Eirik shot me a look.

“Fine,” I said, glaring at the demon. “You can gut him. But no one else.”

The Vikings were on the demon before it had time to do much damage to them. I moved back out of the way as they jumped the demon, blades slashing, black blood flying, and various oaths and demonic screeches piercing the still air of the room. The Vikings were whooping it up as well, and so far as I could tell, having the time of their lives pounding the demon to a pulp. After a good minute and a half of that, all that remained was a blob on the floor that disappeared in a blast of nasty, oily black smoke that stained the floor and covered the Vikings in a fine black ash.

“Don’t tell me—your master keeps demons, too?” I asked Ulfur.

He shook his head, looking with curiosity at the spot on the sage carpet. “No. That was Verin, a demon in Asmodeus’s legions. He was acting as courier between his demon lord and my master.”

I pursed my lips. “Whops. The demon was just sent back to Asmodeus, right? Because you can’t destroy a demon, just his form?”

“Correct.” Ulfur looked a bit worried, which in turn made me think we’d overstayed our welcome and wonder if his master would seek retribution.

“That’s all I need—someone else after my blood,” I said on a sigh. “This necromancer master of yours . . . is he likely to be peeved to find out the courier was temporarily destroyed?”

“De Marco isn’t a necromancer,” Ulfur said, prodding at the black stain with the tip of his shoe. “He’s an Ilargi.”

“Ah.” I tried to remember what it was that Imogen had told me about them. “Those are the guys who steal souls. So, what—” I paused, something Ulfur said chiming a warning bell in my head. “What did you say your master’s name is?”

“De Marco. Alphonse de Marco.”

My jaw dropped a tiny bit. I actually stood there blinking with my mouth hanging open in surprise. “Are you sure?” I asked, immediately realizing how idiotic that sounded.

“Quite sure.”

I shook my head, trying to clear the confusion that clogged up my brain like so much sticky spiderweb. “It can’t be the same person. It just can’t be. It’s coincidence, nothing more. You don’t happen to know his birth date, do you? Or whether he was ever married, or had a daughter named Petra?”

Ulfur looked as confused as I felt. “I don’t know his birth date or whether he was married, although I don’t believe he was. He did have a daughter, but she was stolen from him when she was a baby.”

“Stolen by who?” I couldn’t help but ask.

“Gypsies.”

“Oh, come on, that’s a cliché! Real Gypsies don’t do things like that,” I protested.

He shrugged. “That’s what de Marco told me. He has long sought to find his daughter, but says she’s been hidden well. He did say something odd about her, though. . . .”

“I don’t know what could be much odder than being stolen by Gypsies,” I said, feeling more and more like Alice in a really deranged version of Wonderland.

“He said that so long as he had her horn, the baby couldn’t be used against him.”

I just looked at him for a few seconds. His mild gray eyes held my gaze. “You know, I think it’s going to be better for my sanity if I just move along, both figuratively and literally. If your master wants to have a hissy on my butt about destroying the demon’s form, he can. Otherwise, it’s time to leave. Where can I find your friend Pia and her vampire?”

He gave me the names of a couple of towns where he thought they might live, and escorted us to the door. The Vikings were still riding high on their adrenaline rush caused by destroying the demon’s form, and were quite happy to walk the quarter mile into the town proper, reliving the (in their minds glorious) fight blow by blow.

Chapter 15

Ben was nowhere to be found when we made it back to the Faire. I considered calling him on my mental cell phone (it seemed so much easier than using a real one), but decided I wasn’t such a wimp that I needed to keep tabs on him every second of the day. He was a big boy—I could trust him to go off and do things on his own without knowing exactly what it was he was doing.

The fact that Naomi was at her tattooing booth might have had something to do with my determination to give Ben his space, but I preferred to think of it as being comfortable with our blossoming relationship.

“Let’s go find a quiet spot,” I told the Vikings.

“You are going to summon Loki?” Isleif asked, hope in his eyes.

“Yes.”

They cheered, and accompanied me to a corner of the field that held a couple of huge round cylinders made of up hay. I moved behind them, so they blocked the sight of anyone who might be arriving at the Faire, and pulled out the Vikingahärta. “I just hope I remember how to use this.”

“You will,” Eirik said, taking up a protective stance on my left. Finnvid did the same on my right, both swords in his hands, while behind me Isleif hefted his huge war ax. I didn’t point out to them that Loki wasn’t going to be as easy to destroy as the demon had been.

I held the Vikingahärta, closing my eyes for a few seconds to help calm my troubled thoughts, focusing on one image, as my mother had taught me to do whenever I was about to conduct an invocation.

That image was of her.

“By the fire that burns within thee.” My words came out halting and stiff, reflecting how uncomfortable I was with this. I held the image of my mother in the forefront of my mind and tried again to calm my nerves. “By the earth that feeds thee. By the air that hides thee, by the Vikingahärta that holds thee.”

The valknut grew warm in my unharmed hand, little pinpricks of light beginning to beam out from it. I slipped off the makeshift sling, not wanting Loki to see that I was anything but in the most tip-top shape.

“Deceiver.”

The air around us crackled.

“Slayer.”

Before us, motes of light started gathering together.

“Trickster.”

The lights swirled faster and faster around each other, spinning and elongating into a long oval shape.

“Betrayer.”

The shape shimmered, and darkened in the center as a human form began to resolve itself.

“I invoke thee and call upon thee to descend here!”

The man who stepped out of the light was not who I expected. We stared at each other for a few seconds—me utterly surprised, and he looking furious.

“Who are you?” he demanded, glaring first at me, then at the Vikings, who were just as taken aback as I was.

“I’m Fran. Er . . . you’re not Loki, are you?”

He didn’t look like Loki, whose appearance I remembered as an older man, rather thin, with very white hands and balding red hair. This man had dark brown hair, a goatee, and dark eyes that glittered with anger. I took an instinctive step back, raising my hand with the valknut in a protective gesture that attracted his attention.

“What do you have there? ” He ignored my questions, casting his own out with a sharp bark that had a compulsion attached to it—a sort of magic spell that made you want to do whatever was asked of you.

“It’s mine,” I said, struggling against the need to answer him.

“Vikingahärta,” Finnvid blurted out.

I glared at him.

“Sorry, goddess,” he murmured, looking somewhat chagrined.

“Goddess?” The man’s eyes narrowed on me. “Vikingahärta?”

I straightened myself up, holding the Vikingahärta firmly, drawing strength from the fact that it didn’t like this man. “No to the first, yes to the second. Would you mind telling me who you are, and why, when I summoned Loki, you appeared instead?”

“Do not summon me again,” he snapped, and while I stared at him in surprise, he spun around and walked back into the oval of light, which proceeded to dissolve until it was nothing.

“Bullfrogs! With warts on them!” I swore, wanting to do bodily harm to someone. “What was all that about? Who was that man? And why did he come when I called Loki?”

“Should we know the answer to that?” Isleif asked Eirik.

Eirik shrugged. “The goddess knows things. She tells us, not the other way around.”

“This goddess hasn’t a clue,” I muttered, kicking at a clod of earth. “Now what do I do?”

The sudden hum of the generators as they were turned on, triggering the big lights that lined the Faire, was the answer to that question. I sighed, felt sorry for myself for sixteen seconds, then turned and marched back to the Faire, slipping the Vikingahärta’s chain over my neck.

“What are you guys going to do this evening?” I asked Eirik later, as the three stood around my mother’s booth, where I was selling off the last of her stock.

“Bed Imogen when she is done,” Finnvid said immediately, casting a warm glance down the line of tents toward the one Imogen manned. “Until then, I will think about bedding Imogen.”

“We shall wench,” Eirik announced, nodding at Isleif. “There are many women in town who desire our rods. Then, after we have wenched our fill, we will pillage a McDonald’s. We have not done so in five years, and we have missed the joy of plundering Chicken McBlobs and dipping sauces.”

“And Big Macs.”

“Aye, and the Big Macs.”

“You would pillage without me?” Finnvid asked, looking hurt.

“You will be bedding Imogen,” Eirik pointed out.

Finnvid thought for a moment. “Imogen would like to pillage, too. We will do so after I have bedded her several times.”

“It is important that a man regain his strength after repeated beddings,” Eirik told me in the tone of one confiding a fact of great importance.

“Er . . . yeah.” I gnawed on my lower lip for a bit, wondering if I should ask Eirik and Isleif to stay with me when I tracked down the orgy Ben was supposed to go to, but decided that there really wasn’t any danger in what I planned to do—a little spying—and sent them all off with a happy wave, and a warning to Eirik and Isleif to use protection while wenching, and to be sure to pay for their pillaged goods.