“Useless.” I gasped back a sob. “It works so well on regular demon contracts. I was so sure—I was counting on it so much, but it’ll kill you, not save you, and—”

Ezra captured my hands, pressing them between his warm palms. “But you were searching for something else. You went to find a grimoire.”

I nodded, sniffling. Sliding my hands from his, I pushed off the sofa and crossed to the front door. After taking off my jacket, I’d left the textbook-sized grimoire on the closet shelf. I carried it back to Ezra and set it on his lap.

He stared at the emblem inscribed on the black leather cover.

“What does it mean?” I asked, sinking onto the sofa beside him. “The symbol.”

With one finger, he traced the circle. “The Court.” He touched the crown. “The Red Queen who rules it.”

“Their Queen is this ‘goddess’?”

He nodded. “Have you ever noticed that all demons are male?”

I blinked, then shrugged. “I guess, but I’d never thought about it.”

“They’re all male because only male demons can be summoned. Female demons can’t be called into this world. The cult says that’s because demon males are servants of the one true Goddess who created magic, and she sends her servants to this world to aid and protect her followers.”

His mouth quirked in a humorless smile. “Eterran says females are never summoned because they would obliterate anyone who summoned them, contract or no contract.”

“Huh. Um.” I swallowed. “Speaking of Eterran … your fighting style has changed.”

Real amusement softened his smile. “We came to a truce. It’s been interesting. We should last a bit longer now that we aren’t constantly fighting each other.”

Fear jumped in my chest at the reminder of his dwindling time, and I looked down at the grimoire. He ran his thumb along the cover’s edge, then drew in a deep breath. Holding it in his lungs, he opened the book.

I squinted. “It’s written in … Latin?”

“Most spells are in Latin or another ancient language.” He turned the pages, flipping past precise Latin printing and ink flourishes. “I remember a book just like this during the ritual.”

I leaned closer as he continued to peruse the tome. The walls of text morphed to diagrams of spells and detailed drawings of Arcana circles. Demonic runes marked other pages. He kept going, and illustrations of humans appeared, their bodies marked like a disturbing mockery of a medical text.

He stopped on an ink illustration of a face, the man’s mouth open to reveal long fangs. His eyes had the colors reversed—the sclera pitch black, with a white pupil in the center.

“That’s a vampire,” Ezra muttered. “Why is there a drawing of a vampire in here?”

I’d never seen a vampire in person, and judging by that illustration, I didn’t want to.

Ezra flipped to a detailed drawing of the vampire’s creepy inverted eye, paused to scrutinize it, then continued. More diagrams. Another drawing of a human, marked up with illegible Latin text. He turned to the next page and stopped again.

A drawing of a wolf. But if the book had a vampire in it, then I was willing to bet that wasn’t a regular ol’ Canis lupus.

“Werewolf,” Ezra whispered.

My hand was already diving into my pocket. I pulled out my phone, and in seconds, I was speeding through my gallery of photos, racing back in time to December.

A photo filled my screen. I’d snapped it the day after Ezra and I—and Eterran, if I were being fair—had stopped apprentice alchemist Brian from kidnapping Sin, who’d been bitten by a mutant werewolf. We’d gone back the next day to clean up, gather evidence, and write our report for the MPD.

The picture I’d taken showed a square piece of paper lying beside a steel box with a foam insert, the cutouts in it suggesting it had held vials or test tubes. We’d turned all that evidence over to the MPD, but I’d stolen a few photos beforehand.

The crisp handwriting stood out sharply against the white paper.

Brian,

Please find enclosed your final stock. I hope to receive a completed sample by the end of the month.

Yours most sincerely,

- X.

“It’s signed ‘X.’” I croaked the words. “And that metal case … what if it contained …”

Ezra had gone rigid beside me. “Demon blood. It contained demon blood—a conduit of demonic power, according to the cult.”

My gaze flicked between the photo and the grimoire.

“And vampires,” he muttered. “There was something about a surge in vampire activity last November. Drew was talking about super-powered vamps.”

I swallowed hard and gestured at the book. “Keep going.”

He flipped through the pages. More diagrams. Drawings of strange creatures began to appear—not demons, but other things … beasts that vaguely resembled animals. He kept turning. Now we were into a section on infernus spells, and then …

I pointed at the page he’d halted on. “That looks like a golem.”

My voice was remarkably calm, but internally, I was shrieking, “Golem!” over and over like a madwoman.

“A golem,” he agreed, staring down at the man-shaped behemoth of steel drawn in careful detail.

“The liquid that came out of Varvara’s golems,” I said, again sounding far calmer than I felt. “Aaron said it smelled like burnt blood.”

My gaze met Ezra’s, and we said in unison, “Demon blood.”

I swallowed against the panicky ringing in my ears. “Ezra, just who is Xever?”

“He’s the cult leader, and the summoner who created all the demon mages in Enright. His demon, Nazhivēr, is very powerful and only loosely contracted. When I was a teenager, Xever used Nazhivēr as an example of a loyal Servus, and claimed all demons could serve us like that if our faith was strong.”

His jaw clenched. “Nazhivēr killed Lexie when she lost control.”

I rubbed his shoulder, sympathy softening the tension in my jaw as I waited for him to push through the flare of old grief.

“Xever didn’t live in Enright. He visited every couple of months, but even though he was rarely there, everyone was blindly loyal to him. He was so … composed and perceptive, and he seemed all-knowing to me.” A faint frown turned his lips down. “I’m more familiar with Xanthe. Seeing her tonight was a bigger shock than seeing Xever.”

“Wait. You know the assassin?”

“Assassin?” He blinked. “Xanthe is the mentalist assassin you described?”

My mouth had gone dry. “How do you know her?”

“She’s the Magna Ducissa—the cultist ranked just below the Magnus Dux. She spent more time in Enright than Xever. A few days every month, at least, helping settle in new members and working with the demon mages.”

I studied the cold bitterness in his gaze. “You tried to kill her first.”

“Xever made me a demon mage, but she’s the one who convinced my parents I should become a protector.”

Cold settled deep in my limbs. A mentalist with the ability to make her victims do whatever she wanted … Had she used that power against the cultists without their knowledge? Her control didn’t seem to have had any lasting effects on us, but were there other ways she could use her ability?

Had she influenced Ezra and his parents into accepting the cult’s dogma?

“All along,” I muttered, “was Enright just an experiment on how to create a perfect demon mage? Experiments on living people … just like Brian was experimenting on living werewolves?”

“Xever, Xanthe, and the cult helped create those enhanced golems, too. They may have done something with vampires as well, if Drew was right about an unexplained surge in their strength.”

My hands clenched around my knees, squeezing. “Ezra, just how big is the Court of the Red Queen?”

“I don’t know.” He gazed at the golem illustration, and for a second time, crimson glimmered across his left eye. “But whatever Xever and Xanthe are doing … whatever they want golems and werewolves and vampires and demon mages for … we need to know.”

Reaching across him, I flipped the grimoire closed and said fiercely, “But before anything with them or the Court, we need to save you.” Noting the lingering red gleam in his pale eye, I added, “And Eterran, I guess.”

A faint, un-Ezra-like smirk twitched his lips before his expression smoothed again.

I rubbed my sweaty palms on my leather pants—which just smeared the moisture. Ew. “You said you had some leads of your own.”

“I do.” He set the grimoire on my lap and rose to his feet. “Xever and Xanthe have destroyed a lot of lives and made a lot of enemies. We aren’t the only ones working against them.”

Circling the coffee table, he picked up the Vh’alyir Amulet, letting it dangle by its chain without touching the medallion.

“We have potential allies right under our noses—surprisingly powerful ones.” Returning to the sofa, he lowered the amulet onto the grimoire’s cover. “And I know how to convince them to help us.”

I stared up at his sudden grin, mesmerized by the fire in his eyes—that spine-tingling intensity born of his newfound desire to survive. To live.

Shaking off my trance, I squinted at him. “Who are you talking about?”

His grin widened. “Just wait and see.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“I don’t understand why this needs to be a surprise.”

“Don’t you enjoy a little mystery in your life?”

“Not at the moment, no.”

Standing between Aaron and Ezra as they bantered, I rolled my eyes and rubbed my cold hands together. The last night of January was as unpleasantly cold as the rest of the month had been, and I hoped February would pick up the slack. We desperately needed a sign of spring.

It didn’t help that we were huddled in a grove of trees in the middle of a park. The same grove, in fact, where the Crow and Hammer’s witches had repaired my bond with Hoshi just over a week ago—which was in the same park where we’d fought Burke and his demon hunter cronies in one of our first Keys of Solomon encounters.