I touched my nose. Was it the lack of glasses? I looked down at myself. Or the leather jacket? In what way had I become more appealing to the opposite sex?

The question occupied me the whole way back. We entered the old marble lobby of the Lee Building and headed for the stairs—Zylas had decided he disliked elevators. As we neared the sixth floor, a tug on my jacket stopped me.

I turned around. Zylas stood on the step below me, putting us almost at eye level.

“Why did you blush?” he asked.

“I … what?”

“When the hh’ainun male talked to you.”

I blinked. “I was embarrassed.”

“Why?”

“I … I’m not used to getting attention from guys, I guess.”

He was silent. I hesitated, then pushed his sunglasses up on top of his head, revealing his glowing eyes.

“You’re hiding your thoughts now, Zylas,” I said. “What are you really thinking?”

His jaw flexed, then he puffed out a breath. “Do you like hh’ainun males more?”

“More? You mean more than you?” My breath caught as I clued in. “No.”

“No?”

“I …” My brain jammed, a fresh blush warming my cheeks. “I think … you’re …” My voice shrank to a whisper. “You’re more attractive than any human man I’ve ever met.”

He didn’t have any trouble hearing my mortified admission, and he smiled in a pleased way, his shoulders relaxing. I abruptly recalled that he wasn’t considered desirable by demon standards. Female demons turned their noses up at the weak Vh’alyir House.

My blush intensified as we returned to the unit, but it faded quickly as I unbolted the door, unable to block out memories of arriving with Amalia. Socks’s plaintive meows as Zylas and I came in without the missing member of our little family didn’t help. I’d been thinking about her almost constantly since unlocking the Vh’alyir Amulet’s spells, wishing I could share our new discoveries with her.

I had no way to contact her. Unless she called the burner phone she’d left with me, I would never talk to her again.

Our morning’s work was spread across the coffee table and half the floor. Sheets of large drafting paper were taped together, and I’d spent hours carefully drawing out the three different spells the amulet had shown us—a feat that’d only been possible because Zylas had recreated them in glowing crimson so I could trace them directly onto the paper.

The first one was, as far as I could tell, the portal array with no missing pieces. Since step one of ending summoning forever appeared to require a portal, that explained why Anthea and Zh’rēil had included it in both the grimoire and the amulet.

Though we had the complete spell, actually opening a portal might be the most difficult part of the process.

Zylas and I had stopped for lunch just after finishing our drawing of the second and third arrays. We hadn’t parsed out the details yet, but we knew the portal array needed to be activated first. The other two spells were performed on the open portal and would consume its magic in some way.

I scarfed down my sandwich, feeding a few bits of turkey to Socks, then joined Zylas at our drawing of the second array. It was the simplest of the three and mainly Arcana, which surprised me.

As I knelt beside him, I was strangely aware that he hadn’t changed out of his human clothes. The jacket’s hood lay over his shoulders, his hair extra mussed from the fabric.

Watching him pore over the drawing, I bit my lip. We could end summoning. We could stop the enslavement of demons and destruction of their society.

Zylas kept saying he had to go home. Was that only because of his promise to the payapis to change Ahlēavah? Or was there some other reason? If he changed the demon world by ending summoning forever, would that be enough? Would he still want to return home?

Or would he consider staying?

The forbidden question rushed through my mind, and I tried to stamp it down, but now that it was loose, it refused to die. I’d been fighting that question since the day Zylas had pointed at his book of landscape photography and asked if we could see all those places.

I’d thought it was such a ridiculous question—but maybe it wasn’t. Because asking him to stay didn’t mean he could never return home.

We could spend months traveling North America.

We could spend years traveling the planet.

We could spend my entire lifetime exploring the world, and at the end, Zylas could return to Ahlēavah, become an Ivaknen, witness the slow recovery of the demon society for himself, and raise strong sons to help revive his House. There was no denying that his lifespan was longer than mine. He didn’t have to sacrifice a future in his own world to spend more time in mine—to spend more time with me.

But did he want to?

I twisted the hem of my sweater as he leaned over the drawing, bringing his nose close to the paper. His tail flicked back and forth, a frown pulling at his lips.

Did he want to stay with me a little while longer? Would he even consider it?

I breathed deep, steeling my courage. “Z—”

“What is this?”

He pointed to a spot on the array. Gulping back my question, I shifted closer to look at the Arcana rune paired with the only demonic rune in the set.

“That’s the rune for earth,” I answered.

He turned to the third array, and I followed his gaze to a similar pattern of lines where two runes sat together, both demonic.

His breath rushed out and he sat back on his heels. Something about the blankness of his expression sent a chill rippling down my limbs.

I shuffled on my knees to face him. “Zylas?”

His gaze flicked to me, then he pointed at the array with the earth rune. “This one is earth lēvh.” He pointed at the other array. “This one is Ahlēavah lēvh.”

“So … earth spirit and the demon-world spirit? I don’t understand.”

“I think it means …” He trailed off, looking between the two arrays as though hoping for an alternate answer. “It means one vīsh is for the earth side. The other vīsh is for the Ahlēavah side. One spell is for you, here. One spell is for me, there. Together, they end summoning.”

“For you … there?”

He didn’t reply, staring at the arrays.

“You mean,” I said, my voice strangely loud in my ears, “that to end summoning, you have to cast this spell from the other side of the portal? From within Ahlēavah?”

Again he said nothing.

I pointed at the arrays. “But these spells will use up the portal’s power. You’d be …”

Trapped. Cut off. Gone. He’d be out of my reach forever.

He looked up at me, his face unreadable and his crimson eyes dimmed by shadows. “It does not matter.”

Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter.

Of course it didn’t matter. Because I was the foolish one daydreaming about him staying. He wanted to go home. He’d wanted to go home all along.

The spell changed nothing—it merely destroyed the slight, farfetched slice of a chance that he might’ve stayed with me for a little longer.

Chapter Twenty-Five

I stood in the shower, hot water pouring on my head with half-hearted pressure. I didn’t need another shower, but it was the only place where I could cry without Zylas hearing me.