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T he next morning, we topped off the tinctures I’d begun last night after foraging for more rosemary and wild marjoram by the brightening light of the rising sun. We searched for the plants needed for the other two tinctures, too, as well as filling the taper candle form in turns to create the five total candles in the array’s third layer. While we waited for the wax to set enough to release each taper so we could begin the next candle, the three of us ranged through the woods in search of the absolute best place to lay out the first layer of the array.

The nexus was dormant. Working next to it in the Western Maryland Botanical Garden for the last few years, I should’ve felt something if the nexus was stirring and if not me, then others who called Frostburg home must have sensed a subtle shift in the power focused in these woods. Despite the remote location, signs and wonders should have sparked rumors that drew the attention of area magicals. The Brass Hat Guild’s concentration of academics and researchers would’ve been crawling all over this mountain.

None of that had happened.

The nexus was nonetheless waking. Jae was right. The veil between our worlds hadn’t thinned enough to open. Though I searched the leaf litter for signs of non-native wildlife and invasive plants, I discovered only bear scat, game trails of local wildlife, and the feathers and nests of native birds. No foreign plant life encroached on the biome, either. I found nothing except blackberry thickets vying with the usual assortment of wildflowers, poison ivy, and shrubs. Indeed, the lone invasive species I identified was an especially industrious patch of mile-a-minute vine overtaking one portion of a narrow, trickling creek threading a meandering path through the nexus.

Power enervated all three of us, pouring into us from the earth to restore our inherent magics.

For Skip, the boost of vibrant energy seemed to have little effect. Human form or not, he was an imp through and through. How I could have missed identifying who he was, I didn’t know, because Skip…was Skip. Happy in his service to and adoration of Anand, he bounced from task to task. After not reporting to his job at the dispensary for many days now, losing access to his edibles hadn’t fazed him. I’d guessed his fondness for recreational pharmaceuticals was a hobby rather than an addiction, but witnessing evidence of that firsthand comforted me. Otherwise, he was his same exuberant self. The only distinction I noted between the stoner roommate I’d shared a house with and the Skip who scrambled inside the nexus was that my familiar peppered us with an amazing scope of trivia about all matters magical that he’d hidden from me before.

“Continue following his blood trail. That will lead us to the center, where the ley lines cross.” Skip hopped the bubbling creek that bisected the spatters of demon blood that had lingered from Jae’s desperate escape. “The heartwood tree that grows where the nexus’s power concentrates won’t have matured yet, but I guarantee the vibe has fed a sapling. Can you feel it?”

“I sense heartwood energy.” My demon pointed. “From there.”

Where restoring Skip’s full power had changed him not a whip, the rejuvenation of Jae to his full strength had been a shocker. I’d never grasped how weak my demon had been after portaling, not just physically but magically. Oh, I saw signs of his injuries. Until that morning, though, the raggedly mending rents in his wings and collection of thin scars mapping his skin in various stages of healing depending on whatever drain on his power had taxed him…The imperfections were just Jae to me. I’d had no experience or knowledge of my demon otherwise.

The intimidating and beautiful being I’d woken in the arms of at the rising sun astonished me then and flummoxed me still. Granted, rousing inside a protective cocoon of leathery wings would quicken the heartbeat of anybody. When I’d finally nodded off last night, the three of us had pressed together to share body heat against the chill, but my demon had not summoned his wings to blanket us. Jae wasn’t in flight, so he’d magicked his wings out of sight. Still healing, my demon had guarded them as the vulnerability they were to him. Then.

I would never forget waking in the tight grasp of leather and bone, nor the long span as he’d stretched those wings to release Skip and me from his embrace at dawn. Strong. Unbroken and unblemished by the wounds that had forced him to this realm. Dark as midnight, with red creeping wherever leathery sinew met slender though no less sturdy bone. Overnight, his wings had become magnificent, a wonder to admire in frank awe.

Had he ever struggled to keep us in the sky after I’d discovered him in the Grove?

I entertained no apprehension in my demon’s abilities to fly us now. Not just me and my demon, either. Jae would have no difficulty bearing both me and my familiar far from this place if danger arose. No death spiral awaited such a burden. Not like my first flight with Jae at all.

The miracle of my rejuvenated demon hadn’t stopped at his wings. By sunrise, the power of this place had mended his dark skin, marked now only by sigils and runes to call forth his magic which were no longer marred by cuts, slashes, and scars that had not only disfigured him but also weakened him these past many days. I’d thought once, during the stingy weekend we’d had for recovery, that the wounds he’d received before I’d set eyes on him might have healed enough to feed a spark of magic into a sort of intact sigil to trigger whatever spell the sigil designated. I might even have been correct.

But with so many injuries canvasing his body, I’d no clear conception of how much power had been etched into Jae’s flesh.

Multitudes.

Every inch of his hard, muscled frame had been painted with the faint lines, curves, and swirls of more sigils and runes than I could count or identify. Each depiction was a picture representing some bit of complex magic simplified for the ease of Jae’s use. One might purify water. Another? Facilitate healing. The next? Lob an electric jolt in battle.

Though I could work basic sigils, I was no alchemist or sorcerer. Had my demon rewarded me with the luxury of examining his sigils so I could bring the muted lines on his dark skin into focus, I would’ve failed at recognizing what power most gave him. The breadth of his magic was that vast.

He hadn’t acquired so massive a treasury of accessible power quickly.

“How old are you?” I’d asked him over our breakfast of roasted rabbit he’d hunted and the broadleaf plantain and dandelion greens Skip and I had foraged.

Jae was short. Small, for his kind, compared to the demons we usually glimpsed on our television sets in North America. While I hadn’t believed him a child, I had thought him young, like me. Now I wasn’t so sure.

No young adult would have so many sigils inked into his skin.

Jae had frowned at me over the flicker of our relit campfire. “I do not understand this question.”

“Demons don’t mark time as humans do.” Skip had gnawed the meat from the bone of a juicy rabbit leg. “Unlike imps who are created fully formed, demons are born and grow to maturity, but once they reach adulthood, demons are exactly like us. We do not age.”

“Wait. What?” I narrowed my eyes on my familiar, my stomach rolling. “What do you mean you don’t age? Unless you are a god or goddess, every being ages. Even vampires age. Only deities are immune from the laws of entropy. Everything else grows old and dies. There’s no eluding it.”

Skip had tipped his head back and laughed. “Oh, I suppose if any of us survived long enough to age, we might deteriorate and lose our strength and power, but we are long dead before then.” He waved a negligent hand at Jae. “Violence, war, and bloodshed rules the daemonica realm.” He gestured to his chest. “Imps sacrifice our lives in service to our gods and goddesses.” He shrugged. “Old age is a luxury denied to many. Humans are blessed to experience it.”

“B-but…” Bewildered, I’d shifted my stare from Jae to Skip. “Demons die in our realm. Many, when they portal to us. Some in battle, but not always. None of them are immortal.”

“When the human we have bound to us perishes, we die with them.” Jae had nodded. “Did your kind never wonder why demons only bind with young magicals? Those humans just crossing the cusp to maturity, whose magic is mostly nascent?” He chuckled. “Because we are greedy. Though portaling extends our lives beyond our violent end in daemonica, we survive longer here if we bind the youngest human adults.”

My eyes narrowed on him. “I thought you don’t measure time.”

“Not as you do.” Jae shrugged.

“He isn’t as young as you are.” Skip had shared a wry chuckle with my demon. “He’s fully matured and well-established in his magic, if that’s what is bothering you.”

Now that the nexus had healed and recharged him, I couldn’t mistake that my demon was very much quintessential in his power. Not that I’d believed him weak or physically vulnerable before. Okay, yeah, Jae’s short stature had surprised me, but I’d learned and accepted that made him more dangerous, hadn’t I? I’d treated him as a peer. An equal. The demon possessed more physical strength than I did or ever would, but my skills as a level-ten druid balanced that scale.

The thing was…Jae wasn’t my equal.

He was, in every aspect, more than I could and would ever be.

That realization shouldn’t have unsettled me. Until now, western Maryland boasted no resident demon, but I wasn’t as dumb and inexperienced as Jae liked to pretend. I’d seen my share of news reports about other demons bound to magicals in the States, especially those on the east coast. Even mundanes knew the human half of every team was each pair’s point of vulnerability, both in strength and power. Demons were badasses. No matter how intensely a demon’s partner developed his or her magical prowess, the human’s biggest threat was the firmness of his or her grip on a demon’s leash. On my trek to the community center yesterday, Clara had presented as a worthy adversary to me, but only to me. Jae would’ve eaten her for lunch. Perhaps literally.

Humans were no rival to demons.

The dexterity and speed Jae moved through this nexus, leaving me and Skip behind proved it. He sensed the focus of power, the concentration of magic where the ley lines met. Not me. Not Skip. While the energies of the place vibrated inside and through me, I felt that as an overwhelming magical white noise. It consumed me.

Jae could—and did—follow the strengthening zing of power to its source.

We trailed him only because he slowed to keep us in sight and when his eagerness to locate the center overtook him, we followed the dried spatters his blood had painted on leaves and dotted the forest floor when he’d portaled to our world from his.

“This way,” he said, calling out to us from just ahead to our left.

Hurdling the fallen and decaying trunk of an oak, I broke into a clearing no more than twenty yards wide to find my demon, hands on his hips, studying a thin shoot of a sapling struggling to grow in the unforgiving chill of the mountains. Robust leaves in various shapes tipped new branches that comprised the sapling’s canopy, reaching only as high as Jae’s head, the circumference of the slender trunk no wider than Skip’s scrawny biceps.

The heartwood tree.

No druid magic required, the lowliest mundane could identify it by its leaves. No other tree in this world, or I’d wager in Jae’s realm, was like it because the heartwood shared samples of leaf shapes from all the other trees. This one boasted the spiked lobes of maples, birch ovates, the heart shape of redbuds, and palmate compound leaves akin our buckeyes. No spikes or clusters of pine needles yet, so this heartwood was quite young, but the tree didn’t begin exhibiting evergreen traits until it neared maturity. A peculiar species, the heartwood thrived in every hardiness zone, from tropical swamplands to arid deserts. Wherever a nexus had been located, a lone heartwood tree grew at its center. Only one. The tree sprung up at that locus of every nexus, there and nowhere else.

Skip scrambled over the dead oak to stand next to me, his mouth curving to a pleased smile. “I knew it.”

Because dormant nexuses could not sustain its heartwood tree.

If ours still slept, that sapling would not have been.

My demon swept the ground skirting the tree and began kicking twigs and fallen leaves aside to create a bared space on the forest floor. “Here.” He pointed an insistent finger down to the sparse circle he’s cleared.

I arched an eyebrow at him. Skip and I had agreed over our campfire that morning that we should lay Teddy’s array at the center of this nexus, where power gathered the strongest. Instead of waiting a month to charge each layer of the array anywhere else, the magic concentrating in the nexus would allow us to activate the array in a matter of days. Only the full moon time-locked us—the second layer required tinctures and potions, one of which was moon water. While that was the easiest to create, the moon wouldn’t be full to charge water with its light until tomorrow night. That didn’t give me much time to figure out what the damn array did before we activated it.

Jae had paid little attention to our plans and preparations. He’d left us to once again hunt in the forest while I’d finished the other tinctures, but he’d joined us after Skip and I had smothered our campfire to search for the nexus’s center.

No, that was inaccurate.

He hadn’t joined us.

He’d led us to it. Granted, my demon had portaled through the center to reach our realm from daemonica , but he’d been wounded and near death then. As he guided us through the woods, I hadn’t the sense that my demon returned to a spot he remembered. Our shared link reflected no such certainty. He searched, as we had intended to. He simply made a path through the thickets and brush to find the heart of this nexus faster and more efficiently than we would’ve. Skip and I had his blood trail to follow.

Jae followed…something else.

“The ley line runs here,” Jae said, pointing again at the ground.

Skip’s brows lifted. “Which line?”

My demon pressed his lips together in a harsh line, his jaw jutting at a stubborn angle. “Restoration.”

“Ah. That makes sense,” my familiar said.

I swiveled my head to glare at him. “I beg your pardon?”

“The first layer of your father’s array is healing, but also protective. Using the appropriate ley line to boost its power is logical,” my supremely il logical roommate said. He shrugged. “C’mon. Work to do.”

He didn’t fool me, though. Skip knew what the array did. Maybe not entirely, but he’d guessed what magic Teddy’s array would call forth once every layer had been fully charged. Jae, too. Hell, Skip had made an educated guess. I’d bet my demon wasn’t guessing. He knew. The precision of the circle of ground he bared over the ley line spoke of his familiarity and confidence in this elaborate bit of complex magic, even if he wouldn’t say a word.

Did I trust him?

No.

Okay, I’d relied on my demon to portal us from the wreckage of my boyhood home to a safer place. Whatever dangers surrounded the nexus, guarding the perimeter, we were as snug and secure within it as could be. Our council and powerful magicals patrolled the border, but none so far seemed eager to explore inside the nexus. We had spotted no one. Jae had located a place we could hide, and, overwhelmed by the loss of my childhood home and the security it had represented, I’d depended on him for that.

I didn’t trust my demon with Teddy’s magic, though. He hadn’t told me what power that magic would draw to us. My Jae held secrets.

As had my father.

For that matter, so did I.

Despite the conflagration of silent mystery and hidden agendas, I walked to the patch of ground Jae had scraped free of debris. I dug into my pockets for the stones he’d collected for me from inside my burning house and the tools I needed to set the array—twine, protractor, thin twigs I’d gathered to mark the points of the array, and a ruler. I stripped off my clothes, handing them to Skip, and sank to the earth. I shivered at the chill lingering this morning, but for just a moment. When I sat cross-legged, my naked skin connecting with the earth, the nexus’s magic warmed me.

If it hadn’t, the heat of my demon sinking to the ground behind me would’ve. I startled as his arms slid around my waist, his hands clasping at my abs. He spread his legs so that his hard, muscled thighs sandwiched my hips. He rested his chin on my shoulder to murmur in my ear. “This is better.” Let me in.

I shivered at the press of his hot skin to mine, understanding, as though from a distance, that allowing Jae into my head didn’t rock me. My utter inability to keep him out did. Not that he forced his way inside my mind. He couldn’t. I wouldn’t have stood for that and the strength of my will would have pushed his presence from my thoughts as easily as swatting away a fly. My demon was a force to be reckoned with. But so was I. Although Jae had been a constant hum inside my head since I’d found him in the Grove, he could not go where I did not invite him. Evicting him from my brain would be no trouble.

I just didn’t want to.

Hadn’t wanted to. Never wanted to.

With him, I wasn’t alone. With Teddy, the power inside me had been a secret to hide, a threat to my life and safety, something I must guard close. To Ma, what I was…scared her. She loved me. At her worst, when the bottle had won the war, she’d loved me, but I also frightened her. Sometimes, I didn’t blame her for that. I frequently terrified myself.

Jae didn’t care about any of that. The demon was inside my head. Hiding the scary and intense pieces of myself and my magic from him wasn’t possible. He saw. He knew. He understood.

And he wanted the intimacy of that connection with me, anyway.

I saw and understood him, too. Mine wasn’t the only mind flayed open—our link ran both ways. I felt his thirst for violence, his menace, and how shaken my demon was in his core by his unquenchable desire for retribution. Or was it justice? The betrayal that had almost ended his life and sent him portaling through the nexus still sank deep. I shared that hurt, not only for the treachery that had almost ended him, but also for losing his tribe and home. Jae’s grief rivaled mine, gnawing, relentless.

We were different people. We weren’t the same species, for crying out loud, but we were no less a matched set. Two sides of a coin. Neither complete without the other.

Together, our combined magic was unequaled.

In the cradle of his embrace, I turned to him. Is it always like this?

His grasp on me tightened. Ne.

Skip groaned in frustration…somewhere. Far away, it seemed. “Work now. Play later.”

Jae chuckled, the warmth of his breath on my neck sweet and mesmerizing. “Play later,” he repeated.

So I skated fumbling fingers across the ground next to my bent knees for my tools.

Mundanes were assholes for many reasons, not least of which for kicking us out of public schools after testing as magical in our tweens. Turned out, magic required a lot of math. Occasionally complex math.

While setting an array wasn’t horridly complicated, the angles and distances of each point of the pentagram arrangement required precision. The easiest method was using twig markers and twine to draw a star. I checked, adjust, rechecked, and confirmed all interior angles were thirty-six degrees. Each leg of the star had to be even, too. The minutest variation in either angle or distance would disturb the magic brought forth. For minor spells, slight discrepancies weren’t important, but this was the capstone of my dad’s formidable magic. Properly laying the points of the array mattered. Since activating the array would consume much of the components, I wouldn’t get a second chance.

“The hematite first,” Jae said, a sly murmur in my ear.

He couldn’t have known. I’d studied Teddy’s array for endless hours, bent in concentration over his sketches of the first layer most because I understood how it worked. Far more so than I grasped what the subsequent layers did, anyway. My dad hadn’t noted an order for laying the five stones. I would’ve remembered.

The start of the array, however, was human magic. Not demonic. Despite its reliance on pure samples, the crystals were common and the power each called for wasn’t that complex. Skip was right. This was fundamental magic, a protection spell, one that drew a hedge of security in which to restore and heal.

But Jae knew it, this human magic. Better than I did. My demon knew that the order in which I laid each stone influenced the power this spell drew.

“To the east, smoky quartz,” he said.

When I placed the second stone and closed my eyes, the curve of his claws scraped my fingers. Some used incantations to focus intentions while working magic, including arrays, but I’d never needed that. I concentrated on what I desired and my intent was more than enough. My demon didn’t murmur or chant, either. Joined with me, he fixed his will with mine and homed in on what my power reached for. Healing. Security. Strength. My body tingled, the rush of his magic and mine racing through me and into the rocks.

I wasn’t setting the array, bringing forth magic and power.

We were.

By the time we completed the first layer of the array with the black tourmaline, I shook, enervated with the raw energy of the nexus crashing through me. My demon did, too. He was no more immune to this place than I was. Though I felt like I might rattle out of my skin, I opened my eyes and lifted my gaze to the azure blue sky. Jae also lifted his chin off my shoulder and looked up. With a long exhale, I released my gratitude and yearning to the heavens and my demon alongside me blew out a prolonged breath as well, doing the same.

With that, we set the first layer of the array. No other task remained for this part of Teddy’s magic except the wait to allow the stones to, together, soak up the power and energies here.

The twinkle in Jae’s scarlet-lit eyes met and exceeded the gleeful satisfaction that must be shining in mine. Because this magic would work. We didn’t just know that. We felt it.

“Excellent.” When I glanced outside the array Jae and I both had occupied in its center to focus the magic, Skip sat as well, cross-legged, scant inches away in the leaf litter. Had my familiar boosted and directed my power to help us achieve this magic? The smile curving his lips said so, but if he had, the maneuver was deftly performed. I hadn’t sensed the intrusion of another into the synergy of my magic binding with Jae’s to wake the stones.

Skip unbent and pushed to his feet, brushed dirt and stray leaves from his clothes. “Get dressed. We need to move our supplies so I can guard the array while you’re gone.”

Gone? I frowned, my glance shifting to my demon to see if he had any idea what my familiar was babbling about. “Where are we going?”

Jae grinned. “North.”

The rough camp we’d slept in last night was about a mile away and since Jae and I had portaled in just the clothes we wore, we had only the contents of Finnegan’s backpack and the array elements Skip and I had begun preparing. Moving to the heartwood at the center of the nexus should have been a quick hike.

It wasn’t.

Both Dyer brothers waited for us when we returned, the older Dyer tending our campfire, which he’d relit to crackling orange and yellow flames. He’d circled the fire with rock, upon which he’d rested a metal grate for cooking. On that, a tin coffee pot warmed.

“Will you marry me and have my babies?” Skip chirped in gleeful delight as he accepted a steaming camp mug from Andrew Dyer.

“You are one strange dude.” He laughed, then nodded to his little brother. “Henry said you need our help.”

Despite my demon’s rush to the side of the youngest Dyer, Henry remained seated on the ground, transfixed by whatever game he played on his Nintendo Switch. Attention fixed on the screen of the handheld, Jae plopped beside him. “What is this magic?” my demon asked.

“Newest Zelda,” the boy answered, expertly working the controls on both sides of the game system. “No Wi-Fi in the woods, but I can still play this part.” He glanced up. “You should call John Griffith now. On speaker.”

I retrieved Griffith’s phone from my pocket and since we were back in camp, I powered it back up. No point in draining the battery while we’d searched for the nexus’s center—no bars. That whole area was a cellular dead zone. Most nexuses were like that. Something in the energies zapped electronics or otherwise turned our digital gizmos to dead bricks. The closer anyone drew to the center, the more useless our technology became. Here, on the fringes, I could occasionally pick up a faint signal, though, and when Griffith’s phone booted up and I pressed my thumb to the screen to unlock it, sure enough, a single bar lit up the top right corner.

The phone also vibrated, the screen showing Evil Spawn as an incoming call.

“How is he?” I said, tapping buttons to heed the young oracle’s command. “The Dyers are here. You’re on speaker.”

“What? How’d they find — “Griffith’s voice squawked from the phone. “You know what, never mind. I don’t want to know. How are you ?”

“Safe,” Jae said.

“If the Dyers found you, anyone can.” Griffith sighed. “Wherever you are, you need to go. Immediately.”

I glared at the phone. “Is Finnegan alive?”

My shoulders slumped in relief when my spying roomie’s voice joined the conversation. “I’m better. Healing.” Fabric rustled. “But John’s right. The Chicago Maces haven’t given up. Whole damn county’s been invaded with mage mercenaries. You need to get gone. Rapidly.”

“Bea and I are negotiating for a cease in hostilities, but no luck so far,” Griffith said with a prolonged exhale. “Until you and Jae have fully bound, you’re too vulnerable. The Maces won’t call off the assassination order while they have a legitimate chance of eliminating you.”

“You’re sure they weren’t responsible for Teddy’s murder?” I asked. “I may be an embarrassment, but he humiliated them first.”

“Absolutely not. Clark Hocking vanished the same night Teddy was killed and the high muckety-muks up north had no reason to disappear a low-level air mage alongside Teddy. Clark and Bea came to Cumberland off the trails like most runaways, but their lineage is magical. Bea has bragged that Hockings came to American on the Mayflower, for fuck’s sake. The Maces wouldn’t have murdered a Founder’s Family member, no way. It had to be the trafficking ring Teddy and Clark were investigating.” Griffith grunted. “Who are also now searching for you. In earnest.”

I scowled into the phone. “How can you know that?”

“Too many saw you with your dad’s grimoire last night. I couldn’t keep that quiet,” Griffith said.

“Rumors flew through healers at the community center clinic while I was there,” Finnegan added. “When John says the gossip mill is churning, he understates the issue.”

“Your recovery of your father’s grimoire becoming public knowledge was a matter of time, anyway.” Skip blew steam from his coffee and sipped. “Teddy investigated the trafficking ring, so, naturally, the traffickers believe he must have left clues to their identity in his final grimoire. Of course they are targeting you.”

“But…he didn’t.” Overwhelmed, I glanced around the woods, too confident I’d spot my father’s murderers lurking in the trees. “I haven’t studied and read every detail, but Teddy left nothing about any trafficking ring. He recorded instructions for magic, advanced magic. I’ve seen nothing like it before.”

“Nor have I,” said Finnegan.

Skip saluted me with his coffee cup. “Or me.”

“See that? You build a machine by combining these pieces,” Henry told Jae. He pointed at his video game screen. “Once the machine is put together, you have the tool you need to complete the quest. Nothing else will work.”

“Issa.” My demon nodded at the boy. “This magic is wise.”

Turning my back on the distraction, I concentrated on Griffith and the call. “Teddy’s grimoire is full of directions to create tinctures, layers of the array, what runes to scratch on spelled candles. He left grocery lists and song lyrics. He doodled.” My fingers tightened with my frustration on the phone. “But not one word about trafficking magical beings or their parts. The only name on any of the pages is mine. I’ve looked. If he masked the information in code, I can’t break it.”

“What Teddy’s grimoire contains is irrelevant. What his murderers believe he recorded in it is what’s important,” Griffith said, his tone argumentative but determined, “and the additional danger those beliefs place you in. Because right now? There’s too much heat on you in Allegany County. Between other demons who haven’t given up the search for Jae, the Maces, and the trafficking ring, I can’t protect you. You need to run.”

“He and Jae need to visit the dragon in Pittsburgh,” Skip said and then blinked wide eyes at me when I glowered at him. “What?” He waved at Teddy’s grimoire clutched in the hand not clasping Griffith’s phone. “One totem is a dragon scale. Do you believe they sell those on a shelf at Walmart?”

“The array also requires a hellhound’s claw,” I said, irritated. “Got any brilliant ideas for getting that?”

“Excuse me, what?” The older Dyer brother, who had ignored all of us, including the demon and his little brother bent over the handheld game. “You’re looking for a hellhound?” Andrew narrowed his eyes, glinting with suspicion. “Why?”

“Teddy’s array.” I waggled the grimoire at him. “Super complicated magic, lots of layers. A step in activating the array includes placing totems at precise cardinal points, and all the totems are extremely rare. Each will be difficult or impossible to obtain.” When Jae coughed, I wrinkled my nose. “Okay, we have the First Blood demon hair. That totem, while not common, is accessible to us.”

“Uh huh.” Andrew shifted his weight on his feet. “And you need a hellhound’s claw.”

“Yup,” Skip said.

Andrew grimaced. “Does it have to be a whole claw? Or would nail clippings work?”

Abandoning Henry to his game, Jae stood. His muscles went taut with sudden alarm. “You have a hellhound.”

My jaw dropped. “He does not.” I pivoted my stare from my panicking demon to the older Dyer. “How?”

“Puppy came through the nexus about a year ago.” Henry reached up to tug at Jae’s hand.

My demon, too, gaped at Andrew.

“Sweet baby Jesus,” Griffith said over the cell phone. “Do you understand me, Andrew Dyer? Towpath wants no trouble from the Brass Hats. I did not hear this.”

“I did,” Finnegan muttered.

“ We know nothing about any hellhound,” the guild boss said, voice hard and unforgiving.

“You groom a hellhound?” Skip said, arms crossed as he studied Andrew Dyer up and down. “You. Trim its nails.”

“ Her nails.” Andrew scowled at my familiar. “And yes, we groom Peaches. If we don’t, her claws gouge the floorboards.”

“Her claws get caught in the grooves on the deck when they grow too long. That hurt her.” Henry nodded. “She limped for weeks, poor puppers.”

A whining yip echoed from the woods surrounding us and my powerful badass demon paled. Not ghostly white, but his dark crimson skin leeched to ashy gray. “You brought the hellhound with you?” He stood, spreading his feet to brace as he narrowed flinty eyes on Andrew Dyer. “To me?”

The answering growl resounding from the brush near our temporary camp lifted the tiny hairs at my nape in screaming alarm. Jae zipped from Henry’s side to mine, muscles taut, his scarlet eyes sweeping the surrounding thickets for signs of danger.

“For fuck’s sake, don’t kill each other,” Griffith’s voice sang out from the phone. “We’re on the same side.”

“Hellhounds fight in demon wars. No other creature is more efficient or capable of taking out a demon. You know this.” Skip glowered at both Dyers. “If you had one and were bringing it to our camp, you should have said. We’re supposed to be allies.”

“You guys aren’t the only ones trying to avoid placing a bigger target on your backs. Henry said we needed to come, so we came, but I’m not trusting my brother’s life to a demon, First Blood or not. I gave Peaches the command to guard our perimeter and if that’s all that was necessary, you never would’ve guessed she existed.” Andrew shrugged a careless shoulder. “Not sorry.”

“Peaches is the very best girl.” The younger Dyer wrinkled his nose at Jae. “Be nice.”

“Not a pet,” Finnegan said on shaky squeak, then cleared his throat. “Hellhounds cannot be domesticated. They are animals, work animals. And weapons. They are dangerous .”

Snorting, the kid released one side of his Switch to lift his fingers to his lips. He gave a sharp whistle. “You’ll see.”

Jae pasted to my front like glue, so I didn’t glimpse the Dyers’ hellhound at first. I knew the beast must have emerged from the surrounding brush only by the tensing of my demon’s already bunched muscle, but when Jae didn’t snarl or brace to attack, my curiosity overrode my at-best chancy survival instincts. I pushed out a sharp breath that rustled the dark curls topping his head blocking my view and stooped around Jae to see better.

The damn creature, swear to God, had plunked to the ground at Henry’s feet, rolling in the dirt with her eager belly exposed for rubs.

Which the younger Dyer boy happily delivered. “Who’s a pretty girl? Who? My girl! Such a good, good puppy,” Henry said on a terrifyingly normal coo.

Roughly the size and bulk of an adult mastiff, this hellhound was indeed a pup. Since they were rarer than demons, I’d never seen a picture of one, forget video, but by federal law, schools in counties surrounding nexuses were required to teach one lesson annually on the danger of hellhounds, should any portal into our world. Because the western Maryland nexus had been dormant for generations, our yearly lessons were lackadaisical. No one had deemed the predators a legitimate threat to us, but I still knew, the affectionate black beast writhing at Henry’s feet to beg for pats and rubs would mature to stand as tall as Jae and after losing her puppy fat, would fill out with dense muscle.

To be fair to the Dyers, this one was young enough to be mistaken for a large breed dog…if not for the bright crimson eyes to rival my demon’s scarlet glare. If the person finding the hellhound didn’t quite know what a dog was supposed to look like, she’d pass for a mutt at first glance, anyway. The body resembled a mastiff with that solid, wide barrel chest, but the tail? Collie. Long and carpeted with beautiful inky fur that must be a pain in the ass to keep free of burrs and briars in these woods, but even that was strange, because the rest of the hellhound’s fur was short. Except near the ears. Those resembled the peaked ears of a Great Dane’s and the tufts of long hair at the base jangled my nerves with the screaming sense of wrongness. The hellhound’s head resembled a Pitbull’s, which I believed was in part what had led to that breed’s misunderstood reputation for violence and aggression. The hellhound’s mouth was a little different, though. This one’s snout already pushed forward more than your average pittie, sharp white fangs glistening in the black maw instead of a normal dog’s teeth.

Young or not, the hellhound petrified me.

Shock and fear froze me in place and glued to my front, my demon—incredibly—trembled. The shaking could be mistaken for hostility toward the hellhound, but linked to Jae, I felt his panic coursing into me as a rushing flood. His fear kicked my pulse into an alarmed and skittering sprint.

When I glanced at him, my unflappable familiar had also paled ghostly white. “It came th-through the nexus?”

“ She came through it, yes.” Andrew smirked at Skip as he strolled to his younger brother, crouched low to the ground, and began vigorously scrubbing his open palm over the hellhound’s offered belly. “I found her almost a year ago? Henry sent me out in a blizzard to rescue her, but we get snows earlier and later than you guys in Cumberland. Might’ve been close to a year and a half.”

“You rescued,” I said, struggling to piece his words together, to make it make sense, “a hellhound.”

“Well. Yeah.” Andrew’s mouth thinned to a hard line. “She wouldn’t have lasted long in that storm without help. Hellhounds are as vulnerable to cold as he is.” Andrew jerked his chin at Jae. “Anyway, getting her home was a chore. She probably weighed as much as Henry does now, but she was mostly unconscious, so I could drape her over my shoulders to carry her.”

Wait.

Puppy or not, the vicious and lethal hellhound was only mostly unconscious while Andrew carried it draped around his vulnerable neck?

Flummoxed, I watched him bend to kiss the beast’s snout.

Her tongue lolled, and her butt wriggled.

“She was right as rain in a few days,” Andrew finished. “We named her Peaches because when I found her, she’d clawed the shit out of a peach tree my mom planted on a corner of the nexus before she died.” He laughed. “Destroyed the tree.”

“And you didn’t think to report the appearance of a hellhound to anyone,” Griffith said via the phone, the astonishment in his tone matching my own.

Henry scooted closer to the squirming hellhound and frowned at me and my phone. “They would’ve killed her!”

I blinked because…uh. Yeah? An aggressive and lethal predator jumping into our world? As far as I knew, which wasn’t a lot, hellhounds could take down a dragon with little trouble and those fuckers were so scary powerful our magical councils gave them a wide berth. Dragons occasionally showed up and nested wherever the fuck they wanted. They didn’t even need the damn portals. They could hop into our realm anywhere, but we left them alone as much as possible, in the hope dragons wouldn’t decide humans were a delicious and crunchy snack.

And hellhounds could kill one without breaking a sweat.

At least dragons didn’t portal to our world on a bloody rampage, not in recent history. Dragons came to us to nest. Mated pairs lingered to raise their dragonets, vanishing once the younglings matured, but a few stayed. Very few. If we humans didn’t bother them, they rarely ate us or burned our cities to ash. Fair trade.

Hellhounds never portaled to our world without raining down death and destruction.

Never.

And this one lolled at the Dyers’ feet.

“Jesus.” I shuddered.

Jae growled.

“Cut it out,” the younger Dyer said with a grimace at my demon. “Peaches is awesome. She won’t hurt anything or anybody. Will you, girl?” Henry patted her briskly.

The hellhound’s tail wagged with joyful agreement.

“That’s not entirely true. Peaches bonded to me,” Andrew said, looking up to arch an eyebrow at my demon. “But she’s very protective of Henry. If you make no move to threaten either of us, or my sisters, Peaches will get along with you fine.”

“You saved the hellhound to guard your brother.” Skip’s shoulders slumped. “Okay, that’s reasonable.”

Nothing about this, any of it, was reasonable. I couldn’t smother my faint squeak when my familiar crept by slow inches to Henry, Andrew, and the scary as fuck hellhound puppy. I lifted my hand to my demon’s hip, digging my fingers into him as we both watched Skip crouch by the beast.

Were imps immune to hellhounds? To their magic and power? When Skip’s hand rose, I cleared my throat, and he halted with his fingers curling just above the hellhound’s pelt. “Can he breathe…”

“Fire?” Andrew chuckled, then glanced down to the hellhound. “Peaches. Bic!”

The beast yipped, hand to God. Yipped as though the animal was a true pet, and expanding her chest, Peaches obeyed the command and coughed. A small flame no bigger than my fist burst from her mouth, startling Skip, who jumped.

Andrew reached into his pocket, withdrawing a golf ball-sized chunk of dried meat from it to reward his…familiar?

With that epiphany, everything fell into place for me. Relief swamped me, almost as enervating as my panic short moments ago and connected as we were, my demon’s taut muscles eased too. Andrew Dyer had tested as a powerful sorcerer only that morning, though I suspected he’d hidden who he was and what he could do for years, as I had. Who was I to fault him for an unusual familiar? Without trying, I’d drawn an imp and, as Griffith had said, sometimes a familiar found his or her magical. No luring necessary. Skip wasn’t as dangerous as a hellhound, but my power and Andrew’s differed. Maybe the gods or fate or plain blind luck had decided the older Dyer boy required more protection than I did and had sent the fiercest of warriors across Andrew’s path.

Jae huffed out a breath. I can defeat the hellhound.

Now who’s being stupid? “Cool.” I gulped. “The fire’s impressive for still being so young.”

“Oh, Peaches can do better than that.” Henry’s spine shot straight. “Andrew gave her the small flame command. You should see her when he tells her to—”

“Henry,” Andrew said on a warning growl, then focused his attention on the hellhound. He snapped his fingers. “Peaches, alert.”

The beast scrambled from her puppylike sprawl in the dirt to sit at rigid attention at Andrew’s side.

My heart thudded because, although she now reached the older Dyer’s chest, I realized that once the hellhound grew to adulthood, the tips of her ears would point higher than Andrew’s head and the guy wasn’t short. He was taller than me and just as fit, with muscle built from manual labor instead of a gym membership. I shifted on my feet, my nerves jangling. “You use voice commands.”

Andrew shook his head. “Only to show you three that Peaches is obedient.”

My phone resonated with Griffith’s harrumph. “The question is, will she volunteer a claw to power Teddy’s array?”

“Doesn’t need to.” Henry pushed off the ground to stand by his brother. “Lost a claw in a crack on the back porch, remember?”

“I’ll have to look for it. The claw dropped into dead leaves and whatever else is beneath the porch, but nothing comes onto or leaves my land that I don’t know about. That claw is still here.” Andrew narrowed his eyes on his little brother. “Somewhere.”

“Good,” Finnegan said, but I could tell from the low slur of his voice that he was tiring. “While you search, David and Jae will head north to obtain the dragon scale.”

“Clara and Menolac are negotiating a meeting, but that’ll take a couple of days, which is perfect since you can’t travel to Pittsburgh by road or flight,” Griffith said. “Too risky. The search for you is too hot.”

“Portaling is out. Everyone would track us the moment we leave the nexus,” I said.

“The dragon would also consider portaling anywhere within his territory a direct attack,” the guild boss added. “No, absolutely not.”

I squinted at the phone. “So how are we getting to Pittsburgh?”

“You’ll bike pack up the Great Allegheny Passage, of course.” Skip trilled a laugh. “You enjoy hiking and camping. You’ve trekked all over the GAP and the C&O Canal countless times. Taking a bike up to Pittsburgh will be a breeze for you.”

Probably. While I preferred hiking, I’d taken a week off work to bike the C&O Canal trail last summer and then hopped a train to return home. Bike packing wasn’t new to me. To my demon, though?

He squared his shoulders and glowered at me. “What is a bike?”

Shit.