“Do you know the name of the demon it belongs to?” I asked.

A confused look crossed his face. “Name? No.”

A long shot, but I had to ask.

I took a step, then rubbed my foot over a corner of the triangle, breaking the spell. Spooner fell over in his chair, a floppy puppet with slackened strings. He whimpered as I approached and set the caduceus down.

Each side of the thick tabletop bore a small indentation flanked by horizontal lines. Deceptively decorative. I pressed my finger into the indentation on one side. Nothing. Second side. Nothing. Third … a small drawer creaked open. Inside were two wads of dog-eared hundred-dollar bills bundled with wide rubber bands, a small ladies’ pistol, and in the back, a swirl of pink fog surrounding what could only be the glass talon.

I gathered it up with shaking hands. It was cool, and heavy. Not smooth, as I’d expected, but marred with long, rough ridges. The base was ragged and opaque ivory, the remainder clear.

After all the worry and frustration, there it was.

Could I use it to find the summoning spell for the albino demon?

I nestled it in the center of my palm and closed my hand around it, situating the talon between my index and middle fingers. Gripping it tight, it felt like a weapon in my hand. I slashed at the air once, wielding its power, testing. I relaxed my fingers and transferred it into my other hand, dropping it to my side.

Spooner continued to whimper. I glanced at Lon and nodded. He lowered his gun and spoke to him in a low, rational voice. “I wanted you to know what she could do. Don’t look for her, don’t ask about her. Don’t even think about her. If I find out that you have, I’ll come back, and I damn well won’t be happy. That goes for my kid too.” He gaze captured Spooner’s. “We’re not afraid of you, but you should be afraid of us.”

Lon turned his back and began walking away, then paused. He looked at the ground as he spoke. “Later today I’ll wire you the money you paid for it. I’m not a thief.” In a barely audible murmur he added, “Not anymore.”

33

“Amazing,” Lon said. “It really does look like a fairy. Jupe was right.”

I gripped a freshly charged clay doll and watched my servitor’s small pink figure float above our heads in his library, hoping against hope that the glass talon would generate enough live energy to link it to a book containing the albino demon’s summoning name. Hoping also that the book was here. Only one day remained until the Luxe deadline, and if it turned out that the servitor could find the right book, but it was in someone else’s library across the globe, I was screwed.

It was early afternoon. Jupe was watching a movie in his room, but Lon had made him promise to stay in bed; he didn’t even know I was here. We stopped by my house after the confrontation with Spooner, to check in on Riley and pick up the supplies I needed to do the servitor spell, then I followed him in my rental.

The servitor hung at the ceiling. Not unusual. It sometimes took a few moments for it to get a fix on its objective and begin hunting. The pink light would either go through the ceiling, or float back down. Through … or down, through—

It floated back down.

My heart pounded.

Hovering near the tops of the bookcases, it glided in front of the fireplace, past Lon’s small sealed cabinet of stolen rarities, behind the desk, bobbed in place for a few seconds, and like a birthday balloon with a slow leak, it lazily dropped and floated to me, filtering back into the clay doll.

I had the servitor retrieval spell neatly prepared on one of Lon’s blue paper markers. Spitting on the drawing, I whispered the incantation and smashed the clay doll against it.

It was off-putting to be in the same room as the transmission image. I could see myself and Lon through its vision, the shelf of books it had spotted, and the particular book it singled out. A fat, red leather binding. “There!” I said, pointing as the image disintegrated.

The transmission acted like a magical decongestant; loosened Heka seethed inside me. Head swimming, I swayed, dropped to my knees, and fell onto my back with a loud thump. Closing my eyes momentarily, I waited until the nausea subsided. Lon’s knees hit the rug beside me. I squinted one eye open as a red leather-bound tome was dangled in front of my face.

“Is this it?”

Goetia Demonica Muliebris, read the worn gilded title on the front cover.

I laughed. “Yep.”

“Goddammit,” he murmured, sitting back on his heels. “I never would’ve thought to look in here.” Cracking it open on my extended legs, he hunched over and began hurriedly skimming the entries.

“Why not?” I pushed myself up into a sitting position.

“Because,” Lon explained, fanning carefully through crackling vellum pages, “I just assumed from what you said that the demon was male.”

“That’s what the caliph told me.”

“This is an encyclopedia of female demons.”

Well, damn. I watched him flip through the goetia, carefully turning each page. Then he stopped. I moved closer to read the text along with him.

Next to the simple relief of a woodcut demon, the border of which was illuminated in flaking silver, was the name of the primordial being: Nivella Krustallos Daemonia.

“Not male, and not an albino either,” Lon said with wonder. “A White Ice Demon.”

I’d never heard of this class, but now that I knew it, I could look up the correct summoning seal.

Lon read the text out loud: