“How big is giant?” Mason asked as we tossed our food wrappers and walked to our bikes.
Brock picked up his helmet. “As big as the woman’s collie.”
It took us less than ten minutes to reach the address Raoul had given Brock. The elderly woman looked surprised to see us instead of the police, and Brock told her we worked for animal control. That seemed to appease her, and she told us she’d been walking her dog like she did every evening, when that thing came out of nowhere and went after her dog. She described a brown, furry creature with six or eight legs and pincers for a mouth. Brock asked how she’d gotten away from it, and she proudly showed us the stun baton she carried on her walks.
She told us where she was when the attack happened, and we left her to investigate. When Brock found several drops of blood on the street, we started searching from there. It didn’t take long for me to find a broken basement window in what looked like an empty house. The glass fragments outside the window indicated it had been smashed from the inside.
I alerted Brock, who made short work of the lock on the back door, and we quietly entered the house, weapons drawn. The door opened into the kitchen where we discovered an assortment of pewter bowls, candles, and packets of brown and red powder. I knew without asking that these items were used by warlocks in spells. But what kind of spell, and where was the person who had cast it?
“Stay together,” Brock whispered. He led us from the kitchen and into a living room that looked untouched. A search of the first and second floors turned up nothing, but we needed to make sure there were no humans in the house.
As soon as Brock opened the door to the basement stairs, the stench of blood and sulfur hit us, and I had to put a hand over my mouth. The grim look on Brock’s face when he shut the door again told me it was bad.
“What is it?” I asked, following him back to the kitchen.
“Looks like a summoning gone wrong,” he said as he pulled out his phone and called Raoul.
I suppressed a shudder. Warlocks summoned upper demons and held them captive to strengthen their magic. Summoning was dangerous because it required a powerful spell to pull a demon through the barrier. More than one warlock had ended up dead – or wished they were – because they’d messed up the spell and lost control of the demon. Just because summoned demons weren’t in their physical bodies, it didn’t mean they couldn’t inflict a lot of damage and pain.
Brock hung up and looked at us. “Raoul and the Council team are on the way.”
“Why would Vivian’s team care about a summoning?” I asked. As dangerous as they were, summonings were commonplace among magic users, and not something the Council bothered with. Unless, they thought this was more than a normal summoning.
Mason leaned against the doorframe. “You think that spider thing is a summoned demon that got loose?”
“Not possible,” Brock and I said together. He smiled at me and continued. “Even if the spell went wrong, the demon wouldn’t have an actual body. It could possess the summoner, but it would look human. That spider might have come from this house, but it wasn’t summoned.”
“Well, there goes that theory.” Mason’s brow creased. “By the way, shouldn’t we be out there looking for it?”
Brock nodded. “We’ll go out after Raoul gets here. He wants us to sit on this place until then.”
Over thirty minutes later, an SUV pulled into the driveway. Los Angeles traffic is a bitch unless you’re on a motorcycle that can maneuver easily around the other vehicles.
Not exactly the most patient person, I was pacing when they entered the house.
“Have you been down there?” Vivian asked Brock.
“No. Raoul said to wait for you.”
“Good.” She turned to Mason and me. “Ever been to the site of a failed summoning?”
Mason answered for us. “No.”
She smiled grimly. “It can be messy, and there might be residual magic, depending on what happened. We’ll go first, and once we give the all clear, you can come down.”
“Got it.” I watched Eugene set a metal box on the counter. He opened it and pulled out a rectangular device, which he switched on. Seeing my curiosity, he said. “It’s warlock-made, and it detects magic so we don’t accidentally walk into a spell.”
“Handy device.” I’d never seen one before, and I wondered if it was new technology they were trying out. I thought about how Sara could see through glamours, detect magic, and neutralize spells. Maybe our tech guys were trying to replicate that ability in a device.
Raoul opened the basement door, and Eugene went first, holding the device in front of him. Raoul and the others followed, leaving Mason and me alone.
I was more than happy to stay up here for now. It wasn’t that I had a weak stomach around dead bodies. I detested magic. A warlock named Orias had bound me with magic once, a few years ago, and I hated how helpless it had made me feel. The only magic user I trusted was Sara because I knew she would never use her power against me.
“Crazy shit, huh?” Mason said.
I kept my gaze on the open door to the basement. “At least it never gets boring.”
He snorted. “I swear I’ve seen more action since I came to L.A. than most new warriors see in ten years.”
“You picked the right assignment.”
“Actually, L.A. was Beth’s idea. If I’d had my way, we would have gone to Westhorne.”
“Really?” Why would anyone want to go to a stronghold over a place like Los Angeles? Sure, Westhorne was home to Tristan and Nikolas, but nothing beat being in the field.
He smiled as if he’d read my mind. “I wanted to go there to work with Nikolas, but Beth refused to go because of Chris. We all know how that worked out.”
“What about now?” I asked. “You still think about going to Westhorne?”
“And give up all of this? And surfing?” He gave me a look of mock horror. “Not a chance.”
“All clear,” called Raoul.
Mason and I hurried down the stairs. I braced myself for whatever was waiting for us. As a warrior, you had to have a strong stomach, but I’d heard how gory a failed summoning could be. I prepared to see blood and body parts everywhere.
I reached the bottom of the stairs and looked around the open basement in surprise. There was a body and some blood, but it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected.
A large circle was painted on the concrete floor in what looked like dried blood. Outside the circle, symbols had been drawn with a crystal placed in the center of each one. At the center of the circle was a smaller one done with more crystals. The inner circle was broken by the body sprawling across it. Based on the white robe he wore, he was most likely a warlock. Or he had been before his chest had been ripped open.
My eyes took in the trail of blood from the circle to the broken window. Could the warlock have been killed by the thing that had attacked the woman and her dog? And what kind of creature was present at a summoning? My gut told me it was a demon – maybe even a new one – despite what we’d said to Mason about it being impossible to summon a physical demon.
I shivered at the thought. Our people had spent a millennium identifying and documenting every species of demon on Earth. We knew their strengths and weaknesses, how they killed, and more importantly, how to kill them. If someone had figured out how to bring new demons out of their dimension, the implications were too great to consider.