She sighed. “No, she passed away quite some time ago.” Her brow furrowed in thought. “I’ll get in touch with Katashi, see if he knows of anyone working in this area.” Pain flashed quickly through her eyes and was gone. “He owes me anyway,” she added softly.
I knew Katashi, the summoner who’d trained my aunt. I’d gone to Japan last year for a couple of months to study under him—a complete waste of time and money. He was ninety if he was a day, and a condescending, sexist asshole. I could barely tolerate him for two months. I had no idea how my aunt had put up with him for close to a decade.
“I appreciate it,” I said.
Her chin dipped in a nod. “I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for Katashi to respond. You’d best get to your research, if you want to have any chance of results.”
I smiled wryly. “I guess I’d better.”
“Let me know if you need anything,” she said, then looked back to her cards as Carl walked back into the kitchen and sat back in his chair as if he’d never left.
I slipped off my stool and made my escape to the library.
Ages ago—or so it seemed—Ryan had asked me why I summoned the demons. And my reply to him was something flip, on the order of, “Because I can.” But, in truth, there was so much more to it than that. It wasn’t simply the fact that I had this ability. It was the fact that the summoning gave me something in my life that I didn’t have and probably never would have. It gave me purpose and a sense of accomplishment, and it was something that I’d earned. No one had anointed me as a summoner. Other than the innate ability to open the portal, I had to work and learn and study and bleed to get to my current skill level. I wasn’t heir to some incredible power or fortune that had been bestowed upon me, and it wasn’t as if some supernatural accident had occurred that had made me this way—like the stories where a homely girl is turned into an all-powerful vampire or werewolf or some such thing. No, I’d fucking earned this. This power, this ability was mine.
That’s why I summoned the demons. Because I could.
But right now, standing in the middle of Aunt Tessa’s library, I almost wished I couldn’t. Because then maybe I wouldn’t have to deal with this nightmare of a room.
My aunt insisted that there was a method to the madness in her library. And, to her credit, there was something about this place that somehow allowed me to find what I needed to find, even if it wasn’t always what I was looking for. Yet I continued to insist that it could not truly be called a library. Those were places of order, with some sort of system in place