my coat pocket a white silk pouch of salt that I had scraped out of my twenty-five-pound bag. The amount was excessive, but I wanted a solid circle, and some of the salt would be diluted as it melted the snow. I glanced at the sky to estimate where north was, finding a mark on the etched circle right where I thought it should be. That someone had used this circle to summon demons before didn’t instill me with any confidence. It wasn’t illegal or immoral to summon demons, just really, really stupid.
I made a slow clockwise path from north, my footprints paralleling the outside track of the salt as I laid it down, enclosing the angel monolith along with most of the blasphemed ground. The circle would be a good fifteen feet across, a rather large enclosure which generally took at least three witches to make and hold, but I was good enough to channel that much ley line force alone. Which, now that I thought about it, might be why the demon was so interested in snagging me as its newest familiar.
Tonight I’d find out if my carefully worded verbal contract made three months ago would keep me alive and on the right side of the ley lines. I had agreed to be Algaliarept’s familiar voluntarily if it testified against Piscary, the catch being that I got to keep my soul.
The trial had officially ended two hours after sunset tonight, sealing the demon’s end of the bargain and making my end enforceable. That the undead vampire who controlled most of Cincinnati’s underworld had been sentenced to five centuries for the murders of the city’s best ley line witches hardly seemed important now. Especially when I was betting his lawyers would get him out in a measly one.
Right now the question on everyone’s mind on both sides of the law was whether Kisten, his former scion, would be able to hold everything together until the undead vampire got out, because Ivy wasn’t going to do it, scion or no. If I managed to get through this night alive and with my soul intact, I’d start worrying about me a little less and my roommate a little more, but first I had to settle up with the demon.
Shoulders so tight they hurt, I took the milky green tapers from my coat pocket and placed them on the circle to represent the points of a pentagram I wouldn’t be drawing. I lit them from the white candle I used to make the transfer media. The tiny flames flickered, and I watched for a moment to be sure they weren’t going to go out before I stuck the white candle back on the broken grave marker outside the circle.
The hushed sound of a car pulled my attention to the high walls dividing the graveyard from our neighbors. Steadying myself to tap the nearby ley line, I tugged my knit cap down, stomped the snow from the hem of my jeans, and made one last check that I had everything. But there was nothing left to procrastinate with.
Another slow breath, and I touched my will to the tiny ley line running through the church’s graveyard. My breath hissed in through my nose and I stiffened, almost falling as my equilibrium shifted. The ley line seemed to have picked up the winter chill, slicing through me with an unusual coldness. Putting out a gloved hand, I steadied myself against the candlelit tombstone while the incoming energy continued to build.
Once the strengths equilibrated, the extra incoming force would flow back to the line. Until then I had to grit my teeth and bear it as tingling sensations backwashed at the theoretical extremities in my mind that mirrored my real fingers and toes. Each time it was worse. Each time it was faster. Each time it was more of an assault.
Though it seemed like forever, the force balanced in a heartbeat. My hands started to sweat and an uncomfortable sensation of being both hot and cold took me, like being in a fever. I took off my gloves and jammed them into a deep pocket. The charms on my bracelet jingled, clear in the winter-silenced air. They wouldn’t help me. Not even the cross.
I wanted to set my circle quickly. Somehow Algaliarept knew when I tapped a line, and I had to summon it before it showed up on its own and robbed me of the thread of power I might claim as its summoner. The copper spell pot with the transfer media was cold when I picked it up and did something no witch ever did and lived to tell of it; I stepped forward, putting myself into the same circle I was going to call Algaliarept into.
Standing across from the person-sized monument cemented to the ground, I exhaled. The monolith was covered in a black smut from bacteria and city pollution, making it look like a fallen angel. That the figure was bowed weeping over a sword held horizontally in his hands as an offering only added to the creepy feeling. There was a bird’s nest wedged into the fold of the wings as they curved around the body, and the face didn’t look right. The arms, too, were too long to be human or Inderlander. Even Jenks didn’t let his kids play around this one.
“Please let me be right,” I whispered to the statue as I mentally moved the white rill of salt from this reality to that of the ever-after. I staggered as most of the energy pooling in my center was yanked out to force the shift. The media in the pot sloshed, and still not having found my balance, I set it down in the snow before it spilled. My eyes went to the green candles. They had turned eerily transparent, having been moved to the ever-after with the salt. The flames, though, existed in both worlds, adding their glow to the night.
The power from the line began to build again, the slow increase as uncomfortable as the first quick influx of tapping a line, but the ribbon of salt had been replaced with an equal amount of ever-after reality arching high to close over my head. Nothing more substantial than air could pass the shifting bands of reality, and because I set the circle, only I could break it—providing I had made it properly to begin with.
“Algaliarept, I summon you,” I whispered, my heart pounding. Most people used all sorts of trappings to summon and contain a demon, but seeing as I already had an arrangement with it, simply saying its name and willing its presence would pull it across the lines. Lucky me.
My gut clenched when a small patch of snow melted between the warrior angel and me. The snow steamed, the cloud of reddish vapor billowing up to follow the confines of a body not yet taken shape. I waited, my tension growing. Algaliarept varied its shape, sifting through my mind without me even knowing to choose what scared me the most. Once it had been Ivy. Then Kisten—until I had pinned him in an elevator in a foolish moment of vampire-induced passion. It’s hard to be scared of someone after you’ve Frenchkissed him. Nick, my boyfriend, always got a slavering dog the size of a pony.
This time, though, the mist was definitely a human shape, and I guessed it was going to show up either as Piscary—the vampire I had just put in prison—or perhaps its more typical vision of a young British gentleman in a green velveteen coat with tails.
“Neither scares you anymore,” came a voice from the mist, jerking my head up.
It was my voice. “Aw, crap,” I swore, picking up my spell pot and backing away until I almost broke my circle. It was going to show up as me. I hated that. “I’m not afraid of myself!” I shouted, even before it finished coalescing.
“Oh, yes you are.”
It had the right sound, but the cadence and accent were wrong. I stared, riveted, as Algaliarept took on my outline, running its hands suggestively down itself, flattening its chest to my lame excuse of womanhood and giving me hips that were probably a little more curvaceous than I deserved. It dressed itself in black leather pants, a red halter top, and high-heeled black sandals that looked ridiculous out in the middle of a snowy graveyard.
Eyelids lightly closed and lips open, it shook its head to make my frizzy shoulder-length red curls take shape out of the lingering haze of ever-after. It gave me more freckles than I could possibly have, and my eyes weren’t the red orbs it showed when it opened them, but green. Mine weren’t slitted like a goat’s either.
“You got the eyes wrong,” I said, and I set my spell pot down at the edge of the circle. I gritted my teeth, hating that it heard my voice quaver.
Hip cocked, the demon put out a sandaled foot and snapped its fingers. A pair of black shades materialized in its grip, and it put them on, hiding its unnatural eyes. “Now they’re right,” it said, and I shuddered at how close it matched my voice.
“You don’t look anything like me,” I said, not realizing I had lost so much weight, and deciding I could go back to eating shakes and fries.
Algaliarept