Free Fury of the Demon (Kara Gillian) by Diana Rowland Page A

had no idea where they were. Eilahn’s favorite place on the property was the roof and her second favorite was the woods on my nearly-ten acres of property. The roof, most likely, I decided, with the pair of them perched like beautiful human-shaped gargoyles by my satellite dish.
    After making my silent-ish way to the kitchen, I plunked my laptop and notepad on the table, started a pot of coffee, then scrounged in the fridge while I pondered what needed to go on my Hunt for Idris to-do list. Even though I knew he was still in the demon realm, Katashi was definitely right there at the top, so I went ahead and scrawled his name on my pad before prepping my first cup of coffee with the appropriately massive amounts of sugar and cream.
    Like me, Zack had a list of the known Katashi people and would do some digging there. Katashi’s main base of operations was in Japan, but I wasn’t going to make the assumption that his people had Idris there. Master Isumo Katashi had too damn many connections.
    Over eighty years ago, he’d performed the first summoning since the mid-seventeenth century. Self-taught, he’d called Gestamar, a challenging as all hell high-level demon. It still boggled my mind that he’d managed to do so and survive. I couldn’t stand the man, but I had to give him mad respect for that feat.
    As the first summoner of the twentieth century, he naturally became the root source of
all
modern summoning, which meant that every active summoner had either learned directly from Katashi or one of his students, myself included. Though I’d spent only a couple of useless months with him, my aunt Tessa—who’d taught me—was his student for almost a decade.
    In other words, the old man surely had one hell of a network with students and associates all over the world, which meant a myriad of potential hiding places for Idris.
    I sat, took a sip of coffee and noted
Follow up with Ryan and Zack
beneath Katashi’s name. Better to wait for some solid info on the old bastard before tackling that mess. I tapped my pen on the paper and considered the events that occurred right before I was summoned to the demon realm six months ago, then wrote
TRACY GORDON
in all capital letters. Though not directly linked to Idris, Tracy had tried to sacrifice me to make a permanent gate between this world and the demon realm, which meant he surely had connections to
someone.
Most likely one of the Mraztur since Kehlirik, a reyza of Rhyzkahl, had guarded Tracy’s focus diagram.
    Ryan, Zack, and I had already done a pretty thorough search/tear-down of the house where Tracy Gordon had lived, helped by some nice sledgehammer-to-wall action. I was pretty damn confident nothing remained there that could be useful to us.
    It was his other house that interested me, the one that he owned through a shell corporation, and the one where, in a room packed full of books and papers, Kehlirik had guarded the diagram. If Tracy had kept journals, I figured they’d be there, and I damn well intended to find and take them, along with anything else in his library that caught my eye.
    Finders keepers, you son of a bitch.
    With the sun now rising and my plans of library-pillaging firmly in mind, I finished my coffee, took a quick shower, dressed, then grabbed my bag and headed for the front door.
    I made it out and onto the porch before I realized the hitch in my plans. Two Chevy Impalas sat in the drive, along with a Toyota Camry I didn’t recognize. The Impalas had government plates, which told me that my fed-boys had finally been issued new vehicles to replace their Crown Vics. And I didn’t know who the Camry belonged to, except that it wasn’t me.
    I have no car
. I’d resigned from the Beaulac police department, which meant I didn’t have a department-issued vehicle anymore.
Well, shit
. Ride on the back of Eilahn’s motorcycle? That would make pillaging the library a
lot
more challenging. I sighed and turned to head back inside, then paused.