“Finish your story, please?” I urged.
He ran his fingers through his hair. “He was … angry, God almighty, so angry. I could feel it, like a smothering blanket. The bindings that they had were useless. Rhyzkahl scattered them and …” He paled, his hands beginning to shake.
I leaned forward. “What happened?”
Greg clenched his hands together. “I don’t remember everything. But what I do remember is that he knew that Tess and I were there. I don’t know why he didn’t destroy us like the others, but he knew we were there.”
“How do you know?”
He looked up at me. “Because he said so. Pointed right at us while his hands were still—” His voice faltered. “His hands were still covered with my mother’s blood.” He gave a low moan and dropped his head into his hands. “My father asked him to remove her cancer. And he did. God almighty, he did. Every bit of it. Ripped it all from her. It’s been almost thirty years and I still remember that. My father lying dead at his feet, and my mother …” He shook his head, unwilling or unable to say anything more.
I was silent for a moment, then risked touching his knee. “Was everyone else killed?”
Greg took in a heaving breath. “Yeah. It was a slaughter. A fucking slaughter. As soon as Rhyzkahl finished and left, Tess grabbed my hand and dragged me out of there.” He scrubbed at his face. “She kept her head, I’ll give her that. I was totally hysterical, nearly catatonic. She got me away and to a safe place, then she went back and dumped every can of gasoline we had down the stairs and started a fire. Covered it all up.” He sighed, and I could see him pushing the memories back down. “Her mother had been killed, too, but she held it in until it was all over.”
Suddenly so much about my aunt made sense. What a hideous burden to hold for all those years. I felt an odd twinge of guilt for some of the unkind things I’d thought about Tessa. And there was a small part of me that wanted to deny, to refuse to believe that it could have been the same Rhyzkahl, the same Demonic Lord that had killed all those people, but deep down I knew that it was true, knew that he was capable of wreaking that sort of vengeance to satisfy his honor. I’d felt that same rage coming from him, that same capacity for slaughter, before he inexplicably changed his mind and decided to seduce me instead.
“I’d always heard that it was a heater explosion during a cocktail party,” I said.
Greg shrugged, color beginning to return to his face. “There wasn’t much of an investigation. I mean, back then they didn’t have CSI. And the fire was so hot that there wasn’t much left anyway. They just went in and found bone fragments and teeth and didn’t think much more of it except that it was terribly tragic. I mean, this is a small town.” He laughed weakly. “Which is kinda funny when you think about how many damn summoners were living around here.”
I nodded, but it made perfect sense to me. There were areas of arcane power here that tended to draw in people with the ability to take advantage of them, which was one of the reasons that New Orleans was such a hotbed of the “supernatural.”
I closed my notebook. “I appreciate you telling me all of this, Greg,” I said, standing.
He stood as well. “You’ve seen him. And you’re alive. How?”
I shrugged, an unconscious imitation of him. “I wish I knew.”
I STOOD AT THE DOOR TO MY AUNT’S HOUSE, STARING at the blue-and-white wood with the stenciled flowers at the edges and the way-too-cheerful Welcome! sign on the door, working up the nerve to knock and face her. Okay, facing my aunt wasn’t the big deal, but telling her just what had happened in my summoning was. She’s going to freak. Totally fucking freak. I sighed and knocked. It was past time that I talked to her about it. I’d been finding every possible reason to put it off in the last few days, and now two weeks had passed since the summoning.
My aunt pulled the door open a split second later. “Took you long enough to knock,” she said with a questioning smile. “I was starting to wonder if you’d fallen asleep on my doorstep.”
I stepped inside, automatically wiping my feet. Today my aunt was wearing a full Japanese kimono with an expertly tied obi—with her frizzy blond hair in two pony-tails that stuck out from the sides of her head. Shockingly, it worked on her.
“If you knew I was out there, why didn’t you open the door?”