CHAPTER ONE

Demonicon

omewhere between one candle and the next, she had slept. What remained when she surfaced was not quite a memory, more like the afterimage of one, already fading before she could turn to look at it directly. Vastness. Quiet of a particular kind, not the quiet of an empty room or a still forest, but something older and more absolute, the quiet of a place that had never contained sound and therefore had no relationship with its absence.

And beneath it, so faint she might have invented it entirely, a hum. Low. Patient. Rhythmic as breathing.

She lay still for a moment, eyes open in the dark of her father’s study, and waited for the feeling to finish leaving. It did, the way dreams always did, not all at once but in pieces, the edges dissolving first until only the center remained. Then that too was gone, and there was only the familiar ceiling above her, the smell of old books, and the specific silence of a house that had been empty too long. Jexi exhaled and sat up.

A dream. Nothing more.

She almost believed that.

The chamber was lit by the few remaining candles she had left burning, their flames stuttering against the cold stone walls. She returned to the lectern, her gaze settling on the book before her with the same uneasy fascination she had brought to it every night for months. Her breath was shallow, held longer than it needed to be. The sigils on the cover pulsed faintly with a slow red glow that did not behave the way ordinary magic behaved, and she had stopped pretending to herself that she did not find it fascinating.

It had taken months to break her father’s wards. Not because she lacked the skill. Because he had built them with the careful precision of someone who knew exactly what he was protecting against, and that someone, she suspected now, had been her.

The breakthrough had come from his own notes. Buried in the margins of a study he had never finished, written in his neat scholar’s hand, was the incantation that opened what he had labeled, with what now seemed like deliberate understatement, The Demonicon.

She placed her hand on the cover and began to recite. She had perfected the incantation. The syllables left her tongue in the precise order her father had set them down.

The sigils brightened beneath her palm, pulsing faster, matching the rhythm of her heart, then setting it. She felt the cover tremble, felt it want her hand off it. She kept her hand where it was.

“What in the Seven Hells!?” she muttered, more curious than alarmed.

A part of her, the small careful voice she rarely listened to, suggested that there might be reasons her father had sealed this book, and that those reasons might still apply. That the smart move, the responsible move, the move that would not later be analyzed as a profound personal failure, was to step back from the lectern and consider the matter further.

She kept reciting.

When the last syllable left her lips she gripped the cover and pulled. The book pulled back. Heat rose through the leather, climbing her wrist and into her forearm with the unhurried persistence of something that had nowhere else to be. The sigils flared, sending dark energy lashing against her skin in a series of small, vicious snaps. She did not let go.

“Open.”

Her voice came out lower than she had intended. The book vibrated beneath her hand. The heat became pain. The pain became the kind of pain that, in retrospect, she would describe to no one, because describing it would have required her to admit that she had continued anyway.

She continued anyway.

There was a sound, distant and not quite human, like something realizing it had lost. The cover resisted one final time, then snapped open with a sound like a distant, anguished scream. The force of it traveled up her arm and into her teeth.

Then it was done, and she was standing at the lectern with her palm tingling and a book that was finally, undeniably, hers. She looked down at the open pages.

“That’s right, bitch.”

By the time she returned from bandaging her hands, the chamber had darkened to a single sputtering candle. Its thin flame trembled against the cold stone walls, throwing long, restless shadows across the shelves and floor. The Demonicon waited on the lectern where she had left it, open now, silent and patient, as though it had merely allowed her time to recover.

Jexi approached carefully and brushed her fingers against the exposed page.

It was warm under her fingertips, far warmer than parchment should ever be. It was supple in the way that good leather is supple, except that good leather has been tanned and cured and stripped of whatever made it part of a living thing. This had not been stripped of anything. It had the specific give of something that still knew what it had been.

She pulled her hand back. “This isn’t parchment,” she said. Then, quieter, “It’s flesh!”

She stumbled away from the lectern, wringing her bandaged hands together as though that might rid her fingers of the texture still clinging to them. The sensation remained anyway, lodged somewhere deeper than touch.

“That is deeply twisted.”

The Demonicon sat beneath the dying candlelight, its faint red runes pulsing in their slow, patient way. It offered no defense.

“Who,” she said to the empty room, “sits down to make a book and decides, you know what this needs? Skin!”

The book remained open. Waiting.

Jexi stared at it for another long moment. Then she drew a breath, set her shoulders, and stepped back to the lectern.

“It will take more than that to deter me.”

The book would not be rushed. Each page was unlike anything she had ever seen, the script shifting and reforming under her gaze, refusing to settle until she gave it her full attention. Only complete focus would force the symbols to hold still, and each one considered whether she had earned that focus before yielding.

Abyssal was not a language anyone learned casually. Scholars had spent lifetimes on it, far more disciplined scholars than she would ever pretend to be, and emerged with workable proficiency at best. There were specializations within the Academy devoted to translating fragments of it, men and women who had given their careers to a single chapter of a single text and considered the work well spent.

She had become fluent in a few months, stealing what hours she could from the rigid demands of the Academy.

Late one evening, as her fingers traced the cryptic letters of a particularly complex passage, she caught herself reading it aloud, the guttural syllables rolling from her tongue as effortlessly as common speech. Her hand stilled. A reluctant smirk tugged at her lips.

Years at the Academy. I could barely string together a proper arcane incantation without it blowing up in my face. Yet here I am, speaking the language of demons like I grew up in the Abyss… Fitting.

She exhaled, the smirk fading into something quieter.

Why is it always the forbidden things that come so naturally to me?

She shook her head and turned back to the page. Whatever talent she possessed for Abyssal would not protect her from its dangers. One small mispronunciation could mean the difference between summoning a minor imp and being torn apart by a Demon Lord, and she had no interest in dying because of an accent.

Before attempting anything ambitious, she found a simpler passage near the beginning of the book, a minor ritual that read almost like a primer, one that felt included for someone exactly like her. The summoning of Krazzik, an imp bound to the Circle of Ash and Smoke. The notes called it a test. A harmless nuisance by demonic standards. Still dangerous if treated carelessly.

She followed the instructions exactly. Chalk laced with ash and powdered iron. Sigils traced with the steady precision her father had drilled into her years ago. A single drop of blood at the center.

Her voice was steady as she whispered the invocation, the Abyssal syllables shaping themselves in her throat with a fluency that, by now, no longer surprised her.

The air inside the circle darkened and cracked. Sulfur unfurled into the chamber. Oily green smoke gathered, churning, and from within it the imp emerged, small and hunched, wings twitching, barbed tail coiling behind it like a viper.

It grinned at her. Jagged teeth. Eyes the color of sick lamplight.

“You speak well,” it hissed in Abyssal, “for a mortal.”

Jexi did not flinch.

“I speak better than you think.”

She tightened the binding with a gesture. Krazzik winced and snarled.

For one breath, the nearest line of chalk thinned and smoked, and Jexi’s heart lurched before the sigil brightened and forced him back.

The imp went very still. It did not challenge her further. It stayed only long enough for her to test her binding, her banishment phrase, and her own nerve. Then she sent it back.

When the chamber was empty again, she sat on the floor and pressed a hand to her chest until her heartbeat slowed.

I can do this.

I’m ready.

It was only after that first success that she dared to go deeper. The book opened to her now, the way a difficult instrument opens to a player who has finally stopped fighting it. Page after page catalogued fiends, summonings, and the precise costs and offerings each demanded. Each entry carried the same quiet warning beneath the technical specifications, the kind of warning that did not need to be written explicitly, because the reader who needed to hear it would not have been reading the book in the first place.

She paused on a page that had been waiting for her, although she could not have said how she knew.

Xal’tharn.

A scholar. A keeper of forbidden knowledge. The kind of demon who preferred bargains to violence, and whose bargains usually ended badly for the party who had not read the fine print. The summoning required powdered human bone, sulfur, obsidian, and chalk. She crossed the chamber to her father’s spell laboratory.

The room had not been disturbed in years, yet it had not surrendered entirely to neglect. It remained exactly as he had left it, meticulous in the places he had cared about, organized by a logic that made sense only if you understood the man. Rows of vials lined the shelves, labeled in his careful hand, each one a small monument to the kind of work that was, by any reasonable measure, far beyond what an Academy wizard should have had access to. She read as she went.

“Powdered basilisk horn. Blood of a red dragon.” She lifted a phial of swirling silver mist. “Essence of the Astral Sea.” She let out a short laugh, shaking her head. “Gods, Father, what were you doing?”

She picked up a vial that glimmered in the dim light, its deep blue contents catching her eye. “Tears of a Solar.” She rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. That’s just excessive.” She exhaled sharply. “Is chalk too much to ask for!?”

The mundane components were harder to find than the mythical ones. Slowly, she found everything. The powdered bone was in an iron urn, its contents so fine the urn felt almost weightless. The sulfur was in thick glass, the smell sharp through the stopper. The obsidian had been carefully wrapped in silk. And the chalk, of all things, was buried beneath three jars of less stable substances and required two minutes of swearing to locate.

She gathered her materials and returned to the chamber. “And that was the easy part.”

The summoning circle took her a long time to draw. Not because the work was difficult, but because she wanted it perfect. She knelt on the stone, and the chalk moved cleanly under her hand. When the circle was finished, she sprinkled the bone dust along the lines, set the obsidian at the five points, laid the sulfur over the whole arrangement, and traced the final runes into the sulfur with her finger, slowly, until every detail was exactly as the book required.

She closed her eyes and breathed. She began.

“Tharak’zul mentharak, vrith’naar xal’duras.”

Her voice came out steady, the Abyssal syllables shaping themselves in her throat. The air around her thickened. The sigils brightened.

“Vorath’khal min’drath xal’nethara.”

The resonance was not hers alone now. Each word lingered after she spoke it, vibrating in the air, pressing against the walls of the chamber.

“Velkorath amir’dan shal vaz’orah.”

The candles guttered. The shadows on the stone walls began to move with an energy that did not match the flames that cast them.

She felt it then, the power answering her, bending toward the shape she was giving it.

This is actually working.

“Zal’torash vrin’shalal daekorith.”

As the final syllable hung in the air, the chamber crackled with the weight of what she had just done. Loose papers lifted from the desk and scattered. The candles snuffed in a single breath, all of them at once, and darkness swallowed the chamber, leaving only the slow red pulse of the summoning circle.

A low hiss rose from the center of the circle, like the sound of a serpent stirring from its slumber. The darkness deepened there, drawing in the light from around it, and within the blackness, two glowing red eyes appeared, peering out at her with malevolent curiosity.