Never summon from the Twelfth House. For the trespass of this sacred covenant, the sons of Vh’alyir will destroy you.
Could that be the warning my mother had referenced? Did she think Myrrine Athanas had summoned a Vh’alyir demon?
“Zylas?” I glanced over my shoulder. “Didn’t you say no demon of your House has ever been summoned before?”
He sleepily cracked one eye open. “Var.”
“Are you sure? Could a Vh’alyir have been summoned a really long time ago?”
“I do not know.” When I continued to look at him hopefully, he released a huffing breath. “Maybe. Most stories of our House are forgotten. Other demons say we are never summoned, but they maybe would not know if some few of our Dīnen disappeared long ago.”
Only demon kings—the Dīnen—could be summoned to Earth, a fact which I suspected was unknown to most Demonica practitioners. I might be the only human on the planet who knew we were stealing demon leaders to enslave as fighting puppets.
I tucked my hair behind my ear. “Why have your stories been forgotten?”
“The old Vh’alyir demons are all gone. Dead.” He gazed at the ceiling, his eyes seeing another world. “Our history died too. We are only what we are now.”
“What are you now?”
He closed his eyes again. “I know no stories. My sire died too soon to teach me.”
A memory pricked my subconscious, something else he’d told me, but before I could chase the feeling, he added brusquely, “All demons of my House are young and zh’ūltis. They do not know stories either.”
If the Vh’alyir House didn’t know their own history, maybe a Dīnen had been summoned and the current generation had forgotten about it. Myrrine had lived a very long time ago, even by demon standards—whatever those were.
I shuffled through my mother’s notes to another page that referenced Myrrine Athanas. Returning to the grimoire, I searched for any mention of the ancient sorceress. Probably futile, considering the length of the grimoire and the illegibility of some pages, but …
In the back half of the book, I turned past an endless section of complicated arcane arrays and their accompanying instructions, full of crossed-out sections and notations—that would be fun to translate—and found a long list of incantations.
Was it just me, or did this page feel different?
I peered at the edge. Were two pages stuck together? I rubbed the corner between my finger and thumb, and the edges parted. With painstaking care, I peeled the pages apart and laid them flat. On one side was the completed array that went with the marked-up instructions, and on the facing page was an illustration of a medallion.
It vaguely resembled an infernus. The artist had drawn both sides, with a tiny but complex array filling one face. The medallion’s other face displayed spiky markings in an outer ring around eleven sigils.
In the center was a twelfth sigil—Zylas’s House emblem.
My heart beat faster as I leaned over the page. A line of text, four words long, titled the illustration, but I couldn’t read it. It wasn’t Ancient Greek, Latin, or any language I recognized. What did it say?
“Imailatē Vīsh et Vh’alyir.”
I jumped. I hadn’t heard him move, but Zylas was sitting up. He reached past me, his arm brushing my shoulder, and touched the line of illegible text.
“Imailatē Vīsh et Vh’alyir,” he repeated. “Magic Amulet of Vh’alyir.”
It was written in demonic?
“A magical item of Vh’alyir?” I twisted to look at him. “What is it?”
“I do not know.”
“But it’s named after your House.” The only other text on the page was a short line scrawled under the drawing—this one in Ancient Greek. Excitement fizzed along my nerves as I flipped to a blank page in my notebook and picked up my pencil. It didn’t take me long to translate the line.
ὁ ὅρμος ὁ ἀπολωλώς ἁπάντων ἐστιν ἡ κλείς Μυρρίνη Ἀθάνας
The lost amulet is the key to everything.
– Myrrine Athanas
“The lost amulet,” I whispered, “is the key … to everything? What does she mean, everything?”
Zylas frowned at the page. “How is it lost?”
“If Myrrine wrote this note, I guess the amulet went missing during or before her time.” I slumped back against the sofa. “Key to everything or not, it’s no use if it’s been lost for millennia.”
“But it is not lost.” He pointed at the array-marked side of the illustration. “This imailatē was around Tahēsh’s neck before I killed him.”
Chapter Two
“All right.” Amalia paced the length of the living room, her hands clasped behind her back. “You’re saying this ancient amulet, which was lost thousands of years ago, is the ‘key to everything,’ according to a medieval sorceress who may have summoned a Twelfth House demon despite it being forbidden.”
“Not medieval,” I corrected. “She lived during the archaic period, same as Homer. The earliest Greek poet,” I added at her blank look.
“Sure, right.” Amalia strode the other way across the room. “So this amulet, which for some reason has his”—she nodded at Zylas, who was sitting on the breakfast bar—“House sigil smack dab in the middle of it, was lost back in the archaic period, but he”—another nod at Zylas—“saw it a few months ago around the neck of a First House demon.”
“Yes.”
She raked her hands through her long blond hair. “And Zylas has no idea what the amulet is?”
“Not in the slightest,” I told her.
Her face scrunched with bewilderment. “I don’t get it.”
“Neither do we.” I swept over to the grimoire, which waited beside Zylas on the counter, open to the amulet page. “I translated the pages before and after this, but they don’t explain what the amulet is.”
“Why would it be in the grimoire without an explanation?”
“Myrrine knew something about it. My mom’s notes suggest Myrrine added extra entries in the grimoire. Maybe she explains what the amulet is.”
Amalia followed me to the counter. “I’m dying to know why it’s Vh’alyir’s Amulet. Why would something from the Twelfth House be so important?”
“And why did Tahēsh have it?” I looked up at Zylas. “Any ideas?”
He braced his elbows on his knees, his dark brows pinched above his red eyes. “He wore it when I saw him in the kaīrtis—in the circle. He brought it with him.”
“He was summoned with it? But … but if it’s documented in the grimoire, it was here first. How did it get from my world to your world?”
Amalia squinted at Zylas. “Did it not pique your curiosity when you saw him wearing an amulet with your House emblem on it?”
Scowling, he jabbed a claw into the illustration. “I only saw this side. I did not see my House.”