“I know that,” I said. He released my hand and gave me a warm smile.

A quiet fell, undercut by the muted rush of the water heater. “Where’d you grow up?” I asked, feeling as if I was taking a hammer to the smooth glass of the silence. It sounded more abrupt than I’d intended. “I mean, you’re not from the South, are you?”

A slight smile creased his mouth. “Depends. Are you going to call me a damn Yankee if I admit I was born in upstate New York?”

“Nothing so nice,” I replied with a small laugh.

He folded one leg over the other, resting his ankle across his knee. “I guess I’ll have to brave the insults then. Saratoga, New York. Went to high school at Saratoga Springs High then left for the bustle of the big city.”

“New York City?”

He grinned. “Cleveland.”

This time my laugh was genuine. “Oh, my. Culture shock!”

“In more ways than one.”

I tucked my feet underneath me. “What about your folks. Do they still live in Saratoga?” I knew what the answer would be. Or rather, I knew what he needed to tell me.

He shook his head, a shadow flickering across his face. “My mother passed away right before I started college. My dad about five years later.”

I made the appropriate sympathetic expression. He believed it. Surely nobody was that good an actor. “Any brothers or sisters?”

“Nope. I have some cousins I never see, but that’s about it.”

Hunh. I’d expected him to say that both his parents had been only children or some such thing. But maybe whatever caused him to have these fake memories also made him have no desire to seek out the rest of his mythical family.

His memories are fake. They have to be. Is his personality fake as well? Is this the real Ryan? If he ever remembers who he is, will this person go away? Will he still regard me in the same way?

I already knew the answer to that. There was no possible way he’d see me in the same light. Except…somehow he’d acted with the instincts and abilities of his former self when I was hurt and the golems were threatening. Were those instincts always running in the background? Or was that a one-time chink in the armor that held him? I could keep on grilling him about his past, but what was the point? I had zero doubt that if—no, when—I verified this info it would all check out. Whoever had taken the effort to insert this nuanced memory and background would have surely taken steps to make sure the paper trail jived as well.

Fuzzykins chose that moment to stalk into the room. She leaped nimbly onto the end of the couch and stared balefully at Ryan.

“When did you get a cat?” he asked. He reached out a hand to give the cat a scratch, then yanked it back as Fuzzykins snarled and swiped at it with a claws extended.

“It’s Eilahn’s.” I quickly explained the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of the cat. “Don’t feel bad. She hates me too. But she completely adores Eilahn.”

“That’s pretty funny,” he admitted. Then, “Are you summoning tonight?”

I blinked, surprised both at the abruptness of the question and that he would want to know at all. He didn’t like Rhyzkahl—okay, “hated” was probably a better word—and he didn’t usually want any reminder that I had any sort of contact or relationship with the demonic lord.

My surprise must have been evident because he gave a little shrug of apology. “It’s a full moon,” he said. “I figured it’d be tonight—unless you already did for this month?”

I shook my head. “Not yet. I was planning to tonight.” I eyed him, mentally bracing myself for his usual gritted-teeth tolerance that barely masked his dislike of the arrangement. I frowned when it didn’t come. “You seem oddly cool with this.”

He placed both feet on the floor and exhaled. “I did a lot of thinking while I was up at Quantico. I didn’t like some of the things I realized.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the fact that you’re one of my best friends, the fact that I care about you considerably, and the fact that you’re in a situation that I have no right to judge, and that I need to grow the fuck up and actually be supportive.” He gave me a wry smile. “I realized that it’s not enough for me to simply not be vocal about the fact that I hated what was going on, because you’re not stupid, and you can certainly tell I disapprove whether I say it or not. But instead, I needed to change my damn outlook and accept what is and look for the positive in it. In other words, I need to stop being so much of a dick. That was kind of the reason I didn’t call. I was trying to process everything.”

I had to smile. “In other words, you were a dick because you were thinking about how to stop being a dick.”

He chuckled. “Well, when you put it that way.…”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I appreciate it, no matter how it came about.”

He put his hands on his knees and gave a nod, seeming relieved. “Okay, well, I should get out of your hair then, but how about we catch up tomorrow—I can bring over pizza and some DVDs of shows that I’m sure you’ve never seen but I think you should.”

I groaned. “You’re still trying to make me a nerd, aren’t you?”

“No,” he said with a dramatic sigh. “I think there’s no hope of that. But it won’t stop me from trying.” He stood, and I followed suit. “So, tomorrow?”

I nodded. “It’s a plan.”

He smiled, gave me a close hug. I allowed myself to relax against him before we separated. For a brief instant I thought he was going to do something like kiss my forehead or cheek or something else that fell within the affection-between-friends boundary, but he merely smiled at me before turning and leaving.

I watched through the window as he drove off. We’d broken through a huge barrier in our relationship. He’d come to accept the presence of Rhyzkahl in my life. I could stop with the cycles of guilt and angst and all that.

Except that I felt as if it wasn’t real. Is this all part of the act? Am I just another facet of his cover?

Chapter 6

After Ryan left I made a glancing effort at cleaning the kitchen that extended to loading the dishwasher and nothing else. A nap followed shortly thereafter, and even though I’d only intended to sleep for a couple of hours, it was nearly ten p.m. when I woke.

There was a note on my bathroom mirror from Eilahn—written with a dry-erase marker in a flowing, elegant script—telling me that she was running some errands and that I was to stay inside. She never left my property without informing me first—not because she felt she had to report to me, but because she wanted to reassure me as to my safety, and to be sure I knew to stay within the wards.

I let out a small sigh of relief. This was the second time I’d summoned Rhyzkahl since she’d become my guardian, and I never knew whether she’d expect to be in the summoning chamber with me. But the last time I summoned she had errands as well, so apparently she was fine with making herself scarce. Not that I was worried about anything going wrong with the summoning itself because of her presence, but time with Rhyzkahl was…

Well, let’s just say I preferred privacy for those summonings.

I’d learned not to worry when I couldn’t find her in the house. Most of the time she was roaming on the rest of the ten acres that made up my property. The majority of it was woods, and I had a suspicion that wherever she called home in the demon realm was heavily wooded, because she moved through the trees and undergrowth with an uncanny silence and grace that spoke of a deep ease with her surroundings.

I headed to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. Did Eilahn ever get homesick? As confident and assured as she seemed to be, surely there were chinks in that armor somewhere. For that matter, did she have family? A mate? I dumped the water into the top of the coffeemaker, troubled that this was only now occurring to me.

There’s too damn much that I don’t know about the demons and their world. I readied my mug with sugar and creamer as I pondered that. The demons were usually deliberately mysterious and evasive when it came to questions about their world—at least, that’s what I’d always been taught and had come to understand from the reading I’d done during my studies to become a summoner. In fact it was considered a waste of effort to ask those sort of questions, since the asker would likely end up paying for an answer that didn’t actually give any information.

Even though it had never particularly bothered me before, I found that it bugged the crap out of me now. Why wouldn’t the demons answer those type of questions? Or maybe the question should be, why are summoners discouraged from asking them?

I poured my coffee and sat. I had a demon at my disposal now. Maybe it was time to start finding some shit out.

After I finished waking up I showered and began my usual mental preparations for summoning. I was only summoning Rhyzkahl, but I didn’t want to get out of the habit of being in the proper frame of mind.

I laughed as I toweled my hair dry. I’m “only” summoning Rhyzkahl. He was supposedly one of the most powerful of the demonic lords in existence, and I was now an old hand at bringing him through. Of course, if he wasn’t willing to be summoned, it would be an entirely different matter. Such a summoning would require several summoners working together to be certain that the lord could be contained long enough for whatever was required so that they could avoid being slaughtered. Rather like the summoning of Szerain that had accidentally turned into a summoning of Rhyzkahl. Over thirty years ago six summoners had teamed up to summon the demonic lord Szerain, in an attempt to obtain healing for the breast-cancer-ravaged wife of one of the six, Peter Cerise.

My hands slowed then stopped, and I let the towel drop to the floor. Szerain was willing. That’s what Tessa had said. That’s why those six summoners had decided to summon him instead of some other lord. But if he was willing, why did they need six summoners? Why else would they all be there? This had been gnawing at me in the background for the last month and a half. And now I was seeing more ways that it just didn’t add up. Was Szerain willing, or simply more open to such things? But again…why six summoners?