“Na, of course.” He pointed to one. “This is about Ahlēavah.” He indicated a set of three. “This is about Ahlēvīsh.”

“Ahlēa, Ahlēavah, and Ahlēvīsh …” I repeated slowly. “Those are connected, I’m guessing, but what do they mean?”

“Ahlēa is the deep vīsh of my world.”

“You mean demon magic?”

“No.” He tapped a claw against my impello artifact, hanging from the same chain as my infernus. “Where does the magic of this come from? Not from you, na?”

“It comes from the natural energies of the earth.” My eyes widened. “Is Ahlēa the demon world’s natural magic?”

“I do not know about the world, only my home. Ahlēavah is the land of Ahlēa.”

Excitement shivered along my nerves. Was this knowledge any human alive possessed? “What about Ahlēvīsh?”

“Hnn.” He squinted thoughtfully, then reached under the coffee table and withdrew his big book of landscape photography. Laying it across my notes, he opened the cover and flipped past photos of mountains, rivers, islands, and cliffs before stopping on a page.

Unlike the blue skies of the previous images, this one featured a colossal cave filled with massive, columnar crystals of a murky white color. They sprouted from the rocky cave floor in haphazard tangles, thirty to forty feet tall.

The caption in the bottom corner read, “Cave of Crystals, Naica, Mexico.”

“Ahlēvīsh are like this.” He traced a crystal. “The shapes are different, and some are smaller. Some are bigger. They are in many places in my world, but not in others. Ahlēa’s magic fills them, so we call them Ahlēvīsh.”

I dragged my astonished stare from the photo. “So they’re magical? Can you use the magic?”

“We use them, but not for magic. They are like this.”

A tug on my neck. I looked down to see him holding the infernus.

“We can go inside Ahlēvīsh like I go inside this. It is called kish lēvh. Inside, we are safe. Nothing can hurt us. We can recover strength and heal from injuries.”

A memory sparked: Zylas telling me that, when his father had died, he’d only known how to fight with his claws and hide in the Ahlēvīsh.

He pulled the infernus closer, forcing me to lean toward him. “I can feel Ahlēvīsh power in this. It is not the same, but …” His crimson stare drifted across me. “Its vīsh tastes like Ahlēa and like you.”

Cheeks flushing, I tugged the infernus out of his hand. “So, the demonic runes in the summoning spell invoke magic from your world. And it seems part of the infernus magic is tied to Ahlēvīsh.”

I slid papers aside to uncover the cult grimoire, turned the page until I found the array for the second part of the demon-mage ritual, and tilted it toward Zylas.

“What about the demonic runes in this one?”

Leaning over the page, he indicated a rune in the center node. “It means ‘blood.’ What does this magic do?”

“The first part of the ritual summons a demon into a circle, same as you were summoned. This second part then summons the demon out of that circle and into a new summoning circle … which has been embedded in a human. The demon is trapped forever inside the host because the circle can never be broken.”

He bared his teeth, a flicker of his disgust at humankind darting from his mind through mine.

“I think,” I said slowly, “that the blood rune is used to bind the summoning to the demon.”

“So he is summoned instead of a new Dīnen.”

Nodding, I gazed at the array with its two circles set inside a third. Summoned first from the demon world and into a circle. Summoned from that circle into a human body that acted like a circle. No way to link the demon to an infernus to carry him across the circle’s nebulous boundary. No way to break the circle without killing the host or somehow breaching the host’s soul.

Dark thoughts danced at the edge of my awareness—Zylas’s swift mind speeding through his knowledge of the demonic side of this magic and what he’d learned of the Arcana.

Summoned. Called from the circle into the hh’ainun. The hh’ainun is a circle too.

Summoned twice.

Summon him again?

I gasped. My wide-eyed stare met blazing crimson eyes. “Is … could that be it?”

He bared his teeth in a wolfish grin.

Chapter Seven

“We’re going to summon Eterran out of Ezra.”

At my bold statement, Ezra, Tori, Aaron, and Kai stared at me in disbelief.

They stood on one side of Aaron’s dining table, while Amalia and I stood opposite them, the surface between us spread with our notes and drawings, plus the cult grimoire. We’d just finished explaining the three stages of the demon-mage ritual and how we’d come up with an alternative to breaking the magic that imprisoned Eterran.

After a long, disbelieving pause, Kai fixed his dark eyes on me. I’d interacted with the electramage the least of the three mages, and his cool gaze was slightly unnerving.

“It’s been a while since I studied Demonica basics,” he said, “but from what I remember, summoners can call a demon of a particular type, but they can’t summon an individual demon.”

“Not from the demon world, no,” I agreed quickly. “But making a demon mage requires summoning the already summoned demon a second time in order to insert him into the human host. We’re going to do exactly that.”

“There are complications,” Amalia added. “The big one being blood.”

“Blood?” Tori repeated worriedly.

Ezra frowned. “The second summoning required Eterran’s blood. He doesn’t have a body anymore. My blood isn’t demon blood.”

I wasn’t surprised that Ezra had spotted the potential deal breaker with this plan. “No, your blood wouldn’t work. But I think we can modify the spell to summon Eterran using blood from the same House.”

That modification had come straight from Zylas. He’d added a sequence of runes to our new summoning array that would, if all went to plan, link the magic to Eterran—using one additional ingredient.

“Are you familiar with demon Houses?” I asked.

Aaron nodded. “Yeah. Different demon types are called Houses and there are nine or ten of them.”

“Twelve,” I corrected as I lifted my backpack onto the table. It landed on the wooden top with a solid thunk. “But yes. Their Houses are essentially lineages, so any blood from Eterran’s House will be nearly identical.”

“You want us to get another demon’s blood?” Tori pressed her hands to the table. “How are we supposed to do that? We don’t even know what ‘House’ Eterran is from!”

“Dh’irath, the Second House,” I told her. “The same house as Nazhivēr.”

Her face blanched at the demon’s name. I could imagine what she was thinking: that I was suggesting we find Nazhivēr, defeat him in battle, and get our hands on enough of his blood to perform the summoning ritual.

A smile spread across my face. Controlling my excitement so I didn’t outright laugh while they were all so tense and worried, I dragged a metal case out of my backpack. With a flourish, I flipped the lid open.