Mark of the Demon Read online

  I rubbed the back of my neck. “I … had been hoping to learn how to reverse a portal without having to close and reopen.” That was why it was worth the effort to summon the higher-level demons. With the proper negotiation of terms, they could be persuaded to share a measure of their knowledge and skills.

  The demon ticked his claws against his leg, a thoughtful expression on his monstrous face. “And you were forced to anchor and close when I left your control to apprehend your intruder. Forgive me. I should have waited to know your wishes first.”

  “No, it’s all right,” I said, more than a little shocked by the apology. “Trust me, I’m very pleased that you caught the guy, especially before he did any real harm.”

  “Still, I should have waited to know your will first.” He gave me a small bow, moonlight glinting off the curved horns on his head. “When next you summon me, I will school you in the technique to allay my shame in failing you.”

  I controlled my expression, with effort. I knew that matters of honor were deathly serious among the demonkind, but this was my first experience at being owed a debt of honor. “You have not failed me,” I said, carefully choosing my words and trying not to show my glee, “but I would be honored to learn this and would consider any debt between us null.”

  Kehlirik abruptly went still, hissing softly.

  I took a cautious step back. “Is something wrong?” Crap. What had I done now?

  The demon gave a low growl. “Something touches the arcane in this sphere.”

  I started to relax, then frowned. “What do you mean? Another summoning?” There weren’t many other summoners in the region. In fact, I didn’t know of any in all of southeast Louisiana except for my aunt, though I figured New Orleans probably boasted a couple. Of course, people who made a practice of summoning demons didn’t usually hang signs on their door advertising the fact, and summoning itself was not exactly a common skill. You had to have someone mentor you in the art for several years, plus you had to be willing to shed some blood now and then.

  I’d been mentored by my aunt Tessa, of course. By the time I hit my teenage years, I realized that there was more to the world—and my aunt—than met the eye. The day after I received my driver’s license, my aunt “introduced” me to my first demon, who confirmed her suspicion that I had the ability to be a summoner. After beginning my training, I discovered that here, finally, was something I excelled at. The rituals, the forms—all felt as natural as breathing. Training under my aunt had not always gone smoothly, but I’d never regretted starting down that path to become a summoner.

  Maybe Tessa had summoned tonight as well? The spheres were in excellent alignment for the higher-level summonings, and with the moon at full it couldn’t get much better.

  The demon settled his wings, as if uneasy. “I cannot tell, but it has a taint to it.”

  “What sort of taint?”

  Kehlirik growled again, a deep, throbbing sound that made the hair on my arms stand on end, even as used to demons as I was. “Blood and death.” His eyes narrowed. “More I cannot determine. I am not versed in such. You would need to call another to learn more.”

  Crap. There was no way to summon again tonight. Two summonings in one night was far too draining and dangerous. I glanced up at the moon again. It would still be full enough tomorrow. That would work.

  Kehlirik gave a heavy snort. “A vehicle approaches this place. Do you require more service of me?”

  “No,” I said, after a brief hesitation. “My thanks again, reyza. Your help has been invaluable this night.” My original reason for summoning the demon had been blown, but it had been more than made up for by his promise to school me in the more-advanced forms. I would definitely summon him again on the next full moon.

  Kehlirik folded his wings in close and bowed his head before me. I took a deep breath, finding my focus, then lifted my arms and began to speak the words of dismissal as I pulled potency to me. A sharp wind rose from nowhere, sending dust into my face and bringing with it an acrid, sulfurous smell that burned my nose. I squinted against the wind at the massive form of the demon, carefully holding my focus as I finished the chant. Kehlirik rose up with a bellow, spreading his wings and throwing his head back. A blinding sliver of light formed behind him, and in the span between one heartbeat and the next he disappeared, with a sharp crack like a breaking glacier. The light dissipated and faded, spinning off sparklets that danced briefly in my peripheral vision before disappearing.

  The wind died instantly and I dragged my hands through my shoulder-length mud-brown hair, finger-combing it as best I could. Just in time too; I could see headlights coming up my long driveway and hear the crunch of tires on gravel. My legs wobbled and I sat heavily on my front step again, taking deep breaths to get rid of the black spots that briefly pirouetted through my vision. Dismissals were nearly as draining as summonings, though nowhere near as dangerous.

  The sheriff’s unit stopped just a few feet from my front porch and out stepped Justin Sanchez—a short and skinny deputy with uneven teeth and dark hair that looked unkempt no matter how short he cut it. He sported a scraggly mustache that looked like a balding caterpillar beneath a nose that had a slight bend to the right. He’d been with the PD before he transferred to the sheriff’s office and had been one of my teammates back when I first became a cop, teaching me early on that size wasn’t everything in a fight. More importantly, he taught me how to snap my gum—an annoying trick I used to harass my aunt until she threatened to cease teaching me if she ever saw gum in my mouth again.

  He gave me a grin. “Looks like this moron picked the wrong house, huh?”

  I batted my eyelashes and put on an innocent expression. “Why, Officer, I’m jest a helpless li’l gal. I was skeert to death!”

  He laughed. “Yeah, right. For some reason I feel sorry for this guy.”

  If you only knew.

  “By the way, nice jammies,” he said with a sly smile.

  I hurriedly crossed my arms over my chest. The “jammies” were just the silk shirt and pants that I wore to summon, but it hadn’t occurred to me to throw on different clothes. Or even a bra. Not that I was so well-endowed that it was instantly obvious, but Justin was a cop and a guy. And it was chilly out. He had noticed.

  And while I knew he was just teasing me and giving me shit, I never knew quite how to respond when guys joked with me in a quasi-sexual way. My aunt Tessa was not the most sociable of people, and I’d been forced to figure out the complexities of social skills on my own—with varying degrees of success. That was one of the reasons I loved being a cop: There was a built-in sense of brotherhood that satisfied a long-buried desire to somehow belong.

  That was also why I loved being a summoner—there were rules when dealing with demons. Dealing with humans was never simple or straightforward.

  Justin didn’t seem to notice my angst—he just snickered at my reaction, then settled down to the business of taking my statement and the report of the burglary. He took a few obligatory pictures of the damage to the window by the front door but didn’t bother going inside. Damn good thing, since the door to the basement was still ajar. That would have been a tough one to explain—the chalked circle, the carefully placed candles, the tinge of incense. I kept my smile fixed on my face while I gave myself a mental head-smack. I had no desire to be dubbed a “Satanist” by people who had zero clue about demons and the arcane. Even though there was no such creature as “Satan” or “Lucifer” or a “Prince of Darkness”—at least not among the creatures I dealt with—that fact wouldn’t help me explain away my penchant for summoning the other-planar creatures that were known as demons.

  Finally Justin had all the information he needed and had my perp stuffed into the back of his car. He scowled as he closed the door. “Dopehead. He’s totally zoned out.” He glanced back at me as he climbed into the driver’s seat. “Hey, I think you cut yourself on some of the glass.”

  I followed his gaze to my left forearm, where a th
in trickle of blood was snaking its way down to my hand. I quickly swiped at the blood with the hem of my shirt. It wasn’t the first time I’d stained the shirt with blood. “Yeah, looks like I brushed against something. It doesn’t look too bad though.” I knew it wasn’t a serious cut. The knife I’d used was razor-sharp, and I’d become skilled at making the requisite slice no deeper than it needed to be. It was always worth that small pain to feel the sense of utter satisfaction after a successful summoning, to know that, as long as I didn’t screw up anything in the ritual, I would be able to control a demon. Even if I couldn’t control anything else in my life, I knew I had that.

  “Well, be thankful that you’re not working tonight. Apparently the night watchman at the wastewater plant found a body.”

  I leaned against his car. “Unless the guy was killed with a bad check, I doubt I’ll be involved.” That was one nice thing about working mostly white-collar crimes: I very seldom got called out in the middle of the night for an investigation.

  Okay, that was the only nice thing. Everything else about it bored the living crap out of me. For two years I’d busted my ass as a detective in Property Crimes, and three weeks ago I’d finally been rewarded with a transfer to the Violent Crimes Division. However, I had yet to have a case assigned to me, and since there were still plenty of check-fraud and identity-theft cases, I’d continued to work those while I learned the ropes of homicide investigations.

  But I could live with that. The feeling of accomplishment at the promotion had been damn near as sweet as a successful summoning. Here I was with thirty looming on the horizon, and I could actually say that I was finally getting somewhere in my life. I had a solid career and something resembling a future, despite my best efforts to fuck up my life when I’d been young and stupid.

  “Girl,” Justin corrected as he pulled on his seat belt. “Not a guy. Cut all to shit, from what I heard, with a big mark on her chest.”

  Goose bumps sprang up on my arms. “You mean, cut as in torture? Is the mark on her chest a symbol?”

  Justin snorted. “Now, why you gonna go thinking like that? It’s probably some crack whore who got on the wrong side of her dealer.”

  “Or it could be the Symbol Man—”

  “Yeah, yeah, you’re as bad as the rookie officer who called it in,” he chided with a teasing smile. “He was squalling that he had a ‘Symbol Man murder!’ Don’t you be overreacting and jumping to conclusions too. I mean, it’s been three years since the last body was found. And the methodology is different too. All the other bodies were found in remote areas, pretty decomposed. This one’s a fresh dump, in a place with a security guard, which would guarantee that the body would be found quickly.” He lifted his radio and keyed up, advising the dispatcher that he was clear of the scene with one arrest. “If anything, it might be a copycat,” he said, after replacing the mic in its holder. “He killed twelve people, then stopped. Why start up again after three years?”

  “Thirteen,” I corrected, an odd excitement and unease running through me. “There were thirteen bodies found. I read through the case files just a couple of weeks ago. And maybe he stopped because he got sick, or was in jail.” Or maybe he was just waiting for the right time to come around again? A sliver of sick fear wormed its way down my spine at the thought. I didn’t want this particular theory of mine to be right.

  The phase of the moon was only one factor when summoning a demon. The spheres containing this world and the demon world moved in patterns much like the orbits of planets, and summonings could be performed only when the spheres overlapped. The greater the overlap, or convergence, the easier it was to perform the more-complex summonings. The convergence had been so small for the past few years that it had been damn near impossible to summon anything higher than eighth level.

  But now the convergence was nearly as high as it could possibly be and would remain so for at least another month.

  If those murders were part of some sort of summoning, that would explain why he’d stopped. And why he would start again now. I rubbed at my arms, unsettled.

  “Whatever. Guess we’ll find out eventually,” he said, glancing back to see if his arrestee was still zoned out. “All right, lemme get this dumb-ass to the jail. You just go on back to your nice comfy bed, and don’t worry your little head about any more mean ol’ bad guys coming in.”

  I pushed my unease aside and gave him the laugh he was expecting. “I feel so safe.”

  “Protect and serve and all that shit,” he said, giving me a mock salute, then he rolled up his window and drove back down my winding driveway.

  My smile died as soon as he was out of sight. I returned to the porch, mincing over the gravel in my bare feet as quickly as possible, then snatched up my cell phone and scrolled through my stored numbers.

  “Turnham here,” my captain answered crisply on the first ring. I breathed a mental sigh of relief that I hadn’t woken him up. I’d taken a chance in assuming that, if there was any suspicion at all that this was a Symbol Man case, he’d be on the scene.

  “Captain, it’s Kara Gillian. I heard you might have a Symbol Man case at the wastewater plant?” I was trying to keep my voice level and calm and professional, but I had a feeling that my eagerness leaked through.

  “How the hell did you hear that? Do you keep your radio on twenty-four/seven?”

  I couldn’t help but smile. There were plenty of cops who lived and breathed police work and who did keep their police radio on at all times. In fact, I’d been one of them when I was first hired, listening obsessively to every call and keeping mental tabs on what was going on in the world outside my house. I loved being a cop, and it had been like a deep breath of fresh air for me to be a part of something special after more than a decade of what was often bitter loneliness. It had taken nearly a year for me to finally accept that I could, in fact, occasionally turn my radio off and still be just as much of a cop. “No, sir,” I said. “I had a 62R at my house, and Deputy Sanchez clued me in when he picked up my perp.”

  “Ah. Well, that’s all right, then.” He sounded mollified. “And I’m glad to hear you nailed the guy. I take it you want to be in on this case?”

  “Well, sir, if you don’t think I’d be in the way. It’s just that I probably have the most familiarity with the case files right now, and I think I could help.” I held my breath as I waited for his response. Most likely he’d tell me to meet up with the lead detective in the morning to fill him in. But what I really wanted was to see the body.

  “If you don’t have a problem coming out to the scene at this hour, that’s fine with me. You have something to contribute, and it would be good experience for you,” he said, to my relief.

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I promised. I raced back inside to change as soon as I hung up, suddenly deeply grateful to my drug-addicted intruder for choosing tonight to break into my house.

  SO, WHAT ARE THE CHANCES THAT IT’S THE SYMBOL MAN AGAIN? The question dominated my rattling thoughts. The towering pines that crowded the road created an ominous illusion of a dark tunnel as I sped down the deserted highway. Just because a body was found with similar injuries doesn’t mean it’s the same killer, I reminded myself. And I wasn’t sure if I’d be relieved or disappointed if it turned out to be something else. Obviously I didn’t want more people to die, but at the same time I’d been burning with curiosity about the Symbol Man and his victims for nearly three years, and the desire to know was nearly smothering.

  The creaky Ford Taurus shimmied annoyingly as I crested a low hill. I could see the lights of Beaulac in front of me, the moonlight reflecting off Lake Pearl beyond the city. It was breathtakingly beautiful, but I wasn’t in the frame of mind to appreciate the view. Perhaps it was merely coincidence that he would start up again now. Just sheer happenstance that the three-year break would coincide so perfectly with the alignment of the two spheres. Anything is possible, I tried to convince myself, but the feeling in the pit of my gut wasn’t buying it.<
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  St. Long Parish was mostly rural but still within reasonable driving distance to New Orleans—which was why I liked living there so much. A small, quiet parish with the city of Beaulac as its hub, it boasted only a few murders a year and not much other crime except for the usual mix of drug abuse and burglaries. And those rare murders were most often the result of disagreements that had been fueled by alcohol and testosterone.

  Lake Pearl had been formed centuries earlier from a convergence of several bayous, and the city of Beaulac had sprung up on its shore, developing a comfortable industry catering to sportsmen and weekend vacationers. Though Beaulac was a city only by the strictest definition, for a few years it had gained unfortunate notoriety because of a serial killer who’d become known as the Symbol Man.

  I smacked the dashboard of the Taurus in a futile effort to stop one of the more annoying rattles. Even if this victim bore the same symbol, I had to accept the chance that the killer could be a copycat. I grimaced and whacked the dashboard again, muttering something rude as the radio knob flew off and bounced under the seat.

  Even if it’s a copycat, it would still have to be someone who knows the details about the symbol. Pictures or specific descriptions had never been officially released, but I knew that information had a way of leaking out. It only took one officer to talk about it after hours in a bar to make it common knowledge. But Captain Turnham would rain hot death on anyone who spread confidential information about this case. He was an absolute stickler for protocols, which made me even more appreciative of his approval to come to the crime scene.

  I made the turn onto the gravel road that led to the water-treatment plant. Surrounding the plant was a wooden fence emblazoned with a large red sign that proclaimed: City of Beaulac Wastewater Reclamation Facilities. A white metal building housed the main offices of the facility, and behind that were a number of large vatlike structures that I assumed had something to do with the actual treatment of the water. I gave a low whistle when I saw how many police vehicles were already there. Parked just outside the wooden fence were five marked units, a half dozen unmarked cars, plus a crime-scene van for good measure. I searched for a spot close by, then finally gave up and parked out on the road. I needed the exercise anyway.