty sure I found it. Even better, it’s currently part of an exhibit at the National Art Center in Tokyo. I’ve attached a picture and a copy of the translated documents.
J
Hot damn. Even though there was no possible way to get our hands on it in time for the summoning, I liked the idea of having a stash of the arcane dampening material as a just-in-case. Idris could swing through Japan and scoop it up. Of course, I had zero idea what was involved in “borrowing” part of a museum exhibit, but I had friends in high places—Hello, Madam President—who could pull the right strings.
And when she inevitably asked why I needed an ancient stone turtle, I’d do what I always did: make up something clever and confusing.
Pleased, I sent the necessary emails winging their way through the internet then topped off my coffee. As I spooned in more sugar, clanging from the back yard drew my attention out the window to where Bryce and three security guards laboriously rolled up a huge Sk
eeterCheater net. Its launcher squatted on the far side of the nexus, about a dozen feet beyond Rhyzkahl’s orbit. Our mechanic, Ronda Greitz, hunched over the launcher as she tinkered with its inner workings.
“I just have one question,” Janice said, having politely waited until I wasn’t so obviously busy.
“Only one?” I smiled, appreciating her courtesy.
She chuckled. “Okay, I have thousands, but the most burning one is, why do you have two giant boulders in your living room? And what on earth are they made of? It’s no mineral or substance I’ve ever seen.”
Exhaling, I took a seat across from her. “Each one has a person inside of it,” I said then went on to give her a quick rundown of the “plague” and its phases, as well as its connection to the rakkuhr that was pouring through the valves.
