Mark of the Demon Read online

“So beautiful,” he murmured as he bent to kiss me again.

  Who does he think he’s kidding? The thought flashed through my mind with a distant ache, and I almost pulled away. Dark memory flared again—the horrible month after my father’s death, no longer suppressed beneath the compulsion of this arcane creature. I shivered in his arms, suddenly gripped in the hideous recall of the times I’d been pushed against the wall by the seventeen-year-old son of my foster parents. The whimpering horror as he’d thrust his hands beneath my shirt and into my pants, groping roughly and stealing from me the idea that a man’s touch could bring comfort and pleasure.

  The clumsy and awkward attentions of my boyfriends had done little to dispel that. But this … this was different. His hands were warm and strong on my back, and the kiss was gentle and deep and hot all at the same time. His touch eased me, silently coaxing me to calm and granting me enticing glimpses of what an attentive and skilled lover could give. I relaxed into him, feeling the warm rush of pleasure once again as I moaned softly into the kiss. It was real this time and a thousand times better.

  He broke the kiss, pulling away only far enough to slip his shirt off and cast it aside. He looked down at me, and after a brief hesitation I unbuttoned my own shirt and let it slide from my shoulders. He smiled, gaze traveling over my body as an oddly shy gratification swirled through me. His hand came up to my breast, fingers lightly encircling my nipple, and I shivered as I felt it harden against his touch. He slowly slipped his hand down to the waist of my silk pants, a line of gooseflesh springing up on my skin, following the trail of his fingers. His mouth found mine again and I leaned into the kiss with a low groan, unresisting.

  He pulled me down to the thick carpet in front of the fireplace, still kissing me. His hair tumbled over me and I twined a hand in the silken mass, silently relishing the exquisite texture of it. His arms encircled me, holding me close as he shifted his hips into mine. I shuddered and threw my head back, grinding against him. I’d never felt anything like this—never had anyone shown this much passion, this much desire for me. He was showing me a world I’d given up on, giving me back what had been stolen from me.

  He shifted, placing me on my back, gently parting my knees and moving between them. He kissed me deeply, his mouth strong and sensuous, then his lips moved down to kiss my throat. His tongue caressed gently over my neck, gliding further down to eventually circle my erect nipple.

  I made a sound of pleasure as he caught the nipple between his lips, then between his teeth. He bit lightly and teasingly and I twined both hands into his hair, arching up into his mouth. His hand came up to fondle my other nipple, then he slowly kissed his way down my belly, fingers still lightly squeezing the captured nipple.

  I sucked my breath through my teeth, shivering at the wealth of sensations. His lips traveled over the laces of my pants, tugging, then he went lower and pressed his mouth against me, biting lightly as he rolled my nipple between his fingers. I cried out, gripping his head in my hands and pressing my hips upward.

  He lifted his head to look at me, one hand toying with the laces of my pants. “Do you wish to leave these on?”

  I smiled down at him, silently marveling at the smooth muscle, the perfection of his body. I didn’t know what he was, but at this point it didn’t matter. He’d dishonored me by his initial compulsion of me and was repaying that small debt of honor by giving me the solace and release that an attentive partner could give. The irony wasn’t lost on me that the end result was awfully similar, but the crucial difference was that this way the choice was mine to make.

  I laughed. “No, I do not.”

  He tugged my pants down and off in one smooth motion, then pulled away from me just long enough to slide his own boots and breeches off, eyes flashing in what I almost thought was triumph. He returned to cover me, his deep eyes holding mine for just a moment. Then, with a sound that bordered on a growl, he slid into me. I threw my head back as he filled me, giving a shuddering moan as the heat rose between us. I rocked my hips up to his, meeting his steady thrusts.

  He kissed me hungrily as he drove into me, groaning against my lips. I returned the kiss eagerly as I clung tightly to him, nails digging as my climax built. His muscles were like malleable iron beneath my hands, rippling with each driving thrust.

  My climax exploded, shocking me with its depth and duration—stronger than anything I’d ever experienced before. I cried out and clutched at him as he let out a guttural snarl, emptying into me, grinding his hips into mine. I continued to lift my hips to his as he released. Finally he slowed, then stopped, his breathing deep and heavy.

  He rolled to the side and wrapped his arms around me. I sighed and pillowed my head against him.

  “I don’t even know who you are,” I said after a moment, looking up at him.

  He stroked a finger down the line of my jaw, expression unreadable. “Your call was not for me.”

  I shook my head. “No. I was trying to call a luhrek. Rysehl.”

  A strange smile quirked his lips, then he kissed me lightly and stood. Baffled, I sat up and stared at him as he dressed.

  “Wait,” I said, finding my voice. “Please. Who are you? I mean, I was trying to call Rysehl, but you obviously aren’t Rysehl, and I didn’t mean to call … whoever you are. So, what … er, who are you?” I realized I was babbling, and I clamped my mouth shut.

  His eyes met mine, and once again the power in them took my breath away. “I am Rhyzkahl,” he said, giving me an enigmatic smile. “And, Kara Gillian, you may call me whenever you need me.”

  Then he was gone.

  I STARED AT MY REFLECTION IN THE MIRROR. I WAS not a beautiful woman. I knew that. I was by no means unattractive and I did my best to keep my figure in shape, but I was usually referred to as “cute,” sometimes “pretty,” occasionally “quite appealing,” but almost never “beautiful,” unless it was someone who wanted something from me. I had boring-brown hair that refused to take any sort of curl, dark gray eyes that refused to be hazel or blue-gray or even sparkling, legs that were about three inches shorter than I would have liked for them to be, and an insistent little layer of pudge at the top of my jeans. Not beautiful.

  So why had it happened? Why was I still alive? I was too realistic to think that my charm and beauty and sexuality had swayed a creature of that much power from rending me to shreds or keeping me for a plaything to be tormented at his leisure. And why seduce me?

  Reality had crashed in on me seconds after he vanished from my basement summoning chamber, and I’d wallowed in a full-blown freak-out for nearly an hour, indulging in plenty of self-loathing and heaping servings of crippling doubt. I’d finally gone to bed, but sleep had been elusive.

  Two enormous issues kept battling with each other in my head over which was worth stressing out about more. First was the matter of what the fuck went wrong? It had been a simple summoning. A fucking fourth-level summoning! And Rysehl was a demon that I’d summoned dozens of times before. After I’d calmed somewhat, I walked around the diagram, obsessively checking every sigil and rune that I’d sketched out, looking for any deviation, any smudge or change that could have altered the portal, and finding nothing to explain what had happened.

  But this creature had said his name was Rhyzkahl. Had I mispronounced “Rysehl”? Somehow garbled the word? I cast my mind back over the summoning, the ritual, over and over until it was all little more than a jumbled blur. I thought I said it right. The names are close, but not that close.

  I felt as if someone had pulled the floor out from under me. I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought I was good at this. I shuddered and scrubbed at my face, struggling to push away the aching doubt.

  But forcing myself to stop thinking about the summoning only shifted my thoughts to the other elephant looming in the room. Oh, fucking shit, I silently wailed, why the fuck did I fuck him?

  I couldn’t even give myself the “easy” out and blame it on his compulsion of me. I knew that he was capable of
doing so, since I’d managed to figure it out and call him on it. But then he gave me his word…. And a demon’s word was inviolate. No, I’d just been incredibly needy and pathetic.

  I grimaced and turned on the water, cupping it in my hands and splashing it onto my face. I scrubbed away the grit in my eyes, keeping the water deliberately cold to try to shock myself back to a reality I could understand and accept.

  I sighed and reached for the towel. Nope, still the same haggard and confused face staring back at me in the mirror. I’d already taken a hot shower, with water as close to scalding as my water heater would give me, seeking to sear the memory of the night away.

  But you don’t want to forget, I accused myself. You enjoyed it.

  I sighed and straightened. And that was the truth. That had been some seriously incredible sex. No doubt. Best. Sex. Ever.

  Which circled my thoughts back to: Why me? Why seduce me? Was sex that hard to come by in the other spheres? That made no sense. He wanted something from me. An alliance? A summoner of his own? It was possible, I supposed. I’d heard of summoners who allied with particular demons, though such alliances were unpredictable and fraught with danger.

  I had to assume that Rhyzkahl was some sort of demon that I’d never heard of before. My portal had opened into the demon realm—I felt reasonably confident of that. The demons I knew were creatures of arcane power, inhabitants of one of the many other planes of existence and one of the few that was accessible from this plane with the proper forms and rituals.

  There were twelve varieties, or levels, of demons that could be summoned, or so I had been taught. When I had first begun my training as a summoner, I started with simple summonings of zrila—first-level demons not much larger than a cat, though with reptilian bodies and six legs. Limited intelligence and easily controlled. Ten years later I had progressed to the twelfth level: reyza. And not once during that time had I seen or heard of anything like Rhyzkahl. He was obviously a creature of great power—that much was clear by how easily he’d shattered the bindings and wardings. But I had no idea what he was or what his place was in the hierarchy of the demons.

  My mind kept going back to what he’d said to me. Call me whenever you need me. Call him? Summon him? Who was he to say such a thing? And how was I supposed to do that when I didn’t know how I’d done it in the first place?

  I walked out to the living room and fired up my computer, then pulled up a search engine. It was a long shot, but I’d struck gold with the Internet before. There were no formal organizations or cabals of summoners that I knew of, but there were a few message boards—the type that catered to the “paranormal nutjob” faction—that were sometimes used to exchange information between arcane practitioners. A good 99.9 percent of the posts were incredibly fantastical piles of bullshit, from people who claimed to be “masters” of arcane power. But every now and then a nugget of promising information could be unearthed from someone who actually knew what the hell they were talking about.

  No such luck this time, though. I ran searches with every possible spelling variation of Rhyzkahl, but the only hit I came up with was with Rhizko—which turned out to be the user name for a pudgy and pasty online gamer of indeterminate gender.

  I leaned back in the chair and rubbed my eyes. “Shit.” The two hours of fitful tossing that had preceded my alarm going off had not done much for my energy level or mental sharpness. “Shit,” I said again for good measure, then stood. It was barely seven a.m., and the autopsy on the victim from the wastewater plant wasn’t until noon. I had time to seek answers from a far more reliable source.

  I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt from a Miami-Dade PD training seminar, shoved my hair up into a ponytail, and jabbed some mascara at my eyelashes as a pitiful concession to makeup. After the autopsy I would come back and change into something decent. It was sorely tempting to just bury myself in work, push all of this crap to the back of my mind. That was the way I usually dealt with stress in my life.

  But I already knew that this was one problem I wouldn’t be able to put aside until later. I needed to know, and since the Internet had failed me, the next best hope was that my aunt would have some useful information in the library at her house.

  Now I just had to figure out how to explain to my aunt how I’d screwed up such a simple summoning.

  AUNT TESSA’S HOUSE was on the lakefront, a century-old two-story with gleaming white paint and lovely blue gingerbread molding adorning the porch. Most of the equally lovely old houses in this area had been restored and were now tourist attractions. Many offered tours. My aunt’s was not one of them.

  There was a cheerful Welcome! sign on the door—a standing joke, since my aunt encouraged visitors about as much as I did. I avoided people by living in the middle of nowhere, and my aunt did so by maintaining carefully crafted wards and protections that were set around her house. Unless a person was invited or had significant need to be there, most who came to Tessa’s house remembered something more pressing that needed to be done or decided that the visit could be put off until another day.

  I once asked her why she bothered with the welcome sign at all. She replied that she didn’t want people to think her too odd or standoffish, so having a welcome sign on the door would mollify people’s attitudes toward her.

  I had learned long ago that the best way to deal with that type of rationalization from my aunt was to just nod and change the subject.

  I could feel the faint prickle of the wards as I entered her house, a sensation like passing through an invisible beaded curtain. I wiped my feet automatically, though I doubted that my shoes were dirty. But Aunt Tessa kept her house clean enough to be a showplace, even if she never allowed anyone inside except me. She’d restored the house by herself right after I started with the PD, and it still looked just as perfect as the day she’d finished—gleaming hardwood floors, elegant flowered wallpaper, and exquisite crown molding—all immaculate and flawless.

  “Aunt Tessa?” I called.

  “Front room, sweets!”

  I stepped around the corner to see my aunt ensconced with a book upon an antique love seat. Sitting lotus-style. How a woman in her late forties could be limber enough to sit like that was beyond me, but Aunt Tessa was remarkable in numerous ways beyond her flexibility.

  To most in the community, Tessa Pazhel was the mildly eccentric and extremely unpredictable woman who ran the natural-food store downtown. Tessa dressed the part, too, wearing brightly colored skirts and clashing shirts in eye-searing tones one day and then muted khakis and combat boots the next. Wild kinky blond hair sprang out from Tessa’s head, the polar opposite of my painfully straight brown hair. Tessa was whippet-thin, while I had to fight tooth and nail for every ounce of fat loss. The only feature we had in common was our gray eyes.

  I was the spitting image of my mother—Tessa’s sister. At least that’s what I’d been told and shown in pictures. My own memories of my mother were dim at best.

  Today my aunt was dressed in a mid-calf-length blue velvet dress, with heavy silver chains draped around her waist and black suede boots on her feet. She lifted her eyes from her book and peered at me as I sat in the chair next to her.

  “Well, you’re alive,” she said without preamble, setting her book aside. “Which means that if you summoned Kehlirik it didn’t go too horrendously wrong.” She leaned forward, eyes narrowing as she looked into my face. “But you sure don’t look very happy about a successful summoning.”

  “The summoning of Kehlirik went fine,” I said. “I’ve officially completed my training and am now a full summoner.” I paused. It would be so easy to just leave it at that. But then I wouldn’t get any answers. “I … uh, tried to summon again last night, and … well, things didn’t go quite the way I’d planned.”

  The angles in her face seemed to sharpen. “That right there is a very bad thing. When there’s any deviation from the plan in a summoning, someone usually ends up in bad shape.” She arched an eyebrow. “So, what happen
ed? You tried to summon a higher-level demon again and couldn’t hold it? You dismissed it? It didn’t come all the way through?” She shook her head. “Two big summonings in a row is pretty dicey.”

  I groaned. “Aunt Tessa, I don’t know what went wrong. I wasn’t trying anything ambitious at all. I was trying to summon a lower demon, Rysehl. Easy. And I called Rysehl, but that wasn’t what came through.”

  Tessa went very still, and when she spoke, her voice had lost all trace of its usual gaiety. “Kara, what came through?”

  Shit. How was I going to explain to my aunt that not only had I somehow screwed up the summoning but then I’d gone and had sex with the creature?

  Tessa reached out and grabbed my hand, bony fingers painfully tight on mine. “Your silence is unnerving me, kiddo. Spill it.”

  I winced. “I called Rysehl—I’m sure I did! But it wasn’t Rysehl. I’m still not sure what he was, but he said his name was Rhyzkahl.”

  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.”