a singsong tone through my head, sending chills down my back.
Gritting my teeth, I stood off to the side of the room and raised my hands out in front of me as I slowly summoned up a little energy before sending it seeking the symbol. The only reason I was able to do this was because it was part of the spell that closed the doorway. If you didn’t know the symbol was there or how to close the door, you’d never be able to feel it.
The demon shifted a bit nervously near me, but didn’t give any other indication that it might be agitated by what I was doing, which was a relief.
The energy left my body and instead of flying off toward one of the walls, it went straight down to the floor. I stepped back, staring at the stones for a second before the obvious finally dawned on me. Instead of putting the symbol on the wall and then hiding it from view, the bastard put in on the stones that made up the floor. Crafty. Simon Thorn had always been an extremely crafty devil.
Stepping back toward the kitchen, I gathered up more energy, no longer fearful of the demon that was still hovering close. There was a feeling of gleeful excitement coming from it that did nothing to settle my mind. I wasn’t fond of the notion that I was doing anything that pleased the creature. Of course, I didn’t want to do anything that might piss it off because that might give it a reason to remove my head.
The burst of energy I sent out wrapped around everything that rested on the floor of the main room. Items trembled briefly before rising steadily into the air. Glass tinkled and papers shifted, but nothing fell from the massive table as it rose. When everything hovered two feet above the floor, I waved both hands in a circular motion toward my body as if I were rowing a boat while whispering a simple spell I had used when folding laundry.
Like flipping over dominoes, the stones in the floor tossed over so that they were now lying on the backs. One after another rolled over and resettled into its proper place in a gray wave until the symbol was revealed in the stones. A gasp escaped me and I took a step forward before I remembered that I was holding two spells together and didn’t need to be distracted.
When all the stones were flipped over, I gently lowered everything back to the floor and knelt down. Simon had been intently focused on the protection of himself and the items in the room. The warlock hadn’t merely painted the symbol on the stones. He had chiseled it in so that there was no removing it short of destroying the stones in the floor.
Add your blood. Make it yours.
As the demon hissed the words through my head, a dagger shot across the room and landed point first between a pair of stones less than a foot from my hand. I jumped back, watching the blade shiver there in warning. That could have very easily been my chest or the back of my skull.
I wasn’t crazy about the idea of closely tying this demon to me a second time, but putting my blood in the symbol in Simon’s rooms meant that I could more easily close the doorway. I could control the demon in a manner of speaking, though I knew I was lying to myself if I thought I could control a demon. The only concern was that if I didn’t agree to make this doorway mine, then there was a good chance the demon was going to kill me for the irritation. I might let it sulk in the basement at Asylum, but it had a lot more free range in Simon’s rooms.
Unfortunately, what won out in the end wasn’t the idea of being able to lock the demon away more effectively. It was the notion that Simon’s rooms would now be mine and I could use the demon to keep out the warlocks and the witches who might want to take over this space. My gig as a guardian wasn’t going to last. They’d reach a point where they’d tire of the game and finally kill me for using magic. But before that, they’d revoke my right to visit the Dresden library. I was easier to kill if I knew less magic than they did.
With Simon’s rooms, I