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“Someone I used to know.”
I headed towards the stairs and heard him quietly say, “We should all be so lucky to be someone you used to know, brujita.”
I climbed up and paused at the door, then looked back. “You’d be luckier to stay in the present tense.”
Santiago chuckled. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
I glanced past him and took in the scene one last time. The gears of my mind began to spin faster and faster, and I pressed my hand to Santiago’s chest to stop him. The cotton of his shirt was so soft it felt like cashmere under my palm.
“Wait,” I said.
“We really ought to go, I think. It’s only a matter of time before the demon realizes we’re down here, and I’m not set up to contain it right now.”
“Hold on, I’m trying to think.” I scanned the double outline of the circle, trying to remember the last time I’d seen something like it. Memere had done something similar once, though with an undersprite—a lesser immortal trickster, not as bad as a demon.
Why the two circles though? I know she’d told me, but I was having a hard time calling the lesson back to mind.
“The two circles,” I said, wondering if Santiago might be able to jog the magical recall for me. “I don’t think the second one is designed to keep us out.” Most magical circles were about containment, not protection. “So why the second circle?”
I nudged my way past him and jumped down the last couple steps. He followed behind me and re-lit the Zippo. Shink-flick.
“Can I see that?” I took it from him without waiting for his answer, but he let it go easily and stooped with me when I got low to the dirt floor outside the second circle. What I’d originally thought was chalk and blood was actually a thin line of bloody salt.
“It’s a binding blockade.” He prodded the line with one finger. “The inner circle was to bring it up. This one is what’s keeping it trapped.” Upon that last realization, he withdrew his hands and rested them on his knees, looking at me expectantly.
“This is what’s keeping it trapped in the house,” I summarized, and he nodded.
“How did you notice that? I honestly thought it was a guardian charm, to boost the strength of the inner circle and deter obstruction from the outside.”
I lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “It was the salt. I just did a pretty weird ceremony, and the salt reminded me.”
“This is good though, right? If the circle is intact, we only need to get everyone out of the house, and then I can perform the trap enchantment.”
I got back up with my heart in my throat. “Except Gamigan has a weird gift, if what your book told me is true. If it takes a human host, it can use that host’s form again whenever it wants. So, either the thing upstairs is Tansy, it’s Gamigan in Tansy, or it’s Gamigan pretending to be her. I mean… if she’s the one who called it. Meaning it could have used her to break the circle.” I was spitballing at this point, but seeing the cinder block on the altar was a pretty strong hint that this was all Tansy’s doing. What she was up to and why were questions I still couldn’t even remotely answer.
I walked the entire circumference of the circle, expecting to find it broken somewhere. In order for the demon to have learned Tansy’s shape, it had to have possessed her at some point. That was the only way it could mimic her appearance. If the demon had used her as a host body, that meant it had an opportunity to use her body to do anything it wanted. Including letting it out. That was the reason so few magic users messed around with demonic summoning. Ultimately it ended up going terribly wrong, and no one wanted to be the asshole who unleashed hell on earth.
Thanks, Tansy.
But the circle was unblemished, barely a crystal out of place.
As I approached the altar I held the lighter out ahead of me, so the small sphere of light it cast fell on the framed photograph. In it, two dozen grinning college girls were lined up in neat rows, beaming for the camera like they were contestants in a Most Wholesome Smile contest. I squinted to get a better look and saw a sign in front of them. Delta Phi 2016. It was practically brand new, showing the most recent group of sisters from that year.
Several faces among the group were circled with blood. Having never met the missing girls, I couldn’t be positive, but I was almost certain the circled girls were Heidi, Laura, and Alexandra.
And one more.
Tansy.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
We emerged in the kitchen and found it empty.
Plastic beer cups and glass bottles were strewn across every flat surface and all over the floor. The music had fallen silent, but the strobing lights remained, creating ghosts out of shadows every few seconds.
Santiago inched ahead of me and glanced around the vacant space, an expression of unmasked confusion lifting his brows and etching a frown out of his mouth. “Did your boyfriend get them out, maybe?”
Oh, so he did acknowledge that Wilder and I were romantically involved, he just didn’t care.
