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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 amember 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 potencythat I knew of was the one the Symbol Man had used—torture and murder. Needless to say, I didn’t want to go there.

    Ryan let out a low whistle. “That looks seriously ugly.”

    “It’s ridiculous,” I complained. “Why the hell did she need all of this?”

    “I dunno, but she was apparently not kidding about keeping people out.”

    “I’m her only fucking relative. I should be able to get in.”

    He peered at the winding wards. Ryan was able to sense the arcane, though not to the degree I could. “Fucking shit. Where would you even start?”

    “That’s the problem. I’ve been poking at the edges for the past couple of weeks, because it doesn’t look so bad there. But every time I get that part undone, it re-forms.” I scowled at the door and the writhing wards. I’d been spending almost as much time at Tessa’s house as at my own—to the point where I’d begun to keep clothing and toiletries in her spare room. “I’m just going to have to dive into that big knot in the middle.” I thought I could see where to begin to unravel the damn things; all I needed to do was work up the nerve to touch them arcanely. You’re being chicken , I berated myself. If you’re wrong, you’ll get a big zap. Get over it!

    “Well, here goes nothing,” I muttered as I began to mentally reach out. “It’s not like my aunt would try to—”

    I threw myself backward as I