Touch of the Demon

“Wouldn’t they go back to Earth? Make it through the void?”

Safar grunted and shook his head. “Dahn. No. With the ways closed, there was no passage.”

I gripped the stone hard. I knew damn well why Mzatal had suggested I come up here—so that I could feel exactly how I was feeling now. But why? What purpose did it serve in his game? I hurriedly wiped away my tears. “How were the ways opened up again?”

The reyza turned on the wall and resettled into a crouch facing me. “Szerain and some of the demahnk, the Elder syraza, worked for over two hundred years to correct the inter-dimensional ruptures and arcane distortions enough to reestablish a valve.” His eyes slid to mine. “In one nine zero eight on your calendar, in the area you call Siberia.”

“Oh…wow. So, do you need valves to equalize the arcane pressure or something?” Tessa had a small one of these valve things terminating in her library, and I’d speculated that it functioned as a pressure release valve.

Safar gave a nod. “Simply stated, yes. After that, more were possible, and with less impact.” He snorted, lifted his face as if to feel the sun on it fully. “Fifteen years later, at the age of fourteen, Katashi performed the first summoning in centuries.”

“Katashi?” I blinked in surprise. Katashi had mentored Tessa in summoning for nearly a decade, and I’d spent a miserable couple of months with him during which I learned zilch except that he was an intolerant, inflexible asshole. I’d assumed he was in his seventies, but if Safar was right, Katashi would actually be over a hundred years old. Damn. Well, that explained why so many summoners had been trained by him. I hadn’t realized that he was pretty much the grand poobah of modern summoning.

Safar snorted, “Kri, Katashi. He summoned Gestamar in his near disastrous first summoning. Had he been slain by the recoil rather than merely injured, it is improbable that you would be a summoner now.”

Holy crap. Summoning an ancient reyza like Gestamar as an untried and unmentored summoner was a mind-boggling accomplishment. Katashi must be a fucking genius. Not that he’d shared any of that with me.

I stared out at the horrific view, skin crawling from the feel of it. Did the demons hate me—Elinor—because of all of this? So far they didn’t seem to be holding a grudge, and, for right now, I was okay with not knowing the answer.

For that matter, the demons had been downright accommodating. “Not that I’m complaining, but considering I’m a captive, why are y’all being so nice to me? Apart from Mzatal, who’s pretty much a dick.”

Safar lowered his head and peered closely at me. “It serves no purpose to cause you unnecessary distress. I have read Earth books, seen Earth captives, so I understand your question, though I do not understand causing distress without purpose.”

Earth. I hugged my arms around me, suddenly feeling horribly homesick and isolated. I wanted my own bed, real coffee…hell, I’d even take some of Tessa’s weird fruity tea at this point. I wondered what “necessary” distress they’d cause if they decided they had a purpose.

The groan of hinges pulled me from my self-pity spiral. I looked back to see the young blond man stepping out through the doorway. He smoothed down the front of a way-cool belted tunic-coat; a faintly Indonesian-looking thing of a color that flowed from purple to green to black as he moved. Definitely not Earth off-the-rack. He ran his hand over his hair with the supposed aim of taming it a bit, though it immediately sprang up again into the unruly blond cloud.

Straightening, I turned to face him. He stepped forward and cleared his throat, fidgeting slightly and not looking at all like the focused summoner of the previous night. I still pegged him at around twenty, but right now he was doing a great impression of a nervous teen. “Greetings,” he said with a lift of his chin as he quite obviously fumbled for something resembling poise. “I am Idris Palatino.”

I dipped my head in a nod. “I’m Kara.” I paused. “But I suppose you already knew that.”

He actually blushed. “Yeah,” he said, looking down and picking at his sleeve. “I kinda had to know it to…y’know.”

“To summon me,” I finished for him, but I tried to keep the bitterness from my voice. I couldn’t find it in me to be obnoxious or snarky to him. It’d be like kicking a puppy.

Idris exhaled, lifted his gaze back up to me. “Yeah, summon you.” He smiled nervously. “It was hard.”

I leaned back against the stone wall, shrugged. “Well, I don’t always come when called.”

His smile increased a bit. “I mean, it’s not something you do every day—try to summon a human blind while they were on the move.” He shook his head. “But even when I could find you, I couldn’t lock on.” His forehead creased. “It was weird.”

My own smile spread to a grin. “Yeah, I bet you couldn’t.” The cuff I’d worn back on Earth was a crude version of the collar and blocked the arcane pretty damn effectively.

“Everything looked okay,” he continued. “Even Lord Mzatal said it was good, but then…nothing!” An exasperated expression crossed his face, and he shook his head. “I almost didn’t believe it when I actually got a lock on you, but then you came through and—” He abruptly paled and drew in a sharp breath. “Holy shit.” He paled more.

“Idris?” I pushed off the wall and wondered if he was about to pass out. “You okay, dude?”

“Shit,” he breathed. “The blood. You were covered in blood and…” He gulped. “Did I screw up a ritual you were working on?” His eyes lifted to mine, pleading. “Did I cause someone to be…”

“No,” I said emphatically, shaking my head. “No, Idris, I swear that had absolutely nothing to do with your summoning of me. That was an entirely different clusterfuck.”

He exhaled in profound relief. “Oh. Okay.” Some of his color began to return. It was clear he didn’t like the image of someone getting shredded, but he was obviously better able to deal with the horror of it if he wasn’t the cause. “Sorry,” he said, giving me a shaky smile. “Kinda freaked me out.”

“Understandable.” I liked him a lot more now that I knew it would affect him so deeply. So what the hell is he doing here serving this lord? I wondered.

“It was a gate,” I told him. “Or rather, an attempt at one. The summoner who created it—Tracy Gordon—tried to lock me into it.” I grimaced. “I got out, but then the guy’s partner threw him into the still-active gate.” I flicked my fingers out in a “explosion” gesture, winced. “The reason you weren’t able to summon me was because I had something a lot like this,” I said, tapping the collar around my throat.

Idris began to smile, then grinned as the pieces fell into place for him. “That’s why the sliders would just…slide! I thought it was a new variance or something and couldn’t nail it.” Remembered frustration flashed across his face. “The lord said it was something Earth-side and to keep doing what I was doing.” He rolled his eyes. “Now I’m glad I didn’t start trying new variances. I’d never have—” He winced. “—um, gotten you.” A puzzled look came over him. “But, if you had an artifact why didn’t you leave it on or stay behind wards?”

I let out a low snort. “After Tracy died it unbalanced the gate. It would have been disastrous, so I took the cuff off to close the gate down properly.” I shrugged, spread my hands. “So, for you, patience is a virtue.”

“Yeah, for sure in your case,” Idris said. “It’s not usually possible to summon a human from Earth unless they’re at a hotspot—a permanent place that’s been amped up for that. Humans simply don’t carry enough natural potency for it to work right. Like, when I summon Katashi here, it’s from a hotspot at his place.” He shrugged.

“How the hell did you get me then?” I held no illusions that I had some sort of mega-potency going on.

He grinned. “It was something the lord figured out and had me work on with him. It took a whole month to get the parameters right,” he said with a note of casual pride in his voice. “Lord Mzatal knows his stuff. He had me tap into one of the hotspots here and learn the patterns. It kinda developed from that.”

“Is it pretty much the same the other way around? I mean, a summoner on Earth trying to get a human from here?” I continued to hold onto the slim chance that Tessa would get past her summoning block and rescue my ass. Slim because ever since she’d spent time in the void earlier this year, she’d given no indication that she would ever summon again. She’d always summoned like clockwork before, and I wondered if she even could now. But surely she would at least try to rescue me, right?

“Well, the human still needs to be on a hotspot,” he said. “But for the most part it’s about the same.”

My hopes lifted again. “How many hotspots are there here? One on every corner?” Hey, a girl could dream.

“Nooo, not one on every corner.” He laughed, though not unkindly. “Not even close. But even so, to get enough power to pull a human, it’d take at least two skilled summoners,” Idris said. “Probably three to be sure. All summonings from this end take both a summoner and a lord working together.”

Hope dashed. Other than Katashi, I didn’t know if Tessa knew any other summoners. And with her avoidance of summoning and summoning topics, there’d been no chance to teach her the nifty storage diagram I’d developed, which might have given her the potency needed to do it alone. Double crap.

Idris seemed pretty cozy, not at all like he was under duress or anything. Here he was talking about doing arcane Research and Development with Mzatal as if it was normal everyday business. What the hell was he doing here with that dickwad? “How long have you been here with Mzatal?”