He tilted his head. “I can’t decide if that’s incredibly flattering or seriously pathetic.”

I rolled my eyes. “Pathetic, obviously, because I just realized that I’d forgotten what a smart-ass you are.”

“You know me too well.”

I wish! I thought, then hurriedly pushed the thought from my mind. “So, are you working anything right now?”

He made a face. “Nothing fun. I’m working a public corruption case—utterly mundane. Can’t really talk about it.”

I nodded and resisted the urge to pry. I’d been in law enforcement long enough to know that there were some things that had to remain confidential—if I wanted to remain friends with him, that is.

I gave a mental sigh. Ryan was seriously good-looking, though certainly not in any pretty-boy sort of way. He was about a head taller than me, with nice broad shoulders, a trim waist, and gorgeous eyes that I often felt were wasted on a guy. But I didn’t have very many friends, and I was—okay, I admit it—too chicken to make any sort of move and risk blowing the friendship all to hell.

But, damn, there were times when I really wanted to jump his bones.

“So where’s your partner?” I asked instead. During the Symbol Man investigation, Ryan had been partnered with Special Agent Zack Garner, who looked far more like a lifeguard than an agent specializing in arcane and supernatural incidents.

“That blond bastard is on vacation. California.”

I laughed. “Surfing?”

“You nailed it. So how about you?” he asked as he looked through my fridge for something to drink. He snagged a Diet Barq’s out of the bottom drawer and quirked an eyebrow at me. “Anything going on that you can talk about?”

I grimaced. “Yeah. I’ve had a pretty shitty day. Sarge called me this morning to go wake up one of our narcotics detectives, and I found him dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

“Damn,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry to hear that. It doesn’t get much shittier than that.”

I scrubbed at my eyes and leaned back against the counter. “Actually it does.”

He gave me a disbelieving look.

I took a deep breath. “Brian’s essence was gone. Consumed.”

He was silent for several heartbeats. “You mean, like your aunt?”

I shook my head. “Tessa’s essence was drawn out to power an arcane ritual. It was intact—sort of like taking a battery out of a robot and using it in something else. Brian’s essence was … eaten. There was nothing but shreds left.”

Ryan sat down at the table and looked up at me, a frown playing across his face. “How can you tell? I mean, doesn’t the essence leave the body after death anyway?”

“Yes, but not immediately, and it’s more of a gentle release.” I pulled out a chair on the other side of the table and plopped down. “Fuck, you’re going to make me try to explain this? Um, it’s like the body—the physical shell—has the essence in a firm grasp. When it dies, the grasp is loosened, which allows the essence to float away whole, so to speak. But when it’s consumed, there are ragged edges still left behind, like meat torn from a bone.”

He gave a shudder. “All right, that sounds pretty hideous. So, he … what, doesn’t go to his afterlife or whatever now?”

I rubbed my temples. “It’s a bit more complex than that. Everything I’ve been taught about essence and potency says that, while there’s no such thing as actual from-one-body-to-the-next reincarnation, essence does get reused. Think of it like water being poured back into a pitcher. The next time a child is born, another glass is poured out. But if too much essence gets consumed, then there won’t be enough to create new life, and we’ll start seeing some nasty side effects.”

“Such as?”

“Stillbirths,” I said quietly. “Ill patients dying when they should have been able to recover. An empty ‘pitcher’ would almost have a vacuum effect as it pulled back any available essence.”

He frowned. “What about population growth?”

“More essence can form, or grow from existing essence, but it takes time. Think of a tomato. Takes weeks to grow it but minutes to eat.”

“I think it scares me that you know this,” he said, a slight smile twisting the corner of his mouth.

I shifted uncomfortably in the chair and didn’t smile back. “I think it might have been my fault.”

He straightened. “Wait. What? Why on earth would you think that?”

I quickly explained about the ilius and my worry that somehow I’d failed to dismiss it properly. But by the end of my recitation he was already shaking his head.

“Nope, not buying it. I don’t know that much about summonings and demons, but it doesn’t make any sense that it would escape your control and then go swoop down on this guy. Even if he did commit suicide.”

I sighed. “I know, but I can’t think of a better explanation.”

“Then you haven’t figured it out yet,” he said. “You will.”

I gave him a small smile. His belief in me was probably misguided, but it was still reassuring. “Well, just for that, I’m going to let you come with me to my aunt’s house while I try—yet again—to break in to her library so I can do some research.”

He gave a bark of laughter. “Like Tom Sawyer ‘let’ his friends paint the fence?”

I grinned and stood. “Damn, I didn’t know you could read.”

“Yeah, well, it was an audiobook.”

“Smart-ass. I’ll meet you over there.”

I stood in the hallway of my aunt’s house and scowled at the door to the library. I loved my aunt. I really truly did. She was the only family I had left after my parents died—my mother of cancer when I was eight and my father from a drunk driver three years later. She raised me and became my mentor after determining that I had the talent to become a summoner of demons. Aunt Tessa had the capacity to drive me crazy, and there were times I wanted to throttle her, but I did love her.

However, at the moment I was back to wanting to throttle her. She’d rigged her library so full of twisty-ugly wards and other arcane protections that I felt like a member of an arcane bomb-disposal unit. And though I’d known she had a zillion arcane protections on her house and library, I’d assumed—foolishly, as it turned out—that my aunt had allowed some sort of exception for me, her only living relative.

I couldn’t even open the library door to see what kind of condition the room was in, because of the protections that writhed and pulsed in angry coils of purple and black—visible only to someone who could see the arcane. To the average person, it looked just like a regular door.

Actually, the average person wouldn’t get close enough, since part of the protections on the library—and on the house itself—involved a complicated aversion effect that made anyone trying to get into the house suddenly think of something that urgently needed doing elsewhere.

The aversions hadn’t been hard for me to get around, but the rest of the protections were another matter entirely. Working with arcane wards was not my forte. It required skill and potency—much like a summoning. I needed more experience to gain the skill, and potency was difficult to come by except during the full moon. The reason that summonings were usually done when the moon was at or near its fullest was because natural potency was rich and calm at that time. During waning and waxing of the moon, potency was scattered and hard to control. It was low and weak during the dark moon, but it was even, which was safer. Fluctuations in potency could be devastating when summoning a demon. I’d summoned the ilius the night before the full moon—safe enough to do with a third-level demon—but a summoning of anything higher than eighth or ninth level was best left to the night of the full. The restrictions of the phases of the moon were a pain in the ass, but the only method of storing potency that I knew of was the one the Symbol Man had used—torture and murder. Needless to say, I didn’t want to go there.