“Samantha will start the portal very small, as she has been, only opening it further once we see that it is in the correct position,” Ammu explained.
“Oh, right,” Kaitlyn said, clearly relieved. “OK.”
“She will also check with Sketch, again as she has been, to make sure that what we are summoning is, in fact, an imp, rather than something else.”
“Yep,” Sam agreed.
“Now, Sketch,” Ammu said, “your job is very important. If the thing that wants to come through the portal does not look like this, you must warn us. I am painfully aware that art in 335 BC was not what it is today, but the drawings reproduced in this book were designed, nonetheless, to depict for the summoner the true nature of the thing being summoned. Dark creatures like to play tricks on the mind, so no matter what we see, you must see this creature, or we will not bring it through. Do you understand?”
“Yeah,” Sketch said.
Ammu continued to look at him pointedly, as though Sketch’s reply might not have fully reassured him.
“I got it,” Sketch said. “What I see, goes. This thing here, or shut it.”
Ammu chuckled. “Concisely put,” he agreed. “Finally, Daniel, the song for the imp will be different than the gryphon’s. It might, at times, be a little unsettling, but trust your intuition.”
“OK,” Daniel agreed.
“The same is true for you, Mackenzie. The movements you will feel called to perform will be different than the movements that protected the gryphon circle. Focus on the imp, intend to repel anything but the imp, and trust your instincts.”
“Roger that,” Mackenzie confirmed.
“Well then,” Ammu announced, “when you are ready.”
“Here,” Mackenzie said, choosing their starting position. “Count us in.”
“It’s go time,” Sam said somberly. “One… two… one, two, three, four.”
Sketch watched as the runes began to glow with power. The blue light did not seem any different, but everything else did. The shapes of the runes were strange, almost twisted. Mackenzie’s gyrations were no longer fluid, containing writhing, jerking movements that seemed unnatural. And Daniel’s song was now in a distinctly minor key, its notes discordant, leaping dramatically away from the rest of the music before returning to the larger theme.
The overall effect set his teeth on edge, and he watched even more intently when Sam, standing in the center of the circle, began to raise both hands toward the summoning room. She counted backward so Mackenzie would know the exact moment in which she intended to open the portal.
“Five… four… three… two… one… now!”
Sam splayed the fingers of both hands out wide and flung her arms forward as though she were trying to shove the air itself through the observation window. In that same moment, a portal opened in the center of the summoning room. It was small, just as she had promised—no larger than Sketch’s own thumbnail. She looked over her shoulder and nodded at him, making him breathe a little easier. She would hold the portal at that size for as long as he needed.
Rolling his shoulders and stretching his neck to each side, he took a deep breath, exhaled it, and then reached out with his mind toward the thing he could feel sniffing around the portal entrance. He was nervous, remembering the rotting face he had seen before, but where that thing had felt like disease, like decay, like the cold hand of death grasping at your heart, this thing felt more like… trouble.
Sketch relaxed a little. He didn’t like trouble, but he was used to it. He could survive trouble.
He saw the thing clearly in his mind’s eye, just like the photograph. Its tiny hands reached into the portal, alternating between one and the other, feeling around inside the tunnel up to its shoulders, exploring it. Its pug-nosed, bat-like face was too big to fit into the circle, but Sketch imagined it pushing one beady jet-black eye into the darkness, trying to see through the hole, and he giggled a little.
He pulled his mind back to the here and now enough to give Sam a thumbs-up, and she gradually moved her hands apart, widening the circle until the imp burst through the hole and fell immediately to the ground, the portal having opened waist high in the air.
“Oops,” Sam said. The imp tumbled end over end across the floor before coming to rest against the far wall, its head and torso lying supine on the concrete, its legs extending vertically above it. “Note to self: not everything has wings.”
Ammu flipped a switch on the wall next to the window. “I have set the intercom system to work in both directions so we can hear Staff Sergeant Miller, and he can hear us as well.”
Miller nodded toward the window in reply.
“You have company, as they say,” Ammu announced, “on the floor to your right, roughly center of the wall.”
“Roger that.”
Miller snatched a spray can from one of the many pockets on his camo pants and deployed it in the general direction Ammu had indicated. The imp screeched in annoyance, turning orange for just a moment over about half its body before shimmering in place, absorbing the paint and returning to its original dark gray hue. To Miller, it seemed as though half of a neon orange imp had appeared on the floor next to him for just a moment and then disappeared again.
“I am so not going to get used to that,” Miller muttered, his words coming through clearly over the intercom.
“It’s moving,” Mackenzie called out.
“Where?” Miller looked around the room helplessly.
“Straight at you!”
Miller sprayed the can again toward the floor at his feet, catching the imp in a new coat of orange just as it lunged for his pants leg.
“What the…” he exclaimed. “Hey!”
The imp was already halfway up his body before the orange coating disappeared, but this time Miller was ready for it.
“That was a mistake, little bugger,” Miller said cheerfully. “I might not be able to see you, but I can feel you all right. Ha! Gotcha!”
Grabbing at his own chest, Miller managed to grasp the imp around its waist, but it was moving quickly, already starting to pull itself through his hand.
“Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast,” Mackenzie warned him over the intercom. “You won’t be able to hold onto it.”
“Yeah, they briefed me,” Miller acknowledged. He reached into another pocket, trading the paint can for a tracking dart, managing to shove it into the imp’s back just before it broke free from his grasp.
“Nice!” Kaitlyn cheered.
“OK, per protocol,” Miller announced, obviously for a microphone that was recording the session somewhere, “ICIC Experiment 6A, trying paintballs first.”