of them. Eleven sigils … with a twelfth in the center. This represents all twelve demon Houses.”
He took a swipe for the paper and I snatched it away, my heart lurching. He couldn’t summon a demon with only the House sigil, but I wasn’t letting anyone touch this drawing.
“Have you ever seen or heard of an infernus like this?” I asked him.
“Is it an infernus? Where did you learn about this? Where did you get your demon? Your demon must be the First House.” His attention swung between my infernus and the drawing. “The same sigil is in the center of the design.”
I didn’t like the heightening greed in his dark eyes. “You haven’t answered my question.”
“I’ve never seen an artifact like that before. But if you give me the drawing, I can certainly look into—”
I folded the paper with snappy motions. If he’d never seen it before—or wanted to pretend he hadn’t—I wasn’t giving him the chance to memorize any more of the drawing.
“Tori?” I prompted. “You had questions?”
“Uh.” She squinted as though waking from a daydream. “Questions. Right. I’m investigating a series of unsolved bounties on demon mages.”
As she flipped open her folder, I hid my chagrin. This time, Zylas wasn’t out of the infernus and listening in. He’d warned me that he couldn’t “hear” lies through my inner relay of the conversation.
“Certain sources and witnesses,” Tori told an unenthusiastic Naim, “have suggested a summoner is creating demon mages using an artifact imbued with demon magic.”
Wait … did she say demon mages?
“What do you know about demonic artifacts?” she asked the ex-summoner, oblivious to my arrested stare.
“I’ve never created a demon mage. I don’t know how it’s done, or if it requires artifacts.”
“Yes, of course. I’m just looking for information.”
She flipped through a few papers in her folder. Black-and-white documents flashed past until she paused on an old photo of two men, one facing the camera and one in profile.
I gasped.
Tori glanced at me. I tore my attention off the photo.
“S-sorry,” I mumbled. “Go on.”
I scarcely heard her as she prodded Naim for more information about demon mages. My gaze dropped to the photo again, on display in her open folder.
The young man, maybe twenty-five, who faced the camera was a stranger. His skin and hair were equally pale, giving him a washed-out, almost phantomlike look. Speaking to him was another young man, and with his face in profile, his only defining characteristic was his dark hair.
I wouldn’t have recognized him if not for the scar distorting his lower lip, the deep indent permanently twisting his mouth.
Claude.
It had to be him, twenty years younger. How likely was it that more than one person had a scar like that—or more than one person involved in Demonica?
With effort, I refocused on the conversation. Tori had just asked a question—which I’d completely missed—and Naim was considering her as though unsure whether he cared to answer.
“In regular summoning,” he began, measuring each word, “the demon is summoned into a circle, the boundary of which is impenetrable to the demon. In demon-mage creation, the demon is summoned into a human body.”
Thoughts of Claude evaporated from my head, replaced by disbelieving revulsion.
“The human body—or, some say, their soul—is the cage that traps the demon. It will either assimilate into its host or keep fighting to escape until it kills the fool that offered himself up for the ritual. When the human dies, so does the demon.”
“That’s horrible.” As the words slipped out, I realized I had my hand pressed to my mouth.
“Wait.” Tori leaned forward. “If the demon is summoned right into the human, is there even a contract? Or is the demon simply trapped and it just … goes along with everything so it doesn’t die?”
“I assume there’s a contract, or at least binding magic involved.” Naim shrugged dismissively. “As I said, if you want specifics, you need the summoner. No two demon mages are exactly the same—though they all meet the same end.”
I swallowed my stomach down. Demon mages. I’d heard of them, of course, but they were a myth—the kind that spawned nightmares. They were the most illegal magic of all, according to the MPD, and unlike many other magical bans, I’d never seen a single complaint or argument against MagiPol’s harsh treatment of demon mages and those who created them.
The snap of Tori’s folder closing startled me out of my contemplation.
“’Kay, well,” she told Naim, “thanks for nothing.”
Sneering, he turned to me. “Now, girl, where did you get your demon?”
I