Mark of the Demon (Kara Gillian 1)

My aunt was silent, and when I looked up at her I was shocked to see a stricken expression on her face. “Aunt Tessa? What is it?”

She swallowed visibly, throat bobbing in what would have otherwise been a comic manner. “Rhyzkahl.” She let out a ragged breath. “Yet here you are still, and in what appears to be one piece.”

I tried to give a diffident shrug. I didn’t have to tell her about the sex part, did I? “Yeah, well, I mean, I, uh … just remembered what you taught me about dismissals.” I avoided looking directly at my aunt. I am such a damn chickenshit. “So, um … what is he?”

“You … dismissed him,” Tessa stated, voice flat with disbelief.

“I’m still here, right?” I tried to keep my voice steady and blasé.

My aunt remained silent, and after several seconds I risked a peek at her face. Tessa crossed her arms over her chest and glowered at me.

“Young woman,” she said in a voice that was cold enough to destroy the entire citrus crop of Florida, “you are going to tell me exactly what happened last night.”

I took a nervous breath. “Not until you tell me who or what Rhyzkahl is.”

I steeled myself for a verbal flaying, but instead Tessa just sighed and nodded. “Yes, you need to know that. I’m sorry I didn’t already teach you that, but, by the spheres! I’d no idea you’d be insane enough to call one of his ilk.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose! Who is he?” I looked at my aunt warily. “Is he some kind of creature that can take human form?”

Tessa shook her head. “No, nothing so simple as that. Library. Now.” She unwound her legs and was out of the room before I could stand. By the time I walked down the hall and into her library, Aunt Tessa was already sitting cross-legged on the floor with a stack of books piled about her.

I set my bag down on a pile of papers on the table. There was no point in looking for a clear space. In fact, I had always thought that library was an inappropriate term for the room. Describing a room as a library gave one the impression that it was fairly ordered, with books on shelves and arranged in some logical manner or system. But order and logic did not apply anywhere here.

True, there were shelves on the walls, all of which were filled with books or papers of various types, but the books were shoved onto the shelves in a completely haphazard manner, often without any attempt to keep the spine out to make it easier to look for a specific title. There was no free wall space; absolutely every inch, from floor to ceiling, all the way to the molding around the door, was bookshelves. A broad wooden table dominated the center of the room, with two worn leather-upholstered chairs beside it. Books, scrolls, and papers tumbled over one another on the table and chairs, with more piles of books in scattered locations on the floor throughout the room.

And from the center of the ceiling hung an enormous, luxurious crystal chandelier—utterly out of place and looking far more suited to the ballroom of an ocean liner.

I’d once had the temerity to throw my aunt’s own words back at her and point out that the chaos in the library could attract unwanted energy and interfere with her summonings. I’d been rewarded with the crisp response that just because I didn’t understand her organizational system didn’t mean it didn’t exist. Hell, for all I knew she really did have some sort of methodology, but in ten years I had yet to fathom it.

Tessa scratched the side of her nose, then motioned me over. “Are you sure it called itself Rhyzkahl?”

I moved over to my aunt and knelt beside her. “Umm, yeah. Pretty darn sure.” More than sure. Those words were seared into my memory, along with the memory of him lying beside me, his hand resting on my hip, his lips on my skin. The sight of him standing and pulling his shirt on, muscles rippling more pleasingly than any male model—

I abruptly realized that my aunt was peering at me, eyebrows drawn together. I summoned an innocent look and worked on controlling the flush.

Tessa gave me a measuring look, then pointed to a picture in the tome before her. “That’s Rysehl.” The picture showed a wingless creature that looked like a goat/dog/lion, with an elongated reptilian face and small stubby horns that curved up and forward from the sides of its head. A spiky ridge crest rose from the middle of its forehead, extending down to the nape of its neck. In the picture the demon crouched, head tilted to one side as if listening for something. I knew this demon, knew the face. This was Rysehl, a fourth-level demon. The one I’d intended to summon.

I shook my head. “Definitely not what came through last night.”

Tessa shrugged and turned to a page that was marked with a black feather. “All right, then, how about this one? This is Rhial.” I didn’t recognize this particular demon, but I could see instantly that it was a mehnta, a ninth-level demon—which was obviously not the one I had encountered. Mehnta looked like human females—albeit winged human females with clawed hands and feet and dozens of snake-things coming out of their mouths. Most assuredly not Rhyzkahl.

“No.” I was starting to get annoyed. I knew what demons looked like. The differences between the lower- and higher-level demons were unmistakable. The higher the level, the bigger and more intelligent they were. Seventh and up were winged, with the twelfth-level reyza nearly half again as tall as a normal human. The faces of reyza were still bestial, with mouths full of deadly sharp teeth and long extended fangs, but not as much so as those of lowers. The higher demons’ bodies were far closer to a human’s, too, though with more muscle and power than any human could ever hope to attain. “It wasn’t a zrila, savik, ilius, luhrek, nyssor, faas, kehza, graa, mehnta, zhurn, syraza, or reyza.” I rattled the names off quickly.

“Thank you for that lesson in demonology,” my aunt replied dryly.

I sighed. “Aunt Tessa, I thought you recognized the name Rhyzkahl. What is he?”

Tessa ignored me and flipped to another section of the tome. “This one is Rhykezial.”

This picture didn’t show a creature that I had any familiarity with at all. It looked more like a painful cross between a squid and a spider, and I figured it was one of the multitudes of creatures that could not be summoned between the planes. Or perhaps something from another plane entirely. There were a multitude of planes, but the demon realm was the only one that ever intersected with this world, as far as I knew.

I let my breath out gustily. This was starting to feel like looking at a lineup. “No, Aunt Tessa. Can’t you just tell me what Rhyzkahl is?”

Tessa closed the tome with a soft thud. “I just don’t want to believe that you summoned that one. To be honest, I find it very hard to believe that you summoned that one.” She gave me a sidelong look. “Especially since you’re still here and still you.”

I could feel the flush starting to rise again. “I’m here and I’m me. And I told you. I didn’t summon him.”

Tessa stood, pressing her lips together as she moved to a bookshelf by the door. She hummed to herself—a tuneless, discordant thing—tapping her finger on her chin while she scanned the shelves. Finally she made a small noise of triumph and pulled a thin volume off the top shelf, turning and dropping it in front of me.