The wooden box held a few other items as well. Two tiny bottles of oil—sandalwood and neroli—which I used with chalk and blood for the central sigils. A shallow blood collection bowl that hadn’t seen use in years. Though I now had far more skill in making a cut in the midst of ritual, I couldn’t bear the thought of tossing out the bowl. And, finally, my ritual knife. Nothing fancy—a simple buck knife with a wooden handle and a five inch single-edged blade in a plain leather sheath. But Aunt Tessa had given me that knife before my first summoning, and I’d never used any other for an Earthside ritual.
I picked up the knife, suddenly wistful. If I ever mastered the shikvihr I’d have no more need to shed blood for basic summonings, and the knife would become as obsolete as the bowl. I squared my shoulders. No, not “if.” When I mastered the shikvihr. So what if I had no idea when I’d be able to return to the demon realm for more training—or if Mzatal would be available to train me. I’d already achieved the seventh ring, and I damn well intended to get the rest.
The scent of cured tobacco mingled with the other aromas, and I smiled as older memories rose. My grandfather, Mike Pazhel, sitting on the front steps of this house with a cigar between two fingers, grinning and opening his arms to me as I ran to him after my first day of kindergarten. Walks through the woods with my hand in his as he pointed out wildlife and spun fantastic stories of the secret lives of the squirrels and birds and raccoons. He’d built this house with my grandmother, Gracie, who’d died a year before I was born. The cover story blamed a freak water heater explosion, but in fact Rhyzkahl had killed her along with four other summoners during a botched summoning of Szerain.
After her death the family fell apart. My grandfather tried to drown his sorrows in whiskey, my mom ran off and married my dad, who she’d been dating for two years, and Tessa left for Japan to study under Katashi. Mom got pregnant with me only a few months later and, due to financial circumstances, she and my dad ended up moving back into this house. My grandfather quit drinking, and for eight years I had the advantage of growing up with a loving family. Then my mother died of ovarian cancer, and less then two months later a heart attack claimed my beloved grandfather. Three years after that, a drunk driver killed my father, which indirectly started me on the path to becoming a summoner.
I unsheathed the knife and closed the box. Time to get down to business.
After one last inspection of the circle of chalked sigils on the floor, I took my place at the perimeter and concentrated on Mzatal and our bond. I’d hoped that doing so would help clear the pathways for the summoning, yet instead it rekindled a deep and distracting ache. I drew a breath and released it slowly, pushed aside the ache. There was hope for us, but not yet.
I gathered potency and sent out the preliminary “knocking” call that would let Mzatal know I wished to summon him. Continuing to hold the strands, I counted to one hundred then made a precise cut on my forearm and dripped blood onto the diagram. I sank into the rhythm of my chanting, and soon the summoning portal opened like a vortex of lightning-threaded, purple clouds. Unusual but not detrimental. Wind whipped around me as I set the knife down and lifted my arms. The binding strands jerked wildly in my grasp, but I adjusted expertly, held firm, and called out his name.
“Mzatal!”
My heart leaped as I felt him answer the call, but an instant later the portal lurched in a way I’d never experienced before, nearly causing me to lose my hold. Sweat dripping, I wrestled the potency flows, yet everything I did seemed to have the opposite effect of what I intended.
“Fuck you, you piece of shit portal!” I yelled into the vortex. “That’s the way you want to play? You think this is my first rodeo?” Pausing, I watched the mad flailing of the flows then yanked hard to damp the resonance. “Yeah, that’s right, bitch. You can just calm your ass down.” I continued to make careful corrections and finally constrained the vortex enough to pull Mzatal through. The swirling wind whined then dropped to nothing, leaving the smell of sulfur in its wake.
Breathing hard, I anchored the flows and sank to my knees as my muscles refused to hold me up any longer. Mzatal’s aura engulfed me like heat off lava, and I dragged my eyes up to him. He stood in the center of the diagram, silhouetted against the lightning flashes of the closing portal, with his feet shoulder width apart and hands in fists at his sides. Blood dripped from his nose to skitter and hiss across the arcane pattern on the floor like water on a hot griddle.
The portal closed behind him with a sharp crack, plunging us into semidarkness. “Kara Gillian,” he said in a voice rich, deep, and hard. “The timing is inopportune.”
Loss and dismay shot through my heart. “Lord Mzatal,” I said, doing my best to keep my own voice strong and steady. He’d closed the chink in his walls to a pinprick. “You have withdrawn more.”