Vengeance of the Demon: Demon Novels, Book Seven (Kara Gillian 7) (6 page)

I reclined and gazed up at the ceiling, exhausted but pleased with the outcome. In a minute I’d get up and go to bed. Yep, any minute now.

Screw it. The sofa was comfortable enough.

Sleep didn’t come immediately, and I drifted in a state of don’t-want-to-move. Thoughts tumbled sluggishly.
What if the Rasha-Idris deal goes wrong, and Mzatal doesn’t send Idris? No. It can’t. She’ll come through. Bryce and Idris need a vehicle. Jill has an old car that she rarely uses. I’ll ask her if I can borrow it. Sheets and towels. They’ll need those. Clean ones. Bryce in the guestroom, and Idris in the basement. That’ll work. If Ryan comes home and wants the basement back, he can suck eggs.

What does that even mean?
An image rose of Ryan tapping a hole in one end of an egg and slurping out the contents.
That doesn’t seem all that dire.

It’s probably something filthy. Dirty eggs.

Chickens are messy.

And who put a stupid nightlight sigil on the ceiling?

A voice brushed me, like a whisper of breath on my cheek. Familiar and unwelcome. I twitched physically and mentally, awake enough to ward off the encroaching nightmare.

“Kara?” Again. Clearer. Seeking.

Heart pounding, I jerked fully awake and sat up.
Rhyzkahl
. That was Rhyzkahl’s voice.
What the fuck?

I looked around me. My living room. My sofa. The afghan in a heap on the floor. Fuzzykins perched on the recliner. The song-rasp of crickets. The whirr of the air conditioner cycling on.
Normal
.

I was definitely awake. I’d experienced enough dream visits from the treacherous Rhyzkahl to know the difference. I drew the afghan up and hugged it to my chest. My pulse slowed as the familiarity of my home embraced me. Fuzzykins hissed, her eyes round and locked onto me. She flattened her ears, hissed again. Yep. Normal.

Or not.

A dim amber sigil glowed on the ceiling. Not my sigil. Not my
ceiling
. A mosaic dome with its apex and sigil just below my tongue-and-groove paneling. Transparent, like an overlay.

“Kara?” Thin. Weak. “Are you . . . here?” In front of me.

My gaze snapped down. Superimposed over my fireplace was a ghostly image of
Rhyzkahl
upon a bed, naked except for a twisted sheet draped over his hip.

“What’s going on?” I demanded, breathing shallowly. “What the fuck are you doing?” Panic clawed within my chest as I recoiled on all levels.

The vision faded to little more than a shadow. “I . . . am here.” Distant. Desperate. “Stay. Kara.”

Stay? I hadn’t moved. The shadow brightened and clarified into the vision of Rhyzkahl in his bed over the backdrop of my living room.

“You still have a fucking link to me?” My voice shook with anger and visceral terror. “You worthless son of a bitch.” I should have known he’d find a way. Had he made this link as part of the
rakkuhr
virus? I squeezed my eyes closed in an attempt to shake the connection. Though I no longer saw the physical aspects of the living room, potency strands and my protective wards shimmered in othersight as expected. Yet the vision of Rhyzkahl intensified—vibrant and textured and
real
.

My eyes flew open, and I sucked in a breath as my living room returned with only a ghost of Rhyzkahl.
I’m seeing him with othersight?
That was different. In other dream sendings, I’d been fully asleep while he manipulated my experience to feel like reality.

“Kara!” He lifted a shaking hand toward me.

Heart hammering, I closed my eyes again. Slipped out of othersight. My wards dimmed. Rhyzkahl solidified more. A reyza bellowed in the distance. The heady fragrance of flowers mingled with an acrid tang of sweat and pain.

The cushions of the sofa pressed against my back, yet at the same time I stood beneath a domed ceiling with Rhyzkahl before me.
This is beyond weird.
His usual dream projections were
nothing
like this.

Opening my eyes, I withdrew to the living room. Then twice more. With each shift, my control of how much I saw and felt increased.

Weird . . . and cool.
Concentrating, I called forth Rhyzkahl’s shadowed chamber. Heavy drapes hung over the windows with only the faintest hint of daylight at the edges. The sigil in the ceiling cast a sluggish illumination onto the bed and little more.

I stood near the bed with my chin up and my gut churning. His silky white-blond hair had been cropped to finger length, and he currently had a serious case of bed head. The faas had probably cut it since several feet of hair would be a stone bitch to keep tidy on a bed-bound patient. His beautiful face was haggard and drawn, and he looked as if he’d lost a solid thirty pounds since the plantation battle.

Breathing unsteadily, he fought to sit upright but could only manage to prop on an elbow. “What is it . . . you want?” he croaked.

Delicious shock coursed through my veins.
He
wasn’t controlling this. His reactions were too natural—unmeasured and unscripted. I was in
his
dreamspace, not the other way around. And that meant that what I saw here was his reality—the weight loss, the cropped hair, the shadowed room.

This had the potential to be very
interesting
. I finished my perusal of the chamber before answering. “Want? From you?” I snorted and raked my gaze over him. “Seeing you like this is a damn good start.” My tormenter helpless and in pain. A decent and noble person would have at least a whisper of sympathy for Rhyzkahl. Not me. The asshole had willfully duped, used, and tortured me, had been party to submerging Szerain in his horrific imprisonment as Ryan, and had sponsored human trafficking. And that was only what I knew of.

Frowning, I sauntered to the side of the bed. He followed my movement warily, trembling as though in pain. I paused to test the dual awareness, saw my living room, felt the afghan. It really did seem too good to be true, which meant I needed to stay on my toes. I wouldn’t put it past one of the Mraztur to set an elaborate trap using Rhyzkahl as bait.

“What are you playing at now?” I asked him, wary. Testing. “Why did you call me to your dreamspace?” Experimenting, I pictured butterflies erupting from the cushion beside him. To my surprise and delight, dozens streamed forth in an iridescent flutter to circle and float in the dome
.
Verrrrrrrry interesting.
“That’s what this is, isn’t it?
Your
dreamspace?”

Disbelief widened his eyes as he stared at the spectacle. “No . . . no!” He swallowed noisily and turned his head toward the door. “Rega,” he called out in little more than a hoarse whisper. “Rega!”

I laughed as the door stayed firmly closed. “The faas can’t save you from yourself, Rhyzkahl,” I told him. “No one is going to answer your call.”

His gaze skittered around the room in wild panic. “This cannot be,” he rasped in distress. His fingers plucked feebly at the sheet. “No. It cannot.”

His dream sendings to me had felt utterly real. Was that how he perceived this? “What cannot be?” I asked with a tilt of my head. “That I’m in your crib? That you can’t read me?” I sidled closer and regarded him. “Damn, you look like shit.”

Breathing raggedly, Rhyzkahl again tried to sit up only to sag into the cushions. “You
are
here.” A wild and desperate look came into his eyes. “You are
here
.
I feel you.
Here
.”

“Would you stop fucking saying that?” I snapped. “Yeah, I think we’ve established that I’m heeeeere.” I slung my hands out wide to encompass the whole dreamspace then dropped them to my hips. “And now I get an early Christmas present.” Pursing my lips, I gave him an obvious once-over. “Are you hurting?” Not that I really needed to ask. He was devious, sneaky, underhanded, and deceitful, but even he couldn’t fake all the signs of pain. Cautious breathing, muscle tremors, sunken cheeks, and the misery that colored his aura. Still, I wanted to hear it from him.

“Yes.” His throat worked, and a deeper agony lit his eyes. “Zakaar.”

“What about him?” I asked, voice hard as obsidian. “Don’t you dare try and tell me you give a flying fuck about his condition.”

Desolate despair etched more lines into his face. “I cannot . . .
cannot
exist . . . without Zakaar.”

Yep, as I suspected, his “concern” went no further than how Zack’s condition affected his own. Rhyzkahl was a hot mess because of the broken ptarl bond, but Zack suffered far more—locked in human form and unable to touch the other demahnk. I leaned close and bared my teeth. “Zakaar
warned
you. He gave you every chance to stop being a fucking asshole.”

“Cannot fault Zakaar,” he rasped. “He will . . . return.” He lifted a shaking hand to touch my forearm. “He will.”

I jerked away and stepped back, ignoring his low moan as I pulled my arm from his touch. “I wouldn’t hold my breath on that, if I were you,” I said. “I don’t see him returning to kiss your boo-boos and make them better any time soon.” I paused to savor the moment. “
Or ever
.”

He made a desperate reach toward me. “No, no . . . stay close,” he pleaded then withdrew his hand as if realizing it might be a deterrent. “Stay close.
Please
.”

Suspicious, I considered him. “Why?” I edged a bit closer, watching him carefully. He closed his eyes, and a small amount of the tension eased out of his face and body.

“Hurts less.” He swallowed. “I can think more clearly . . . when you are near.”

Perhaps my presence grounded him since he no longer had Zakaar to give him balance? But why me? Somehow I doubted that any random human had the same effect. Maybe it was my affinity with the demon realm groves that made me a walking Vicodin for the fucker? Or perhaps it had to do with Elinor—the summoner who’d inadvertently triggered a cataclysm in the demon realm hundreds of years ago. A fragment of her essence lingered on mine, which was a large part of why Rhyzkahl had oh-so-nicely picked me for his torturous sigil scar ritual. For that matter, maybe it was those fucking scars. Whatever the reason, it meant I now had serious leverage over the son of a bitch.

I poked him hard in the shoulder with a knuckle. “How’s that?” I asked with false brightness. “Does that help?”

To my shock my little jab might as well have been a tiny charge of power. A look akin to orgasmic relief bathed his features, and the anguished feel of his aura eased a smidge. “Yes,” he replied, deathly serious as he met my gaze.

Mouth pursed, I nodded, then punched him in the face as hard as I could.

“Fuck You!” I shouted as he let out a wheezing cry of pain. I danced back from the bed and shot him the bird with both hands.

Heedless of the blood pouring from his nose, he struggled off the bed and to his feet as I continued to withdraw. “Kara, no,” he gasped. “Do not . . . leave me.” He collapsed to the floor, hand extended and face panicked. “No, Kara . . . do not leave me.
Please
.”

“Buh-bye,
dear one
.” I blew him a mocking kiss. “Now,
wake up
.”

With no more effort than it took to breathe, I withdrew from the dreamscape into the full presence of my living room. Not a trace of Rhyzkahl in sight or arcane sense. Awake, super-charged with adrenaline, and feeling insanely
alive,
I shoved the afghan aside and leaped to my feet. Humming with elation, I flipped on the light. Everything dripped with color and vibrancy, and my blood thrummed through my body.

“Rot in hell, motherfucker,” I sang then proceeded to dance badly around the room with only Fuzzykins to judge me.

It didn’t take long for my overall fatigue to catch up and tell me to cut out the dancing crap. I yanked my summoning journal from the bottom of the pile of papers and notes on the coffee table, settled in the recliner and flipped to a blank page. Though I was craptastic about keeping up with day to day journaling, I was trying hard to keep a record of important occurrences. This dream-thing most certainly ranked right up there in importance, especially since I didn’t know how it happened. Could it possibly be connected to the incident with Jill on the valve? She’d said Rhyzkahl cried for me. Yeah, well, he could keep crying for all I cared.

I dutifully recorded the event—along with some choice expletives. I intended to share this incident with Zack and Mzatal and absolutely no one else, which meant I needed to safeguard my notes. Though the journal itself was warded, I traced three intricate aversions on the page, then added a fourth for good measure. A far cry from the pink diary I had as a kid with its lock that could be picked with a bobby pin.

Riding the tide of my wild and crazy journaling frenzy, I also made notes on the pond valve weirdness with Jill, then dragged my notebook from my purse and transcribed Zack’s sleep-talking into the journal.

Jill. Rhyzkahl. Szerain. Ekiri akar. Sovilas mir nah shey. Xharbek. Ashava.

Next, I flipped back to find Marco Knight’s strange warning.

Twelve. The twelfth is a radical game changer. Spawned of fierce cunning. Beauty and power exemplified. Beware the twelfth.

All sunshine and lollipops. That sucker belonged with the info from when Szerain altered and activated the twelfth sigil on me. I backtracked to that entry in my journal. The words Szerain spoke when he called
rakkuhr
to consummate the sigil loomed in the middle of the page.

Vdat koh akiri qaztehl.

Qaztahl was the demon word for a demonic lord. I’d asked Eilahn about the phrase, and she had explained that the shift from the “a” sound to “e” in qaztehl simply designated uber power. It roughly translated to
Infinite resources to the all-powerful demonic lord unfettered.