“You look wrung out, sweets,” she said, eyeing me with worry.

“I feel wrung out,” I admitted. “I’m working a big case that has me pretty baffled.”

“You work too hard,” she said, “but I know it’s important to you.”

I rubbed at my temples, still knotted up from the blowup with Ryan. “Yeah. My personal life is a fucking mess too. Or at least it feels that way.”

She made a tsking noise. “You’re simply unused to having a personal life.”

“Well, this is true,” I said with a tired smile. “Being a social isolate was easier in a lot of ways.”

“I’m serious, Kara. Think about it. Six months ago you were practically a hermit, without a single person you could call friend.”

I fought the urge to scowl. “I wasn’t quite that pathetic.”

She gave me a dubious look. “You didn’t have any friends, and you know it. Now stop being so defensive. I’m more responsible for that than you. But my point is that now you do have friends. And you don’t know how much you can rely on them without scaring them off.”

I wanted to protest, but unfortunately she’d managed to nail down a hefty portion of my current angst. “Yeah,” I said slowly. “I guess so.”

“So, enough psychoanalysis,” she said brightly, as if she’d solved all of my ills in a few sentences. “You’re investigating the murder of Vic Kerry?”

“Among others.” I lowered my voice even though there was no one else in the café. “Someone has created a construct, like a golem, and is using it to kill.”

Her expression darkened. “That’s ugly stuff. I wish I could help you, but all I know about golems is in the library, and I think you already absconded with the pertinent books.” She gave me a narrow-eyed look that made me grin.

“Vic and I went to high school together,” she added in another wrenching change of subject.

“I didn’t know you knew him,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. “Oh, I wasn’t friends with him or anything. I didn’t even realize I’d gone to school with him until last year. He was doing the taxes for the store and we happened to get into a conversation about how old we were. Turned out we were in the same graduating class, and even had the same senior English teacher. But I don’t think we ever spoke a single word to each other. You know how that goes.”

I gave a neutral shrug. I didn’t like to think about my high school days.

“But, you know ... He and Mike Moran were really tight,” she said, with a slight frown.

“Huh? Mike Moran, the keyboardist for Lida’s band?”

“Oh, no. He’s actually a Michael Junior. Mike Moran was his father.”

I straightened. “And he and Vic were good friends?”

“Best friends. Vic even stood in Mike’s wedding, if I recall correctly. Mike and Audrey got married right out of high school. Everyone thought they were insane to rush into marriage like that, but then eight months later Mike Junior was born.” She snorted. “Stupid reason to get married, but they seemed to be doing all right. Then Audrey got pregnant again.”

“She died in childbirth with Lida, right?”

“Eclampsia,” Tessa said with a nod. “Damn near lost the baby too. Hard to believe that happens anymore, but it does.”

“Do you know how Mike Senior died?”

“Accident at the house, from what I understand. The roof collapsed in the garage. Mike was killed, and the kids were hurt—Michael quite seriously.”

“Was it an old house?” I asked.

“Nope. New construction,” she said. “He and the kids had only moved into it a few months earlier. Big two-story house with a huge yard. Mike and Ben had a debris removal business that was really taking off, thanks to a couple of big hurricanes and the need to clean up demolished houses. Those two grew up dirt poor, and Mike wanted to give the kids the kind of house he’d always dreamed of living in.” She gave a sad little smile. “The builder was blamed for the collapse, but no one could ever prove fault.”

The bell rang over the door as a couple entered the shop, and Tessa patted my hand. “Lemme scoot and take care of them.”

“That’s all right, I need to run anyway.” I stood and gave her a quick hug. “Thanks, Aunt Tessa.”

She gave me a return squeeze, then turned to greet the customers. I watched her for a moment, smiling. No matter what else was fucked up in my life, Tessa was still the same person she used to be in all the ways that mattered.

Chapter 26

The pinch of my stomach reminded me that I hadn’t eaten much of my lunch, and so, before driving home, I veered through the drive-thru of the coffee shop and ordered a muffin and a hot chocolate. There was a small part of me that both hoped and dreaded that Ryan would be at my house, waiting for me, but my driveway was silent and empty.

I pushed aside the desire to dissolve into angsty moping and headed inside, locking the door behind me. I dropped my bag by my desk, but paused after I did so, gaze lingering on my computer. Rhyzkahl had been on there. I knew he was up to something.

I dug the instructions from Brad out of my bag, then fired up my computer. Finding the Internet history was shockingly easy, but unfortunately the results didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Six different searches in Google Earth for various locations in south Louisiana. One was in Leland Park. One was the Beaulac Police Department. Yet another was in Slidell in the middle of a subdivision.

I puzzled over the locations for several minutes, then sent it all to my printer. I knew that Rhyzkahl wanted more access to this sphere for a reason—not simply because he enjoyed my sparkling personality. As soon as things calmed down a bit, I needed to dig into the why a lot harder. And how did he know how to use a computer?

What if Rhyzkahl is behind this summoning thing, trying to make me feel threatened so that I’ll call him more often? A sour taste filled my mouth as I pondered that possibility. I wanted badly to believe that the demonic lord wouldn’t be that sneaky, but unfortunately I knew too well that the sense of honor that demons lived by was not one that prohibited devious shit like that.

I continued on down to my basement, oddly unsettled at the turn of my thoughts. Despite my knowledge of the deviousness of demons, I still had a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that Rhyzkahl would try and manipulate me like that. As much as I tried not to, I was growing to really like the demonic lord. But I’ve been known to be colossally naive before.

I crouched by the storage diagram. Rhyzkahl knew perfectly well that I had the ability to summon him at any time of the month. Could he be counting on that? Give me a bit of a scare so that I’d call him to me, thus giving him more opportunity to do whatever it was he was up to?

I shook my head. Either way, I needed to have power at my disposal. Even though I couldn’t really measure the amount of potency the diagram contained, I could tell that it wasn’t quite enough for a summoning, and I had no driving urge to risk running out of juice in the middle of opening a portal. I liked my molecules in their current configuration, thank you very much.

For the next twenty minutes I gradually siphoned power into the diagram, only stopping when I began to feel shaky and nauseated. Still not enough to risk a summoning of a demonic lord, but it was getting there. After I ate something I might be able to do a bit more, but still I knew that I wouldn’t be doing any summonings tonight.

Tomorrow then. But even as I thought it I discarded it. No, I needed to try to call him to my dreams tonight. I could still ask him if he was involved in these attempted summonings, and even if I couldn’t be guaranteed a straight answer from him, I could at least let him know it was happening.

I returned upstairs, unsettled at my decision. Unfortunately there really wasn’t an easy answer. Calling him to my dreams was still risky because he had too much control over the setting and circumstance.

I dug something easy and microwaveable out of the freezer and set it to nuke as I pulled the envelope with Roger’s financial information out of my bag. I poured a glass of wine, then sat at the kitchen table as I painstakingly made my way through the account summaries. Seriously boring shit, but my time working in white collar crimes had me fairly used to it.

Roger clearly made a decent living as a trainer, though he wasn’t rich by any stretch. But he had modest savings and a fairly strong credit score.

Yeah, yeah. This wasn’t what I wanted to know. I flipped through until I found his investment portfolio. All one page of it. There was only one investment. Puzzled, I skimmed through the rest of the information in the envelope to be sure I hadn’t missed anything. But, no, there it was:

Fifteen thousand dollars worth of stock in Lake Pearl Bank.

What the hell? Why would Vic loan Roger money and then put it all into one investment? And had he done the same with the money he’d loaned Adam?

I relocated to my computer and stuck the CD with the info from Vic Kerry’s computer in. But I couldn’t find any reference to Roger or Adam or loans for fifteen thousand dollars. I did find information about vacation destinations and new cars, as well as a number of links to dating websites. Vic Kerry had definitely craved a better life for himself, and I was fairly sure he’d used Roger and Adam in his quest, but I couldn’t make the whole thing click together.

I could feel an answer tickling at the back of my head, but I couldn’t get it to behave and come out and play nice. Screw this. It was already late enough that I was going to be short on sleep. Too much had happened today for me to think straight.

I returned to the basement to pull a smidge more power into the diagram, then hauled my sorry, tired ass back up to my bedroom. Between the wine and the working with the arcane, I was asleep a heartbeat after my head hit the pillow, barely remembering as my eyes closed to dream of Rhyzkahl.

Chapter 27

I rested my hands on the stone of the battlement as I looked out over the deep canyon. A chill breeze teased my hair but I didn’t want to go back inside. Morning mist shrouded the bottom of the abyss and I knew it would be hours yet before the sun would clear the high ridge and burn it off. A waterfall tumbled down the cliffs, descending into the depths with a muted roar.