Touch of the Demon (6 page)

I took the mug and peered briefly at the contents. Couldn’t tell a damn thing about it except that it was liquid and it had a weird and tangy scent. Fuck it. It wasn’t as if this day could get any worse if the stuff turned out to be foul.

I slugged it down with only a slight grimace. It wasn’t vile, though I doubted I’d be asking for seconds.

“Your chambers are here,” Safar said as I placed the empty mug on the table. “Bed and bath there.” He gestured toward the door with a claw.

“
My
chambers?” I said. “You’re not taking me back to that other room?” My spirits dared to rise a few millimeters.

He crouched and shook his head. “
Dahn
.”

I peered at him. “How hard is it to learn y’all’s language?” I asked, pretty sure it was hard as hell given the gutturals, stops, and sounds that were just plain weird.
Kri
meant “yes” and
dahn
meant “no.” I’d picked that up from my dealings with demons through the years but not a lot else, since the demons I summoned all spoke or at least understood some English.

Safar spread his wings in a bone-popping stretch then settled them again. “Difficult for humans. Most who spend time here learn some words and phrases. Few become conversant. Only three have gained fluency.”

Most Who Spend Time Here.
Well, let’s just hope I’m not here long enough to learn more than a few phrases.
I grimaced and amended my mental statement.
And not because some asshole lord decides to kill me because he thinks I’m a threat to his world.

“So, what do I do now?” I asked.

He peered at me. “Eat, bathe, rest, whatever you choose short of killing yourself or leaving the grounds.”

“Eat?” I asked as my stomach gave an accompanying growl. “Real food?”

He bared his teeth. “Kri…yes. It will be here soon.”

I eyed him dubiously. “Not that broth stuff, right? Real, solid food?”

Safar rumbled in what might have been amusement. “Real, solid food.”

My spirits rose a couple of inches this time. “Any chance I can get clothing? Underwear? Nifty shit like that?”

“In the bedchamber, awaiting.”

Now for the money question. I pursed my lips. “What about a toothbrush?”

“You will find the basics in either the bedchamber or the bath chamber.”

Hot damn. I pushed up from the table and headed for the bedroom, along the way realizing that my headache had vanished in the past couple of minutes.

Relief wound through me when I found my own clothing and shoes on the bed, obviously clean. I checked out the bath chamber next and stopped dead in my tracks, eyes fixed on the graceful gold-stone bath tastefully adorned with a pattern of leaves.

“You carved this for me?” I hear myself say, barely able to contain my delight.

Szerain sits on the edge of the tub, fingers idly tracing patterns of light on the surface of the water. He looks over at me, smiles. “Finished only yesterday. You will abide for some time to come. Rhyzkahl and I came to agreement.”

“And what of Giovanni?” I ask, barely daring to breathe or hope. He looks away, and my heart sinks. “My Lord?”

And there I was alone in the bath chamber staring at a tub already full of steaming water and no clue what happened to Giovanni. Like a fucking cliffhanger. Gah! I tried to get the image back but no luck.

Well, there was no doubt that Elinor had a thing for this Giovanni.
How did all that turn out?
I wondered. Elinor died. I knew that much. Murdered? Was that it? I couldn’t shake the utter certainty that there was something more to her death than simply being consumed in a gate. Not that
there was anything simple about that, but still. And then the biggest mystery of them all: How had a slip of a girl with only adequate summoning skills come so close to destroying the world? There was a missing piece to all of this. I
knew
that. Even if no one else knew what had really happened, surely I could figure it out, right? After all, I had the best eyewitness camped out in my head.

And then there was Szerain. I took a step forward and touched the carvings on the lip of the bath where the memory-vision had been. He didn’t look anything like Ryan in the face, but his build, green gold eyes and hair were right. Well, Szerain’s hair was longer than Ryan’s FBI-regulation cut, but the color and texture were a match. What else about him was different? Elinor hadn’t been afraid of him. That was some consolation at least.

Every answer seemed to raise two more questions. I gave a mental shrug and dipped my hand in the water. Plush towels, basic toiletry items—including the much-desired toothbrush—and a full hot bath. Looked like just what I needed. Yeah, a nice long soak could make up for a lot.

I stuck my head out of the bedchamber. “I’m going to bathe, okay?”

Safar snorted and crouched, which I took for acknowledgment.

I returned to the bath, stripped quickly, and sank to my neck in the water. For a moment I wondered who the hell filled the damn thing since there was nothing resembling a faucet, but then decided I really didn’t care. It was completely awesome. Would’ve been better if I didn’t have a death-or-madness sentence coming up in two days, but what the hell. All the more reason to enjoy the shit while I could.

After about twenty minutes I felt more human and more certain that I was well clean of any lingering Tracy-bits and my own puke-spatter. I dried and dressed but paused before returning to the main room, taking this chance to peer at the damn collar in the mirror. No seam that I could feel or see. My gaze swept the bathroom and finally rested on the edge of the stone table that held the basin. Crouching awkwardly, I scraped the edge of the collar against the table about half a dozen times then peered at it in the mirror.

Shit.
The edge of the table had a long gouge on it, but the stupid collar was as pristine and whole as ever. Not even the slightest mar or scratch. What the hell was this stuff?

Sighing in annoyance and disappointment, I returned to the main room just as a pair of
faas
burst in, one carrying a mug and the other a tray of what I sure hoped was food.

“For you. For youuuuu!” one burbled as they placed tray and mug on the table. With a body about three feet long, a sinuous tail about twice that, and six legs, the faas reminded me of a sleek blue-furred lizard. It peered at me with near comic curiosity, its vertically-slitted bright golden eyes round and shining over a broad snout. Its tail coiled and undulated ceaselessly, and the demon itself vibrated all over as though it could barely contain itself. I’d summoned faas on several occasions to do arcane warding in my house, and I didn’t think I’d ever seen one be still. “Jekki! Jekki! I am,” it said, vibrating yet more, purple iridescence shimmering over its fur.

I smiled. Couldn’t help it. Faas had that effect on me. “Kara Gillian. I’m honored to meet you, Jekki.”

The second faas raised up so that it supported itself on the back four legs and had free use of the front two as hands. It traced a quick blue sigil in the air and coalesced it into what looked like a little azure gem which it promptly tossed to Jekki. “Faruk. I am Faruk. Kara Gill Ian,” it said, holding its fisted right hand out as though waiting for a fist bump. “Faas of Mzatal say greet to Kara.”

I found myself grinning despite the trauma of the past couple of days. I had no idea what the protocol was for this, so I just went with what I knew and gave the faas a fist bump. “Right back atcha, Faruk. Greetings and all that,” I said, hoping I hadn’t made a social blunder like eating with the wrong fork. Apparently it was okay, because Faruk bared its teeth in a smile and held its hand out toward Jekki, who returned not only the blue gem but two red ones it dug out of a belt pouch. “Eaaaaaaat! Drinnnnnnnnk!” Faruk said, and then both darted out without another word.

Still smiling, I looked over to Safar. “What was that all about?”

Safar rumbled in amusement. “They traded
kek
. Tokens,” he said scrunching a soft drawstring pouch that depended from his belt—his only article of clothing. It sounded like a bag of marbles, so I suspected it contained a bunch of these tokens. “Wagers,” he said as if that explained everything.

I was about to ask what sort of wager, but a savory scent demanded my attention, and I turned to the table, mouth watering. The faas had brought food—real, solid food—and
that
was the most important thing to me right now. I didn’t recognize much of the stuff, but I figured it was safe enough. If Mzatal wanted me dead, it wouldn’t be by poisoning.

I broke my liquid diet with gusto, though I stuck mainly to simple, vaguely recognizable things: grape-like fruit that tasted of lemon and melon, potato-y things that tasted like…potatoes, which they probably actually were. A creamy sweet cheese that would’ve gotten a five star rating except for its sickly grey-green color. I only tried it because, unbeknownst to me, some of it was stuck to the bottom of one of the relatively innocuous crackery things. It was so damn good even the color couldn’t put me off after that.
The experience should have emboldened me to try some of the other questionable “delicacies,” but, um, no. That sort of experimentation would have to wait until I was either hungrier or not so stressed.

I finally wiped my face and hands, dropped the napkin on the table, then looked to Safar. “You said I could do anything as long as I don’t try to kill myself or leave the grounds,” I said. “Does that mean I’m allowed to explore?”

He stood. “Unless I say you are not to go somewhere, yes.”

Bath, food, and a sliver of freedom? My attitude was better already. Might as well find out everything I could before the end, right? I headed out to the hallway, looked up and down. “I’ve never been in a palace before.”

Safar patiently dogged me as I wandered the lower levels of the palace, but after what was probably an hour or so of examining paintings and statues and poking through empty rooms, I found myself in what I knew, with Elinor’s help, to be the main entry corridor. I stood near a set of double doors at the end of a broad arched corridor that ran at least twenty-five yards to a matching set of double doors. Judging by the distance, I figured it led to the other side of the palace. One of the doors stood half open, so I headed out to see the sights without bothering to ask Safar for permission. I figured he’d stop me soon enough if I went somewhere I wasn’t supposed to go.

The first thing that hit me when I reached the open air was the sense of spaciousness. I mean, I could look up and see sky like this at home, but it just felt
bigger
somehow, as if what I could see was only a small part of what was there.

I stood before the central section of the palace atop a set of three broad steps overlooking a large courtyard. To the left and right, wings of the structure angled out to frame the grounds, the far ends terminating in towers. Déjà vu whispered once again, but this time with a memory of watching the sun set from the tower to the left. Apparently that was west, or whatever the local equivalent was. The west tower rose gracefully above the roof line, but the one to the east was another story. It looked like it had literally melted to half its height, with stone in frozen flows around its base. What the hell could do something like that?

Walkways paved in dirt-stained white stone curved
through ragged grass, sometimes lost in overgrowth. Tangles of weeds flourished in what might have been flowerbeds. In the distance I could see that the courtyard was bounded by what were once likely manicured bushes but were now shaggy lines of wild growth.

I sighed. Much like the interior of the palace, everything suffered from neglect. What a waste.
I guess none of the other lords bother to take care of it with Szerain gone.

The center of the courtyard was graced by a raised circle of stone approximately twenty feet in diameter surrounded by eleven columns, in an eye-pleasing blend of honey-gold stone and wood, like much of the palace behind me. That was as good a destination as any, so I headed for it. The buzz of insects—or what I assumed were insects—mingled with an intermittent raucous cry that sounded like a cross between a crow and a bullfrog. Untamed vines dripping tiny scarlet flowers snaked up the nearest three columns. As I got closer, I identified them as the source of a pleasant tangy-sweet scent that laced the air.

Peering through the leaves, I saw that the columns bore subtle carvings that had to be sigils, though I didn’t recognize a single one of them. The whole place emanated a subtle potency that rippled in goosebumps up my legs, and I had the strange sense that it was asleep and…dreaming.

“
Dak bah!
” came a loud shout off to my left. I turned to see a reyza I didn’t know and the shadowy form of a zhurn near the wall of the west wing. They were heavily engaged in something that I could only describe as a fast and furious game of rock, paper, scissors, but with a lot more possibilities, and both hands were used. A few minutes of attentive focus taught me not much more, except that the reyza tended to favor a four-fingers-spread configuration, they were pretty damn serious about their fun, and that the kek tokens were passed back and forth periodically.

A rush of air warned me, and I looked up in time to see a
syraza
make a precise and graceful landing in the center of the pavilion, its subtly iridescent-pearl skin catching the sun.

For one brief, heart-stopping moment I thought it was Eilahn, my kickass demon bodyguard. She’d been killed on Earth, which meant that she would, hopefully, return here just as I’d returned to Earth after my death in this world.
But even as my hope flared I realized that it wasn’t her. I’d only spent a few minutes with Eilahn in her natural form before she’d shifted into a human guise, but it didn’t matter. I knew this was a different demon. It just didn’t
feel
like Eilahn.

This demon stood a head taller than me, long of limb, with bird-like delicacy, paper thin wings, and a decidedly feminine cast to its—her?—features. I truly had no idea how gender worked with so many of the demons. Most of the time I simply used whatever pronoun seemed to fit the best. I had no doubt I’d been utterly wrong a time or three, but so far none had taken insult. At least I hoped not.