I pressed both hands to my face, breathing deep, then crouched and slid a flat metal case from beneath my bed. I whispered the incantation and flipped the lid open. The Athanas grimoire waited in its nest of brown paper with my notebook.

I lifted the latter out and flipped it to a completed translation.

I have stood before a demon of another world and wondered that which no woman should ever wonder. I have yearned for that which no woman should ever claim. I have laid my hands upon that which no woman should ever touch.

My throat bobbed as I swallowed. Like Myrrine, my ancestor who’d added her story to the grimoire thousands of years ago, I too had stood before a demon and wondered things a woman shouldn’t wonder. I’d longed for a demon. I’d touched a demon. I’d kissed a demon.

I could forgive myself for getting caught up in the moment. Zylas had just revealed he’d been protecting me all this time simply because he’d promised, not because our contract forced him to. I’d been emotional and overwhelmed. I hadn’t been thinking straight.

That excuse no longer applied.

Myrrine had accepted her feelings for her demon, but she’d lived in a different time. I lived in a world where demons were considered brutal killers too violent for anything but enslavement as a contractor’s tool. Zylas was neither a slave nor a tool nor a heartless monster—but he was a brutal killer.

I bit the inside of my cheek. Not only was I in a complete tailspin over our kiss, but I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. Sharing my confusion with Zylas wouldn’t help either of us, and confiding in Amalia was out of the question.

That had left me in the same spot for the past four days: caught in an unending spiral of doubt. Every time I convinced myself this attraction between me and Zylas was worth exploring, panic would set in that I was making a terrible mistake. But when I tried to convince myself it could never happen again, my reasons seemed so flimsy.

Exhaling, I stacked the grimoire on my pile of reference texts and headed back to the living room.

Zylas was sprawled across the sofa, eyes closed. Three of the dozen cookies remained on the plate, but he’d eaten his fill.

He opened one eye as I sank down to sit on the floor between the sofa and coffee table, my back against the cushions. His tail was draped off the seat beside me, the barbs on the end gleaming faintly. I arranged my books and pen, then opened the grimoire to the page where Anthea had begun her first experiments in Arcana Fenestram—portal magic.

Though I could feel his gaze on me, Zylas said nothing.

I squinted at the complex notation spread across the grimoire page, then flipped the aging paper until I found one of Myrrine’s journal entries. Why hadn’t she written more about her relationship with her demon?

The ancient sorceress lingered stubbornly in my thoughts as I mindlessly turned pages. What I wouldn’t give to be able to jump back in time and speak with her. What answers could she offer about the mysterious workings of the demonic mind?

I stole a glance over my shoulder. Zylas’s eyes were closed again, his breathing slow. Black hair tangled across his forehead, the small horns that marked him as a young adult in demon years poking through the messy locks.

My gaze traveled along his jawline, then down the column of his throat to the shadows of tendons that ran to the inner dip of his collarbones. His hard pectorals met those defined abdominals that I could never ignore … and that enticing V shape.

I’d touched every inch of his back while massaging his tight muscles after an intensive healing, but his front … somehow that was more intimate. More suggestive. More forbidden.

My hand crept upward. How deeply asleep was he? Large doses of sugar made him drowsy but he was never completely comatose.

I touched his inner forearm. The muscles beneath my fingertips tensed as he inhaled, his eyelids fluttering—and a swirl of emotion danced through my head, thoughts and feelings that weren’t mine.

A vision of burnt-red sand, dotted with jagged rocks, surrounding a hidden valley among the dunes. Dwellings of chiseled stone at the valley’s base. The sun’s rays flaring on the horizon. A cold, teasing wind that carried a gritty scent tinged with an iron tang.

Pashir. Ahlēavah. Home.

Flickering. A twist of longing. Swirling memory, then a nightscape of dark buildings and brightly lit streets. A glowing window, beckoning. Slipping through long drapes, soft carpet underfoot. A quiet bed, covers pulled up over a sleeping body, dark hair spilling across a white pillow.

Foreign. Strange. Hh’ainun.

A slash of denial. Icy trepidation. The dark room deepened into black night. A concrete platform, glowing with lines and runes and surrounded by salty water. A ring in the center, the night sky of another world calling.

Go!

What are you waiting for?

Isn’t this what you want?

The sound of my own raised voice hit me like a slap to the face and I recoiled, my fingers digging into his arm.

His eyes opened all the way, dim with drowsiness. “Vayanin?”

I stared at him, my lungs frozen as the fragments of his thoughts and memories slipped away—but I couldn’t unhear my voice as he’d heard it. Those harsh, angry, desperate shouts … was that what I’d sounded like when I’d told him to go through the portal?

When I merely stared at him, saying nothing, he squinted briefly, then closed his eyes again, too sleepy for the mysteries of a hh’ainun female.

Disquiet simmered in my chest as I robotically faced the grimoire and gazed sightlessly at the open book. I’d felt his longing and denial, but which of those memories did he long for and what was he denying?

As the question churned in my mind, the pages in front of me came into focus, the complex notation in cluttered Ancient Greek letters sinking into my distracted brain.

I leaned closer to the page. “Zylas?”

“Var?” he muttered unenthusiastically.

“Look at this.”

He sat up and leaned forward, his face appearing beside mine, chin brushing my shoulder. He gazed down at the grimoire.

“Hashē,” he breathed, his irritation forgotten. “You found it.”

If I hadn’t just revisited the array through his eidetic memory, I might not have recognized it. But the spell laid out across the ancient paper matched his recollection almost perfectly.

My hands curled into fists. “The portal spell.”

Chapter Two

The portal spell was the most dangerous Arcana array in the world. Maybe the most destructive Arcana array in history. It was the spell that had brought about the creation of Demonica—and enabled humankind’s enslavement of the demon race, triggering the slow decay of their society.

“This,” I said, pointing at the oversized sheet of brown paper upon which I’d traced out a large spell, “is the array Saul and his creepy twin sons used to open the portal four nights ago. Or as close as I could draw it.”

I’d drawn it using Zylas’s memory as my reference. It’d taken some practice to get the telepathic memory sharing thing to work, but if he focused, I could see the same thing as him.

Amalia, crouched beside me, studied the sketch.

“This,” I continued, indicating a second large sheet, “is the final version of the spell from the grimoire—or I think it’s the final one. It didn’t have any corrections on it. Melitta wrote in her journal entry that she’d copied all the final spells into the back of the book. Claude stole those pages, but the original versions should be in the grimoire somewhere.”