As the first summoner of the twentieth century, he naturally became the root source of all modern summoning, which meant that every active summoner had either learned directly from Katashi or one of his students, myself included. Though I’d spent only a couple of useless months with him, my aunt Tessa—who’d taught me—was his student for almost a decade.

In other words, the old man surely had one hell of a network with students and associates all over the world, which meant a myriad of potential hiding places for Idris.

I sat, took a sip of coffee and noted Follow up with Ryan and Zack beneath Katashi’s name. Better to wait for some solid info on the old bastard before tackling that mess. I tapped my pen on the paper and considered the events that occurred right before I was summoned to the demon realm six months ago, then wrote TRACY GORDON in all capital letters. Though not directly linked to Idris, Tracy had tried to sacrifice me to make a permanent gate between this world and the demon realm, which meant he surely had connections to someone. Most likely one of the Mraztur since Kehlirik, a reyza of Rhyzkahl, had guarded Tracy’s focus diagram.

Ryan, Zack, and I had already done a pretty thorough search/tear-down of the house where Tracy Gordon had lived, helped by some nice sledgehammer-to-wall action. I was pretty damn confident nothing remained there that could be useful to us.

It was his other house that interested me, the one that he owned through a shell corporation, and the one where, in a room packed full of books and papers, Kehlirik had guarded the diagram. If Tracy had kept journals, I figured they’d be there, and I damn well intended to find and take them, along with anything else in his library that caught my eye.

Finders keepers, you son of a bitch.

With the sun now rising and my plans of library-pillaging firmly in mind, I finished my coffee, took a quick shower, dressed, then grabbed my bag and headed for the front door.

I made it out and onto the porch before I realized the hitch in my plans. Two Chevy Impalas sat in the drive, along with a Toyota Camry I didn’t recognize. The Impalas had government plates, which told me that my fed-boys had finally been issued new vehicles to replace their Crown Vics. And I didn’t know who the Camry belonged to, except that it wasn’t me.

I have no car. I’d resigned from the Beaulac police department, which meant I didn’t have a department-issued vehicle anymore. Well, shit. Ride on the back of Eilahn’s motorcycle? That would make pillaging the library a lot more challenging. I sighed and turned to head back inside, then paused. Something was different about my porch.

A lot was different, I realized with a start. The stairs had been rebuilt and the railing along the front replaced and painted. Moreover, a swing now graced the porch—a lovely wicker thing that hung from two solid eye-bolts in the ceiling.

I moved down off the porch and onto the gravel driveway, turned to get a better view of the front of my house. There were flowers—actual living plants—in neat beds on either side of the steps. A pretty little crystal and brass arrangement hung from a corner of the porch, catching the morning sunlight and casting it back out in shards of rainbow. There was even a birdfeeder hanging from the other corner, though I wondered whether any bird would come near the house while demons perched atop it.

I smiled with warm pleasure. My house looked . . . nice.

Eilahn leapt lightly from the roof and smiled at me. “You have your bag. Where are we going?” she asked with an enthusiastic lift in her voice.

“I was hoping to go to Tracy Gordon’s summoning house to check out his library,” I told her. Maybe I could borrow the Camry? That would be better than riding pillion on the motorcycle.

Her face grew hard and more than a little scary. “Tracy Gordon baztakh unk kirlesk.” She spat into the gravel.

I didn’t know what that all meant, but it was simple enough to guess the sentiment, and I certainly couldn’t blame her for it. He’d shot her twice, point blank, and killed her. Fortunately, because it happened on Earth, she made it through to the demon realm and recovered. Once through the void was usually successful. Twice, not so much.

I nodded toward the Camry. “Whose car is that?”

She followed my gaze, then looked back to me and beamed. “Yours!”

I gave her a blank look. “How can it be mine?”

Eilahn ducked through the front door and returned before I had time to process she’d gone. She dangled a set of keys in front of me, displayed the brass fob with Kara’s Kar neatly engraved in script on it. “Because this proclaims that these keys match your vehicle, I have tested them in the ignition, and they fit. Therefore, that,” she said with a nod toward the car, “is your vehicle by the process of a successful trial.”

Kara’s Kar? I rolled my eyes. My house elves were out of control, but right now I wasn’t about to complain. I took the keys from her and smiled. “Well, let’s try it out!”

A note on the dash in Zack’s neat handwriting held clear, concise instructions for operating the automatic gate. Yet another point for the elves.

The house Tracy Gordon had used for summonings and other arcane practices was on the far side of Beaulac, but since it was so early in the morning, and there was little traffic, I went ahead and cut straight through town.

A garbage truck made noisy work of dumpster-emptying behind Beaulac Junior High, while across the street a man in nothing but shorts and sleep-tousled hair ignored his dog’s yappy barking at the din. A few determined souls headed into Magnolia Fitness Center, clutching towels and water bottles. I was probably still a member there, I realized, since my dues were on auto-payment.

“Back when I was a street cop, this was right about the time I’d be heading to the station for shift change,” I told Eilahn. “Whether I was coming on or going off duty, I always liked seeing the world wake up.”

She slanted a disbelieving glance my way. “Liked? You who pulls your pillow over your head if any dares disturb you before mid-morning?” She let out a low snort. “I doubt you woke to your alarm and thought, ‘Oh, what a pleasure it will be to see the world wake up!’ You would have liked to have been in your bed.”

“Okay, so maybe ‘liked’ is a relative term,” I said with a laugh. “But since I had to be up anyway to keep my job, I figured I might as well dig for a silver lining.”

“Ah, yes,” she replied, “because you are always a model of good cheer before you have had your coffee.”

“Are you crazy?” I asked with mock horror. “Who the hell said anything about going to work without coffee? Do you know how many people I’d have shot even before roll call?”

Eilahn gave a musical laugh, then nodded toward Grounds For Arrest, the coffee shop across the street from the PD. “I wonder how he has remained in business with you gone.”

“Now that’s a mystery.”

My mood remained light as we continued on through town. We passed by the Garden Street Industrial Park, and I stuck my tongue out at it since it was from there that I’d finally been summoned to the demon realm. The industrial park had been developed a couple of decades ago with grandiose plans of bringing in high-tech industry. Too grandiose for Beaulac, it turned out. A gate in the chain link fence was closed and locked, and a large sign proclaimed it to be the future home of an “exciting new development in health care” by RiseHigh LLC.

I doubted the new development would be as exciting as promised, but at least something worthwhile would come of the place.

We made it to the house without any issues and, thanks to the early hour, we managed to avoid problems with nosy neighbors. To my relief and dismay, the wards on Tracy’s house remained intact. Good because it meant the contents probably hadn’t been vandalized, and bad because we’d have to get through some serious protections.