Secrets of the Demon (Kara Gillian 3)

I caffeinated myself, showered, and made myself reasonably presentable before heading over to my aunt Tessa’s house. Tessa had been released from the neuro center a couple of months ago, after she’d mysteriously recovered from her even more mysterious coma. It hadn’t been mysterious to me—I’d been fully aware that her essence had been pulled away from her body to fuel a powerful arcane ritual. She’d spent six weeks in a coma—without a mark on her body or anything that showed up on a CT scan or an MRI to explain it. With Rhyzkahl’s help and instruction I’d created an arcane beacon to draw her essence back to her body—barely in time, too. Her body had been perilously close to losing its grip on life.

It had been another month before they’d allowed her to be released, but she’d finally convinced them—in her inimitable acerbic fashion—that she was in full possession of her faculties. After she was discharged I made sure to send a fruit basket to the nurses on her floor—as much of an apology as a thank you.

My aunt’s house was in a historic district along the lakefront, full of century-old houses maintained or restored to immaculate condition. Gleaming white with elegant blue molding and pristine landscaping, Aunt Tessa’s house fit the neighborhood perfectly. My aunt, not so much.

I knocked twice, then opened the door and stuck my head in. “Aunt Tessa?”

“Kitchen!”

I headed obligingly in that direction and found my aunt perched on a stool at her counter with the daily crossword in front of her. Her frizzy blond hair was pulled up into a twist on top of her head, and she had on billowing hakama pants that nearly overwhelmed her skinny frame and a gray T-shirt that said FRAK OFF—overall, a somewhat tame look for her. Unlike her personal style, her kitchen was as exquisite as the rest of her house—rose-colored tiled floors, lovely wallpaper with subtle patterns of climbing ivy, and dark granite countertops. Her one deviation from the original nature of the house was her appliances—stainless steel and thoroughly modern.

Well, there was one other deviation: the summoning chamber in the attic. I rather doubted the original owners had intended for the space to be used in that manner.

At the kitchen table sat Carl, with a mug of coffee beside his hand and a book in his other. He lifted his eyes briefly and gave me a small nod, then returned his attention to his book. I was still getting used to thinking of him as Tessa’s boyfriend. To me he was Carl the Morgue Tech, quiet, somewhat emotionless, and—I’d discovered—impervious to arcane wards and who knew what else. And for him, that small nod was the equivalent of an exuberant greeting. Tall and lean with an athletic build, he had hazel-brown eyes set in a lightly tanned face and closely cropped hair that was more transparent than blond. He really didn’t fit the stereotypical image of a lanky and pasty morgue worker, but his general demeanor made up for any deviation from the expected norm. I took a quick peek at the cover of the book he was reading. Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures.

Yep, more than made up for not looking the part.

Tessa gave me a smile. “Hiya, sweets. You had a busy night last night?”

I pulled myself onto a stool opposite her. “Er, well yeah. Had a thing with the FBI task force. Woke up about an hour ago.”

“So was it a demon?”

I blinked at her. “Huh?”

She pursed her lips. “The singer. The threats. Was it a demon that attacked her?”

“How on earth did you know about that?”

Tessa gave an exaggerated sigh and flipped her newspaper over to show me the front page. “I didn’t lose all my brains cells while I was in that silly coma. The paper stated that Lida Moran was receiving threats that ‘demons would take her soul,’ ” she said, making quote marks with her fingers. “You were working late last night with your FBI friends, and there was an incident during her concert.” She gave me a smug smile. “So. Was it a demon?”

I chewed my lower lip as I scanned the article. It was a well-sanitized version of what had happened—no doubt thanks to the efforts of Ryan and Knight—with a few eyewitness accounts of audience members who, luckily, were skeptical enough to say that it was “some dude dressed up like a demon or something.”

I began to set the paper down, then paused at another sight of the name Moran in a different article near the bottom of the page. LOCAL BUSINESSMAN BEN MORAN DONATES TO WOMEN’S SHELTER. I was usually completely clueless when it came to who The People were, but even I knew that Ben Moran was a major player in the local social and business scene. “Is Ben Moran related to Lida?” I asked.

“Her uncle,” Carl said without lifting his eyes from his book. “He was her guardian too, after her dad died several years ago. They live on the other side of the lake.”

“The rich side,” Tessa added with a quirk of a smile. “Ben Moran is on the board of Lake Pearl Bank and owns Moran Debris Removal.”

“Well, I’ll get to see for myself,” I said. “I’m going over there this afternoon to talk to Lida and see if I can find out anything more about what happened last night.”

Tessa tapped the counter. “Which brings us back to my question: Was it a demon?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not sure what it was, but I’m damn near positive that it wasn’t anything from the demon sphere.” I set the paper down, satisfied that there was no mention of me, and nothing that remotely implied that anything supernatural had occurred. Not that I expected the newspaper to say anything of that sort. “It had a strange resonance though,” I continued, not concerned about Carl overhearing any of this. He was already clued in about the demon summoning, and he was also the last person I was worried about blabbing indiscreetly. “I’m pretty sure I’d know it again if I felt it. I had a zhurn with me, and it said that the thing was some sort of construct. Maybe a golem or something of that ilk.”

Carl abruptly straightened and closed his book. “Time for me to leave,” he said with a ghost of a smile. He stood and moved to Tessa, giving her a sweet kiss on the cheek before heading out. A few seconds later I heard the front door open and close.

I resisted the urge to comment on how strange he was. I didn’t exactly have much room to talk. I returned my attention to Tessa. “Um, anyway, I don’t really know too much about constructs or golems, so I’m probably going to be spending some time in your library doing research.”

Her mouth drew down into a frown. “I’m not sure I want to allow you back in there after you ransacked it so terribly!”

I met her eyes with my own steely gaze born of too many weeks of uncertainty, stress, and feelings of betrayal. “If you’d been honest with me, there would have been no need to rearrange anything in that library.”

I was shocked to see pain and sadness flicker across her face before she looked away. “I thought it was the right thing to do at the time,” she said, voice suddenly quiet and hoarse. The capitulation and show of submission hit me like a blow. Tessa had always been the dominant one in our relationship—perfectly reasonable and logical since, not only had she been entrusted with raising me after my parents had died, but she’d also been my mentor in the art of summoning.

It wasn’t the only change in her that left me somewhat unnerved. Somehow she’d known of my agreement to become Rhyzkahl’s summoner, and in the weeks after she’d woken from the coma I kept expecting her to lay into me about it—to give me a full verbal flaying. Or to at least want to know more about the circumstances that had led to the agreement, or the terms of my oath. But neither argument nor conversation had ever materialized, and the couple of times that I’d tried to speak about it, she’d hurriedly changed the subject, as if the thought of even mentioning a demonic lord was anathema.

I shifted uncomfortably on the stool, suddenly insanely glad that Carl had left before he’d been forced to witness this. Or had he somehow known this was coming, and excused himself accordingly? Anything was possible. Especially with him. “Look, if you don’t want me to use the library, I’ll understand.”