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Paul shook his head. “That’s not it. They’re coming through without a mark on them, but eight out of ten are dead, as if the bodies got remade but didn’t get turned back on. It’s been like that ever since the valve explosion back-blasted into the demon realm. A syraza showed up on the clifftop in Mzatal’s realm a few days later, dead as a doornail.”
I sucked in a breath. “Katashi!” I exclaimed. “I knew he had to be a demon. Am I right?”
“Got it in one,” he said, smiling at my excitement. “Lord Kadir believes the syraza took over the life of the real Katashi nearly forty years ago, after a decade of preparation.” His attention drifted back to Kadir who strolled toward a knot of soldiers and auxiliary personnel in front of the old smoothie shop.
I managed to catch Pellini’s eye then sighed when he gave me a “still no luck” glower. Crapsticks. “So fake Katashi is dead dead.” At least I could be hugely relieved on that count. Scratching even one name off the My Nemeses list was a huge deal. Though I sorely wanted this news to exonerate Tessa, the unpleasant truth was that the Katashi she’d known and revered for the past thirty years had been the fake-Katashi. Hell, she might have even known he was a demon. “Whose puppet was he? Jesral’s?” That made the most sense considering one of Katashi’s key summoners, Tsuneo, had a tattoo of the slimy lord’s sigil.
“Nope,” Paul said, to my surprise. “All the lords seemed truly shocked that he was a demon. They—” He broke off, tensing as Kadir stopped in front of a burly soldier.
“What is it?” I frowned in Kadir’s direction but couldn’t see anything different in his terrorize-all-the-humans behavior. “Paul, what’s wrong?”
The words were barely out of my mouth when Kadir’s aura shifted from ice-cold scary to trapped-in-a-room-with-one-hundred-serial-killers scary. Paul started toward Kadir but halted when the lord glanced at him over his shoulder.
Paul retreated to me, pale and tense. “It’s . . . okay,” he told me. “He’s not going to hurt the guy.”
The burly soldier unfroze and dug in his pockets. A moment later he came out with a pen and what looked like a paper napkin and began to write.
“What on earth is Kadir doing?” I asked, frustration and bafflement rising. “Getting the dude’s phone number?”
Paul didn’t answer. Kadir left the soldier to his writing then strolled toward us, his aura engulfing me like a tidal wave of eel-filled slime. Palms sweating, I squelched my survival instinct to get the hell away. Along my ribs, Kadir’s sigil scar itched.
He stopped before me with an enigmatic smile that sent chills up my spine. “No need to fret thus, Kara Gillian. I depart.”
“Wait,” I said and forced myself to stand taller and lift my chin. “We have common ground. You don’t like the flow disruption caused by the rifts. We don’t like anything about them. What can we do Earthside to counter the damn things?”
Kadir studied me for several heartbeats, ice-cold gaze intensifying. “Use the rakkuhr as the demons do. Tame it. Shape it to your will.”
Gooseflesh swept over my skin at the mere thought of handling the vile shit, but I gave a nod of acknowledgement. “Show me how.”
He hissed out a breath. “I do not touch it. It is insidious.”
Interesting. Kadir and Mzatal vehemently reviled rakkuhr. Rhyzkahl and the other Mraztur used it, though I had the sense it held them in a stranglehold grip. Not so for Szerain. He commanded it. That was likely at least part of why he’d been exiled to Earth. “Then how can Szerain manipulate it unscathed?”
Kadir leaned close until his face was only inches from mine. “Szerain is dangerous.”
“That’s why I need him.” Szerain was dangerous because he’d broken the rules, pissed off the Demahnk Council. That alone earned him a gold star in my book. And with rakkuhr screwing up Earth, I needed him more than ever.
Kadir straightened, his eyes narrowed. “You dabble in destruction, Kara Gillian.”
I bared my teeth. “I dabble in survival.”
Kadir laughed, a sound that lifted the hair on the back of my neck. “As do I.” He glided toward the Spires with Paul in his wake. “In the end, we shall see whose dabbling leads to survival.”
“Working together to save both our worlds would be a nice change,” I called after him.
Pellini dropped his hands from the crystal and wisely shifted well away from the gate-gap,
clearly uninterested in a surprise vacation to the demon realm. Kadir paused and regarded him, dangerous expression warming ever so slightly, then he placed his hand on Paul’s shoulder and stepped into the gap between the crystals. The gateway flickered, and Paul gave me an encouraging smile an instant before he and Kadir vanished.
Pellini and I exchanged a what-the-fuck look.
“Did they—” He clamped down on the rest, but it was obvious we were both wondering the same thing. Despite the gate’s showy flickering, neither of us had felt it activate. Did that mean Kadir had found a means to teleport like the demahnk? It was certainly possible. The lords were all half demahnk, and Kadir had previously demonstrated the ability to surf interdimensional flows in a way no other lords could. But if Kadir had teleported rather than use the gate, then I had an uneasy feeling that he was still on Earth—with Paul, who could tap into computer networks as effortlessly as a lord tapped into potency flows.
“Whew!” I said, eyes on Pellini. “I’m glad they’ve gone back to the demon realm.”
“Yeah, no kidding!” He blew out an exaggerated breath. “That was intense.”
As if some deity had thrown a switch, the statue-people staggered free of their invisible bonds. Hornak barked shaky orders for status updates and surveillance footage, but my eyes went to the burly soldier as he looked around furtively and shoved the pen and napkin in his pocket. Crap. What had Kadir done to the poor guy? I headed his way as Hornak cursed about hazy memories and nothing but fuzz and static on the camera feeds. At least the consensus seemed to be that Paul and Kadir had, indeed, returned to the demon realm.
