Secrets of the Demon (Kara Gillian 3)

Tomorrow then. But even as I thought it I discarded it. No, I needed to try to call him to my dreams tonight. I could still ask him if he was involved in these attempted summonings, and even if I couldn’t be guaranteed a straight answer from him, I could at least let him know it was happening.

I returned upstairs, unsettled at my decision. Unfortunately there really wasn’t an easy answer. Calling him to my dreams was still risky because he had too much control over the setting and circumstance.

I dug something easy and microwaveable out of the freezer and set it to nuke as I pulled the envelope with Roger’s financial information out of my bag. I poured a glass of wine, then sat at the kitchen table as I painstakingly made my way through the account summaries. Seriously boring shit, but my time working in white collar crimes had me fairly used to it.

Roger clearly made a decent living as a trainer, though he wasn’t rich by any stretch. But he had modest savings and a fairly strong credit score.

Yeah, yeah. This wasn’t what I wanted to know. I flipped through until I found his investment portfolio. All one page of it. There was only one investment. Puzzled, I skimmed through the rest of the information in the envelope to be sure I hadn’t missed anything. But, no, there it was:

Fifteen thousand dollars worth of stock in Lake Pearl Bank.

What the hell? Why would Vic loan Roger money and then put it all into one investment? And had he done the same with the money he’d loaned Adam?

I relocated to my computer and stuck the CD with the info from Vic Kerry’s computer in. But I couldn’t find any reference to Roger or Adam or loans for fifteen thousand dollars. I did find information about vacation destinations and new cars, as well as a number of links to dating websites. Vic Kerry had definitely craved a better life for himself, and I was fairly sure he’d used Roger and Adam in his quest, but I couldn’t make the whole thing click together.

I could feel an answer tickling at the back of my head, but I couldn’t get it to behave and come out and play nice. Screw this. It was already late enough that I was going to be short on sleep. Too much had happened today for me to think straight.

I returned to the basement to pull a smidge more power into the diagram, then hauled my sorry, tired ass back up to my bedroom. Between the wine and the working with the arcane, I was asleep a heartbeat after my head hit the pillow, barely remembering as my eyes closed to dream of Rhyzkahl.

Chapter 27

I rested my hands on the stone of the battlement as I looked out over the deep canyon. A chill breeze teased my hair but I didn’t want to go back inside. Morning mist shrouded the bottom of the abyss and I knew it would be hours yet before the sun would clear the high ridge and burn it off. A waterfall tumbled down the cliffs, descending into the depths with a muted roar.>“You look wrung out, sweets,” she said, eyeing me with worry.

“I feel wrung out,” I admitted. “I’m working a big case that has me pretty baffled.”

“You work too hard,” she said, “but I know it’s important to you.”

I rubbed at my temples, still knotted up from the blowup with Ryan. “Yeah. My personal life is a fucking mess too. Or at least it feels that way.”

She made a tsking noise. “You’re simply unused to having a personal life.”

“Well, this is true,” I said with a tired smile. “Being a social isolate was easier in a lot of ways.”

“I’m serious, Kara. Think about it. Six months ago you were practically a hermit, without a single person you could call friend.”

I fought the urge to scowl. “I wasn’t quite that pathetic.”

She gave me a dubious look. “You didn’t have any friends, and you know it. Now stop being so defensive. I’m more responsible for that than you. But my point is that now you do have friends. And you don’t know how much you can rely on them without scaring them off.”

I wanted to protest, but unfortunately she’d managed to nail down a hefty portion of my current angst. “Yeah,” I said slowly. “I guess so.”

“So, enough psychoanalysis,” she said brightly, as if she’d solved all of my ills in a few sentences. “You’re investigating the murder of Vic Kerry?”

“Among others.” I lowered my voice even though there was no one else in the café. “Someone has created a construct, like a golem, and is using it to kill.”

Her expression darkened. “That’s ugly stuff. I wish I could help you, but all I know about golems is in the library, and I think you already absconded with the pertinent books.” She gave me a narrow-eyed look that made me grin.

“Vic and I went to high school together,” she added in another wrenching change of subject.

“I didn’t know you knew him,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. “Oh, I wasn’t friends with him or anything. I didn’t even realize I’d gone to school with him until last year. He was doing the taxes for the store and we happened to get into a conversation about how old we were. Turned out we were in the same graduating class, and even had the same senior English teacher. But I don’t think we ever spoke a single word to each other. You know how that goes.”

I gave a neutral shrug. I didn’t like to think about my high school days.

“But, you know ... He and Mike Moran were really tight,” she said, with a slight frown.

“Huh? Mike Moran, the keyboardist for Lida’s band?”