I walked out of the office into the rain. It was both a relief and a pain for it to be raining. A relief because hopefully it would help to quell the fires up in Bastrop, but a pain because I had to walk three blocks to where I had parked my truck. By the time I reached it, my waist-length black hair was hanging in limp strands and my makeup was ruined. Good thing I didn't have a date or anything to worry about tonight. I looked horrendous when I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear view. My hair clung to my face and my clothes stuck to me as I sat down in the seat.
Driving with wet jeans on was only slightly less difficult than any other movement would have been in wet denim. Happy that I didn't have a standard transmission anymore, I pulled out of the lot and headed home. My colleagues made fun of me for living in the country, but I loved it and made fun of them for living in the city. They would never understand. How could they? They had grown up with the sirens and lights and the noise of it all. I, however, relished the silence of a backwoods night. The rain would be ticking off the roof of my house, not against the windows of some tiny apartment. There was a real chance that if it rained enough I wouldn't be able to get out of my driveway in the morning. It had happened before. All it would take was a good three to four inches of rain and I would need a boat to leave my house. It was wonderful.
My house was a good half-hour outside of the city limits if there was no traffic. Once I got past F.M.1604, where the road went down to two lanes and straightened out for the most part, there wasn't another car on the road. I let my foot press down on the accelerator, feeling as though my truck was floating over the rain-slick highway. No one would ride with me in a carpool, though there were several people living on my way to work that I could have saved some gas money. Doing eighty miles an hour in the pouring rain might have been one of the factors keeping them away. I didn't care. It meant I had a quiet vehicle except for the radio and didn't have to wait for anyone to come out of the office after me or worry about being late because someone forgot their briefcase.
I pulled into my driveway just as the rain began to let up. It had been falling steadily for the better part of an hour, but the fact that it was already letting up was not good. I was far enough north of the city that I could smell the smoke from the brush fires when the wind was right. Most of the hill country had been evacuated or had been warned to expect it. They needed the rain, bad. All those thoughts left my mind when I saw the faint flash of taillights as my headlights swept my house. Dorian was here and I felt a tingle run down my spine the moment when I knew he had heard the tires popping on the gravel. The old imp would have used his magic to get into the house by now. For some reason, he preferred to use my house to practice what the demonologists taught at the local community college. Maybe he didn't want the demons seeing a certain painting he had hidden in his house.
He wasn't the Dorian Gray of fiction who never aged, but he did have a painting of a very old man hanging on his office wall, and he liked to keep up appearances. In truth he was just a human who made a deal with the wrong demon and lost his soul, changing him into an imp. He was damned to wander the world and try to gather souls for his master. When I met him, I thought this meant he knew what he was doing. The fact of it was he didn't have any more of a clue now than he'd had when he lost his soul in the first place. He hadn't used a circle on that demon, either.
There wasn't a single light on in the house that I could see, but I guess the imp wouldn't need it with his vision. Wondering what he could possibly want, I walked in through the kitchen door and dropped my keys on the counter. Several of my hurricane lamps were glowing in the office, and I sighed. I could feel the magic building as he prepped a spell, and the faint whiff of lilac as his aura snapped a circle in place. I knew before I went in that there would be a molecule thick layer of his purple-shaded aura between the two of us and whatever he had just called into my office. The idiot insisted on calling things outside of a circle instead of trapping them inside it, and one of these days I was going to kill him for it. The demons got a kick out of it, though because it meant they weren't trapped in a four-foot-wide circle, forced to stoop if the one doing the summing couldn't make it tall enough for them to stand.
I opened the door to the office just as a man appeared sitting behind the desk. He had on a plain suit and tie and tossed his feet up to get more comfortable. Black eyes looked out at both of us, narrowing when they landed on me. Maybe he could taste the taint he had put on my aura.
"Dorian Lucien Gray," he said to the imp, then he turned back to me. "Ah, it's so good to see you again, Emerald. Do come sit down."
He patted his lap suggestively, and I took the chair across the desk from him as he frowned.
"You're not here because of me, Azazel," I said and then turned my attention to the imp who was stupidly sitting in the middle of the floor, staring at us. "Get this over with, Dorian. I'm tired and I need to go to bed."
"Your little friend here needs to learn more respect for your property, lover." The demon behind the desk smiled when I glared at the word. "Calling a demon in the middle of your house and not even putting him in a circle. Tsk, tsk. Whatever shall I do to him?"
"You can't do anything to me, demon," Dorian finally spoke up. "I summoned you, so I control you." That same attitude lost him his soul the first time. With no soul to lose, it would just get him killed now. If he was lucky. If he wasn't, well...
Azazel's smile faded as he looked at the imp, "Is that what they taught you in Demons 101? It doesn't work that way. I would think you learned this when you made that unfortunate deal with Sitri. Should have made that deal with me, you know. I might have just kept you as a slave instead of holding your soul in a bottle on a shelf."
Paling a bit, Dorian's hands moved in a complex curse that I didn't recognize. Azazel only smiled wider, showing even white teeth. "You are bound by the laws of summoning."
Turning to me, the demon said, "Explain to him how the laws of summoning really work, honey."
Dorian stared at me. He he was starting to look scared, but what did he really have to lose?
"The laws of summoning they teach you about in school don't exist. At all," I said.
He should know this by now. Maybe it was because the only school that would take him was a community college and not a certified demon university that taught true satanic magic, or maybe he had short term memory loss and couldn't remember the reason he needed to be more careful. I didn't know, but he had to stop summoning these demons into my office.
"Demons are summoned into circles for a reason, Dorian," I continued. "When they're in a circle, they will do just about anything to get out of it, as long as there is a profit in it for them. If you call them and they are outside the circle, there is nothing keeping them from walking right out the door to cause mischief."
Azazel laughed at the last comment, but Dorian paled further. Apparently he had finally realized what he was doing wrong.
"I thought that calling him without the circle would make it nicer than calling him into one," he said. "The professor said they are compelled to answer our questions when we summon them."
