Chapter 18
The antechamber swallowed me, overly spacious, overly white, and utterly barren, as though decor had gone missing. The opulence and splashes of color in the rest of the palace warmed and augmented the white, but here, it was unbroken winter. I hurried across the expanse of floor, demon-marble chilling my bare feet.
With a breath of relief, I passed through the open door of the summoning chamber itself, its dark gray walls and floor and pleasing warmth a startling contrast to the room behind me. It seemed the lords had identical summoning chambers, which I guessed had to do with function rather than taste. Hundreds of sigils ringed the chamber, too many to even begin to puzzle out their purpose or meaning. All pulsed faintly, yet to be ignited and activated. That’s what we’ll be doing, I realized, tension and a vague worry twined with a near breathless excitement. I didn’t know how this sort of ritual worked, but it still excited me to be intimately involved in such a creation.
Rhyzkahl stood with his back to me, barefoot and wearing almost the same thing he’d worn on my first accidental summoning of him: cream-colored leather breeches that hugged the muscles of his legs, and a white shirt of some sort of silky material. I controlled my impatience and nerves while he completed a sigil. Finally, he turned to me.
“Close the door,” he said. “Then ignite the sigil upon it.”
I shut the heavy door but paused, frowning as I peered at the sigil. It was a deeply complex thing, with whispers of something intimately familiar. Yet I had no idea how to do what he asked.
“Use your connection with the grove. Ignite it as you would a closure seal for a portal, but draw the grove energy as well,” Rhyzkahl said. “It is a source of deep power, and its use to ignite the master seal will offer the greatest anchoring and shielding for the ritual.”
I nodded, then drew on the grove and extended to the sigil. An instant later it flared to life, igniting a chain of patterns that ran along the perimeter of the chamber. I exhaled in delight, the weirdness with Jesral forgotten.
“Excellent,” Rhyzkahl said. “Without a summoner controlling the portal from the exterior, it is vital that the room be deeply shielded and solidly anchored when the portal opens.”
I didn’t have to ask him what could go wrong if it wasn’t. An unshielded portal could do very bad things. I wanted to get back to Earth in one piece, thank you.
“Are you ready to begin?” he asked.
“I am,” I replied, smiling.
He lowered his head slightly, hair falling forward to frame his face and drop it into shadow as he held his hand out to me. My pulse quickened as I crossed through the diagram to take his hand.
With his other hand he sealed the patterns, then pulled me in closer. He looked down on me, eyes veiled and distant. “You have come to me, dear one,” he said, a smile with a hint of sadness curving his mouth. “To go home.”
After my encounter with Jesral, I didn’t know what Rhyzkahl had gone through to make this ritual happen. Something sure seemed to weigh on him, and I didn’t want to add to it, just go home. I smiled up at him. “Yeah. And thank you,” I said, giving his hand a squeeze.
Slowly, he lifted his head to look beyond me as if thinking of something else. Mentally prepping for the ritual, I figured. Excitement wound through me for multiple reasons, and I had to firmly tamp down the desire to jump up and down or laugh or anything else that would no doubt seriously fuck up Rhyzkahl’s focus.
I glanced around at the myriad of sigils, then scanned the arcanely traced glyphs on the floor. There’d only been about a half dozen in Mzatal’s purification ritual. Here, they covered a good portion of the summoning chamber floor. My eyes rested on the center—Rhyzkahl’s mark. I frowned. Something about the glyph next to it looked familiar. I was sure I’d seen it before, but damn, I couldn’t place it.
I looked up as Rhyzkahl drew a deep breath and dropped his gaze back to me. “I do not always get what I want,” he said, which confused me at first until I remembered that I’d asked him that question the other day. But why was he telling me now? Did he want me to stay here in the demon realm?
He released my hand, expression unreadable as he laid a hand against the side of my face. “Soon you will be gone,” he murmured.
I raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you’re going to miss me.”
His only response was to look out over my head again, muscle in his jaw twitching. Maybe he really would miss me? He wasn’t one for sharing his deeper feelings, but he certainly didn’t seem to be eager to send me on my way. A whisper of doubt crept in. As much as I enjoyed my time with the lord, I had no desire to stay here any longer.
I put my arms around him and gave him a light squeeze. “Don’t worry,” I told him with a smile. “I’ll summon you soon enough. We still have another two and half years or so on our current deal.”
But to my surprise he put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me back enough to disengage from my embrace. His face hardened briefly before he turned away from me. “There is much more than summoning.”
My doubt increased. “I know. I’ve seen so much.” Surely he wasn’t reconsidering sending me home? “I’ll definitely have new and interesting questions for you next time I summon you.” My smile slipped as he remained facing away, hands clenched into fists at his sides, shoulders rising and falling with quickened breaths. “Rhyzkahl?” I set a hand gently on his back. “You okay?”
He went still at my touch, so still I wasn’t even certain he breathed. I slid my hand up to his shoulder. “Rhyzkahl, please tell me what’s wrong.” I gave a somewhat shaky laugh. “You’re kinda freaking me out a bit.”
He turned and looked down at me, face alive with emotions I’d never seen in him before. Uncertainty. Worry. Something akin to desperation flickered in his eyes as he caught my face in his hands. What the hell was going on with him? More bullshit with other lords? Something with Jesral? That one sure as hell had his own agenda. Definitely time for me to get my ass back home before I got dragged into any of that lord shit.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said softly. “How about a goodbye kiss?”
Rhyzkahl hesitated only a heartbeat before dropping his mouth to mine in an ardent kiss. I relaxed eagerly into it as I skimmed my hands up his chest and around his neck, slid my fingers through the white-blond silk of his hair. I felt the tension in him ease as he wrapped arms around me, clinging to me. I was going to miss him too, I realized, as odd as our relationship was.
I expected him to break the kiss and begin the ritual, but he continued as if he couldn’t get enough of me. He pulled me close to him, one hand sliding down to cup my ass. A shudder ran through me, and I obligingly rocked my hips against the growing evidence that he was possibly wanting more than a simple goodbye kiss. Some hot sex for the road? Yeah, I was okay with that. I quickly worked the buttons of his shirt loose and slipped it from his shoulders. He shook it free of his arms to let it fall to the floor, then brought his hands to my waist, gathering the dress and breaking the kiss to pull it over my head. His eyes flashed with hunger and the hint of desperation again. But it was gone before I could fully register that it was there at all.
He gently lowered me to the floor in the center of the diagram. I flicked a quick glance at the sigils, for a moment paranoid that this “goodbye fuck” was somehow meant to power the diagram, but they remained quiescent. Good. Because that would’ve been weird.
He slipped his breeches off and returned to cover me, hair falling over me in a curtain of silk as he held my face gently between thumb and fingers of one hand. “In this moment, we are right here, right now,” he said, voice resonating with intensity. “Nothing else is of import.”
Smiling, I wrapped my arms around him. “We are here,” I echoed.