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shining and rosewood scented.
    Taking the parchment in his hands, Simon knelt and began the invocation:
    “O Powers who sit at the foundations of the world,
    Hear my plea.
    I come in an hour of darkness, and I ask for light.
    I come in a time of siege, and I ask for aid.
    I come a stranger, and I ask for mercy.
    Shut not your eyes to my countenance.
    Deafen not your ears to my voice.
    O Powers, I kneel before you as a supplicant.
    O Powers, I ask for aid.”
    On the last line, his voice dropped, and he felt the resonance in his chest. He stood in one smooth motion, the graceful ascent of a bowing courtier. The power he’d built rose with him. Simon felt it travel up from the center of his body through his chest and his head and then out, taking wing in one radiant burst of energy. It left him standing breathless in the middle of the room, every muscle in his body tense.
    He wanted at once to shout for joy and to snarl defiance, to sing hymns and swear the worst oaths he could think of. He wanted to run like a schoolboy on the first day of summer holidays, to make love to a woman until neither of them could stand, to laugh long and hard and to weep just as intensely.
    Life , he thought dimly. I do think it worked then.
    That made him laugh in a way that he hadn’t since perhaps before he’d seen Alex at the gaming tables and the spirit looking over his shoulder. Now laughter rose through his chest like the power had, and it felt astoundingly good.
    Everything did. Simon ran a hand down the bulge in his tunic and wrapped his fingers around the swollen shaft beneath the silk. Almost of their own accord, his hips thrust forward, rubbing his cock against the tight grip of his fingers.
    If he’d been elsewhere, Simon might have tossed off there and then. He knew it wouldn’t have taken long. But this was not the place for any sort of casual release, partnered or not, and there was no time to sneak off to his rooms.
    With a considerable effort of will, he opened his hand and turned his mind to old geometry lessons. By the time he finished lacing his boots, Simon was physically presentable, but the euphoria remained. He chose to think of it as a good sign. Calling on the solar powers always had left him somewhat giddy, so it was only logical that such a large working would be even more intoxicating.
    Certainly, he thought, he must have been a little drunk to have invoked Kali. Simon hoped that had been wise, but now that he was out of the chamber and back in his normal clothing, he wasn’t at all certain. All the other Powers he’d invoked had been relatively minor: servants of something greater, like Michael and Gabriel, or the sort of god who was really just a larger person, like Apollo and even Sekhmet. Kali was a Greater Power herself. And even the most benign of the Great Ones were very dangerous.
    She is, however, one very necessary side of a coin. And she is Chamunda, slayer of demons. Hard to find someone more appropriate.
    Abruptly, he thought of Joan.
    Perhaps she’d been in his mind all long. Quite possibly, she’d inspired his choice at the end. Certainly neither her presence nor the world from which she came could be absent from Simon’s thoughts for very long. They were too unusual, too significant, and too disturbing, Joan herself nearly as much so as her world. Her utter ruthlessness was appalling, her swift determination unsettling, and her whole person so unlike any feminine ideal Simon had ever encountered, even in his progressive circles, as to be utterly alien.
    Yet perhaps that disturbing strength and focus was what the situation demanded. The spell Simon had just cast would turn aside demons and curses, but magic wasn’t the only threat in the world. Reynell could use men, controlling them by a spell or a fistful of banknotes. The idea had seemed ludicrous earlier—Alex Reynell sending out assassins like some shadowy mastermind in a penny novel—but earlier Simon hadn’t had hellhounds trying to