You need only bleed and use my  name.

I understood the words but not their meaning. I’d had no idea hellions could even be summoned until Ira had told me. In fact, I wasn’t sure exactly what he’d told me. But I knew how to bleed.

It took a minute of searching through commercial-grade stainless steel drawers in the kitchen, but I finally found a drawer full of knives. I selected the shortest—a paring knife—and slid the drawer closed with the clang of metal. Then I sat on the floor, my legs crossed in front of me, and silently hoped I was doing the right thing. And that whatever summoning involved, it wouldn’t put me in danger of being killed or captured in the next few minutes.

Then I sliced open my palm.

It was a small cut. In the movies, they always make a huge gash whenever they need blood to summon the forces of evil, but that had always felt like overkill to me. Surely evil doesn’t care how dramatic your blood loss is, right?

In the movies, it never really looks like those gruesome self-inflicted cuts hurt, but in real life—even for the undead—it hurt. A lot.

I set the knife down and let blood well up into my palm until there was a pool the width of a dime. It was slow going, until I realized my heart wasn’t beating, which meant my blood wasn’t flowing. Not very quickly, anyway. So I concentrated on making my heart function, and blood collected faster.

Then I made a fist and let it drip onto the tile floor in front of me, because I wasn’t sure what else to do with the blood. Or what exactly Ira meant when he told me to “use” his name.

“Ira.”

My voice didn’t echo, because I was inaudible to human ears and thus most of the physical plane. So I wasn’t really surprised when nothing happened.

“Ira.” I tried it again, audible to the whole world, had anyone been there to hear me. That time there was a slight echo of my voice in the empty room. But no hellion appeared.

“Come on! You promised you’d...be summonable!” And hellions couldn’t lie.

My frustration and anger built as I stared at the blood still dripping slowly from my hand onto the floor. There were a couple of little red squiggles, because my hand had jiggled. They almost looked like...

Letters.

And suddenly I understood. He hadn’t told me to say his name. He’d told me to use his name.

I unclenched my fist and dipped my forefinger into the blood. Then I wrote his name in capital letters, several inches above the small pool of my own blood.

“Ira.” I wasn’t sure if saying it again would really help, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, out of nowhere, the hellion appeared in front of me, his denim-clad knees level with my eyes.

I looked up. And up. And up. Ira was tall. He was also the youngest-looking hellion I’d ever seen, and it bothered me more than I couldeven comprehend that I actually had a basis for that comparison.

“I knew you would call.” The hellion dropped effortlessly into a squat in front of me, and I lurched backward when he was suddenly staring into my eyes. “Blue. Nice, but they’d look better in red. If you’re ever mine, your eyes will be red. It’s a painful procedure, of course—not that it has to be, but it will be—yet utterly worth the effort. You would look brilliant in red.”

While I gaped at him in shock, the hellion sank onto the floor in front of me, leaving his name and the small pool of my blood between us. He crossed his legs, and I was almost certain he was mirroring my position on purpose.

“Ira?”

“Of course. No one else can come when I’m summoned by name. That’s how it works.” He must have seen the confusion in my face. Or else he was reading my thoughts—a possibility that terrified me, but that I couldn’t safely rule out. “This is your first summoning?”

I nodded, nearly mesmerized by the dark red veins in his solid-black eyes. By his shoulder-length hair, so deeply red it was almost black. He looked like an evil rock star. In jeans.

I’d never seen a hellion in jeans.

“That’s because none of the other hellions you’ve dealt with are strong enough to appear when called. They don’t like admitting that—it makes them look weak—so they simply refrain from mentioning the possibility.”

“Avari is too weak for...summoning?” My fear was back, and it was rapidly bleeding into true terror. Avari could snap me in half with two fingers. He could breathe in my general direction and freeze me solid. If he was too weak for this, then just how powerful was Ira?

The hellion frowned, but no lines appeared on his broad, clear forehead. “Oh, no, my little fury, don’t be scared. I enjoy your fear, true, but I’d much rather have your anger.”

“I don’t give a shit what you want.”

“Ah, that’s better.” Somehow, his smile made him look even scarier. And...oddly satisfied, for a hellion of rage. “And true, no doubt. Because this is about what you want, isn’t it?”

“How does this work?” I wasn’t going to say another word until I understood just how much danger I’d put myself in. Had I just unleashed a hellion into the human world, with no restrictions? “What exactly does ‘summoning’ mean?”

“Think of this like a phone call, only we’re talking face-to-face. Convenient, huh?”

“So, you’re not really here?”

“Of course I’m here. But because you summoned me, and I accepted your invitation, I can’t touch you without your permission. And I can’t interact with anyone else while I’m here.”