I sat up and found Mzatal standing naked a few feet from the edge of the pond. With his back to me and his unbound hair pulled forward over one shoulder, I had a lovely view of his back, where well-formed lats swept down to a narrow waist above a perfectly muscled ass. Though he was the eldest of the demonic lords, I couldn’t help but think that sort of thing was irrelevant considering they were all several millennia old. All had an ageless look about them of men in their prime, though I now knew that most trained diligently to maintain peak physical condition—Mzatal included.

Mzatal’s hands worked potency strands in rhythmic patterns, but I had no idea what he was doing. I felt the caress of his mental touch as he turned his head to give me a smile. I returned both smile and mental caress, then scooped up my clothing. It would be lovely to while away the day watching him work in the nude, but the pile of stuff from Tracy Gordon’s house awaited my attention.

“What are you doing?” I asked as I dressed.

“There is much potential in the confluence behind your house,” he told me. “I am using this valve as an anchor point to stabilize the flows between here and there.”

Frowning, I tugged shoes on. “Wait, there’s a valve here?”

“Yes. I will adjust the concealments.” He made a peculiar little twist of his hands. “Are you able to sense it now?”

I moved toward him, then felt it—a ripple in the arcane flows, as if a layer of thin silk waved over my skin. I’d experienced it before with the valve in my aunt’s library and the one in the parking lot of the Beaulac PD. I hadn’t understood the sensation at the time, but now I had some hard-core training under my belt, along with the seventh ring of the shikvihr.

“Oh wow,” I breathed. “When I was a kid I came out here all the time, and I’d sit right where you are and read or do homework or just daydream.” A smile spread across my face at the memory. “It always felt so . . .” I groped for a word to describe it, then shrugged. “Right. It felt right.”

Mzatal touched my cheek and gave me a fond smile. “You were drawn to it even then, beloved.” But his eyes went back to the valve, and his smile faded.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“It is very draining being on Earth,” he said, frustration lacing his voice. “I do not know how long I can maintain. Perhaps two days.”

Shit. The amount of native potency on Earth was vastly lower than in the demon realm. The lords depended on that energy source, like a plant depended on the sun, and right now Mzatal was a battery draining faster than it could recharge. Humans didn’t have the same problem when in the demon realm—in fact they tended to thrive and only risked “overcharge” if the ways between the two worlds closed, such as what happened during the cataclysm.

Yet while I’d known he wouldn’t be able to remain indefinitely, I hadn’t expected the time frame to be so desperately short. We don’t even have a real lead yet, I thought with worry.

“How are Zack and Szerain able to stay here for such an extended length of time?” I asked. “Can’t you do whatever they do?”

He shook his head. “Zakaar is demahnk and thus not affected in the same manner as other demons,” he said. “And Szerain is diminished, much disconnected from potency, and living as a human. Neither means serves as a solution for me.”

I sighed. So much for an easy fix. “Does it help for you to be around the valve?”

“It does,” he reassured me. “And the confluence may also prove useful. I will work today to stabilize and integrate both, since I will need them to seek Idris as well as to maintain my potency.”

“All right.” I kissed him, slid my hands around to cup his delightfully firm ass. “I take all the credit for using up your power last night.”

Chuckling low, he caught my head and returned the kiss with toe-curling fervor. “And I will give credit where credit is due.”

I returned to the house with a spring in my step, and told myself I wasn’t going to worry about Mzatal’s limited time here. We’d simply have to work our butts off until he had to leave. Our current plan was for him to immerse in tracking Idris through the flows—which had the added bonus of allowing him to recharge at the same time, even if only a trickle. Meanwhile, I’d focus on the more conventional, though no less important, aspects.

Breakfast was a quick affair, consisting of coffee alongside bacon piled atop a cream-cheese covered bagel and smushed into a sandwich. I ate this with one hand while Eilahn and I retired to the living room to continue the Sisyphean task of working through Tracy’s journals. I’d been fooled by the ordered condition of his library. Sure, everything was arranged all nice and neat, but within the actual journals and notebooks, disorder reigned on a scale to eclipse that of my aunt’s library.

However, despite the pervasive random passages and enough stream of consciousness to make James Joyce cringe, I gradually found a rhythm to the entries, and after about half an hour of reading, I straightened.

“I think I have something. These look like some of his notes for that gate he made in the warehouse.”

Eilahn shifted with uncanny smoothness from her kneel-sit to peer over my shoulder. “Yes, it does appear so.” Numbers, notes, neatly sketched sigils, and a half dozen alternate ritual configurations covered several pages in a tattered and coverless spiral bound notebook. She reached and traced a slender finger down a column of numbers. “What are these?”

Frowning, I puzzled over them. “Oh! It’s dates and times,” I said after a moment. “Look, it’s year month day hour minute, though it’s only the ones that had passed before Tracy died that have the hour and minute.” With that realization, I examined them more closely and looked for patterns. “See how these dates have a range of times by them, but crossed out? He’d narrowed them down to specific times. Then we have ones with the range only, and here, these later dates don’t even have a range.”

“Ah, yes.” She angled her head. “It is as if he was tracking an event.”

I peered at the numbers. “You mean like he knew the date of something but didn’t know the time?” I drummed my fingers on the page as I considered that. “I think I get it. He knew the date of whatever it was, wrote down the time of it, and then managed to extrapolate a range of time for the next few dates.”

Eilahn’s finger paused on one line of numbers. “That is the date you were summoned by Mzatal.”

“And the day Tracy died.” A curse whispered out of me. “He didn’t live to mark down the time of whatever it was.” There were many more dates after that one. A year’s worth, every few weeks. Including—

“Today!” I bounced in my seat. “Eilahn, look. Whatever it is, there’s one happening today.”

She lowered to a crouch, gaze skimming the column of dates and times. “Yes, between nine and noon.” Her mouth twitched as she angled her head at me. “I assume you wish to go witness this event, whatever it is?”

I laughed. “Do you really need to ask?”

“No,” she replied with a smile. “It was indeed a foolish query. But we will need to make haste as it is already after nine.”

Standing, I grabbed for my bag. “Let’s roll.”

A sturdy padlock secured the chain link gate at the industrial park, but after Eilahn peered closely at the lock for nearly half a minute she announced that “someone” had very carelessly failed to clasp the lock shut.

I grinned and helped her pull the gate open. My demon bodyguard had some cool tricks up her sleeve.

We passed through the gate and closed it behind us, then continued down the main drive. An eerie ghost-town quality pervaded the complex as we passed empty storefronts—auto supply store, ceramic tile showroom, discount furniture outlet, and others of that general ilk. None of the high tech industry the developers had hoped for.