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months with Haul Du learning to make coins disappear or pulling rabbits from my hat. Mages weren’t reluctant to go to the source when they wanted to know something. My Dad was an amazing Librarian, but there were beings that made him seem like a rank amateur.
    Demons.
    Yeah, I know. With proper precautions, dealing with demons—or angels, although that was a whole other situation entirely—didn’t have to be a life-threatening activity. It’s not like Templars weren’t accustom to dealing with celestial or infernal beings. We had a long history of communing with the messengers of God, and there were numerous times we’d defended the Temple against the minions of Satan, or beaten back the forces of darkness to clear a path for those righteous souls on pilgrimage. This was sort of the same, only different. Mages called forth these beings, containing them safely while they made their request.
    Okay, actually they were demands. I’ll admit that made me a little uneasy. These weren’t nice postmen and waitresses we were trapping, they were beings of evil, although some of them were less evil than others. The Goetic demons who got summoned were relatively harmless. The mage asked for information and the demon was bound to provide it. Bound. As in they could not return to hell or escape the confines of the circle until they coughed up whatever the mage wanted.
    Normally I never would have considered doing such a thing, but I’d seen the ceremony performed several times. I had the ritual, and the demon’s sigil that I’d seen safely summoned before. Outside of some initial bluster, the demon had seemed rather eager to provide the information, and easy to both contain and banish back to hell. Not a big deal. I’d spent my life doing lesser magics, the sort of things a Templar should know how to do. Eight months as a ceremonial magician might not sound like much, but I’d been studying their methods for nearly a decade and had quite the advantage over most of the initiates. Which was probably why someone had gotten to digging around and discovered my heritage.
    I could do this. As stupid as it sounded, this was an easier and quicker option than crawling back home to ask a favor from the family who thought I’d turned my back on twenty generations of Knights. I could do this.
    Yeah. And that’s why my palms were so sweaty. I wiped them on my pants and picked up a copy of the leather-bound notebook I’d used as a personal grimoire while with Haul Du , and the three reliable books I owned on sigils and summoning. This was going to be a long night. I’d better make some more coffee.
    Two cups later I was sprawled across my couch, notebook on the pillow beside me, nose-deep in one of my reference books, when I heard the knock at the door. It opened, even though I knew I’d locked it, and standing in the doorway was Dario. He wasn’t wearing his bondage club attire tonight. Instead he looked like a sexy prime-time lawyer in a charcoal-gray suit with the jacket tossed over his shoulder. I stared at him over the back of my couch, stunned into silence both by his incredibly hot appearance and his nifty door opening trick. Was that a vampire thing?
    “Can I come in?”
    Now that was a vampire thing. Thresholds held power— some more than others. Vampires weren’t the only beings who needed permission to cross one, but they suffered the most in trying to force an entry.
    I opened my mouth to invite him in, then snapped it shut once I remembered him ditching me in a bad section of Baltimore to walk home. He couldn’t come in if I didn’t invite him. All I had to do was get up and slam the door in his face. Although he could keep opening it and pestering me from outside the threshold. In all honesty, I did want to invite him in so I could chew him out for last night without all my neighbors hearing.
    But not without a bit of groveling on his part first. I flung out a hand. “ Pechar .” The door swung shut, the bolt