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“Yes, sir,” I said with a confident nod while I sent up a silent wail of despair.
“Good deal. Get on that.” With that he clicked off.
Pellini snorted. “I am so incredibly glad I’m not the Arcane Commander.”
“Paperwork.” I sighed. “Can’t I just go through a rift with some C-4?”
Chapter 13
The house was quiet when we returned, and the mouth-watering aroma of lasagna filled the air—reminding me that I had no idea when I’d last eaten. A cookie in the war room? And that was hours ago.
Cory lay on the fold-out sofa and had progressed from merely hell-gel-covered to the Phase Three red-egg state. Giovanni still slept peacefully, and
Bryce and Sharini Tandon huddled in the war room, reviewing our surveillance camera footage. At the kitchen table, Jill perused a fat tome from the basement library, while two huge pans of lasagna sat atop the stove.
She glanced up. “I just took them out of the oven. They need to cool down about ten minutes before you cut them.”
“I wish everything else would cool down so easily. Now we have even more weirdness.” As I hunted up a cold drink, I filled her in on the gate and Kadir situation.
“Huh. That’s interesting.” Jill gave me a speculative look. “About an hour ago Bryce told me he could feel Seretis again through the bond—just barely enough to know that he’s alive. I wonder if there’s any connection to what happened with the Spires?”
“I don’t know, but that’s fantastic news. How is Bryce handling it?”
Pleased affection lit her eyes. “It’s like a thousand pounds lifted off his shoulders. Nice to have some good news.” She closed the tome. “I’m glad you got to talk to Paul, too. Plus now we know the hostile demons aren’t the only ones still in existence in the demon realm. I’m not thrilled your Lord Creepy Psycho is on the loose, though.”
As she straightened papers, I glanced out the kitchen window to see Rhyzkahl doing pushups on the roof of his house. “Fuck the lords,” I murmured.
“Not that one, I hope!”
I snorted. “Don’t worry, that one is never getting ’twixt my nethers again.” I turned away from the window. “‘Fuck the lords’ is what that big demon said a few seconds before he ripped out his own throat and dropped a buttload of gold in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot.”
Jill pursed her lips. “Was it a Jontari warlord?”
“It was a reyza, the biggest . . .” I fumbled to a stop. “Wait. A whatsit whosit?”
“I’m probably pronouncing it all wrong,” she said with a little shake of her head. “I was guessing based on the gold, but you’d know better than I.”
“I’ve never seen a demon wear gold before, but the Piggly Wiggly demon shouted ‘Jontari’ before he died. What do you know about it?”
“Oh! Not a lot. I came across a reference to warlords wearing gold. Armbands. Wing, ear, tail, and nose jewelry. That sort of thing.”
“Back up.” I felt as if I’d stumbled into deep water while wading in a familiar pool. “I’ve never heard of demon warlords either.”
Jill looked puzzled. “They’re the leaders of the major Jontari clans.” At my baffled expression, she narrowed her eyes. “Are you messing with me?”
“I swear, I’m not.”
She didn’t seem convinced but carried on. “Jontari are the demons not associated with the lords. Like, ninety-nine percent of the demon population.”
“That’s impossible.” But even as I said it, doubt crept in. Though I’d lived in the demon realm for months, I’d only seen relatively small numbers of demons in the various lords’ realms. A couple of hundred total at the most. “No, I guess it’s not impossible. I’ve been finding gaps in my knowledge big enough to drive a planet through. This could be yet another sizable hole.”
She tapped her chin in thought. “Maybe it’s not an accident. Between the library here and the database the librarians are maintaining, I only found one sketch, one memoir, and three partial sentences in as many different books—with adjacent pages torn out.”
I tensed. “As if someone was trying to erase knowledge of them?”
“Could be,” she said. “The sketch looked a bit like a graa and had text beside it in Aramaic, but there was a margin note that said ‘Jontari.’ I only noticed it because that was the only word on the page written in the Roman alphabet. The memoir was uncensored, probably because it was wedged inside a book of insect drawings and got overlooked. It has a story about the summoning of a Jontari ruling warlord. An imperator.” She made a face. “Before the summoner could finish feeding blood to the demon, it ripped him in half and ate his guts as he died.”
A shudder went through me. I’d been eviscerated by a demon, though not during a summoning. And what was the deal with feeding it blood? The blood I spilled during summonings was to add strength and power to the diagram. “Was there anything else?”
