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

Something was different about my porch.
    A
lot
was different, I realized with a start. The stairs had been rebuilt and the railing along the front replaced and painted. Moreover, a swing now graced the porch—a lovely wicker thing that hung from two solid eye-bolts in the ceiling.
    I moved down off the porch and onto the gravel driveway, turned to get a better view of the front of my house. There were flowers—actual living plants—in neat beds on either side of the steps. A pretty little crystal and brass arrangement hung from a corner of the porch, catching the morning sunlight and casting it back out in shards of rainbow. There was even a birdfeeder hanging from the other corner, though I wondered whether any bird would come near the house while demons perched atop it.
    I smiled with warm pleasure. My house looked . . .
nice.
    Eilahn leapt lightly from the roof and smiled at me. “You have your bag. Where are we going?” she asked with an enthusiastic lift in her voice.
    “I was hoping to go to Tracy Gordon’s summoning house to check out his library,” I told her. Maybe I could borrow the Camry? That would be better than riding pillion on the motorcycle.
    Her face grew hard and more than a little scary. “Tracy Gordon
baztakh unk kirlesk
.” She spat into the gravel.
    I didn’t know what that all meant, but it was simple enough to guess the sentiment, and I certainly couldn’t blame her for it. He’d shot her twice, point blank, and killed her. Fortunately, because it happened on Earth, she made it through to the demon realm and recovered. Once through the void was usually successful. Twice, not so much.
    I nodded toward the Camry. “Whose car is that?”
    She followed my gaze, then looked back to me and beamed. “Yours!”
    I gave her a blank look. “How can it be mine?”
    Eilahn ducked through the front door and returned before I had time to process she’d gone. She dangled a set of keys in front of me, displayed the brass fob with
Kara’s Kar
neatly engraved in script on it. “Because this proclaims that these keys match your vehicle, I have tested them in the ignition, and they fit. Therefore, that,” she said with a nod toward the car, “is your vehicle by the process of a successful trial.”
    Kara’s Kar? I rolled my eyes. My house elves were out of control, but right now I wasn’t about to complain. I took the keys from her and smiled. “Well, let’s try it out!”
    A note on the dash in Zack’s neat handwriting held clear, concise instructions for operating the automatic gate. Yet another point for the elves.
    The house Tracy Gordon had used for summonings and other arcane practices was on the far side of Beaulac, but since it was so early in the morning, and there was little traffic, I went ahead and cut straight through town.
    A garbage truck made noisy work of dumpster-emptying behind Beaulac Junior High, while across the street a man in nothing but shorts and sleep-tousled hair ignored his dog’s yappy barking at the din. A few determined souls headed into Magnolia Fitness Center, clutching towels and water bottles. I was probably still a member there, I realized, since my dues were on auto-payment.
    “Back when I was a street cop, this was right about the time I’d be heading to the station for shift change,” I told Eilahn. “Whether I was coming on or going off duty, I always liked seeing the world wake up.”
    She slanted a disbelieving glance my way. “
Liked?
You who pulls your pillow over your head if any dares disturb you before mid-morning?” She let out a low snort. “I doubt you woke to your alarm and thought, ‘Oh, what a pleasure it will be to see the world wake up!’ You would have
liked
to have been in your bed.”
    “Okay, so maybe ‘liked’ is a relative term,” I said with a laugh. “But since I had to be up anyway to keep my job, I figured I might as well dig for a silver lining.”
    “Ah, yes,” she replied, “because you are always a model of