Chapter 1
Someone had recently taken a leak in the alley behind the Beaulac Police Department. Splash marks were still visible against the bricks, and the beam from my flashlight reflected off the rivulets that led to a broader puddle in the center of the alley. Some other sort of noxious liquid dripped from the corner of a dumpster in viscous plops to mingle with the piss, and the dregs in a broken beer bottle added one more pungent ingredient to the resulting aroma.
I carefully picked my way around the various pools of who-knew-what as I made my way out of the alley. Along the ground behind me ran a faint track of arcane sigils, appearing in my othersight as silvery-blue shimmers, and completely invisible in normal vision. In front of me, Eilahn patiently traced more patterns along the back end of the building, using nothing but the movement of her fingers and her will.
This side was easy. The Beaulac Police Department and its parking lots took up most of a block in downtown Beaulac. We’d started with the back-alley end and the south side that held the detective’s parking lot and the entrance to the Investigations Division. Those were unoccupied at this time of night. The main entrance with its broad glass doors faced the street, which would only be tricky if anyone driving by happened to see us and wonder what we were doing. But the north end of the building—the one that held the entrance to the Patrol Division—would be the most difficult, since officers came and went through there at all hours.
For decades, the station had been a brick and chrome example of seventies’ era architecture, but thankfully it had been renovated in the past year to remove the majority of the chrome and restyle the structure to better fit the “elegant southern town” feel that the rest of the buildings along the street were striving for. Across from the station was the city administration building, built well over a hundred years ago and looking more like a plantation building than a government facility, complete with massive columns and a broad balcony. The rest of the street was taken up with smaller city offices and about half a dozen small shops and restaurants. The city had done its best to make the downtown area picturesque by replacing the big sodium vapor streetlights with smaller ones that were meant to look like Victorian gas lamps. Wrought-iron benches had been painstakingly bolted down along the sidewalk, and large planters interspersed between them. But right now, any elegance was overshadowed by the cheap and tacky Christmas decorations that the city workers put up a few days prior. Maybe next year they’d have enough in the budget to buy decorations that didn’t look quite so sickly.
Probably only if they cut salaries, I thought sourly. As long as they didn’t cut mine, I could put up with a Santa Claus who looked vaguely leprous.
I shifted out of othersight and peered at my watch using my flashlight. Four a.m. We’d been at this for nearly an hour and were barely halfway around the Beaulac PD building. But Eilahn had been adamant that the places I spent the most time should be protected—at least as much as was reasonable. She was a syraza, an eleventh-level demon, assigned—gifted? loaned?—to me by the demonic lord Rhyzkahl after it had become clear that someone or something in the demon realm wasn’t thrilled about my association with him. And Eilahn took her job damn seriously.
The wards on my house had been beefed up into intense and powerful protections, with an outer layer of aversions that would hopefully make intruders lose their desire to continue into my home. Needless to say it wasn’t practical or desirable to have that sort of thing on the Police Department building. Instead, these protections were the sort that would make it highly difficult for me to be summoned while I was inside them—necessary since someone in the demon realm seemed to be intent on doing just that.
The wards were undetectable by anyone without arcane abilities. At least I sure hoped so. But even though they couldn’t be seen by the naked eye, the process of laying them down looked pretty damn weird. Hence the reason we were out at oh-fuck o’clock in the morning—after the bars closed and before the sun came up.
I sighed and cast a longing glance across the street at the dark and closed coffee shop that had recently opened up next to the city administration building. Grounds For Arrest. The painting of a steaming coffee cup on the window seemed to taunt me.
Eilahn softly cleared her throat, and I dragged my attention back to the matter at hand. Slipping back into othersight, I let the sensations wash over me as I checked for gaps or weak spots in the chain of sigils. Even incomplete, the patterns buzzed against my senses pleasantly, like a flow of warm water over my skin. If any part of the sequence had been wrong or poorly scribed, I’d feel it like a vibration in the back of my teeth. But no, it was clear that this demon knew what she was doing.
“You there!”
I straightened and turned at the male shout from behind me, squinting in the sudden light shone into my eyes. Beyond the glare of the flashlight I could see it was someone in a Beaulac PD uniform. Crap.
“What’s going on here?” the officer demanded.
I lifted a hand to shield my eyes. “Could you lower the light please? I’m Detective Gillian. Who’re you?”
The officer obligingly lowered the flashlight. I tried to blink away the spots that now swam in my vision. “Oh, hey, Kara. It’s me, Tim Daniels. Sorry. Y’all looked like you were doing some serious skulking.” He gave a small chuckle.
I returned the chuckle. Luckily we’d already come up with a hopefully believable fiction for why we were tromping around the PD in the middle of the night. “Nope, nothing nefarious. I was bringing my cat to the vet earlier and it got away from me, so my roommate” —I gave a vague gesture toward Eilahn— “and I are trying to see if we can find it now that there aren’t a lot of people and cars around to scare it.”
His gaze shifted to Eilahn and lingered there. I couldn’t really blame him. The form she’d taken after I summoned her was female. Or, to be more specific, smokin’ hot chick. Tall and athletic, with violet eyes and sleek dark hair that flowed past her shoulders, she somehow managed to look Asian, Jewish, Indian, Swedish, and black all at once. Right now she was dressed in jeans, low-heeled boots, and a snug-fitting long-sleeved black shirt. Yeah, I’d have stared too if it was my first time meeting her. I tried not to think about the contrast between us. I was about three inches shorter, with boring gray eyes, poker-straight mud-brown hair that was more fly-away than sleek, and, while I wasn’t pudgy, I sure as hell didn’t have anything resembling an athletic build.
“I just got off shift,” he said, gaze not leaving Eilahn. “I’d be glad to help you look. What’s your cat’s name?”
Eilahn shot me a glance, and I masked a grimace. Crap. We hadn’t counted on anyone actually wanting to help us look for a cat in the middle of the night. “Erm, its name is Fuzzykins.”
The demon’s expression didn’t change a whit, but I could feel the withering Fuzzykins? That’s the best you can do? as clearly as if we’d shared a telepathic bond. Damn good thing we didn’t. I really wasn’t sure I wanted to know what she was thinking most of the time.
“Fuzzykins,” the officer repeated, grinning. “I love it. I’m Tim, by the way,” he said to the demon. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
“Eilahn,” she replied with an easy smile.
“Nice to meet you, Ellen,” he said. I bit back a smile as her eyes narrowed at his mispronunciation. “So, what’s this cat look like?”
Her eyes flicked back to me. Damn it. I was on the hook again. “It’s, um, a calico.” Those were sort of rare, weren’t they? “Without a tail.”
“A calico Manx. Well, that shouldn’t be hard to miss,” he replied with a laugh.
Ah, hell. He really did intend to help us look for this nonexistent feline. So much for getting the warding finished tonight.
“Tim,” Eilahn said with a tilt of her head. “Perhaps you could run to the store for us and purchase some food for Fuzzykins to help lure her out.” She gave him a smile that even dazzled me. I quickly dug in my pocket and came up with a battered twenty-dollar bill that I passed to her. In turn she pressed it into his hand without ever breaking eye contact, letting her fingers linger on his.
The poor boy never had a chance. Half a minute later he screamed off in his cruiser.
I cocked my head and regarded the demon. “How the hell did you learn how to do that?”
Her brow furrowed in puzzlement. “Do what?”
“That smile-seducey, make-men-drool thing.”
She tossed off a shrug. “I read a lot.”
Damn. I needed to hit the bookstore.
I moved to the corner and peered down the street. A damp and chilly breeze ruffled the wrinkled tinsel wrapped around the lamp posts. One of the eyes of an illuminated reindeer flickered on and off, making it look like it had a twitch. A dog barked somewhere several streets away, but otherwise the smooth silence remained unbroken. No cars. No one to see us.
Eilahn turned back to the chain of arcane symbols, then paused, eyes narrowing. A whisper of arcane brushed over me even as a scuff of sound from the roof drew my attention upwards. I barely had time to note a black shape swooping down before Eilahn leaped at me in a flying tackle.
I remembered to tuck my limbs in, and somehow she managed to roll with me so that I didn’t hit the ground in a painful sprawl. The attacking demon was fast though. In the next instant it was on us, one clawed hand seizing my left bicep, and its other three on Eilahn. I tried to bite back the yelp of pain as one of its claws pierced skin. This was a graa—easy enough to recognize with its multiple arms. Hopefully this one only had the four. I’d seen some that had as many as eight—multi-jointed and ending in strange hands consisting of a thumb and two fingers, each tipped with curved claws. They looked almost spider-like—if spiders had wings like roaches and heads like crabs and hindquarters like a lizard.
Twisting, I tried to wrench my arm out of its grip, but I might as well have been a kitten trying to escape a lion’s mouth. Eilahn seized something on its head that looked like a spicule or antenna and yanked harshly, wringing a hiss like a teakettle from it. The three of us rolled in a weird tangle of arms and legs and claws—a strangely quiet fight, punctuated only by my breathless cursing and the graa’s hissing and snarling. They didn’t have vocal cords, and one of the reasons I rarely summoned this species of demon was because I had such a fucking hard time understanding them.
