Free Mark of the Demon by Diana Rowland

before. After I’d calmed somewhat, I walked around the diagram, obsessively checking every sigil and rune that I’d sketched out, looking for any deviation, any smudge or change that could have altered the portal, and finding nothing to explain what had happened.
    But this creature had said his name was Rhyzkahl. Had I mispronounced “Rysehl”? Somehow garbled the word? I cast my mind back over the summoning, the ritual, over and over until it was all little more than a jumbled blur.
I thought I said it right. The names are close, but not
that
close
.
    I felt as if someone had pulled the floor out from under me.
I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought I was good at this
. I shuddered and scrubbed at my face, struggling to push away the aching doubt.
    But forcing myself to stop thinking about the summoning only shifted my thoughts to the other elephant looming in the room.
Oh, fucking shit
, I silently wailed,
why the fuck did I fuck him?
    I couldn’t even give myself the “easy” out and blame it on his compulsion of me. I knew that he was capable of doing so, since I’d managed to figure it out and call him on it.
But then he gave me his word…
. And a demon’s word was inviolate. No, I’d just been incredibly needy and pathetic.
    I grimaced and turned on the water, cupping it in my hands and splashing it onto my face. I scrubbed away the grit in my eyes, keeping the water deliberately cold to try to shock myself back to a reality I could understand and accept.
    I sighed and reached for the towel. Nope, still the same haggard and confused face staring back at me in the mirror. I’d already taken a hot shower, with water as close to scalding as my water heater would give me, seeking to sear the memory of the night away.
    But you don’t want to forget
, I accused myself.
You enjoyed it
.
    I sighed and straightened. And that was the truth. That had been some seriously incredible sex. No doubt. Best. Sex. Ever.
    Which circled my thoughts back to:
Why me?
Why seduce me? Was sex that hard to come by in the other spheres? That made no sense. He wanted something from me. An alliance? A summoner of his own? It was possible, I supposed. I’d heard of summoners who allied with particular demons, though such alliances were unpredictable and fraught with danger.
    I had to assume that Rhyzkahl was some sort of demon that I’d never heard of before. My portal had opened into the demon realm—I felt reasonably confident of that. The demons I knew were creatures of arcane power, inhabitants of one of the many other planes of existence and one of the few that was accessible from this plane with the proper forms and rituals.
    There were twelve varieties, or levels, of demons that could be summoned, or so I had been taught. When I had first begun my training as a summoner, I started with simple summonings of
zrila
—first-level demons not much larger than a cat, though with reptilian bodies and six legs. Limited intelligence and easily controlled. Ten years later I had progressed to the twelfth level:
reyza
. And not once during that time had I seen or heard of anything like Rhyzkahl. He was obviously a creature of great power—that much was clear by how easily he’d shattered the bindings and wardings. But I had no idea what he was or what his place was in the hierarchy of the demons.
    My mind kept going back to what he’d said to me.
Call me whenever you need me
. Call him? Summon him? Who was he to say such a thing? And how was I supposed to do that when I didn’t know how I’d done it in the first place?
    I walked out to the living room and fired up my computer, then pulled up a search engine. It was a long shot, but I’d struck gold with the Internet before. There were no formal organizations or cabals of summoners that I knew of, but there were a few message boards—the type that catered to the “paranormal nutjob” faction—that were sometimes used to exchange information between arcane practitioners. A